'We're nothing more than bargaining chips' – what it means to be Ukrainian in wartime

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/23/-sp-ukraine-russia-identity-wartime

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Andriy Ignatov, 40, economist, Kiev

I think a lot of Ukrainians are thinking about their personal history these days. We’re all wondering how to deal with this legacy that’s been handed to us – communism, famine, the Second World War, Orthodoxy. It all feels very fresh, very raw, now that Russia is waging war on us again.

In Ukraine, your hometown says a lot about who you are. Every city has its own distinct character; “Oh, you’re from Vinnitsya? You must be this kind of person.”

My grandfather, Yuriy Ignatov, grew up in Kharkiv, and it played a big part in shaping who he was. Kharkiv was the first Bolshevik capital of Ukraine, and my grandfather was a true Soviet.

In Ukraine, your hometown says a lot about who you are

He joined the Communist Party after the Second World War and it gave him education and career opportunities that he wouldn’t have had otherwise. He and his wife were veterinarians, and eventually he became a fairly high-ranking agricultural official.

He wasn’t one of those people who got excited by Soviet slogans or getting their pictures taken next to statues of Lenin. He just genuinely believed the USSR had been formed for a reason, and that it was out to achieve something important.

My grandfather loved to read and learn new things, and he was always ready for an argument with us kids. He would tell us about how great the Communists were, and we would tell him it was all bullshit.

Despite being a real Soviet man, my grandfather was also very proud of being Ukrainian

For years, he denied that there had ever been a Holodomor – Stalin’s man-made famine aimed at forcing Ukrainian peasants off their land and onto collective farms. This was true even though his own family had been evicted from their property during the famine. Most of his family died during the famine and the Second World War, but it was something he never talked about.

Despite being a real Soviet man, my grandfather was also an intellectual and very proud of being Ukrainian. He saw Ukraine as the engine that kept the whole USSR running. And as he got older, he began to see that his children weren’t enjoying the same benefits that he had. Life wasn’t getting better.

He was 87 when he died in 2013. A few months before that, he told me there were rumours in his veterans’ group that Russia was going to try to restore the Soviet Union. He thought that would be a good thing. But I think it would have killed him to see what’s going on now, watching Russia invade Ukraine, seeing what these terrorists are doing to us now.

Oleh Hubar, 61, city historian, Odessa

I don’t identify myself in terms of any kind of nationality or ethnicity. I was baptised as Orthodox Christian, and in the spiritual sense I consider myself a representative of Russian culture. Although, I repeat, I am absolutely not fixated on the issue of nationality.

Odessa is traditionally a Russian-speaking city. Although before the Bolshevik Revolution, of course, it was very common to hear Yiddish – one out of every three people spoke it.

My family is like many Odessa families - a big mix of ethnicities and religions.

My paternal grandmother, Maria Kazakova, was half-Jewish and half-Russian Orthodox. She ended up marrying Lev Hubar, who worked in the office of a milling company with his father and who fought in the First World War. The Hubar family was considered part of the Odessa elite.

My family is like many Odessa families - a big mix of ethnicities and religions

My maternal grandmother was also Jewish; my maternal grandfather was a Baltic Sea German. He ended up deserting from the Russo-Japanese War with a group of other soldiers and went into hiding. He never came back.

My mother, Yevdokia, kept her mother’s name as well. She was lucky enough to survive the Second World War. Odessa Jews were murdered en masse by Romanians and Germans during the occupation. My mother lost almost her entire family.

My father, Iosif Hubar, served as a senior lieutenant in the Soviet Army. He was decorated after his unit “scattered and liquidated” four German platoons.

We – ordinary people – are nothing more than bargaining chips in a big game

My family has always taken a critical stance toward government, but we were never among what I would call the constructive opposition. We always tried to view everything in a rational, sober manner.

Regarding the current situation, I can say that the war isn’t being fought in the east. It’s certainly not being fought in Odessa.

It’s being fought at a much, much higher level. And we – ordinary people – are nothing more than bargaining chips in a big game.

It’s not worth demonising anyone in this war, because our leaders are equally bad. Each works for his own interest, and one isn’t better than the other. The worst is that so many people are dying because of it.

