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Title: Seven Years of Rising From Infantilism Author: Oleh Andros Date: 2022-04-14 Language: en Topics: Ukraine, Russia, War Source: Retrieved on 2022-05-28 from https://www.nihilist.li/2022/04/14/seven-years-of-rising-from-infantilism/
Let’s talk about seven years.
Today I “celebrate” not quite a “round” date (seven is not a “round”
number, ie. it is an awkward number). In the beginning of March 2015, I
set out on the months-long path from being entirely a pacifist Kyiv
civilian to becoming an active “participant of the ATO (anti-terrorist
operation).”
We, the drafted soldiers and officers, left our sheltered and
comfortable lives in the Kyiv region behind and traveled first by train,
then by bus to the “division line” in the Donetsk region.
(After the active battles of the previous summer, in 2014 the front line
between Russians and Ukrainians was established as a division line
between Ukraine-controlled territories and pro-Russian separatists areas
in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. This line appeared in
April 2014, after Russian colonel Girkin-Strelkov ignited the
Russo-Ukrainian war in the city of Slovyansk in the Donetsk region.
Minsk treaties (first and second their variants) declared the status
quo. The line (not an official border, Kyiv and Moscow didn’t recognize
the newly “established” so-called “people’s republics of Donetsk and
Luhansk”) was “completed” in February 2015, after capturing of the
Ukrainian city Debaltsevo by the Russian regular army and pro-Russian
separatists. So from February 2015, until the full-scale Russian
invasion on February 24, 2022, the division line was relatively stable,
except capturing of small Donbas villages by Ukrainian forces and the
battle in Avdiyivka in 2017).
There was a cold wind from the fields that day, and the same wind is
blowing today.
Back then, we filled our magazines with the proverbial thirty rounds per
“horn” (Soviet slang name for magazine), and today I have one of my
supporters in this unsustainable world besides me again, the AK-74
rifle. Back then, I slept in a sleeping bag on a makeshift bed of empty
boxes of artillery shells… and tonight I will sleep in the same familiar
position.
I would have a lot of helpful advice for myself eight years ago, when I
first encountered political violence. I brought cobblestones to the
rebels on Hrushevsky Street on January 19, 2014. And one month later I
watched the news from Crimea unfolding in silent helplessness, feeling
too weak and incapable to face the Russian invading forces.
More precisely, I was a prisoner of learned helplessness – I thought
that Ukraine had enough armed forces to repel the Russian occupation of
Crimea and then Donbas by force. But this was precisely the moment when
we, Ukrainians, needed to give up our hopes that “the state would save
us”. It turned out that the state and the armed forces are ourselves,
not some abstract structures far away.
In 2014 I was not ready to face the cruel reality which meant that a
newborn Russian dictatorship wants to destroy everything that I love,
all the values that I appreciate, democracy, and freedom too.
(For the foreign reader, I am referring to the Hrushevskogo street riots
which were part of the famous Euromaidan or Revolution of Dignity
protests in 2013-2014. For us, it was a fight for democracy against the
corrupted, pro-Russian, authoritarian regime of the Ukrainian leader,
and Russian puppet Yanukovych. In response to anti-protest laws in
Ukraine (announced on 16 January 2014 and enacted on 21 January 2014), a
standoff between protesters and police began on 19 January 2014 that was
precipitated by a series of riots in central Kyiv on Hrushevsky Street,
outside Dynamo Stadium and adjacent to the ongoing Euromaidan protests.)
One year after that, in February 2015, I became a newly drafted soldier.
It was not a voluntary decision, but rather compulsory, because I
remained the same scared childish person as in 2014. But it was a
necessary stage in preparation for my volunteer act now, in 2022. Now I
see the bitter truth: nobody except us will defend us and my values.
Russian invasion showed me that it isn’t ok to just sit by passively and
wish that the authoritarian dictatorship and bully would act civilly.
That bullies only understand violence. And I didn’t ever want to feel
helpless to defend my freedom and my way of life again. Like I felt
hopeless in 2014 as an untrained civilian.
Seven years is a long enough time, both for the spiritual development of
one person and for a radical change in the world. Babies born in 2014
are already in the first grade. People have amassed capital and started
families. States had time to start and end wars.
What of significance was happening to us?
