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FROM LENIN TO HARRY POTTER: HOW TO PUBLISH A BOOK IN RUSSIA

Published in Sydney NSW Writer’s Newsletter, Jan 2007

The delivery man dropped a bundle of heavy packages onto my patio. They were tightly wound in black waterproof material, like something prepared for a polar expedition. I cut one of the packages open. Finally! I was holding a beautifully designed Russian hardcover book with large golden letters on the cover, with lots of coloured photographs inside, titled, “Sentenced to Death.”

It all began back in 1984 after my secret meeting with my sister in New Delhi. I was a “wanted” person, still under the death sentence for “high treason” in the USSR, imposed after my escape by swimming across the border to Turkey; my sister was a well-respected media lecturer at a Party School in Novosibirsk. At the time I thought she was taking a tremendous gamble meeting me during an organised tour to India by her trade union organisation. Much later I found out that she was allowed to go abroad only on one condition: that she would try to recruit me (with the help of the KGB officer who accompanied the group). I don’t really blame her: she still is a devout and idealistic communist (of non-card-carrying variety) and for her at that time my return to Russia would have been a step in the right direction. She thought she could have freed me from the clutches of “capitalist sharks and foreign intelligence services.”  Fortunately, another mirror broke in the land of broken mirrors: there was a defection in her group and the KGB flunkey with career on line was busy chasing the fugitive.

The two separate worlds that the death sentence imposed on me collided.  Soon after that fateful meeting with my sister I began to dictate my memoirs onto a tape.  I thought my sister would never see it published or even be able to read it. So I dictated it in English and later had it transcribed.

It was a bit of a miracle to me and to everyone who knew me when my book was finally published in Russia last year. My sister, perhaps for the first time, understood my life’s journey, having seen it thus publicly legitimised. Her “conversion” was helped by the fact that I received excellent reviews from the major radio stations and some Russian publications.

My sister represented a significant part of the Russian population that got psychically dislocated, torn between their nostalgia for the “good old times” and the new, turbulent and unpredictable Russia. But I also had a larger audience. There were young people who simply admired my courage in escaping from Russia; others who enjoyed my adventures in the West; and yet others who were reminded of the brutal times that brought the Soviet elite to power and that still kept many of their descendants at the helm of the new Russia.

It is likely that my Russian memoirs would still be sitting in a chest of drawers were it not for Eduard, a scientist in Moscow, who encouraged me to publish my book. On his own initiative he translated (gratis) the first Russian draft on his palmtop during his daily trips to work on the noisy and crowded Moscow subway. His wife Natasha, who is a professional journalist, edited the first draft. After much editing and revising of my own I emailed the manuscript to an editor in Neva, one for the oldest publishing houses in St. Petersburg. She was recommended to me by a colleague in New Zealand who published her translation of Noam Chomsky’s book in Russia.

The editor emailed me back: “I read you ms with bated breath...” This sounded promising. Then, as it often happens in Russia, things slowed down to a crawl. Had I not accompanied my wife on her visit to Russia soon after making the initial contact with the editor, very likely, nothing would have happened.

A week after my arrival I was in a lift of a sleek building in St. Petersburg, having undergone a strenuous security check (against burglars, not spies!). Inside the office people were busily moving between small cubicles in which surprisingly late model workstations were blinking. The old Soviet publishing house was privatised by the new owners who managed to carve a niche for themselves in the rapidly changing and ruthless publishing market.

Just then, “the most-read nation on earth” had finally emerged from a literary purgatory of the perestroika years. By 1995 Russia’s publishing output fell by 75% from some 2 billion copies per annum published during Soviet times. Few people missed Lenin’s Collective Works, the circulation of which at one point had reached 511 million copies. The Russian readers were then avidly devouring books by their own romance, crime and fantasy writers, as well as the foreign “Harry Potter” books. The most successful writers of this new genre were women who deftly capitalised on the sense of nostalgia for escapist romance and adventure created by the ugly but exciting reality of Russia ruled by the Mafiosi and the “new rich.” Daria Dontsova, the queen of the “ironic detective story”, at one time had 18 million books in print. Not as much as Lenin, but more than Harry Potter. She was closely followed by a book on home cooking by a well-known TV show hostess. And just lately the literary disposition has changed again, influenced by the new petrodollar-fuelled economy and the resurgent pride in the resource-rich Russia: at the top of the bestseller list, a 5-volume set of patriotic books about the glories of Russian history, accompanied, paradoxically, by Richard Branson’s  “Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life”; yet another motivational book on giving up smoking; and a story of the demise of Spartak, the once famous Russian soccer team.

