Readers might be familiar with the online diary of Nastya Travkina, a journalist and writer – and Russian citizen – living in Kyiv who shares near-daily accounts of her experiences during the war. But Nastya’s diary covers more than just her own experiences. It also features sharp political reflections on Russian military aggression and musings on Russian and Ukrainian politics and history. Nastya shares the stories of people, plants and animals during wartime, writes movingly about love and death – as any day under constant bombing could be her last – and raises funds to support Ukrainians impacted by the Russian invasion.
We had an extensive interview with Nastya and are deeply grateful for her willingness to share and elucidate.To support Nastya’s work, follow this link. To donate to Nastya’s frontline ambulance fundraiser, click here. Follow this link to listen to Nastya Travkina’s diary read aloud (in Russian).
Interview by Vika Privalova
Edited by Daria Serenko
Could you tell me a little bit about your background? We met at the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography, but what have you done since graduating?
I should say that I find it difficult to talk about myself and my Russian background at the moment. First, it all seems unimportant and irrelevant. Secondly, I feel like I’ve lost any emotional connection to my past over the years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But obviously, I’m not an amnesiac.
I was born in Moscow to one college student pursuing a degree in education and another studying cybernetics. Two years later, the USSR collapsed, capitalism arrived, and we were left with neither the teaching and cybernetics jobs nor the nuclear family. I grew up in Moscow and applied to study philosophy at Moscow State University twice. However, I got disappointed and dropped out after a year. Then, I decided to organise my own education. In 2008, I moved to Kyiv out of love for Sergiy Jdanov, who has been my creative partner as part of the duo bojemoi for the last 15 years, and, since 2020, my husband as well. We collaborate on paintings, articles, debates and a joint podcast; he is my muse, my partner and a challenging opponent in arguments that sharpen my perspective and foster my growth.
I decided to enroll at the [Moscow-based] Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography after I had moved to Kyiv. I had this naïve notion that I’d make so many film industry connections that we’d be able to shoot David Lynch–style movies with piles of dirt that utter haunting truths from the Upanishads or something along those lines. Instead, I spent my days in the Institute’s library, reading books on aesthetics (the philosophy of art). I liked the people who make movies in Russia even less than I liked the people who taught philosophy. Anyway, it was a stupid idea. After that, my childhood friend Egor Mostovshchikov and I improvised a publication in Moscow called Batenka, Da Vy Transformer. It was there that I learned to edit, lay out articles, collaborate with authors and essentially run a publication. Jdanov also began his writing career through this platform. During that time, my primary interest – psychology – pulled me more and more towards neuroscience. In 2017, I began writing about the brain, and in 2018, I transitioned to working with the Russian online media outlet Nozh. There, I started writing long-form essays about the brain and editing articles about various topics in the humanities by non-journalist experts. In 2021, I published a book about the brain titled Homo Mutabilis, which essentially defined my public identity before the full-scale invasion. Well, there was also my blog, Nastiglo. I have not worked with Russian publications since 24 February 2022.
Could you tell me a bit more about how and why you ended up moving to Kyiv?
My relationship with Kyiv developed in three phases. I first visited Kyiv in 2007, when I was 17, with some friends who were just starting out as journalists. At that time, Moscow had been having ‘dissenters’ marches’ for several years. We would chant slogans like ‘Russia without Putin’, break through riot police cordons (they were still unarmed back then, though some other people were already getting their heads bashed with batons), spend the night in jail. Back then, there were no police wagons; they would load us onto passenger buses, and we could sometimes get away by telling them ‘such-and-such article says you have no right to detain me’. Encounters with the police were a part of our urban routine: ‘Don’t sit here’, ‘Don’t take pictures’, ‘I’ll break your camera’, and so on. Meanwhile, Ukraine had had its first revolution in 2004, which was a moment of great excitement for us. I vividly remember our first visit – my friends and I bought Viktor Yushchenko merchandise, these orange scarves with the word ‘Yes!’ on them, and ran through the city wrapped in them and shouting with joy. It was a city where we didn’t have to fear the police. That was an astounding feeling back then. I arrived in Kyiv just ahead of my eighteenth birthday, carrying a letter of permission from my parents to cross the border. Once I turned 18, I ceremonially burned it on the pedestrian bridge to Trukhaniv Island. I guess the ritual worked. The following year, I spent all my holidays in Kyiv, sometimes coming just for the weekend and catching up with friends. A year later, in 2008, after dropping out of Moscow State University, deleting my social media and disconnecting my phone, I moved to Kyiv. I was deeply disappointed living in Moscow but had found great love in Kyiv – the usual story. To renew my visa, I just had to cross the border every three months. I would go see my family for a week and then go back.
