Hate & Hope: Oleksandr Bojtschenko on the War
Just for the record, today is 1st March 2022. I’m sitting at home on my computer in my native city of Chernivtsi and, as I type these lines, I’m constantly checking the news.
The Romanian border is just 40 kilometres from my house. In Romania, 1st March is known as Mărțișor, a holiday greeting the arrival of Spring. But today, Romania is welcoming refugees from Ukraine, who are marching along a forty-kilometre route from Chernivtsi towards the Romanian border. At various other points, they’re being welcomed into Poland and other neighbouring countries. 1st March 2022 – a day on which Europe welcomes Ukrainian refugees fleeing an all-out war started by Russia. Right until the last moment, millions of Ukrainians couldn’t believe it would actually happen. Millions still can’t, but they already know it’s real.
A married couple, him and her, are staying at my house; friends of mine who managed to escape from the mutilated town of Bucha near Kyiv. But their parents didn’t manage, so they stayed behind: hers in Kyiv; his in Hostomel. There is street fighting in both Kyiv and Hostomel… My friends try to make themselves useful in Chernivtsi: she volunteers; he joined the Territorial Defence Forces. So far, things are quiet in Chernivtsi – as quiet as they can be during a war. The air-raid sirens were wailing last night and the night before, but there was no bombing.
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Bucha after the Russian shelling, March 2022, photo: East News
What’s in the news? A rocket strike on Freedom Square in central Kharkiv. A rocket strike on a residential area in Chernihiv. Kherson pounded by shelling. Okhtyrka in the Sumy oblast attacked by multiple – rocket strikes. Shelling in Borodianka near Kyiv. Bombing in Dachne near Odesa. Bashtanka in the Mykolaiv oblast under fire. Kharkiv again – a residential building this time. A cruise missile slams into a residential building in Zhytomyr. A Tochka ballistic missile strikes a residential area in Mariupol. Killed and wounded, killed and wounded, killed and wounded… but mostly Russian-speaking civilians. All this against the backdrop of Putin’s assertions that his army isn’t fighting the civilian population, but Ukrainian Nazis who seized power in the country against the will of the Ukrainian people. Someone should tell Putin that the Ukrainian President is Jewish and our minister of defence, Reznikov, has a Russian surname...
Why is he doing it? Because Putin is a 21st-century Hitler, about whom Ukrainian intellectuals, for instance, had been warning ‘the West’ about for years already. Only ‘the West’ preferred not to listen, as none of the Ukrainian intellectuals had oil and gas like Putin. They didn’t really listen to the Poles either, though I saw this poster in Kraków back in 2005: ‘Hitler is right there in the Kremlin today’. The difference being that today, the Hitler in the Kremlin possesses considerably more powerful – nuclear – weapons and is suffering from a more acute paranoid personality disorder, which drives him to project his own Nazism onto the world around him.
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On 28th February 2022, a museum with works by Maria Prymachenko was burnt down during a Russian attack in Ivankiv near Kyiv.
And so, this day grinds on. Now there’s news of a missile strike on the Kyiv TV Tower. Next to the tower is Babyn Yar, Ukraine's most famous memorial to Holocaust victims. A Russian missile fell close to the monument, killing five civilians and wounding five more. In 2022, while Putin is murdering people in Babyn Yar, the Russian foreign ministry is demanding that the Israeli ambassador explain why his country hasn’t come out in support of Russia’s anti-Nazi operation in Ukraine… It’s hard to imagine a more revealing symbol of contemporary Russia and its policies.
If only this were true of contemporary Russia alone. Didn’t Astolphe de Custine, author of La Russie en 1839, witness the same ‘restless desert’ and ‘eternal prison’ two centuries ago? Seemingly, the perceptive marquis’ conclusions have not lost one iota of relevance today. Especially since pathologically lying Russia is eminently more dangerous than any Asian atrocities. Rather than striving to be a civilised country, Russia is trying to convince Europe that it is European by creating ‘Potemkin villages’. Therefore, its entire arsenal of diplomatic and espionage resources is being hurled into a permanent 'pull the wool over our eyes’ operation.
But even more important is the fact that de Custine quickly grasped the essence of the vicious circle, according to which in this ‘state of inconceivable happiness’ power and people coexist:
Such a state system could have emerged nowhere else but in Russia. However, had they lived under any other state system, the Russian people would not be the way they are.
And therefore:
A subjugated nation is always deserving of its yoke: tyranny is the consequence of a submissive nation.
One hundred years later, the Polish writer Andrzej Bobkowski added to de Custine’s observations:
From the outset, I use the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Russians’ as frequently as possible, since they have nothing to do with communism or regime change, which are superfluous. The essence is Russia – ancient Russia – which has so little awareness and comprehension of the concept of ‘freedom’ that it has no need for it… I have always hated them, from an early age, and today I hate them as ‘purely’ as their cynicism is ‘pure’. One should not hate, but sometimes hate is perhaps so justified that to renounce it would be to renounce oneself.
(Trans. MB)
Andrzej Bobkowski, 'Війна і спокій' (War and Peace). Kyiv, Критика 2007.I often quote this excerpt, which sums up my attitude towards Russia and the absolute majority of Russians. Like Bobkowski, I will never renounce that hate, which – regretfully – has become an integral feature of my identity, though no one is surprised by it. On the contrary, truly amazing words poured today from the mouths of the mayors of Kharkiv, Mariupol and Mykolaiv (Russian-speaking cities formerly regarded as culturally and politically pro-Russian). All three declared they were ready to fight to their last bullet to defend their cities and kill the ‘Russcist-fascists’ (sic) with their bare hands. For decades, people like me have been trying in vain to convince people like them that Russia is our only deadly enemy. Putin managed to persuade them in just a matter of days…
Our hate now gives us hope… but not only. In the end, European parliamentarians have also given us hope by outlining European prospects for Ukraine. Above all, we’re currently giving ourselves hope through mutual love and our ability to make sacrifices for our common future. According to a legend surrounding the Mărțișor holiday, on 1st March, Spring noticed a snowdrop growing beneath the snow and decided to save it. Then Winter attacked Spring, injuring her. But Spring dripped her blood onto the snowdrop to revive it, so Winter lost in the end. And it will keep losing, forever.
Originally written in Ukranian, translated by Mark Bence, April 2022
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