Graveyards
St. Michael’s Square is a cemetery.
Under the mournful gaze of Princess Olha, St. Andrew the Apostle, and Saints. Cyril and Methodius, this place has become a graveyard for the burned remains of Russia’s imperial ambitions: a tomb for the “Russian world” (Русский мир). The oxidized metal of tanks, self-propelled artillery, air defense systems, and armored personnel carriers, still smelling of oil and fire and death rest here before the gates of St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery like decaying sphinxes, filled with garbage and dead cigarettes and stripped of the glory they thought they embodied as they rolled across the border in February 2022.
And they are covered with the inscriptions of their intended victims: For Ukraine. For Kherson. For the children. For Boris. For everyone.
How many hands, one wonders, left behind their final messages here before going to the front for the last time; before going silent?
These wrecked objects are silent in their own way, but they are not mute: they are locked in an accusatory dialogue with what is left of unlucky passenger cars and their ghosts, things that were simply and apathetically killed. But now when their killers try to speak — of purpose or meaning or faith or symmetry or anything at all— their grammar fails them and they mutter only in the lost tongues of the “Russian world,” which no one really understands. These are pointless, vicious things, and it is their fate to be mocked and defaced and humiliated, like robbers decomposing on the gallows.
Somebody has shoved an empty coffee cup into the barrel of a T-90.
The cars radiate warmth under the wet July sun.
The tanks are strangely cold.
***
The square is not the only graveyard at St. Michael’s, however, nor even the most significant one: the walls of the monastery itself are cloaked in the portraits of the dead, a virtual necropolis for those who have fallen in defense of Ukraine since 2014. Chronologically arranged and stretching down Mykhailivs’ka towards Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the “Memory Wall of Fallen Defenders of Ukraine in the Russian-Ukrainian War” is not simply a memorial: it is a history and a didactic text and a funeral incantation. The wall speaks of liberation and the death of empire and the voids left in society and family and flesh in defiance of catastrophe. The walls of St. Michael’s are a book of the dead and manual of resistance.
This day, a soldier scrambles up the shoulders of another to affix yet another portrait to the wall; a middle-aged woman with a big white purse watches on silently. I did not see whether the soldiers were fastening a new picture to the wall or just repairing an older one, and I suppose that it does not really matter. Someone once living is now dead, consumed by the “Russian world.” This far down the wall, the portraits are no longer uniform: earlier ones are all the same size, neatly arranged in rows. Here, they come in all shapes and sizes; some are just printed out on pieces of paper and taped to the monastery so no one forgets.
A collective funeral that never ends.
***
Russia spent much of 2021 and early 2022 amassing its troops on the Ukrainian border, sneering and gloating and defying the world to truly name the thing that it denied; the thing that the world could see; the thing that the world was saying, in strangely measured tones, should not happen. And when it did happen, Russia already believed that victory was a thing to be spoken of in the past tense.
Expecting little resistance, but nonetheless preparing for substantial civilian casualties, it positioned mobile crematoria at the front lines. Lists of Ukrainians marked for arrest and execution were drawn up; plans were put in place made to depose or assassinate President Zelensky and replace him with a puppet government, maybe one headed by the ousted gangster Viktor Yanukovych. Russian propaganda outlets were ready to publish, at barely a moment’s notice, their pre-written articles hailing the “liberation” of Ukraine and its reintegration into the “Russian world.”
This was to be simultaneously a geopolitical and a cultural project. “A new world is being born before our eyes,” read one infamous article published in RIA Novosti on February 26. “Russia’s military operation against Ukraine has ushered in a new epoch,” marking Russia’s “return to its own historical space and its own place in the world.”
The article was quickly retracted.