The second phase began in 2010. I was nearing 21, without a university degree, and facing the prospect of a life as a housewife. We decided to send me to university so that I would at least have a social circle, a profession, something to fall back on. We were looking for something… ‘cool’, and we found the Institute of Cinematography. I studied [for the entrance exams] for a few months and got in. All five years of my program, I travelled to my second home in Kyiv regularly: for New Year’s holidays, the break after winter exams, the May holidays, and summer vacation.
The third phase began in 2017, when I realised that I was in this relationship and in this city for the long haul. After Russia annexed Crimea and occupied eastern Ukraine, the conditions for Russians staying in Ukraine became stricter: I could stay for three months, then had to leave for another three months. So I had a routine of spending three months in Ukraine and three months in Russia. Sometimes, Sergiy and I travelled to Russia together, but as the years went by, people got more and more awkward and hostile towards my partner. It was clear we had to stop.
The pandemic worked in our favour: I went to Kyiv in 2019, we applied for marriage registration in early 2020, and a month later, the pandemic hit and the borders were closed. Otherwise, I’d have had to go away again for three months and then come back to file the marriage application. Instead, I stayed due to COVID-19 regulations. It was the first time in 15 years I had lived in the same place for a year and a half – and not had to be separated from my partner. Living together and not being forced to go anywhere was just amazing. Then, to represent my putting down roots, I began adopting houseplants like crazy, something I couldn’t afford to do before. I have about 50 pots of them – a sign of my commitment. At the start of the full-scale invasion, when my family tried to talk me into leaving Ukraine and going abroad to escape the war, my main objection was that all my plants would die! I’m kidding about that being my main objection, but it was one of them.
Has anything changed in your self-perception since moving?
I describe my 15-year relationship with Ukraine as ‘gentle deimperialisation’, similar to the concept of ‘gentle Ukrainisation’, which involves the subtle cultivation of Ukrainian national identity.
In 2008, I was a product of Moscow’s imperialism and cultural chauvinism. If there were an imperial bingo card, my Russian family (my extended family) would have checked off every box, from ‘corporal punishment in front of the icon corner’ to ‘heartfelt belief in the superiority of the Russian language over all others’. (I was convinced that Russian had the most extensive vocabulary in the world until my late teens.)
I had patient friends in Ukraine who, I believe, understood that my views weren’t a deliberate stance but rather an unexamined mimicry of the environment I grew up in. After all, I’ve always been a nice person who liked the idea of mutual respect, freedom and equality. I was practically a hippie when I was young. I was willing to learn, even if I didn’t grasp everything immediately. Right back in 2007, I stopped calling Ukraine ‘the Ukraine’[1] and attempting to ‘explain’ to people that the name ‘Ukraine’ was derived from the word ‘periphery’ (of Russia), as I had regrettably been taught at home. The question of language lingered with me for a long time. In Kyiv, I was surrounded by a Russian-speaking environment, and for a while, I still held the chauvinistic stereotype of Ukrainian as a ‘funny language’. Gradually, however, I began to understand Ukrainian almost without realising it.
