Owen Matthews > Quotes

“He remained convinced that belief was the only gravity that could hold his contradictory world of duty and lies together. But he was no longer sure he had preserved enough of it to make the center hold.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“In Siberian merchant weddings well into the 19th century, the bride's father would strike his daughter with a specially made whip, pronouncing the words, 'By these blows you, daughter, know the power of your father. Now instead of me, your husband will teach you with this lash.' The whip would be ceremonially passed from father to son-in-law.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“To survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to willfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.”
― Owen Matthews, Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

“Somewhere on his prudent little journey to power, Efremov had taught himself to smile. It was an underhand weapon to use on people, rather like silence on the telephone, but effective. Efremov smiled now, a thin smirk. Though he outranked nobody still seated at the table, his presence caused every man to stiffen and compose his face. Theirs was the quiet not of insolence, but of fear.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“Stepan Krasheninnikov, a young botanist who became the Bering expedition's chronicler, found the natives of Kamchatka unusually degenerate and disgusting even by Siberian standards. They 'eat their own lice and wash in urine...share their food with their dogs and smell of fish', Krasheninnikov reported. They also 'cannot count beyond three without using their fingers'.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“Just a very big bomb, a weapon of war, you say. Wrong. They were once. But now there are too many of them. They are too powerful. Nuclear weapons are the end of human history in all places, for all time.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“In Italy ‘ruins generally form themselves’, quipped the Italian, ‘but in St Petersburg they are built from scratch’.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“Maria’s man Guri was the immediately recognizable king of the sandwich bar, lord of all the sausages. The man was big and swarthy, with waved dark hair parted like a razor slash. He was broad and thick-faced and violent, with pressed-together lips and a patriarch’s paunch. The Georgian wore a stained cook’s apron and barked orders to the waitresses as though to junior members of his extended family.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“Though neither Putin’s siloviki – nor even ultra-conservative philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin – would put it in these terms, a war of national salvation was the only force powerful enough to stop the encroachment of the modern world and radically cut the country off from the West.”
― Owen Matthews, Overreach

“A midlevel Party apparatchik, no vices beyond the usual, on paper a typical example of the species. His official photo showed a bloated face with a bully’s straight gaze and the resentful pout of a much-commanded man. Like most officials of his level, Belov’s rise had been punctuated by a flurry of official complaints from colleagues and citizens, swirling in his wake like candy wrappers in the backwash of a Party sedan. Complaints, the tiny revenge of the powerless. Everyone wrote them.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“Under the Empress Elizabeth, who abolished the death penalty for most offences in 1753, the crimes for which a man could be exiled to Siberia included fortune-telling, vagrancy, 'begging with false distress', prizefighting, wife-beating, illicit tree-felling, 'recklessly driving a cart without use of reins' and for a brief puritanical period in the 1750s, even taking snuff. Until the mid-eighteenth century, these exiles were always branded, usually on the face or right hand, to prevent them ever making their way back to the world. The convicts would spend up to two years shuffling in columns to their exile along the great Siberian trunk road known as the Trakt. The jingle of their chains and the ritual cries of “Fathers, have pity on us!” as the condemned men held out their caps for food was, for all travellers, who passed them in their high-wheeled carriages, the sound of Siberia. By tradition at Tobolsk, 1100 miles from Moscow, the prisoners’ leg irons were removed – a mercy, but also a sign that they had gone too far into the wilderness for escape to be survivable.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“In summer, crossing northern Mongolia on horseback is mesmerizing. The land is so open that a day's travel appears not to change one's place in it at all, while underfoot an apparently infinite number of tiny gerbils scramble into their holes at the sound of a horse's hooves, making the ground tremble and seethe at the periphery of one's vision. The skies on this high plateau are a deep midnight blue; they seem as big as the world. In midwinter, these steppes are an endless, featureless desert of snow.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“This Mister Rezanov was a dynamic fellow, hot tempered, a dedicated scribbler, a talker, with a head more inclined to making castles in the air in his study than to making great deeds come true in the world.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“Any historian who sets out to search for a hero will almost inevitably uncover something of the scoundrel. Heroism, it seems, is visible only through a long lens. And so it was with Nikolai Rezanov. I followed the man's shade from the boulevards and palaces of St Petersburg to the squat rain-dripping counting houses of Pskov, where he passed a dreary provincial apprenticeship. Travelling by train, coal truck and bouncing Lada, I tracked him from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, once the capital of Russia's wild east, into the land of the Buryats and to the borders of China. I crunched along the black sand beaches of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka and the black sand beaches of Kodiak Island, Alaska, at opposite ends of the Pacific. I stood in the remains of the presidio where Rezanov had danced with Conchita and shivered in the rain on the windy outcrop known as Castle Rock in Sitka, once the citadel of New Archangel, where he had spent the cold, hungry winter of 1805–6. And I spent hours – many hours, since Rezanov was a bureaucrat, a courtier and an ambassador who wrote something almost every day of his life – in the company of the reports, diaries and letters in which Rezanov described his ideas and circumstances voluminously, but his feelings only barely. It is only in the last three years of his life, far from home and viciously bullied by the officers of the round-the-world voyage he believed he was commanding, that the man himself begins to emerge from the officialese, indignant and in pain.”
― Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

“Everything we thought we shared with the civilised world was borrowed. Moscow literary editor Varvara Babitskaya, February 2022”
― Owen Matthews, Overreach

“People, detached from their homes and set loose in the world, drift till they find the places that fit them.”
― Owen Matthews

“You know what I can never understand about you Russians? You love anarchy, each one of you. I know you fuckers. You all have rebel souls. Every one of you wants to screw the system. But together, you have a terror of chaos. You’ll go to any lengths to prevent it. I always wondered why. Perhaps because you know yourselves too well. You know what you’ll do if suddenly nobody is watching over you with a stick. That’s my profound thought for the day.”
― Owen Matthews, Black Sun

“War but were raised on heroic cinematic myths of the unity, nobility and purification that came of fighting a just war against the forces of evil. War would create a new Russia grounded in patriotism and sacrifice, not the selfish pursuit of comfort and prosperity. Above”
― Owen Matthews, Overreach