First: of course, the COVID-19 panic of 2020, which continues to this
day (but has been all but forgotten about it in Ukraine), when
checkpoints appeared for a rather far-fetched reason all over Ukraine,
and barriers appeared all over “united” Europe. Regarding my pragmatic
worldview and looking back now, the scale and need for lockdowns that
destroyed the global economy seem exaggerated. I’m not a COVID skeptic,
I trust evidence-based medicine and am vaccinated, having two doses of
Pfizer. But I believe that some governments worldwide abused their
position and took advantage of the virus to enforce more control over
their people. And the COVID shock factor was used to the advantage of
governments that have long been preparing for war, like Azerbaijan in
2020 and the Russian Federation in 2022. Any excuse would do, and some
regimes saw COVID as good a cover story as any.
Second: the relative rise of the Ukrainian economy in 2016-2020. The
well-to-do “we”, the conditional middle class, had enough money to
support with their cash not only the lower rungs of the Maslow pyramid
but also the music industry, up to festivals of thousands of audiences
like “Atlas Weekend”. There was even a movement of “Burners” (Burning
Man US festival fans) in Ukraine. And my social circle in Kyiv visited
nightclubs in Podil (a district where the techno scene flourished, often
compared with places like Berghain in Berlin). Entirely new to politics,
young men and women even fought against the far-right and cops, who were
scourging these clubs. (Police tried to control drug trafficking in the
Kyiv techno scene, and far-right NGOs made self-promotion on “fight
against drug dealers”).
The Corona Crisis showed acutely how the middle class really needs to be
culturally filled. I mean, the middle class felt a lack of music, any
type of entertainment, etc. during lockdowns. So before the crisis of
2020, the Ukrainian middle class was ready enough to pay for the
cultural needs, not only for the basic needs.
Taken together, it shows that Ukrainians during the “hybrid” Moscow
invasion, unnoticed anywhere but Donbas, were thinking not about
survival, but about the attributes of material prosperity, and cultural
needs, too.
This comes strictly in contrast with Russian propaganda in 2014-2022,
which claimed that Ukraine is a country drowning in poverty, corruption,
nationalists lynching, suffering from “Nazi junta” etc. We were not “in
poverty”. Of course, a lot of Ukrainians couldn’t find jobs in Ukraine
and instead moved to the EU, especially Italy and Poland.
But in general, the Russian “hybrid”, unofficial invasion since 2014
didn’t lead to starvation and economic fall in Ukraine, as Putin
expected (maybe it was his “plan B” for this war, in case he did not win
immediately).
Certainly, the darkness around Ukraine and the world was creeping in.
The failed uprising against the Chinese dictatorship in Hong Kong, 2019.
Syria in ruins, with Putin’s active assistance. Behind the
ever-expanding Iron Curtain, in Belarus, Luka (this is how Belarussian
opposition calls Lukashenko) suppressed an uprising against himself.
More precisely, the 2020 protests in Belarus were similar to the Orange
Revolution 2004, the pacifist way of protest, which did not work against
the KGB, whose workers literally set prisoners on the bottles. (This is
a type of torture used in Post-Soviet prisons when a prisoner is raped
by a bottle or police baton etc.).
Orange revolution 2004 in Ukraine and Belorussian failed revolution 2020
were totally pacifist and hippie-style. This doesn’t work against
dictatorship. Rebels have to use violence against violence
(unfortunately for non-violent activists and philosophers).
Lukashenko’s victory over the opposition in 2020 led directly to
enslavement of Belarus by Putin’s dictatorship, and, finally, to the
2022 war: Luka gave Belorussian territory for the free use of Russian
invaders.
Exactly one year ago Putin suppressed the rather timid protests in
support of Navalny in a few cities of Russia. Back then I worked as a
news journalist, and I could hardly believe my eyes when I read that the
Russian Foreign Ministry’s invectives against the West were written in
2021, and not at the height of the Cold War. Even then, in April 2021,
we experienced another chill of suspicion when the “bunker grandfather”
(a nickname for Putin coined by Navalny) stationed troops around Ukraine
under the guise of exercises.
All together, both Lukashenko’s brutality and the violence of Putin, who
went completely insane in quarantine, were forming a noose, tightening
and ready to choke Ukraine. But when Putin tried to kick the chair from
underneath he didn’t account for the will of the Ukrainian people. We
are holding it in place and will not let Ukraine hang. We are still
holding on, keeping Ukraine from falling.
And when it comes to my personal development over the past seven years,
I gradually rose from infantilism to an awareness of myself, my needs,
and my level of responsibility to the future of Ukraine.