A year ago, my memoirs were a real publishing risk in Russia. Putin had initiated a nationalistic campaign aimed at boosting the people’s morale (and the flagging ranks of the Russian army’s recruits). My notorious escape still touched the raw nerve of the Russian “patriots.” A particularly irritating detail was the fact that my escape began when I broke out from a psychiatric institution were I was confined after evading the military service. (The long-drawn war in Chechnya has made most young Russians desperate to avoid, often through  malingering and other forms of evasion, being drafted into the ramshackle and brutal Russian army.)

The meeting with my editor in St. Petersburg, a youthful looking woman with a Tartar name, ended on a positive note. But then… a scheme that we had struck, to create a new series made entirely of memoirs, fell through. My editor had to find a new home for my book in one of their existing series. (Most of the books were published and marketed as a series with similar readerships, covers and marketing thrust.) Since my memoirs contained unique photographs and documents from my own archives, it was finally fitted into the series called “Secret Materials.” The series contained previously unpublished historical materials on Soviet and foreign leaders, Russian and foreign spies, and other stories such as the story of abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. Once published, the editor assured me, my books will be sent to some 60 distributors throughout Russia.

Just before my book went into print I got a call from my editor saying that their in-house “brand managers” have suddenly decided to change the title and the cover of my book. Instead of “The Escape,” it became “Sentenced to Death,” a more catchy title, especially as my last name on the cover in large gold letters was the same as that of the current Head of the Russian secret police. The superimposed images of the Kremlin and the Statue of Liberty completed the gory ensemble. The “brand managers” felt it was a guaranteed eye-catcher.

Some months later I was invited by the publisher to come to my book launch during Moscow’s Annual International Book Fair. But their margins were so meager, they told me, that they could not pay for my fare and would only put me up in a three-star hotel during the day of the launch. Instead of spending over 2000 dollars on fares and more on expenses I produced a professional DVD of my book’s presentation, complete with sights and sounds of Australia.

I spoke to my Russian friends on their mobiles during the presentation. They were impressed by a wide plasma screen on which the DVD was shown, by my editor’s inspiring speech,  and the fact that all the available copies were sold out at the Book Fair. One just had to ignore the poor air-conditioning inside the exhibition hall on a hot summer day that made it difficult to breathe, let alone speak, while any attempts to find my publishers’ stall after braving the hour-long queues at the entrance had required the perseverance of Sherlok Homes.

Have the book’s royalties made me rich? I wish that was the case. The hardcover with many coloured photographs inside and over 300 pages long was retailing in Russia for about $6. This leaves the author, after paying the onerous tax on foreigners, with about 15 cents per copy. The even tougher task was getting my author’s copies that I had acquired with my royalties, to Australia. My nephew, a Moscow businessman, had to spend hours in various offices, precuring copies of author’s agreements and customs declarations that would prove he wasn’t sending out some illicit copies or rare collectors’ books. It was a logistic nightmare. Once the books were purchased, the printer’s warehouse refused to either send the books to me or to store them. Only one Central Post Office in Moscow seemed to accept parcels for posting overseas. My nephew had to stand every time in a new line to send each individual parcel separately. The electronic indicator above the counter, manned by a single overworked and hassled-looking postal worker, was generating random numbers. It was like a lottery, waiting for one’s ticket to be called out while clutching it in a sweaty fist. Some knowledgeable people next in line suggested to my nephew that the quickest way to post a parcel was to take a drive to Riga, the capital of the independent Latvia, some 800 kilometers to the west. Another option was to walk across the road to a DHL office and pay a few hundred dollars extra for postage.  There were other tragicomic incidents involved. A severe winter frost in Moscow burst a boiler in my nephew’s house, so he had to use the money I sent him for postage to repair the boiler.  All told, it took over a year since the publication for the bulk of my books to reach me in Australia.

Was it all worth it? No doubt it was. Over the next few weeks the SBS radio is broadcasting excerpts from my book in most capital cities in Australia. I have planned book launches in Sydney and Melbourne. But most importantly, my story has gone down on record in Russia and is available in most countries where Russian-speaking people live. And my nephew has got a new boiler, ready for next winter.