[000:00:00;00] what kind of revival of nazism or communism is there, they teach them critical theory, and under the guise of critical theory , i will repeat myself now, you can even compare the theory of the flat earth, because if you do not see its circularity, then it means that you, well, think critically , and that is why here in the political plan we have a lot of things that, frankly, can be considered in perspective , you know, some kind of freudian there, for example, in relation to the new mental nervousness of western society, but we will have to live with it and work with it and change it , another way out probably not. thank you very much, thank you, mykhailo yakubovych, orientalist , researcher at freiburg university , germany, was with us, we are going to take a short break now, then we will come back and continue, we will talk about the main topics of the week, stay with us. events, events that are happening right now and affect our

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saturday political club, this is vitaly portnikov. this is lesya vakulyuk, we are glad to see you, and we continue, today we actually started with the topic of the holodomor, and one way or another, even with mr. mykhailo, we still remembered stalin and everything that happened in the world and in ukraine, in particular, in those times, who else i didn't light a memorial candle today, by the way, you can put it on the windowsill and remember all those ukrainians, millions of ukrainians who became victims of all this horror, and in this way honor their memory and how to show solidarity, show that you, that we we remember this, and when did you find out about it, by the way, about the memory candle, no, about the holodomor, about the holodomor, it was the 90s, huh, and i remember that my grandmother, i had a teacher of ukrainian literature, who was for such ukrainian literature, and not the one prescribed by the party, and in the early 90s, she learned that they would

show a documentary about the holodomor somewhere in the people's house, i'm from khodrovat , such a small town in the lviv region, and she me took me there and i was shocked. these shots, i was about 10 years old then, probably, i don’t know if it would be said now that it is traumatic for a child, but in fact i was very grateful to my grandmother that she showed it to me, and then, later on, she let me read it to lasa samchuk maria, one book was for the whole the city and she moved between schools, several schools and everyone reread the book, and the only thing is that even in independent ukraine, it was just some kind of background event in 1990, of course, yes, that is, they only discovered it for themselves, and then i remember when i was already a journalist, i worked in corres in kyiv, and it was amazing that in kyiv it was still necessary to prove to some politicians that it was a holodomor, that it was an artificial famine arranged by russia, and ukrainians were being destroyed, i

have known about this since the 70s, and that is amazing , that i was told this in the family circle, my aunt, who was a lawyer in soviet times, she was just starting her legal practice, you know, how it happens after law school, and she was sent to the villages, uh, to... witness cases of cannibalism under the time of the famine, and she saw it all, she, because she was such a principled soviet person, she did not give any evaluations, it was generally her way of communicating with me, she did not give evaluations, if she started to give evaluations, they were correct evaluations, the general line of the party, but she reported facts that did not exist in the form of some soviet ones, it was always strange for me, i always couldn’t understand the meaning of this upbringing, but it was like that, on the one hand, she didn’t want to talk to herself about what

the state in which she lived in generally imagined and in which she is was working, on the other hand she knew it and wanted me to know it, it was, strangely enough, a struggle with herself, like an internal struggle that she wanted. pass on to the child so that the child knows the truth, and therefore, oddly enough, i knew everything about the famine, and by the way, the famine became the delayed cause of the death of my aunt's family, her parents, her younger sister, already during the hitler occupation, why ? because her parents refused to evacuate from cherkasy, she convinced them that it was necessary to evacuate, they also told me that the nazis would go and simply exterminate all jews. her father said: wait, listen, the soviet newspapers wrote about how soviet ukraine was flourishing in the 1930s, there were corpses

of peasants coming from the surrounding forces, people were dying of hunger, before our eyes was a catastrophe and a tragedy , how can you believe such a press that matters, what they tell about the germans, they are liars. and murderers, i will not go anywhere, because i do not believe them, and it is also a tragedy, by the way, that a person who did not believe the soviet press so much that he was ready to not believe it, when in principle she told the truth, and as a result she paid for it with her life, not every person of jewish origin could forge , but my grandmother's parents, i was my aunt, my grandmother's older sister, could forge, so the famine overtook them in the form of bones precisely because they were the atmosphere itself was terrible, and the other thing that surprised me in those 70s and 80s was that it was not possible to talk about it, well, one thing, and the fact that no one talked about it,

two. the situation with the holocaust was a little different, we tried to talk about it, we were silenced, in schools, i remember how my teachers in schools just didn't allow the summer times. the union won, won, of course, but it was not possible to say that jews died in babenomura, it was taboo, soviet people, no jews, jews are nationalism, you are just an agent of zionism, there is no such thing, no meaning, whatever the difference is, these are all soviet people, which means that the holocaust was basically hushed up by the state, and the people themselves preferred not to talk about the holodomor, that is, there was such a thing, it was terrible. obviously, people were talking, perhaps in some family household circle, intra-nationally, the circles were hermetic, i could not have known about it, since i was not a person of ukrainian origin, so i imagine that in ukrainian families,

