Last November my wife, Elizabeth, planted a great many tulip and daffodil bulbs in the cold autumn soil so that in the spring, even more flowers than usual would bloom around our village house, located an hour’s drive from Kyiv. Our neighbours have sown garlic and onions for the winter, planted flowers and scattered fertiliser over the ploughed land, so that with the arrival of the first spring warmth, their vegetable plots and gardens will please the eye, the heart and the mind, thoughtful of another year’s harvest.
But between now and the spring there is winter and there is war.
And where the war is felt more keenly than the winter, a thaw will be caused not by the sun’s rays but by blast waves and heat from exploding shells and mines. In those terrifying places, the seasons of the year merge into one – they are fiery furnaces in which neither trees nor people survive.
During war, a person’s need for beauty increases a hundredfold. On the internet and TV news, we are shown ruins, bodies being pulled from the rubble of Ukrainian cities and villages. For months we have not been able to get enough sleep because of Russia’s missile and drone terror. From 10 in the evening until 10 in the morning, sirens sound in cities across the country, calling Ukrainians to go down to bomb shelters. In cities and towns located closer to the front line, the sirens sound 24 hours a day and civilians who remain must work hard to stay alive. Many people bearing this unimaginable hardship are sustained by the hope of liberation of captured territories and a return to their peaceful lives – a return to freedom.
His leer was so filthy it would have you reaching for hand sanitiser. A man over 40. A man who knew so, so much better
Irishman in Singapore: I wondered if I was foolish to emigrate in my 50s. But I feel more alive than ever
‘My sister’s boyfriend never left us alone at Christmas. Should I confront her?’
The five cheapest cars on sale in Ireland right now. Two are EVs
We do not know what will come first: peace or spring. But we know that the spring will definitely come. It will come even in places where everything has been burned to the ground. Grass will grow through the decayed military uniforms in the trenches, through the bones of soldiers, through the carcasses of burnt armoured vehicles. War is not able to stop the calendar or time. It only stops life, destroying it, making a person hide from everything that falls from the sky, that shoots, that explodes.
[ Writer Andrey Kurkov tells Ukraine’s story: ‘It’s my duty. This is my front line’Opens in new window ]
In early December, a Russian missile fell into a lake in the village of Vysoke, 10 kilometres from our village. Half of the water and silt from the lake rose into the sky and fell on nearby houses, painting the walls and roofs a swampy green colour. In our village, the explosion was felt like an earthquake. Our neighbours ran out into the yard, afraid that their houses would fall apart. They waited until the echo of the explosion had faded away and the earth calmed down and froze under their feet. Then they returned to their houses, which had stood firm this time.
This missile explosion filled their hearts with dread, but within an hour the fear had passed and was replaced by fury and a rock-hard faith that Ukraine will defeat the Russian aggressor.
During the last three years, I have often thought about fear, but I have never really felt it. I remember the first explosions in Kyiv, which woke me up at 5am on February 24th, 2022. I felt no fear, only bitterness. Someone had decided to tear our world apart. Those explosions signalled the start of a new era – a time of active war. It took a long time to get used to this new era. But now, it feels as though we are used to it. We have come to terms with the fact that at any moment a rocket or a drone can explode nearby, someone can be killed, and it might be me or a member of my family.
We live with the reality of war, but it is not fear that drives us as we go about out daily business. Fear does not overshadow our thoughts or guide our desires. We remain, for the most part, free people, free from fear and free in general.
For Ukrainians, freedom has always been more important than stability, more important than wealth, more important, unfortunately, than laws. This would seem to be one of the main differences between Russians and Ukrainians. For Ukrainians, freedom is more important than stability; for Russians, stability is more important than freedom.
This war is all about this difference. It is a war against the Ukrainian love of freedom, against the Ukrainians’ desire to determine the fate of their country and their own destinies.
[ Kurkov to Zabuzhko: contemporary Ukrainian authors at a glanceOpens in new window ]
The young Ukrainian poet and author of children’s books, Volodymyr Vakulenko, refused to leave his home near Kharkiv when the Russian army approached his village. Perhaps he did not want to evacuate so as not to traumatise his son who has learning disabilities, but most likely, he stayed in the village consciously, in order to remain free, to show the occupiers that he was not afraid of them. He retained his sense of self-worth. He understood what the price of such a decision could be and, the day before people in Russian military uniforms came to take him away from his home forever, he took his handwritten diary – a record of his time under occupation – and buried it in the garden.
He left his home for the last time on March 24th, 2022. Only eight months later, in the forest of Izyum, was the body found in the grave marked “319″ confirmed to be that of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko. Two bullets from a Makarov pistol were removed from his body. Those bullets were the price the writer paid for his freedom of choice, for choosing to remain himself and remain the master of his own home.
Throughout the eight months that Vakulenko’s fate was unknown, the writer and poet from Lviv, Victoria Amelina, was trying to find out what had happened to him. It was she who dug up Volodymyr’s handwritten diary from under a tree in his garden. Amelina immediately prepared the manuscript for publication.
Before our eyes, over the last 22 years, Russian society, with virtually no resistance, has lost all its freedoms and has become locked into a totalitarian system that threatens the entire world
A talented, determined and freedom-loving person, Victoria Amelina put aside her prose at the very start of the war and began to document the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine. She also accompanied foreign writers and journalists on their trips around Ukraine, most often to regions close to the front line. This was how she exercised her free choice.
On one of those journeys east, she was accompanying Colombian writers and journalists. Amelina took them to the city of Kramatorsk, in the Donbas. There she was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a Russian missile. She paid with her life for her love of freedom and for helping others to understand Ukraine and to understand freedom. She paid for not allowing Russia to intimidate her into becoming a refugee who would wander abroad far from her homeland.
