Jul 6: Victoria Amelina, ‘I was the worst investment the Russians ever made’
Published by The Guardian on July 6, 2023
‘I was the worst investment the Russians ever made’
Victoria Amelina, as published in The Guardian on July 6, 2023
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many believed that all borders would disappear. I remember singing Wind of Change by the German band the Scorpions at an international summer camp near Pskov, then the Soviet Union, in 1990, and feeling like the lyrics truly spoke to me: “The world is closing in / and did you ever think / that we could be so close, like brothers?” Were we all “children of tomorrow”, dreaming and believing in a better future? Where are we now?
The winds of change turned out to be nothing more than an illusion, and my belief in it only shows that, culturally and mentally, Ukraine has always been a part of the somewhat naive west. The difference is that the Ukrainians were destined to face the truth eventually. Some learned it from the stories of Ukrainian dissidents like the poet Vasyl Stus, who was murdered in a Russian penal colony five years before Wind of Change was released. Others, like me, had to experience the Russian world first-hand to realise that the border between Russia and Ukraine is not a redundancy or a formality, but essential for our survival.
It seems that we are all doomed to repeat our mistakes if we don’t know where our home – the safe space of trust – ends, and which of its borders need to be especially well guarded.
I was born in western Ukraine in 1986, the year the Chornobyl nuclear reactor exploded and the Soviet Union began to crumble. Despite my birthplace and the timing of my birth, I was educated to be Russian. There was an entire system in place that aimed to make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the centre of my universe. I attended a Russian school, performed in a school theatre named after the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and prayed in the Russian Orthodox church. I even enjoyed a summer camp for teenagers in Russia, and attended youth gatherings at the Russian cultural centre in Lviv, where we sang so-called Russian rock music, which was actually more honest about the changes happening in Russia than the naive compositions of the Scorpions.
When I was 15, I won a local competition and was chosen to represent my home town, Lviv, at an international Russian language contest in Moscow. I was excited to visit the Russian capital. Moscow felt like the centre of what I considered home. My library was full of Russian classics, and even though the Soviet Union had collapsed almost a decade earlier, not much had changed in the Russian school I attended, or on Russian TV, which my family had the habit of watching. Additionally, while I didn’t even have the money to travel around Ukraine, Russia was happy to invest in my Russianisation.
At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the “former Soviet republics” as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn’t need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to Red Square.
Hopefully, I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments the Russian Federation ever made.
In Moscow, a famous journalist from ORT, a top Russian TV channel at the time, approached me for an interview on the evening news. I was flattered, I felt like a star. The journalist started with a polite question about how I was enjoying the event and the Russian capital, but quickly moved on to her real agenda. “How oppressed do you feel as a Russian speaker in the west of Ukraine? How dangerous is it to speak Russian on the streets of your home town, Lviv?”
I gasped as I realised that I wasn’t a star at all; I was just being used to manipulate millions of viewers of the evening news. The huge camera was watching me and a big, professional microphone was in front of me for the first time in my life. I was only 15 years old. But in that split second, I had to figure out where the borders of my home were. I wasn’t Russian, after all – I was a Ukrainian kid brought to Moscow to reinforce certain Russian narratives. I may have believed that Russia was a great country with peace at its core, but I only felt that way because of watching the very channel that was now trying to exploit an inexperienced 15-year-old.
“After our complex history, it would only be natural for Ukrainians to feel uncomfortable and react at times to the Russian language,” I replied. “However, I don’t experience any oppression. Maybe your information is outdated? I am young, and there’s no such problem among the younger generation.”
The journalist tried to ask me again, but my responses weren’t going to change. She had already failed. I doubt they aired this interview on the evening news. Or perhaps they managed to edit it in a way that suited their agenda. Now, as a Ukrainian writer, I receive requests for interviews from various Russian channels, but I decline them all. My Moscow experience was quite enough.
