Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the

The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay

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2025-01-09 07:30:05

Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?

F iction has a habit of coming to life in Russia. On the evening of 2 April 2023, the military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky appeared at an event in St Petersburg organised by Cyber Front Z, a group of semi-professional keyboard warriors who boost Kremlin war propaganda online. With more than half a million followers, Tatarsky was a mid-tier celebrity on Telegram, the social media app that has become a hub of Russian news and political debate.

As guests mingled, a young woman with long, salon-waved blond hair approached Tatarsky. She presented him with an unusual gift: a gold-painted statue of himself. About two minutes later, the statue exploded, killing Tatarsky and injuring 42 people. The blond woman – 26-year-old St Petersburg native Darya Trepova – was arrested the next day. She said she had believed the statue contained a listening device, not a bomb, and that she had acted on orders from a man in Ukraine she knew only as “Gestalt”.

Trepova was an unlikely killer. A vegan feminist who had dropped out of medical school and worked at a vintage clothing store, she had been arrested at an anti-war protest in February 2022 and held for 10 days. Not only was there nothing to suggest that she would carry out an assassination, Tatarsky was an odd target, a bellicose social media influencer without real power. Trepova was sentenced to 27 years in prison for her crime.