Hitting the books: Sergei Nikitin tells a hidden history

‘I was not surprised to hear that my book had been banned.’

In 2015, the Kremlin introduced a law on ‘undesirable foreign organisations’. This followed the ‘foreign agents’ law of a couple of years earlier. The foreign agents law was aimed at Russian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), whereas the law on undesirable foreign organisations affected foreign NGOs: they could be shut down without trial, and banned. These laws formed part of a clampdown on civil society. Ten years later, there is scorched earth where there were once dozens of non-commercial organisations.

On 8 April 2022, the Kremlin closed the Moscow office of Amnesty International, which had been opened in 1991 by Marjory Farquharson, a British Quaker. I was the director there from 2003-2017. According to state propaganda today, everything foreign is suspicious and unfriendly towards Russia and its people. (The country has had similar anti-foreign attitudes in the past. In the late-1940s, the Kremlin ran an anti-western campaign during which many words with foreign origin were banned in the USSR. They were replaced with a Russian translation. ‘Football’, for example, became ‘nogomyach’, and ‘crossword’ became ‘krestoslovitsa’.)

The clampdown meant I was not surprised to hear that my translation of the 1923 book Plague, Pestilence and Famine, by Muriel Payne, a British nurse, had been banned in Samara in the Volga basin. Libraries there were told to take the copies down.

Payne worked in the Quaker Relief Unit near Samara, saving the lives of local Russians, feeding them, and curing them. Fortunately, it was only Samara which was so anti-western: copies of the book that were sent to other towns where Quakers worked are still available.

The anti-western Russian laws gave me an idea on how to title my new book. Three stories – about a US Quaker, a British doctor, and an Irish Quaker – were published in Russia under one title: Desirable Foreigners. Nancy Babb, from Philadelphia, worked in two Quaker missions – she was in Russia in 1917-1918, and in 1921-1927. Melville Mackenzie was a retired military doctor who spent a year and a half in Russia, curing the Quaker relief workers, and Russians too. Dorice White, a Friend from Waterford, spent ten years in Russia. She was the last director of the Moscow Quaker centre, and left the USSR in 1931.

As with Muriel Payne’s book, several dozen copies of Desirable Foreigners were sent to libraries, museums, and archives – to the towns and villages where British and US Quakers were working a hundred years ago. I know that people living in that region are glad they can find out more about a history which had been hidden from them. It is dangerous for the libraries and museums to acknowledge the book in social media and newspapers, but I know that there are Russians who are eager to read stories of Quaker relief work, and who are grateful for books that tell them how their grandparents were saved. They know that it does not matter what language you speak. We are human beings, and it is natural for humans to do good and feel good because of it.

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