Looking back, it’s difficult for me to recall what views I held during my youth in Kyiv. My partner, friends, and I lived in a somewhat insular world, immersed in studying religion, esotericism and art – finding every possible way to escape from reality. But I definitely remember that I knew that I had the patterns of thought and behaviour of Great Russian chauvinism; friends pointed them out, and I tried to correct myself as much as possible – but it was all just details. The political awareness that had taken root when I protested in Russia hadn’t yet sprouted; it had been replaced by a more escapist, philosophical outlook. At the time, my friends and I viewed art as the central focus of life – not as a social instrument, but as a religious one. (That’s why we called ourselves bojemoi [Russian for ‘Oh my God’ – trans.]. We saw artists as bearers of the divine spirit.) In my early twenties, I lacked any real political awareness. You could say I was a textbook example of Putin’s strategy of depolitisation: I thought that that politics was inherently dirty, everyone in it was pursuing their own selfish interests, and as a ‘unique individual’, it wasn’t for me. I struggled to connect the individual problems I was fighting – corruption and pro-government propaganda in universities, a lack of freedom in chosing research topics, psychological abuse in schools, anti-feminist backlash in society, religion being elevated over scientific thought – to the broader political system. These problems seemed to me like isolated failings or personal shortcomings. I couldn’t see the forest of the system behind the trees of individual cases.
Worse still, I wasn’t able to make much sense of what happened in 2014. I was the ideal ‘useful idiot’ for Russian propaganda: smart enough and well-educated, but with a complete blank spot in the part of my brain responsible for political consciousness (not that there’s really a specific area for that, just kidding). It was fertile soil for hybrid warfare narratives like ‘Those aren’t our troops’. I felt really ashamed in 2022, not only of the full-scale invasion that my compatriots had started and supported, but of all the aggression since 2014 and, most of all, of my own stupidity. There is no other way to put it. My husband and I have had many conversations about how difficult my poor understanding of the situation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has been on him. Only after 24 February, when I began reading daily about the path of Russian-Ukrainian relations since 1991, about the Kremlin’s reaction to the Ukrainian revolutions, about the doctrine of hybrid warfare and about Russian foreign policy – only then did the scales fall from my eyes. This self-education and the Russian missiles flying into Ukraine, into Kyiv, into my very neighbourhood, brought with them a shock wave of retroactive awareness of [Russian intervention in] Transnistria, Ichkeria, Sakartvelo, Syria, and post-2014 Ukraine. Then I delved deeper into the Soviet oppression of ethnic minority republics, the man-made famine there, the genocide.
For this past year and a half, my thoughts on history, politics and my role therein have become meditations on a monstrous fractal in which an oppressive state is reflected in a society shackled by fear and violence, which is reflected in a dysfunctional family, which is further reflected in the individual, in their language, thought patterns and even emotional habits.
It felt like I had seen, in my own reflection, in my own pupil, an abyss of wholesale systemic violence, all these things that I had soaked up after being born in the heart of a corpse empire trying desperately to stop its decay with more violence.
My entire heritage, upbringing and worldview are crisscrossed with these thin, poisonous capillaries of Russia’s worst garbage. I have no choice but to lie in the hospital bed of acceptance with the IV of knowledge in my veins – hoping to one day cleanse my self’s bloodstream of the poison of violence in thought, word and deed, as the Buddha advised.
A huge step forward for me was learning the Ukrainian language. As I wrote, it was not an essential part of my life in Kyiv. I only had to use it to do paperwork, read food labels and medicine instructions, and tell my husband’s deaf grandmother what was going on on political talk shows. I began learning Ukrainian in 2022, during the second month of the invasion, as a political act of protest. However, I soon discovered that it revealed an entirely new world to me, the world of a distinctly different political consciousness – a Ukrainian consciousness. From Ukrainian political standup shows (e.g. by Anton Tymoshenko) to books by Ukrainian historians (e.g. Yaroslav Hrytsak), from Ukrainian intellectual YouTube channels (e.g. The Ukrainians) to Ukrainian literature (e.g. Ivan Bahrianyi), I gained a deeper understanding of the inner workings of modern Ukraine, access to real-time perspectives on the war with Russia, and, most importantly, a new lens through which to view myself.
Language determines thinking: you can’t think without language. Politics affects language: patterns of language shape patterns of thought, which are limited by the boundaries of a specific language. I firmly believe that a person who does not speak any language other than Russian and who has not read foreign research into their history, culture or politics, preferably written in languages other than Russian, does not have the tools to fully reflect on themselves and their country. Not to mention the fact that writing done in an authoritarian country should always be examined sceptically, at the least for unconscious self-censorship and, at the most, for deliberate misinformation.
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What do you think political consciousness is?
