Dmitry Glukhovsky’s new novel ‘Registration,’ about Russians seeking to cash in on the war, has been called an émigré’s rebuke to those who stayed behind. Is that fair?

On September 17, Dmitry Glukhovsky posted his new novel, “Registratsiya” (“Registration”), online for free. Set in wartime Russia in the 2020s, it follows the pregnant girlfriend of a contract soldier as she tries to marry him as quickly as possible to qualify for benefits. The book is still stirring debate on social media. Many readers fault Glukhovsky, who has lived outside Russia since 2022, for judging those who stayed so harshly while he himself is relatively safe. Literary critic Liza Birger examines whom Glukhovsky condemns, and why.

Warning: This article, like Glukhovsky’s novel, contains profanity.

In 1920, Nadezhda Teffi published the story “Ke fer?” (“What to Do?”) in the first issue of the Parisian émigré newspaper Posledniye Novosti. Amid snippets of Parisian conversation, she described a bewildered Russian general emerging onto the Place de la Concorde and repeating: “All this, gentlemen, is very well, of course. Very well indeed. But que faire? What do we do?”

More than a century later, Glukhovsky has written “Registration,” in which “What do we do?” again becomes the prevailing tone — merciless and deeply bitter. Beyond the painful bewilderment of the present day, there is real horror here, too: the story of an ordinary person turning into a monster.

Monsters have long been Glukhovsky’s central subject, well before he himself was cast as one in the eyes of Russian society: in October 2022, he was added to the “foreign agents” registry, and in 2023, he was sentenced in absentia to eight years in a penal colony for an antiwar Telegram post. No one has done more to find Stephen King–style everyday horror in Russian life.

Mutants inhabit a future subway system in “Metro 2033” (2002) — and, as history has shown, that was hardly the worst way things could turn out. In “Sumerki” (“Twilight,” 2007), an ancient Mayan curse creeps from the jungles of the Yucatán into a Moscow translator’s apartment. In “Tekst” (“Text,” 2017), the source of horror turns out to be an ordinary narcotics officer’s phone. And in “Post” (“The Outpost,” 2019–2021), madness crosses a bridge over the Volga, spread by the words of a “demonic prayer.” The only way to escape is to puncture your own eardrums — much as with Russian propaganda. The monsters almost always come from outside, while Moscow remains the center of the world — as though Glukhovsky cannot imagine it as a source of evil, though today we might argue otherwise. What frightens him much more is the horror and despair of the rest of Russia.

Stephen King wrote that a plot is a fossil waiting to be dug up, and that “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” Glukhovsky has found that in present-day Russia, there is no need to dig: monsters are literally around the corner. In this new world, we have to protect ourselves from ourselves above all.

“Registration” opens with a sketch of seemingly peaceful life in Vologda. Tatyana, whose son Sasha is a contract soldier, is getting their new apartment in order. While he is at the front, she uses his pay to cover the mortgage. Meanwhile, Sasha’s girlfriend Ulyana, a massage therapist at a small salon, vapes a strawberry-flavored e-cigarette with a friend (“Kristina laughed melon, Ulyana strawberry”) and dreams of the future: she has just learned that she is pregnant with Sasha’s child.

The opening pages are the novel’s best. Here Glukhovsky still has the energy to write beautifully: “Things grew orderly; things grew clean. Life was finally doing what Tatyana told it to. It obeyed her puffy, crimson hands, as if scalded, smoothing itself down and lining up in rows.” Later, horror displaces that beauty. Sasha, it turns out, has gone missing in the war. When he is found in a Moscow hospital without his legs, his mother and girlfriend begin fighting over the benefits while he is still alive.

So Ulyana travels from Vologda to Moscow. She urgently wants to marry Sasha because, with a child, she is entitled to two-thirds of the benefits. They face delays in registering their marriage, and someone demands a bribe. In Moscow, she stays with her aunt and uncle, Marina and Maksim, members of the city’s intelligentsia. Maksim runs a small bookstore beyond the Third Ring Road. He boldly keeps books by “foreign agents” on the shelves — until activists show up with prosecutors — reads Meduza through a VPN, and tries to keep his composure. Marina runs a decorating agency and takes contracts from the mayor’s office. To keep her business, she reluctantly puts portraits of “heroes of the special military operation” on bus stops for May 9. Their family has “crawled away” from the war. Their son Kirill has already gone to Georgia via the Verkhny Lars border crossing and come back because “it gets a little old,” and he keeps partying happily despite the draft summons hanging over him.

Bringing Moscow intellectuals and a massage therapist from Vologda together feels rather contrived. In real life, they are probably farther apart than the émigré writer is from his characters. But the contrivance lets Glukhovsky show a cross-section of society and leave no one in the story unstained. Émigrés come in for just as much criticism. Consider Kirill’s speech about how Muscovites brought Tbilisi “the best Moscow had to offer — matcha lattes, kink parties, and dog-walking services,” yet the Georgian capital still cannot measure up to the Russian one. Or Maksim’s school friend Mitya, who calls from Israel and says that once they dig all the “little Arabs” out of the tunnels in Gaza, there will be peace. “Isn’t that the same as what’s happening back home?” Maksim asks.

