THE GREAT HUNGER AND THE LONG SILENCE
“Secrets” is the name of a Ukrainian game where children dig a hole into the ground, throw anything brightly colored into it that they can find – blooming flowers, shiny stones, dazzling scrunchies, shiny doll clothes – and then lay a piece of glass over the pit, cover it with dirt and run away. Not until they feel unobserved do they return, wipe the earth from the glass and look at their secret treasures through the pane. One of the most prominent voices of contemporary Ukraine, Oksana Zabuzhko, named her 2009 novel after this game: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets.
Zabuzhko traces this game back to the time when the Bolsheviks assumed power in Ukraine and people saw themselves forced to bury their icons or their jewelry – essentially everything that was precious to them. As Zabuzhko was asked a couple of years later if it even made sense to dig up long-buried Ukrainian secrets, she answered that this was the essential question of Ukrainian society since the country’s independence. After all, at least two generations had lived with the silence.
The essence of a secret is that you remain ignorant as to who knows the truth and what they know, exactly. Whether you yourself know the whole story and whether it corresponds with the truth: this also remains hidden to you. When this is about a historical event, about a genocide, like it is in the case of Ukraine, then this secret is part of a collective experience that flows like lava under a crust of silence.
However, it would be wrong to talk of Holodomor today as a secret, because by now the attempted genocide is taught in history classes in Ukraine, and tour guides tell tourist groups about the systematic murder of the Ukrainian population through famine in 1932 and 1933. The only contested fact is the number of victims – it was certainly multiple millions. But the investigation of this crime was something first experienced by the third generation after genocide. Two generations had to live with the fact that the memory of terror lay buried under a layer of earth.
I myself stumbled upon Holodomor by accident. No one in my family, whose roots lie in contemporary Russia and Ukraine, knew about it. In school, I had heard nothing about it, not in elementary school in Moscow and also not later during high school in Germany. It wasn’t until I – fully grown – asked friends of my mother about their early lives in East Ukraine that talk of the “Great Hunger” kept coming up. “The hunger, back then, you know, my parents had lived through the Great Hunger.” No: I didn’t know. What kind of “great hunger”?
I asked about it, received vague answers that didn’t sound like a hushed-up historical event. No one talked of a genocide. In their reports the terror campaign sounded like private misery.
One of the women described how her father had twice almost died: first as a child in Stalin’s famine, as the entire grain harvest and livestock and everything produced by the farmers was transported to Moscow until the corpses – starved to skeletons – began to fill the streets. And a second time, he was already very old, as Russian separatists attacked the Donetsk Basin [Donbas] and suddenly borders were established where none had been before. The father of my interview partner lived on that strip of land that neither Ukraine nor Russia provided with food, because it hadn’t been decided to whom the region should belong. “They nearly starved him twice. On the same little piece of land, you understand?” No: I didn’t understand. I had no idea. But I slid the loose earth carefully to the side and looked through turbid glass into a pit.
As I started to talk with these women, I had no ideas for a novel. In the interviews I wasn’t interested in the war of the past or the new century. I wasn’t looking for the old or the new Ukrainian national sentiment, because all of my interviewees belonged to my mother’s generation. They were born in the 60s and 70s in the Soviet Union, had experienced the most important events of their lives before the fall of the USSR, and their most important decision in the newly independent Ukraine had been to decide to leave. We spoke Russian with one another. No one wanted to talk about day-to-day politics (which I was happy about). They were simple people, irrespective of their profession (most of them were doctors). They would have nothing to say, they assured me in one voice. What came together was audio material that lasted multiple days.
The longer our conversations lasted, the more they resembled road engineering projects in Ukraine: there, if you stick a shovel into the earth, you’ll first hit the femur of someone who starved in the 1930s, and right after that, the broken skull of a Wehrmacht [Nazi] soldier will emerge. The event most deeply anchored in European memory is probably the Massacre of Babi Yar, during which the Wehrmacht murdered 33,000 Jewish people within 48 hours. Today, the valley in Kyiv is a memorial where the German Foreign Minister lays flowers.
As a writer, linguistic monstrosities are more interesting to me than any virtuously constructed metaphor. They are like regenerating bone after a badly healed break. In my interviews, I started to listen attentively to coarse jokes, strange allegories and unique semantic creations.
The “Homo Sovieticus” is one of these terms. It’s a word for someone who was so strongly shaped by the lived realities of the Soviet Union that he still behaves according to the rules of a world that has long since disappeared. “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself,” Hannah Arendt writes.
One could also describe the women with whom I spoke for my novel as “Homo Sovieticus.” And I suspect it is also the correct term for myself. I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up there. When people began to call me “Russian” after my family immigrated to Germany, I had to contradict them twice: first, I had nothing – so I believed then – in common with Russian culture except for the language. After all, we emigrated precisely because we were not Russians. And second, if I belong to a people, then I belong to the Jewish people.
On my birth certificate it reads: born in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad); Citizenship: Russian; Nationality: Jewish. Nationality was always noted in Soviet documents under Paragraph 5, which led to the joke that if someone suffered from Paragraph 5, they were Jewish. There was, by the way, no line for religious identity on “Sovok” certificates. “Sovok” – an additional bone spur that I encountered time and again in conversations.