I remembered this story in 2022, watching an interview with an elderly man in Mariupol. He was desperate, disoriented and disarmingly honest. “But I believed in this Russian world, can you imagine? All my life I believed we were brothers!” the poor man exclaimed, surrounded by the ruins of his beloved city. The man’s apartment building was in ruins and the illusion of home, the space he perceived as his motherland, the former Soviet Union where he was born and lived his best years, had been crushed even more brutally. The propaganda stopped working on him only when the Russian bombs fell. The border between independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation arose in his mind as a crucial barrier, just like it did in mine when I realised I had only been brought to festive Moscow to lie about my home town in Ukraine, so that the Russian viewers could hate it even more.
I think most people would now agree that a wall between us and Russia is a good solution until Russian society undergoes significant changes. A world where every neighbour is a friend is a nice idea to sing about, but where Russia is concerned, it is unfortunately not so realistic.
It is tempting to believe in the simple, inspiring concept of welcoming everyone as a friend and brother. But does this approach actually work? In a very different winter in 2019, I saw another collision between the imaginary idyll, where borders can be crossed in search of miracles, and a harsher reality. As my family and I prepared to celebrate Christmas in Boston, Massachusetts, I found myself standing among a forest of trees, promising my son that we would choose the best one. Despite my lack of experience in choosing Christmas trees (in Ukraine, we had always used an old, artificial, but reusable one), I regretted not looking up some advice beforehand.
I needed to ask the seller for help selecting a tree, but he seemed too busy with other customers and clearly needed to sell all the trees, even the poor quality ones. However, I knew what would get him to pay attention to us. I simply mentioned that this would be our first Christmas in the United States, which was true. And the “Welcome to America” magic began. The man immediately made us his priority and helped us find the perfect tree. He seemed to be one of those true Americans who believe that welcoming newcomers is at the core of American values.
I knew of course that this value was shared by many in the US, but not everyone. After all, it was the time when Donald Trump was president. As I walked the streets of Cambridge, I always stopped to look at a picture of a child that had been attached to a church fence – one of those children who had been separated from their parents and detained at the border, and had not survived. The only crime of the little girl in the picture was crossing the border from Mexico into the US with her parents, who were only trying to give her a better life.
The Christmas tree seller was just as angry about the family separation policy in the US as I was. But Trump supporters had different ideas about what the country was and how its borders should be protected. It was incomprehensible to me why it was so difficult for Mexican migrants to cross into the US in 2019, yet so easy for Russian soldiers to cross the border into Ukraine in 2022.
One thing remains indisputable: humanity constantly messes up with borders. Much like adolescents unsure about their identity, we let the wrong people in and keep the right ones out. We pay too much attention to appearances, including not only the colour of our skin, but the colour of our passports; instead we could pay more attention to core values like freedom, dignity and the rule of law, which we either do or do not share. Yet some of us are easily tricked by strangers, like I was when I admired Russia as a kid, or we are too scared of them, like Americans clamouring for a wall to keep Mexicans out. Why are we so wrong in choosing who to trust? Perhaps it’s because we don’t know how to trust each other in our own countries.
As a writer, I tend to think of home as the narrative shared by its inhabitants. People and places come about in stories: poets, playwrights, ancient prophets and novelists have all imagined the countries and cities we live in now, and their stories have greatly affected us and our relations with one another. But what story do we all fit into? My answer is complicated and straightforward: the only story we all can fit into is a true one.
The true history of Ukraine is complex, painful and dramatic. For a long time, no book reflected my family’s experience or explained why I didn’t inherit the Ukrainian language from my grandparents. Their decision to protect their kids (my parents) by raising them to speak Russian was inexplicable to me as a child. Growing up speaking Russian made me feel out of place. So eventually, I had to write a novel about families like mine. My home town Lviv was in the heart of the “Bloodlands”, as the historian Timothy Snyder calls the lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea. I had to discover that the Soviet army killed thousands of Ukrainians early on in the second world war. And that around 100,000 Jewish citizens of Lviv perished in the same period.
My family lived through the trauma of the Holodomor, also called the Great Famine, which took place from 1932-33, but my grandparents never talked in detail about it. Silence creates cracks so deep that it is hardly possible to feel at home. When stories about the Holocaust or Holodomor are not fully revealed, we’re bound not to trust each other. Who were you in 1933? The hungry one or the one taking all the food? The one who shot Ukrainian activists in 1941, or the one who searched for their loved one among the decomposing bodies? The scared one watching from the window when Jews were taken away or the one who took them? The one who wrote to the KGB about your neighbour or the one who helped Ukrainian dissidents? There were silences instead of the much-needed stories. And where there’s a lack of true stories, there is a lack of trust. We are bound to believe the propaganda and draw all the wrong borders again and again, never feeling completely at home.
