Chapter 52: Putin, Ukraine and the Story of a Story
In 2014 a young American freelance writer named Noah Sneider came to us with a story. More specifically, he came to us with a question that he hoped he could answer in a story still taking shape.
The question involved Vladimir Putin and why he had decided to send his army into eastern Ukraine. Noah, then based in Moscow, had made his way to Kiev.
As it happened, I had known Noah all his life – his parents, both terrific journalists, were close friends of mine and my wife from our years in Tokyo, after which they had moved to Moscow to cover the death throes of the Soviet Union. Noah spent his early childhood in Moscow and spoke Russian so well that, as a young child, his English was heavily accented. After college he made his way back to Russia. And in 2014 with Russian troops in the Donbass region of Ukraine, Noah was on to a story that it felt preordained he would cover.
Of course, we wanted the story and were eager to work with Noah in helping him find it. But with a catch: would he be willing to let readers in on the process of bringing his story to life? Would he be open to letting them follow him from story inception, to memos with our editor, Mike Hoyt, through the line edits. Noah, brave soul that he is, was game, and with that we launched “The Open Rehearsal Project.” https://medium.com/the-empire-strikes-back
There are stories that leave journalists, young and experienced, thrilled to be covering yet perplexed in trying to untangle and tell. Noah had witnessed a lot in Ukraine. He had a handle on the proverbial what and how of his story. Now he needed to make sense of the why. He recognized that at the core of Putin’s Ukraine incursion lay something bordering on the primordial in Russian history. He also understood that his job was not to write a primer on Russia’s foundational myth, but to tell a story.
He and Mike set to work. Here is Noah, back in Moscow from Ukraine, with a memo to Mike: an update on where the piece is at… to be honest, I’m struggling with a few things, some having to do with story structure, others with the idiosyncrasies of my memory. I’ve been torn about where to pick up the writing again.
After everything that happened in eastern Ukraine, it’s hard to put myself back in Crimea and recall what it felt like. At first I thought it’d be better to just raid my eUkr notebooks and write those moments while they were still fresh in my mind. but working backwards chronologically left me w a mess of anecdotes and no sense of how they fit into the narrative… So I stopped and instead went all the way back to the beginning of my travels and tried it from there…
We writers lucky enough to have worked with Mike know that there are few editors more patient and more encouraging – even as he pushes and cajoles us to find the story. Noah was lost, which is inevitable when stories get more complex – or rather when you decide that you are not going to be satisfied with just observing and chronicling; that you need to know.
Mike, recognizing where Noah now found himself, and knowing he needs a path forward, appreciates that it will not do to simply leave Noah to write his way out of his quandary. He replies:Your opening, the “Deep History” draft, is beautifully written and deeply inviting, but I am wondering if the questions you are asking in this email now—about structure and the use of the chronology of both events and of your travels, and about how to weave in the history that is so central to the piece—might require us to go back and make clearer in Deep History what the whole piece—"The Empire Strikes Back” is setting out to do.
Sometimes, really often times, having a headline in mind can do wonders in sharpening things – an essential step in committing to a direction of a story, and filtering out the clutter and with it the fretting about what to include and what is not essential in propelling the story forward. The Empire Strikes Back. High concept: a gift writers too often ignore as seeming too “Hollywood.” But in this story, it captured just where Noah was going.
Mike: it feels to me that if the readers truly understand the question/argument you set out to address/articulate—if we can make it simple and clear—they’ll go along with you on the journey, even if the structure for doing so gets complicated. In other words the question has to be simple even if the answer is not.
Actually, you’ve almost done it already. Right in the beautiful second graf: “This is a Ukrainian story, but it’s not really about Ukraine, not really about soldiers and seizures and referendums. The cold rationality of geopolitics has no place here. This — the precipice that the world is teetering on — is about identity and memory and (deep) history. This is a story about the Russian Empire.”
Mike continues: But most important, it feels to me as if you make a flat statement that this turn of events is about “identity and memory and (deep) history. This is a story about the Russian empire.” It is an argument, and a pretty clear one, in fact. But it’s big, and it doesn’t open up to a narrative, exactly; it doesn’t tell us what about it or how you are going to get to it that statement.
What if the next sentence was something like: “I landed in TK in Crimea on DATETK, and as I witnessed events on the ground, and as I traveled north to Ukraine as the action moved there, and finally to Moscow, to try to understand these things, I found myself moving backward in time, as well, into the deep history that shapes the Russian present and makes TK inevitable…”
Noah understood that this was not just the story of one version of history, Russia’s as seen through the lens of Putin’s expansionist dreams. It was about Ukrainian history, too. As he wrote in a scene he sent to Mike: Outside Crimea’s Parliament, in the shadow of a gold-domed church and a WWII memorial, I found people spray painting silver hammers-and-sickles onto red flags. Locals hung a homemade banner on the base of a retired tank at the center of the monument: “Hands off our history! our memory! our pride!” A diminutive older woman, Lyudmila, led the operation, laying out the backdrops and admonishing the younger men around her: “Spray! Spray faster! Don’t dawdle!”
Eight years later, in the midst of Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Noah’s story feels prescient. For all the Kremlin’s insistence that it is acting in response to NATO expansion and in its Orwellian spinning about ferreting out “Nazis,” lays a belief about Russia’s destiny, and with it Ukraine’s.
Noah now lives in Japan, where he is Tokyo bureau chief for The Economist. He has been monitoring events in Ukraine and in Moscow, and posting what he describes as “voices from the war in Ukraine, in translation” on Twitter @wartranslation
Even as the news keeps rushing at us, and the world is left to make sense of a war that is terrifying, increasingly brutal, and verging on madness, I come back to this paragraph that Noah wrote in 2014.
For Russia, the Ukrainian question is one of origins. In the twenty-three years since the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia has been struggling to forge a new identity, to identify a new national idea. What does it mean to be Russian, to be Russian now, absent Tsarism or Socialism or the culture of Tolstoy? What these recent events make clear is that for Russia, Empire is an existential need. Russia cannot be merely a country; it must influence others in order to justify its prodigy. And at the heart of this Russian imperial project lies Ukraine. For Putin, the answer to why Russia exists lies in the Dark Ages when pagan princes roamed these lands. In what may turn out to be the most important speech of his political life — a ‘Putin Doctrine’ for Eurasia, if you will — he said, “Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride.”
You can find it here. (The story originally appeared in 2014 at our previous site, The Big Roundtable) And please do share it.