29 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Celebrated Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov. Photo: Juerg Vollmer
After five days of silence, my friend, a writer, journalist, and historian in occupied Melitopol, finally sent me a message. I’d been afraid something had happened to her, that I would never hear from her again. But, thank God, it turned out that she’d simply had no internet access or telephone reception. I asked her to keep a diary of life under occupation, to take photos on her smartphone, and to send all that to me. I would keep it safe. The original diary could then be destroyed.
She’s been living under occupation for more than two weeks and doesn’t set foot outside, for fear of being captured. The director of the Melitopol History Museum, Leyla Ibragimova, a Crimean Tatar, has already been kidnapped. They terrorised her, interrogated her, confiscated her and her family’s phones and computers — then released her. The next morning they picked her up for another interrogation. Activists and journalists are disappearing in the occupied territories. FSB agents walk the streets with lists of names and addresses in hand. These lists were prepared before the start of the war.
Oleg Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka, was abducted by the Russian military. Eventually, he was released — after eight days of beatings and torture, of demands to go over to the Russian side, of hunger and thirst, of humiliation. Those who beat him hid their faces and forbade him to raise his head and look at them. Is this today’s Russia? Yes. But it is also the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These are the practices of the Gulag. The Ukrainian author Stanislav Aseyev wrote an entire book about the torture camp in Donetsk. After two years of captivity in this camp and in the prison run by separatists, he had plenty of material. He studied closely those who beat and abused Ukrainian prisoners of war and others who had been seized on the streets and brought to this already infamous concentration camp, called “Isolation.” Years ago, the place had been a factory for the manufacture of insulation for electrical wires. Later, under the same name, it became a contemporary art centre. When the separatists, aided by the Russian military, captured Donetsk, they converted it into a concentration camp, with a set of chambers in which all their detainees were tortured. Stanislav Aseyev’s book has already appeared in several languages, including English. I highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to better understand what went on and continues to go on in the separatist “republics” since 2014. And now the same things are happening in the territories occupied by the Russian army.
We’re well into 2022. Books about what is happening now in Ukraine are already being written, but are not yet published.
The unsuccessful attempt to annex or, to put it plainly, occupy all of Ukraine has angered Putin and now, judging by the military actions of the Russian army, Russian generals have been ordered to destroy cities and villages, to kill civilians, and simply to make sure that Ukraine ceases to exist.
This is not the first attempt to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. In the late 1920s, Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms, and for this the Soviet government deported 250,000 families to Siberia. In 1932-1933, as punishment for the same individualism and unwillingness to become part of Soviet collective agriculture, all reserves of wheat and, indeed, all sources of nourishment were confiscated from Ukrainian peasants, leaving them with no food for the winter. Some seven million Ukrainians perished during this artificial famine organised by Moscow.
In those same years, the Soviet government decided to destroy Ukrainian culture. Nearly all the country’s leading writers, poets, and playwrights were arrested, sent to Solovki in the north of Russia, and shot. In Ukrainian literary history, the authors of this period are referred to as the “Executed Renaissance.” These people had tried to revive Ukrainian culture after decades of official prohibitions on the use of the Ukrainian language and on anything distinctly Ukrainian in tsarist Russia. Soviet communists had decided that the revival of Ukrainian culture posed a danger to the Soviet Union. And alongside the writers, poets, and playwrights they executed, the NKVD also shot many artists and theatre directors. The works of Mykhaylo Semenko (1892-1937), Maik Yohansen (1895-1937), Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), and dozens of other Ukrainian writers killed in that purge could only be published again after the collapse of the USSR.
Today’s Ukrainian intellectuals face the same danger. That goes for writers and journalists and historians. Anyone who believes that Ukraine should remain independent and become part of Europe is already an enemy of Russia. Culture is what cements a nation. Ukrainian culture has only just begun to revive after 70 years of Soviet rule, 70 years of censorship and persecution.
But today that culture and its representatives are the targets of Russian bombers. The attacks on Kyiv have killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famed actress Oksana Shvets. Near Kyiv, in the village of Bucha — home to a number of writers and composers— Oleksandr Kislyuk, a well-known translator from Ancient Greek and other languages, a teacher at the Theological Academy, and a professor at the Drahomanov Pedagogical University, was shot by Russian soldiers on the threshold of his house. It is thanks to him that Ukrainians can read the works of Aristotle, Tacitus, Thomas Aquinas, and other classic authors in their own language.
Now Oleksandr Kislyuk has been murdered and one wonders who will finish the translations he was working on in his final days.
Among those killed in this war are at least three painters. There are also photographers and scientists, musicians and architects, schoolteachers and university professors.
For almost a month, now, Russian bombers have been aiming directly at schools and universities, theatres and libraries.
Near Kyiv, in the village of Ivankiv, a bomb hit a historical museum that housed the works of famous Ukrainian primitive artist Maria Prymachenko (1909-1997). While the museum burned, locals carried her paintings out of the fire. Now those canvases are kept in the homes of people who live next to the ruined museum.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has sent an order to all museums to prepare their exhibits for evacuation to Western Ukraine. Some museums managed to pack up their collections, others simply lowered them into basements and underground rooms. But none have so far been evacuated. The most important thing is to evacuate people from cities under constant bombardment and artillery fire.
