"Postcards" Mykola Riabchuk

Bloody Europeans

“Oh, those bloody Europeans!” my friend says as we cross the flower-strewn, ash-covered Maidan. “They’d still be dithering to this day if Yanukovych’s henchmen hadn’t shot so many people.”

I have no desire to defend “the Europeans”, given that for several months I’ve been doing nothing but criticising them in dozens of articles, interviews and commentaries. But I’ve been doing it in their newspapers and on their radio and television stations. I’m not going to do it in Ukraine, though. Not because I accept two different truths or two standards, but because even without me there are more than enough people in Ukraine eager to criticise the West and feed their compatriots’ infantile grudge against the whole world, which apparently owes us something.

Michael Winterbottom’s film Welcome to Sarajevo includes one very telling episode. Journalists in the besieged city bombard a UN official who is passing through with the question of when the international community will finally put a stop to the daily killings of civilians by Serbian snipers and artillery fire. To which the official replies sternly, “We have to deal with 13 countries in the world which are worse than Sarajevo.”

Sadly, this is true. Elsewhere in the world there are at least thirteen regimes far more brutal and bloody than Yanukovych’s henchmen. And I believe that only those of us who protested outside the Chinese Embassy in defence of the Tibetans, who spoke out against the massacres in Andijan and Zhanaozen, or who pressured their own government not to negotiate with the bloody Putins, Karimovs and Nazarbayevs of this world have any right to accuse the Europeans of indifference.

Everyone else ought really to keep quiet. Or better still – thank the Europeans for actually doing something, even though there really are at least thirteen countries in the world that need help more than we do. And which, though I say it with a heavy heart, nobody in Ukraine cares about.

Perhaps the problem of dual standards starts right here.

27 February 2014

Self-definition

A few years ago, in Simferopol in Crimea, a friend and I were looking for a library. The middle-aged woman we asked for directions was not in the slightest surprised that we spoke Ukrainian – on the contrary, she set about explaining everything to us extra carefully, and, most significantly, also in Ukrainian. She found it hard, she lacked words, and her pronunciation was skewed, but she made the effort nonetheless, even though she must have known that we would have understood Russian too, and that we wouldn’t have been offended in the slightest. It was as if she were attempting to prove to us outsiders that in Crimea, as everywhere else, there are all sorts of people, and that by no means does everybody fly into a rage every time they hear Ukrainian.

My daughter, as a child, came up against one who did, in a minibus in Sevastopol; she had the misfortune to ask him something.

“Can’t you say it po-russki?!” he growled at her.

But the other passengers in the minibus did not back him up – on the contrary, they were embarrassed by him and started apologising to their “guest” for their irritable compatriot, a dyed-in-the-wool internationalist.

Most people are guided by common sense and have no desire to be thought worse or more savage than they actually are.

I see similar incidents in Lviv sometimes, too, where people try their hardest to answer visitors in Russian or in Polish, making a hash of the first and an even worse hash of the second, all in the name of ensuring that visitors don’t think the locals are the dreadful cut-purses and nationalists that the propaganda of both their home countries would have them believe.

In both cases it is less about communication than about a symbolic message. Well, communication too, but on an entirely different, more universal plane.

There are times, though, that remind one of the incident portrayed in Eugène Ionesco’s well-known play, when one after another, people are turned into rhinoceroses, and start running about the streets with the Russian tricolour flag. Or marching about with torches. And those not yet turned into rhinoceroses keep quiet and out of the way so as not to get crushed by their heavy feet.

As a staunch liberal I see nothing wrong with the fact that some rhinoceroses feel the urge to set up states of their own. Or annex themselves to other, bigger and better-armed states.

Only what, in such states, becomes of those who are still not rhinocified and most probably never will be? Like the passengers who stood up for my daughter that day, or the woman in Simferopol who did her best to tell us the way?

12 March 2014

The Museum of the Occupation

Ten years ago the Estonians opened a Museum of the Occupation in Tallinn, in a small, glass building in Toompea, a fairly central part of the city. Among the exhibits there is the full set of doors from the Gestapo and KGB torture cells, as a metaphor for memory, which we can only peer into through a tiny peephole. And in the courtyard a dozen stone suitcases, all identically grey and infinitely heavy – all that is left of the thousands of people deported and murdered.

The occupation of Estonia – first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet again – lasted more than fifty years. My friend Kadri, who invited me to the museum, told me that the Soviet Anschluss of Estonia was very similar to the contemporary Russian “special operations” in Ukraine – the same brand of infiltrators, the same breed of fifth columnists, the same sort of “peaceful demonstrators” falling into line behind GPU officers, the same “assistance” in bringing alleged order and defending entirely unwitting aborigines from themselves.

