Instagram Post Text
Attention! Translation was done using AI, mistakes are possible
My mother is from a village 20 kilometers from Mariupol. It’s a Greek settlement. My father is from Belarus. They met in Mariupol — he was plastering facades there. He took her to Belarus, to Homel. In 1986, Chernobyl happened, and my mother went to give birth to me in her homeland. So I was born in Mariupol but grew up in Belarus. Then I married a guy from Donetsk. A year later we moved to Moscow. In 2013, I still flew into the beautiful Donetsk airport, into a city that was alive and thriving. Nothing foreshadowed disaster. We visited both his relatives and mine. My ex-husband is a 3D artist — they had this progressive scene. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. People were settled, doing their thing. Obviously, every country has internal squabbles — people from Homel and Brest don’t always get along either. But why should another state intervene? Nobody in Donetsk wanted to be part of Russia. Half [the relatives in 2014] moved to the Kyiv-controlled part, half came here [to Mariupol].
I have a lot of relatives in the Mariupol area — my grandfather on my mother’s side had 9 children. And my grandmother had three more. I went there every summer. Before school, my mother would take me in early May and pick me up in September. Everyone felt like family.
Now you can’t reach people — Mariupol is blockaded. Some relatives have gone missing. We don’t know where my mother’s one sister is, or the other.
My aunt with her daughter and granddaughter have lived in Sochi since 2014, but they had an apartment in Mariupol. People lived between two countries, and it wasn’t a problem. My aunt took her granddaughter, said they’d go to Mariupol where everything was calm, packed up and left. This was about three or four weeks before. Our older generation, with their brainwashed minds — they didn’t understand at all that it was already approaching, that there would be war. They left — and the war started. So my sister is in Sochi, and they’re there. My sister calls me: I don’t know if I’ll ever see my child and my mother alive again.
The two of them — my aunt and granddaughter — sat in a basement for 18 days. Then by pure miracle they got out, because friends were leaving by car on one of the days when there was a corridor. The friends knew where they were hiding, drove there, started calling out — nobody came out. They got scared, thinking it was all over. But they [aunt and granddaughter] were deep in the basement, afraid to open the door. Then they came out when they heard a familiar voice.
The child said afterward: “What I was most afraid of was that it would never end, that we’d never get out of there.” The child sees a psychotherapist now. My aunt refuses therapy, though she’s falling apart. The person who drove them out is no longer alive. In the child’s group, a 9-or-10-year-old girl was killed by a concrete slab. A missile hit the building, and everything from the 9th to the 6th floor collapsed like that.
In the village of Kliucheve, where my grandfather and uncle live, the DPR forces arrived. There were 2 houses of relatively well-off Greeks by Mariupol standards. They came in, took some things, stayed for two days. Like the Germans. I remember being little, my grandmother telling me that the Germans had been stationed in the village, lived in the house. It’s the same village, the same houses.
There’s my grandfather, uncle, uncle’s wife, her daughter, and a three-month-old granddaughter. No electricity, no gas, no water, no communication. I ask how they feed the infant. They say: nothing to worry about, we were raised on cow’s milk — we’ll raise her the same way. What saves them is that it’s a village. I’m very afraid for them (the interview was recorded on April 19) — the fields around the village could become a battlefield.
My uncle’s first wife was sheltering in a private house in Mariupol — about 30 people were there. She says a Ukrainian tank drove up, and they said: “Gather everything you have — this house won’t exist in a moment.” And they just blasted it with an APC. I ask if she’s sure they were Ukrainians. She says yes. Well — they’re firing from all sides. When they leave, they clear everything behind them. And so they made it to Lithuania — she sends a video of a two-year-old saying: “Grandma, is there going to be boom-boom now? — No, not anymore.”
The Russians bombed the village of Sartana [near Mariupol], where my grandmother’s biological sister lives. Someone among my relatives sends me YouTube links — my 92-year-old grandmother is on screen. She’s talking about sitting in a bomb shelter under that very maternity hospital, 70 people there. Some Polish guy doing vlogs, and she tells him: “Son, I lived through World War II, but I never saw the horror I’ve seen now.”
She has two sons — doctors, currently working in hot spots. With one of them the relationship is very complicated — [my] mother calls him (they’re cousins) and he tells her to fuck off. Says we’re the ones to blame for everything. They used to talk, be friends, when my mother visited in summer, they’d meet up.
