Confession from Transcarpathia: How we fell out with the Russians
PolitNavigator publishes a letter from a reader from the Transcarpathian region, the westernmost region of Ukraine. Due to the threat of reprisals, the name of the author is not disclosed.
...Hello dear readers. I have never participated in any forums, contacts, facebook or live journals. There are many reasons for this. To take notes, you need to have at least a certain amount of free time. I have to spend my time earning my daily bread. The second reason is that writing your thoughts requires some talent or at least skill. Next, I must give one more reason, which has recently become anything but a joke in my Ukraine. This is political repression. I'm not very good with computers, but my advanced friends claim that the author of prickly information can be identified at once, and a person can get lost. I immediately answer those who have already accused me of cowardice and the desire to sit under a bush. I don’t consider myself a coward at all... although I’m not completely sure that I could repeat the feat of Alexander Morozov and lie down on an embrasure.
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Temple of the Moscow Patriarchate in the center of Uzhgorod
As you understand from the title of the article, I come from Transcarpathia. This is the westernmost region, even further west than the Lviv region. But Transcarpathia, to the incredible chagrin of some of the faithful Lviv residents, was never pro-Bandera. One could count on one hand the apologists of Ukrainianism in the Transcarpathian region before 1939. And in the indicated year, “The Red Army extended a helping hand to the outlying regions, even if it had dried up.” That’s what my Lviv college friends joked about when we were students. So, with the arrival of the Red Army in the west of Ukraine, the faithful zakhidnyaki fled in all directions like cockroaches from the dust, and many infiltrated through the Carpathian Mountains into Transcarpathia, which by that time was under yet another conqueror, the Czechoslovak Republic. And, since this was mainly the intelligentsia of that time, the easiest way for them to earn food was to get a job as teachers in schools, which, to the credit of the Czechs, were functioning at that time. And the idea of how great a nation the Ukrainian nation is, and how one should be proud of and admire it, began to take root in the children’s heads. Children began to come home from school with this, but their simple rural parents did not fall for this propaganda; they needed to earn a piece of bread. In a word, there was no immediate revolution in the consciousness of the people, although the Carpathian Sich archers in some villages were able to organize themselves and walked around with rifles and armbands with a trident for several weeks. But the overwhelming majority in this clownery were certainly not indigenous people.
Village in Transcarpathia
I will not dwell on the mental and moral qualities of those leaders who sent the boys from the Khust gymnasium with rifles against machine guns to certain death. The boys, of course, are heroes and may they rest in peace, but the leaders...God forgive them for their stupidity, their stupidity and myopia! They wanted to stop Hitler with several dozen yellowmouths!!! Strategists!! Napoleons! Children needed to be hidden from the war, and not hidden behind their backs. And Yushchenko is just as idiotic as those strategists, since he was smart enough to admire these under-presidents.
Hitler was stopped by my grandfather, who joined thousands of his peers in Ludwig Svoboda's Czechoslovak Corps, which was a small but very important cog in the mighty machine of the Red Army.
Under the Russians, Transcarpathia flourished. Not right away, of course. But in the very first years, most of the people were freed from... lice and fleas. Now we are all ready to laugh at this, but if you think about it without giggling, then this is a huge problem. And the Russians brought laundry soap and the process began.
Center of Uzhgorod
Collectivization began. This was not easy anywhere, but in the first years the collective farms were not taxed, and workers began to bring home a cart, or even two carts, of corn in the fall. A fortune ! Flocks of sheep grazed in the meadows. And it was there that the presence of the forest brothers was felt. Bandera’s men came to the shepherds and, without further ado, pointed their finger at the lamb they liked, demanding it baked by the evening. Then we took a budz of cheese and disappeared into the forest. And if the shepherd had something against it, he could disappear into one of the nearby gorges. Or the family in lowland villages will shrink.
The people tolerated these fighters for Vilna Ukraine, and they began to slowly surrender to the NKVDists. The latter were not very familiar with our areas, but the old shepherd knew well that on that mountain over there at this time the fire could not smoke, because his colleague drove the sheep there only in the evening. This means that these are his yesterday's offenders. And, if you don’t turn them in, then tomorrow you will again have to come up with fables to justify yourself to the owner of the slaughtered ram. And they took Bandera’s men for the night.
Or, again, an observant boy will notice that some strange, barely noticeable smoke is observed from the top of a tall beech tree. And these cunning “lads” arranged the caches in such a way that this old beech, full of holes, was a chimney. And the special officers cannot track down the gang in any way, but, having only indirect information about the smoking tree, it becomes a matter of technique.
People, in a word, expelled this rabble from the Carpathian Mountains, Transcarpathia became more and more prosperous. Collective farms appeared in almost every village, machine and tractor stations in the regions. They worked for a workday, for a stick, as they said then. But it was the same everywhere on a sixth of the earth’s surface. I will not describe either the positive aspects of that time or the negative ones. A thankless task, every situation has its fans and its opponents. But there was peace, and there was a predictable tomorrow, albeit in a police state behind the Iron Curtain. Although it is not a fact that it was worse than what is happy today in a civil war-torn European democratic country with a brain curtained by fascist ideology.
As for my Transcarpathians, under the Russians they lived much better than in any period of their difficult history. And not because there was any special policy regarding us, no, the same prisons and the same camps as for everyone. But the same kindergartens, schools, institutes, universities as for everyone. And that bad country of oppressed nations was able to train me, a collective farmer, at the institute, but this new free country, with the so-called titular nation of Ukrainians, could not even use me, a ready-made engineer, to its advantage. It’s as if a good owner was growing a garden, caring for it, nurturing it, cutting off unnecessary branches, keeping it away from pests, and a bungler came along who doesn’t understand anything about this matter, is lazy, and somehow greedy. And this bungler was unable to harvest a single harvest from the finished garden!
