Interviews with Georgians and Ukrainians: A Villanova Grad Documents the Impact of Russian Wars
On Tuesday, January 31, 2024, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted Ms. Lucy Minicozzi-Wheeland, graduate student in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Regional Studies at Harvard University, research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Intelligence Project, invited lecturer at Gori State University, in Georgia and Villanova Alumna. She has received the Fulbright Research Grant conducted which she conducted in Odesa, Ukraine. Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland has also completed the Critical Language Scholarship and Boren Fellowship in Tbilisi, Georgia. She initiated and substantially contributed to the Voices from Ukraine oral history project with the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. The event was moderated by Chiji Akoma, Chair of the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Mark L. Schrad, Director of Russian Area Studies at Villanova University.
Oral History interviews often appear in the archive as transcripts of conversations held in the past. They are useful primary sources for the person being interviewed, opening a perspective on their way of seeing the world. However, they rarely reveal the interviewer, the reasons driving them to conduct the interview, or the methods they bring to the recorded conversation. At the recent Lepage event, Lucy Minicozzi-Wheeland revealed the personal and geopolitical context behind her work initiating the Voices from Ukraine oral history project, and her work behind the scenes conducting the project. She demonstrated that oral history interviews must be conducted with empathy and respect for the storyteller, and that doing so has allowed her to serve the communities of those she has interviewed.
Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland modeled the importance of empathy for conducting oral history interviews by putting herself in the position of the autobiographical storyteller and thereby inviting the audience into the place of the interviewer. She wove her presentation of the stories she has collected of Ukrainians and Georgians affected by wars against Russia with disarmingly vulnerable, autobiographical stories, inviting the audience to empathize with her. At her most candid, Lucy revealed her diagnosis of being on the Schizophrenia spectrum and how this forces her to manage stress or risk having seizures. She described the difficulties of living with chronic illness and how she spent ten trying years with her doctors attempting to find the correct combination of medications. However, she also recalled moments when she has been able to help others who struggled with mental illness. Most importantly for interviewing, her neurodivergence, while “different from living through war,” has given her “an immense sense of empathy that is essential for conducting [Oral History] interviews.”[1] Thus, the form of her presentation, moving back and forth between her own life and telling the stories of those she has interviewed, modeled her central methodological concern: storytelling and oral history interviewing alike require empathy and respect.
Like many of her friends and interview subjects in Ukraine, Ms. Minicozzi Wheeland “can divide [her] life into the time before Russia invaded, and the time after.” On the night of the invasion, February 24, 2022, she messaged and called everyone she knew in Ukraine, unable to stop watching the news in horror. “I was desperate to know if they were alive and safe.” In the coming days she began conducting interviews with some of her friends who recounted their experiences of the first days of the war. In one interview, an English teacher from Odesa described the first night, seeing the sky lit by rockets and hearing the sound of explosions. “It makes your heart rush like never before.” Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland spent the next days and sleepless nights, frantically checking in with her friends in Ukraine.
“It was through speaking to each of them and hearing their perspectives that I came up with the idea of collecting more official interviews from Ukraine.” This was not a detached, academic endeavor, merely collecting oral histories for future historians to use as primary sources. Lucy’s idea for the Voices from Ukraine, “came from a place of desperation, to do something to help.” Having just started working with the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, she was well placed to publish her friends’ stories for a wide audience to read. She began interviewing those she already knew, and before long she was talking to their friends, and friends of friends — people across Ukraine she had never met.
Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland’s goal was and remains “to spread as much awareness as possible about the horror that Russia’s invasion has inflicted, as well as the strength and resilience of the Ukrainian people.” She told two stories of mothers of Ukrainian soldiers that she interviewed for Voices from Ukraine that exemplify Ukrainian’s resilience and the horrors of war. The first, Iryna, explained how her son, Dimetro, was part of the defense of Mariupol and subsequent, eighty-two-day siege of the Azovstal steel plant.[2] “When my son was at Azovstal it became scarier and more infernal there every day…food ran out and there was no drinking water…Every second I waited for some good news from Dima. He always held up well insisting that they were all good, but in fact it was horror.” After Russia broke the siege, Iryna held out hope that her son was taken prisoner and not among the killed. Weeks passed. Then she saw him in a photo of prisoners of war. “I was happy beyond words!”
However, many stories did not end so happy. Vera, the second mother that Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland interviewed, also had a son at the siege of Mariupol. Cell connection was irregular. First, she expected the war to be over in time for her son to come home for his birthday the following week; he was not so optimistic. His birthday came and went without her hearing from her son. “On April seventh we received a call from the regiment. ‘Your son died.’ Pain, pain, a lot of pain. I will not accept it…so many dreams, plans, hopes.” Despite her pain, Vera ended her interview with Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland by relating the news that Vera’s sister is alive. “No connection. No food. No money. Thank God she is alive. We live in hope.” Vera, like many Ukrainians, has suffered horrible grief because of the war. Even so, amazingly, she remains resilient.
Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland wept after interviewing Vera. This depth of empathy is the heart of Lucy’s approach to oral history interviewing. She described how conducting Oral History interviews cannot be about herself, the interviewer, or about the prestige and approval she might receive from conducting these interviews. “It is truly about listening to people’s stories and sharing them in a way that they would want them to be shared and publishing them on a larger platform.” Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland went on to describe how every stage of her method of interviewing is about the other person. Lucy always assures the interviewee that they should only share what they feel comfortable with, that they can skip questions, and should never feel any pressure during the interview to tell stories that might be to raw to relate. Finally, after the interview, she takes care to maintain relationships with those she interviews, letting them know when and where their story has been published. All this, she explained, “is about becoming a trusted member of the community.”
When Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland travelled to Georgia with her Boren Fellowship she began conducting interviews with those who have been affected by Russia’s 2008 invasion of the country. Interviewing Nino, an internally displaced person (IDP), Lucy learned she was not the first to interview those in Nino’s community. Since 2008, Nino said, many journalists had come, promising to tell Georgia’s story, collecting interviews, and disappearing, never to be heard form again. Nino took one journalist to her grandmother, who upon recounting having to flee her home began to weep. The journalist remained expressionless. “Nino swore she would never bring another researcher or journalist home.” Lucy’s approach to interviewing is an important break with what Nino was used to. Indeed, after many interviews, the storytellers have taken Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland out for a meal, refusing to let her pay. “I remember telling them that I was the one who should pay for their food, because they were helping me with my project. They explained that they wanted to pay for my food, because through this oral history project, by publishing their stories, I’m helping their community as well.”
Apart from helping the communities she has joined by telling their stories, Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland’s personal, empathetic interviews have, on at least one occasion, also brought solace to the bereaved. She first interviewed Mikaylo in Ukraine, just before Russia invaded. He enlisted and still found time to wish Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland a happy birthday and New Years from continents away. One day she found on Facebook that Mikaylo had been killed in the line of duty. Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland contacted his mother to wish her condolences and sent her the recording of the interview. Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland recounted that “A few days later, [Mikaylo’s mother] told me that when things would become very difficult for her, she listens to the recording of the interview. She said that when she listens, he is alive.” Concluding her presentation Lucy declared, “that’s why we do this. That’s the power of interviewing. When we collect stories, when we preserve people’s freedom, they can live forever.”
[1] All quotes are Ms. Minicozzi-Wheeland from the Lepage Event.
[2] For more of Iryna’s story see “Mariupol’s Last Stand: Inside Azovstal,” accessed February 5, 2024, https://huri.harvard.edu/mariupols-last-stand-inside-azovstal.