I am more prepared for the war of 2022 than my frightened self was in
2014-2015. Eight years ago, I was chasing away the idea that the
unfolding war was about me. Now it is absolutely clear that it’s about
me. It is about freedom, respect and democracy for me and for future
generations of Ukrainians.
My fellow service members in the army are also similarly affected. We
are all from entirely different walks of life, from IT specialists to
sommeliers, plumbers, and tractor drivers. Some of us are IT “teamleads”
with $3k salaries (an unbelievable amount for ordinary Ukraine
citizens), and some of us have nine years of education and can’t code to
earn such money. But what we all have in common is living on the edge
and doing what needs to be done. We are not victims, but we are standing
up to this bully, Putin. We possess the place that we need to, and we
certainly have nowhere to retreat. It is not Donbas around us, as
unfamiliar as it was to us Kyiv dwellers back in 2014, but… we look
around us and fight to protect the places where we worked, rested, and
loved.
There are “hardships of the life of a serviceman” mentioned in the
Charter of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In the Soviet times, nobody
understood for what ideological reason servicemen had to face dangers in
Afghanistan and other countries. (The same feelings had US soldiers in
Vietnam – their war was aggressive and unfair). But in the ongoing war,
the dangers of war for Ukrainians turn out to be not hardships but just
a part of ordinary life.
I no longer wish to write satire about the people around me in the style
of Jaroslav Hašek, which I did when I observed the tragicomic situations
at the brigade headquarters in Volnovakha city in 2015. There is no more
tragicomedy, and there are no more understatements, doubts about the
legitimacy of the drafting, and two-faced stories in the Russian
propaganda style of “not everything is so unambiguous.” There is no more
hypocritical “ATO” instead of war.
(For foreign readers: a massive problem of recognizing war by Ukrainian
society was the official naming of the Russo-Ukrainian war. From 2014 to
2018, it was called “ATO”. From April 30, 2018, until February 24, 2022,
it was called “Joint Forces Operation”. Ukrainian officials seemed very
hypocritical doing this naming, maybe for some diplomatic and
international law reasons. Anyway, thousands of people died and were
injured not because of “total war” in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but
because of some unclear phenomenon called “ATO”. This is why feelings of
mistrust of Ukrainian officials were widespread in society – until the
beginning of total war in 2022).
There are no more orders not to return fire to the enemy (typical order
for the Ukrainian army after the first and second Minsk treaties in
2014-2022). There is no surrender of Crimea to the Russian “little green
men” (March 2014) and Sloviansk to incomprehensible “intruders” (April
2014). The enemy is no longer “hybrid” and no longer “ih-tam-net” (a
quote from Putin’s speech in 2014, which means “there is no Russian army
in Ukraine”). There is no more pretending, this is all-out war. No one
is pretending it is anything else. The masks have been removed in
February 24, 2022 – now only will against will and weapons against
weapons remain.
I have the privilege of knowing several fine people in the Russian
Federation. They are a ray of light in the darkest realm of
totalitarianism. They are now writing desperately from there, from the
center of evil. They write me messages and make anonymous blogs. Because
any voice against Putin and war in Russia became a punishable crime, and
free speech in blogs too.
We, Ukrainians, and a few non-zombified Russians who took to the streets
are alive, vital.
We are the very roots of Polissya, the Wild Steppe, and Slobozhanshchyna
(historical regions of Ukraine, well-known because of Cossacks,
guerillas, Anarchists, and rebel movements). We are sprouting through
the flames, through the asphalt and concrete.
We are the living versus the lifeless (non-living).
The zombified, intimidated, or indifferent population of Russia is the
embodiment of the dead.
I know of only a few people in the Russian Federation who are still
“living beings”, and not yet dead.
We are now at the center of the Hollywood narrative of the war of good
versus evil (and universal, inherent in all fairy tales). Only intense
emotions. Only hatred, outrage, and anger. Only life on the edge as we
hide in the dugout from the firing of self-propelled artillery and Grads
rocket launchers. And each time, this feels like a new birth, as you
realize that you risk not writing the next lines of your article after
another shelling.
Of course, according to the laws of the psyche, you cannot live for
months with these emotions only. As in any fairy tale, the narrative
within which we find ourselves is dramatized with valleys and peaks of
tension.
But let us remember our present feelings. Not all generations are
privileged to be actors in a poignant play.