The Russian part of my social-media feed has been making me feel as if I have lost touch with reality. Every morning, when I log on, I see pictures of people I know living lives that look bizarrely normal. They are eating at restaurants, socializing indoors, attending shows, receiving prizes at in-person ceremonies, and making reporting trips. At the same time, not a day has gone by in recent weeks when someone from my extended social circle in Russia hasn’t died: the founder of a tiny puppet theatre where I used to take my kids; a beloved children’s poet; a literary critic I knew; and several acquaintances’ parents. Once in a while, a social-media post will acknowledge the bizarre dissonance of behavior and consequences. A book editor in Moscow posted two pictures, side by side, of people in line, one at an indoor mall and the other in what looked like an office building. “This is the line to shop the new Uniqlo collection,” she wrote. “And this is the death-certificate line at the registry office. That’s not including the picture of the line to pick up personal belongings of the deceased at the COVID hospital.” Most of the time, though, the two streams—the pictures of life and the announcements of death—flow in parallel, not crossing.
Anna Temkina, a sociologist at the European University at St. Petersburg, has been puzzling over this split consciousness. In the spring, when Russian cities, like much of the rest of Europe and some U.S. cities, were largely shut down, Temkina and her colleagues asked several dozen people—mostly current and former colleagues and graduate students—to keep journals of their experience of the pandemic. Their respondents were enthusiastic, thoughtful, and, being sociologists, skillful. “They were thinking hard about time and space,” Temkina told me over Zoom, from a house she is renting outside of St. Petersburg. “Time, especially, changed: there was a lot of it and not enough, it was all over the place, it was impossible to structure, and the journaling helped with that a bit.” What struck Temkina most, though, was what happened next. After a two-month break in journaling, the researchers asked the same people to return to writing for ten days in September—and hit a wall. “A majority of them wrote back, ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t,’ ” Temkina said.
“This is when I got to really thinking about what’s happened to us,” she said. “I think that, in the spring, we were struck by something other, something outside of us that was changing our reality. But, by fall, we had become this other. It had entered us. We changed, and we no longer wanted to think about it.”
Temkina’s respondents—and, she thinks, many Russians—learned to live with the pandemic, though not necessarily with all of its precautions and limitations. “Everyone has struck some kind of bargain with fate,” she said. People go to the theatre and museums, for example, despite the obvious risks. “I think we maintain our identities by doing the things we ought not be doing.”
The disorientation and exhaustion of Temkina’s spring set of journalers will probably sound familiar to many Americans who have experienced anti-pandemic measures. And, as in the United States, the federal government in Russia largely absented itself from designing a response, leaving it up to regional authorities to develop pandemic policies. In St. Petersburg, local officials closed nonessential businesses in April and directed people to stay at home. Galina Artemenko, a journalist, told me, by Zoom from St. Petersburg, that the city was empty and quiet, save for the emergency-broadcasting system, which kept blaring, “Stay at home.” Hospitals did not have enough P.P.E. By the last week of April, the city’s official death tally from COVID-19 was twenty-seven people. (The real death count was almost certainly much higher.) Nine of the dead, Artemenko told me, were medical workers.
Artemenko and a friend, the AIDS activist Irina Maslova, decided to try to draw attention to the predicament of doctors. They planned to deliver flowers and small posters commemorating the nine dead medical personnel to the city Health Committee building. “We had pictures of only two people, a neurosurgeon and an anesthesiologist,” Artemenko told me; the rest of the flyers listed the names of the deceased under the image of an angel. Flowers were hard to track down, Maslova told me, over Zoom from St. Petersburg, because all the florists were shuttered. On April 27th, the two middle-aged women traversed an empty city center with the pictures and two bouquets to lay at the health agency’s front door. Once there, they noticed that the building across the street, the House of Radio (the home of the city’s main broadcaster), was under renovation. “It had an excellent construction fence around it,” Artemenko said. The women attached the nine posters to the fence. “Two police officers appeared. They took pictures and video and called someone. We were prepared to get arrested, but they just walked away.”
About the same time, Temkina and her colleagues at the European University were undertaking a field study in hospitals around Russia, interviewing medical professionals; one of the researchers got a job as an orderly to conduct ethnographic research. (She was not undercover.) What they found, Temkina said, was “one failure after another. There were P.P.E. shortages, like elsewhere in the world, but when philanthropists tried to donate P.P.E. to hospitals they were turned down, because the hospitals are terrified of inspections.” Shortages of tests meant that physicians who had been infected but recovered could not get cleared to return to work—which exacerbated the shortage of doctors. Authorities kept changing policies on COVID hospitalizations, and when they finally settled on designating specific hospitals for COVID patients, the decision created a bottleneck. “There were long lines of ambulances outside of hospitals, waiting for the people they’d brought to be admitted, and, as a result, these ambulances were not available to respond to other calls,” Temkina said. Most of all, the study showed that health-care providers felt abandoned and vulnerable.
In the days and weeks after Artemenko and Maslova hung the nine posters on the construction fence, the makeshift memorial grew rapidly. People sent them photographs and bios of doctors and other medical professionals who had died. After rainfall badly damaged the memorial, Maslova asked a print-shop owner she knew to reproduce the photos on waterproof plastic sheets. By the end of June, there were sixty-six people on the wall, most of them doctors and nurses from St. Petersburg and its suburbs: “Alexander Sharonov, forty-five, chief of anesthesiology and intensive care, Maternity Hospital No. 9”; “Konstantin Lapin, thirty-five, trauma surgeon, Kirov Military Medical Academy”; “Dmitry Yarovoy, thirty-three, ophthalmologist, City Hospital No. 2.” The fence became known as the Memory Wall.
The memorial served a pragmatic political purpose, among others. Both the federal and local governments authorized compensation payments to families of doctors lost to the pandemic, but authorities were reluctant to release money to medical personnel who hadn’t worked on COVID wards. Artemenko and Maslova told me that, by making the names of the deceased public, the memorial helped grieving families in their requests for compensation.
In the summer, the pandemic seemed to ebb. St. Petersburg reopened for business. Sidewalk cafés popped up near the memorial. “It was nice that there were people sitting around, talking right there—there was something alive and human about it,” Artemenko told me. She would borrow a large green watering can from a Georgian café to water the many flowers at the wall.
The government called on people to come out, in person, to vote for changes to the constitution, making Vladimir Putin President for life. Officials staged a Victory Day parade, postponed from May. Russians travelled on crowded trains and planes to take traditional summer vacations. People I knew started falling ill in batches. They would post party photos and, a few days later, report that they were sick. An ocean away, I could play amateur contact tracer just by reading my Facebook feed.
How bad were things in Russia in the summer? It’s hard to tell, because the government hasn’t told the truth, nor has it told consistent lies. In the spring, the federal government directed local authorities to classify deaths as resulting from any underlying condition—such as heart disease or H.I.V.-related illness—that may have been exacerbated by the coronavirus, rather than list COVID-19 as the cause of death. By the Health Ministry’s own admission, the policy was implemented inconsistently, resulting in spotty and often contradictory statistics. According to two different government agencies, the number of people who had died of COVID in Russia by the end of September was either fewer than twenty-one thousand or just over fifty-five thousand. (The former figure is given by the federal consumer protection authority, which, inexplicably, makes most pandemic policy; the latter figure was calculated by the national statistics committee.) Internal documents obtained by Mediazona, an independent news outlet, show that, by November 22nd, nearly seventy-five thousand people had died in COVID wards. Estimates of excess deaths point to even greater numbers. Mediazona journalists have compiled a database of both national and regional death figures and concluded that Russia has lost a hundred and twenty thousand more people this year than it lost, on average, during the same period in the previous five years. If this trend keeps up, it could land Russia among the top five countries with the fastest-growing mortality rates. Even according to official data, the number of people getting sick and dying is on an unrelenting upward curve, setting daily records for at least a week.
