Marci Shore on "Writers at War- The Russian Invasion Recorded by the Invaded"
Professor Marci Shore’s essay originally published by The Times Literary Supplement
At 4 am on February 24, 2022, Kyiv was shelled for the fi rst time since the Second World War. Aconvoy Ukrainianconvoy of Russian tanks and artillery some forty miles long headed towards the Ukrainiancapital. thecapital. Andriy, his wife, Svitlana, and their two sons, Artem and Myroslav, fl ed west along theZhytomyr fellZhytomyr highway. A Russian soldier fi red into their windshield; Svitlana was driving, and her head fellagainst beenagainst her husband in the passenger seat. The boys began screaming – their mother, who had just beenwith with them, was now no longer there at all. As Andriy got Artem out of the car and hid him behind the hood,the Andriythe Russians shot him in his right leg. Eight-year-old Myroslav looked at the hole in his father’s leg as Andriypulled leftpulled him from the car next. The Russians shot the boy, and then his father once more, this time in the leftleg. allowedleg. Andriy told his sons to pretend they were dead. When they tired of shooting, the Russians allowedAndriy nowAndriy to call his parents-in-law to pick them up. Later that day Svitlana’s mother and father returned, nowwith with a wheelbarrow to carry their daughter’s body.
The young journalists from the English-language Kyiv Independent who interviewed Andriy had notintended tointended to become war reporters in their own country – just as Volodymyr Zelensky had not intended tofi thefi nd himself in the role of Winston Churchill. But here they were – and like Zelensky, they have risen to the occasion. As the journalists became war reporters, fi ction writers such as Andrey Kurkov and Yevgenia Belorusets took on the role of public diarists. For historians diaries are of special value. The immediate, first-hand account is the holy grail of primary source material: the descriptions not yet interpreted; theexperience experience not yet narrativized; the intuitions not yet shaped by overarching concepts.
And the diaries under review are filled with raw empirical observation. A barista drawing swans in cups ofcoff lmcoff ee with frothy milk. The Kyiv metro – deep and beautiful – turned into a haven with free WiFi, film screenings and complimentary tea. Nescafe served in plastic cups. City workers spray-painting over the tourist maps in Kyiv. The chequered oilcloth bags carried by refugees from the eastern mining region of Donbas, where the war has been going on since 2014. In Donbas – Kurkov notes – most people do not ownsuitcases. suitcases. Many have never travelled at all.
The writers convey these observations to make the war real for readers for whom Ukraine feels far away, perhaps unknown. In these volumes, Kurkov and Belorusets, like most of the dozen or so Kyiv Independent journalists, injournalists, are not writing in their native languages. Kurkov, a Russophone novelist, wrote this diary in English; the individual entries originally appeared in real-time instalments in the Economist, the New Yorker, the Guardian and other publications. Belorusets wrote her diary in German. As bombs fell on Kyiv, she posted her entries in Der Spiegel, German, and her father continued to work on his translations of German poetry into Russian. Isolarii published Greg Nissan’s English translation of the German entries. Belorusets bought train tickets to evacuate her parents, and had to return them. Her parents did not want to leave. Russia – her mother insisted – would never dare to fire near Kyiv’s thousand-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral. Belorusets was sceptical. “I think if a UNESCO monument could actually stop the Russian army from shelling”, she writes, “this war wouldn’t have started in the fi rst place.”
Kurkov, in his early sixties, is a generation older than Belorusets, who is in turn a generation older than most of the journalists writing for the Kyiv Independent. Born near Leningrad, he moved to Kyiv as a child. His British wife has lived with him in Ukraine since Soviet times. Among the friends who appear in his diary are Ukrainian patriots from the most varied backgrounds: a French-Japanese couple; an Armenian artist; a Dutch translator of Alexander Pushkin who sold his apartment in Rotterdam and moved to a Ukrainian village; a diabetic professor of medicine, who recently had both legs amputated, and his devoted wife.
