Displaced, page 1
ALSO BY
VALERY PANYUSHKIN
12 Who Don’t Agree
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2022 by Valery Panyushkin
First publication 2024 by Europa Editions
Translation by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
Original Title: Час волка
Translation copyright © 2024 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover design by Ginevra Rapisardi
ISBN 9798889660590
Valery Panyushkin
DISPLACED
CIVILIANS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR
Translated from the Russian
by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner
DISPLACED
To my friend Mustafa Nayyem,
who suggested I write this book.
To my wife, Olga Pavlova, who brought
together the characters of this book.
To my father, Valery Panyushkin,
who will probably never read this book.
TRANSLATOR PREFACE
Valery Panyushkin, an award-winning Russian journalist, began writing this book in the first few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shocked by his country’s aggression, his father’s support for the war, and by the hard realization that he could no longer practice his profession in a country where all independent media outlets had been forced to close and the two words “no war” carried a prison sentence, he travelled to the southern regions of Russia, Latvia, Poland, and Germany, and began collecting the personal stories of refugees, people from all walks of life and from all over Ukraine who had been displaced by the conflict. Placed side by side in one powerful narration, these testimonies create a complex picture of the human tragedy and resilience brought on by this war and provide a glimpse of the problems to come. This book is a warning to all of us. “As it happens, anyone can become a refugee,” writes the author. And adds, “It shouldn’t be this way.” We began working on this translation in October 2022. Since then, many things have changed, but the fighting continues in what many have come to see as a war of Good versus Evil.
Translating these accounts of the refugee crisis precipitated by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 posed a number of challenges that were at once linguistic, political and historical. Perhaps the most persistent challenge was the author’s use of the present tense. Switching to the present in narratives from the past is fairly typical in Russian; it is far less so in English. The use of the present tense in this book, however, seemed intended to capture the urgency and precarity of the situations described—the events erupted without warning and the subsequent unfolding of those events seemed utterly unpredictable for the ones caught in the vortex of war. We, therefore, made every effort to preserve the book’s present-tense narration, even when it strained the norms of English.
Language use is also a theme. The complex and fast-changing language politics of the region is a topic that arises repeatedly throughout the book—an inevitable consequence of a Russian-speaking journalist covering a war in Ukraine, where Russian is now the language of the aggressor, at the same time that it is the dominant language of many Ukrainians, especially from the Eastern part of the country. A central feature of Russian pro-war propaganda is that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were being discriminated against by being “forced” to use Ukrainian in various institutional settings. Efforts in many post-Soviet republics to promote the official national language, which had been in various ways marginalized during the Soviet period in favor of Russian, became a central feature of Russia’s politics of resentment, weaponized by the Putin regime to foment secessionist ambitions in a number of regions. As a consequence, several individuals featured in this book react with hostility to the use of Russian or, in the case of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, make a concerted effort to use Ukrainian more in their everyday lives—for example, Alla Achasova’s young son spontaneously switches to Ukrainian at home following the first wave of bombings. She follows suit.
The independence of Ukraine, which followed a national referendum in 1991, when 93% of Ukrainians voted to secede from the Soviet Union, was reflected in, among other things, the call to use Ukrainian versions of place names, rather than the Russian ones, in international publications, and in official use in other languages, e.g., Kyiv, instead of Kiev, Lviv, instead of Lvov. In some cases, it has led to the replacement of Russian imperial names with native Ukrainian ones, such as Kadiivka, in place of Stakhanov. Every chapter of the book opens with a propagandistic announcement from the Russian Ministry of Defense, in which the Russian versions of Ukrainian place names are used. We decided to preserve those spellings in these passages while using the official Ukrainian spellings in the body of the book to underscore the connection between language and politics in the region. The refusal to use Ukrainian spellings is yet another way the Russian government seeks to deny Ukraine a distinct linguistic and cultural identity and thereby its right to exist as an independent nation.
Finally, the book’s journalistic focus on the current moment means, perhaps inevitably, that the complex history of the region is assumed. To provide some background, we added footnotes, where relevant. For example, when recounting the story of Anna Tsimelzon’s grandmother, who was evacuated during World War II from Tallinn, Estonia, to the Ural Mountains, deep in the heartland of Russia, Panyushkin notes that she dressed up in the formal gown and high heels she had for some reason brought with her to celebrate the “liberation of her hometown.” Of course, this is referring to the liberation of Tallinn from German occupation. The German occupation was, however, replaced by the re-occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by the Soviet army. The three Baltic States had been forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union as “constituent republics” in August of 1940, putting an end to two decades of independence. Against the backdrop of this complex history, this book traces the tangled fates of regular people, peaceful civilians who got caught in the middle of a war. This book is about the displaced.
For readers interested in the historical background, we would recommend Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton & Company 2023).