Indeed, in defiance of Moscow’s imperial self-congratulation, to say nothing of its war machine, Kyiv resisted. Ukraine resisted. And the “Russian world” began to disintegrate right into the soil; right in front of everybody’s eyes. Few moments more vividly lay bare Moscow’s naivety and its brutal conceit than those images of lightly armored trucks — employed by OMON riot police that were meant to “pacify” the Ukrainian population after victory — attempting to charge, unsupported, into the center of Kyiv, only to be annihilated by the city’s defenders.
Barely a month after attempting to encircle Kyiv and lay siege to its people; barely a month after the 40-mile long convoy got bogged down on its approach to the city; barely a month after the entire Ukrainian military was supposed to have buried; with Zelensky in exile; with the “Russian world” greeted in the streets as the apotheosis of liberation…the Russian offensive instead committed suicide. It left in its wake bound hands and dead eyes and drained blood in the streets and breathless mouths telling of the decomposing organs of the hungry void of the “Russian world” that could only devour whatever it touches.
Kyiv became a graveyard for the Russian military and, ultimately, for Russian ambition, whose delusions were left smoldering and blackened along with the heat-cracked bones of the crews of the tanks that now rust before St. Michael’s.
***
The “Russian world” has no future and can offer nothing but oblivion—that much was clear from the atrocities it left behind as it withdrew from Kyiv. But it nevertheless has inertia and and the Russian military, its physical corpus, shambles on. The occupied territories and their inhabitants, meanwhile, are drawn inexorably into its void, for as the Nobel Laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk has pointed out: “Occupation is not a matter of exchanging the flag of one state for that of another. Occupation brings torture, deportation, forced adoption, denial of identity, filtration camps, mass graves.”
For decades, Russia has used “passportization” — the distribution of Russian citizenship, willingly or unwillingly, to facilitate its geopolitical ambitions. In occupied territories of Ukraine, doctors, teachers, civil servants, and ordinary citizens all face immense pressure to become participants in the construction of the “Russian world” as Russian citizens. The crumbling buildings and smell of corpses around them serving as a sickening reminder of what it means to refuse.
Others, meanwhile, have been deported to Russia, many of them subjected to confinement, interrogation, and torture in grim “filtration camps,” and hundreds of thousands of children have been kidnapped to Russia or Belarus, at times with the help of the Belarus Red Cross. These children have been subjected to brutal deculturalization, stripped of their citizenship and passports, made to speak Russian, and adopted out to Russian families, ostensibly because they are “orphans,” while the mechanics of their orphanage are studiously elided. Some of these children have managed to be returned to their families, and the stories they tell are beyond reckoning. Their souls and bodies will be marked by the touch of the “Russian world” forever.
In the “Russian world,” occupation also means colonization. Having razed Mariupol to the ground, and killed or deported its population, Russia now tries to replace one reality with its own. The Russian government makes a big show of “rebuilding” the city, whose destruction it blames on “Ukrainian Nazis”; Russian influencers and tourists travel there to pose for pictures in front of gutted buildings, where the corpses of their own victims still decay; they go on “extreme vacations” with their children to the Azovstal plant; and they buy up property in the city, convinced that the radiant future is just awaiting the end of the war.
These are acts of desperation, the violent, shambolic attempt of a dying empire to give form and flesh to its delusions; to conjure into existence some kind of substance to fill the moaning void in its guts. It is the empty performance of liberation and renewal, one intended to efface the truth of what happened there and substitute in its place a collective hallucination.
Russian occupation seeks to eradicate more than just Ukrainian lives though: its larger goal is to deconstruct the social and cultural bases upon which those lives attained meaning. As Richard Ovenden notes: “The destruction of knowledge and erasure of memory has always been a war aim for those who seek to impose their own version of history on the next generation.”
Dozens of libraries, museums, churches, and universities, have been damaged or destroyed since the commencement of the war. Ukrainian books are dumped in the street and burned, and the public sphere is being cleansed of the Ukrainian language, including in schools. Educators from occupied Crimea, as well from within Russia itself, are being recruited to teach a Russian nationalist curriculum: “Russian language, Russian literature, Russian history, nature of one’s own country (Russian) for elementary and secondary school.”
