This essay is a revision of a previous essay, How I Learned to Hate.
“Let them eat sh**.”
This is what my daughter’s piano teacher said to me in Russian over the phone about Ukrainians.
A prim 68 year old woman who wears her hair in a bun, I was taken aback by her statement.
“I’m from the Ukraine,” I reminded her, still shocked by her choice of words.
“The Ukraine of the past isn’t what it is today,” she countered. “But let’s not talk about politics.”
It was too late. The damage was already done, on both sides.
Our shared connection- our Russian heritage, culture, language- was fractured by not just the words but the sentiment that went with them. She is incensed by what she sees as anti-Russia propaganda in America and believes the US and NATO are responsible for the war in Ukraine. I see Russia as a dangerous aggressor who threatens the world order. Two people from similar backgrounds on opposite ends of reality.
She had hatred, but so did I. With the news coming out of Russia, my shock turned into anger. This past year, I learned to hate. This woman’s response further justified my hatred toward the Russians, and I’m Russian.
I find myself looking at footage of Ukrainians shooting and killing Russians and I don’t flinch, and I usually do flinch. I can’t stand horror movies. I pick up spiders with my bare hands and release them outside. I’ve been vegetarian since March, deciding that if I can’t kill an animal, I shouldn’t eat it.
When it comes to killing Russian soldiers, though, I don’t flinch. I watched as a Ukrainian sniper picked off one Russian soldier after another through night vision goggles. I didn’t flinch. I watched a Russian soldier fall in enemy fire. “Good,” I thought. I found a certain satisfaction with every Russian soldier that fell or was captured. When it’s a Ukrainian soldier that falls, I have empathy that morphs into anger, then a subconscious hatred that, when prompted, rears its ugly head.
I’m reminded of a Soviet film about a young woman recruited in the World War II effort. She protests that she can’t imagine killing anyone, but by the end of the film, when she has witnessed the brutality of war and her friends butchered around her, she picks up an automatic and fires.
While there was plenty of goodwill between Russians and Americans at the end of the Cold War, the Russians that supported democracy and freedom of speech are now either in exile or in prison. What’s left are people I have little to nothing in common with, people that support Russian imperialism, people that attack civilians, then “rescue” the children to their own countries, indoctrinating them with Russian propaganda and patting themselves on the back for their good deeds. Those children that are too young to remember may never see their families again. Kidnapping children is a rape of the Ukrainian people.
Ukraine is not Belarus, whose president is supported by the Putin regime. Ukraine overthrew its Russian-oriented president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 after months of protests. Ukraine is more diverse and western-oriented. If Belarus wants to be Putin’s alter boy, that is their right, but that isn’t Ukraine’s character.
“Wage Peace Not War” hangs a longtime slogan in a house I know. The situation in Ukraine is beyond a catchy peace slogan. Early in the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin directly to meet with him- in Kyiv, in Moscow, anywhere. We both speak Russian, he said. We understand each other. Putin refused and went for the jugular- the capital, Kyiv. This wasn’t about protecting eastern Ukraine for Russian speakers. This was about taking over a country to have a sphere of influence.
The recent bombings of Lviv in the far west of Ukraine and Odesa in the south wasn’t about securing so-called “freedom” for Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. It was about terrorizing the country to make everyone feel unsafe, no matter where they lived, and to exert pressure on Zelensky to back off and let Russia have its way, as it often does because of its size and most importantly, nuclear weapons.
Russia’s backing out of the grain deal and bombing the grain Ukrainian farmers worked so hard to produce, that countries in Africa, Asia and Europe rely upon, is unethical and sickening. Just as Russia used winter as a weapon when they bombed utilities, leaving people stranded in the cold, Russia is using food as a weapon.
When Russia attacks, Ukraine unifies. “We all have to be strong in the face of this tragedy,” wrote my younger brother from Kyiv after we connected over the bombing in Lviv, our birth city. With its diversity of Russian and Ukrainian speakers, Ukraine may not have known, exactly, who they were before the war, but now we now know who we are not. We are not Russians. We are not those Russians.
One social media post that stands out from thousands I’ve watched since the war began is of an elderly woman lamenting the death of her adult son in a bombing raid, cursing Russia in Russian. This wasn’t a Ukrainian who already had every reason to despise Russia. This was a Russian woman cursing her own kin. Our children take care of us when we’re old. Losing a child isn’t just the loss of a life. It’s the loss of your life.
The sound of her lament affected everyone. No one stopped her mourning or even wanted to, because everything she said felt true. Everyone on camera, the rescue workers, the victims, the relatives, all spoke Russian. The Russians bombed everyone, repeatedly. Some of us are experiencing a tear in our self-identity as a result of Russia’s atrocities.
Ukraine has a young president that looks to the future. Russia has an old president that conjures up the past- the repressive regime of the Soviet Union, which he said was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” The demise of the Soviet Union, responsible for millions of deaths and untold number of repressions, is a catastrophe? This is someone who is looking in the rearview mirror and making a u-turn while the rest of the world is running away from the scene of the crime.
Witnessing Russia right now is embarrassing to me as a Russian. I taught my daughter Russian because it’s important to my heritage. Now, when people ask what language I’m speaking, I find myself apologizing. “I’m from western Ukraine,” I explain. “I’m Russian from western Ukraine.”
I hated explaining myself and searched for a way out. “What should we call ourselves?” I asked a friend, also a Russian speaker, from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. “We’re not Ukrainian, are we?”
“What would you call yourself if you lived in France?” was his reply.
I was disappointed, tethered to the fate of my ethnicity. Then, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I saw Zelensky give an address wearing a shirt that simply read, “Ukrainian.” Not “Ukraine,” or the symbol for Ukraine, as he often wears, but “Ukrainian.” This was an important step in the psyche of a nation. We are used to identifying ourselves by our ethnicity- Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, or another ethnicity inside Ukraine. Seeing Zelensky, a Jew, wear that shirt opened the door to what it meant to be Ukrainian.
“We are all Ukrainians,” Zelensky recently said to a group of troops he was awarding medals. It reinforced a change of culture. The war unified us against a common enemy. I will always be ethnically Russian, but I’m not Russian from Russia. I’m Ukrainian.
I can’t say the same for Russians living in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of them, as many as 700,000 by some estimates, have fled Russia since the start of the war. These are people for whom being Russian in Russia is no longer tolerable.
I never thought I would get to this point of separation from people with my common language and culture. Like many soldiers on the front lines, families who have lost a loved one, people whose homes were destroyed, lives uprooted, never to return (literally), I never imagined myself here. I do not have the losses they do, but my internal state is the same, or worse. If I was on the front lines, I would shoot the Russians.
I don’t know what to compare this to. The American Civil War? Intense altercations between Americans in school board meetings? The split between Democrats and Republicans? Germans who abhorred Hitler? Divorced individuals? How do you explain the feeling of disgust toward someone that looks like you and yet is completely, utterly, not like you on some fundamental level?
Russia reminds me of a sumo wrestler swinging his weight around. When my 9 year old daughter asked me why Russia invaded Ukraine, I said because they are “Glutton Zhora,” a boy from a nursery rhyme that eats everything in sight and then complains of a bellyache. Sometimes, when I think she is in another room, she catches me unawares, reacting tearfully to Ukraine’s hard fought gains or in despair from the lives destroyed. When she sees the light blue and yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag, she brings it to my attention, like an “I Spy” game. “Slava Ukraini,” I respond, partly to myself.
Fortunately, the slogan is pronounced the same in Ukrainian and Russian.
