From the editor: Novel about gays in 1990s Russia evokes the era brilliantly
Russia in the 1990s was still a grim place, but its people were also experiencing new freedoms, while Western expats tended to see it as a land of adventure. This is the setting for Paul David Gould’s novel Last Dance at the Discotheque for Deviants, just published by Unbound, which tells the story of a young gay Russian man who dies mysteriously and two friends who try to find out what happened to him. Gould, 58, is gay himself and was based in Russia during that time. He now works for the Financial Times as a subeditor. He told me in a video interview what motivated him to write the book and how he feels about Russia today.
Paul David Gould with a copy of his book. Photo: Yakir Zur
Gould, who is from Huddersfield in Yorkshire, studied Russian at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1989. He spent about four years living in Voronezh, Moscow and Riga while the Soviet Union was collapsing and in the aftermath of that.
Last Dance is Gould’s first novel. It features the three cities he lived in, with the main character Kostya meeting British student Jamie in Voronezh in 1989-90. They both move to Moscow in 1991, with Kostya hoping to make it in the theatre world and Jamie getting a job as a journalist for the fictitious Moscow Herald, an English-language paper that is much less prestigious than the real-life Moscow Times. If Jamie can break a big story about the capital’s underground gay nightclub scene he might make it to the Times, he thinks. After Jamie pushes Kostya to come out as gay but rejects him as a lover, Kostya starts dating Dima, who is from Riga and is having to act in porn films to make ends meet.
Getting nowhere with his theatrical ambitions, Kostya starts working for an organisation called US-Care that ostensibly provides funding to worthy Russian projects but is beset by corruption. This plotline was partly inspired by Gould’s time working for the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce, he says.
The book cleverly jumps around in time and switches between the points of view of the three men and Kostya’s mother Tamara Borisovna. We learn at the beginning that Kostya has died and gradually see how Jamie and Dima team up to investigate, while Tamara Borisovna has to deal with her discovery that Kostya was gay.
Gould started writing the book several years ago, before the annexation of Crimea, and it went through 10 drafts. It was rejected about 30 times, partly because it doesn’t easily fit into a genre. Kostya’s death is not the stereotypical “body found in the snow” story that people expect in novels about Russia, Gould says. It’s more complicated than that – and original. Because of the timing, he didn’t try to “shoehorn” a commentary about the Ukraine invasion into the book before publication. Instead it has a subtler anti-war message with Tamara Borisovna’s friend’s son having been killed in Afghanistan and Kostya bullied during his compulsory military service.
Kostya’s awkward visit to Jamie in England is based on that of Gould’s friend Andrei, who came to see him in Birmingham in 1990. “He pitched up in England with no money, didn’t have a change of clothes. I had to pay for him, I was out of work,” Gould said. “He didn’t speak a word of English and was really clueless, it was a bit of a disaster… When we took Andrei shopping, his jaw hit the floor; he was used to the empty disgusting gastronom. I threw in this line in the scene where Kostya goes to Sainsbury’s: ‘Now I saw the truth: you greedy thieving capitalists could feed your people, and we sharing egalitarian communists couldn’t’. Throughout the book, there’s a running commentary on the failings of Communism, but also some of the cruelties of capitalism.”
Homophobia in Russia is the main theme of Last Dance, although Gould didn’t experience too much of it himself. “There was one incident where I was at one of those pop-up nightclubs and went outside with my Russian boyfriend at the time and a gang of lads did approach us and somebody attempted to hit me and I just got out of the way in time,” he said. “I experienced some racism too, because I’m mixed-race. The Russian friends I had were quite accepting of me being gay… I did, however, experience more homophobia from one Russian secretary at the Chamber of Commerce. Like her, there’s a character in the book called Nastya, who keeps saying to Kostya, ‘Why haven’t you got a girlfriend?’”
Vladimir Putin has taken the homophobia that already existed to some extent in Russian society and weaponised it, Gould told me. “Culturally it’s difficult to ascertain how much of these attitudes are top-down and how much are bottom-up… What’s happened with Putin now is really out of the playbook of the fascists like Hitler or Franco or Mussolini: they chose a minority category who don’t conform and then they are at the sharp end of repression.” Even more disturbingly, some gays who were targeted as victims of Putinism have now become its advocates, like other Russians. Gould recently spoke to a gay friend in Russia who thinks the country is fighting Nazis in Ukraine.
“I despair of Russia,” Gould said. “When I went to university it was the Gorbachev period, glasnost. I was really motivated by this sense of hope, of building understanding, and of course by arms reduction. I like to feel I made a tiny, tiny contribution by going to Voronezh and meeting lots of Russians. A contribution to peace and understanding, and I felt that everything was on this positive trajectory…
“I have since taken a more hawkish attitude since the full-on invasion. Before the annexation of Crimea, I had been bending over backwards to give Russia the benefit of the doubt. I was saying we need to understand them better. I thought that trade was a guarantor of peaceful relations, and we’re seeing that it isn’t. Not only is the war merciless and cruel and barbaric and unprovoked, it makes absolutely no sense, it will bring no benefit to Russia whatsoever.”
