About THE KULESHOV EFFECT (Эффект Кулешова) (Freedom Letters, 2024)
On November 1, 1974, the mercurial Soviet screenwriter and poet Gennady Shpalikov is found hanging by his scarf in a Moscow apartment. Two decades later, American orphan Tom Benjamin sees the long-banned original cut of Shpalikov’s greatest film and declares: “I know these people.”
Tormented by impossible recollections of Shpalikov’s final years, Tom goes to Russia for answers. Lost on a milky night in 1995 Petersburg, he meets film student Kira Morozova — a young woman untangling her own inexplicable memories: a tsarist massacre, a husband lost to Stalin’s Gulag, and her own death. But right now, Kira has work to do. On the set of Shpalikov’s film. In 1961.
And she takes Tom with her.
Suddenly spliced into the vibrant, dangerous days of the post-Stalin Thaw, Tom and Kira build a life together in Soviet cinema. But in Russia, as in the movies, new dangers always loom — and with them, cruel choices.
Using the eponymous film theory—the Kuleshov Effect—as both a structuring element and a metaphor for how the characters’ lives are “edited” and recontextualized by systems of power, THE KULESHOV EFFECT sheds light not only Russia’s past, but also on its current brutal impasse.
About the Russian-language publication
THE KULESHOV EFFECT (Эффект Кулешова) was translated from English by Ekaterina Kevkhishvili with a foreword by the renowned Russian dissident writer Dmitry Bykov and published in late 2024 by the dissident exile press Freedom Letters. Freedom Letters was created after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine by publisher Georgy Urushadze, the former director of Russia’s Big Book Award—the Russian equivalent of our National Book Award. The press, dedicated to publishing works that would fall afoul of Putin’s censors, has released books by luminaries such as novelist Vladimir Sorokin, the late Alexei Navalny, dissident leader Ilya Yashin, revered Ukrainian poet Alexander Kabanov, and Dmitry Bykov himself. In early 2025, Effekt Kuleshova was named one of the publisher’s best books of 2024.
Since its publication, Effekt Kuleshova has received excellent reviews and attention from the burgeoning Russian/Ukrainian literary diaspora. The book was reviewed in Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most prominent opposition newspaper, now operating in exile. (I have translated the review, written by the legendary Soviet animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky, here.) I also had the opportunity to appear on literary critic Nikolai Alexandrov’s popular YouTube show, Not Only About Books for a wonderful (and exhausting!) hourlong Russian interview. (I shared my thoughts on the interview—which we had to repeat twice due to a power outage in, of all places, Tbilisi—here.) The book was also prominently featured on exile journalist Dmitry Gubin’s show, ON AIR.
Effekt Kuleshova has been sold online and in bookstores across Europe and in Israel, where the émigré and exile communities are, in the Russian fashion, voracious readers. Eventually, Georgy Urushadze managed to get Effekt Kuleshova and a handful of other Freedom Letters books placed (for as long as he can manage to keep them there) on the primary Russian online bookstore, Ozon, so in recent weeks the book has been able to reach readers in Russia proper.
Responses to the Russian version of THE KULESHOV EFFECT:
“Greg Blake Miller’s The Kuleshov Effect is probably the best American novel about Russia in the past 50 years, if not longer … a brilliant farewell anthem for a dying Russian civilization.”
– Dmitry Bykov, Russian exile novelist and poet, two-time winner of the Big Book Award (Russia’s equivalent of the National Book Award).
“The Kuleshov Effect is a beautiful book, wise and deep, filled with intriguing references and “Easter eggs”. It crosses many eras, but at the center of the upheavals is the Soviet Thaw of the 1960s. And the living eyewitnesses to the age say it’s as if the author was beside them and heard and saw them and described everything the way it really was. There’s just the right amount of mysticism in The Kuleshov Effect. There’s a shocking final twist. And there’s a cat who travels between worlds.”
