rc101 dispatch: the escapism is getting louder. so is the war.

At Leipzig Book Fair, I ended up sandwiched between two crowds — one escaping reality, one confronting it clearly. Which one are you?

Source: Leipziger Messe / Tom Schulze.

On my travels to book shows and lectures, I always pick up a bunch of interesting books and meet fascinating people. Recently, I had a thought: what if I start sharing all of it with my subscriber family here? This is how the rc101 dispatch format became a thing. Let me know what you think, and whether it is of any value to you — via the chat link below.

Have you tried walking through a crowd of 200,000+ people? Instead of taking the speaker’s back door, I decided to do exactly that to get to my stage at the Leipzig Book Fair 2026. At the very last moment, I was not entirely sure I was in the right place — I was constantly surrounded by tens of thousands of fabulously costumed people.

I took another turn, and suddenly I entered a parallel universe. No costumes. My stage was much smaller than anything in the Manga Comic Con part of the fair, but every seat was taken, people were standing. I had just 30 minutes. Total focus on russian colonialism, the German translation of the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, and what imperial occupation means in practice. You could cut the air with a knife — nobody was on their phones.

Both crowds I was navigating were rational. One was choosing comprehensible worlds. One was choosing to see the incomprehensible one clearly. In this dispatch, I will feature Ukrainian reads I picked up at the fair to help you navigate the reality that is rapidly closing in on us.

Before I published the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, I had never been to a book fair outside Ukraine. Since 2022, I’ve travelled to lots of them across Europe and beyond, and every year they look dramatically more different from what I knew — not just from Ukrainian fairs (where there is an explosion of public interest in literature, especially reflective on history), but from what they used to be. More and more of these look like comic cons. Cosplay, manga sections, and crowds dressed up in elaborate costumes. The book as an object is still there. But the centre of gravity has shifted.

---

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

---