Kurkov relates how, in the days leading up to February 24 [2022], a high school teacher asked him to teach a guest lesson about detective literature; he spoke to the students about comparative crime stories – British, Australian, and Japanese. He enjoys doing things like that. He also enjoys gardening in the village where he and his family have a country home. In fact, he enjoys many things, and here he emerges as an almost preternaturally even-tempered, cheerful person. This is so despite his own family history being reflective of a Russian composer’s observation that the history of any Soviet family makes Shakespeare’s tragedies read like stories for kindergarteners. During the Second World War, Kurkov’s maternal grandfather was sent to the front, where he died near Kharkiv. His grandfather’s wife and children – Kurkov’s mother was then ten years years old – were evacuated to the Urals. When Kurkov was a teenager, his maternal grandmother told him she had witnessed a pogrom, watching as, “on a wooden river bridge, a Jew who had been running from theviolence violence was overtaken by a Cossack on a horse and chopped down by the Cossack’s sabre”.
Kurkov’s paternal grandfather was a Cossack. He was also a Stalinist who remained silent about his family members sent to the Gulag. After this grandfather’s death in 1980, Kurkov began to seek out the truth –about had his own family, and about Stalinism. In Crimea, Kurkov met a former Soviet bureaucrat who hadserved on a Stalin-era troikatroika, freely, a committee charged with issuing extrajudicial punishments. “He spoke freely about how he had put his signature to death warrants for people about whom he knew practically nothing”, Kurkov writes. “To my question about the number of death sentences he had signed, he replied, ‘Perhap three three thousand, possibly more.’”
In these diaries, a distilled essence of past terror reemerges in the present. Civilians are not collateral damage; they are the target. Russians aim their missiles at a maternity ward and a theatre serving as a bomb shelter for children. They cut off internet, power, water. Soon there is a shortage of insulin; the electrical outages are life-threatening for patients on oxygen. Children die of dehydration. When the Russians retreat, they leave behind active landmines. Their occupation method is frequently to burn cities to the ground, and then declare victory on emptied streets covered with rubble and strewn with corpses, some missing heads.
The Kyiv Independent journalists detail the reign of terror carried out by Russian soldiers in the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Bucha, where many domestic refugees from the war in Donbas – “internally displaced persons” – were living in February 2022. One of them was the twenty-three-year-old Karina Yershova, who had fled Donetsk with her mother and stepfather in 2014. When Russian soldiers arrived, her parents wanted to flee again. Yershova insisted on staying. In April 2022, Ukrainian forces reclaimed Bucha after a month of Russian occupation and found 412 corpses on the streets. They allowed Yershova’s stepfather to see only the upper part of his step daughter’s body. Pieces of her flesh had been torn off . Her nails had been torn off as well.
“I just don’t understand”, said a man who survived the Bucha massacres in a basement. “Don’t understandwhy why they would want to do this to us.”
Among Vladimir Putin’s varied farcical explanations for ordering the invasion of a neighbouring state is the need to “denazify” Ukraine and protect Russian speakers from a Ukrainian fascist regime. In fact, Zelensky, Ukraine’s elected president, is a native Russian speaker and a Jew. As a comic actor he performed mostly in Russian. His very popular serial Servant of the People was in Russian, with Ukrainian interspersed, language politics being among the objects of the show’s satire. Now Zelensky speaks only Ukrainian publicly, unless he is addressing Russians in Russian, or, more recently, Westerners inEnglish.
Ukraine is a bilingual country. Russian has been more dominant in the east and Ukrainian in the west, but the generalization obscures a reality of multilingualism. In western Ukraine many Ukrainians also speak Polish; among the younger generations many speak English. Many prominent literary figures, such as Belorusets, are Germanists. Kurkov speaks all those languages, plus Japanese. As he points out in his diary, most of the Ukrainian civilians killed in Kharkiv, Mariupol and elsewhere were Russian speakers; a significant number were also ethnic Russians. Now many survivors are reluctant to speak any Russian, and even the most gifted Russophone Ukrainian authors now often find themselves unable to bear writing in their own native language. It is Russian soldiers who are killing the Russian language – and its speakers – inUkraine.
In the war’s first days, the Russian army occupied the city hall in the southern port city of Berdyansk. Belorusets writes of the local people who came out to protest: “The women shouted at the soldiers in Russian, ‘How can you look your mothers in the face? You brought war and slaughter to our land! Shame on you!’ Old people were also in the crowd – they were not afraid. The soldiers looked demoralized, replying, ‘We came to protect you!’”