– Marina Dyachenko, winner of the Aelita Prize and co-author of the Vita Nostra series, including the recently released School of Shards (Harper Voyager, 2025)
“The Kuleshov Effect has millions of readers all over the world; many of them just don’t know it yet. Please open this book and enter this world: It’s real down to the smallest detail, fantastic, cruel, tender. Get to know these people — or have you already known them a long time? In cinema, the Kuleshov Effect is an editing technique in which the collision of frames produces new meanings and sensations. In Greg Blake Miller’s masterly (and “Margarita-ly”) novel, the mosaic of images and upheavals of 20th-century Russia works in exactly this way. Is it mysticism? Phantasmagoria? But in that case, why do the eyewitnesses to these events confirm that it all happened just like this?”
– Marina Dyachenko
“I read The Kuleshov Effect with excitement, gulping in the air of bygone years. People I’d known well suddenly reappeared, mystically alive, as if they’d gone out a moment and then come back, not understanding my shock. The gestures, the expressions—this is who they were! Miller conveyed what’s impossible to convey—the spirit of an age—with composition that’s refined but natural and absolutely organic. One wants to live different lives—isn’t that what we all hope for? The Kuleshov Effect is a one-of-a-kind thing, significant in many ways.”
– Alexander Mindadze, screenwriter (The Fox Hunt, Parade of Planets, Dreaming of Space, Minnesota) and director (The Separation, On Saturday)
“Having been privileged to read both the manuscript of The Kuleshov Effect in the original English, as well as the Russian translation version published by the leading dissident publisher Freedom Letters, I can attest that this novel, is fascinating, absolutely masterful prose, mesmerizing in both versions. Miller is a guide at the level of Lem and Tarkovsky through various eras, especially the magical 1960s. His seemingly nonchalant, yet caring and precisely multidimensional chronicle creates a unique, virtually cinematic atmosphere. Once an anglophone reader is given an opportunity to begin this literary journey, the epiphany will be a memorable one indeed.”
– Gari Lait, author of Confluences (Bagriy, 2020), Saganazh (Kreschatik/MGraphics 2024), and Doloroso (Textum Araneum, Kyiv, 2022)
“Nothing since Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly Ones has fascinated and astonished me like Greg Blake Miller’s The Kuleshov Effect. The book has the effect of cinematic montage, splicing together voices from different historical epochs to create a fantastical narrative. Each time period grows organically into the next, first with fragmentary memories about the heroes of the great Sixties generation, and then with the appearance of the heroes themselves. Thanks to Ekaterina Kevkhishvili’s outstanding translation, the style of the prose inherits and revives the almost carefree intonations of that great generation, the intonation of love for life and the acceptance of it as it turns tragic.”
— Elena Stishova, former editor of The Art of Cinema (Iskusstvo Kino, the largest and most important Russian/Soviet film journal), longtime professor at the State Cinema Institute (VGIK), and winner of a Nika (the Russian Oscars) Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to the Cinema.
“Remember this name: Greg Blake Miller. The novel is The Kuleshov Effect, and it’s the best book about Russia in the 21st century, and, really, in the last half of the previous century. … The two others that come to mind are Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergei Nabokov and J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, which are both outstanding. … Miller’s novel shifts between Leningrad/Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, written with stunning knowledge of the smallest details of those times. … You’ve never seen me so blown away by a novel, and I’m afraid you won’t again in the next 50 years.”
– Dmitry Gubin, prominent exile Russian journalist, and host of Gubin ONAIR.
“Having stopped producing illusions, Russia produces emigrants — this is the first thing you think while reading Greg Blake Miller’s outstanding new novel, The Kuleshov Effect. This is likely the best novel about Russia in the past half century. You have the sense that you’re watching Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Alexei German’s Khrustalyov, Мy Car!, and Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters all at the same time, simultaneously not understanding a damn thing and suffocating with happiness. And it’s an ingenious translation. Pull your umbrella back, as Pasternak said, and go get your copy right away!”
