Post-Soviet PTSD and the Future
Russia’s war on Ukraine means it’s time to rebuild the world again
Two days before Russia invaded Ukraine, I bought a flower-print dress and a pair of sandals. I was thinking of an upcoming conference in Paris and fantasizing about strolling along the bank of the Seine in a nice, new outfit. When Russian rockets started blasting Ukrainian cities, I felt a sharp pang of guilt and shame. How could I be so silly, so selfish, so sickeningly shallow to think about dresses and shoes, knowing that — for weeks — Russia had been amassing military forces around Ukraine? What kind of senseless denial had I been living in?
In the days that followed, I cycled through feelings of uselessness, sadness, anger, rage, and intense powerlessness. All along, I kept frantically following the news on every possible medium, madly retweeting snippets of information as if that would somehow alter the reality on the ground.
The undeniable reality that I didn’t want to accept and confront was that the war in Ukraine was never supposed to happen. The fact that it did — that it IS happening — means that the post-Cold War world order, imagined in the 1990s, is dead. It is buried under the rubble of shelled apartment buildings and a kindergarten in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
I moved through the days in a daze, safe and sound in my American apartment, far away from the war, yet I felt like my own life was in danger. The very premise on which my life’s hopes and dreams had rested for 30 years was crumbling with each explosion. This premise was that the Soviet Empire had collapsed; that it would never again put its boots on the necks of other countries; that, as a person who survived the Soviet system, I was free to live, love, work, and think as I wished. None of this could still be true in a world where Russia was invading Ukraine and the rest of the world stood and watched as the tanks rolled in. This was Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979 all over again. This was Soviet-style aggression. Brutal, senseless, horrifying, and seemingly unstoppable.
As I scrolled through social media, friends who, like me, had grown up in the former Soviet Bloc and emigrated in the 1990s, were sharing similar feelings of exasperation. One of them wrote, “the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end of the hopes of my generation.” Masha Gessen, a Russian emigre who now writes for The New Yorker, published a moving essay about the “crushing loss of hope” among some Russians today, who feel a sense of shame and powerlessness in the face of Putin’s tyranny. The wave of desperation was overwhelming.
Yet there was no desperation in the eyes of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he posted a video from Kyiv on the second day of the invasion, surrounded by members of his government, bravely looking at the camera and saying, “We are all here!”
The video made me cry. A few quiet, shivering sobs in front of my laptop as I watched Zelenskyy’s determination and courage. And it also brought me back to reality and gave me a sense of clarity about what I, and many like me, was experiencing.
This is post-Soviet PTSD and a profound sense of survivor’s guilt.
Nobody was chasing me out of my home. No air-raid sirens were blasting outside my windows. Nothing, absolutely nothing was happening around me to trigger my fear and despair. Yet the feelings were real, and they had been clenching my chest to the point of near suffocation.
Those of us who grew up in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s — “the last Soviet generation” as anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, another Russian emigre, called us — lived through the end of the world when the Berlin Wall came down. We had to rebuild a new world in our minds and in our everyday realities. It was a world based on hopes and dreams of freedom and prosperity. We invested our entire futures in the promises of democracy and opportunity offered to us by a mythical West.
Throughout our childhoods, we had been “protected” from this mythical West by communist governments with walls, barbed wire, pervasive mind control, and nuclear warheads. And then it all ended, as if by magic, and we were poor, idealistic, naive, and scared. But we were also elated to touch freedom, eager to see the Western world, and hungry for a piece of its prosperity. We went after these dreams with the determination and resilience that only youth affords. We wanted to believe in this new world with all our hearts.
In this new world, a Russian invasion of Ukraine should have been impossible. In this new world, the whole notion of a rivalry between the West and Russia should have been moot. All former communist countries were supposed to become, one by one, just like “the West.” In fact, the whole world was slowly but surely supposed to become like “the West.”
But, of course, this was all a dangerous delusion, although we could not have known it back in 1989. As we got older, wiser, and more comfortable, we didn’t want to face reality. We kept living in denial. We saw the rise of Putin and the crack down on dissent in Russia. We saw the growing webs of kleptocracy around the former communist world. We saw the cynical pursuit of greed and power reach deep into the no-longer-mythical West as well. But we told ourselves there was still hope. And even when the Russian army started surrounding Ukraine, we did not want to believe that a massive invasion was possible. We wanted to believe it was just posturing, saber rattling, misguided dramatic flair.
Our denial exploded when the first rocket fell on Ukrainian soil. Our post-Soviet PTSD is kicking in with full force now. It makes many of us feel that going on with life as usual is impossible. It makes us feel that all hope is lost. It makes us feel like we’re at the end of the world. Again.
It’s time to rebuild the world again.
The pain we feel is good and necessary. It is a powerful wake-up call and a reason to get up and act. We have no time for desperation. We have no time for fear. So what can we do?
First, we must recognize that we are suffering from post-Soviet PTSD and take care of ourselves. Feel our feelings. Talk about them. Find strength in community. Ground ourselves in the present and recognize all the strength, resources, and experiences we have gained in the past 30 years. We are not powerless. We are not victims. We are survivors. We are dreamers and doers.
We have faced the end of the world before and we have made it through. Just like Ukraine’s defiant president Zelenskyy, we are all still here!
Once we recognize this, it is time to start rebuilding the world again. We need to rebuild it in our minds, but also in the policies and institutions we create and support, and in the values we pass on to our children.
Here are three things we have learned in the last 30 years, which we must remember as we build this new world:
- Freedom and prosperity — democracy and capitalism — are not two sides of the same coin. Just look at Russia’s oligarchs and America’s business moguls. Wealth does not make one a democrat. Comfort does not make one a fighter for freedom. At the same time, freedom is easily surrendered when one has no means of survival. Principles are traded in for food and warmth. We should fight for both freedom and prosperity, but we should remember that one does not guarantee the other.
- We exist in an interconnected world where every conflict, no matter how far, affects us personally even if not immediately. This will feel overwhelming and scary at times, but we must resist the temptation to isolate and hide. We cannot be single-issue voters. We cannot be single-cause activists. We cannot ignore the suffering of others, just because they are far away from us. We must recognize that we are all connected and we are all responsible for the future of this world.
- Recognizing our interconnectedness, we must nevertheless start where we are and stay true to our humanity. We must reach out to people around us, organize, discuss, engage in local politics, educate ourselves, educate others, offer help and support, build webs of solidarity, and continue to dream. In doing this, we must challenge ourselves to remember and nurture our shared humanity. Tyrants want us to look at each other as enemies. Tyrants dehumanize others in order to justify their extermination. We must fight for our values and dreams without denying anyone’s humanity.
Building a new and better world will be hard. It will take time. We will have to endure pain. We will suffer defeats. We will have to push beyond our limits. But if we give up now, if we remain trapped in the clutches of post-Soviet PTSD, then aggression wins. Tyranny wins. Desperation wins.
Thank you for reading. Check out the other stories in my publication Meantime.
Connect with me on Twitter: @nadiakaneva
