A Curious Story of a Hidden Letter From 1932
I came to the archives of Welsh National Library as a researcher of local pacifist movements’ history. True to old British tradition the building of the Library was tucked in a small and pretty university town with a jaw-breaking name of Aberystwyth situated on the brink of civilization, i.e. 3 kilometres from Irish Sea and as far from any multicultural city as humanly possible. By the time the project started I’d been already living in Wales for several months, and had my chance to experience all pleasures of cultural isolation from my home Ukraine. It is interesting how when the code of your culture completely vanishes from everyday surroundings, you unconsciously start looking for its traces on every corner.
Apart from getting to listen to a shameful lot of Ukrainian music, I started researching the question of Ukrainians in Wales. The first thing that came up naturally was coal, the reason of many industrial regions’ demise. By the end of the 19th century Wales became one of the biggest suppliers of coal in the world. And when you say coal, think miners, and where there’re miners, you find Ukrainians. An employee of Big Pit, the largest mining museum in Wales and himself an experienced underground worker said that even now in some operational mines one can find writings in Ukrainian (and I wonder what kind of messages they entailed). A volunteer in my office whose father also worked ‘in the valleys’ added that in 1960s his family lived not far from a Ukrainian restaurant. One time his dad was forced to spend three days celebrating a humble Ukrainian wedding.
Unfortunately for the seekers of a better life industrial boom soon came to its logical end, and miners went with it.
However for a brief moment Welsh workers also came to Donbass, Ukraine in search for a better life. After founding in 1889 the town of Hughesovka now notoriously known as Donetsk, a Welsh businessman John Hughes was chased out of his own new world by Russian revolution of 1917. And I can’t help thinking that Hughes’ Welsh birthplace Merthyr Tydfil, despite all its green hills, still bears a visible resemblance to Donbass in its lightly depressive post-industrialist grandeur. Aberystwyth is a different story.
Clean, studenty and slightly lethargic during summer Aberystwyth had seemingly nothing in common with Ukraine. During WW2 it served as a safeplace for London archives and was later rewarded for service with a number of valuable gifts including Shakespeare’s manuscripts and Da Vinci’s drafts. And, really, what better place to hide things when there’s only ocean and brave New World ahead. In a grand classical building of National Library on top of the hill overlooking Cardigan Bay you can feel the full significance of history and your place in it. Lawns are swarmed with bunnies jumping freely on the grass and groups of students lying lazily with their lunch sandwiches and apples.
It’s strange to think that several centuries ago this area was in the heart of fighting for Welsh independence. By the time WW1 broke out, the dreams of independence were replaced by a motto ‘if not free, let’s be safe at least’. Thus in 1922 local youngsters from Urdd organization set up an annual campaign of transmitting radio messages of Peace and Goodwill.
Set with the intention to reconcile peoples, it was a pressing issue in-between two global wars. Every year on the 15th of may Welsh volunteers would issue a message to the kids around the world asking to support pacifist movement. Or at least send a note and tell what kind of threats there are in various places, and how to tackle them all. What is truly interesting, they did receive answers every year and from many places.
Of course the contents of return messages couldn’t was fairly naive. But put together three letters from say the year 1933, coming from Italy, Japan and Germany, pepper this stew with an answer from USSR, and you will receive a three-dimensional picture of what all those people thought (or pretended to think). The same people who in less than a decade will be shooting at each other.
Put together three letters from say the year 1933, coming from Italy, Japan and Germany, pepper this stew with an answer from USSR, and you will receive a three-dimensional picture of what all those people thought (or pretended to think).
Take a syrupy letter from Italy. With wishes of “all the best in safekeeping peace around the world” local embassy attached an even more sweetly declarative message from a group of school children of a Roman school. One can almost drop a tear on the lines while reading their touching words. Until a quick google search adds some context to the story and it turns out that the school of Opera Nationale Balilla was a youth fascist organization the kind where children were obliged to carry rifles as a part of their school uniforms.
German story is yet darker. In the course of several years a teacher from Thuringia paints a chilling picture of shifts in his hometown, where radical sayings of parents are transmitted by the kids and start to transition into actions. Then in 1933 the last letter comes, and its contents can’t be more contrasting: ‘it is all fine,’ — the teacher writes, — ‘as we believe in our bright furer and our glorious Arian nation.’ A sad example of how a personality is crashed under the weight of big historical events.
A neat stack of three folders from Soviet Union that I found had record from only three years, 1932, 1934 and 1936. The 1934 and 1936 folders held nothing noteworthy except for an agreement of a radio center Solyanka in Moscow to transmit Peace and Goodwill Message in USSR together with a bunch of Soviet radio program leaflets sent to show a wide scope of knowledge that communist people received in their fabulous country. It all frighteningly resembled catalogs from some kind of a religious cult.
The year 1932 opened with a translator’s note addressed to Urdd’s director of that time. In the note a translator was mentioning a letter from an exotic place called “Nikopol.” The next page proved what I together with my infinitely poor knowledge of geography suspected: “village Mikolo-Musijevko-lernejo”. Was indeed situated in Ukrainian Nikopol.
It turned out though that the translator from Neath did not at all speak wither Russian or Ukrainian. Because the original letter was written in Esperanto, language of our bright communist never-happening future. Luckily Esperanto is something of a mixture between Italian and English, beside local translator did an excellent job, and to translate the message was quite easy. Here is what it said:
Dear friends,
We received your letter from our teacher Johano Celovanaj on 18/5/32.
We are pupils of a village school in the Ukraine. Our village consists of 120 houses — about 700 inhabitants. All are farm workers. One collective ownership exists in our village — that means that nobody has his own ground, horses and machines — everything is common property. Every villager must work if he is of full age and strength. Children must learn and old people must rest. All receipts are divided according to occupation and number of days worked. Those who work the most receive the most. In our school are two teachers and 80 pupils. Education continues here for four years, afterwards we go to a neighbouring village where there are higher classes. All children in our country must attend school for seven years. In our school we learn esperanto in the fourth class, but in other schools in our district they do not learn it and speak of it with hostility.
We will be very pleased if you will reply to us. In a second letter we will write to you about our school life, the life of our parents, etc.
Please explain to us what is the meaning of Goodwill Day about which you write.
We hope you will keep well,
Your friends, Drobot Nokolao, etc., etc.
Our Address:
If you wish us to receive your letter more rapidly, write our address in Ukrainian.
In its simple and naive style I immediately recognized the time and the people, also a bit more naive, different in the manner my grandparents were different from me, but sharing a common cultural code. I could see the year 1932. Ukraine, vast fields of Nikopol, and a village of 200 people. A storm of ten-year-olds who run into a stuffy classroom after lunch break. And greet their teacher who puts a fancy foreign envelope on his desk. Just imagine how enormous this world might’ve seemed to those kids, who sat to write an answer: “We are pupils…”
I’d always thought of 1932 as a dark and scary time where Ukraine could well be an embassy of hell on Earth, where people could only live in terrible suffering, as it was the same year when Eastern and Southern regions suffered both the hunger and beginning of Stalin repression. What history books never said and what I never knew was that those were also times when people learned and dreamed about universal language for everyone and wrote letters to other schoolchildren across the world, and were part of this global life I naively thought I was the first generation to live. And yet it is exactly how Welsh youngsters saw the kids from my country in 1932. Now I wonder, how people would see us eighty years on?