when they gathered and locked the doors , as in jewish families families gathered and locked the doors, they could talk , well, maybe they didn't drive, but they just knew that here, in principle, people with the same problems and memory, they could talk about... this, but when, let's say, i think my classmates never talked to me about it, maybe they did talked about it with their parents, but their parents told them, just please , don't tell about it at school, don't tell the teacher about it, god forbid someone tell, yes, about some jewish problems, about anti-semitism in the soviet union, i also knew , which does not need to be said, when you leave the apartment, you left the apartment, there is the territory of danger. mr. vitaly, but if in the early 90s, even people who survived the holodomor, or the descendants of those who survived the holodomor, denied it, i think that in soviet times they definitely did not say, because it was it's scary, well, someone spoke, someone didn't speak, there were always people, believe me, and the ukrainian environment is as strong as any national environment in the empire, so that there were always people talking to each other, it's just

obvious that it was not mass, but there was another point that distinguishes the holodimor from the holocaust, what do you understand, the holocaust is over, the people who were participants in the holocaust, they were punished, they were taboo, they were pure evil and there was no doubt that you walk with them on the same streets, if you suddenly met a person who was a participant in the destruction there, relatives there and so on, then in principle he knew that this person was a criminal, or he was hiding there and afraid, and what happened to the organizers of the famine? they stayed close to you, the system, the institution, whatever they came to power, they stayed in power , well, someone was shot, of course, but those who were not shot, they had no problems, that is, you actually lived in the same state as your executioners, and these executioners were considered respected people. and this was an additional problem

of fear, another injury, of course, because you actually continued to be in a repressive state, and people who in principle could have been participants in these repressions were heroes of this state, this is what i am trying to explain all the time, that by and large this is soviet ukraine or soviet russia in general, it was the dpr , it's just that bandits seized too much of the government's territory, you shouldn't think that...' it was such an ordinary state, i don't know what modern ukraine or some modern france is like, only more repressive, no, that's not true, it was just a bunch of bandits and the bolsheviks were a bunch bandits, and there is no need for any illusions that they were simply able to seize power, as pushilin from pasichnikov got power from putin, and putin himself seized power in russia with his chekists, this has nothing to do with institutions, because institutions work

exclusively as a tool . repressions, and the people who are themselves in these institutions are also people with a criminal psyche, and this was also an additional such moment, and i think that this, here we say, to what extent this trauma still exists, does not allow the ukrainian people to develop, i think this is very serious the thing is, i don't think that all this has been overcome, i think in principle that the ukrainian people after the cold war... this is a completely different nation, and to the great happiness of the ukrainian people, it joined soviet ukraine, a territory where all this did not exist, of western ukraine and volyn, and the people who lived in these territories, they did not live with such a traumatized psyche, you know what surprised me, i am from the west of ukraine, and when i came to kyiv and said: "people, the famine, it's so scary, they died." ukrainians, then very

often my colleagues who are either from the kyiv region or elsewhere further east, they said: well, what’s the matter here, but nothing, well, it wasn’t a harvest, it’s just that they didn’t accept it, how can you not accept it, well, look, that’s how it always happens with traumatized nations, that’s it things, same story with the holocaust, european jewry deeply traumatized by the holocaust, a traumatized nation, there were just jews in the united states of america, and jews living in israel who didn't survive, ugh. and these are essentially different experiences, people who later came to israel from europe, they experienced everything, it is completely different than, people of the same jewish origin who did not live without it, because if you visited auschwitz, or your relatives all died there, you have a different consciousness, and the same here, imagine that you are a descendant of a family that survived the famine, what should you do, i will tell you. on

march 5, 1953, the husband of my aunt, another sister, told you about that. he is a ukrainian from a ukrainian village that survived the famine from a rich family that was dispossessed and died, he barely saved his life because he ran away. to kyiv and he learns about stalin's death, ugh, these little rooms. on mykhailivsky provolk in the center of kyiv, he turns on the gramophone, puts on a record with dance music , he was a chorister, a dancer, there in

the opera house, and starts dancing, dancing, because he has a joyful day, while everyone is sobbing for show, that's how everyone sobs, not for show, well, anyone? they cry, he dances, my aunt, whom i told you about, a communist, comes to her sister's house, comes in, sits on the sofa and watches him dances and doesn't say anything, because she understands everything, she doesn't tell him, my god, how can you dance on such a day, she is silent. because she realizes the depth of his trauma and she realizes that now the happiest day of his life has come, here is a story about trauma, and i, he managed, so he managed to survive this trauma, because he hated all