– Dmitry Gubin
“I once wrote that my late friend and colleague Gennady Shpalikov—one of the real-life heroes of Greg Blake Miller’s new novel The Kuleshov Effect—‘was not only the freest person I knew—he was the only absolutely free person.’ … InThe Kuleshov Effect, Miller demonstrates this same freedom. This freedom is in everything—in the handling of the story, in the free artistic play with time and space. Nabokov rated the level of a reader—actually having in mind, of course, the level of the writer—by the quantity of details he could hold in his mind, and in this regard Miller is absolutely unrivaled in his descriptions of both American and Soviet reality. He masterfully conveys the most difficult innermost essence, the atmosphere of an age, right down to the smells. The detail in his descriptions at times approaches the level of hallucination, summoning the sense that before us is a recording of what has been seen and projected on a screen. And if the future reader wants someday to know what Leningrad-Petersburg looked like during and after the crash of the socialist economy, I couldn’t give better advice than to read Miller’s chapters about an American student’s visit to the Russian Nineties.”
– Andrei Khrzhanovsky, renowned Russian animator, director, now in exile, in a review of The Kuleshov Effect for Novaya Gazeta. Khrzhanovsky attended film school with Andrei Tarkovsky and Gennady Shpalikov, and Shpalikov wrote two of Khrzhanovsky’s films.
“The Kuleshov Effect is the ideal novel, the ‘ethereal colossus,’ to borrow a phrase Anna Akhmatova used to describe Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the multilevel construction of The Kuleshov Effect, the reader from time to time finds himself on the landing where he—along with the novel’s heroes—is sincerely worried about the fate of a a tiny gray furball, a kitten named Aelita, daughter of Pushkin(a) the Cat. This lyrical line illuminates the pages of the novel with an especially warm light. That’s not to say that the book is not sometimes cruel, ironic, and terrifyingly precise. Here you’ll find our—Russia’s— ‘hopeless optimism’ and ‘the faces of our new Soviet hypocrites, inflated to the point of bursting with declamatory patriotism’ … and our country, which ‘loved its fairy tales almost as much as it loved its lies’. And here you’ll also find Yuri Gagarin, who ‘show(ed) us—Russians, humans—what we’re capable of when we pause the bloodshed.’ These kinds of images, like the entire content and structure of The Kuleshov Effect, paint a portrait of the author, whose deep and empathetic understanding of Russian history and culture can only make the Russian-speaking reader proud. Why does he love us so? This is a mystery, without which, as we know, good art cannot exist.
– Andrei Khrzhanovsky
“Greg Blake Miller’s miracle of a book, The Kuleshov Effect, transported me back to my youth, all the more remarkably because a non-Russian had created a book that was a flying carpet to the Soviet cinematic 1960s, the land of Andrei Tarkovsky and Gennady Shpalikov. … Reading this remarkable novel about Shpalikov and the creation of the classic film The Illich Gate while re-watching various versions of the film, I suspected that The Kuleshov Effect actually came from the pen of the great Russian exile writer Dmitry Bykov, under the pen name of one of his many trickster doubles. The American author’s understanding of life is so absolutely Russian (and not in the imperial sense!) that I couldn’t shake my doubts. But my first hypothesis turned out to be wrong: Greg Blake Miller is real, an actual American. He’s even on Facebook!”
– Lilya Pann, longtime critic for Russia’s premier literary journal, Novy Mir.
“Achingly poignant. It’s been a long time since I cried over a book. The most unfathomable question is, how could an American write such a book? But Professor Miller has answered that question with The Kuleshov Effect.”
– Nikolai C., reader review of the Russian Edition, OZON.ru
“An outstanding, simply outstanding, book.”
– Arianne, reader review of the Russian Edition, OZON.ru
Back jacket copy for the Russian Edition, from Andrei Khrzhanovsky:
“This book does the impossible—it resurrects my beloved friends from the dawn of the Sixties. It resurrects them exactly as they were: ingenious, happy, tormented, beautiful, intolerable, and great. And the book itself resembles them—and is just as unpredictable.”