In 1940 the “liberators” deported almost a quarter of the population to Siberia – about the same number as they had a year previously from western Ukraine. In their place they installed “specialists”: countless specimens of Homo sovieticus from across the empire. “Ten more years,” Kadri smiles sadly, “and the Estonians would have become a minority in Estonia. Even Russification wouldn’t have been necessary. We’d have had our own Lukashenko or Yanukovych – forever.”

In 1918–1920, for more than two years, the Estonians, like the Ukrainians, managed to hold back the Bolshevik hordes – and they ultimately managed to defend themselves. The Ukrainians are still fighting; their Vabadussõda (War of Independence) is not over yet.

And in fact it is not over for the Estonians either. I sense this in their uneasy questions, worried looks, and now also in the collective memory recounted in the museum – which is as heavy as the stone cases and as bloody as the doors from the Soviet torture chambers with the figure of the demonic KGB colonel in the background.
26 April 2014

Dreamers

At the entrance to the theatre, an actor was standing, jotting down in a notepad the dreams of the people coming to watch the play. I don’t know what for. Perhaps for a new project of some sort. Or maybe it was a commission from some sociologists or market researchers. Or perhaps it was the director’s idea for putting the audience in the mood.

The play was about Donbas, about the war, about hostages, terror, and the lack of a way out. Perhaps it really was worth writing our dreams down before it started, so that no-one could refute them afterwards, at least before themselves.

I had to admit to not having any dreams.

The actor couldn’t believe it.

“Don’t you dream,” he asked, “of the war ending, of everybody being able to go home, and of Ukraine becoming a normal country?”

“No,” I answered. “That’s not a dream, that’s a wish that is quite attainable. It requires a clear plan, decisive action, and good attention to detail. There’s no place for dreaming here. It’s simply a project that needs to be put into action.”

“But projects are born from dreams!” the actor protested.

“No.” I answered. “Projects are born of specific needs. The only things to come out of dreams are poetry, science fiction, and political utopias.”

In other circumstances I would have explained to him that the word mrija, dream, only entered the Ukrainian language in the mid-nineteenth century, coined by Mikhaylo Starytsky. And that in Old Slavonic the word mechtat’ was inextricably bound up with imagination, dreams (waking and sleeping), illusion, and the ancient Greek “fantasia”. It is similar in other languages too. English speakers have only the one word: dream, regardless of whether they are awake or asleep. And the related German trügen means to deceive, to hoodwink.

“You were too aggressive towards that lad,” my wife said once we were inside the theatre.

“I wasn’t aggressive. I just know that nothing will come of all this as long as we continue to talk about Ukraine in terms of dreams rather than plans, projects, means and rules.”

“Now you’re dreaming,” she said, following me into the darkened auditorium, where the play had already begun.
25 July 2014

Two Separatists

It’s actually quite hard to come across a separatist who is still alive in Kyiv, but I know two – one Donbas separatist and one Galician one. The “Donbas one” was born in Lviv [in Galicia – translator’s note], and then moved to Kyiv, where he realised that in Kyiv a Ukrainian has reasonable chances of surviving intact – at least physically – while in Donbas there is none. And hence his conclusion that Donbas, with its oligarchs, Lenins and millions of Homo sovieticus types, must imperatively be separated, so that the rest of the more normal country can join the rest of the more normal world.

The “Galician” separatist was born in Donetsk and also only became a separatist when he moved to Kyiv, where he saw that the “russki mir” here is in poor, though not hopeless condition. With the help of RTV, the FSB [the Russian Federal Security Service – translator’s note] and a few spetsnaz units, it should be possible to bring about some semblance of order. Galicia, on the other hand, is territory lost to the “russki mir”, incurably contaminated by the West, the Uniate and Catholic religions, and a bourgeois brand of nationalism. In his view, then, it is worth cutting out the gangrene to prevent its miasma poisoning the more normal Ukrainians – or, as he in his Russian accent pronounces it, UkrA-inians. Who are, of course, also Russians, only with a different accent.
I still meet the “Donbas” separatist now. He is even more fervent in his advocacy of the need to cordon Donbas off behind a wall, barbed wire and minefields. And to cordon ourselves off by the same methods from Russia and its maniacal “russki mir”. As if that “mir” were confined to Russia and not in the heads of a good half of Ukrainians.

The “Galician” separatist has disappeared somewhere. Perhaps he has gone to his native Donetsk to fulfil his dream of finally and irrevocably separating Galicia. To this end, all he and others who share his vision have to do is liberate Novorossiya from the Nazis, take Kyiv, and push through to the Zbruch. Some say this will take two weeks, others – two days.