these people who took away a normal life his family, but there were people who could not survive it like that, there were no such vital forces. there was no such feeling of hatred, and i wonder why i can is to analyze, precisely because of these family stories, because i see these people, people who experienced all this, people, i saw it at the intersection of these two tragedies, you see, the families were relatives who survived the famine, there are relatives who survived the holocaust, and i saw how these two actually traumatized nations come together there in one family relationship , and only in these people, you know, i, how they feel, someone lost people to hunger, and parents and brothers and sisters, and someone lost people to the holocaust after 5 years, and

then people live in this soviet in a place where it cannot be mentioned, these are the biggest events of their lives, most importantly, these are national traumas, these are domestic traumas, these are their traumas as children, in principle, the state would do everything possible to help them come to their senses, to rethink the memory and she says, no, shut up, shut up, shut up, and in fact only their great-grandchildren or grandchildren, who were not direct witnesses of the tragedies, when independence comes, but in independence, during independence , begin to reinterpret the memory independence, i don't i think that some person would appear who could, i don't know, laugh at the holocaust , deny it, because officially , you could do it, you couldn't hang around and deny it, but you couldn't even mention it, that's also an interesting position , no one denied the holocaust, on the other hand, you could have told you in soviet propaganda the story that the holocaust was arranged by the zionists, together with the ukrainian nationalists, there was a wonderful book that

was published in dnipropetrovsk by this ray publishing house called the union of the trident and the star david, i read it, i wrote a competition paper specifically about that, i wrote about all these anti-zionist propaganda books of the uzladavih, their contents, i was just very interested, and i found such a book, which told how the zionists agreed with the ukrainian nationalists about the holocaust , and how, well, they just said that they were ukrainians, they needed them in order to destroy as many jews as possible, so that the jews went to israel and they could not be destroyed, and they agreed with the nationalists that they would destroy them, and the ukrainian nationalists agreed with the hitlerites, a very simple theory, so i remembered it, because i think, well , it turns out that we, we ourselves are to blame for all this, it turns out, so it's like the ukrainians are also to blame for the famine, themselves, because somehow the communist party didn't grow as much bread as they wanted, and then

they didn't want to eat, so we remember that this famine, by the way, is also an interesting story, when it was organized, it was huge... mistrust of the soviet leadership of ukraine and the second secretary of the party's central committee, the then leader mendel hatayevich of the dnipropetrovsk party organization , a jewish boy from katerinaslav was shot, and in his place was put a russian postashev, who was sent from russia, who was the main leader of the whole story, because they did not trust the natives. ukrainians, even those of non-ukrainian origin, stanislav kasior was a pole, the first secretary of the party's central committee of those times, were still not trusted, because somehow they knew too many ukrainians. and postoshev didn't have anyone he knew, he

came as if from abroad and therefore he could absolutely calmly carry out all this policy, the signature of how he carried it out, he was transferred to russia, shot, well, as happens with mass crime organizations, that he knew too much, but what was another interesting moment, forget about the incredible, i would say a cynical turn of events, in principle, stalin decided to destroy all the organizers, not the organizers, but the executors of the holodomor, ugh, postyshev , the first standing of the central committee of the party , stanislav kosir, the chairman of the council of people's commissars, vlas chubar, other representatives of the country's party leadership, the chairman, presidium of the verkhovna rada of the ukrainian ssr hryhoriy petrovsky, in whose honor dnipropetrovsk was named. who signed all these decrees, in general, which led to the holodomor, well, formally, but he signed, of course, he did not destroy only because petrovsky literally ran away, this is

a famous story, he simply ran away from stalin, being a candidate for a member of the politburo, transferred to an illegal position, well, he was a man with a long, illegal past, a former resident of kotorzhan there, a member of the state duma, so he also endured repressions, in an unknown place, at some of his acquaintances. somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and then all his life he worked on the farm in the museum of the revolution in moscow, when he was sleeping fast, and his children were shot, it seems, as always happens, but he saved himself, and even lived to be awarded the title of hero of socialist labor, already conceived khrushchev as an old bolshevik, but this is the only exception, in ukraine three central committees of the party were destroyed one by one, people were elected to the central committee and all the rostry. after all, we don't even know some of the managers

ukrainians of those times, because there are no photos of them, so as not to testify, well, that was simply the time of the reformatting of the apparatus , ugh, and so as not to testify, there were probably also different motives, but in the 60s, the restoration of socialist legality and rehabilitation began , thus i ended up, let's say , on chubor avenue at some point in my life, and nearby were the streets of kosiora. zlatonskyi, other soviet bolsheviks, postyshev, it generally became an icon of soviet ukraine, books, biographies, films, that is, as part of the rejection of the cult of stalin and debunking stalin's repressions, people who were direct participants in the destruction of the ukrainian people were added to the soviet iconostasis. and it was presented under the label of restoration of justice. here, if you want to rehabilitate your loved ones there, your cultural figures, one or