THE KULESHOV EFFECT has been excerpted in the prominent Russian-American journal Времена (Times), Volume 39, Issue 3, July 2026) and as an audio excerpt in Западное побережье (West Coast), Issue 18 (2026).
Sayeth the Hummingbird …
Lives of the Non-Saints: Adventures in dystopia with Svetlana Satchkova’s “The Undead”
Lives of the Non-Saints
Adventures in dystopia with Svetlana Satchkova’s The Undead (Melville House, 2026)
By Greg Blake Miller
Among the lords of dystopia, certain principles are sacrosanct:
(1) The thinker must be always on trial.
(2) A guilty verdict is good, but a guilty plea is better.
(3) The not-guilty do not, and cannot, exist.
Dystopias are lands without innocents. A suspended sentence hangs in Damoclean splendor over everyone, provoking the kind of purposefully anodyne behavior that only the terrified or self-convicted can ever truly practice. This is called anticipatory obedience by some, survival by others, and complicity by the self-righteous, the recklessly brave, and the stone-throwing outsider. These are easy categories from which to recruit a Winston Smith (Orwell’s 1984), a D-503 (Zamyatin’s We) or a Katniss Everdeen (do I have to speak its name?). What you’re far more unlikely to find in the ranks of glorious dystopian heroes and antiheroes is a Maya Kotova.
Maya is the hero of Svetlana Satchkova’s new novel, The Undead (Melville House, 2026), and she is neither collaborator nor dissident nor fear-zombified faceless pillar of the Muscovite realm. She is not trying to discover or reclaim her humanity because she’s never lost it. She’s not trying to overcome fear because she doesn’t realize she’s afraid until it’s too late. She walks an arc that belongs neither to the hero nor the victim. She is, in a word, human. She errs, and therein lies the divine in this novel.
In marrying the dystopian realities of creeping 2010s Putinism with the almost cozy tropes of a young-urban-creative narrative of the same period, Satchkova manages to kill two genres with one tome. Satchkova, a Russian writer who came to the U.S. in 2016 and became—as is clear from this book—an American writer, too, joins surfaces reminiscent of the hipster Brooklyn of the Sutton Foster/Hilary Duff sitcom Younger (2015-21) with the creeping dread of a Kafkan penal colony. She not only survives the collision but emerges as the last author standing.
The Undead provides an essential window into the surreal mix of delusional normalcy, illiberal degradation, and moral bewilderment that presided in Moscow in the decade between Vladimir Putin’s return to power in 2012 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At the start of this period, the administration managed the near suffocation of an energetic national protest movement that had grown under the banner of “Russia Without Putin.” In 2014, it responded to a similar but more successful movement in Ukraine by seizing Crimea and invading the eastern part of the country. Along the way, prominent Russian dissidents wound up poisoned, dead, jailed, or run out of the country.
And yet the spirit of opposition persisted in a way that today—when an airless totalitarianism has descended—seems somewhere between quaint and miraculous: Until his 2020 poisoning and evacuation to Germany, Alexei Navalny was building his anti-corruption (read: anti-Putin) movement in Russia and presiding over the creation of daring, deeply reported and bitingly sarcastic YouTube documentaries; after Crimea was annexed, the legendary Russian rocker Andrei Makarevich released a song called “My Country Has Lost Its Mind”; massive memorial marches followed the 2015 murder of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. On a smaller scale, the cultural intelligentsia still gathered in cafes and spoke—more softly than before—about a parallel Russia where ideas still flowed more or less freely on the internet, daring art was still produced, opposition figures on local councils still strived to practice a sort of grassroots politics of decency, and the desire to live a normal life neither infected nor inflamed by Putinism seemed not only acceptable but admirable.
