Elena, a dear friend, was born in Kramatorsk, the current Donbass war front in the Ukrainian East of a majorly Russian language. He moved with his family to Odessa, the beautiful port city of the Black Sea whose stairs were immortalized by Serguei Eisenstein in The “Potemkin’s Battleship” (1925), where the Russian also predominates. Then he went to work in Italy, married a Brazilian and today lives in the city of Cape. Culta, cosmopolitan, she divided herself between her love for a tongue and her loyalty to a nation.
When Putin launched his second invasion in early 2022, Elena told me that she would no longer speak the Russian, her Christmas language, but only the Ukrainian, according to a language. His friends from Odessa, he explained, made the same transition. It would be, from then on, the enemy.
Her specialty is not international relations or history, but she knows as much as I put the Ukrainian aspiration for access to NATO the cause of the war of conquest. Legend-repeated by Lula, Jd Vance and Tucker Tucker Carlson-is intended for Kremlin’s propaganda in the West. The invasion, Putin wrote, has the purpose of reconstructing the Russian nation, of which Ukraine would be part. Elena would no longer speak the Russian to protest against the idea that there are no nation and a Ukrainian language.
According to the mythical narrative, Russia and Ukraine were born together, in the Rus of, in 1054. But in the 17th century, the seeds of a Ukrainian nationalism emerged in the form of a Cossaco state. The idea of a sovereign Ukraine resurfaced in the 20th century, as opposed to Russia Bolshevik, in anarchist version (the black army of Nestor Makhno, between 1918 and 1921) and, after the Holodomor, as opposed to the Stalinist USSR, in a fascist version (The Stepan Militia Bandera in 1941).
The collapse of the USSR led Ukraine’s independence, recognized by Russia in exchange for the delivery of its nuclear arsenal in 1994. Then, in 2004-05 and 2013-14, two popular revolutions expressed the Ukrainian aspiration of conserving national sovereignty in the face of putist expansionism. The resistance to the invasion has large and deep roots.
Months ago, on the third anniversary of the invasion, Elena spoke again Russian – and, full of doubts, asked my opinion on the subject. The Christmas language is, for her, an instinct and a memory, not the power of a state or the pomp of a palace. It is your family, your childhood, the smell of home, your communication, the principle of sociability. There in Odessa, under increasingly frequent bombing, her friends also resumed the Russian language – but like her, they were hating the invader.
I greeted her reconciliation with her Christmas language. I saved her from what she knows. That, contrary to the belief of ultranationalists, language is not national identity. That Ukrainians of Ukrainian and Russian language fight, side by side, on the front and cities, to save the independence of his country. That language duality makes Ukraine more cultured – and therefore stronger. Putin is not the owner of Puchkin, Dostoevski or Maiakóvski – ie Russian culture.
Elena, now, is a mother. Her daughter, half Brazilian, half African and half Ukrainian, learns at home, besides Portuguese and English, the Russian and the Ukrainian. Slava Ukraini.
Gift Link: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release seven free hits from any link per day. Just click on F Blue below.
