Rise after a Fall

Spring 2014 Turned All Values Upside Down

Spring 2014 Turned All Values Upside Down

I was a photographer. Looked for the beauty. My credo was a simple phrase: “What you see with love, is beautiful”... I looked at any created item as the result of creation, realizing that it was beautiful by nature. I tried to tell people that they did not need modifications to be better...

I loved people, loved peace. It can be said that I was a cosmopolite who would find a common language with anybody and wherever on this planet. However, I have always wanted to live in one place. In Ukraine. The fact is we are all cosmopolites as long as troubles don’t trouble us. Then everything changes. Then the reality of events opens your eyes to the world. And the colors around lose their brightness. They appear not to be so peaceful and joyful. There is too much of red...

Then, on March 9, 2014, I was another person already. Not the one I used to be. The world I loved had changed. Cosy calm life had turned into a fight, a challenge, a competition, a battle for survival and revival of the identity, for the land and the right to be called Ukrainian...

It is true that my life changed. I felt hatred and just grinned thinking about the people whom I used to bring smiles. It was like being a wolf among silly sheep that were driven by deceitful shepherds to the slaughter, while the former were eager to follow those shepherds. The masses were hooked by cheap promises and populist slogans. These people had their hands chained, and their minds trapped. They publicly burnt Ukrainian flags in the streets.

They burnt out Ukrainian emblems, embedded in granite. They demolished Ukrainian symbols with hammers and sledges. They ruined everything symbolizing, standing for and referring to Ukraine with the hatred of the berserker, the fury, rage and blank eyes. Their souls and minds were as if feeling the inevitable future and fought in the invisible agony. They initiated witch hunting. Kidnapped, tortured, tormented everybody who differed from them.

The arrival of the Russian spring turned bloody, with the corpses of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars found here and there. The occupation started with the seizure of military bases and murders of Ukrainian military people...

Blood, violence and death constitute the face of modern Russia. At that time I wanted to cry from powerlessness and anger. But in fact we were not so helpless...

At first Mum talked me out of participating in protests, meetings, from night watches and patrols. She was afraid, since she anticipated the following detention, arrest and imprisonment. My granny cried. Instead, I was the one I had to be. The citizen of my country, a Ukrainian. And my family stood by me. You must never stop, let alone surrender. There is nobody else but us.

As a result the apartment was all covered in Georgian ribbons as useless conspiracy. Five-liter containers with buckwheat for the Ukrainian military men. Socks, honey and cigarettes. Procured medications in case of the start of the active war and stocked respirators in case of any chemical or gas attack. Perhaps, it looked ridiculous, but who could know what was to come. We were not ready to see our “elder brother” unleashing a war against us and coming to kill us.

It was a holiday. However, not too preoccupied with the holiday itself, I was thinking more about the meeting that had to follow the ceremony of paying the tribute to the memory of the warriors who died in the Second World War. Yes, it was May 9, 2014, the celebration of the Great Victory. The day on which we had long been taught to pay the tribute, along with other slaves of the ideology, to the heroes who had died for false ideals. Flowers. Salutes. The frontlike shots of vodka for people of all ages...

Teaching the new generation wrong thinking of how good it was “once”, memories of the good old days of fame. Life in the past. Zombifying by brainwashing is an element of the Russian Federation strategy.

Victory Day! My great grandfather was also at the front. He, like many others, was a prisoner of war. He fully felt the “award” for his deeds... At that time the final tribute expressed as a shot in the back by the NKVD secret police was normal. Both then and now, to be captured meant to become a public enemy, become labelled. Then you could be among the expendables only. Every year I would be at the parade with the portrait of my great grandfather, paying the tribute and commemorating his name, the name of the person, who had not been honored and respected for being a hero. That year I was carrying it among hundreds of other faces of compatriots so that he could see those people with a slanted view. I was sure that he would have been proud of me and, like half a century before, my great grandfather would despise the grey masses of feeble minded people. They were wearing Georgian ribbons, celebrating the new occupation. A new invasion. A new g******e. The ruling cannibal illegally seized the power. Illegally occupied the Ukrainian land. My Motherland.

So I was walking with the photo of my great grandfather, being proud that he had given his life for the Motherland. Each time on May 9th, my friends and I visited the War Veterans house. There we would make tea and bring sweets, sing songs, recite poems, thus celebrating their deeds the way we could.

But this year the demonstration was completely different. It was not a holiday for veterans but for occupants. The symbol of the Georgian ribbon had already been disgraced, because we tied it on everything we could see around, to celebrate not the victory of our ancestors, but the contemporary Russian occupation revolution. And it seemed to me that while I was walking with the picture of my courageous relative this event was established not for him, but for Vladimir Putin. Because everything around reminded me of this person. These ribbons and his portraits on T-shirts, and graffiti on the walls of buildings, and pensioners’ calls for glorifying Putin, but not the veterans of the Great Patriotic War[2].

My conscience was clear, my thoughts were sober like never before. I was walking free among those deprived of freedom. Unlike the intoxicated people surrounding me, I knew who I was. I knew where my home and my Motherland was. It has always been and will be Ukraine.

That spring 2014 turned all my life values. With its injustice and cruelty, Russia sowed the seeds of war into the fertile Ukrainian land, but the tree that has grown, will one day grab the serpent on its neck with its roots. And will kill it with its spear. Will remove the filth from this land...