another, you still have to take as the main thing that you are rehabilitating party figures, who in fact carried out all these criminal decisions, and very often were the engine this whole humane movement, and it was always such a disaster for me, and of course this one the page of participation in the famine, she froze. ugh, no one ever talks about it, because there was no holodimor, of course, there was no, so it was the fiery revolutionaries who had monuments, and who were much better than stalin and his guards, because they they shot, repressed, and the fact that some bandits killed others, well, there was no need to talk about it, as you remember, the whole of kyiv was renamed in essence, with names and pronouns. of these people, in fact, kyiv itself was a monument

to the restoration of socialist legality, a monument to the khrushchev thaw, and in fact these were the names of the executioners, and only in the 90s did we begin to get rid of these names bit by bit, we didn't get rid of all of them, remember, it was a very, very long time, and that too to a certain extent people were created by some misunderstanding of reality, misunderstanding of the scale of what happened. therefore, when president yushchenko initiated all these real changes and in the historical memory of the state, practically the entire party of regions , with the exception of two deputies who were from lviv and therefore simply did not laugh, well that's it they were afraid that they would come here, well, it was taras chornovil hanna herman, we even remember who it was, they voted against a clear, i would say, definition, head. because viktor yanukovych believed that such a definition, firstly, quarrels ukraine with russia, and

secondly distances ukraine from russia, and that's it. but now you can hear from the ukrainians, what did that yushchenko do, he carried on with his holodomor, i often hear this, i hear it , listen, it is also clear, i think that in principle, i cannot say that i was ardent, a supporter of president viktor yushchenko when he was president, because i also expected more concrete and clear actions from him in terms of reforming the country, but each person can do what he can do, what viktor yushchenko tried to change... the attitude of ukrainians towards their, i would say, national memory, is a huge revolution in consciousness, in principle, when you sow such seeds, they do not yield results immediately, both in education and in the way the media treats these or that problems, and in what arises

such a real attitude to the tragedy, imagine again the jewish people who do not want to mention the holocaust, but say, listen, let's not worsen relations with germany, it is important for us to build with them, we needed them, of course, and now we need good relations with everyone, and the germans will probably be offended, what does that mean, we will say that they are responsible , they have kites, my god, we will have a fight with them, and this is a serious european state, imagine what modern israel would look like , in general, would modern israel still exist with such an attitude towards its own history. now extrapolate it to the holodomor. by and large, the holodomor is one of the fundamental events in the history of the ukrainian people, because even the number does not matter , what matters is, firstly, that there were millions of people, and secondly, that it was an artificial history. in many nations, a great famine is the foundation of national consciousness. i

remember i was in dublin, at home. while there was a museum of great hunger, then when i came next time, i think this one the museum was already built, a museum that is remembered not only for its exposition, but also for the monument near the museum, when there are people walking, hungry people, it is beautifully done there, it is like this in essence, also a variation from our near the girls, the museum of the famine, but there are several people from the tortured, scary faces, and when you see it, you perceive the history of the irish people with all the traumas in a completely different way, you start to understand a lot about the irish, things that you could not in principle understand, but you are a foreigner, and you imagine an irishman, for which this story suddenly does not exist, this is a fundamental story, the great famine, but

this great famine, one way or another, was connected with the negligence of the british government, with the misunderstanding of the scale of the problem, but that is, it was not there, it was not intentional, of course, no one in london was going and didn't say: "let's go, let's starve the irish, there they just tried somehow not and didn't pay attention to it and didn't understand what it would lead to, and this treatment of ireland as a territory not like britain, relatively speaking, about all this can be said, and it is also a trauma, but the irish though. they know that the british government did not plan their destruction, deliberately , and now it did not go to war in the same way as russia , well, of course, it did not want to go and would not go, because it was a complicated relationship between these two peoples, they can to compare with the relationship between russians and ukrainians, but one way or another , this is a slightly different story, and here we understand that we are talking about an artificial golet, and we are talking

in the 90s, the leadership of democratic russia, you renounced communism. why can't you tell the truth that communist the government, the bolshevik government went to the artificial destruction of the ukrainian people for one reason or another, political, economic, social, choose which ones you like more, in the end, make them for yourself, the main thing, no, we can't do it from one stop reason, because then we will have no reason to hope that we will return you to our ceremonial haven, and therefore we will pretend that you and i have the same fate, we also had a famine in the volga, and you were hungry, well, that's just the result of carelessness of the agrarian policy of the bolshevik government, well, first of all, this is also not true, all these famines that were in russia itself, it was also not only the result of negligence, but the result of punishment of the peasantry, which, although it was not a base for the bolsheviks, they considered their own the base of the proletariat, which was in the minority, imagine,