In liberated Ukraine after 1991, a generation grew up that felt a sense of continuity, history and belonging for the first time in many decades. Having an apartment was the anchor of existence. Now the devastation is returning.
Everyone in my generation and in my parents’ generation had a dream – to have a house, to own a home of their own. In Ukrainian, the same word is used for «house» and «home», similar to German. Having a home, be it a house or rather just a small apartment, meant owning your own present and maybe also a piece of the future. With a home of your own, the possibility of being uprooted, relocated, thrown out of history again seemed less likely.
determine about yourself
A home meant security, or at least the relative security a person could have in post-Soviet Ukraine. Owning a home also meant being in charge of yourself. It meant being the subject of your own life, with a voice, with an inheritance, with freedom (whatever that may have included).
Compared to the lot of previous generations who had been resettled, displaced, expelled, starved, and massacred, and whose memories, libraries, and disordered archives were sent to the Orcus of Oblivion, a house seemed like a castle, a fortress. One that quickly filled with its own mess.
Separating the history of Ukraine from the history of the Empire was fascinating work.
It’s important to remember how central a closet or basement is to the idea of a home. Every house couldn’t exist without a room in which heaps of useless items accumulate – just in case. I recently read how the elderly mother of a friend of mine collected empty jars of jams or sauces that she had eaten on her flight from Kyiv to Budapest before the war. She later wanted to store homemade pickles in these jars – and a cupboard is already filling up when she gets home again.
In her essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about women’s agency and female experiences that are legitimized or delegitimized by the power that resides in financial independence and freedom. According to Woolf, in order to be able to speak of and about her life, “a woman must have money and a room of her own”.
Such a room is a symbolic, but at the same time a very present space. The undeniable reality of the walls, the windows, the roof, but above all the door creates a safe place where memories, pain, experiences and thoughts can also become real. A separate room means a separate order of things, of large and small, important and sentimental items that life carries with it. It enables a sense of ownership and the possession of one’s own voice, which can stand up to societal and often gender-specific expectations and demands.
Conversely, depriving people of their sense of ownership of their own space is a powerful means of domination and submission. When millions of people could not own anything for decades, literally “living out of suitcases”, constantly aware of the possibility of being resettled at any time for any reason. When people do not exist freely, but are subjected to collective living conditions by the will of a ruler, their thinking and speaking are also penned in. Amidst the din of the crowds that empires plan to move back and forth, individual voices are faint and barely audible.
Our unique generation
The Soviet Empire was a master at making this kind of noise. Therefore, after 1991, when entering a supposedly new world, the new era, a house, a small apartment almost became a fetish, both for people who were born in the first decades after the great war and for those who were born before the fall of communism.
Over the years, the tiny apartments bought with money from early salaries, parents’ savings and the meager legacy left by grandparents from their paltry pensions have only gotten bigger. Some even grew into townhouses with gardens and trees planted by the owners themselves to watch children and grandchildren play beneath.
We got older. Now there were kids and dogs, partners and exes, we all needed room to breathe, room to house our lives. All those faded photo albums and remnants of family china, grandmothers’ vases and carpets, fathers’ books or stamp collections, some records, some certificates – they all needed a place to be, a place to tell their story.
And once those stories circulated, other stories, previously denied and hushed up, began seeping through cracks and cracks. We fed them our own diaries, archival research and books.
We Ukrainians born in the late 70’s and early 80’s are a unique generation. We are the last to consciously experience both Soviet coercion and post-Soviet independence, the completely analog reality and comprehensive digitization, the ruins of failed socialism and the pains of wild post-totalitarian capitalism. We were the first to have the opportunity to travel, study and work abroad freely. And yet most of us returned home.
The work of separation
We were the ones who felt a sense of continuity, history and belonging in the space of the former Soviet Union for the first time in generations. We could retrace our roots, explore our cultural heritage, explore different, often conflicting and problematic parts of our history. Separating the history of Ukraine from the history of the Empire was fascinating work. Books have been written, museums built (or rebuilt), archives examined, films made, points of view debated and future perspectives explored. Our voices and our stories became stronger and richer, we had conquered our own space.
All of this came to an abrupt halt on February 24, 2022, when Russian bombs and missiles fell on Ukrainian cities. In the days and weeks that followed, it became painfully clear that people can move even if they don’t want to, but not houses, nor rooms, books, archives or museum collections.
Our history turned out to be a very material, physical, immobile matter that had to be subordinated to survival. People fleeing danger in the great trek west were forced to leave much behind. In a moment everything they did, everything they created, planted, collected, loved, whatever they believed in, had to fit in one suitcase. Or sometimes just in a small backpack.
But no, the displacement of people in Ukraine did not start in February 2022, it started in March 2014 and has never stopped since. In the process, almost two million Ukrainians were taught the term “temporarily displaced persons” so that they would cling to the word “temporarily” with all their might.
In the ruins of the bombed and burned down houses in Mariupol or Kharkiv lie the keys to the abandoned houses and apartments in the Crimea, in Donetsk and in Luhansk, some of which have been destroyed, but some of which are only inhabited by strangers.
come home again
Old photos, letters and other personal belongings that survived World War II can be found in the rubble of buildings in Kyiv or Chernihiv. They belonged to people who are no longer with us and whose stories are in danger of disappearing. In hundreds of thousands of empty homes across the country, flowers are wilting in pots, scraps of food are rotting on shelves and refrigerators. Meanwhile, relatives and friends, dead or alive, look from the photos into the empty rooms. Their owners check the news every day, write to their neighbors and friends on social networks: How are you? Are you there? is the house still standing?
There is no more food, no flowers, no pictures in the thousands of houses and apartments because they are no longer standing. Their owners are homeless and lucky if they are still alive. But more and more often they’re just dead. The materiality of the story, the devastation of not having a home, no longer has any power over them.
“Home is no longer a place, but an omnipresent point on the map,” a friend recently wrote to me. Every day they and many others stare at this point, only to keep reassuring themselves to come back home and rebuild their own homes. Thoroughly. Once again.
The Ukrainian Kateryna Botanova is a cultural scientist. She works as a journalist and curates the Festival Culturescapes in Basel. – Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.
On Wednesday, April 20, Kateryna Botanova will be part of the NZZ panel discussion “The War is Back: Putin’s Raid on Ukraine” (together with Mikhail Shishkin and Eric Gujer). On April 27, at 7:30 p.m., she will perform together with Evgenia Lopata and Kateryna Mishchenko on the topic “Cultural Education and War”. in the Zurich Literature House on.