With one foot in the Soviet past and the other in Europe

What is the other side?

It’s people… how should I say it? Those with pro-Soviet inclinations. The orange/black insignia, the Ribbon of Saint George, is used by Moscow and by pro-Russian separatists, such as those in Donetsk. This symbol has been forbidden in Ukraine for two years. This is why the policeman in the film asked those wearing this badge to remove it. That said, I definitely don’t think that one “side” is better than the other. My film is about the people who came to the May 9th victory parade to lay flowers at the monument built in the centre of Mikolayiv in memory of the war. There were very different people there. Some came to the main street of this southern Ukrainian city as part of the pro-Soviet and pro-Russian Immortal Regiment marches, while others came to create their own pro-Ukrainian march. This included very different people, right and left, liberals and conservatives. But all these people had the Ukrainian flag, and they spoke both Ukrainian and Russian. The Idea of my film was to show one day in the life of a southern Ukrainian city that was a part of the Russian and Soviet empires in the past and now is seeking a new identity.

You have a detailed knowledge of history. What is your personal background and what is your relationship with documentary?

I was educated as a journalist but I moved into documentary filmmaking. I made a few short films and am working on a feature film at the moment, which is supported by the Ukrainian Film State Agency^[1]. History is a very important part of our lives but it is very complicated. However, it is vital to understand what happened in the 20th century. Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union and is now independent. As I show in my film, I believe it is important that the country fights for its independence – because that is what is going on in Ukraine at the moment, a continuing war of independence. We have been a colony of Russia for three centuries and they don’t want us to be independent. It wasn’t easy for Russia to give independence to Poland or to Finland, and it is even harder for them to give it to the Ukraine.

Poland and Finland were never part of the Soviet Union…

No, but they were part of the Russian Empire.

Parts of them.

Like Karelia. Karelia was Finnish territory that became part of the Soviet Union. When that happened, all the Finns left the region and moved to Finland.

These territories, and I mean the whole of Eastern Europe here, were always changing hands over the centuries. The eastern part of Poland and Bessarabia, for instance, were both part of the Russian Empire and Prussia/Greater Romania, respectively. It seems to me history is always a contested topic in these territories and there is always more than just one point of view to look at it. To me this is in fact an advantage, because western views on the history of Eastern Europe tend to be more one-sided. During the “GoEast” film festival, you said that you want to live in a European country. What does that mean and how do you see the future of this region?

The future for me is democracy and liberalism. Ukraine is not a mono-national country, we have many nationalities living there, and therefore it is important to come to a decision on how to live with one another. Due to the variety of peoples present in Ukraine there are many difficult topics. We have to learn how to speak with one another. The history of the 20th century up to Brezhnev’s time in power is neglected in the current historical discourse. We have been living with too much propaganda and many topics are taboo because of this.

Aren’t we going from one extreme to another, though? Aren’t we going from Soviet propaganda to a particular western reading of history?

We do need to find our own way, that is true. All countries bordering each other have to find their own way to deal with history, as they will have the same conflicts: Ukrainian villages in Romania and Romanian villages in Ukraine, for instance. But Romanians aren’t coming to Ukraine to claim it for themselves.

Like the Russians?

Yes! In the last war the Russians wrote on their tanks “To Berlin!” Now they are writing “To Kyiv!” They want to create a “New Russia” as they did in Georgia, for example. In the Georgian War they came and took a part of Georgia; and in Transnistria it is the same. The Russian empire is alive and well. The Russians need to control territories that don’t belong to them any more. And now we are at war: the people in military uniforms in my film are the ones fighting it.

Is it Russia that’s doing this, or is it the people living in these territories that have split allegiances? After all, this is what your film is about: the generational conflict. On the one hand, you have the babushkas, such as the ones wearing the orange/black ribbon together with the veterans wearing their decorations on their chests; and on the other hand, you have the pro-European population. Are the former, the babushkas and the veterans, plainly wrong?

No, I do not think that some people are wrong and others are right. The pro-Soviet people believe in the past; the others believe in the future. You can see this from our elections, too. My film is not about the elections, it is about our identity as a nation. How do people identify themselves? With the country that won the Second World War? My grandfather was also part of this war. Once I asked him to tell me something about the war, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Others love to talk about it. Probably some of the veterans in my film belong to this group. The question is: Are they really veterans? You see, some of them could not have been in the war. How old would they have to be to be veterans of the Second World War? Most veterans are already dead. Some of them (in the parade depicted in my film) cannot be veterans. They are simply a part of the propaganda.

