2023-10-11 11:52:21
Faces and voices from the eastern borders of Europe now have their place on newsstands.“Put the east in the center of the map” indeed constitutes the ambition of the quarterly review Comet, the first issue of which appears this Wednesday, October 11. Sold at the price of €22, it was born from an observation shared by its editor-in-chief Léna Mauger in her editorial: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine revealed a lack of understanding of an entire part of our continent. »
Revealing “voices, images, courage, silences”
To repair this lack, Comet offers a series of great stories and photo reports, an interview and maps on 208 pages. Carried by a controlled, airy and at the same time impactful model, the whole fulfills the promised objective of revealing “voices, images, courage, silences”. In the first part, the most important, testimony and reality, rich in their singularity and their nuances, prevail over theory. Secondly, ideas complement them, but controversy has no place.
Imperialism, far from theory
The first issue is devoted to imperialism which, with the invasion of Ukraine, proved not to be the prerogative of the United States alone. As expected, Comet does not approach the question from a theoretical angle. This emerges throughout the reading: through the “Georgian novel” by Emmanuel Carrère, where the French writer goes to meet his cousin, the president of Georgia, Salomé Zourabichvili, thanks to a photo report by Russian photographer Alexander Gronsky on Russian propaganda posters or a letter from the Russian lawyer Alexei Gorinov. He wrote it on his knees from the penal colony in the Vladimir region, where he was sent after calling the invasion of Ukraine a “war” and proposing a minute of silence in full municipal council, in the Krasnoselsky district of Moscow.
The words of Nigina Beroeva, correspondent in Moscow for French media, also allow us to understand the concrete issues of imperialism. In category “I am writing to you », between texts sent from Budapest or Bishkek, the journalist tells us about her mother, born in 1975 and who “is one of those Russians convinced that the USSR was a great country and that its disappearance is a tragedy.” Since the implosion of the empire, she has lost everything – “his world, his house, his social status”– and pretends to believe that the war in Ukraine is just a “special military operation”. But deep down, “she understands everything” and, since her daughter had to go into exile, is going through “the darkest moments of his life”. A testimony which, as her daughter says and as her ambition Cometaide “to better understand what is happening in Russia”.
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