标题: 2022.03.02 乌克兰英雄的简史 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-3-3 06:08 标题: 2022.03.02 乌克兰英雄的简史 EYEWITNESS
A brief history of Ukrainian heroes
The country used to lack national myths. Now they’re everywhere
Mar 2nd 2022
BY ANDREY KURKOV
Before the war Ukrainian teenagers liked to text each other photos of Russian rappers. Now the image circulating on their phones is of a faceless man in a helmet, the so-called “ghost of Kyiv”. This legend was born on the second day of the Russian invasion. An unknown pilot was said to be patrolling the skies over Kyiv in an old Soviet mig-29. As of Tuesday morning, he had supposedly shot down at least ten Russian fighter jets. Though the ministry of defence has insisted the spectral ace is real, corroborating evidence is scarce – some videos purportedly showing him in action turned out to be culled from computer games.
Other memes are flowing back and forth: the soldiers on Snake Island who responded to a warship’s call to surrender by telling the Russians to “go fuck yourselves”; Vitaly Skakun, the sapper who volunteered to mine the bridge to Genichesk as a column of Russian tanks approached and got blown up in the process (the Russian army still captured the city). Even the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has become cooler than St Petersburg grime with his defiant videos on social media.
Since it gained independence in 1991, Ukraine has struggled to find heroes around whom to build a national myth. The ones that history has passed down to us don’t quite work, for various reasons. But the past few days have generated dozens. There is something fitting about the fact that the most romantic of them, the ghost pilot, may not even be real. If these heroes didn’t exist we’d have to invent them. Right now it feels like courage is all that stands between us and total obliteration.
I’m not a soldier. When I did national service in the army I was a prison guard. I can dig trenches but I’m over 60. I know my front is the information war. Nonetheless, I have to stay in Ukraine. And people like Skakun, the sapper, make me think I don’t have to run. They give me a sense of safety, even though they’re fighting far away from me. They help me feel that Ukraine will stand.
Many of the plinths in Kyiv where people might look for patriotic inspiration are occupied by figures who now seem obscure, divisive or unloved. Ukraine’s difficulty in finding national heroes reflects its chequered past. We are a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic society that various great powers have tussled over – the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Tsarist empire, the Nazis. What one part of the country sees as bravery another might see as treachery or oppression. Ukrainians don’t like having anything imposed on them, least of all heroes.
True, few people have anything against the national poet, Taras Shevchenko. But he was exiled by the Tsarist imperial police in the 19th century for his patriotic verses, and victims rarely make good heroes, especially for a people at war.
The Soviets tried to make Bogdan Khmelnytsky into a national figure. This 17th-century Cossack army leader was a useful symbol for the Kremlin: he famously invited the Russians into the country, formally asking the tsar in 1654 to help him fight the Poles. Soon afterwards, the tsar banned the Cossack army and the Ukrainian territories lost their independence. A monument to Khmelnytsky stands in the centre of Kyiv’s old city on Sofiyskaya Square, right next to my house. It hasn’t been vandalised since Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. But nobody brings flowers to it either. It does not help that his supporters killed thousands of Ukrainian Jews, whom they accused of being in league with Poland.
Right now it feels like courage is all that stands between us and total obliteration
The most controversial Ukrainian “hero” is Stepan Bandera, an ultra-nationalist who welcomed the Nazis to Ukraine in 1941 because he wanted to rid the country of communists. His obsession with Ukrainian independence eventually led the Nazis to send him to a concentration camp, where he spent most of the war. Afterwards he settled in Munich and was assassinated by a kgb agent in 1959. Many Ukrainians appreciate his dedication to the country’s independence (some volunteer forces now fighting Putin have re-christened Molotov cocktails “Bandera smoothies”). Others remain appalled by the violence his followers committed.
More recent attempts at national myth-making have been no more successful. For a brief moment Viktor Yushchenko looked like he might have the right ingredients. When he stood against the Kremlin’s candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, in elections in 2004, he was poisoned and left permanently disfigured. The ensuing wave of outrage became known as the “Orange Revolution”, which prompted a re-run of the vote. After Yushchenko was elected president, however, he was only too ready to compromise with the old order.
The Maidan uprising in 2014 might have produced someone better. A military pilot and captain in the Ukrainian army, Nadezhda Savchenko, was taken prisoner by the Russians who put her on trial in Moscow, where she swore at the judge and refused to recognise the court’s authority. She became a member of parliament upon her release, yet was a perplexing political figure, at times advocating friendship with Donbas separatists. Some thought the Russians had turned her. Today she is completely forgotten.
Will there be statues of Zelensky one day? Will people visit them? Perhaps we will no longer be stuck in Ukraine’s endless cycle of heroes turned anti-heroes. Since 1991 Ukraine has been an independent country for the first time since Khmelnytsky’s heyday in the 17th century. Our people value that independence above all else.
I’m not a soldier. Heroes like the sapper make me feel I don’t have to run
Even many who don’t like Zelensky’s government or Ukraine’s political system are willing to fight for it rather than see Ukraine crushed by an outside power. If this war’s heroes do things that later tarnish their reputations, the sheer bravery of these days will live on. I think people will remember the name of the sapper, Vitaly Skakun. We will build a new national identity around him.■
Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer. His most recent novel is “Grey Bees” (Deep Vellum/MacLehose Press)