I’m all alone here. But I’m a sixth-generation Odessa native. I don’t want to leave

I’ve had many opportunities to leave Odessa, to leave Ukraine. All my relatives left. My father, mother, and sister Inna all died in the United States. My uncle and aunt did also. And all their children live there.

I’m all alone here. But I’m a sixth-generation Odessa native. I don’t want to leave. Someone needs to stay behind to visit the graves of their ancestors.

This is my city. I don’t need any other. My grandmother is buried here, my teacher, my father’s younger sister Olga, in whose honour I was named. And many others. I want to be with them.

Natalia Zubchenko, 31, anaesthesiologist, Dnipropetrovsk

I work as an anaesthesiologist at the front-line evacuation hospital set up at the Dnipropetrovsk State Medical Academy for wounded Ukrainian troops. My husband is also an anaesthesiologist; he’s currently working in a field hospital.

Most of us didn’t have any experience with field medicine or treating combat injuries. We weren’t expecting a war. It took us about two months to get up to snuff.

It’s nice to know that other people know about my country and care about what’s happening here

My grandmother, Nina, was born in the village of Chervone in Zaporizka Oblast. It was 1933, in the middle of the famine.

My great-grandparents had already been labeled as kulaks – wealthy peasants – and had their property seized. My great-grandfather had owned a mill. Somehow he and my great-grandmother managed to find work during the Holodomor, and no one starved to death. They ate grass and whatever they could find to survive.

My grandmother moved to the city around Dnipropetrovsk around 1950 to start nursing school and then medical school. She became an obstetrician/gynaecologist.

She never had any particular love for the Soviet Union. Her memory of the Second World War was of the German soldiers handing out candy and the Soviet ones ramming their tanks into houses.

We don’t think of ourselves as east or west. We’re central

In 1963, she was formally punished at work for speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian. But she ended up being the Communist Party boss at her hospital just the same. Now she speaks Russian better than Ukrainian. But occasionally I can still hear the Ukrainian slip in, especially when she answers the phone.

Dnipropetrovsk is a very specific city. For a long time, it was a closed city because of the Yuzhmash ballistic missile plant. Even now, we have our own way of doing things. We don’t think of ourselves as east or west. We’re central.

I think Euromaidan did a very good thing for Dnipropetrovsk. If a year ago you had shown someone here a blue-and-yellow flag, I don’t think it would have meant anything special to them at all. But the Maidan roused people’s sense of national identity.

The Maidan roused people’s sense of national identity

If the Russians had invaded and there had been no Maidan, I think the situation right now would be quite different. They might have made it to Dnipropetrovsk, or even further into Ukraine.

That said, I don’t think our soldiers are getting nearly the support they need. I think there’s more to this war than we can see. I only hope that when we find out the whole story, it’ll be clear that our people are dying for a reason.

I’ve traveled quite a bit, and I used to spend a lot of time explaining that Ukraine was a country next to Russia, but that it wasn’t the same thing as Russia. It’s nice to know that other people know about my country and care about what’s happening here.

Volodymyr Ogloblyn, 60, photographer, Kharkiv

I was a Little Octobrist, a Young Pioneer, a Komsomolets, the whole deal. But I never got into the Communist Party. I was the type of person who asked too many questions.

Technically, I’m Russian. My parents were Russian and I’ve spent a lot of time there. But I’ve lived in Kharkiv since I was small and this is my city. Ukraine is my country.

Technically, I’m Russian... but Ukraine is my country

I was raised by a single mother. My father was in the army and then just kind of drifted off. He ended up marrying another woman with the same name and patronymic as my mother. Maybe it made things easier for him – less to remember.

We went out to the square for all the Soviet holidays. No matter what. You had to, otherwise someone would call the police.

When I was about 14, my mother and I went to Crimea for the first time. It was the first time I had seen the sea, and it was amazing. What [Russian president Vladimir] Putin did in Crimea is no different than taking someone’s wallet. He stole Crimea from us.

What Putin did in Crimea is no different than taking someone’s wallet. He stole Crimea from us

I’ve worked for years with Russian publishers, but it’s not clear those relationships are going to continue. It’s tough to have a normal conversation with Russians these days.

For one thing, they’re blind to what’s going on in Ukraine. And for another, they can’t bear the thought of Ukrainians living better than they do. They think that if they live badly, everyone else should, too. And they can’t stand the fact that Ukrainians on the Maidan were ready to die for their country.