In Ukraine, everything changed in the first days of December 2013, at the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity, when protesters took to the streets after President Yanukovych rejected closer ties with Europe in favour of Moscow. After the police severely beat students on Independence Square in Kyiv, it became clear that this was a time to prevent Ukraine from turning into an authoritarian state like Russia or Belarus. Everyone who felt like a free Ukrainian had to take the risk of heading to the Maidan. But what if others didn’t have the courage to join the demonstration? Then the few brave ones would be powerless against police violence. To take to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other.
Eventually, up to half a million people showed up. That’s when we knew we could count on each other. Ukraine finally felt like home to me, too. Home isn’t a magical, perfect place, but a place where, if you are being beaten by the police, you can be sure that your neighbours will show up to take a stand for you.
The old silences didn’t disappear miraculously, but after 2013 we trusted each other enough to build platforms and institutions that deal with our traumatic past as well. And after the Revolution of Dignity, there was a new true story, in which the question “Who are you?” was being answered by everyone every day in 2014. There was war at our doors, fighting continued in the Donbas region, but our vision was as clear as ever.
In the spring and summer of 2014, I was sure a full-scale Russian invasion had already begun, and that the brutality would intensify and gradually spread throughout Ukraine. I packed my three-year-old son’s belongings into an emergency backpack so we would be ready to hide in a bomb shelter at any moment. At that time, the bombs didn’t fall on us; Russia annexed Crimea and ruined the lives of Ukrainians in Donetsk and Luhansk, but didn’t go further in full force. The world didn’t react. So the borders of my home were clear: they were Ukraine’s borders. No one had our backs but us.
We had each other, and that was invaluable. But what about the beautiful vision? If we couldn’t yet achieve the perfect world where we all supported one another, what about our cosy continent, Europe? Those years of the initial Russian invasion, 2014-2015, were a time when many Ukrainians felt betrayed not only by Russia, but also by the west, for not coming to our aid. We were Europeans under attack, but it was mainly our problem.
In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian news agency sent a message via telex to the world, shortly before Russian artillery wrecked his office. It read: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.”
The Czech writer Milan Kundera started his 1984 essay The Tragedy of Central Europe with this message. As one of the leading figures of the 1968 Prague Spring, Kundera understood what the brave Hungarian had meant by dying for Europe. As a Ukrainian writer in Kyiv in 2022, I can’t stop thinking about Kundera, writing in exile after the Prague Spring failed. We, Central Europeans, are ready to fight for Europe, even if at times our love may be unrequited.
Europe didn’t come to Hungary’s rescue. Nor did it come to the Czechs’ rescue, or the Ukrainians’ in 2014. If being a Central European means being betrayed by Europe, Ukraine is certainly a member of the club.
However, when Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe did take in fleeing Ukrainians and accepted us unconditionally.
I was out of the country at the time of the invasion. My flight from Egypt back to Ukraine was scheduled for 7am on 24 February 2022. The flight got cancelled, of course; Russia was bombing Ukrainian airports from Kyiv to Ivano-Frankivsk. “Do you know what happened?” the Egyptian official asked me as soon as we entered the terminal. I didn’t reply for a moment, so he kept repeating as if allowing me time to take it in: “You cannot go to your country.”
We stood for a long time amid a desperate crowd of Ukrainians, but eventually we were the only ones left in the tiny airport. The rest of the Ukrainians had left the building, heading to buses laid on by their tour agency.
That day, I bought overpriced tickets from Egypt to Prague, where Milan Kundera had fought for his home and Europe in 1968. At Hurghada airport, citizens of the European Union checked in casually and headed to the security control area; all Ukrainian citizens were asked to wait on one side. We tried to explain that Ukrainians had been able to travel to the European Union without visas for several years. But the airline workers replied that that didn’t matter now: Prague had to tell the Egyptian side whether they were ready to let us into the country.