“People visit each other at home, and they see masks only as something they need to wear to avoid getting a fine,” Maria Leevik told me. Leevik works as a counselor at the Botkin Infectious Disease Hospital, which was, back in April, the first hospital in St. Petersburg to be exclusively designated for COVID patients. In early fall, she took a month off work to prepare for her dissertation defense; during this time, she told me, she continued wearing a mask but otherwise allowed herself to “lead a normal life,” sometimes socializing in friends’ kitchens for hours on end. (Her dissertation is on behavior modifications among H.I.V.-positive men.) Leevik told me that she almost came to believe that the pandemic was over, until she came back to work and witnessed several deaths in the course of a few weeks. She returned to self-isolating.
The construction fence at the House of Radio came down on November 13th. Artemenko and Maslova arranged for the portraits of medical workers, which numbered a hundred and six, to be taken to the well-regarded Museum of Political History of Russia. They also secured permission to have a monument placed near the entrance to the Pavlov Medical University, which has lost several staff members in the pandemic. The monument will be a bronze copy of an angel created by Roman Shustrov, a well-known St. Petersburg sculptor who died of COVID in May, at the age of sixty-one. His older brother, Alexander, a mime, died of COVID a few days before him. Both men’s wives contracted the virus and recovered.
“I think our wall was a push to do the work of memory,” Artemenko said. St. Petersburg is a city of many monuments and memorials, in part because it’s the former imperial capital, and in part because of the unparalleled loss and trauma that it suffered from a nine-hundred-day siege by Nazi troops, during the Second World War. Both Artemenko and Maslova drew direct parallels between their efforts to preserve the legacy of COVID and the way that the city keeps the memory of the siege. One difference, though, is that the siege ended in 1944 and was memorialized years later, whereas the coronavirus pandemic is raging and will probably kill more people in the next few weeks than it did in the past several months. Isn’t it too early for monuments and museums?
Temkina, the sociologist, suggested that the experience of living in the Soviet Union, with its forever wars and constant threat of loss, provides an analogy, albeit a rough one, for the way that Russians have adapted to the coronavirus. “There is always a war going on somewhere, and in this war people die—it’s ‘natural,’ ” she said. “There is nothing you can do about it, there is no way out, no exit and no voice, so you opt to stop noticing it emotionally.”
In Russia, unlike in the U.S., people who disregard pandemic precautions do not fall predominantly into a particular political camp; often, in fact, they are not COVID deniers (or COVID dissidents, as Russians call them) at all. They are just those who do not trust the government. “Because I’m living in a rental house, I have a television set here,” Temkina said, almost apologetically—in her regular life, like most highly educated, Western-oriented Russians, she hasn’t watched television in years, because it’s controlled by the state. But she’s been turning it on recently, and has discovered that the government’s public-health message is clear and correct: wear masks, social-distance, stick to your household. “But it’s white noise,” Temkina said. Russians are so used to being lied to that they never believe anything. It would be difficult, in any case, for this government to expect people to observe stay-at-home orders after herding people to the voting booths in July.
“It becomes a game,” Kirill Fedorov, a psychotherapist in St. Petersburg, said. (An example: masks are required to enter the subway, so people take them off as soon as they are in the station.) Fedorov’s father fell ill in October, was diagnosed with COVID, and spent a week on a ventilator, before dying last month at age sixty-five; his death certificate lists “heart and lung failure” as the cause. “It is always the tragedy only of that particular family,” Fedorov said. “If it hasn’t happened to you, it doesn’t exist.” It’s not that Russians believe that the virus is a hoax; it’s that they lack common ground with one another. The “white noise” on the television is not part of any conversation; there is no public sphere, and it might be said that there is no public.