I was a Soviet child myself and I believed in the mottos celebrating the Soviet state since kindergarten. Today I am 41, but when I was nine, I was made a pioneer and wore a tie emblazoned with the insignia of Brest.^[2] I realise now, of course, that all this was pure ideology. Beforehand, ideology was an integral part of my life, and this included the May Day parades. Since then, however, a lot of things have changed. We had Gorbachev, perestroika, etc. A lot changed, but some people did not. Some people continued to believe in what Stalin achieved –   building a strong country, etc. For these people it does not matter how many died in the Gulags, nor the Ukrainian famine. It is very complicated, but I think we have to discuss this with each other and find a way to understand.

My feeling is that your film, indeed, shows this conflict without commentary. On the other hand, when I hear you talking about it, I feel as though you want to comment on it. As such, I get two contradictory messages: One that says “there is hope; let’s talk about this conflict”, and the other one that is very pessimistic, as shown in your film.

We should be thinking about the future, but do so with an eye on the past. That is why we have to learn the real history, one that’s not been tainted by the propaganda of school books. If we want to be a democratic country, we need to become more open. And people who only watch Russian TV, for example, don’t have enough information to do so.

Okay, let’s accept that. But do you think the Russians (although this is making a generalisation) are not aware of what you call “real” history? Haven’t they already learnt this history 30 years after the collapse of communism?

Have you seen the images from Moscow where people are laying flowers on Stalin’s grave?

This is not exactly proof that people don’t know about it, is it? It may also show they are proud of the victory in the war.

I’m sure many people are proud of the victory in the Second World War. It was a very hard war (to win). But the Soviets had a motto: Nobody should judge winners! That means we didn’t know for many years about the victims of Stalinism. Also, the newly declassified data of the real number of deaths in that war in the Soviet Union is more than 40 million. It is a huge number.

But I have to insist, have all people, both Soviet and post-Soviet, been one hundred per cent indoctrinated by propaganda? Many books, for example, have been written in Russia itself during the 1990s about the crimes of Stalin and Beria…

People ignore them, unfortunately. My mom is from Bessarabia and sometimes I go there to visit relatives. Some of them are living in the Bulgarian village just near the Moldovan border. Here villagers go to church on Sundays (the Russian Orthodox church) and have very clear-cut opinions regarding the Soviet Union – they know the state destroyed almost all the churches, but life in the Soviet Union was otherwise fine. There were no problems with Soviet tanks in Prague, nor with the war in Afghanistan. Also it is no problem to them that their children do not study nor know their native Bulgarian language, nor Ukrainian, only Russian was taught in Soviet schools. And I have arguments with members of my own family who come from there. They tell me we cannot know everything about the past, while I tell them that we could know more if we opened a book, and looked things up. But they do not. For them it’s okay that Transnistria is not a part of Moldova; and for me that is not okay.

Since we’re on the subject of western Ukraine and Moldova, let me give you Romania’s example. With 30 years of democracy, Romania veered from extreme socialism to extreme anti-communism. The result is that the country has very little proprietary industry left, and that from a mainly agricultural country for the better part of the 20th century, it got into a position where it imports potatoes from Egypt and tomatoes from Spain…

You don’t protect your market; Ukraine does. Not that it makes a difference. Ukraine has a moratorium on land – you cannot buy or sell land. However, the downside is that there is a lot of wheeling and dealing on the black market. The problem is that Ukraine is an oligarchic country. And I am not saying we should copy everything from the West. We are not a western country, but we are no longer a Soviet one.

However, you do say that you want to live in a “western” Ukraine.

No, I said I want to live in Europe, that is, in a Ukraine that belongs to Europe. I’m talking mostly about the rule of law, courts and the basics of European civilisation. Everything is destroyed at the moment and Ukraine is a very corrupt place. It began during Soviet times and with Gorbachev it got to be more and more corrupt. The elites today are the same as during the Soviet times. The former communists became capitalists.

Isn’t the adoption of western laws to a post-socialist environment something that allowed this to happen?

Is there an alternative? We have to revise our history and watch less state propaganda and not only Russian propaganda, but also Ukrainian. The programming on independent TV channels, which are mostly owned by Ukrainian oligarchs, only favours the owners and no one else. People don’t want to think with their own heads. I mean, just look at our election!

Do you see yourself as belonging to a certain movement of artists or activists trying to promote change?

