LONDON – Donetsk-born historian Olena Styazhkina and Kyiv poet Iryna Shuvalova examined the lack of ways to speak about the war in the Donbas in Ukrainian during an event organized by the Ukrainian Institute in London on April 24.
Styazhkina is a senior researcher at the History Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and an author of prose and historical books. Shuvalova, an award-winning poet and a Cambridge University scholar, studies identity through the prism of war songs. They both came to London to reflect on their research of the war in Donbas.
Styazhkina had to leave Donetsk and fled to Kyiv in Sept. 2014 when the war swept into her native city. She was among those resisting the occupation and used to take part in street protests against separatist groups and Russian mercenaries who came to help to seize the power in the region in March 2014.
“So-called Russian tourists,” she said, pointing to photograph of crowds that gathered on the main square in Donetsk on March 2014, drawing the audience’s’ attention to men dressed in black. “Their watches showed the time two hours ahead of mine (Moscow time). They did not even bother to adjust it to the local Ukrainian time when they arrived to unleash the war in Donbas.”
Styazhkina believes that the war in the Donbas is a continuation of a decades-long policy of the Russian authorities. She listed the countries Russia had attacked before Ukraine: “Russia does what it used to do before in 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in Prague, and in 2008 in Georgia. Nothing new. Nothing new has happened in people’s behavior under occupation either.”
Linguistic deficit
People affected by the war in Donbas ended up not knowing how to express themselves, the historian said. There were no proper words in Ukrainian and Russian languages that would be useful to war victims.
“People are not used to talking about the devastation, about war, trauma, and grief,” she said, explaining that the language of conflict has not changed since the Second World War and is full of Kremlin-crafted myths and propaganda under a name of the Great Patriotic War, a term used by Russia to describe the conflict fought from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945.
“That is why all of us experience a linguistic deficit when talking about trauma,” she said.
According to Styazhkina, Ukrainian language war vocabulary is poor so people often use Soviet Russian words instead, which causes a lot of misunderstanding.
“Words often are interpreted on the basis of the deeply rooted contexts in which they exist,” she said.
Not Stalingrad
As an example of improper conflict language application, she suggested many of Ukrainian media reports about the Donetsk Airport defenders, who got a nickname “cyborgs” for bravely guarding the airport for 242 days until they were defeated by Russian-led and Russian forces.
“The impressive story of the defenders of Donetsk airport in Ukrainian media is often compared to Stalingrad,” she said referencing to a city in Russia, now Volgograd, which became infamous because of the Battle of Stalingrad, a five-months-long military clash between the Soviet and Nazi German armies.
“But this (comparison) means that we do not have our own language to describe these events. And there is a certain fear of speaking up on how genuine and strong we are today. Again and again, we try to reflect our newly discovered strength through the mirror of Soviet cliches,” she added.
This problem all the more so involves the Western media, said Styazhkina. Reporting about the war in the Donbas journalists make mistakes in interpretation: “Words like ‘opolchency’ is (translated to) ‘militiamen’ in English, but in English this word is neutral and does not mean much for Western European people.”
“When the word ‘militiamen’ travels from an English newspaper back to Russian one and is being translated to ‘opolchency’ it is usually interpreted as a sign of support of the Western establishment for the separatist movement,” she said.
“Language is a weapon in this war. Soviet Russian terms translated into Ukrainian and European languages are just like weapons, like tanks, cannons, and machine gun,” said Styazhkina.
A poet Iryna Shuvalova agreed: “How do you explain to a little child what the war is? Suddenly in 2014, we all found ourselves in the roles of little children in a sense – hurt, affected, and in need of expressing ourselves. But there were no words.”
She suggested that war songs for many on all of the sides of the conflict had become this new way of communication.
“It is much faster and more easy to write a song than to write poetry. Also, songs are immediate, they capture the events here and now. Songs are interactive and easily accessible,” said Shuvalova.
“And it is not that uncommon to see a song of the one side taken by another side, repurposed, reimagined often with an entirely different message. Sometimes as a mockery.”
Strong language
According to the findings of Shuvalova, Donbas war songs have a strong language that more and more divides people into warring camps. She believes, that there are two main reasons for that.
“The line between us and them, friend and enemy, is either drawn based on the action, something happened hence you became an enemy – you violated the borders of my country – or ‘you are an enemy because there is something essentially different about you’,” said Shuvalova.
“In the context of the War in Donbas, there is also a message (to Ukrainians) in Russian songs about the unwillingness to admit your Russianness. ‘You do not want to see this brotherly connection that naturally binds you to me, hence you are an enemy’. It is not about what you do, it is about what you are,” Shuvalova said, in referenced to the messages she spotted in war songs about Donbas written by Russian and separatists groups.
She played a couple of war songs for the audience and argued that despite quite clear negative messages against each other, this communication through music is much more complex.
“We should avoid simplification. Simplifications are really dangerous.”