All of this must be understood through the lens of the inescapable colonial imperative of the “Russian world” itself.
A 2021 law, for example, forbade “foreign citizens, stateless persons, and foreign legal entities” from owning land in Crimea, which meant that Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians who refused to give up their Ukrainian citizenship for Russian passports were effectively dispossessed. Meanwhile, Russians have flocked to Crimea and are, in effect, replacing the local population, much of which has either fled to Kyiv or to other parts of Ukraine to escape persecution or death, or have otherwise been deported:
Civilians are being forced to leave Crimea and go to mainland Ukraine to protect themselves and their families from large-scale and systematic human rights violations. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people are arriving in Crimea from the Russian Federation as part of a policy of direct and indirect displacement…Russia…is colonizing part of the territory of Ukraine by changing its demographic composition.
This process of colonization is happening in other occupied territories as well. For example, according to a survey taken in 2017, about 59% of Mariupol’s population was Ukrainian and 33% was Russian. But Russia’s siege and occupation of the city has either killed or driven out a substantial portion of the Ukrainian population. Today, according to a startling report from the Center for European Policy Analysis,
[t]he Russian strategy is to saturate occupied Ukraine with other ethnicities and blur the Ukrainian identity. The Kremlin has sent a lot of workers to Mariupol, particularly Russian indigenous peoples, including Buryats, Tuvans, representatives of Caucasian nationalities, and people from Central Asia.
[…]
Around 40,000 people have relocated to Mariupol…The shift in population is happening so fast that, if the city is not liberated, 80% of its population will be Russian within five years. [emphasis added]
Likewise, around 60% of the residents of occupied Melitopol have fled the city; there too, they are being replaced with Russian colonists “who in most cases have family ties to units of the Russian Armed Forces and representatives of the occupation administrations…Accordingly, almost all residential properties abandoned by native residents are occupied.”
The colonial logic of the “Russian world” is thus manifesting in a rapid depopulation of Ukrainians living in occupied territories, either through displacement, deportation, or death. Simultaneously, tens of thousands of Russians are settling in their place, willing participants in the imperialist fantasy of the “Russian world.”
***
There is another coloniality at work here, too. Numerous reports have noted that large numbers of migrant workers from Central Asia have come to work in the occupied territories, lured by the prospect of higher wages than they would earn in Russia. These migrants, driven to Russia by high unemployment and abysmal wages in their countries of origin, have long functioned in the Russian economy as a cheap and easily exploited workforce. According to one study:
Being non-citizens in their country of employment, labor migrants as deportable non-citizens (De Genova, 2013, p. 1) are also rejected socially. They are separated from their families who are forced to stay behind…exposed to abuse by their employers [and] denied many of the social and economic rights other workers can take for granted, including the right to stay (Bauder, 2014b, pp. 91–92).
Today, Moscow’s reliance on such migrants has assumed new dimensions. Whereas in the past such people might have found work in construction, now they “dig trenches and collect dead bodies on the frontlines.” Moreover, with the Russian government disproportionately conscripting soldiers from its poorest and least ethnically Russian regions, Central Asian migrant workers have become an attractive source of manpower. This has rendered their position even more complicated and precarious, since “most of these immigrants…are young adult men, which has made them targets for recruitment and conscription by Russia’s military.”
Caress Schenk has situated this exploitation of Central Asian migrant labor and manpower in the service of the Russian war effort in the wider context of the same “passport politics” that Russia has employed in Ukraine:
While expanding citizenship opportunities to Central Asians remains a separate strategy from the “passportization” that Russia uses in contested territories, which gives the government an excuse to use force to protect its recently minted citizens abroad, both are examples of increasingly weaponized citizenship policy.
