On the night of February 23rd this year a few writers and journalists gathered in the Kyiv flat of renowned writer Andrey Kurkov, where their host fed them borshch, Ukraine’s national dish.
Recalling that night at the start of his new book on Ukraine, Invasion, Luke Harding notes that their host made excellent borshch; having reported on the former Soviet Union since 2007, the veteran Guardian/Observer correspondent is presumably in a position to know. Kurkov, Harding writes, was “an agreeable companion, the author of many playful and magically luminous books, and Ukraine’s most celebrated living writer. Also, remarkably, he was an optimist.”
A few hours later, at 4.30am local time, Russia unleashed a barrage of missiles, air strikes and artillery rounds, and sent airborne forces and armoured columns on a smash-and-grab raid on Kyiv. In Diary of an Invasion, his own newly published account of the war so far, Kurkov wryly observes that at least Putin did not spoil his dinner party. Instead, Kurkov and his wife were woken by explosions in the small hours of the morning.
“If before the Russian invasion the situation changed every day, now it changes every hour,” he writes in his diary the next day. “But I stay and will continue to write for you so that you know how Ukraine lives during the war with Putin’s Russia.”
A day later, as the Russians advance, Kurkov and his English-born wife, Elizabeth, flee Kyiv, first for their country dacha (home), 90km away, and then to the far west of Ukraine, beyond the Carpathian Mountains. Writing from a borrowed apartment, and sometimes while on speaking tours abroad, he checks in with those who are closer to the conflict – his neighbours at his dacha, and those who stayed in Kyiv, or returned there after the rout of that initial Russian advance. His optimism is, initially at least, tested by his bewildering new condition as an internal refugee.
“I am waiting for the opportunity not just to return to a peaceful Kyiv but to return to my library, to my desk, to the archives I was using to write my latest novel, to my plans for the future, to the world that I have been creating around me for decades, a world that made me happy. I could not even imagine that this happiness could be destroyed so easily.”
Kurkov’s contemporaneous account begins not with the invasion but with the build-up, the daily ups and downs of a country on the brink of what might be extinction, or maybe just another round in a grinding cycle of Russian threats and detente. Often meandering, sometimes unfocused, his exposition of Ukrainian politics and culture at times seem unsure of its intended readership – domestic or foreign? – but there is always much of interest. Not least, the extent to which actor-president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was seen, before the invasion, as too soft on Putin and too easily distracted by his feud with his own predecessor, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
The fact that the crimes of the Gulag… are not a historical trauma for Russia today proves that Russia has not yet recovered from the past
— Andrey Kurkov
Kurkov, an internationally-lauded novelist, is strongest when he writes on cultural matters. And this, he demonstrates convincingly, is a cultural war. For Putin the main war aim is to impose Russia’s top-down, autocratic model of power on its former colony, using Russian language, culture and selective history as weapons of annihilation. If Ukraine is seen to succeed as a free country, what future can there be in Russia for Putin and his like? But for citizens of Ukraine – even ethnic Russians like himself, Kurkov argues – the war is about preserving a more European-oriented and horizontally-organised society from Russia’s crushing embrace.
“In the occupied cities, Russian soldiers use hammers to smash the commemorative plaques placed on the houses where Ukrainian writers and poets, philosophers and scientists once lived. In Chernihiv, the Russian military burned the archives of the NKVD and KGB. This was done to prevent Ukraine from citing the specific dossiers that show how the Soviet government cracked down on Ukrainian cultural figures.”
This erasure of history, memory and fact is, Kurkov says, key to the enduring power of the Kremlin, whoever may be lodged there, whether Czar, Stalin or Putin. Most Russians, he says, don’t want to know what the Kremlin did to Ukraine: they don’t even want to know what it did to Russia.
“The fact that the crimes of the Gulag ... are not a historical trauma for Russia today proves that Russia has not yet recovered from the past, that it suffers from an analogue of the Stockholm syndrome, that Stalin’s past still holds the Russian Federation hostage. It is as if they prefer the torturer they know to the one they do not.”
Kurkov writes ruefully of the plight of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens, especially writers, artists and intellectuals such as himself, who “must now show themselves to be three times more patriotic that their Ukrainian-speaking counterparts ... I am sad to think that after this war, when children will be offered Russian to study at school, they will flatly refuse and say, ‘The Russians killed my grandad!’ or ‘The Russians killed my little sister!’ It will surely happen. And this will be in a country where half the population speaks Russian and in which there are several million ethnic Russians, people like me.”