“And what if they won’t let us in?” my 10-year-old son asked me quietly.
I didn’t know what to answer and just squeezed my son’s hand.
Other Ukrainians and I waited for the decision from Prague for about an hour, discussing rumours about a Ukrainian man who wasn’t allowed to board his flight to Germany earlier in the day. Then the verdict was announced to us: “You can go.”
Even when we got to Prague airport, I wasn’t sure what would happen. The Czech border officer glanced at our passports and then looked at us. She was more interested in the expressions on our faces than in our passport details: maybe she was new at the job and hadn’t yet seen people whose country was being bombarded by the Russian Federation. I think she was looking at us with compassion. Then she just stamped our passports without asking any questions. And I realised that she knew; the whole world was looking at us. I started crying and couldn’t stop, and when my son asked why I was crying, I replied:
“Because we are home.”
“But this is not Ukraine,” he argued.
“This is Europe,” I answered, as if this word “Europe” should explain everything to my child.
We were falling, and our fellow Europeans were ready to catch us. The limits of home may have just expanded, I thought.
A bit later, I learned that train tickets in the Czech Republic and in Poland were free for Ukrainian citizens who had just fled their homeland. I travelled by train from Prague to Poland, and on the third day of the invasion, finally crossed the border back into Ukraine.
At the Polish-Ukrainian border, I witnessed indescribable desperation and fear. Little kids were pulling heavy suitcases, their frightened grandmas and mothers looking even more disoriented than them. I heard screams in the crowd as people were squeezed in the crush, and the loud voice of the border guard trying to get the refugees’ attention and prevent a tragedy. Yet all these people were going to be accepted and even welcomed into the EU. They might not have known it at the time – cold, hungry, and fearful at the border – but at that very moment the boundaries of their home, Europe, were being expanded to include Ukraine.
Europe was home, and it proved to be a space where we could count on each other, as Ukrainians counted on each other at the Maidan in 2014.
We Ukrainians are well aware of the discussions surrounding Europe’s acceptance of Ukrainian refugees. While I share the concerns about racism and Islamophobia, I believe that what happened to Ukrainian refugees was more than just an act of kindness. It was a change in perspective, a change in the story of Europe, and ultimately a change in the borders of what Ukrainians and other Europeans consider their shared home. Ukrainians are now fighting not just for Ukraine, but for Europe as well.
This may not be much help to refugees from Syria or Sudan, unfortunately. But I believe that acts of kindness towards one group of refugees can teach us all, including Ukrainians, to be more kind to all other people fleeing wars. We can sing about a utopian brotherhood, or we can work diligently to expand the limits of the fragile shared trust we have. Despite all the obstacles, I still believe that the dream of a world without borders should be our inspiration. We may never fully realise this vision, but it can turn into a strategy that changes reality for the better.
No one is obliged to take in a stranger or show them love, yet it happens. This love becomes a true story that changes all future stories, including those of refugees.
In June 2022, I arrived in Brussels and took a bus from the airport to the city. I was headed to a meeting at the European parliament to discuss accountability for Russian war crimes. The bus was full of men in suits, all clearly headed to European institutions as well. However, I was perhaps the only one who noticed the irony of the song that opened the bus playlist: “I follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park …” the Scorpions frontman sang. The bureaucrats in their expensive suits kept typing on their laptops, paying no attention to the song and the story it conveyed. I knew I didn’t fit into this story. But I knew that we came to Brussels to write a new narrative for everyone, not to change some lousy playlist on an airport shuttle.
This piece is adapted from an essay first published by the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa under the title Expanding the Boundaries Of Home: A Story for Us All
VICTORIA AMELINA’s funeral service and burial in Lviv. on July 5. She died of wounds from a Russian missile attack on a well-known pizzeria in Kramatorsk on June 27. Lviv was struck by a missile attack on an apartment block and other civilian targets during the late hours of July 5 and early morning July 6, killing at least 6 people and injuring 34. The city’s emergency crews are still trying to say people from the rubble.
Seems that the second-to-last sentence should have "July 5" instead of "June 5".