On Tuesday, the day after the exciting first game of the Stanley Cup finals — a 6-4 victory for the plucky Las Vegas Golden Knights over the veteran Washington Capitals, led by the Russian star Alex Ovechkin — the news came from Ukraine that a Russian journalist who had fled Moscow last year after receiving death threats had been shot in the back and killed while returning home with groceries.
The journalist, Arkady Babchenko, served in the Russian Army in both Chechen wars two decades ago. He had then come home to Moscow and started writing about what it was like in Chechnya, and was hired as a journalist. He kept writing about the war. “I wrote compulsively,” he recalled, “on my way to work in the metro, on my journalistic assignments, at home at night.” He needed, he said, “to squeeze the war out of my system.”
These writings became a sad, humorous, brutal book of stories, “One Soldier’s War,” which came out in English in 2006. Babchenko helped publish a magazine of other war veterans’ writings. “I always dreamed of writing stories for children,” he wrote, “but for nine years already I’ve written stories of bloated corpses in the heat on the streets of ruined cities. You want a great Russia? Here she is.”
Babchenko harbored no illusions about Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, initiator of the first Chechen war, but under President Vladimir Putin, Babchenko’s opposition to the regime and its supporters hardened. In late 2016, he wrote on Facebook that he had no pity in his heart for the Red Army choristers who had perished when a Russian military plane crashed into the Black Sea on its way to Syria, where they were to sing for the Russian forces that had recently bombed Aleppo.
The Facebook post was harsh and uncompromising, and it turned Babchenko into an enemy of the people inside Russia. Two months later, he left, moving first to Prague, then Israel, and eventually Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. He promised to return to Moscow eventually “in a NATO tank.”
I am a hockey fan, with a particular interest in Russian hockey and its complex fate in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and I had spent the morning after the first game of the Stanley Cup finals reading up on the Washington Capitals. I read a charming essay by Evgeny Kuznetsov, a brilliant young center on Washington’s first line, originally from the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, near the Ural Mountains, about how he’d dreamed as a boy of one day playing in the National Hockey League.
“When I got older, maybe 14 years old, I finally got to see a computer for first time,” he wrote. “YouTube was everything. I get to see how Wayne Gretzky plays, how Red Machine play. I get to see how Alexei Kovalev, Ilya Kovalchuk and Ovi play.” (Ovi is a nickname for Ovechkin.)
I watched a clip from the Canadian writer Dave Bidini’s film, “The Hockey Nomad Goes to Russia,” where he happened to visit a 12-year-old Kuznetsov in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his family had moved for his hockey career. It was a “Hoop Dreams” sort of situation, an impossible and even pathetic dream. Kuznetsov was just a…
