Hi everyone. I’m traveling now along the Norwegian-Russian border, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Wanted to share with you a dispatch from here, mostly of photos taken in this remote borderland, northernmost corner of NATO, a region through which the Soviets almost invaded Europe, through which the Nazis did invade Russia… you get the idea. Every place I’ve visited in the Arctic is unique, but here my head spins with all I did not know, all we never see.
“We’re waiting for another Gorbachev,” the tall man says. “A reformer. We hope he is there, on the inside, waiting for the moment.”
What is the moment?
The Russian shrugs. “People in the West think it is Navalny, Navalny, like he will somehow get elected and change everything. It won’t be like that.”
What will it be like?
Again he shrugs. He is an exile now, a journalist, living and working here in Norway, 15 minutes from the Russian border.
“There is a kind of a joke among journalists,” he tells me. It’s funny, not funny, he says. Real and also fabulous, as in fable, as in fake.
Regularly, on Fridays, the Russian government publishes a list of foreign agents, people who are accused of receiving money from outside the country and who act to influence, or disrupt, its politics. It’s a dangerous designation. The list is thick with journalists, activists, opposition politicians.
“We are waiting, like refreshing the page, to see who will be on it! Will it be me? Will it be me?”
One day in March, it was him.
In this place the border is both real and not real, a line on the map and in the minds of people, a barrier unknown to animals, pollution, wind, water and time. What’s real is that the tall man cannot cross. He cannot return home. If the moment comes—Navalny, the next Gorbachev, another revolution—he will only hear of it over the border, like a rumor, like the rest of us.