Satchkova’s Maya Kotova is a member of this café society, a Muscovite filmmaker in her mid-thirties, late to the industry but on the move, surrounded by friends, some supportive, some jealous, as she gets her first big break with a comedy-horror script about the embalmed Lenin rising from his cozy tomb to lead an army of the undead on a madcap romp through the Russian capital. To Maya, who strives to keep her nose to the creative grindstone and out of the political clouds (or the cesspool, as many Russians, with good reason, would have it), it’s just a screwball comedy. But to the cynical coworker who anonymously files a complaint, and to the authorities, who never met a denunciation they didn’t love, the film is a not only a thinly veiled attack on the Putin administration but also a terroristic call for violent revolt.
While Maya sits in court listening to the accusations, Satchkova manages a small miracle of storytelling that encapsulates the uniqueness of the novel: For a moment, Maya is less alarmed by the vicious accusation of sedition than she is by the expert witness’s characterization of her rough cut (she never gets the chance to finish the film) as clumsy and inelegant. Putin’s prison archipelago may be a fate worse than death, but a damning review is a fate worse than life. And life around here is hard enough, dammit.
This is the profound humanity of an unwitting non-saint who doesn’t realize that she’s been mistaken for Joan of Arc and that the match has already been thrown on the pyre. Dystopia, it turns out, often doesn’t look or smell like dystopia until you’re sitting before the judge. The Muscovite surfaces of The Undead are vibrant and seductive—New York without the dirt, Portland without the anarchists. Just snow, and even that’s lovely in a Moscow that has learned that the way to trick Narnians who suspect the cruel hand of the White Witch is to create a streetscape where it is not simply always winter, but also always Christmas (or New Year’s, according to the undead practices of Soviet celebration). Under the mayoralty or Sergei Sobyanin, the Moscow city center became almost sickeningly lovely, and a young and moderately successful creative like Maya has been able to circulate in semi-Bohemian circles without noticing that her life is being ideologically and emotionally geofenced by leaders who will gladly tolerate her as long as she plays the unwitting fool. But Maya is not a fool, simply a human who has not yet evolved into either the cowed or heroic personages we expect to populate a dystopia. She doesn’t get it, because who wants to get the joke when it’s so terrifyingly on us?
Through Maya, Satchkova both examines and empathizes with her countrymen—especially those with fewer means and escape routes than Maya—who still find themselves in Putin’s web. She identifies a syntactic chasm between the zombie, the collaborator, and the dissident, and plants her heroine squarely in the breach. And she reminds the stone-throwing outsider that it’s not unthinkable that we, too, may soon find ourselves on the coast of dystopia.
Greg Blake Miller is a former staff writer for The Moscow Times and the author of the novel The Kuleshov Effect, published in Russian translation as Effekt Kuleshova (Эффект Кулешова) by the dissident exile publishing house Freedom Letters in 2024. His new book, Turn Up the Radio When You Speak, will be released in translation as Sdelai Pogromche (Сделай погромче) in summer 2026.
Mirror
Mirror
In the mirror of my country
I see the self I’m swift becoming,
dogged by denial, cynical and numb,
worn thin with fear about accounts unbalanced
and teetering twenty years in the future
when I am old but unready and the choices
will be at their most harrowing.
In the mirror of my country
I see the shadow of death,
escaped from its valley and roaming
free in the background, just behind my graying reflection.
It is now acceptable, even welcome company
and only vestigial visceral dread sustains
what once was called
love of life.
When the language of our leaders
and our erstwhile digital pals
and our neighbors with their garage doors closing
renders Armageddon with such juicy fluency,
it is hard not to hear ourselves read into the script
and see ourselves in the frame,
motionless and compliant
and waiting for the end.
Who speaks these words
of blustering estrangement
from other humans, other nations,
other habits of mind and body?
Who postures, playing influencer,
shooting craps with souls on the line,
unaware that the loss is inevitably our own?
Why do I feel the cold of the dice
in my own hand?
In the mirror of my country
I am looking at my lips downturned,
my gaze flat and unfriendly
and filled with loathing, not for the country I see
but for the self that cannot rouse itself
to do
something.