There is no consensus in the field of linguistics as to where this word comes from. Is it a short-form of “Soviet Occupation”? Or does it stem from “Soviet”? What is clear is that “Sovok” in Russian means “dustpan.” The shovel, that is, onto which filth is swept. The “Homo Sovieticus” describes, with this word, the country from which he comes. My relatives and I come from the shovel into which the rubbish of history was swept. What does it do to a person, I asked myself, to think that they are just a piece of rubbish on a dustpan? Does the feeling of being superfluous come from that, and does one therefore look longingly to the West? And where does the West start? Already in Kyiv, in Lviv, or only really in Warsaw? “U-kraine” means “at the edge” in Russian. What does a Russian speaker hear when they hear “Ukraine”: this region at the edge? At the edge of one’s own? The Russian author Viktor Yerofeyev wrote recently that in Putin’s “second reality,” Ukraine is no independent state. According to the perspective of the Russian president, this region “on the edge” is being steered by the USA, has a puppet government; moreover, they are working together with Neonazis. The population of the Ukraine are Russians and therefore “brothers” that one must protect from the historical enemy in the West. If Putin is now waging war, he presumably thinks he is waging war against the US.
“I would like to thank all of you […] for the completely unjustified interest in my country […], because it is precisely this interest with which we have not necessarily been spoiled until now; in simple words this means: we are slowly perishing due to the fact that we – dammit, once again – are not being looked after by anyone,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in her first novel in 2006. In the ensuing decade and a half, the Maidan Revolution, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas have taken place, but I still always had a very abstract notion of where these places were and what exactly was happening there.
I had even organized solidarity evenings at theaters, but my emotional connection first began during the conversations with the women, my mother’s friends. As they opened up to me about their lives – far from any contemporary politics – an otherwise grey space on the map began to fill with scents, feelings, [and] images. But mostly with questions. Ukraine meant something to me, not because my relatives came from Odessa and Chernivtsi, but because people were sitting in front of me who told me about these places.
The boundaries of my emotions are the boundaries of my world. For most of us who live in the west, the emotional map ends right behind the Uckermark [Northeast Brandenburg]; we shake our heads worriedly about the electoral results in East Germany and the state of human rights in the EU member state of Poland; and then – at least according to our emotional knowledge – that’s where Russia begins. Not until last December was Ukraine “discovered” by the vast majority. As happens so often it was a catastrophe that led to this: war. Vladimir Putin infamously first let 130,000 soldiers march up to the border of East Ukraine (if you add the marines and the air force, then it was 150,000), then he awarded Belarus – the northern neighbor of Ukraine – with tanks and heavy artillery and let military maneuvers take place – under maximum visibility of NATO satellites – before he gave the command to an obviously long-planned attack.
And suddenly there is an answer to the question of the former American Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo, who in the context of the Trump-Zelensky affair shouted at the journalist Mary Louise Kelly if she really seriously believed that anyone “gives a fuck about Ukraine.” No one could even find it on a map. Pompeo’s unintentional demonstration of singular ignorance became public as I interviewed my mother’s friends. And I asked myself: Who gives a fuck about Ukraine in my family? No one had ever said we came from Ukraine. Everyone spoke Russian and Yiddish; Ukrainian didn’t exist for us as a language.
It occurred to me how I had tried a couple of years ago to wire money to a theater in Zaporizhzhia and the bank teller I had solicited for help while filling out the forms (this was before money transfer apps were available on all cell phones) asked unprompted: “Ukraine – where is that in Russia?” I had to secretly concede that the American Foreign Minister had been right.
Back to the glass-covered pit, back to the secrets under all the layers of earth. I didn’t just hear about Holodomor. A different story that repeated itself in the conversations with the women were the terrifying experiences in birthing centers: abuse during labor, blows, verbal assaults and humiliation of the worst kind. One of the women described how she was forced to walk to another room as the head of her child was already crowning. Another had bruises on her whole body as she came home from giving birth. Another one remembered as a newborn was drowned next to her in a bucket of water right before the eyes of its screaming mother because they determined that the premature baby was not capable of survival. It is difficult for me to see the system behind these monstrosities, but they are not isolated cases. Clearly the motive is misogyny, hate for women, but also the desire to destroy something in need of protection; something defenseless. The humiliation of someone in their most vulnerable moment.
On Russian-language news channels, I hear again and again how men evaluate the loss of human life in war always with the same sentence: “It doesn’t matter, the women will bear us new ones.” In totalitarian structures an individual is constantly sacrificed for the sake of humanity. And the larger the crowd of people in which this terror rages, the more expendable the individual [becomes].
Sovok, the USSR, the Soviet Union – whatever you want to call my country of origin – was an amalgamation of monstrous proportions. The pits covered in glass lie underneath ground that stretches across eleven time zones. Wherever one can discover the “secrets” is barely known to the descendants of those who have buried them.
I fumble around, more intuitively than according to a plan. I stumble onto piles of loose dirt, pose awkward questions: “Mama, which of us were in a gulag?” Impossible for me to describe my mother’s face as she heard this sentence for the first time in her late fifties. In Russian. And from her child, who is by now in their mid-30s. I didn’t receive an answer. None of the women with whom I spoke could give anything in response to questions like this. Presumably they also are looking, just like me, through smeared glass and are trying to understand which secrets are buried under there. And who knew what. The history books have been regularly rewritten in Russia for twenty years.
“Mama, are you sure that none of us spoke Ukrainian?”
My emotional map is filled with questions. It’s possible that’s all that’s available…
Translated by Johanna Schuster-Craig