For two weeks, Ukrainian writers tried to extract their colleague, the Russophone prose writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, from the village of Klavdiyevo, which was practically destroyed by the Russian army. He is a refugee twice over. First, in 2014, he had to leave his apartment in Donetsk. Since then, he and his wife had been living in Klavdiyevo, at the dacha of the Ukrainophone writer and translator Andriy Bondar. Klavdiyevo has been all but flattened by Russian artillery and is surrounded by their tanks. Volodymyr and his wife spent more than a week in the basement of a half-collapsed house. At long last, they managed to break out of encirclement and volunteers took them to Kyiv.
Kyiv is also being hit by rockets, but not so intensively. The chances of survival are greater in Kyiv. There, in his apartment near the railway station, the publisher Mykola Kravchenko* sits at his table and works. He’s editing a novel by a young woman from Lutsk, titled Porcelain Doll. The novel concerns domestic violence. He knows that he won’t be able to publish it anytime soon, but he continues to work in order to preserve his psychological balance, in order to think less about the war.
Yet the war, including the violent attack on Ukrainian cultural heritage, continues. The number of bombed-out churches is already in the tens.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture is still at work and every day its employees collect new information about the historical sites and cultural institutions destroyed by the Russian army.
The list of Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian culture is constantly being updated.
* Editor’s note: Not the Ukrainian political figure of the same name who died in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
28 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Photo: Reporters inside Kyiv’s Buena Vista Social Bar
There’s always a bar. In Kyiv, in 2022, it’s the Buena Vista Social bar, bang next to a Ukrainian police checkpoint which is both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar because there is a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol. Sssh. It’s a joyful shebeen, Cuban-themed, run by Maks, and you never quite know what’s available to drink and who’s going to be there. All the women have a past; all the men have no future. You get the vibe.
Early on in the war, a fellow regular was a big bloke with a thick moustache and a mane of bubbly, curly hair, often seen with his fixer, a Ukrainian freelancer. I never spoke to him but I clocked him as someone who had presence, who was an interesting character, who I had probably seen in Sarajevo or somewhere like that. He was Pierre “Zak” Zakrzewski, she Sasha Kuvshynova, and they were both killed on 14 March 2022 when their vehicle came under fire in Bucha – pronounced Butcher – to the northwest of Kyiv. British journalist Ben Hall was wounded in the same attack. They were working for Fox News, something Zak, 55, who had been brought up in Ireland, had mixed feelings about. But he knew the risks of war too well and made a decision that working for a big corporate was better risk-management than being freelance. His co-workers at Fox loved him, giving him an award as “Unsung Hero” after he helped get Afghan freelancers out of Kabul.
Sasha was 24, bold and fiercely smart. After her death, her dad said that she learnt to read at the age of three and picked up English from reading restaurant menus while on family holidays. She was a fanatical photographer with five stills cameras, had founded a music festival for up-and-coming jazz musicians, worked as a DJ and wrote poetry. She wanted to make movies.
If you don’t like free expression in a democracy, you blow up the TV tower. The Kremlin’s first journalist victim was Yevhenii Sakun, 49, a camera operator for Ukraine’s LIVE station, on 1 March. The Russian army sent in four missiles in the evening, killing a worker in the TV tower complex and four civilians. The next morning I saw the people from the morgue take away the bodies of a middle-aged man and a mother and her child with my own eyes.
The most dangerous area of Kyiv is the northwest suburbs, where the Russian army’s offensive, driving down through Chernobyl, has come closest to the capital. Reporters seeking human stories, of refugees fleeing with their dogs on a lead or their cat in a box, went repeatedly to Irpin. Fearing further Russian advance, the Ukrainian army flooded the river plains near the suburb and blew up the most southerly bridge, leaving people to pick their way across the skeleton remains. Once beyond that crossing, there is a second bridge. That’s where US film maker Brent Renaud, 50, originally from Little Rock and formerly of the New York Times, found himself, filming refugees running for their lives. Brent knew what he was doing, having filmed and reported man’s cruelty to man in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya: all the nice places.
At Irpin, at the second bridge, the Russian army shot him in the neck and he died of his wounds.
Oksana Baulina was one of those intensely brave Russians who were on Team Navalny before their champion was arrested on fake charges and the organisation broken up. Oksana, 43, was declared a “terrorist” by the Kremlin and had to flee Russia. She set up as a reporter and film maker in Poland and reported on the war. When Russian artillery smashed into a shopping centre in Podil, in the northwest of the city, she was killed.
To be honest with you I have done my best to avoid writing this piece for days now because it can only fill one with gloom to think of these brave truth-tellers sent early to their graves by the mobster in the Kremlin. But my pals and I in the Buena Vista are buoyed up the thought that we are in Ukraine exactly because Vladimir Putin does not want us to be here. And on that point, Mr Putin, do fuck off.