A couple of my friends who were journalists became deputies in the parliament, but not all of us are heading in that direction. I’m politically active and try to take part in movements against corrupted courts, for example, or in meetings that are paying attention to Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia, like film director Oleg Sentsov or journalist Roman Sushchenko, but mostly I’m focusing on documentary filmmaking. At some point, however, wherever you are in life, you have to make a decision – whether to focus on your personal life or to try and promote change. The situation in Ukraine is difficult. It is very important that people have access to information and it is up to us to make it available. At some point we will have to understand that some things about our past are uncomfortable. Yet regardless of how it feels, we will have to face the past. This can only be done through discussion. In my film, for instance, there are some shots of groups of people parading with the accompaniment of a song about the Nachtigall and the Roland divisions. These were SS divisions of the German army in which Ukrainians fought.

Are you talking about Bandera?^[3]

No, Bandera was imprisoned in a German camp while this was going on. And look, it is a bit easy, a bit of a cliché to blame Ukrainian nationalism on Bandera. And this is also Soviet propaganda. In Soviet times, they needed an enemy and Bandera fitted the bill. I remember seeing Soviet propaganda films about the Banderites…

So they are not one hundred per cent true? Was their fascism exaggerated?

I am only trying to say that in Western Ukraine there were groups within the Ukrainian army who fought against the Soviets until the 1950s. These were Ukrainian partisans and the Soviets didn’t want to talk about them. They equally didn’t want to talk about the Nachtigall and the Roland divisions that fought for Hitler. In fact, there were almost a million Russians who fought on Hitler’s side as the Russian Liberation Army and that’s something the Soviets kept silent about. This is the neglected history that I am talking about. Of course, there are many history books about these facts, but who reads them? Only intellectuals. In the meantime, Crimean Tatars are being put into prison as we speak and this is beginning to look like a new genocide. The Tatars returned to Crimea during Gorbachev’s time in power after being deported by Stalin in 1943. But now they are being imprisoned again. Just like Russian historian and  rights activist  Yuri Dmitriev  is currently in prison for revealing some of the repressions of the past.

That said, I understand why people still have different interpretations of the past. When I showed this film in Mykolaiv the nationalists didn’t like it because they thought I didn’t portray them in the right way, while people from the other “side” didn’t like it either because they didn’t think I portrayed them correctly. I told them both that I was happy. And what’s more, I didn’t know of some of the things that were happening in the frames I shot myself. However, friends pointed out to me one decorated general who is not real veteran, or others with red flags were carrying portraits of very strange and suspicious people.

Such as?

Some of the faces in the portraits belonged to members of the Party of Regions (the former party of the ousted Viktor Yanukovych), yet were made to look like they were war veterans. It’s like being in a psychiatric ward, really! That’s why this film, for me, is a cake with many layers. 

I agree with you about the need to revise history for the region. However, I also believe the most neutral historical accounts will always have some level of bias…

There are different views, each claiming that their account is true, of course. For instance, I have a friend in Canada who, after seeing my film, told me: “I agree with the older woman [wearing the black/orange ribbon] who said that we [the Soviets] were the only ones who resisted when the whole of Europe came to destroy us.” And I agree with my friend. I am not against the older woman. But things are complicated. The least I wanted to achieve by making this film is to get people talking. That is why I am very happy if my film is able to start a genuine conversation about history, especially inside Ukraine.

This interview took place during the 19th edition of the “GoEast” film festival, dedicated to Central and Eastern European film held annually in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Zhanna Maksymenko-Dovhych is an award-winning film director and writer from Ukraine. Her films include The Unbreakable Ihor Branovytsky (2016), Under the bridge (2014), House with Chimeras (2013), One Day of Euro (2012) Holiday (2017), and, most recently, Mykolaiv. Chronicle of Protests (2019).

Lucian Tion is an independent journalist, film director and international teacher. He has worked in the US, Cameroon, Tajikistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and China. He writes for Senses of Cinema, East European Film Bulletin, Studies in Eastern European Cinemas and other journals and magazines.

[1] The speaker is referring to Peace for Nina, a film documenting a mother’s journey in coming to terms with the death of her son after the latter was killed in the war in Donetsk.

[2] The same as Brest-Litvosk, where the treaty that ended the First World War was signed, but also a site where the Red Army, in one of the first battles of the Second World War, put up a heroic resistance against the Germans.

[3] Stepan Bandera was a controversial Ukrainian nationalist who was associated with Nazism, but also vied for an independent Ukraine. His controversial figure is currently being used by right-wing groups to stir nationalist, and sometimes even fascist, sentiments.

identity, Ukraine, Ukrainian film