In Crimean Tartar, the word for Parliament is Mejlis. Journalist, poet and politician Nariman Dzhelal, deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, was ready to pay with his life for his love of freedom and his people. Russia banned the Mejlis immediately after the annexation of Crimea, deporting or locking up almost all Crimean Tartar leaders, but not Nariman Dzhelal. Perhaps the Russians were hoping to use him in some way, but Dzhelal publicly refused to recognise the Russian annexation of Crimea.
When in September 2021, representatives of 46 countries gathered in Kyiv to establish the Crimean Platform, without hesitation, Nariman Dzhelal travelled from annexed Crimea to the capital of Ukraine to speak at this diplomatic forum on behalf of the Crimean Tatar people and to once again declare non-recognition of the Russian annexation and the need to return Crimea to Ukraine.
After the diplomatic summit, he returned home to Crimea. He knew that the Russian occupation authorities would not forgive him for speaking at the Crimean Platform. Sure enough, just a few days after his return, he was arrested and, along with two Crimean Tatar associates, falsely accused of committing a terrorist act on the territory of Crimea. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison and sent to serve his term in the remote town of Minusinsk in the Krasnoyarsk Territory of Siberia, far from his family and his native peninsula.
In July last year, Nariman Dzhelal was freed in exchange for Russian citizens convicted of war crimes. He had spent almost four years in a Russian prison, but upon his return to Ukraine he immediately joined the fight for the release of other Ukrainian political prisoners sitting in Russian jails. While in prison Nariman Dzhelal did not lose hope of being set free and now he is confident that Crimea will also be “free” much sooner than we think. The strength of his conviction is equal to the strength of his internal freedom, his faith in the potential of a free person and in the potential of a freedom-loving people.
The internal freedom which shines out from people like Volodymyr Vakulenko, Victoria Amelina and Nariman Dzhelyal is an inspiration and a guide for their fellow Ukrainians and people all over the world. Those who nurture the light of internal freedom, who value their conscious freedom of choice, prove that freedom is not only about knowing your rights and having the ability to protect them. They demonstrate that it is, first of all, a daily struggle – a struggle also on behalf of people who have not yet realised that the freedom of the whole society depends on their desire to use their freedom of choice wisely.
If a society forgets about the need to respect the freedom of each member – and this state of sleepy forgetfulness is so easy to fall into – the consequences can be dramatic and even tragic. There will always be political forces that seek to control a society rather than to develop democracy – forces that can lull us into that sleepy state.
I am free, and I am alive, but more than 100 writers, poets, publishers and translators have died since February 2022. They died for the freedom of those who are alive today, for the freedom of Ukraine. These include Volodymyr Vakulenko, Victoria Amelina, Oleksandr Kislyuk, Illya Chernilevsky, and many, many others
Before our eyes, over the last 22 years, Russian society, with virtually no resistance, has lost all its freedoms and has become locked into a totalitarian system that threatens the entire world. Before our eyes, the prime minister of Hungary is trying to introduce laws that are typical of totalitarian states. Before our eyes, the prime minister of Slovakia bows before the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and promises to come to Moscow on May the 9th this year for another celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany – and this at a time when Russia is killing innocent civilians in Ukraine every day.
The war that Russia has been waging in Ukraine for 11 years has taught Ukrainians to love and value their freedom and the freedom of their country even more. Nonetheless, war contradicts all human values. War contradicts freedom of speech and freedom of movement. War contradicts freedom of religion and freedom of creativity. War in general contradicts the very concept of “freedom”.
But freedom is not only the right to life. Freedom is, first of all, the right to be yourself and remain yourself in any circumstances without the risk of paying for it with your life or with your physical freedom.
Despite the war, Ukrainian society continues to value freedom and democratic values. Probably, for the first time in history, a country at war has not introduced censorship of the press or mass media. Political freedoms remain and Ukrainian culture is experiencing an active period of development as cultural figures realise that culture is a vital front in this war – a front that protects freedom of creativity as well as the national cultural identity of Ukrainians.
[ Ukrainian language as a weapon of war: ‘It’s a form of resistance’Opens in new window ]
I am free. These words mean a lot to me. I want to be free, and I want to live in a free country. I want our right to be free citizens of a free Ukraine to be respected not only by the people of Europe, but also by the citizens of the country that has attacked us.
I am free, and I am alive, but more than 100 writers, poets, publishers and translators have died since February 2022. They died for the freedom of those who are alive today, for the freedom of Ukraine. These include Volodymyr Vakulenko, Victoria Amelina, Oleksandr Kislyuk, Illya Chernilevsky, and many, many others. Remember this and do not allow yourselves to fall into a cosy stupor – not now or even after the end of the war, because the freedom of each member of society and the freedom of society as a whole requires constant attention.
Freedom does not tolerate being forgotten. When people assume that it will not go anywhere, that freedom is a given, that is the most dangerous moment.
Freedom is the energy that must govern us, govern the meaning of our life, form the basis of our creativity, and the essence of our social and political activity.
Freedom requires attention, like the bulbs and seeds planted in carefully selected and prepared ground, protected from the ravages of winter. If we do not want freedom to disappear, we must look after it. If we want to be able to exercise our freedom of choice, we must understand that we have it. If we want our children to value that freedom in the future, we must make a conscious decision to use our freedom of choice today.
Andrey Kurkov opened the international literature festival Writers Unlimited in The Hague with this speech on Thursday