– Greg Blake Miller, April 7, 2026
Pelican Refueling
The Storm and After
Ice and Incense
In the hammering snow and brutal ice they gathered to make their stand,
hoping to protect this street, these friends, this dream, this home, this land.
False warriors were all out in force in their fine play-acting garb;
state news rang out with lies and hate and snark and bile and barbs.
In some churches, pastors buried gospel and took Christ’s name in vain.
They had the choice to choose their way; they chose the path of Cain.
All through this land and many more, the holy Word is scorned
and used to load the guns of war, the lamb of peace now horned.
You can’t love your neighbor as yourself but tear her from her child,
can’t say you love the stranger then expel him to the wild,
can’t follow paths of incense when in truth they’re really smoke,
can’t claim you’re fixing anything when all the things you broke
lie in pieces in the streets and shattered on the plain
and you rage at every living soul that goes against the grain
and your concept of the sacred law is the one the tyrant winks,
the one he changes night and day and every time he blinks.
Devil, loose your arrows with blessings from your king;
the rich are lining up in droves just to kiss the ring,
but there’s one man in a ballcap, one woman in a car,
a million folks in waking dreams, one wish upon a star,
one storm of conscience in the head, one tightening of the heart,
one roiling sense deep in the gut that we should play our part.
It might be on this winter road or in the voting booth,
but time has come to pay our debt to the bank of truth.
I sense the people will not quit,
sweet madness in their hearts.
I don’t know how the protest ends
but this is how it starts.
– Greg Blake Miller, January 28, 2026
Illustration by GBM, 2020.
Take This Blue From Me
“The Orange Dome” in Red Canary Magazine
On January 24, as I watched the images of Minneapolis on TV while editing a book about a faraway but everpresent war, the drumbeat of a poem took shape. Many thanks to Joe Donnelly, Victoria O’Campo, and the team at Red Canary Magazine for creating this stirring graphic and publishing it in such a timely manner. (Photo by Chad Davis, Wikipedia Commons, for Red Canary) See the poem on the Red Canary site, along with other terrific RC offerings, here.
Greg Blake Miller discusses “The Kuleshov Effect” and more on the Ocean Bridge podcast
Last month, Ocean Bridge—a remarkable group of novelists, poets, journalists, publishers, editors and other creatives from Ukraine and the Russian and Ukrainian diaspora—invited Svetlana and me for an online “author’s evening” focused on my novel The Kuleshov Effect (Эффект Кулешова) and other projects I’ve got in the works. What a privilege and pleasure it was to spend a couple of hours on the “Bridge” speaking with and reading for these extraordinary people!
The recording of the session is now up on YouTube, complete with some old photos and even a song… The caveat is that most of it is in Russian, but I read in English at these spots: 18:24 (The first scene in “Kuleshov”), 43:23 (how the American student Tom Benjamin winds up with a litter of kittens in Saint Petersburg), 1:34:17 (where I actually sing Tom’s song for Kira), 1:39:30 (about Tom’s mind-bending journey to the symphony to listen to Shostakovich), and 2:19:56 (my recent poem, “Phantom”). For the Russian speakers out there, there’s lots of fun conversation and intel on how the book came to be, and Svetlana Miller reads several of the chapters in Russian, from Kira’s point of view.
Many thanks to everyone who attended, with a special hat tip to the poet and peerless captain of Ocean Bridge, Gari Lait (author of Confluences); editor extraordinaire Oleksiy Kretovich; the wonderful writers Marina Dyachenko (co-author, with Sergei Dyachenko, of the Vita Nostra series), Dmitry Bykov (Дмитрий Львович Быков, VZ: Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Making of a Nation), and Alexei Nikitin (Victory Park); the scholar Victor Shtern; and the founder of Freedom Letters publishing, Georgy Urushadze (winner of the American Association of Publishers’ 2025 International Freedom to Publish Award)! #FreedomLetters #globusbooks
To watch this episode of “The Ocean Bridge,” please click the image above.
I hope to bring this book to an English-language readership soon!
Reentry Shock 