Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Russian (though the author is from Belarus) by Ellen Vayner

First published in Minsk in 2018, Filipenko’s novel features two main characters, 30 year old Sasha, a soccer referee who lives with his young daughter, and 90 year old Tatiana Alexeyevna who is in the early stages of dementia. Sasha moves into the apartment next to Tatiana’s and gets to meet her when she is painting red crosses in the corridor, to enable her to remember the way home. Initially Sasha has no time to chat, but that soon changes as Tatiana begins her story.
Enlisted by the Soviets as a typist she witnessed Stalin’s mass purges in the Great Terror of 1937. During the war her husband disappears, to turn up on a list of captured troops she is asked to type. In a matter of months, she herself ends up in the Gulag.

In 200 pages Filipenko covers the history of Belorus from the 1930s to the early 2000s, from Stalin to Lukashenko. The parallels are made clear, during the Second World War the Belorusians were trapped, half a million killed fighting for Stalin, while tens of thousands supported the Nazis. Today Putin tells the Belorusians that they share a common fate with the Russians, and a novelist, Filipenko, is one of the voices of dissent.

At one point Tatiana says “Dehumanization takes only a second” and that she could never denounce anyone. Sasha responds..If humans have really accomplished anything, it’s the ability to negotiate with their own conscience.
This is an exceptional novel, and one that deserves more prominence than it has received since its publication.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5