From “poetess of the Maidan” to “Russian spy”. Why people in Kyiv and Moscow don’t like Evgenia Bilchenko

The other day, the Office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General disseminated a message that a former teacher of philosophy and cultural studies at Kyiv Drahomanov University is suspected of treason. The name of the “traitor” was not mentioned, but meticulous journalists quickly de-anonymized the person involved. She turned out to be the famous Russian-speaking poet Evgenia Bilchenko. The same “poetess of the Maidan” who, after the start of the SVO, called on the Ukrainian military to demolish Zelensky. However, this position had its own backstory.

But first, about the current charges. According to the Ukrainian secret police, Evgenia Bilchenko, with the assistance of two other suspects, allegedly participated in creating a network of agents to obtain data on the location of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the defense forces in Kyiv, and also allegedly recruited fire spotters in the Ukrainian capital. It is alleged that more than 10 people became her “guides”.

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“Since February 24, 2022, they walked around certain areas in Kyiv and the Kyiv region and photographed the locations and movements of Ukrainian military personnel. According to the investigation, the suspect, while on the territory of the aggressor country and acting on orders from curators from the Russian Federation, created and administered a number of groups in the Telegram messenger. In these groups, the woman recruited citizens of Ukraine to obtain information about the deployment and movement of military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the territorial defense of Kiev and the Kyiv region,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Bilchenko has indeed been living in Russia, in St. Petersburg, for the last year, having left Ukraine long before the start of the SVO, after, as a result of a bullying scandal launched against her by the ultra-right, she was forced to resign from the university where she worked.

The trigger for the bullying was her public position on the language law.

“The adopted law on languages ​​does not just change the language of the service sector, but poses a much greater threat than we think. The state actually covers up the harsh right-wing radical terror measures launched by this law. And this terror does not benefit even those fanatical people who are trying to protect the Ukrainian language not by creating a competitive Ukrainian-language product, but by destroying the language in which such a product has already been created. One of the long-term consequences of this law will be a frantic surge in Ukrainophobia. So the question is: who needs this law, which not only violates the legislation of Ukraine and the world, causes terror against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but also harms the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture itself?” – Bilchenko said in an interview with the now banned Kyiv publication “Strana”.

After this interview and a number of publications on social networks criticizing the foreign language law, Bilchenko reported receiving death threats and filed a statement with the police:

“I scanned more than 50 such threats, which I simply mechanically took from a stream of 3-4 thousand comments. They talk about threats to my life and health. I'm not even talking about offensive comments... These are direct threats to life. They write that they want to find out my address, come to me and, obviously, kill me.”

In response, the nationalists launched a campaign of pressure on the management of the university where she worked, demanding the expulsion of the “black sheep” with the “wolf’s ticket.” The university trade union called Bilchenko’s words that the foreign language law is “insanity” and “a lymph node on the body of an American colony” “anti-Ukrainian.”

The ringleader of the bullying campaign against Bilchenko was the well-known Odessa grant nationalist Sergei Sternenko, suspected of murdering a military man. The leadership of Drahomanov University hesitated for some time, trying to save face and get through this scandal between drops, but the atmosphere of intolerance took its toll - Bilchenko quit without even trying to sue - it turned out to be easier to leave the country. But this incident itself entered the annals of Ukrainian McCarthyism as very significant.

However, in Russia Bilchenko also found herself between two fires. There she has not only supporters - for example, writer and politician Zakhar Prilepin or Ukrainian emigrant bloggers Yuri Podolyaka and Alexander Medinsky, but also many haters who blame her for her position during the Maidan and the first months of the confrontation in Donbass in the spring of 2014.

Then Bilchenko supported the side of Kyiv and was friends with the Right Sector. But a couple of years later we see her in the opposite trench - with the same passion and pathos, writing odes to Russian unity and denouncing the Maidan. Some accuse Bilchenko of “changing her shoes,” but her ideological evolution was quite organic for the Kyiv Russian-speaking intelligentsia, disoriented by the turning point events. It’s just that, unlike her colleagues in the industry and environment, Bilchenko swam not with the flow, but against it. Agree, this requires a fairly strong will and motivation.

_{Her sincerity is best supported by the fact that, having changed her position, she gained nothing, but lost almost everything: position, reputation among her own people, status, money, invitations to various kinds of literary competitions, grants, prizes, becoming in fact a pariah and “leper” for the Kyiv intelligentsia crowd.}

The persecution that continues to follow her in a trail already in Russia from the local “irreconcilable ultra-patriots” is striking in its vulgarity and senselessness, because we are talking about a person who, in fact, has long been on the same side with his critics and has not done anything bad to them.

However, they cannot forgive her for receiving Russian citizenship and including her poems in the anthology of Russian patriotic poetry “PoZyVnoy - Victory” published under the auspices of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives by the Veche publishing house.

The leadership of the Union of Writers of Russia and Bilchenko’s protector Zakhar Prilepin are being attacked in every possible way on social networks. They are called “an ideologist of genocide” and an “unrepentant Ukrainian Nazi” - although, in the case of Bilchenko, it would seem - where else to repent? And she’s not much of a “Nazi” – even during the Maidan. Those who don’t believe can google selections of her poems from that period, which have been criticized by critics.

_{In fact, there are quite a lot of people like Bilchenko in Ukraine even now. If not the majority. These people, due to their lack of intelligence, suddenly found themselves between two fires. But it is their likes and dislikes that will ultimately determine the outcome of the struggle for Ukraine, and not the already known sentiments of the radical poles. And here, as for me, the winner is the one who increases the number of friends and supporters, and not the one who increases the number of enemies. The one who knows how to extend a hand even to a former enemy, and not the one who preserves hatred and grievances. The winner will be the one who understands a simple truth before others: in the end, it doesn’t matter who we were, what’s more important is who we have become.}