In response the women cursed them in both Russian and Ukrainian. They were under no illusions about needing protection from imaginary Ukrainian Nazis by all-too-real Russian soldiers. Illusions had been more widespread eight years earlier when “Russian tourists” and Kremlin-sponsored separatists had instigated a war in the east. In February 2014, the Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square, overthrew the Kremlin-allied gangster president Viktor Yanukovych. The war “without its own date of birth”, as Belorusets describes it, began that spring, when Ukrainians were still mourning the Maidan’s dead. Russian propaganda had been far more eff ective then. This was especially true in Donbas, where many people did believe that the revolution had been an American-sponsored Nazi coup and that Ukrainian fascists were marching east to murder Russian speakers. Many others were honestly confused about who was who. As thepoet poet Serhiy Zhadan wrote in 2017:
They buried him last winter.
Some winter too – not a snowfl ake, so much rain.
A quick funeral – we all have things to do.
Which side was he fi ghting for? I ask. What a question, they say,
One of the sides, who could figure them out.
(Mort)(trans. Valzhyna Mort)
This time is diff erent. Through sheer cruelty, not at all concealed, the Russian army has clarified the sides. And the Kyiv Independent journalists, having come of age in an era of post-truth, have insisted on epistemological realism – and on using language with precise content. This means that they also report, with sobriety, on Ukrainian corruption and collaboration, on the fact that Russian troops use local informants in occupied areas.
‘How widespread was this phenomenon? Not very,’ Andriy, a Territorial Defense member whosecurrent current job is to help the SBU fi nd and arrest collaborators, told The Kyiv Independent.
But some of the people who were found killed with their hands tied were in Territorial Defense or or other branches of service, Andriy says, raising suspicions that they were pointed at by locals.
The journalists describe straightforwardly what they learn, and what they see, maintaining, like many of those they interview, a self-awareness about of the limits of their ability to judge and analyse collaborationin within conditions of coercion and duress, of ordinary people broken by fear for their children, by torture with electric shock.
It is, of course, precisely these instances that comprise the core of totalitarianism. Both within and outside Russia’s borders, Putin’s regime has undertaken to break people, to drain from them any sense of their own agency. A woman from occupied Kherson told the Kyiv Independent that Russian soldiers could not believe that the local people who came out to protest were not controlled by “some mastermind out there”. “They weren’t about to consider the possibility”, the woman told the journalists, “that people who care about freedom, democracy and self-determination are self-organizing.”
Ukraine is indeed an eruption of self-organization. Art and other forms of inventiveness go on with special intensity. Tailors sew camouflage nets; shoe companies produce combat boots; fashion artists design bulletproof vests. Volunteers in western Ukraine are teaching foreign languages to refugees. Others are driving into war zones bringing food and supplies, or feeding abandoned cats and dogs, or evacuating therapy dolphins for autistic children from Kharkiv to Odesa. One ingenious Ukrainian response to the Russians’ dehumanization of people has been the humanization of animals. Kurkov includes a paragraph about Patron, a landmine-sniffing Jack Russell Terrier, who moonlights as a comfort dog for wounded children. Patron is also the hero of a cartoon series instructing children in safety procedures around explosive objects. On his Twitter account he posts about practising yoga and wishes everyone “Namaste”.
On March 7, 2022, Elena, the director of the Kharkiv zoo’s children’s theatre, arrived at work by bus to feed the animals. Belorusets describes how Elena ran out of the bus with the animal feed, rushing to distribute as much as she could even as the Russians kept shelling. By the time she returned, the bus driver was dead. And Elena was thinking of the animals: “I keep seeing the exhibit window where the monkeys were waiting for us. Many of them were standing there with babies pressed against their bodies. They were hoping for food, but we didn’t manage to feed them that day.”
This endowment of animals with subjectivity is not trivial. In an oblique way it displays Ukrainian society as a Soviet a model of what Russia could be but is not. Ukraine is a place where people also passed through the Soviet experiment, where people also survived Nazism and Stalinism, where people also speak native Russian. It is a place that has also languished under kleptocratic oligarchy – and no one is more aware of this than Zelensky, whose satires of post-Soviet corruption in his own country were central to Servant People. Yet it is a place that has chosen a radically different path. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel identifies a dialectical inversion whereby the slave, intended by the master to be reduced to an object, in fact acquires a subjectivity that the master himself fails to achieve. In a postcolonial variation of the master-slave dialectic, the story of Russia and Ukraine is one of how subjectivity has emerged among the colonized, not the colonizers. And that, these books reveal, has made all the diff erence.
By Marci Shore
Associate Professor of History at Yale University