We are spiritually free. And they aren’t. They love to say Russia is a great country. I always tell them it’s not great – it’s just big.

Just let this war be over

Ukraine has everything it takes to be a great country. But all the money we could be investing in our country is just being spent on this bullshit war that we were absolutely not ready for.

The hospitals in Kharkiv are full of wounded soldiers – from both sides, by the way. I collect clothes for some of these guys. They literally have nothing, these boys. People donate money to pay for their operations and artificial limbs.

Just let this war be over. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Andriy Sholtes, 41, writer, Uzhhorod

I’m an Uzhhorod native; my family has lived here for four generations. My grandparents spoke Hungarian, and my parents and I do too. It’s traditional to teach it to children here while they’re young because it’s a difficult language.

I went to a Ukrainian school, but I was also perfectly comfortable socialising in Russian and Hungarian.

My grandparents used to joke that if you lived long enough, you could live in five different countries without ever leaving your village: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the USSR, and Ukraine.

The war in eastern Ukraine is real for us

The war in eastern Ukraine is real for us – a number of guys from here have been killed in the fighting. But I’ve never been to the east. It still feels far away.

The psychological distance between Transcarpathia [in south-west Ukraine] and the east is really big, but that’s normal. We’re just our own region. We have our own advantages and disadvantages.

I have no plans to leave Uzhhorod. I like it here. As long as my children are healthy, the war ends, and my book gets published, I’ll have everything I want.

Volodymyra Kachmar, 54, architect, Lviv

I was one of those people who never paid attention to history in school – it was just a form of Soviet indoctrination. But when I started to research my family, I suddenly found history very interesting.

My ancestors were all priests, teachers, and farmers, and like many Galicians, they were stuck between Orthodox Russians on the one side and Roman Catholic Poles and Austro-Hungarians on the other.

It was only in the 1990s that the Ukrainian security services released files explaining what happened to people like my grandfather

When the Soviets came to power, they made life very hard for Greek Catholic clergy. They were constantly under pressure to convert to Orthodoxy, as a sign of loyalty, or to give up religion altogether.

My grandfather, Stefan Kachmar, had 10 junior clerics under his supervision. It would have been very valuable for the Soviets if he had persuaded them all to convert en masse, but he refused, and in 1946 he was shot by a Russian sniper.

They said it was a stray bullet, but his family knew that it wasn’t a random incident. The bullet severed his spinal cord; he was paralysed and died six months later. My father, Orest, was 15.

My other grandfather, Volodymyr Mysyak, was a lawyer and very active in Galicia’s Prosvita cultural movement. He graduated from Lviv University and was working in the city of Lyubachiv, in what is now Poland. After Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland in 1939, Lyubachiv ended up on the Soviet side, and that was the end of my grandfather’s work as a lawyer.

He went on to work in forestry, but in May 1941 he was arrested. On 26 June he was executed at the Zamarstynovskiy prison in Lviv, along with hundreds of other western Ukrainians, for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” His daughter – my mother, Bohdana – was six.

At the time, no one knew what had happened to him. Olha, my grandmother, looked for him at the prison, but so many people had been killed that she couldn’t be sure he was among them. She waited for him for the rest of her life.

It was only in the 1990s that the Ukrainian security services released files explaining what had happened to people like my grandfather. In 2000, he was officially rehabilitated. He was never given a proper burial, but his name is engraved on the wall of the prison.

All they ever wanted was a country they could call their own

Both of my grandmothers – Stefania and Olha – lived to old age. When my sister and I were growing up, our grandmothers never talked about the past, particularly Stefania. Her husband wasn’t a priest who was shot by the Russians. He was just a “worker who died.” She didn’t want us to be compromised by our family history.

My sister and I were baptised, but we never went to an actual church. Our schoolteachers were assigned to watch the churches on holidays to see if any of their students went in. We didn’t want to be reported.

Every branch of my family has people who were killed or imprisoned or forcibly resettled in the 1930s and 40s. All they ever wanted was a country they could call their own.

I can’t say I have any hatred toward Russia, but they never saw us as a real nation. They stole our history, and now they’re trying to steal it again.

More accounts from My Ukraine, Memory and Identity can be found on RFE/RL