I fear, though, that neither one nor the other dream has any chance of coming true. Because between Donbas and Galicia there are sufficient numbers of soborniks – advocates of Ukrainian unity – who will prevent it if it’s the last thing they do. And, more significantly, there is one more great supporter of the unity of these lands – in the Kremlin, who will do everything he can to salvage our territory in its entirety under the watchful eye of some brave new Yanukovych or Novorossiya “president” Zakharchenko in the role of a local Ramzan Kadyrov.

19 September 2014

Toppling Lenins

A friend from Kharkiv sent me a short video clip documenting the triumphal toppling of the Communist idol on the city’s largest square. Between that event and the toppling of similar idols across western Ukraine, twenty-four years had passed. This is how long it takes for a new generation free of the myths and superstitions personified by those idols to grow up.

“Now we can die in peace,” he wrote emotionally. I understand him. I remember Adam Michnik shouting something similar in December 1989 when we learned of the overthrow of Ceaușescu, the last in a series of East European dictators.

I didn’t want to upset my Kharkiv friend, but I had to remind him that here in Kyiv we still drive along a street named after the revolutionary Fyodor Artiom, the predecessor of the contemporary separatist Igor Bezler, past the statue of the Bolshevik Mykola Shchors, a fighter for the “Donetsk People’s Republic” of his day, and along Viktor Suvorov Street, named for the bloody oppressor of Poland and others of our immediate neighbours. Each of these figures is far more deserving of a place on the scrap heap of history than the whole bevy of Yanukovych-brand politicians most recently consigned by revolutionaries to the rubbish dump.

To push my point home, I sent him a news clipping released by the “serious” Associated Press, which included the information that in Kharkiv “nationalists [had] toppled a huge statue of Lenin” and that similar acts were being carried out all over Ukraine “as a symbolic symptom of anti-Russian moods”.

The same acts that in Eastern Europe twenty-five years ago were construed as symptomatic of anti-totalitarian moods are today in Ukraine seen as no more than evidence of belligerent anti-Russian attitudes. What in Eastern Europe was linked to respected “democrats” is in Ukraine being blamed on suspect “nationalists”.

All these stereotypes are so deeply rooted in the Western consciousness that it will be far harder to eradicate them than to topple all the statues of Lenin in existence.

“So you see you will have to keep on living,” I wrote back to my friend.

I hope I didn’t sadden him too much.

1 October 2014

Statistics

Asli wrote me an anguished letter from Turkey, where the local Putinesque regime had launched yet another purge of the opposition, involving arrests of activists, destruction of independent publishing outfits, and extra beatings for the most recalcitrant.

We met four years ago in Vienna, where for two months we shared a flat kindly provided to us, along with a small writer’s grant, by the Austrian organisation KulturKontakt. Asli had just been released from prison, where she had been facing “terrorism” charges for supporting the Kurds. She wore a corset because of damage she had sustained to several vertebrae during interrogations. She was constantly making coffee and smoking, and she never turned the light off at night. At first I thought she worked at night, but it transpired that she simply couldn’t sleep without a light on. A little post-prison foible.

I had planned to read out her letter at the international Pen Club conference in Bratislava, but I was beaten to it by fellow members, who regaled me with countless stories of the same type from all corners of the globe, from China and Uzbekistan to Cuba and Venezuela. All those tragedies ultimately ended as a dry inventory of kidnapped, imprisoned, missing, beaten and murdered writers and journalists whose only crime was thinking independently and writing unsanctioned content. My Asli, like my Donbas, my Crimean Tatars, my Ukraine, were swallowed up in that six-page list that was the final resolution. And there is nothing we can do about it. Our Bandukovyches really do have nothing on the fighters of the Nigerian group Boko Haram or the Syrian-based Islamic State.

Having crunched all those people into statistics, we are free to move on to the banquet, the tour of the marvellous tapestries in the main hall of the former Primate’s Palace, and a stroll around the incomparable city of Bratislava, dotted with souvenir stalls, sweet stands and mulled wine booths. We may also stumble upon a nativity scene with a King Herod figure in it, but that is not likely to stick in our minds for long.

13 December 2014

Translated from the Polish by Jessica Taylor-Kucia

Mykola Riabchuk – a Ukrainian author and essaist, as well as a founder of Krytyka magazine. His research and articles focus on topics of Ukrainian national identity, politics, and history through a postcolonial lens. From 2014, he is the chairman of the jury of The Angelus Central European Literature Award. The laureate of the 2022 Taras Shevchenko Prize, the most important Ukrainian award given for achievements in the field of culture.