Graphic artist and activist Victoria Lomasko’s compassionate and compulsively readable chronicle of Russia’s forgotten and persecuted, translated by Thomas Campbell, collects her drawings and writing from the last decade. She teaches prisoners to sketch, visits remote schools, joins a trucker camp and a gay film festival, speaks to the survivors of a slavery ring and attends protest after protest, as the police and pro-government youth brigades look on. Yet while Lomasko is a fierce and involved critic of the self-serving powers that be, Others Russias is propelled by the idea that everyone has a story worth telling, and she tells most of them straight. Interviews hit harder for being matter-of-fact (“the boss lady ordered the guard … to break the fingers on both my hands”), and she follows homophobes as well as activists, nationalists as well as anti-fascists. There’s a wonderful immediacy to her portraits, which give colour and humanity to what is at times a grim read. When she shows energised gatherings of people, guitars, placards and balloons, streaks of light illuminate the darkness.
• Other Russias is published by Penguin at £16.99.