Consciousness, in simple terms, is the capacity to know that I’m me, that I exist, and to subjectively experience and reflect on my existence. In short, to recognise my subjecthood. Political consciousness, accordingly, is the capacity to recognise one’s political subjecthood. Politics, according to the Greek tradition of Aristotle, essentially means the affairs of the citizens within the city, matters of local governance: how to clean the water canal, where to build a road, who stole the chicken and what to do about it, and most importantly, who makes the ultimate decision (i.e. who holds power). In other words, political consciousness is a pretty natural part of mental life for humans in a society. It’s essential for working together without fighting.
I don’t think being apolitical is natural. On the contrary, being apolitical is always a state that is imposed. Our brains are wired to feel good when we have control over our lives and our environment, when we can make choices. Children start to assert personal responsibility and seek independent choices around the age of 2 or 3, a phase often referred to as the ‘I can do it myself’ stage. If parents competently introduce democratic practices at this time – offering reasonable options and supporting kids’ autonomy – their child will quickly develop increased control, decision-making and separateness. When kids get together, they quickly start inventing hierarchies and rules for their games and activities, which, to me, is a prototype of political activity. At the next level, society and what children are taught in nursery and schools also play a role. When you are taught to know rather than to think, to remain silent rather than to question, and are punished for free thought and creativity – that deliberately undermines the healthy development of your political consciousness and responsibility. Further political repression makes it worse.
But besides the stick, there’s a carrot. Both I and many Russians I’ve spoken to over the past year and a half have taken the bait of ‘morality’: politics is terrible, and you want to be a good person, don’t you? It’s an ancient technique: the Christian morality of humbly accepting whatever comes your way has been used by those in power for fifteen hundred years to convince people that rebellion, fighting for power, violent protests and revolutions are evil and sinful.
So anyway, I think that for as long as humans have had political consciousness, we’ve had people fighting to repress it. Because wherever you find one smart, politically conscious guy, you’ll find competitors – and together, they can even compete with the beneficiaries of the current status quo. If you want to break down this process to the most primitive, atomic level, I highly recommend Frans de Waal’s book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes.
Could you share more about how bojemoi!, the joint project with your husband, began? What’s its current status?
This project was born alongside our falling in love and likely reflects the psychological tendencies of a young couple to fully merge: we abandoned our individual names, adopted a shared one, and created paintings together. We were visual artists, initially on the side of ‘art for art’s sake’. However, we quickly realised we wanted to convey important spiritual and social messages, so we worked in posters and illustration for a while. Our particular artistic crisis took a material form. A lack of funds for supplies had led us to doing digital media, and from there, we began earning money through illustrations. After a few years, we realised we were essentially renting out our talent to promote other people’s meaningless products and ideas, even though we had done our best to avoid commissions that would cause harm (like cigarette adverts, for example).
By 2017–18, we both had transitioned to writing because we had our own stories to tell (and we still do). The 2023 iteration of bojemoi is a modest kitchen production where we created the first season of a podcast, bojemoi.viina, about the full-scale invasion. We’re preparing for the second season and hope to expand into video production. We’ve decided that we are not going to service other people’s ideas anymore, and that politics absolutely is our business. Well, better late than never.
When was the last time you visited Russia? Is your family there?
The last time I visited Russia was a month before the full-scale invasion, for my uncle’s funeral. On New Year’s Eve, heavily intoxicated, he got lost on Moscow’s commuter train system. It seems he nearly froze on the platform in the -30°C weather, and then was struck by a train while trying to leave.
I set aside a week for the visit to help my parents handle this complicated death. It was not easy to get his body back – both because of the nature of the death and because of the holidays. I spent New Year’s Eve staring at a photo of his corpse sent for identification, a haunting echo of how I would spend the next year and a half – looking at photo and video evidence of Russian war crimes, military deaths and countless other horrors. That’s how I started 2022. And yes, almost all of my family remain in Russia.
What role does your diary play in your life, and how do you feel about sharing your thoughts?