The cover note for Kurkov’s book, courtesy of the New York Times, states that “Ukraine’s greatest novelist is fighting for his country”. But if the pen is a weapon, like a rifle, then – like a rifle – it is more effective at closer range. Whereas Kurkov’s journey, following that borshch party, took him westward, towards abstraction, Luke Harding, a good reporter, writes from the front lines and centres of power, expertly switching focus from the currents of history to lives destroyed by war.
After four years in Moscow, Harding was expelled in 2011 for reporting on the brutal corruption of Putin and his cronies. Like Kurkov, he views Ukraine as a victim of Russia’s enduring imperialist mindset. Many Irish readers will note the parallels between his portrayal of Russia’s disdain for its “little brother” – even great Russian writers such as Solzenitshyn and Bulgakov dismissed Ukraine as a folk myth – and the brutal ignorance of certain other overbearing colonialist powers.
On the eve of the February onslaught, a Ukrainian spy chief briefs Harding: “Ukraine had a ‘pretty good understanding’ of its neighbour, but Russian expertise on Ukraine, on the other hand, was ‘very weak’. Ukrainians spoke Ukrainian and Russian; Russians didn’t understand the Ukrainian language or the country’s culture. He added: ‘They consider us to be a lost province.’”
The year before Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s former puppet prime minister and president, had stated bluntly that Ukrainians were Russia’s “vassals”.
Such lofty disdain translates, on the ground, into hatred and murder. At Bucha, the Kyiv suburb briefly held by Russia before its northern offensive was routed in March, Harding traces the miserable fate of Volodymyr Cherednichenko, a 26-year-old electrician who was abducted, tortured and murdered by Russian troops. His mother and aunt, who risked their lives to search for him, last saw him under interrogation, his arm broken, covered in blood, sobbing that he knew nothing. He was found alone a few days later, shot through the ear in a filthy basement, one of at least 1,400 Ukrainians to die in the area.
“The story of Volodymyr’s death haunted me long afterward,” Harding writes. “It became the stuff of restless dreams. I saw him captive and terrified in the dark. His final moments can be imagined. Fear, despair, loneliness, perhaps hope – and then extinction.”
On the Donbas front we meet Ukrainian soldiers, outgunned and exposed, who adopt the dogs and cats left by fleeing civilians. Not only are they company, but the animals can hear incoming shells three seconds earlier than any human. When their pets take cover, so do the troops.
Harding traces the miserable fate of Volodymyr Cherednichenko, a 26-year-old electrician who was abducted, tortured and murdered by Russian troops
Writing about the siege of Mariupol, Harding interviews women and children who were among thousands of civilians who sought refuge in the city’s famous theatre. At least 600 were killed on March 16th when a Russian aircraft, ignoring the word “children” painted on the roof, dropped a laser-guided bomb on the undefended building. One of Harding’s former local guides, Anatoliy, calls him repeatedly on his cell phone, across the lines of the siege, with increasingly desperate pleas for international help. His last call is wordless, just the sound of the wind. He has not been heard from since Mariupol fell to the Russians.
Both these books end, as they must, inconclusively, stories half-told. Kurkov promises to continue publishing his diary in a further volume, unless the war ends suddenly, in which case he will happily go back to his unfinished novel.
Harding, whose final chapter offers a brief summary of Ukraine’s dramatic autumn victories in Kharkiv and Kherson, but also of Russia’s recent nuclear brinkmanship, ends on an optimistic note. He is struck by the way in which ordinary Ukrainians, in contrast to the rigid Russian state-led apparatus, have adapted to their underdog status, improvising new civilian support systems, diplomacy, military tactics and makeshift weapons, busking their way back into the war.
“Russians were vertical in their thinking, always looking feudally upwards,” he concludes. “Ukrainians were horizontal – a collective or superorganism. This millions-strong, decentralised network was working tirelessly towards a shared and shimmering goal: victory.”
Further reading
Nothing but the Truth (Harvill Secker, 2010) is an anthology of writings by and about the crusading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in her apartment block on October 7th, 2006 – Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday. A moving tribute to a brave but fragile woman who endured official persecution and public hostility for her lucid reporting on Putin’s crimes in Russia and Chechnya.
The Spoils of War (Verso, 2021) by Andrew Cockburn offers evidence that Russia is not the only heavily armed imperium with a violent agenda. Cockburn’s quasi-insider account of the runaway US military-industrial complex shows that the lust for power is not the only root of war. Unlike Russia, the US may have no direct territorial ambitions but foreign wars feed its hunger to make and sell weapons.
The Good War (The New Press, 1997) by Studs Terkel. The leftist historian’s Pulitzer-winning oral history of the second World War is a timely reminder that even deeply flawed protagonists can sometimes be lured into fighting on the right side of history.
