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sheenaghpugh
When Nikolai told them how the family had had to hide in the cellar for a month, the man in command replied “Why were you hiding? We came to liberate you!”
And at that, Nikolai had snapped a little.
“I said, Did I invite you here?”
Jen Stout, born on Fair Isle, had fallen in love with the Russian language in high school, and a school trip to St Petersburg convinced her that she wanted to return. Various things then got in the way – family commitments, lack of finance, Covid – as they do, with the result that, apart from a stay in Ukraine in 2018, it was 2021 before she managed to get to Moscow on a nine-month fellowship. And three months into that, war broke out…
You or I might have gone home at this point, but Stout is a freelance journalist by trade; she went as far as Vienna, to collect some flak jackets a friend wanted taken to Ukraine, then headed for the crossing point of Isaccea in Romania to report on the refugee exodus. Then, after a short conflict-zone training course, it was back to Ukraine, spending time in Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Donbas among other places.
This is a journalistic account but also a personal one; she had friends in Ukraine already and made others while there. It is very much a story of individuals and the war’s effect on them. The laconic response of the man in Kostiantynivka to the shelling of his apartment block: “The place was full of broken glass, broken furniture. His enormous grey cat had been hiding in the cupboard when it happened, so there was no harm done really, he said.” The children at Chuhuiv: “some kids had chosen a hairpin corner for their playtime checkpoint. They brandished plastic guns and scowls […] eerily perfecting the contemptuous glare of bored soldiers.” Some named individuals, like Victoria Amelina of PEN Ukraine and Vlada Chernykh, medic and drone pilot, have been killed since she met them.
She is a sharp observer and alert to reactions that do not necessarily fit the clichés editors expect and want; “One thing stands out in almost every interview I did with the new refugees coming across at Isaccea: their fury. While the paper wanted heart-rending stories of escape and despair, my interviewees wanted to tell me what a bastard Putin was, what a piece of shit.”
Her observation of the way people at war quickly become inured to danger will strike a chord with anyone who has read accounts of the Second World War air raids and how soon the warnings began to be ignored: “a loudspeaker voice boomed out over the intersection, ordering citizens to turn off the lights and mains gas and take shelter. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention.”
Other aspects of the war that come over very strongly: the way a conflict between neighbours inevitably divides families and friends, with some no longer speaking to relatives on the other side of the border; the way it polarises opinion, so that people refuse to speak each other’s closely related language and begin to refer to each other as “nazis” and “Rashysts” – a compound of “russkiy” and “fascist”. The mayor of Kharkiv, once suspected of Putinist leanings, takes to speaking only Ukrainian. When Stout suggests this is political trimming on his part, her Kharkiv friend disagrees; yes, expediency is part of it but there is more: “There was, she went on, this strong sense of personal outrage: how dare these Russians try to destroy Kharkiv’s flower gardens, its beautiful avenues? The mayor, she added, was no exception.” As Hitler found, bombing and invading people is apt to concentrate their minds against you and everything you stand for. One of the most thought-provoking stories in the book is how the Kharkiv LGBT activist Ivanna makes common cause with Tarasenko, commander of the “Freikorps” militia, which had no time for LGBT and had specialised in disrupting their marches. She does so because she feels their common enemy (and the Russian government is of course no more tolerant of LGBT than Tarasenko) is more important. When he dies in battle, she mourns him and writes a valedictory, much to the annoyance of his comrades, who find it insulting for her to speak of him.
This is a powerful book, moving but always striving for some journalistic objectivity. She recounts some instances of journalists behaving badly: harassing refugees for copy, filming without permission, getting in the way of medics. But her own contribution to observing and recording events shows clearly how necessary a job a good journalist does.
