Translated material
“Bull” is with us! Lisa Birger - about why you should read Oleg Kashin's new novel*
Cover of Oleg Kashin's novel "Bull"
In February, ISIA Media Verlag published the novel “Bull” by publicist, troublemaker and regular contributor to Republic Oleg Kashin. Kashin's first fiction book in decades is an adventurous detective story set in a future in which the war in Ukraine has ended and Russia has collapsed. Is it possible in 2026 to write a fascinating book about Russia after Putin and entertain everyone? Lisa Birger thinks the attempt counts.
Russia of the near future. Igor Gavrilov, minister of culture of the Kitezh Republic - one of many formed after the death of Putin and the collapse of Russia - is riding home in a green "fiesta" to Spassk. Outside the window the Oka glitters, the leg amputated near Avdeevka aches, the sense of history intoxicates, Sobyanin sits in the Kremlin, the new republics have almost normal relations with the West, and Russian cities are flooded with Western tourists. Gavrilov does not make it home - on the way he is kidnapped by Uzbeks and demanded to give up “The Bull,” the famous painting that the minister managed to return to his homeland from the Savitsky Museum in Nukus. Around “Bull” a story eventually develops about an entire century in the country’s history: large construction projects of the 1920s, the trials of the 1930s, the Gulag, the quiet party life of the late Union.
But Kashin’s book is more of a detective story than a historical excursion, a sprawling joke in which historical anecdotes exist freely in the same space as historical tragedies.
“Bull” is not the first fiction book by Oleg Kashin, but its author is known, of course, not at all for his prose, but as one of the most prominent - and most controversial - Russian political journalists. With his columns, political comments, reports and interviews, documentary books, including those about Gorbachev, Zemfira*, the collapse of the USSR and Putin's Russia, he created a reputation for himself as a person who is able to talk to everyone about everything, but is not his own for anyone. After 2022, he is at the same time a “foreign agent”, put on the criminal wanted list in Russia in the case of justifying terrorism, included by FBK** in the list of “corrupt officials and warmongers”, and is also under sanctions from Ukraine. We can immediately say that none of his heroes has an equally fascinating biography. Any plot will turn out to be pale in comparison with it.
Documentary details are woven into the fiction of “Bull”. First of all, the painting itself is real - the work of Vasily (Evgeniy) Lysenko, an avant-garde artist who studied with Malevich, was arrested in 1935 and never painted again. Only six of his paintings have survived, and his name is known primarily thanks to the director of the State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Igor Savitsky, who bought “Bull” in 1972 from the artist’s sister, who remained in Tashkent. The painting, by the way, has a second title - “Fascism is Coming”: in the black eyes of the bull one could see sections of gun barrels aimed at the viewer. This name, apparently, was given by Savitsky himself - to justify storing the avant-garde in a Soviet museum.
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