A 2022 law, for example, made it easier for foreigners to obtain Russian citizenship if they had served in the Russian military. Others, meanwhile, “have attested to being pressured, tricked, and even tortured into signing military contracts.” One factory in Tatarstan had reportedly lured Central Asian (and African) girls and women, and then confiscated their passports and pressed them into manufacturing Iranian-designed “Shaheed” drones — essentially conscripting civilians from one former colony to make war upon another.
The ambitions of the “Russian world” in Ukraine have thus become another colonial graveyard for Central Asians.
***
In the early days of the war, a viral video emerged that depicted an irate Ukrainian woman confronting a group of Russian soldiers, whom she was rightly denouncing as occupiers and fascists. In an iconic moment, the woman offered the soldiers a handful of sunflower seeds and spitting “Take these seeds and put them in your pockets so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”
Her words, of course, turned out to be prophetic: the sunflower and its seeds have become symbols of Ukrainian resistance and tens of thousands of Russian troops have died pointlessly in the death throes of the “Russian world” in the fields of Ukraine. Although most of those soldiers probably did not have sunflower seeds in their pockets as their bodies returned to the earth, the war has nevertheless sown other kinds of seeds.
Yesterday, I had to move apartments. The new place let me check in a bit early, and the cleaning lady, a woman probably in her mid-50s named Sveta, was still finishing up. When she was done, we chatted for a bit. At first she asked if I was Polish, and I responded, in my broken Ukrainian, that I was American. I told her that my Russian was better than my Ukrainian, but that I was trying to use Ukrainian whenever possible, for obvious reasons. She smiled and replied, in Russian, “Yes, I’m Ukrainian, but the Soviets forced us to speak Russian and now I only think in Russian. It’s hard. It’s a real shame. And they treated the Ukrainian language like the language of idiots and farmers.” She made a spitting noise to demonstrate how the Ukrainian language was treated in the USSR.
Then she laughed about the recent drone strike in Moscow.
We chatted for a few more minutes, and as she prepared to leave, I thanked her for her help and gave her whatever cash I had in my pockets — just a few hundred hryvnias. She was delighted, and told me that, before the war she had been doing alright: there was plenty of cleaning work and she never had any worries about buying a coffee or a new shirt or whatever. But these days, of course, there are fewer tourists and, consequently, there is less work and less money. She told me that she is not poor, but it is nevertheless harder to make ends meet: now she has to think harder about what to spend her money on.
The exchange left me gratified— not just because it felt good to help someone in an immediate, material way; but also simply because of the fulfillment we can derive from having unexpected conversations with a stranger. But once she left, I suddenly became aware that the “Russian world” had been right there in my apartment the whole time; in our mouths; in the air between Sveta and myself as we carried on our little conversation — in Russian.
Sveta was just a person, just an ordinary Ukrainian who works as a cleaner. But her whole life has been scarred by colonialism, cultural erasure, and war. And here, in the middle of war of national survival, we spoke in the language of the colonizer.
Moments like this, of course, are not uncommon in Ukraine. Most Ukrainians are bilingual (or more!), and weaving communication through the convoluted interstices between linguistic frontiers has always been a simple fact of life here, especially in Kyiv. But language, in all its quotidian utility, is also political and freighted with history and and memory and anguish.
Much has been made, and not always in good faith, about Ukraine’s language laws, which mandate the use of Ukrainian in public affairs and the media. Such measures are usually portrayed as misguided and discriminatory at best; an expression of virulent Ukrainian nationalism at worst. But what of Sveta, who regrets that she can only think in a language that was imposed upon her?
Reflecting on our conversation, I couldn’t help but think of a powerful article published recently by Sasha Dovzhyk, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who herself embarked upon a deliberate “linguistic metamorphosis” after the Russian invasion in 2014:
My mother tongue tastes like ashes. Things scorched by enemy fire, then soaked with rain, touched with rot, smelling of death…Russian is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat.
