‘Gabyshev Went Looking for an Enemy but Returned with Understanding of How to Live without One,’ New Book Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 9 – People around the world have been following the saga of Aleksandr Gabyshev, the man originally styled himself as a shaman but has now rejected that status, since he announced in 2019 that he would walk from Sakha to Moscow in order to expel the Kremlin “the demon,” universally understood to be Vladimir Putin.

            That is the conclusion of a new book by anthropologist and film maker Mikhail Bashkirov entitled “Lightning Illuminations” published earlier this year in Russian by the émigré publishing house Babel according to Gasan Gasanov in a review for RFI Russian (rfi.fr/ru/россия/20260809-семь-лет-пытке-шамана-габышева ).

            Gasanov, a philologist from Azerbaijan who studied and taught in Moscow until leaving for the West a decade ago, says that in his view, Bashkirov’s book is “one of the most important written in Russian over the course of the last decade” and deserves the closest possible attention from Russian audiences and from all concerned about Russia’s future.

            As Homer’s Odyssey teaches, Gasanov says, “the most important thing doesn’t happen when the hero goes on the road as the beginning of the journey is almost always an unrealistic promise. The  real story begins with a return” – in Odysseus’ case to Ithaca and in Gabyshev’s to Sakha.

“Unlike Odysseus, with whom Bashkirov compares his hero,” Gasanov writes, “Gabyshev returns not the winner. He did not reach Moscow, did not exorcise ‘the demon’ and did not overthrow the government. He was stopped on the road, put in a car, taken to Yakutia, and sent for psychiatric examination.”

And yet, Gasanov continues, “it is precisely the return and not the campaign which seems today to be the main event of the story” and contains the most important lesson for Russia and Russians about how they can escape the cyclical experiences of the past once they get beyond Putin.

            Following his detention on the road to Moscow and his return to Sakha, the philologist says, Gabyshev could have admitted he had been defeated. “But Gabyshev himself proposed another way to understand that defeat: he compared himself to a hobbit who returns home and having done so finds new strength.”

            According to him, a hero “is not determined by victory but rather by the ability to survive the fall and then return.”  Instead of starting off again after being put in a psychiatric hospital, Gabyshev changed course.  He denied he had ever called himself a shaman, and he talked instead about pride and humility and his earlier mistake in not recognizing that.

Specifically, he said “revenge is a sin; forgiveness is necessary”—and that is a new and unexpected challenge to Russia because “the question of revenge arises whenever a vengeful cruel regime ends.” What is to happen to those who weren’t the main culprit but nonetheless collaborated with him?

            That matters now and not just in the future: If such people know that “after defeat, they will have the opportuitty to step aside” because people will recognize that the amnesty they will receive “will not be an act of weakness but a strong tool to end the war” all have been a part of in the past.

            By taking this position, Gabyshev did more than he may even have been aware, Gasanov says. If today’s siloviki “know that after the fall of the current regime, they won’t be automatically punished but only those really responsible will, with the rest able to return to normal life, they will have something that no sermon gives: the possibility of choice.”

            An authoritarian system works not just by instilling fear about the possibility of punishment now but about the certainty of it if the regime falls, Gasanov continues drawing out the meaning of Gabashov’s words, because someone can hate those in power but still defend them “if he is sure that after the chief falls, he will die himself.”

            Only if that is understood as Gabashov did can Russia escape from another round of conflict and authoritarian rule given that those defeated now will want to take their revenge rather than repenting and returning to a peaceful life. If Russians pay attention to that, it will give the former shaman a greater victory than any other he might have had.