Journey to Freedom
SERGEI OVSIANNIKOV
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(BLOOMSBURY continuum, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £12.99 • tel 020 7799 4064

On 9 January 2018, The Economist published an appreciation of this work, which had just come out in Russian. The article doubled as an obituary. It described how Fr Sergei Ovsiannikov, an Orthodox priest, had travelled from his parish in Amsterdam to Petersburg some weeks before to launch his book in a climate more inclined to obstruct journeys to freedom than to encourage them. Having contracted ­pneumonia, he was urgently flown back to Holland, where his condition proved ­incurable. He died on Orthodox Christmas Eve, 6 January 2018. These circumstances lend the book peculiar authority, its author having been somehow a martyr to it.

Journey to Freedom is partly testimony. Arrested in 1973, a soldier in the Soviet army, Ovsiannikov found himself in solitary confinement. He faced his inner unfreedom, a function of fear. “The method for making a human being manageable was simple: instil fear in him.” The regime had done this. It had worked. How? “It turned out I did not know how to think.” Refusing to cede victory, he decided to engage in battle, first of all putting his head in order. Thus he can write, without irony: “It was in prison that freedom came to me.”