I began keeping my diary on the second day of the full-scale invasion. That morning, a rocket struck a nearby building, shattering all the balconies, and a Russian plane was shot down over our neighbourhood. A friend sent me a photo of the bloody remains of the pilot. The air alerts were not yet in place; Air Defence were working round the clock as Russian troops advanced towards Kyiv. I did actually think I might die, and there was a pretty high chance of that happening. I suppose I just wanted someone to know what I was thinking before I died. The diary quickly became my routine, my way of dealing with all the disturbing experiences of the day. Over time, I realised that I could use it for self-improvement and to document my transformation. It’s become a matter of personal responsibility.
In the first year of the full-scale invasion, my audience quadrupled. I think the first growth was in my Russian audience, as there was so little coverage of what was happening here – despite my writing being far from journalistic neutrality. Later, I had an influx of Ukrainian readers, because I was dissecting Russian consciousness in the context of military aggression. That was the most pressing question in those first six months: what the hell is wrong with them? Everyone in Ukraine was trying to figure out what was wrong with us Russians.
Usually when I get thank-you notes, people tell me my entries made them cry. I don’t know how that works or why people follow me. I know that lots of people have unfollowed my channel because it’s hard to read. (Sometimes they later re-follow me and tell me why they left.) I’m okay with people sharing my content, although I don’t understand precisely how it works.
I’ve been reading your thoughts on art. Do you think it’s even possible to create anything artistic these days?
When people talk about possible and impossible, I always get confused by the lack of a conditional. Just about everything is possible; the question is, what’s the point? In the context of our previous conversation, I would say it is important to me that art objects are not merely moulds to fill with unexamined content, whether the artist’s or someone else’s. Creative writing and visual art are just a languages; you can use them to say whatever you want. The question is, what do you want to say?
The problem with language is that we are unaware of it, just as a fish is unaware of water, even though it couldn’t move without water and a grasp of hydrodynamics. The same applies to art: if we don’t understand what and why we perceive as beautiful or ugly, funny or sad, sublime or base, we become like a hedgehog laden with all kinds of parasites, other people’s narratives that hide out between its quills. This is especially the case if we are unaware of our political subjecthood and art’s political context (i.e., the relationship of our artistic language to power dynamics).
Overall, I would respond this way: in my view, artists from Russia, particularly those who are from Moscow and/or ethnically Russian, need to pursue self-reflection and non–Russian-based education at a much deeper level. Because Russian culture, culture in the broadest sense, is in deep crisis. In front of our eyes, it’s manufacturing fascism, xenophobia, repression and torture domestically and occupation, genocide and war crimes abroad. It’s a dead culture. I can’t be the only one who felt something inside of me die after the full-scale invasion.
I am chained to the decaying corpse of the culture that produced me.
It is a culture that has made us into fungi, or worse, maggots, wriggling around under its noxious fumes. Metaphorically speaking, I would say that people who belong to this conventional Russian culture have the karmic duty of digesting this poisonous decaying body with the powers of their creative reflection, breaking down and reflecting on all these horrible and rotten things and gnawing through all the militaristic-fascist scabbed skin in order to polish it to ivory and return it to the world as something critically rethought. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a choice: either you drag that rotting corpse with you forever, spreading its stench everywhere, or you humbly take on the role of a mushroom, and that’s that.
What news sources are you following right now, if any?
British Intelligence and the American Institute for the Study of War are my go-to sources for military analysis. For updates on Russian missile activity and planning my day, I follow the Telegram channels Nikolayevsky Vanek (run by Vitalii Kim, head of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration) and Totalna Zrada. For broader Ukrainian news, I rely on Suspilne, NV, and Ukraine Now. I read Meduza and Stalingulag for news from Russia. I also watch clips of Olga Skabeeva’s propaganda show to keep abreast of Ruscist sentiments.
Tell me more about your flowers and your cat. Do they help you cope with the situation?
They don’t do jack for me, and even when there’s no shelling, the cat still wakes me up in the middle of the night! Just kidding. I love my plants. My oldest is now six years old. He almost died once, and I spent year a year getting him back on his feet, since he was my 30th-birthday present to Jdanov. He was our only plant for a while, this bay laurel: a real survivor, very inspiring. Now I have about 50 pots and counting, because I’ve discovered plant regeneration: if you kill them (cut them), but then put them in a growth medium (soil or water), they sprout back. It’s very fulfilling. Jdanov says that the plants changed his perception one time when we were getting bombed: we were barricading the windows, and he suggested we make an extra layer with the flowerpots. I refused and said I wasn’t going to let a rocket kill my plants. After that he saw them in a different light; he said he agreed that living for a being you care about is more meaningful than just trying to survive.