Mariya Manzhos, similarly, has meditated on the meaning of the Russian language for many Ukrainians today:
To me, making [the] departure [from Russian to Ukrainian] felt like exposing a vulnerable, unexamined part of who I was. I saw how steeped my consciousness had been in the narratives of Russification, which for centuries convinced Ukrainians that their language was somehow unrefined and inferior to Russian.
For Dovzhyk and Manzhos, no less than for Sveta, the Russian language is not merely a means of communication. It is a colonial imposition; a way of thinking; a way of being; a way of constructing the world — one that was now complicit in a genocidal war against Ukraine itself. The determination to reclaim one’s own language cannot therefore be simply derided as “nationalism run amok”; rather, it must be understood as an act of emancipation; as an explicit rejection of the ambitions of the “Russian world,” which seeks not only to resettle occupied territories with Russians, but also to maintain its grip on the words and thoughts of colonized peoples. It is an act of self-liberation.
A similar process of reclaiming is unfolding in other former Russian colonies, as well, enabled at least in part by the death throes of the “Russian world” in Ukraine. As Azamat Junisbai recently wrote in a long thread on Twitter:
When I was growing up, Russian language and culture were dominant among young urban Qazaqs. In Almaty, speaking Qazaq was seen as something that only people from rural areas did…Contempt for all things Qazaq as backwards and hopelessly parochial, so common among the relatively more privileged Qazaq city dwellers during Russian rule, is a thing of the past. The brazenly imperial character of Russia’s war against Ukraine has dramatically accelerated this.
But the “Russian world” will not cede territory easily. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, for example, has complained bitterly about the recent adoption of the “Law on the State Language of the Kyrgyz Republic,” which requires all public-sector employees to be proficient in Kyrgyz, as “discriminatory” and “undemocratic.” Lavrov also lamented the decline of Russian in other parts of the former empire:
Not to mention what has been done in Ukraine, and what has been done in the Baltics for a long time. Our experience in the peaceful coexistence of representatives of different nationalities, cultures, religions, while preserving all their national features and developing the Russian language as a unifying factor, is in great demand in the modern world.
As Sasha Dovzhyk notes, however, Lavrov’s fantasies about the attractiveness of the model of the “Russian world” as a “unifying force” in the modern world notwithstanding:
There is nothing like an all-out war with a clearly stated genocidal intent to turn something so seemingly natural as speech into a tool of resistance.
Every mouth and every word spoken in defiance of the “Russian world” can be its cemetery.
***
The seeds of a free Ukraine are thus being sown on the innumerable graves of the “Russian world.” But these seeds are being purchased at an unspeakable price, and their blossoms will undoubtedly take years to germinate. Still, if Russia is indeed waging a war on Ukrainian culture and memory — and it is — then it has already failed, because its vision of the future is a trench filled with blood and teeth and burnt hair and bones and the very memory that it undertakes to replace.
In time, the tanks of St. Michael’s will be consigned to a mausoleum haunted by imperial ambition and self-annihilation; but the ghosts will linger for decades, and the faces on memorial wall will never move again. Some graves will never be uncovered; many lost will never be redeemed. And even after Mariupol is rebuilt, no one can ever return to that place, or at least to the Mariupol that was. Something new will grow there, but the old city has been cannibalized by the “Russian world” and its colonists. And the voice of every person who speaks in defiance, today and tomorrow and the day after that, will sing the last rights of that world before casting its demons into a thousand tombs and planting watchful flowers upon them.
But if Ukrainians are making a garden out of a graveyard, then theirs is a nursery whose fragile green shoots are, of tragic necessity, being nourished today by the flesh and blood of their brothers and sisters. The war continues, and the front is a nightmare; the decaying body of the “Russian world” will shamble on, malevolent and cold, until it is put to rest at last.
At last.
As I write this, the rain is falling in Kyiv, and the seeds are receiving their baptism.
But still Ukrainians work and wait, anxious for clear skies, and their voices will be prayers to the sun.
