SHORTLISTED: EBRD LITERATURE PRIZE 2022 "If you want to get inside the head of modern, young Russia, read Filipenko."-SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH (Nobel Prize winner, 2015) A heart-wrenching novel exploring both personal and collective memory spanning Russian history from Stalin's terror to the present day. Tatiana Alexeyevna is 90 years old and she's losing her memory. To find her way in her Soviet-era apartment block, she resorts to painting red crosses on the doors leading back to her apartment. But she still remembers the past in vivid detail. Alexander, a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two, would like nothing better than to forget the tragic events that have brought him to Minsk. When he moves into the flat next door to Tatiana's, he's cornered by the loquacious old lady. Reluctant at first, he's soon drawn into Tatiana's life story - one told urgently, before her memories of the Russian 20th century and its horrors are wiped out. The two forge an unlikely friendship, a pact against forgetting giving rise to a new sense of hope in the future. Deeply moving, with flashes of humour, Red Crosses is a shining narrative in the tradition of the great Russian novel.

One evening in 2015, journalist Pavel Vladimirovich and his wife Tatyana are at home when the news breaks that there has been a terrorist attack. Over a hundred people have been taken hostage in the Church of the Epiphany in the village of Nikolskoye near Moscow. As they watch, on the TV screen appears the face of one of the terrorists: Vadim Petrovich Seryegin, an old friend of Pavel’s.  The friendship between the two men evolved through periods of conflict, war, peace, emigration, and isolation. Pavel may be one of Vadim’s only friends, and when others realize this, he is asked to negotiate with Vadim.  The Church is horrifyingly silent when Pavel enters. Vadim welcomes Pavel but refuses to capitulate. As the stakes get higher and higher, Vadim’s story including his connection to the wars in Chechnya and the Ukraine is revealed and it becomes clear that the first meeting between the two men was not all it first seemed to be to Pavel.  Back in the church, Pavel learns that the terrorists have one and only one demand, and that it concerns the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.

Several years in a prison camp gave the author an opportunity to know people that he would never have met elsewhere: all great people of wisdom, of different nationalities but all sharing the same absurd fate. Each chapter holds someone's name as a title: names of people who were imprisoned with the author. Developing deep friendships, spending nights in political, philosophical and artistic discussion, these people were thrown in jail as a means of suppression. But an 'enlightened' person knows how to make the most of their time, even in prison.