Gould is now working on another novel that has nothing to do with Russia. “It is a sort of Huddersfield council estate boy meets Motown music story, set in the seventies and eighties,” he told me.
You can receive this newsletter once a month for free, or sign up here for a weekly subscription for just £3.99 ($5) a month or £45 a year. I’m keen to hear what you’re interested in, so if you have tips or questions please contact me at sarahnhurst@gmail.com. You can follow me on Twitter at @XSovietNews.
Russian regions hit by drones, Kyiv under attack
Ukrainian drones apparently struck in several Russian regions, including Pskov Oblast and Bryansk Oblast, on Tuesday night, reportedly destroying transport planes on runways as well as other targets. A report by the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg on Russians’ reaction to the attacks suggested that most haven’t “put two and two together” to understand that they are a direct consequence of the invasion of Ukraine. Russians generally still see themselves as victims and some believe that NATO would have invaded Russia if they hadn’t launched the “special military operation”. Meanwhile on the same night Kyiv endured a massive missile and drone attack by Russia in which two people were killed.
British volunteer killed fighting for Ukraine
British volunteer Samuel Newey, 22, from Solihull, has been killed fighting for Ukraine. He joined the war “to push back against Russian imperialism,” according to a tribute written by his older brother Daniel. Samuel and his father Paul had been charged in 2020 with terrorism offences relating to their alleged assistance to Daniel in joining the Kurdish YPG militia fighting ISIS in Syria. The UK government backed the YPG at the time. The charges were eventually dropped.
Prigozhin buried in secret
A funeral ceremony for Yevgeny Prigozhin, killed when his private jet was downed on Aug. 23, was held in St. Petersburg on Wednesday amid tight security and measures to ensure secrecy. An empty coffin was buried in the Serafimovskoye cemetery, while the Wagner leader’s actual remains were taken to his family plot on the other side of the city. The Kremlin has refused to allow an international investigation into the plane crash in Tver Oblast that killed 10 people, and has said that the aircraft was likely downed deliberately, although no further details have been provided on what might have happened. Vladimir Putin’s other outspoken pro-war critic, Igor Girkin, has announced from prison that he intends to run for president next year.
Anti-war activists get sentences in St. Petersburg, Ulan-Ude
A court in St. Petersburg has sentenced 55-year-old Olga Smirnova from the Peaceful Resistance movement to six years in prison for “spreading fakes about the army”. A small number of other anti-war activists gathered outside the court to support her. “I don’t admit my guilt,” Smirnova said. “I consider my publications about the military actions last spring to be completely accurate.” Smirnova organised anti-war protests and campaigned on behalf of persecuted Crimean Tatars.
Another court in St. Petersburg sentenced Orthodox priest Ioann Kurmoyarov to three years in prison, also for allegedly spreading fakes. In March last year he published a video in which he said that Russian troops killed in Ukraine would go to hell. “The blessed peacekeepers will go to heaven, peacekeepers, why not?” he said. “But those who launched aggression will not be in heaven.” Kurmoyarov was sent to jail to await trial in June last year, where he said medical staff ignored his 25 requests for help. The priest has also been placed on a Ukrainian blacklist for his criticisms of Ukrainian nationalism and the schism between the Russian and Ukrainian branches of the Orthodox Church.
In Ulan-Ude a court sentenced 61-year-old pensioner Natalia Filonova to two years and nine months in prison for allegedly kicking a police officer and poking another one in the face in a courtroom on Sept. 26 last year. Filonova was in court at the time after being detained at an anti-mobilisation protest. She was arrested on Oct. 21 and sent into house arrest to await trial for the assaults, but later sent to jail because she left her home to look for her foster son, who had gone missing. Filonova had previously been jailed for five days for “minor hooliganism and resisting police” and fined 35,000 roubles ($365) for “discrediting the army” after she asked a bus driver to remove a “Z” sticker from a window. The driver evacuated the other passengers and took her to a police station.
Ukrainian POW gets long sentence for firing at building
A court in the “Luhansk People’s Republic” has sentenced 29-year-old Ukrainian POW Denis Zayets to 15 years in prison for allegedly firing from an anti-tank grenade launcher at a block of flats in Sievierodonetsk in May last year, damaging the building. During the fierce fighting in the city before Russia captured it in June an estimated 90 percent of the residential damaged, 60 percent irreparably. Russian authorities published a video of Zayets confessing his guilt with his head shaved and wearing a prison uniform.
Would-be assassin of Chechen dissident sentenced in Germany
A court in Munich has sentenced Valid Dadakayev to 10 years in prison for preparing an assassination attempt on Chechen dissident Mokhmad Abdurakhmanov on the orders of Ramzan Kadyrov. According to the prosecution Dadakayev followed Abdurakhmanov, purchased a gun and found a contract killer from Chechnya, Tamerlan A. “I was supposed to be killed because I and my brother Tumso Abdurakhmanov publicly criticise the Russian regime in Chechnya,” Abdurakhmanov told Deutsche Welle.