And the rum is good.
There is, also, the line from Tom Stoppard’s great play, Night And Day, which I quoted on Twitter while hurrying back from the bar just before – well, actually, just after curfew – had fallen. This, from memory, is how it goes, how the lover of the dead young journalist, played by Diana Rigg, killed on the frontline denounces the false romance of journalism, “it’s not worth the heart-break beauty queen or the crossword and it’s definitely not worth the leader.”
And the old hack, played by John Thaw, replies: “Yes, you’re right. But also the other thing. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”
RIP Zak, Sasha, Yevhenii, Brent and Oksana.
24 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
A Ukrainian journalist detained by Russia’s FSB while reporting on the invasion of the country has been forced to record a video saying that she had not been held captive and that her captors had actually saved her life before being released.
Victoria Roshchina, who works for the hromadske news channel, was released on 21 March, nine days after she went missing in the occupied city of Berdyansk en route to Mariupol. Four days after she went incommunicado, hromadske learned that she had been detained by Russia’s FSB security forces.
She has now returned to Zaporizhia, an area controlled by the Ukrainian government, where she will rejoin her worried family.
After her release, pro-Russian media and Telegram-channels shared a video in which Roshchina denied she had been held in captivity and that the officers had saved her life.
Her employer said that the video was filmed under coercion of the Russian occupiers and that the reporter would tell the true story in due course.
We reported about Roshchina’s reports from the front line and how she had been forced to hide from Russian tanks.
Although Roschina has been freed, the whereabouts of other journalists reporting from the front line is uncertain.
Renowned Ukrainian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Maks Levin disappeared on 13 March in the Vishgorod district, near Kyiv. There had been intensive fighting in the area and it is assumed he has been injured or captured by Russian troops.
Levin has worked for the BBC, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and new website LB.ua among others.
Index on Censorship calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all journalists held by the Russian forces and for all parties to ensure the safety of media reporting on the war.
22 Mar 22 | News and features
My nine-year-old granddaughter Lucia is a miracle. She speaks Russian fluently, without any taint of foreign accent. Paradoxically, she has never been to Russia. She was born in Covent Garden, London, and now lives in Bethnal Green. You can detect in her Londoner’s English a trace of a Yorkshire accent picked up from her father.
It’s not difficult to explain this miracle. Her Russian came to her, first, from her Moscow-born mother. My daughter arrived in England when she was the same age as Lucia is now. She has managed to retain her Russian despite her schooling in the UK. Lucia has also learnt her Russian while frequently spending time with me and my wife – we both emigrated from Russia when we were in our late twenties. The decision to emigrate four decades ago had cost us our Russian citizenships.
And so, since her early years my granddaughter not only heard Russian spoken at home but also learned to read – from the books that we ourselves used to love in our childhood. She fell in love with Pushkin’s poems and Chekhov comic stories, gothic tales of Gogol’s and absurdist children’s poems by Chukovsky and Kharms; she became a great fan of Winnie the Pooh not only in English, but also of its brilliant Russian version created by Boris Zakhoder. Later Lucia was introduced (through YouTube and other channels) to witty, funny and inventive children’s movies produced by independent Russian filmmakers. In short, she immersed herself in the world of images, vocabulary and ideas that have been shared by generations of children of the Russian liberal intelligentsia who used to regard the independent spirit of Russian literature as the best defence of their children’s consciousness against the onslaught of corrupt officialdom.
Lucia couldn’t describe the exact image of this dreamy Russia she had formed in her mind. What kind of mental construction could a child create out of the avalanche of words, pictures and ideas she had avidly been absorbing from books and films in Russian? Is it a fairyland with witches’ gingerbread huts on chicken legs or the one with Stalin’s skyscrapers looming grimly over old Moscow?
Each time when I heard Russian words streaming out of the mouth of my English granddaughter I felt as if I were present at some spiritual seance. Was she possessed by some Russian speaking ghosts? Should she be exorcised? But if it were a ghost, it was a benevolent one. The image of her fictional Russia was surely bright, enchanting and intriguing. For Lucia, it was the ideal country, because it was the place of her beloved mother’s childhood. It had also incorporated a dream of my sweet youth about Russia as the land of the free. Lucia was cherishing this dreamy land and wanted to see for real all that she had heard and read about. There were family plans for a trip to Russia, to celebrate New Year’s Eve in snowy festive Moscow.
And then, when Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday 24th February something disastrous happened. On the Friday Lucia came back home from her primary school in Columbia Road in tears. School children were shown documentary shots depicting the brutality of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. She hasn’t been prepared for the shock. She hasn’t yet learned to separate the nation and its spiritual manifestations from the national government and its apparatus of suppression. What she saw was just the outright destruction of her fictional ideal Russia by the Kremlin’s dream murderers and mother-tongue abusers.
Zinovy Zinik is a Russian-born novelist, short-story writer and essayist. His fiction includes the novels The Mushroom Picker (1987), History Thieves (2010) and Sounds Familiar (2016)