We got our cat from a foster home in early December 2022, the second month of really intense rocket shelling and Shahed drone attacks as the Russians destroyed key Ukrainian urban infrastructure. It was getting pretty chilly, and the power and heating often went out. We’d sit at home wrapped up in seven layers of clothes, lighting candles, cooking on a camp stove, and thinking about how to save and comfort someone else during this awful time. When Kafka the cat showed up at our place, it was the first time since the full-scale invasion that Jdanov started smiling, and we had flashes of pure joy.
I’m not really sure, but it feels like Kafka got a sleep disorder after the May–June shelling. The shelling was exactly every other night, but the air raid sirens sounded almost every night. We would all go out into the hallway at the same time every night, about 4 a.m. Kafka would come out and sit with us. When the shelling stopped, she started meowing in the hallway every night at 4 a.m. She couldn’t calm down until everyone got up. Now, two months later, she is doing much better.
You wrote that you exist at a crossroads between Russian and Ukrainian identity. After years of living in Ukraine, and then after the full-scale invasion began, how did the dynamics of this intersection change? How do you describe your identity in Ukraine?
I have never identified as Ukrainian, even though I have Ukrainian roots on my father’s side (he is from Poltava) and a Ukrainian surname on my passport (albeit with a Russifying misspelling), and even though I have lived in Kyiv since 2008. Not that I identified as ethnically or politically Russian; those just meant I had a certain passport and ‘Slavic’ appearance. I don’t have a strong gender identity either. I’ve always been more concerned with abstract ideas like ‘Am I a philosopher or a writer?’ or ‘Am I a writer or an artist?’ when it comes to my identity.
I only started exploring my national and linguistic identity after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine, because of the nature of the war: it was an attack by imperialism and Russian nationalism on Ukrainian national independence. Only then did I start to see myself as a Russian citizen and ethnically Russian, meaning like, a product of living as those things. This was part of my political protest and a tool of struggle for me. If I can deconstruct my experience, I can help others follow this path. My passport is Russian, so in Ukraine, I am none other than a Russian citizen. That’s how I introduce myself.
Ukrainian identity is a deeply intimate place inside me that appeared after I learned Ukrainian and studied Muscovy and Ukraine’s history from a Ukrainian viewpoint. It is my inner sanctuary, like a bathyscaphe with an air supply that I can use to dive into the toxic abyss of Russian identity and safely explore it. It’s the space where I go to take a step back and view myself from the outside.
I haven’t left Kyiv for a single day since February 24, 2022, and I’ve experienced everything that Ukrainians from Kyiv have experienced. In the spring of the first year of the invasion, we could hear the approaching artillery explosions on the left bank of the Dnieper (the city centre is on the right bank), where the Russian army was advancing. There were a few days when it seemed that the Ukrainian Army would not hold their positions. We were afraid that they would blow up the bridges to protect the city centre and we would end up under Russian occupation. We didn’t know about Bucha yet. That only came out after the Russian troops were driven back from Kyiv. But even then, I felt fear and disgust at the thought of being around Russians who had become murderers and war criminals. I was sure that they would think it was a good idea, very convenient, to kill me and make it look like I was a ‘Russian victim of the Ukrainians’.
This is a Ukrainian experience, one that Russians do not share. The Ukrainians I know tell me that it’s made me Ukrainian. I don’t feel I have the right to be called that or to wear symbols of Ukrainian identity like traditional embroidered shirts until we end the war, the Putin regime and the imperialist relations that bind the territories now known as ‘the Russian Federation’.
Is it important for Russia to resist the war? What do you see as the resistance’s way forward? What can Russians still living there, under the dictatorship, do to help Ukraine?