My parents tell me that Russia is liberating Ukraine. They watch Solovyov on TV all day — about how there was no other choice. I haven’t spoken to my father in a month. With my mother, there’s still some flexibility. I tell her things, she listens, starts to understand. I tell her what to watch, send her links, but my father won’t touch the subject at all. Despite all this — the conversations about how Ukrainians are Nazis. My sister said to pass this on to him: “Why is being a patriot in Ukraine Nazism, but being a patriot in Russia is pride?”
Even when my aunt and her niece sat in that basement, her husband, who cried when they were freed, said — they’ll liberate it soon, and everything will be fine. And I’m like, for fuck’s sake, how is that even possible? How? How do they communicate — I can’t understand it. If everyone switched to the language of feelings, maybe they could find common ground.
I hate Moscow, I don’t want to live here anymore, for me it’s all black and white. Every day I think, hurry up and get the documents, the visas, and leave. Also so I can speak out loud. I used to think I’d move to Patriki, I’d rented a studio on Pokrovka, life was picking up here. And it was all crossed out in one day.
If I can’t manage to go anywhere now, I’ll go to Belarus. I was just there, talked to people. Despite the mustachioed one staying in power, people talk to each other differently than they do here. There are far fewer people who support the government. But in Moscow, I was stunned. All your Patrikis, Pokrovkas and whatnot — people were living in some consumerist bubble.
In my office, patients look me in the face and say there are Nazis there. These are isolated cases, but such a case happened. I don’t have the right to refuse a client, but I do express my position quite openly on Instagram. Some say they don’t know how they can trust me. This is exactly where a civic position intersects with a therapeutic one, and also where you realize that people fall into their own traumas and it’s easier for them to identify with the aggressor. They don’t fully realize what’s happening to them.
When you identify with the aggressor, you kind of feel stronger. It’s a pseudo-strength. If a person in front of me identifies with the aggressor, there’s a chance they experienced domestic violence, and it’s easier for them to believe they’re the bad one.
What do I feel when a person says there are Nazis in Ukraine? Helplessness. If you observe yourself for a few days, you’ll understand that we all come up against one feeling — helplessness. Whether through anger, pain, or depression. We feel helpless. And some cope with it like this — by recording stories. And it helps you live. Some help others, like me, and think, how good that I can be useful to someone. Over there, they have living losses; here, we have losses from broken relationships. War is always a rupture. And my task in the office is to look for threads. And if I don’t find them, it’s sad, and we part ways. But it’s not my initiative — I’m ready to build.
My father represents an inability to tolerate any feelings. There are many such men, especially born in the postwar period — my father was born in 1953. He leaves the room when someone cries; he can’t bear it. I imagine how hard it is for such people who find themselves in a sea of feelings and emotions — they freeze. Our generation, 30–40 years old, most of our parents were born in the postwar period. And they themselves were emotionally frozen. And they raised us the same way.
I see the dynamics. In the first days of the war, there were many people like: “Come on, whatever, it’ll be sorted in three days, everything will be fine.” But over time, people started to sober up. But to sober up, you need to be ready to face this pain, these terrible images of coffins that DOXA publishes. You need to thaw your empathy, if you have it — and it hurts. Some are ready for it, some aren’t. With those who aren’t, I can’t do anything — whether it’s my father or a client, I can’t force-feed them goodness. You stop being a professional therapist if you work without a request. If you force-feed goodness, it means you’re satisfying some needs of your own.
We’re dealing with stages of acceptance. People were first in shock-freeze. Then in denial — they refused to look at anything, didn’t want to know. People who get angry: “Why the fuck are they writing that Russians should die?” — they’re going through anger. And then, when they encounter depression — the fourth stage of grieving, when it’s already impossible to ignore. When death notices come from the cruiser Moskva, it’s impossible to ignore anymore — and thank God. And you see people slowly beginning to thaw. I see it in my office and among acquaintances: pain, tears.
I’ve seen among my acquaintances people who started with “there are Nazis there” and then came to the realization that it’s not so. They realize their complicity. People are afraid to change their minds — they’re scared. They think if they change their mind, they’ll be judged. If they see that you can accept it, then perhaps they’ll show you. Or maybe not. And they cry, they cry. Mostly it’s tears. Anger and tears.
