Recorded December 7, 2025

Transcribed by Will McDonald

Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She has covered culture and politics for the Rumpus, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Independent, and others.

The Undead is her first published novel in English and tells the story of Maya, a Moscow-based filmmaker, who runs afoul of Putin’s government. Will McDonald spoke with Svetlana over Zoom, discussing her process of writing a novel in a non-native language, and how Maya’s story parallels her own and so many other artists living in constant fear of government repression.  

Will McDonald: This is your first published novel in English – no translator necessary. What was that writing and publication process like for you?

Svetlana Satchkova: I had actually written a novel in English before this one and spent about a year querying agents with it, and the feedback I got was, “We like your writing, but we don’t know how to market it.” So even after spending five years working on that novel it didn’t end up getting published. But the bright side was that a few of the agents encouraged me to query them again when I had a new novel to submit and, luckily, as soon as I started The Undead I found the voice immediately and I was able to complete it in a year.

I had already moved to the U.S. when I started working on this, but all I could think about was what was happening in Russia. I mean, it’s really all I ever think about. And leaving Russia was, in a sense, a traumatic experience for me. I hesitate to use the word trauma considering my livelihood is not at stake and bombs aren’t being dropped on my home, but I had to leave my job, my life, and my friends behind. All this is to say I had this brewing inside of me, which really guided me as I wrote this novel and resulted in it becoming a much more political novel than the work I had previously published. 

WM: Your novel definitely conveys the sentiment that simply being apolitical is not enough under an authoritarian regime like the one governed by Putin. At the center of The Undead is Maya, a filmmaker who is very deliberately not political. She has opinions and certainly isn’t ignorant, but her political ideology does not drive her artistic decisions. Yet she still can’t stay out of the government’s crosshairs. As you write in the novel, “People are sent to jail for as little as liking a post on Facebook.”

SS: Yes, this is true! I am not exaggerating when I write that.

WM: I guess I have to ask then, how close is all of this to reality?

SS: Almost every single character in the novel is based on a real person, and almost every single event in the novel is based on a real event. I had to reimagine certain aspects in order to better convey all these different stories within one plotline, but Maya’s trial is based on a real case in Russia. I even referenced it in my acknowledgements. The real case involves Svetlana Petriychuk, a playwright who about five years ago wrote a play called, Finist the Bright Falcon, which was staged by Zhenya Berkovich, a theater director. The two of them were tried by Russian authorities who claimed the play glorified terrorism. 

It was completely absurd and it’s commonly believed that Petriychuk and Berkovich were punished not because of the content of their play or because the authorities truly believed that they were glorifying terrorism, but because Berkovich is, in addition to being a playwright, a published poet and was writing poetry that had been critical of the government’s invasion of Ukraine and sharing it on her Facebook page. And although that’s not why Maya is arrested, the point is that you don’t actually have to do anything for them to come after you. They arrested Svetlana and Zhenya, or Maya in my novel, to set an example. The message is that regular people, your average artist living in Russia, should be afraid.

WM: With all of this going on, what is it like being an artist in Russia today?

SS: So you have to understand that I haven't been to Russia since 2021. I visited right before the invasion, and now I can’t go back because of what I have written publicly about Putin. And truthfully I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back. I say that so you know that everything I say about contemporary art, filmmaking, and literature in Russia is based on what I hear and read from others. 

Prior to the invasion, there were already repressions in place, but starting in 2022 they accelerated to extreme levels of censorship. In March of that year, about a month or two following the invasion, they passed a law which prevented you from basically saying anything about the war. In fact, it forbade you from even calling it a “war.” You had to call it a “special military operation.” And following that law, every single outlet for dissent was shut down and they started targeting specific groups, beginning with the LGBTQ community – or, what they called the “international LGBTQ movement.” Any positive references to the LGBTQ community were outlawed, like in books or in movies – anywhere, even public speech. So it was made abundantly clear that if you made art – be it literature, film, music, anything - you could not say anything that would veer from the official point of view.

To give you an example, they arrested a young street performer named Naoko who was singing songs by other artists the government had deemed, “foreign agents.” Not even songs she wrote, songs by other artists that had left Russia or expressed dissent with the government, and they arrested her. She was 18 years old and after they finally released her from prison after more than a month in custody she fled the country. I’m not sure where she lives now, but that’s just to give you an idea – and there are countless other examples just like her – of artists driven out of the country. And most of the time it's because of the artist's political position rather than what they sing or write in their fiction. That's the reason they're being targeted.