I think the anti-war resistance in Russia today is more than just ‘anti-war’. It is part of an anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian resistance, part of a worldwide struggle. Russia is not the only authoritarian volcano out there, it was just the first to start spewing the lava of war. But if there is no anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist resistance around the world, there will be more such eruptions.
I have no idea what life is like for members of the anti-fascist resistance in Russia or what they are dealing with, so it is hard for me to know what would be effective for them. Perhaps all of us should be thinking globally and linking up with like-minded people around the world, recognising that we are part of a global struggle that is unlikely to end any time soon. Although, if Germany’s example is anything to go by, the future of fascism depends to a large extent on the fate of modern Russia and the elite responsible for the war.
I’ve noticed that Ukrainians and Russians often have very different perspectives on the full-scale war. The 2022 invasion came as a shock, a surprise and an extraordinary horror for many Russians. For many Ukrainians, this was a shockingly cruel but natural continuation not just of 2014 but of the whole history of our relations since a Russia-ruled empire emerged 300 years ago. Many Russians believe that if you kick Putin out, Russia will change completely, things will be just brilliant. For many Ukrainians, it is clear that Russia’s resentment, isolationism, ethnic Russian racism at home and imperialist fantasies could bring another ‘strongman’ promising to restore dominance over former colonies to power. Which of the former republics will then be weaker than Russia is, of course, another question.
So, I think that the cultural, political and economic crisis, the crisis of power, in Russia –all taking place in the context of its own war – is excellent ground for trying to de-imperialise, denazify and demilitarise Russians’ consciousness. We need to start developing new narratives, formulas and solutions now. Ukraine may become a militarily powerful nation with security guarantees, but the former Soviet republics and peoples within the current Russian Federation will not be safe or able to thrive as long as Russians accept a state of constant war, xenophobia, and resentment.
Of course, the most important thing from Ukrainians’ perspective at the moment is to help Ukraine and its defenders. I cannot give advice on what to do or how because in a repressive dictatorship, everyone has to decide for themselves how much risk they are willing to take in the struggle for their values. We should all fight together, but, as anti-fascist writer Hans Fallada wrote in the novel of that name, it will still be the case that ‘every man dies alone’.
You engage in political dialogue with your Russian subscribers, both those who are anti-war and those who are apolitical. Why is it essential for you to continue this conversation? Where do you find the strength to do so? What, if anything, annoys you about this communication? Has there been a case where people have changed their minds on an issue due to your influence and have told you about it?
Ah yes, fate forced me to become an influencer, and now I get paid to shape people’s opinions! To be a bit more serious, it’s my responsibility. It’s the price I pay for my social capital. The conversations also facilitate my work: I find feedback on my writing extremely useful. It’s a data stream that allows me to find the best way into the wrinkles of the collective brain to install the implant of political consciousness. I draw my strength from a sense of duty that, as the group Krovostok sings, can make you lose your fucking mind in an instant. That’s why I haven’t written much about Russians lately. I’m working on an essay about the dangers of apolitical approaches to psychology and psychotherapy using Russia as an example, but it’s going to be a very long read that will make some people happy and others butthurt. (Well, unless all the suffering Russians have already unfollowed me by then. We’ll see.)
After a year and a half, nothing makes me angry anymore. However, the last time I yelled out loud was after an online conversation during Russia’s autumn mobilisation, when some Russians were seriously trying to tell me they had it worse than Ukrainians. That doesn’t make me angry; it literally made me yell out of a mixture of surprise, outrage, and disgust. I interact with nominally anti-Putin Russians, who, while not necessarily reasonable, at least oppose military invasions, mass killings and occupation. I understand that their political naivety stems more from ignorance and the pervasive national disease of apoliticism and imperialism (which I also grappled with for a long time) than from intentional malice. I find it useful for myself to dive into this abyss from time to time, to see from the outside things I may have overlooked in myself reflected in my interlocutors.
That said, many subscribers have always had a clear-cut position and have always supported me.
I deliberately set up a poll to measure my impact, and 15% of respondents said that my blog has changed something in them since the full-scale invasion began. When I asked what exactly, people mentioned psychological and political changes.
Psychological change meant moving out of toxic shame, accepting our collective responsibility for how the situation develops, and stopping narcissistic ruminations a-la ‘but I’m a good person, so Ukrainians should like me’.