But gathering everyone in one place and giving each a line so no one remains innocent has a downside. For Glukhovsky, the world that willingly yields to evil and adjusts to it is, above all, a world of women. He does more than show how people adapt to evil: again and again, he shows women doing it faster and better. The picture is strange. Men started the war and men fight it, yet in Glukhovsky’s novel, it is mostly women who adapt to it, bargain, and inform on others. Women send men to war, too. And women are first in line for the benefits it brings.

Hi, I’m Vladislav Gorin.

I’m the host of Meduza’s daily Russian-language news podcast. This summer, the Russian authorities opened a criminal case against me — not for committing a crime, but for telling the truth about Russia and its war against Ukraine.

Because the Kremlin has branded me a criminal, I can’t go home. I also can’t safely travel to countries like Turkey — even though it’s a NATO member — because I could be arrested and extradited to Russia. I can’t even renew my passport at the consulate anymore. 

None of this is going to stop me. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia who don’t want this war and who still believe in freedom and democracy, and they deserve access to independent journalism. Please support Meduza so I can keep reaching them.

Maksim, ever ready to discuss morality, “sniffed at it but ate anyway” — not always realizing that Marina’s city contracts largely supported the family. Eventually, he gives in, too, and takes books by his beloved “foreign agents” off the shelves: “Bykov and Ulitskaya gazed up at him from the box like kittens peering from the bottom of a bucket on their way to be drowned.” Sasha was a kind boy who felt sorry for slugs as a child. He went to war so no one, “not the cops, not anyone,” could “treat him like shit” anymore. But it is never entirely clear whether that was his own idea or whether his mother sent him to earn money. At the end, Tatyana remembers taking him to the military enlistment office and watching him look at her from the bus “as though it were a prank, as though any moment they’d call the whole thing off and let him go home for lunch.”

Men are “easy to transport by train,” Ulyana thinks when she sees a group of uniformed men of different ages at the station. “You can fit a lot in at once.” Tatyana’s husband Vitalya does little but grunt and wait for a drink to ease his hangover, and no one listens even when he tries to say something. In her fight for the benefits, Ulyana learns to use AI to write denunciations to the FSB and demands that her marriage to the dying Sasha be registered immediately. In the final scene, her transformation into a monster is complete.

“We’ll wait it out, we’ll sit tight, we’ll outlast them for sure. That one died, and this one will die too…” members of the underground scrawl on ads around the city in an act of covert defiance. “But will the people who make it through be the same people who hoped to wait it out?” Maksim wonders. That may be the most complete summary of “Registration.” The book is not really about the marriage registration Ulyana is pursuing. It is an urgent attempt to register — to record — the reality of waiting out the war, waiting for who knows what.

Nothing ages faster than language, which Glukhovsky has always treated as a key to making his work feel current and true to life. Yet his attempts to capture it do not always succeed. Tatyana’s Vologda habit of clearly pronouncing unstressed o’s, sayings like “dick-cunt-Dzhigurda,” and the endless Dovlatov and Bulgakov quotes Maksim seems to use in place of his own words already sound like relics of another time. “Registration” keeps reminding us that its events are happening right now — yet by the end, that “now” sounds a little like “yesterday.”

The decision to post the novel online seems driven by a need to join a conversation before it is too late, though that conversation is nearly over already. Glukhovsky himself tries not to see a divide between “those who left” and “those who stayed” — or, more precisely, any fundamental difference between them. But judging by readers’ first reactions, people inside Russia see the novel as an accusation, and an unfair one, precisely because they no longer recognize their country in this portrait.

Still, the novel should not be read as an accusation or a hatchet job. That is not what “Registration” is about. It is an émigré writer’s attempt to imagine life on the other side of Russia’s border. Is it hard to write a novel about Russia in the 2020s from afar? No harder than writing one about the 19th century or the year 2033. Besides, writers rarely leave home anyway; being away from the thick of events is perfectly normal for them. Whatever else it is, Glukhovsky wrote “Registration” to record and understand what is happening, not to condemn. The book is merciless to everyone, not just the so-called “stayers.” In interviews and essays, Glukhovsky often says “we,” repeating that evil can be found in each of us and that our defeat is collective.

That is also the subject of his book “My. Dnevnik padeniya” (“We: Diary of a Fall”), published by Vidim Books in 2024. It collects columns and essays dating back to 2012, along with retrospective commentary in which he sees them as telling the story of a catastrophe. “Registration,” too, is about any of “us” who tries to wait it out, look away, or somehow come to terms with the new reality. It is about those who cannot go on reading about horrors forever (“life now was not made up of ugliness alone, and it was impossible to look only at the ugliness without wanting to drop dead”) but have no idea what to do — ke fer?