When I was little, it was in Ukraine that I first learned what nationalism is. It was there that people started calling me “moskal” and “katsap,” words whose meaning I didn’t fully understand until I asked my parents. Nationalism was foreign to me, but I saw it in the dull, hardened eyes of the little girls who taunted me. For some reason it was always the girls… There it was, right in front of me — this strange, incomprehensible, baseless, embittered nationalism.
I could never understand what I had done to wrong them, simply by being born in Moscow. We all lived poorly back then, barely making ends meet. They, in a good climate with vegetable markets and fresh milk, surely lived better. But something about us made them envious…
There weren’t all that many of them, of course. Just three or four girls, taught by their parents to hate Russians for some reason, Muscovites especially. The rest were normal, like everywhere.
And I could have forgotten about it and simply gone on disliking such nationalists, never crossing paths with them again, considering them dumb and aggressive fools. But then a single fool in my country started a war, and the others stayed silent and didn’t tear him to pieces for it. And now, because of these criminals, those four girls have turned out to be right — the ones who hated “katsaps” and “moskals” — while everyone else, who treated them decently, turned out to be wrong.
The paradox of life.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but I can’t get this thought out of my head. Those girls at least had their convictions confirmed, while the others were deceived.
Vladimir Putin and his team’s great achievement: to drag all the filthy muck up to the top, and to kill or imprison the rest — both in Russia and in Ukraine.