Political change primarily meant politicising people who had not previously recognised themselves as political subjects. I had experienced my own politicisation, as well as that of friends and relatives, and I wanted to share that with others who were seeking political awareness.
Among other significant points, people highlighted the importance of learning about tools of political action and the broad range of tactics available to them even in the Russian context. In particular, they emphasised the critical role of donations to the Ukrainian Army as the only force currently capable of meaningfully fighting back against and damaging the Russian regime. I believe that if Russians wish to benefit from outcomes achieved at the cost of Ukrainian lives, they owe the Ukrainian military just as much as do we, the people they are defending. Russians have got to start donating yesterday. Thirdly, many Russians, including those living outside Russia, shared that the blog helped them recognise imperialist, xenophobic, racist and fascist tendencies within themselves –and begin to eradicate them, bit by bit.
Does a feminist perspective matter in times of war? What do you think is the biggest difference between Ukrainian and Russian feminist perspectives on war and violence at the moment?
I’m not particularly involved in feminism or feminist activism, and I don’t really have any brilliant insights for FAS members. I can only speak about things of personal interest to me.
Feminist perspectives on discrimination, male privilege, gender violence and internal misogyny gave me a framework for understanding the colonial nature of Russian military aggression. With some simplification, Ukraine is represented in this system by women who gain their independence by overcoming dependency, oppression and coercion. Russia’s unprovoked aggression is a punitive operation in an attempt to return the patriarchal status quo. Ukraine is a victim of violence and has a right to self-defence. The aggressor is to blame for the violence. Russia should be overthrown, brought to justice and made to compensate its victims. Russian feminists have been sympathetic to characterisations of Ukrainian nationalism as a struggle for emancipation and have likened Russia’s war to gender-based violence against its former colony. In the early days of the invasion, this analogy proved enlightening for many people with feminist ideals.
I am not sure how much I know about Russian feminism, but I would guess that it mainly draws on Western practice and liberal feminism. That would imply belief in two things: absolute anti-militarism and anti-nationalism.
The first difference from Ukraine is that many Ukrainian feminists have enlisted in the army to resist Russian aggression. They are fighting not against ‘the war’ as such but for Ukraine’s victory and for women’s rights both in the context of the war and within the armed forces. For more on this, see Hanna Hrytsenko’s article ‘Feminism and the Russo-Ukrainian war, 2014–present’ [in Ukrainian]. I am not sure if there exist hardline pacifist feminists in Russia who condemn not only Russian military aggression but all wars, including Ukraine’s war of self-defence. But in case there are, let me remind you that being able to be a pacifist is a privilege of living in a war-free zone. Choosing to engage in anti-war activism rather than being drawn into active fighting is a privilege reserved for those who do not live in regions or countries experiencing active conflict, for those who identify with the community perpetrating military aggression rather than the one under attack.
The second difference between Russia and Ukraine is that the history of Ukrainian feminism is deeply intertwined with the history of Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainian women have traditionally been involved in the struggle for Ukrainian independence, which was a precondition for their emancipation. It is likely that many Russian feminists, unless they have intentionally studied the issue, see nationalism only as a far-right chauvinist phenomenon. As I’ve witnessed, this can be a source of misunderstanding between, say, liberal feminists in Moscow and women fighting for both their rights and the national independence of their peoples/countries. I believe the relationship between Ukrainian feminism and democratic Ukrainian nationalism could be a useful example for many Russian feminists. It might help them break free of the official Kremlin narrative of (imperialist) fear of all nationalisms and collaborate with women from nations oppressed by Moscow.
In fact, I rather doubt that Russians will ever understand the systemic problems that led to the war with Ukraine without paying due attention to the decolonial movement within the country, and vice versa: studying the history of Ukraine’s struggle for independence makes one rethink the widespread (within Russia) stereotype that being a ‘big country’ is inherently good and justifies Moscow’s use of force to preserve colonial relations with its peoples and republics. And feminism gives us just the lens to see this quite clearly.
[1] Translator’s note: While Russian does not have articles, Russian speakers can use prepositions to imply that Ukraine is merely a region within a larger empire – or that it is an independent country.
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