Book. For seven months and the Russian invasion of this country, Ukraine is the center of Europe. No one can ignore where kyiv and Kharkiv are, but also Kherson, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Mariupol or even Lyman, Izium or Boutcha? Grim geography, obvious front line between two worlds, Western democracies and Putin’s Russia. But, in 2001, when the photographer Guillaume Herbaut went there for the first time, who cared about this part of the Soviet Union which had torn itself away from the stifling tutelage of Moscow and had acceded, ten years earlier , independence? Not many people, to be honest.
However, for twenty years, the journalist will return almost every year to this country, surveying it from Chernobyl to Odessa, from Lviv to Simferopol. As if these bare plains, this black earth concealed for him some tellurism. To tell the truth, it was this people who attracted his curiosity and even his fascination. A people torn between two strong magnetisms, Europe and Russia. A people separated for a long time by two Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian, so close and so distant, so divisive. A people, in the East, prisoner of a nostalgia, that of the Soviet proletariat of mines and factories, and, in the West, rocked by this certainty that, in Western democracies, flow milk and honey.
“Memories Colliding”
Guillaume Herbaut embodies this dichotomy in characters and settings that is clearer than any text explanation. If we had to choose two photos, perhaps they would be those of these two young women with equal blond hair, almost twins: one, Maria Kachaiva, leader of the pioneers of the Communist Party of Crimea, poses in front of a red flag and a realistic painting by Lenin; the other, Inna Shevchenko, founder of the Femen movement, raises her fist dressed in jeans and topless in front of a bar of buildings in kyiv. They are each the heirs of a reconstituted past.
“Two memories collide”, writes the historian Galia Ackerman, in the preface of the book. These two memories, the two worlds that sprang from them, Guillaume Herbaut photographs them tirelessly. Page after page, year after year, it’s like a fragile fabric being torn. Photo after photo, the differences become antagonisms then hatreds. And, soon, the pacifist demonstrations turn into a bloodbath. These are sticks then weapons that appear.
Ukraine puts on this trellis that we discover today. From 2014, Guillaume Herbaut chronicles, on both sides of the front, the Donbass war or rather the soldiers who make it and the civilians who live it. It captures the daily life of this forgotten conflict in what we still considered to be uncertain confines.
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