MyDearFriend!
So I have written a short text connected with the beginning of War between Germany and the Soviet Union. The text is in Ukrainian but you understand it. Didn’t you write to me you love Ukraine regardless and even understand Ukrainian? I would say you understand the Ukrainian words but not the Ukrainian idea. Anyway, do read it…I will repeat the text.
Today is a tragic and at the same time a great day. This very day of 1941 marked the end of the shameful almost two-year period of political and military collaboration between the two most powerful and terrible regimes of the XX century. There is no telling what could have happened if the two countries (+ Japan and Italy) had stayed allies and shared the world.
Anyway, what happened – happened.
Hitler’s insanity pushed him to aggression against the USSR. That is where Hitler’s insanity met Stalin’s insanity and delusion of Nazism met the delusion of communism. Moreover, the history of the last century didn’t know the fight bloodier than that. Stalin’s insanity gained the victory at the ultimate price – tens of millions dead. Our fathers and grandfathers predominantly were on the side of the USSR, they were soldiers of the WW2. Let those who perished stay in our memories forever. Let those who survived and are still living – receive our gratitude forevermore.
However, the blood shed does not sanctify the Stalin’s regime and does not justify its successors either.
It so happened that Ukraine ended up in between the devil and the deep sea. For a long time our country had stayed occupied by the Nazi. Before and after that it carried the burden of the “victorious socialism” alongside with Holodomor (manufactured famine), repressions, shot Renaissance, and the total war with common sense.
The country is still afire. Russian aggressors use the rhetoric of the Great Patriotic War to justify their own aggression. It will lie heavy on their conscience if only they have one.
I received the following letter in response to my text. It was originally in Russian and it would be a shame to translate it into Ukrainian.
“Ukraine was part of the USSR and actively participated in what you call «communism».
Your text contains a lot of conceptual substitutions, doctoring, and manipulation. And you do know it. Or rather you knew that when you were a good Christian poet. Now you are just an object of ideological manipulation. What a shame.”
That godly woman who ardently writes about the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit in Christian Church doesn’t even bother to find arguments for her accusations. She believes I know what she wants to hear from me.
Well, she is right! I do know. I know what I was supposed to write to make her happy. I was supposed to write that France and England were having secret negotiations with Hitler behind backs of the Soviet Union, that in Munich they had given Czechoslovakia away to Hitler, and that Stalin had no other chance but to sign the shameful Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That the two years gave him a possibility to develop the defense and give a fitting (!) rebuff to the enemy. That the time was cruel and victims inevitable. That Russians and Ukrainians make one Soviet nation and they have one common enemy – USA. Something of the sort.
It doesn’t bother her that those very answers would be real doctoring and manipulation, and that I am not the person to repeat the Soviet myths. She is confident I should write something of the sort so that I do not betray the fathers and the heroic past. She is confident I MUST write it the way she wants to hear it. Why? Where does such confidence come from?
I don’t know. Do you?
Love,
Borya
