Putin, The Stranger, and My Vanished Russian Illustrator

Collateral damage from war in an interconnected world

Late last fall, after years of starts and stops, followed by many months of effort far more intense and involved than I’d ever have imagined for such a silly enterprise, I finally published my debut children’s book, “The Stranger of Wigglesworth.”

Despite achieving rather limited success commercially, it still felt like a worthy accomplishment. It was well-received by family, friends, and the occasional rando. And perhaps most satisfying of all (beyond my children’s elation and my nine-year-old having memorized it in its entirety), it got a stellar review and subsequent blurb by a moderately famous public intellectual.

Little did I know how fortunate I was in my timing. Because the thing is, my book’s illustrator is Russian.

When I had first started my search for an illustrator for my newly completed manuscript, I put out several feelers on a well-known freelancing website. Of the various responses I received, the two most promising were from artists residing in Indonesia and Russia respectively.

I’ll admit, I had my doubts about both. Not about their artistic ability (which I found highly impressive. Then again, you’d either laugh or choke if you saw my own efforts at sketching anything that’s not a technical or architectural drawing). But rather, my reservations were about the political and cultural implications of engaging with these particular nationalities. And before you accuse me of xenophobia or bigotry, please understand that my concern was for the artists themselves.

You see, my book is all about freethinking. Although by design, its driving theme is open to a number of interpretations, it’s nonetheless unambiguously about standing up against authority, against conformity and groupthink.

For the Indonesian artist, I was worried that her involvement in a freethinking book that some view as a transparent assault on religious indoctrination might get her into trouble with her Muslim-majority nation’s blasphemy laws. By providing illustrations for my book, she could potentially be found guilty of violating Article 156(a) of her country’s Criminal Code, which could lead to a sentence of five years’ imprisonment. I didn’t want to put her in that position nor be responsible for her getting into any kind of trouble.

For the Russian artist, my worries were different, yet related. Considering Russia’s long history of state-sanctioned atheism under the Soviet Union, I wasn’t too worried about her offending religious sensibilities. (Although Putin has ushered in a religious resurgence with his strategic alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church and its powers of propaganda and social control.)

My concerns were that through her involvement in a book whose villain is a scheming demagogue who rules through fear and deception, she might get picked up on the Russian Federal Security Bureau’s radar, opening up a world of hurt for her, and potentially, her entire family. We’ve all seen what happens to those who speak out again Putin or in any way work against his objectives. It typically involves highly toxic radioactive elements or nerve agents, bizarre “accidents,” or simply a bullet to the back of the skull while out jogging. But that said, I liked her artistic style and she seemed genuinely enthusiastic about both the project and its storyline, so I decided to give her a chance.

We quickly developed an excellent working relationship and a collegiate rapport. Her English was impressive and her grasp of the plot and her ability to turn my storyboard descriptions into vibrant and cohesive illustrations was everything I could ever have hoped for.

I’ll admit, considering how many digital files we exchanged, I was always slightly nervous that every time I opened a ZIP file I might be unwittingly downloading malicious Russian spyware. But I have good antivirus software, and I trusted her, so it wasn’t something I lost sleep over. As I said before, my concern was more that she might get in trouble somehow for her participation in a project espousing freethought, but the odds of that seemed fairly low as well.

Fast-forward four months, and suddenly everything has gone topsy-turvy. Following Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked assault on the independent nation of Ukraine, the world seems to have taken a dark, Orwellian turn as a new Iron Curtain has descended, stranding my dear artist collaborator on the wrong side of it.

For the past several weeks, as I read about the unprecedented sanctions imposed upon Russia by a newly united Western world, and about the devastating effect they’ve had on the Russian economy and on the lives of ordinary Russians, my thoughts have often turned to Elsa. I’ve considered reaching out — either as just a check-in on a friend or to do my part to burst through Putin’s carefully crafted propaganda bubble and supply her with factual information about the “special military operation” that’s shelling maternity wards and bombing clearly-marked civilian shelters — but until today, I’ve resisted.

Again, I’ve worried about getting her into trouble. But I’ve also worried about how everything that’s happening right now has affected her life. I know very little about her personally. We always kept the relationship strictly professional and I studiously avoided any discussion of politics or international affairs. But from the little I know (including the fact that she liked my story and its message), she seems to be a wonderful, kind, caring individual, and it pains me to think of her suffering.

So I finally decided to see if I could track her down. And as I strongly suspected, her account on the freelancing site is no longer available. When I try to click on her profile, it doesn’t give any kind of error message. It simply redirects me to the homepage. When I try searching for her, I get the following:

If I search through our old conversation threads, I can still find the most basic info about her profile, but everything else has simply vanished.

Selfishly, I’m so glad that I had finished my children’s book project when I did, mere months before this new Cold War began. Otherwise, had it occurred mid-project, I would have lost half a year of concerted effort and a fair bit of money as well. But that’s of little consolation.

From the little I know about Elsa, freelance artwork was her primary income stream. I always felt a bit bad about how paltry the sums were I actually paid her, yet I rationalized it by the fact that she set her own pricing, and with the knowledge that the commissions I paid her constituted quite a healthy salary in Moscow. I also took altruistic comfort in the fact that she’s still made far more money off this project than I have.

But it pains me to think that through absolutely no fault of her own, she’s now unemployed. Through absolutely no fault of her own, all the money I paid her is now next to worthless (assuming it got converted to rubles). She is now irrevocably cut off from the world.

I realize her suffering in no way compares to that of the children being starved and shelled in Mariupol, or to the brave Ukrainian soldiers risking life and limb to defend the lives and liberty of their people. And I understand that the suffering of the Russian people is an unfortunate necessity in order to turn the tide against Putin and his ruthless dictatorship. Yet it still makes me sad.

I was flipping through my own book this week, for the first time in a long time, and seeing it through fresh eyes, tempered by both time and events, it struck me how much its villain, the Stranger, resembles Putin. While that was never my intention (other than the fact that he’s meant to be wicked and deceptive), I wonder now if that was part of my story’s appeal to Elsa. I wonder if she saw the clear parallels, and how much she incorporated them into her rendering of him.

I have no idea where her politics lie, and I in no way want my speculations to compromise her status or her safety, but I have to believe she saw in my simple morality tale a reflection of her own predicament and that of her countrymen. I have to believe she saw in the innocent villagers and their ease of being duped by a fear-peddling cult leader, the plight of her own people, likewise fooled by a constant stream of state-run propaganda and the despot who directs it.

Near the very end of the story, having learned of the deception visited upon them by a power-hungry madman who had taken everything from them and left them destitute and miserable, the people at last rise up against their oppressor. The text to the image at the beginning of this essay reads:

And as realization dawned on the crowd, that all had been fooled, they shouted out loud, “Be gone, you vile huckster and fraud! Be gone from our village. Get out of our land!”

I fervently hope this may become yet another case of life imitating art. I sincerely hope the people of Russia, like the poor, deluded people of Wigglesworth, can likewise have the wool pulled back from their eyes, and can rise up and drive away the vicious monster who has stolen their joy and their giggling. Time will tell.

For my part, if somehow things turn out for the best, then I’ll commit here and now to writing a sequel. And I’ll commit to again employing Elsa as my illustrator. Regardless of what happens, much rebuilding and healing lie ahead.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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