Deep Freeze

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a transformative moment for many people who one way or another connected to Russia. The war forced us to look at Russian history from a different perspective; suddenly, all the unanswered questions returned. Issues of hyper-centralization, Moscow-centrism, Russian chauvinism, and systemic racism became so blatant that they sparked a renewed movement for decolonization. By the end of 2022, numerous indigenous anti-war and decolonial groups had formed. This shift was so visible and significant that I felt a profound need to document and record it.

However, I decided to begin with episodes from the 1990s. For me personally, diving into decolonial theory and practice felt like an echo of that decade—as if the questions and problems that required solutions and answers then are resonating with a bitter echo now, like the two wars in Chechnya in the '90s. In 2023, I began a series of autobiographical comic episodes based on real events from the 1990s, during my student years in Irkutsk.

This graphic essay consists of three parts—a collection of episodes from different times. I deliberately chose not to structure this essay as a conventional story with a clear beginning and end. It was important to me to draw and write everything exactly as I remember it, so I could say with a clear conscience that every episode is based on real events and dialogues that happened to me. The only exception is the third part—the family ethnography. There, of course, I cannot know exactly what the dialogues were or what my relatives were saying, but the events that happened to them are real.

There is nothing "sensational" here; you won’t discover any secrets. But perhaps you will see the patterns of violence and suppression that have repeating itself throughout history for the Buryat people: colonization, violence, Russification, the seizure of land, and the flight to Mongolia. At a certain point, the Buryats—while being objects of colonial violence themselves—became instruments of colonization in the hands of Moscow. This complexity does not absolve us, the Buryat people, to share our part of responsibility for the current violence in Ukraine.