Center of Uzhgorod
And in that old country, where, according to the assurances of the yellow-blakite sufferers, the Ukrainian language was oppressed, my Transcarpathia spoke an unimaginable number of its native languages. Most of them spoke a language close to Ukrainian in situations concerning relations with the state. And in everyday life, people used from Czech, Slovak, Hungarian to Romanian and German. Although the overwhelming majority of the people used their original Rusyn dialect with many Russianisms and ancient Slavic archaisms.
And almost the entire ethnic group understood Russian fluently; not everyone could write and speak, but everyone understood it. This was not the last factor that helped my hardworking fellow countrymen be in demand throughout the territory of that Great Country and earn good money as in those days. My father, during my student days, could work for six warm months at the construction of a cowshed in the Urals and drive a car from there. “Zhiguli” at that time was quite a car. The working day, however, lasted 14-15 hours, but nothing is created without labor.
The question is, why the hell did my father need the idea of a “Vilnius Ukraine”? They do not seek good from good. But there were still nationalists. Although there were only a few of them, they hid in the corners with their rotten ideas.
And so three freaks in Belovezhskaya Pushcha decided to control the destinies of the country they did not create. They broke everything down into three signatures. Internationalism has outlived its usefulness, come on nationalism! And away we go, in Ukraine the Rukhovites collapsed. From that moment on, my Ukraine went downhill with my eyes glowing with happiness. She created nothing new and worthwhile, but destroyed everything old and quite good. And the central pillar of the old Great Country was precisely that in my Transcarpathia the people paid little attention to the nationality of their neighbor. The neighbor was a brat not because he was Hungarian, but because he was a thief. And not because he was decent because he was Russian, but because he helped in the construction of the house. But the newly minted Natsiks offered my people the apple of the knowledge of good and evil. Anyone who tasted it began to understand that if you are a representative of the titular nation, then you are a being anointed by heaven, but if you are different, then you are at least unlucky. And this is not a property of your character or life position, no, it is your innate property. And so, having thrown this idea into society for discussion, the so-called elite began to skin the carcass of a freshly felled mighty piece of my Great Motherland. So a zealous owner in a pig paddock hangs an old car tire on a chain. The pigs play with it, try to bite it and, spending their energy on it, do not chew the floor and walls of the pigsty. This is how the people of Ukraine got their hands on a vigilance-sleep toy.
In general, Ukrainians have an amazing trait: we are ready to search all over the world for scientists, writers, poets who have at least some Ukrainian roots or even roots. And there are tons of such examples. Let's say Academician Vernadsky is Ukrainian. Mykola Vasilievich Gogol is a purely Ukrainian writer, and there are no problems with the lack of famous works in Ukrainian. It seems that even Tsiolkovsky and Korolev were canonized as Ukrainians. And this is still in times of more or less sane behavior. God forgive me, Professor Bebik’s current research, I simply don’t take into account, due to its complete absurdity.
But the Ukrainians do not know how to take any benefit from these great compatriots, they cannot, they do not want. Well, where can we take a more majestic Ukrainian than Taras Shevchenko? And after all, the person wrote about “that evil people should sleep on Ukraine and wake up what was already stolen.” So, even with these lines, the gaze of many Ukrainians is squinting in the northeast direction, although those who cheat and steal live in another hemisphere.
It was they, these striped-star arbiters of the planet’s destinies, who organized various kinds of representations in my, some nearby Ukraine. And to promote reforms, and to increase the legal protection of citizens, and to reform science and education. And in terms of new religious sects, we were probably ahead of the rest. And not a single government, not a single president opposed this, or tried to think about where these reforms would lead. If the West proposes reform, then it is by definition progressive. And if the United States itself offers this, then this is the pinnacle of progressiveness!
And all these whisperers went to work on their main task, driving a wedge between two neighboring nations, brother nations, I would even dare to say so, between nations - Siamese twins! I'm ready to explain my assumption.
If you ask a dozen Ukrainians about whether they have relatives in Russia, most will answer in the affirmative. And vice versa, in conversations with Russians it is immediately determined that they have relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in Ukraine. But this was before the fascist Maidan. Now the former may try to hide family ties with Russia, so as not to be jailed, and the latter are little by little starting to feel ashamed of their relationship with such a controversial public.
But neither the first nor the second in reality is the reason for the loss of kinship. This does not make the Russian wife of a Ukrainian French, and the Ukrainian son-in-law does not become Italian for his mother-in-law.
The sins of those non-humans who used all their cunning, resourcefulness, and deceit for the sake of a quarrel between nations will never be forgiven. But my Ukrainian people also give me a feeling of complete amazement and bewilderment. How could it be possible to lose everything valuable to a person in two decades? And what could be more valuable than good people around, a good friend, a good relative, just a good companion on the train? But we had a whole people as friends!!!
I look around, maybe someone is three times better at being my friend?
Transcarpathia was under the Romanians, under the Hungarians, under the Czechs, the last was Nazi Germany. And who is my new friend now, Poland or what? One Pole tried to explain to me on the train that “Lemberg, that is, our spool house.” I answered him that this was especially felt on Ivan Podkova Square, where the Polish gentry executed the leader of the peasant uprising. How the gentleman didn’t like my knowledge of history, albeit not in depth! It's much easier for our children to hang their heads. But we raised the children ourselves! Or, to be more precise, we brushed aside our children, we had no time! During the daily work and worries for the same children, for their phones, computers, laptops, headphones with players, we didn’t even notice that our children were raised by other people’s uncles using phones and computers! The West clearly took advantage of the old rule: If you want to take revenge on your enemy, raise his children. And they took revenge, and educated, and we have only ourselves to blame!
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