1987 and Other Stories

By Vladimir Kozlov

Translated from the Russian by Andrea Gregovich

“Ten tough stories… distinctly unromantic… unflinchingly real. To say this is a world without illusion is an understatement.” – New Pop Lit

A boy and girl risk a trip to the psych ward when they dress like punks after listening to a bootleg Sex Pistols cassette. A career-ending injury sends a football star back to his provincial hometown as the Soviet republics begin claiming independence. A university student risks police brutality to take part in a protest against the president of newly independent Belarus.

These and the other stories in Vladimir Kozlov’s first translated collection evoke the confusion of coming of age during perestroika. While Kozlov’s characters are absorbed in their own struggles, their stories are unavoidably political, mirroring their nation’s uncertainties and the existential crisis of their generation’s post-Soviet adulthood.

Vladimir Kozlov was born in 1972 in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. His fiction and nonfiction has been long-listed for awards in Russia such as the National Bestseller prize and the Big Book prize. In 2011 and 2012 he was nominated for GQ Russia’s Writer of the Year. English translations of his writing have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, AGNI, the Tin House Books anthology Rasskazy and Best European Fiction 2014. Recently he has been making independent films, including a groundbreaking documentary about the influential Siberian punk rock movement of the 1980s.

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Praise for USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid

“In this important novel, leading Russian cultural critic Kozlov, a kind of Russian Chuck Klosterman, puts us right smack in the hearts and minds of those who experienced firsthand the most wrenching socio-political transformation of the Twentieth Century.” — Jeff Parker, author of Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal and Ovenman

“With his tender story of struggle and patience, of individuality and the collective, Vladimir Kozlov has written a novel of quiet and ferocious intelligence, an irresistible read for anyone with even a passing interest in the ways of the Motherland.” — Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb

“Other than Vladimir Kozlov, I can think of no contemporary Russian writer possessed of quite the same keen, unerring ear for the characteristic jagged pacing and sudden concatenations of “Soviet” parlance, or someone gifted with a comparable sharpness of vision when it comes to the myriad minute details which used to define and regulate the comforting bleakness of regular Soviet people’s existence.” — Mikhail Iossel