My father supports the war. Amid the sea of human tragedy my country has brought down upon Ukraine and the entire world, including its own population, there is my personal tragedy: My dad, an old man of eighty-two, supports the war.
He’s a good man, and I love him. He taught me how to ride a bike, paddle a canoe, and how to use a saw, a chisel, and a wood plane. He’s an amazing craftsman who’s spent his whole life making models for theaters and exhibition halls. He plays with my children and fixes their toys when they break—my children adore him. All his life he’s been in love with my mother. And for the two years before she died of a brain tumor, he took wonderful care of her.
But now he supports the war, and we barely talk. I only ask if he’s taken his medications.
When my mother died ten years ago, his grief was so profound that he locked himself in his room, coming out only to get a bite to eat or use the bathroom. He left his room no more than twice a day. And all that time he spent alone in his room he was watching TV.
Back then I worked as a journalist for the Dozhd TV network, which has since been shut down; I regularly appeared on the radio station Echo of Moscow, which has also been shut down; and I wrote for Novaya Gazeta, which is no longer published. I used to tell my father that he shouldn’t poison his brain with all that angry nonsense aired by the official TV networks. But my dad would tell me that he didn’t really watch the news or political talk-shows—mostly soccer and programs about animals. I now think it wasn’t true. Dad didn’t sleep well, and the TV was almost always turned on in his room. I assume that, in addition to soccer scores and fun facts about whales and penguins, the TV was, twenty four hours a day, telling my father about spiteful Nazis who’d seized power in Ukraine, about an insatiable NATO that was encircling Russia with military bases, about transnational corporations that were buying up all of Russia’s oil, about the dollar that refused to let the ruble become a world currency, and about journalist traitors (I was one of them) who slandered President Putin and his project of returning Russia to its status as an international superpower—the TV had been talking to him about all that.
A few months after Mom’s death, when the pain of loss had become less acute, my father started to leave his room. He’d come to visit us, invite us over, play with the grandchildren, and talk with me. We usually chatted about everyday things, but now and then propagandistic clichés would pop up in Dad’s speech: the pressure of the West, aggressive NATO, values alien to Russians, the fifth column . . .
“Dad, I’m the fifth column!”
“No, you’re not! You aren’t the fifth column, you’re just a fool,” my father would say, forgetting the fact that his son was a well-known journalist and writer, something that had once been a source of pride.
And then he’d laugh in an attempt to turn a brewing quarrel into a joke.
It seemed to me, by repeating all those propagandistic clichés, Dad was testing me to see if I’d be willing to dilute my oppositional views with a dose of commonsense conformism. I wouldn’t agree, and Dad would then retreat to his previous position, that of a kindly grandpa who doesn’t care about politics and spends all his time fixing broken toys for his youngest grandson.
That’s how we lived until February 24, 2022, when the war began.
The first week we didn’t talk about the war at all, as if we were hoping it would be over soon, like a bad dream. Then I began writing this book about refugees, and every time I’d return from my travels, I’d go to my father’s and tell him about what I’d seen. I was very careful to tell him only human-interest stories, without any political commentary. I talked about people who’d lost their homes, about an old woman who’d escaped from Mariupol in the trunk of a refrigerator truck, about a boy who’d lost his brother in the war. My father would listen to the stories, sympathizing with my characters but always responding with propagandistic talking points, “Yes, but haven’t the Ukrainians been fighting a war in the Donbas for the last eight years?” “Yes, but hasn’t NATO surrounded Russia with their military bases?” “Yes, but hasn’t the West tried to impose their own values, which are alien to the Russian mentality?” Thus spoke my father, but I kept telling my stories. I hoped to touch him with human-interest stories of misfortune that would gradually dissipate the fog of propaganda he was living in.
Then Bucha happened. I met with a refugee from this small town where more than four hundred people perished during the Russian occupation, and I wrote down her story. But as soon as I started paraphrasing this woman’s account to my father, he jumped up and began screaming. He’d never screamed at me like that before, not once in my fifty-two years.
“How dare you say such things? Don’t you have any decency left? How could you even think that a Russian soldier was capable of killing women and children?!”
He kept screaming, and I was afraid he’d collapse right in front of me and die of a heart attack. But suddenly I realized: He understands everything. People who don’t understand what’s going on or are confused by the official lies have a tendency to take an interest in what they hear, raising doubts and asking questions, especially when speaking with close friends and family. But my father was screaming in utter despair. People who react this way grasp the horrifying reality but are incapable of accepting it because that acceptance would be for them worse than death.
We are the aggressors, and that is the reality. But if we are the aggressors, what is an eighty-two-year-old man supposed to do, an eighty-two-year-old man who’d been brought up, and who’d brought his children up, on the heroic feats of those who fought in World War II, soldiers who’d gone to their death to stop aggressors? What would it mean if we were now the aggressors? It could only mean one thing—suicide.