WM: The art itself isn’t the problem.

SS: Yes, it’s the individual’s audacity to dissent, not the content of the art. 

WM: Is there still a culture of samizdat in Russia?

SS: No, because samizdat referred to literature banned by the government under the Soviet state and discretely disseminated – often written in hand, or crudely reproduced by use of a Xerox machine. But, with the invention of the internet, samizdat is essentially useless. There’s no need to smuggle paper manuscripts anymore. The word “samizdat” still exists, but in the context of self-publishing. That’s actually what the word translates to – self-published.

WM: But is there still a culture of sharing media or art that is deemed illegal or censored by the government?

SS: Yes, that culture has transformed and there’s a sibling to samizdat, which is called “tamizdat,” and that translates to “published there,” as in, published abroad. It thrived during the Soviet Union, and essentially meant that literature would be smuggled out of the country and published elsewhere, primarily in the West, sometimes without even the author’s knowledge. That’s what happened with Doctor Zhivago, for example, and why [Boris] Pasternak had to refuse the Nobel Prize in order to stay in the USSR. 

Since the invasion of Ukraine, this phenomenon has returned. A number of smaller presses have started publishing work by Russian writers that can’t be published in Russia in places like the US and elsewhere in Europe, and in Israel, which has a large Russian speaking population. So this work is being written and published in Russian, but for the Russian speaking communities in these other countries. Last time I checked, I think there are at least 30 presses like this, the biggest of them Freedom Letters. And it is hard for me to know whether these publications are making their way into Russia from these external markets, but I did speak with one editor who said that they are distributing their books inside the country, of course illegally. 

WM: When you talk to artists still in Russia, how are they coping with all of this? Because, in your novel when Maya is arrested and put on trial, it sends her into a period of depression, where she feels that everything she has worked for is lost. Essentially, the life that she built for herself is lost, because not only has she been blacklisted in her industry, but her depression is so deep that she can no longer be creative. I like to think that art will always prevail, but I have to imagine it is hard right now given the conditions. 

SS: Honestly, I don’t have very many friends still left in Russia. A lot of the creatives have left. So it's hard for me to answer that question, but I can tell you what it was like while I was still in Russia.

I self-censored, as many people who are still making art in Russia are doing now. Before The Undead, I published three novels in Russian. I wrote simple, basically, family stories or family dramas. I obviously poured myself into them, but at the same time I knew that there were certain topics that I couldn't touch for reasons that we've been discussing. So, you know, when you don't feel free, it affects your art. For one thing, it limits the number of topics that you even attempt to tackle and you cannot make truthful art. Because obviously, while living in Russia, I was thinking about these same things that I'm thinking about now, about the relationship between the state and the artist, and I couldn't write about that. I wrote this novel only because I'm not in Russia anymore.

WM: Something I really appreciated about this novel is that – although all the evidence presented to the reader, by both the protagonist and the authorities – it is clear Maya is innocent of the crime they claim she committed. But you chose not to make her a martyr or some traditional hero who puts their life on the line in order on principles. She has to think about self-preservation, first and foremost, which is what any of us would do, too. How did you come to that choice?

SS: I don't think it would be easy for me to write a hero story, because I'm not a hero myself. Maya is myself in many ways. The most important difference between us is that Maya is completely apolitical in the beginning of the novel, meaning she's not even interested in what's going on in the country, like she's willfully ignorant to it, even though everyone else is basically confronting her about it. And she's trying to defend herself by saying, “I have no idea about what's going on. I'm not an expert on politics.” 

While I was living in Russia, I was just as much of a chickenshit as Maya. I would never dare to dissent, but at least I knew what was going on. I was not ignoring it. I was following the news. I was trying to analyze it in my own head and talk about it with my friends. And I think that's very important – that when you live under an authoritarian regime, that at least you have enough courage to look evil in the face.

I had a lot of friends who – like Maya – were apolitical. They just ignored the repression because the economy was doing well and they had money and a nice apartment and there were all these new restaurants opening up. Life was good, you know? They didn’t need freedom of speech, or so it seemed. So when I started writing this novel, this was the phenomenon that I wanted to explore, because I could not understand it. Some people aren’t concerned with the same things as me. Many remember the turbulence of the 1990s and the economic depression that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, so they are just happy things are better than they were then.

WM: Putin likes to claim he solved that crisis, doesn’t he?

SS: Yes, that's precisely what's happening. A lot of the support that Putin still gets from the population is because his ascension to power occurred at the same time that oil prices increased, and Russia was suddenly swimming in money, especially in the big cities. But he had nothing to do with that. He was just profiteering, just like many of the people in his circle were and still are.

But there are others who do feel the same way as me and who won’t turn a blind eye to Putin’s repressions. Many of them have now left the country, however, in order to avoid arrest. In fact, over one million people have left Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, and many are intellectuals and artists. So now, jobs and opportunities are opening up that would have gone to those who left, and it's giving others even less of an incentive to dissent because now they stand to gain from the opportunities created by this exodus. 

WM: Early in the novel, Maya is in Italy and is asked by someone “What are things like in Russia today?” And I’ll just read from the novel, Maya says:

Every foreigner wanted to know why her country was becoming increasingly repressive, and what she thought about it. They crave details. People thrown in jail after peaceful protests, journalists beaten, corrupt courts issuing unlawful decisions.

I have to imagine you get these same questions constantly. Do you ever get tired of them? Or, tired of feeling like you have to defend yourself for what the Russian government is doing?

SS: In the beginning, I had to explain myself. Not so much anymore, because some people – or, at least Americans – have gotten bored with the Russia-Ukraine topic, unfortunately. But, early on I had to explain that Putin does not equal Russia, right? He's just some guy who climbed to power through a confluence of circumstance. And he’s managed to hold onto power and turn Russia into a dictatorship. But that is not what Russia is. 

Russia is the people and the language and the culture, and all of those things at once. But it does not include Putin and his clique. That's the regime. So that's what I had to explain. And also I had to explain, obviously, that just because I happen to have been born in Russia, and that I speak the language, that doesn't mean that I support Putin in any way, and that I have to, for example, answer for his crimes. I’ve not always been successful in convincing people of that, however, and have actually been denied certain opportunities for being Russian. I’m not complaining, it hasn’t caused me any huge problems but –

WM: But it is the reality.

SS: Yes. 

WM: Besides the obvious difference in language, is there a difference in cadence and rhythm to Anglophonic storytelling from Russian that you had to adapt to while writing this?

SS: 100 years ago, there were definitely huge differences between Russophone and Anglophone storytelling. For example, if we compare Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to, I don't know, Edith Wharton and Henry James, you would see huge differences. Or if you even compared postwar American fiction to Soviet fiction you would see huge differences. But now not so much. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Especially over the last 20 years with the internet and the world as interconnected as it is, I think culture is becoming homogenized. So I know for a fact that contemporary Russian writers, especially young ones, are very close readers of Anglophone contemporary fiction. They read the same books on plot and structure. So Russian fiction now, contemporary Russian fiction is probably not so different from Anglophone contemporary fiction.

WM: The reason I ask is because, had I not spoken with you prior to reading the novel, I would not have known you were Russian. I might have maybe assumed, “This was translated by an American,” but it wasn’t. You wrote it and there’s nothing to suggest you haven’t been writing or reading in English your whole life.

SS: I think that probably has a lot to do with living in the States for the past nine years. Because, if you read the novels I wrote in Russian and they were translated into English, you would still see how different they are from what you would expect from Anglophone fiction. But then, I don't know, I guess my brain changed since I've come here, and I've just absorbed all that I've been reading, because I haven't been reading a lot of Russian fiction, to tell you the truth, I just kind of completely changed. You know, my interests have changed.

WM: My last question is about the film Maya is making in the novel – an army of zombies taking over the world, led by none other than the undead Vladimir Lenin. Where did that idea come from?

SS: My husband actually came up with the idea. Others have done it before me, too. I think it comes from this strange phenomenon of keeping his corpse on display in Red Square. 

WM: What is Lenin’s legacy like in Russia today?

SS: As a kid growing up in the Soviet Union, Lenin was portrayed as this gentle grandfather figure who loved children. And a lot of people still think that about him and it's why there are still streets named after him and statues of him everywhere. Putin realizes this, too, and he’s criticized Lenin a lot for his role in breaking up the Russian empire, something Putin considers the gravest crime. But he knows that people still have this fondness for Lenin and he can’t criticize him too much or else he might lose their support. So they mostly don’t talk about him. 

WM: The Undead is a really great novel, and very timely. Congratulations on making it to publication and I look forward to seeing it in bookstores.

SS: Thank you.