My father was screaming, shaking, and dropping things because he understood everything, but he couldn’t accept the reality. Because accepting such a reality would mean instant death or the complete destruction of his personality, and of all his values and moral beliefs.
So, I sat there without saying a word. And I thought: “Oh my God, he realizes all this is true!” Then I got up, took my coat, and walked out, leaving the old man by himself. Since then, we only talk by phone, and all our conversations are about him taking his medications.
I no longer think that my father doesn’t understand what’s happened. And I stopped thinking that Russians who support the war are blinded by propaganda. They are blinded, of course, but that’s not the point—most of them understand everything. The point is that no one in Russia has yet to come up with a single reasonable response to the realization that we’re the aggressors. There’s no point suggesting public protests. In a totalitarian society, showing up at a protest is tantamount to beating your head against a brick wall; we’ve already tried that.
But accepting the fact that we are the aggressors is unbearably difficult. There isn’t a single reasonable response that can follow such a realization, except suicide. In the first months of the war, the only thing that saved me from committing suicide was the work I’d undertaken in a state of desperation—to write this book about the refugees.
CHAPTER 1
The Hour of the Wolf
“As a result of strikes by Russian Armed Forces, 83 ground facilities of Ukraine’s military infrastructure have been rendered inoperative. Since the beginning of the special military operation, two Su-27s, two Su-24s, one helicopter and four Bayraktar TB-2 attack drones of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been shot down. All the tasks assigned to the Russian Armed Forces for the day were successfully completed, in particular, securing access for Russian troops to the city of Kherson.” Official Representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense Igor Konashenkov, February 24, 2022.
Wars begin right before dawn. At every military school, cadets are taught that the very end of night, “the hour of the wolf,” is the best time to attack, to take out the guards, to cross the border, and to bomb military targets. People are biologically wired to reach their deepest sleep right before dawn, and even those who aren’t supposed to be sleeping—officers on duty, guards, border patrol—have a hard time concentrating. All cadets learn that, and when those cadets become generals, time after time they begin wars right before dawn.
Officers are not very sensitive people, and they’re not concerned with historical parallels and poetic rhymes. They’ve probably heard Mark Bernes or Garik Sukachev singing “. . . at exactly 4:00 A.M., Kyiv was bombed, and we were told the war had begun.”1 They’d all heard this famous song but didn’t realize it was no longer about Germany attacking the Soviet Union near 5:00 A.M. on June 22, 1945—it was about Russia attacking Ukraine near 5:00 A.M. on February 24, 2022.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, wrote exactly that in a Twitter post: “Russians, this song is now about you.”
The time before dawn. The hour of the wolf. Ukraine is sleeping. An explosion!
Viktoria Svetlich, a manager at Nokia, wakes up from the explosions at a hospital in Kyiv. She’s in the hospital with her fifteen-year-old daughter who just underwent surgery—to implant a titanium plate in her leg. The girl can only get around on crutches. The door of her room opens, and the doctor appears. He says, “It’s war. We’re transferring all the seriously ill patients to the basement and discharging all those who are in recovery. Go home.” But how can you go home on crutches through a city that’s being bombed?
Yulia Leytes, too, wakes up in Kyiv, but in a beautiful apartment near the Opera theater. Yulia is a psychologist and a feminist. Her husband is a Russian citizen, and she worked in Moscow for a long time. She had recently returned to her hometown of Kyiv, unable to tolerate “that vague but nonetheless detectable feeling of un-freedom in the Moscow air,” as she puts it. At 10:00 A.M. Yulia has a scheduled photo session for a project on the workings of violence. They’re supposed to photograph broken flowers left over in flower shops. They tape them together somehow, so they resemble living flowers; they’re meant to symbolize women who have survived violence. And now there’s violence here, right outside her window.
Yelena Chepurnaya, a nurse, wakes up from the explosions and the howl of air defense sirens in Chernigov. She goes to the window and sees her neighbors throwing random stuff into the trunks of their cars without even putting it into bags or suitcases.
Vladimir Pavlenko, a blinds and curtains salesman, wakes up from the explosions in Odesa. His seven-year-old daughter comes into his bedroom, “Papa, I’m afraid.” What can you do—hug the girl, cuddle her on your lap? What else can you do?
Victor N., a movie producer, wakes up from the explosions on the outskirts of Kyiv and opens Facebook, where his whole newsfeed is peppered with the words “war, missiles, bombing.” Victor can’t see the bombing; he can only hear the rumble from afar.
Alyona Klyuchka, a clerk at the city hall of Tsyrkuny, a small town near Kharkiv, wakes up from the explosions and says to her husband:
