Week 9: April 21 – April 27, 2022

Summary of the Week 9, April 21 – April 27, 2022

TURNING HEAVEN AND EARTH FOR UKRAINE VICTORY – psychological definite shift in the Mean War

Inna Rogatchi (C). Soul Search. Original drawing in crayons Luminance, oil pastel, with hand-applied pigment of gold on pigment print on cotton paper. Song for Ukraine exclusive series . 30 x 40 cm. Size in a museum passepartout 40 x 50 cm. Ed. of 10. 2022. The artwork is part of Inna Rogatchi charitable art appeal in support of the people of Ukraine. 

The Mean War against Ukraine continues for 9 weeks by now. It will not be finished tomorrow. As we can see, the world community needed two months to recover from an initial shock and to start not only to express solidarity with attacked Ukraine, but to think – and most importantly, to act properly to help and to assist the the brave and resilient country  attacked by the moral Neanderthals although I didn’t mean to upset the Neanderthals.  

We know that military assistance comes and reaches Ukraine. The only thing is that it comes too late. And in the war , especially in the Mean War, there is no such thing as belated military assistance. 

We also know that Ukraine gets many other possible kinds of help: financial, logistical, intelligence,  humanitarian, possible help in reconstructing the destroyed country. It is all deadly important. But Ukrainian sky is understood to be left a prey to the unqualified savage army of thugs. 

Still, the most important thing has happened during the ninth week of the Mean War. The process which has started on February 24th, 2022, from its total disbelief and all kind of arguments justifying not that whole-hearted help to Ukraine, through the horrors of Bucha, Borodjanka, Mariupol and so many other places, has transformed into firm commitment by the world not only to sympathise with Ukraine, but to stand next to it. This is a fundamental, qualified shift. A principal shift in the commitment to help Ukraine to prevail. 

In the phrasing of the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin ‘to turn earth and heaven’ to help Ukraine to win its battle, the joint decision of the collective West has crystallised. Moreover, the US Defence Secretary has made this crystal clear statement not just anywhere but at the largest US base in Europe in Ramstein, Germany. That base and its military personnel had a long and productive experience during the decades that they had been posted there, so far from their home, and so stunningly necessary in the third decade of the XXI century. I have many friends connected with the US base in Ramstein and I know that well-preserved tradition well enough.  I know that once these kinds of people and institutions are committed, they are committed. There are no ifs left  in such a context. 

Ukraine paid a very high price to be understood in the way it is understood now, and to be consciously defended by the united community of the world’s countries. Unnecessary high price, in my opinion. Unpardonably high price, with insuperable damage on so many levels. But Ukraine also was able, as amazingly as it is, to teach us all to be brave, articulated, moral and resilient. It was a much needed lesson. I hope it will be taken by all parties thoroughly. 

Day 63: April 27, 2022, Wednesday

‘A REGULAR THIRD WORLD WAR’ – STATEMENTS OF THE RUSSIAN MILITARY VETERANS

So, a serious event had happened in the Russian parliament recently, a special meeting of the Duma  ( Military) Veterans Affairs Committee. The Committee is chaired by MP Mironov, the head of the party called Fair Russia. Mironov himself never fails to remind the public that he was a paratrooper in his past. Recently, this Russian MP has gathered some attention by his inflamed public instigation to kill the president of Ukraine. “He did deserve it. He deserved it in full. It serves him right!” – a senior Russian MP was exlaming and repeating, repeating and exclaiming publicly in Moscow recently. Well, we got it: a senior Russian MP, the leader of the parliamentary party, was publicly instigating the assasination of the president of a sovereign state. 

As this was not confronted, the former paratrooper who is seemingly more militant decades after his regular army service, was emboldened to get into the Russian domestic contest of warmongers which is rather crowded. 

During his Military Veterans Affairs Committee recent show in Duma, the people present there, some who should be there to follow the mainstream of Russian politics, you see, were quite impressed, as I am hearing, first-hand.   “There was a super ultra militant hysteria there for several hours, conducted at full speed” – those observers mentioned. 

Just some of the pearls from that Duma Committee official meeting: “ There is a regular war ( which is going on in Ukraine), the Third World war” – said one official, on the record. “ It is a historical battle of the XXI century’ – said another. “ If there is a war, we should carry it all out” – said the third. 

Everyone who was speaking at the meeting was calling for far more radical military measures against Ukraine. The Committee also officially reprimanded Russia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Lavrov who repeated, due to his role and script for it, that their country ‘does not seek the change of the government in Ukraine’ . “What on earth are we not seeking the change of the government there? What else are we seeking then?” – a former MP who is still a member of the Committee was exclaiming. 

The Committee has demanded, also on the record, that Russia’s schools and universities would be running special programs for establishing ‘the correct understanding about purposes and tasks of the war among our children and youth. This is absolutely important’. 

Nobody from the present, several tens of adult men, did not call the Mean War as ‘ a special operation’. They all are former or current officers, for them to call it ‘a special operation’ and to use any kind of euphemisms is an insult. 

Those warmongers from and in Duma really demand more blood and destruction. Yet more blood and destruction. They are very agitated. They see by whatever professional eye that has left among them that their army is losing big and that it is utterly incompetent.  They are registering a professional disaster, ever subconsciously so. But their reaction to what is going on with their army acting in a way of useless barbarians is quite telling. They want it to be improved to the last Ukrainian. And to the annihilation of the Ukrainian cities, towns and villages. 

The hate behind this low militant idiocy is stunning. Even people who are living in Russia and who are professionally observing this one and the other similar official committees and bodies there are stunned. “What on the earth are they hoping for?Are they adequate? How does  it possible for the professional military to be so wall-stupid?” – the person who was present during that telling Committee meeting at the Duma was exclaiming. “In the end of that mad-house show, where everyone tried hard to be more militant than Shoigu & Co, I felt that I needed to see a psychiatrist, to check if everything is OK with me, and if I did not hallucinate all that afternoon at that Duma audience room”. – “But those one in that hall, they did not feel as if they were in urgent need of medical help although they definitely are in danger. They and the world where they can reach’,  – I said to my friend. – ‘No, – he said – they are completely occupied  by running the regular Third World War. They were waiting for that for so long”. 

Day 62: April 26, 2022, Tuesday

CHERNOBYL ANNIVERSARY in 2022

 April 26th is the date which is known to the world as the date of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. As it was not enough, 36 year after that nightmare-like day, Russian geniuses were very close to organising there a terrible repetition from the day one and thereafter of the Mean War 2022. As if it was not enough to cross the path, in the tanks,  through the forbidden zone around the deactivated Chernobyl nuclear station thus rising to the air an enormous cloud of what is known as ‘a rusty dust’, deadly, lethal dust which was left as the result of the catastrophe, to cut the way to the station, according to the genius plans of the genius tactics planned the operation in the Russian army. As if it was not enough to get people on the ground of the Rusty Forest, a no-go 5 kilometre zone on the station perimeter, so dangerous that it will stay in its status for eternity. As if it was not enough to command the thousands of ‘the liberators’ dispatched in that way on the ground to cave in trenches just inside the Rusty Forest. Whom they were supposed to defend themselves from? – I still wonder all the time. As if it was not enough to seize entire active Ukrainian personnel at the station, killing five people there and keeping hostages for three and half weeks the rest of them depriving people who were providing the security of the station – and the bloody captors, as it goes – from food, drink, bathing, and any normal sanitary condition, not mention such luxury as sleep. 

As if it was not enough to make and leave behind a repulsive mess made by stupid barbarians in the station’s premises – just check some of it on the pictures in my poster. As if it was not enough to loot the computers from the Chernobyl centre, and anything lootable from there. As if it was not enough also to loot , for souvenirs, many bottles with samples of highly radioactive liquids from the station. I wonder who would be honoured by receiving such great souvenirs from ‘the liberating operation’, or would it stay in the possession of the marauders, effectively killing them all? As if it was not enough to destroy, on purpose, as orangutans on megatons of steroids, the priceless and crucially important archive of the Chernobyl centre, with unique documentation collected and kept there during the last 40plus years. 

When those vertically-oriented orangutans retreated, solely because hundreds of them started to suffer from acute syndromes of the radioactive disease and had had to be rushed to the nearby hospitals in Belarus for some kind of treatment, Ukrainian authorities and locals who were able to visit what has been left from the neatly maintained previously Cherobyl centre, were stupefied to find such a pogrom both inside and outside it. The same stupefied was Dr Marco Grossi, the Director General of the IAEA who had to visit the Chernobyl twice by now, with his second visit was around the date which we all do remember so very painfully. Now, after that savage pogrom, the Ukrainian Chernobyl Centre urgently needs a large amount of equipment, in order to stabilise the station and its premises and maintain it safe. The orangutans who were enjoying themselves at the Rusty Forest and in the no-go zone would die within a calendar year. This is strictly medical projections. There are hundreds of them. 

Typically , not a word is muttered about Chernobyl in Russia after the truth about their just unbelievable stupid criminal activity there was told to the world after their jackal-like retreat from there. And how boasting they were on ‘taking Chernobyl under our control’ on the first day of their Mean War. Taking control for what? – one wonders. For distributing the souvenirs with lethal liquids among the orangutans without explaining to them that it is not vodka? Amazing army, indeed. A gang. 

Day 61: April 25, 2022, Monday

UKRAINIAN MELODY BY POLISH ORCHESTRAS FOR THE WORLD

On April 11, 2022, two weeks ago, there was a wonderful event in our virtual global space. Thirty eight Polish orchestras, conducted by the top conductors from Poland, Ukraine and many other countries, performed one piece of music in a special action of solidarity with Ukraine, on the initiative of the Society of Polish Philharmonics. The piece they played was Melody by Myroslav Skoryk, a very well-known Ukrainian maetre of music who died in 2020. You are welcome to see and hear this touching and masterly performance here.  

Anyone who is versed in music is aware of the long-standing fact of an exceptional quality of Polish musicians, due to the long tradition and refined way of understanding and performing of music. The brilliant performance of Skorik’s Melody is one more beautiful justification of the thesis. 

But there is so much more in that story and its meaning. Myroslav Skoryk was well-known in the USSR, which had treated his family harshly. That cultured family belonged to the Ukrainian Polish intelligentsia with backgrounds in Europe. The composer’s parents, father the professor of history and mother the professor of chemistry were both brilliant graduates of the University of Vienna. His great-aunt was nobody else than famous opera global super-star Salome Solomyia Krushelnitsky. 

Poor Solomyia who literally did save Madama Butterfly for Puccini and posterity, with the composer  always remembering it with trepidation and love ( Solomyia sang the Butterfly part for the second time and in a new edition in June 1904 at the Teatro Grande in Brescia, four months after the fiasco of the opera at its premiere at La Scala in February 1904), who sang under the button of Toscanini, and together with Caruso, Shaljapin, Ruffo, after the death of her Italian husband, the mayor of Viareggio, decided to return briefly to her house in Lviv, then in Poland. That brief return turned to be eternal, as the year of those events was 1939 and the month was August. 

A world star was confined in a few rooms in her house which was occupied in turns by Soviet and German troops, had no possibility to move anywhere from Lviv either during, or after the WWII, and left strayed and penniless there giving private lessons to earn some miserable living. She was repeatedly refused to be given Soviet citizenship thus denying her the possibility to work or pension. But she was promptly extorted by the Soviet authorities to give away her villa in Viareggio, and her entire property in Italy. 

When a poor lady of an advanced age agreed to do that under heavy pressure in early 1950s, Solomiya was provided the Soviet passport to travel to Italy and to handle the business via Soviet representatives. Being thoroughly robbed, a legendary singer was allowed to work at the Lviv Conservatory as a teacher. She was bestowed a professor title one month before her death in 1952 at the age of 70. Among a very few possessions that Salome Krushelnitsky managed to keep, there was her photograph with a signature from her good friend and colleague, they were travelling the world and performing  at the stage together, maestro Giacomo Puccini: “To the most beautiful and best Buttefly ever’. 

There is no wonder that a quarter of a century after Solomyia’s death, her grand-nephew Myroslav has authored a ballet called The Return of Butterfly about the astounding life of his great aunt. The ballet which was written back in 1978 is in the repertoire of the Lviv Opera today. It is beloved by the public. 

Myroslav Skorik and his immediate family were the same trapped in Lviv as his famous aunt. The composer was a year old at the time. He was born the same year as my uncle.  A couple of years after the end of WWII, in 1947, Skoriks family was deported to Siberia for about a decade. They were allowed to return in 1955, so the future big composer did not have a chance to meet his aunt in person, but the family in which such a star was the centre of its general and cultural life did educate Myroslav about her and her friends and colleagues’ life and input in world culture. 

The process of return of the exiled families of ‘enemies of the Soviet people’ from Siberia and Kazakhstan in the 1950s and 1960s is a separate and special saga. Many of them actually did not, many did so partially. We know is first-hand in detail, as my husband’s family was exiled to Kazakhstan from yet ‘better’ place, the Gulag Valley of Death in the Russian Far East, following the arrest of his father, regarded by the NKVD ‘the enemy of the people’ whose guilt was simply belonging to ‘the wrong’ family of the similar to the Skoryks culture intelligentsia from Poltava, of a Jewish origin as it goes in my husband family’s case, and with the same Polish multiply cultural connections which were the tissue of life in Poltava historically, as it was in Lviv.  

Myroslav Skorik has become well-known pianist, composer and conductor, and is regarded as the one of the strongest proponents of the famous and special indeed Lviv Musical School. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a famous composer emigrated to Australia and got an Australian citizenship, but the same as his famous great-aunt did  a half of century ago, he also returned back home soon. Skoryk was the leader of the Union of the composers of Ukraine and the artistic director of the Kyiv Opera in the mid-2020s, until a few years before his passing. 

His Melody played with such soul and beauty by so many Polish musicians all over Poland in their solidarity action two weeks ago, is regarded by the Ukrainians as one of their most essential melodies. No wonder why. Among the international conductors who led their corresponding orchestras in that beautiful action of solidarity in the midst of the Mean War, there was naturally the conductor from Ukraine, who is shown in the end of the video. It is a telling performance.  But  most importantly, the essence of that great solidarity  gesture is a joint emotional expression of the best which is there in the souls of those people who are not indifferent to the torments of the others, the victims of the ongoing Mean War. 

I am very grateful to the straight-back Polish musicians and their international colleagues for such a Melody. For such a memory. For such in-tuning of their and our hearts at the moment when words do not work at all.

Day 60: April 24, 2022, Sunday

The TWO MONTHS OF THE MEAN WAR : GRIM BALANCE

Inna Rogatchi (C). A War Kind of a Spring. War Pictures. 2022.

It is a beautiful spring sunny day today. There in Ukraine. And there in Russia. It is also an Orthodox Easter which is celebrated in both countries, the aggressor one and the attacked one. 

The Russian Orthodox Church has a lead today in their national celebrations, from the huge cathedral in Moscow to small ones in small cities. Their TV is all-religious today, non-stop. The degree of official state hypocrisy there is beyond imagination. Their current church leadership is just another top functioners. They are unable to be and to do otherwise. The schism between the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, their nomenclature, and many people in Russia who are believers and are against this cursed Mean War, is giant. I cannot tell how many years should pass for this schism to disappear. 

So many Christian people in Russia are grieving today, on the day which generally is their most bright holiday of hope. So many people there are saying, writing and repeating: “Jesus resurrected not here and not for us this year”. So many people are publicly deciphering Russian XB abbreviation on all their Easter cakes and many other decorations in an anti-war way. Normally, that XB means ‘Christos Voskres, Jesus Resurrected’, this year it means, for many people there,  ‘ Chvatit Voiny, Enough of War’. 

Many people decided not to go to their churches, but to stay at home, to meditate, not celebrate, alone and with one’s own family and close friends, to escape those impossibly false ceremonies at the Russian Orthodox Church officialdom. It seems to be the most dramatic, most sober, most sad Easter in Russia for many people there with conscience for the past 30 years, for the time of one generation. 

Having said all that, I have also to say that although there are many of those people with conscience in Russia today, many of those who are categorically against the Mean War, who are suffering, who are living in deep personal crisis, with great compassion towards the Ukrainian people, the victims of the Mean War, with burning shame for their country and its leadership who has entered into this mad adventure, and outright military crime, still, my friends, and their friends are in a stunning minority in that big country. 

With confusion and terror, they are saying about those thousands filing  cafes all over Russian streets, those smiling, celebrating, drinking, eating, enjoying themselves and all around. Those are people of all ages, one should not be mistaken to think that it is only elderly generation who fell victim to the unprecedented Russian propaganda and support the Mean War sincerely. 

As one of the respondents of the fresh social study conducted by two Moscow-based sociologists in three cities of Russia said to them: “of course, I am against the war. Who is for the war, actually? What are you talking about? But where do you see the war, actually? We are conducting the special operation, as we are explained very well daily, and this is not a war. Of course, I am against the war”. Of course, he is. 

This unbelievable laziness of mind, this amazing inability to think independently, this mass instinct of power does not matter how it is used. These behavioural treads demonstrated by the majority of the Russian people during the last two months, in their blind support of the Mean War, does not matter active or passive, are extremely disappointing phenomena. Many of them, especially in the sphere of culture, are worried that they would be ‘cancelled’ internationally solely because of the fact of their national belonging. They might be because the decision-making about exclusion of Russian and Belarussian cultural and sport participants at the international events would not be able to make distinctions. 

This is naturally a grim perspective, and it is quite upsetting for those people in Russia who are against the war, but still might become the victims of the international boycott to their country-aggressor. 

But in my view, much more deep and serious scars of rejection and desolation could mark those people from Russia who are laughing in their cafes today, ignoring the photos from Ukraine which each of them can easily access but does not bother to do so. This kind of indifference, arrogant, purposeful indifference, this kind of ready acceptance of utter lies, and this stunning absence of compassion among such a big segment of 145-million society is the most warning mark of the Mean War. 

Perhaps, that man in the Kremlin who has decided to go on for the Mean War, did it to a serious degree with his knowledge, understanding, or feeling of this quantity of support that he, his views, his position, his methods would enjoy in the country where his club of friends has ruled over the last 20 years. He is, or perhaps, was pragmatic enough to act ruthlessly but more or less within the margin of what was acceptable to the prevailing amount of the people in his country. 

The fact that the horrific unjustified war, with crimes committed daily against the territory and the people with whom a huge amount of Russian citizens do have family relations, not to speak about friendly and collegial ones, is supported, accepted, and does not , actually, much bother prevailing number of population, screams out. It gives its leaders a carte-blanche for ceremonial Easter rituals, with enormous pomposity, and the similarly enormous hypocrisy, not only by some individuals who behave in churches as on the Mausoleum roof, because they simply do not know a difference, but most importantly, but that extremely false church leadership who shamelessly serves the regime to its best.  

As the Mean War ran for two months now, 60 days and nights of horror and annihilation, it can be seen, felt and understood that it is not only Moskva the flagship did sink in Russia. It is the Russian society’s common conscience that sank. This is self-inflicted trauma. And self-inflicted traumas of the sort are treated the most slowly. If ever. 

Day 59: April 23, 2022, Saturday

ORTHODOX EASTER: RUSSIAN GREETINGS FOR ODESSA

We knew that Russia’s commander-in-chief and his military would avenge the sinking of their Moskva flagship. There were various ideas among the experts regarding the possible targets. Experts are aware of strategic and tactical flaws in the present Russian warfare, flaws so stunning that the size of their army does not decisively matter, actually, so much below any level of quality it is. Still, experts were expecting significant military targets in Ukraine to be chosen by the aggressors to strike their revenge for their flagship sanken in the Black Sea. Military is a key-word here. 

But in the morning of the Quiet Saturday as a day before Easter is known in the Orthodoxy, Odessa was attacked by seven Russian missiles which most likely were fired from their submarines in the Black Sea there. Two of the missiles were intercepted by the Ukrainian air defence forces. The rest five attacked the residential areas of Odessa wounding 18 people and killing eight people, including three generations in one family, all women, grandmother who was just over 40, her daughter, 20-something young mother, and her just three-months old baby Kira. 

Three-months-old baby girl.  Three generations in one family, in one hit. On the Quiet Saturday on which, according to the Orthodox customs, one should not even get slightly irritated, not to speak on anything else. 

 Many people lost their words by these barbarian actions of those who started and still conduct the Mean War, for two months by now. But I think that we should not retreat to that mode. We should name the things by their names. We should demand accountability for committed crimes. The Mean War should not be allowed to happen. Not in the first place, not after two months of barbarian savage attacks. 

Those who assume the right to kill innocent people should be stopped immediately and treated for who they are, military criminals. They did show to the world, not just to Ukraine, what their religion is. They did it on the most sacred time in the Orthodox calendar – but what do they care? Anyone who might suppose that spiritual values of humanity means anything to the Kremlin bosses and their military, is not on this planet. 

Once, in my book “Ten Commandments in the USSR”, the book which researches and explains the Soviet mentality and how it has been formed, I wrote: “Those who are apologetic for the Soviet regime, are either idiots, or scoundrels”. Either one did not give a damn on the value of a human life to praise the USSR, or one was a total jerk unable to comprehend the reality in which 250 million people lived as in the prison ( minus nomenclature and the KGB and around). 

Today, I would say that anyone who finds any apology for the butchers from the Kremlin is not an idiot any longer. The openness and real-time availability of information deprive potential idiots from that escape of an absence of the information. 

Today, those who tolerate the actions of the Russian military and those who direct it, are either patented cowards or simply despicable creatures.  Would it be a chain of German former chancellors, third-class plebeian French and Italian politicians, trembling power figures in Austria, nasty mental machos of the both sexes in Hungary or Serbia, greedy German, French or Italian industrialists, or pathetic as ever Western commies  intellectuals of all kinds and sorts.  We should not be interested in their motives, there are usually just two: money or compromenational material against them in Russian possession. 

Orthodox Easter Quiet Saturday Russian bombing in Odessa just did show once again, graphically, tragically, who they are: jackals. Stupid, lazy, uneducated, unable, lying, brainless, soulless primitive criminals. 

Day 58: April 22, 2022, Friday

RETURN OF UKRAINIAN REFUGEES: UNPRECEDENTED PHENOMENA

Inna Rogatchi@. Hope Against Hope. Blue & Yellow Song for Ukraine series. 2022.

When I heard it for the first time, I thought that there is a separate case. It was in the midst of the frantic evacuation of the Ukrainian civilians from their homes, a hectic flee, with all kinds of emotions involved. My friend told me that in the middle of an uneasy journey in the car towards Poland, some of her distant relatives decided to return to their homes. ‘How come? Why?” – I asked. We all knew that the situation was precarious there. – “Well, they just want to return to their home. They do not want to go to the unknown”, – my friend told me. Those several women did return to their homes from the middle of the way of their small group of a few cars. They were using auto-stop to get back. 

But day after another, I was and still am learning that Ukrainian people are returning to their homes en masse. I have noticed that many of them, in Poland, Germany or France, did not like to register as refugees. “We want to work, we do not want to be refugees” – they have told one friend who helps them in Berlin, and to the other one who does the same in Paris. They also believe that to be ‘a refugee’ is somewhat shameful, degrading them in those societies where they had to flee from their homes and their work. 

As the Mean War continues, more and more refugees from Ukraine moved back to their homes. That steady process was unfolding to the degree when the number of the people returning to Ukraine has become larger than the number of those who are leaving the country. It happened a couple of days ago. This is an unprecedented phenomenon. It does tell a lot about the Ukrainian people, their attitude to their life, to their country, and to their way of thinking and living.  

 It was overseen, in my view, with not enough attention and understanding given to this important feature of the Mean War. 

The refusal of a large number of the people who had to flee their homes to become refugees, and to keep that status,  their willingness and intention to work in the new countries and circumstances speaks powerfully about dignity and self-respect. The return of hundreds of thousands of the people from Ukraine back to their homes in the midst of the war tells about their caring about their country and their belonging to it. 

This is a luxury for a huge amount of the inhabitants of Russia. Since Karamzin and Pushkin, since Gogol, Chekhov, Saltykov-Schedrin and Turgenev, we know from generation to generation , once and again, how a huge bulk of Russians dislike their motherland. They always wanted to study abroad, to work abroad, to travel abroad, to buy abroad, to live abroad. There always was and still is that powerful disbalance in their own society and in their own lives, for very many of them, between sharp dislike and criticism of practically everything ‘here at home’ and over-rosy perception of so many ever-attractive features for them ‘there abroad’. 

As one of the current descriptions goes: “ The true Russian patriot today has his children living and studying abroad, his apartment in London or Berlin, his summer house in Spain or Italy, and his working position here in Russia’. 

It always was like that for very many people in Russia, and I do not believe that this feature would change in the foreseeable future.  

But I still  am thinking about so many Ukrainian people who are returning back to their country, their cities, their homes, under the Russian bombs, despite the war. And I am proud that I was born in Ukraine. I really am. 

Day 57: April 21,  2022, Thursday

EASTER TRUCE UNFULFILLED

Inna Rogatchi@. Expectations Failed. War Pictures. 2022.

A few days before an Orthodox Easter on the coming Sunday April 24th, 2022, Antonio Gutteres, the UN Secretary the General, extended an appropriate gesture, both political and human-wise. He addressed the presidents of Ukraine and Russia with a suggestion to introduce an Eastern truce, at least for a several days period. Ukraine agreed momentarily. Russia did not. Telling, but not surprising for a bit. It would be surprising if they would agree, and yet more, if they would keep the promise. 

As far as I can see, nobody in Ukraine was holding breath in this expectation. They know their neighbour much better than well-disposed top officials from Portugal, New York and many other civilised places.  

They know the real attitude of the Russian leadership towards matters spiritual which, in fact, is an obscure illiteracy. They also know what those mediocres with nukes at the top of the power pyramid in Russia are fascinated with, apart from gas & oil prices and logistics. That Russia’s bosses’ true fascination goes undeservingly for militant quazi-myths, a surrogate anti-science rubbish which is extremely attractive for the circle on the top of the Russian power today. 

So, no, unlike Mr Gutterres, Ukrainian people did not expect a miracle of an Eastern truce from their neighbour who is determined to destroy the entire country. So determined are they that they did not even bother to pretend or to impose, even temporarily,  a kind of normal human behaviour in the society celebrating Easter.  

 But still, the UN Secretary General decided to visit both Ukraine and Russia in his forthcoming trip in an effort to establish the conditions for the direct peace negotiations  between the aggressor and victim presidents under the UN patronage and in the Turkey premises. That ‘s all fine. Every sincere effort is worth it. But for all wrong reasons – and all wrong messages -Antonio Gutteres decided to visit Russia first. This is just flat wrong. The right diplomacy with this kind of tyrants is true, as medical, as it gets. Otherwise, they will continue to behave in their boorish mode of an outcast. But what is more serious and what really matters, they will continue to destroy. 

SLAVONIC MOTHER OF RURIK the PRINCE: Putin’s Torment – Essay

The essay was published at The Times of Israel.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Threatening Horizon. 2021.

There has been an indicative moment inside the Kremlin recently, which did show Putin’s torment. In a dialogue with a 10-year old boy , all orchestrated as always, but still, children are blessed to provide some spontaneity by default, the Russian leader got involved into the theme in which he prides himself to be an expert. The theme is history, specifically, Russian history. The boy was instructed to speak about the favourite subject-matter of the leader. So, the leader eagerly got involved into the matter of who really founded Rus, pro-Russia. Were it the Normans represented by Rurik, as the world knows it? Or were there some Slavs on the ground who did invite Rurik, who thus initiated the establishment of the Fatherland? The man in the Kremlin very soon seemed to forget about the boy on the screen who did his job by getting the leader into the discussion, and produced quite a meaningful monologue? “So, the adepts of the Norman theory of the Rus establishment are actually wrong. First of all, there is an opinion that Rurik’s mom was of Slav origin, something like that”. There was a pause among the audience on the screen. Everybody waited to hear a new theory of the origin of Russia produced by the leader. The leader was in the intense process of revolutionising the science of history. He had his drive. 

“And yes, indeed, Rurik did not find himself here in Novgorod, in the end,  by chance, by the way. It needs to be understood that he was not invited there by chance. Rurik had had some kind of relation, or perhaps his relatives may have had, some certain relation to Slavs, Slavonic territory, to Novgorod, and so on!” Putin the historian was completely absorbed in his articulated thoughts, I understood from the people who were privileged to see the show with their own eyes.

The leader went on: “ The fact that someone with a squad came here from some Scandinavian place, does not mean at all that the Norman theory of the establishment of the Russian state is correct. Not at all.” 

The silence among the participants on the screens was getting more and more ceremonial. People sensed that they were witnessing an important revelation. They were right about it. 

“ Because somebody did call him ( Rurik)  in, somebody indeed invited him to serve here. He ( Rurik) did not get there on his own. He ( Rurik) did not conquer a thing on his own, not at all!”  The leader was very engaged in this extraordinary passage on history of his country which he leads so catastrophically. 

In fact, Putin’s desperate monologue on allegedly Slavonic mother of Rurik and his struggling appeals to convince anyone who would listen that Rurik did-not-come-&-conquer-anything on his own, but was invited, asked to do so, shows the torment that the Kremlin boss is struggling with amidst his disastrous campaign in Ukraine. After two months of the Mean War, the man who started this nightmare tries to find – and to air – any justification to his terrible decision-making, even assigning allegedly Slavonic mother to Rurik. Thanks that he saved Rurik’s father, for now. 

That extraordinary by all standards, including no standards, knowledge of history, Russia’s leader ought to his new school of so-called historians  who call themselves New Chronologists. Do not think that they are uneducated charlatans. They are charlatans indeed, but educated ones, mostly professors of maths and some of them of physics, all working at the best – as it used to be – in Russia university, the University of Moscow. The fact that mathematicians and physicists all of the sudden decided to come out with an entirely new version of history, does not bother the Russian educational authorities. On the contrary,   they were given a three-story very well renovated building in the centre of Yaroslavl, and a lot of financing to run the Museum of the New Chronology there. The exposition of the ‘museum’ which opened in 2019, is technically semi-savvy, with usage of new and multimedia. There is a constant stream of students from schools and higher education who were mandated to get the latest word in the historic science from there. 

The degree of lunacy in the narrative of that museum is incomparable. The Galilee is presented there as ‘Russian city of Galich’, Jesus is said to be ‘the son of the Galich princess Irina who married Joseph’, Jerusalem in that museum’s main exposition is known as “Eros, the capital of the second Empire”. It teaches masses that “Jesus was born in Crimea” and that Crimea is also “the place where Jesus’ mother was buried”.  “The first Christians ( who were from Crimea) established the first ever monastery in the cave which now is the part of the men’s monastery in Bakhchisarai ( in Crimea)”.  

Some more revelations from the Russian New Chronologists supported and promoted by the state:  “Crusader Wars” and Trojan War are various names of the same war. This war, in fact, was the first world war”.  During that war, “the Western Europe was fighting against Galich Rus non-stop”. Until ‘the Western Europe fell, with establishing all over Europe a new Empire whose capital was Vladimir, temporarily so, while Constantinople was in the process of building’. I swear, those are direct quotes.   

Attention: we are getting to Rurik. In this officially accepted and promoted version of lunacy, “The Russian state was found by a disciple by Andronicus-Christ, a member of the Royal Roman dynasty, who is described under the name of Aeneus in Virgil’s poem ‘Aeneid’. In the Russian history, that is the famous prince Rurik, who consolidated separate Russian principalities into a single kingdom. The powerful state created by Rurik-Aeneus, covered the Volga region and the Nordic Balck Sea coast. The capital of the kingdom was the city of Yaroslavl’ – is written in the explanatory panel, with QR code provided. 

There is a lot of unbelievable garbage all over that three story building in the centre of the city near Moscow where that museum is thriving. This kind of ‘knowledge’ is fed to the president of the country with a long history, previously mighty science, and huge nuclear arsenal. That president seems to be susceptible to this sheer lunacy if he gives the public historical overview regarding Rurik born from ‘ a Slavonic mother’ directly from his Kremlin office.

The morning after that extraordinary history hour in the Kremlin, the Russian leader ordered his hopeless minister of defence to halt the assault of Azovstal in Mariupol. I bet he saw Rurik in his dream last night, and tried to defend himself on the matter of Rurik’s mother.  

Week 8: April 13 – April 20, 2022

Summary of the Week 8: April 14- April 20, 2022

SLAVONIC MOTHER OF RURIK: Putin’s Torment

Inna Rogatchi(c). Sky Landscape V. 2018.

There has been an indicative moment inside the Kremlin recently, which did show Putin’s torment. In a dialogue with a 10-year old boy , all orchestrated as always, but still, children are blessed to provide some spontaneity by default, the Russian leader got involved into the theme in which he prides himself to be an expert. The theme is history, specifically, Russian history. The boy was instructed to speak about the favourite subject-matter of the leader. So, the leader eagerly got involved into the matter of who really founded Rus, pro-Russia. Were it the Normans represented by Rurik, as the world knows it? Or were there some Slavs on the ground who did invite Rurik, who thus initiated the establishment of the Fatherland? The man in the Kremlin very soon seemed to forget about the boy on the screen who did his job by getting the leader into the discussion, and produced quite a meaningful monologue? “So, the adepts of the Norman theory of the Rus establishment are actually wrong. First of all, there is an opinion that Rurik’s mom was of Slav origin, something like that”. There was a pause among the audience on the screen. Everybody waited to hear a new theory of the origin of Russia produced by the leader. The leader was in the intense process of revolutionising the science of history. He had his drive. 

“And yes, indeed, Rurik did not find himself here in Novgorod, in the end,  by chance, by the way. It needs to be understood that he was not invited there by chance. Rurik had had some kind of relation, or perhaps his relatives may have had, some certain relation to Slavs, Slavonic territory, to Novgorod, and so on!” Putin the historian was completely absorbed in his articulated thoughts, I understood from the people who were privileged to see the show with their own eyes.

The leader went on: “ The fact that someone with a squad came here from some Scandinavian place, does not mean at all that the Norman theory of the establishment of the Russian state is correct. Not at all.” 

The silence among the participants on the screens was getting more and more ceremonial. People sensed that they were witnessing an important revelation. They were right about it. 

“ Because somebody did call him ( Rurik)  in, somebody indeed invited him to serve here. He ( Rurik) did not get there on his own. He ( Rurik) did not conquer a thing on his own, not at all!”  The leader was very engaged in this extraordinary passage on history of his country which he leads so catastrophically. 

In fact, Putin’s desperate monologue on allegedly Slavonic mother of Rurik and his struggling appeals to convince anyone who would listen that Rurik did-not-come-&-conquer-anything on his own, but was invited, asked to do so, shows the torment that the Kremlin boss is struggling with amidst his disastrous campaign in Ukraine. After two months of the Mean War, the man who started this nightmare tries to find – and to air – any justification to his terrible decision-making, even assigning allegedly Slavonic mother to Rurik. Thanks that he saved Rurik’s father, for now. 

The morning after that extraordinary history hour in the Kremlin, the Russian leader ordered his disastrous minister of defence to halt the assault of Azovstal in Mariupol. I bet he saw Rurik in his dream last night, and tried to defend himself on the matter of Rurik’s mother.   

Day 56: April 20, 2022, Wednesday

MUSEUMS AND MUSEUMS: KYIV and MOSCOW

On March 22nd, 2022, there was a much anticipated event in Moscow, the opening of Grisha Bruskin’s important Scene Change exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery. 77-year old Bruskin who lives in New York has become internationally known during the ‘perestroika’ with many of his works expressing a typology of Soviet life. Later on, Bruskin has become a master of what one can call as anti-totalitarian art. He is a world-famous artist, and this special exhibition in Moscow was prepared to mark the 75th anniversary of the artist in his native city. Due to the covid, the exhibition was postponed until now. The exhibition was built in nine consequent halls, with artworks and installations there strikingly , just strikingly relevant for today. Even up to a Chagall-like portrait of a pair flying in the sky, with brightly red shoes and blue-and-yellow colours in the centre, yellow dress of a woman against bright blue sky.  The painting was exhibited alone on a big wall, in its centre, clearly in a statement-like motion. 

There was also an entire hall of many sculptures as if screaming of Gulag, eternal Gulag, as it goes. Many figures in that frightening and extremely well- installed exposition reminds Mr P, for some interesting reason, although Bruskin created it many years ago. ON his other well-known paintings, also created decades back, many still figures remind the same Mr P, in a prophetic vision of the artist. 

There was a hall hosting well-known Bruskin’s installation of two thousand-figures composition featuring a totalitarian, pro-fascist crowd of mannequins. It was a retrospective exhibition, but it screamed out its incredible actuality, as if all of those many works were done by Bruskin just yesterday. As some of my art friends who was lucky to visit the exhibition said: “It seems as time encounters the artist, as the artist was the first one to know what would happen”. 

It was a very special thing to open this exhibition in Moscow and in Russia these days. And at least the art and culture community there got all its messages. They could barely believe that it was really happening. And they were right. They know their country all too well. On April 19th, 2022, three and half weeks after the exhibition’s opening, it was shut down, violating the agreement with the artist and announced plans for the exhibition to be opened until July this year. It was shut down momentarily, citing ‘technical reasons’ without any further explanation. Moreover, any trace of the exhibition was erased from the New Tretyakov Gallery site. As it never happened. Ever. Happened. Gone.  There is some information about ‘unhappy signals from some unhappy visitors’, as museum staff admits privately. There  also was information about some high-up culture establishment visitors who were shocked to see this scream against totalitarianism in the centre of Moscow at the leading state art institutions today. It is all so familiar to us who lived through it in our Soviet and late-Soviet life. The time has obviously made a loop in that huge place, with those many millions whom Grisha Bruskin did show so eloquently. Only he did not know that it would be relevant again. Or he might have known. 

At the same in Kyiv, there were dramatic scenes in all main museums in the capital of Ukraine – as the one in the poster. The thing is that the museums in Kyiv had been frantically busy there recently, during the Mean War. They were emptying themself. It was a huge operation about which it has become possible to tell only now, after it has been completed a few days ago. Not just some of the most valuable artworks, but all of it had to leave its homes, and to be transported to the safe places to wait until the end of the war there. The picture in the poster is telling , but it is yet not the most dramatic from the materials documenting the operation to save the treasures from the Kyiv museums. There are pictures of huge beautiful frames piled in the futuristic stacks,  empty,  in empty halls. They are staying there as  carcasses. It was a truly painful scene. For how long will the Kyiv museums be in this desolated shape? For long, I presume. It all is part of life, normal life. Culture has been attacked in Ukraine methodically and severely, in a premeditated plan carried on by the force of ultimate evil, as the whole world is terrified to see daily, for 56 days by now. 

They eliminate culture with a certain plan and in a full conscience. They eliminate it, or force it to retreat, both in their own home and in the home of the neighbouring country which they invaded without any reason but with viciousness and brutality, in order to weaken the people’s morale, their spiritual strength, their aspirations and their will for freedom, both inner and behavioural. They forced the Kyiv and other Ukrainian museums to empty themselves and to shut down in an ongoing effort to make everyone like those figurines from Grisha Bruskin’s prophetic installation: similar mannequins, faceless, expressionless, with similar intention, similar move, and that move is a fascist salute, their only drive. Two thousands, two million, two hundred million. The more, the better.  

But those stupid tyrans – why tyrans is always stupid? Because they are extremely marginalised in their own intellect, so to say – always loose, and end badly. There is simply no other way. But they are also always bad students, and they never learn history as they should. 

Day 55: April 19, 2022, Tuesday

‘WHO HAS PERMITTED YOU TO LIVE NICELY?’

We know by now how ‘the liberators’ behave in the myriad of Ukrainian cities, towns, villages that they attack and enter. The loot carried on by ‘the liberators’ is colossal, massive, encompassing. It is barbarian in all and every way. 

They grab everything: furniture, tv sets, jewellery, even used female underwear ( what for?). They grab it to send to their homes via post from Belarus in the parcels from 50 to 450 kg, and with a giant mass of goods transported in the military trucks to Belarus to be sold at many impromptu bazaars there. It is a huge and blossoming business there by now. 

Everything that they could not grab, they smashed, destroyed, and broke in a manifesting way of savages. They are having a pleasure from this massive application of brutal force and anti-human behaviour. 

They are also instigated by their commanders to mark their bloody presence on Ukrainian soil and in Ukrainian homes. They are defecating on purpose on the neat sofas that they could not take with them, on the kitchen tables in once neat kitchens, in the sitting and dining rooms of the people who cared about their living and tried hard to make it nice. It is a challenge, you know. To show who is the master in everyone else’s house, and in a certain style of the nation of poor Tchaikovsky and poor Chehov. 

From many interceptions during the Mean War of the Russian military speaking with their families back in Russia we have heard regularly: ‘How the heck are they living so nicely here?”  meaning Ukrainians whom ‘the liberators’ brutally attacked, crushing all their belongings and marvelling repeatedly on neat houses and taking care of premises of the Ukrainian people. 

Then the slogan which is in the photo appeared as ‘the liberators’ stamp over the destroyed houses and homes: ‘Who permitted you to live nicely?’ This vandalism is seen all over ruined Ukraine today. This is the mark of ‘the liberators’. The mark of their phenomenally  stupid enviness, their unlimited  greed, their moronic aggressiveness and blazeness. Ruining and defecating Z-zombies who have placed themselves as outcasts without even understanding that because they are unable to grasp the concept. Such is the Kremlin force. Shameful, despicable, criminal. Many thousands of such products of humanoids. Catastrophic result of the twenty years of the regressive development of a huge country in which the young generation of the people of 20-something years, those in that savage-like army of looters, still believe that life is conducted with someone’s permission only. 

Day 54: April 18, 2022, Monday

WAR HYSTERIA IN RUSSIA 

Inna Rogatchi (C). New Caprichos I. 2022.

A true-life story from a doctor from St Petersburg who works at ambulance service there. 

A few days ago they got an emergency call from a woman who was terrified: “ My son has been attacked and severely beaten by Ukrainians. He lays unconscious on the roof ( of our building). Ukrainian attackers are still there. It is extremely dangerous to reach the roof. Please help!”

The ambulance went to the woman’s address immediately, along with the police patrol. When they arrived at the place, they found nobody on the roof. Calling the woman’s son’s mobile which she had provided, the police found him safe and sound on his working place where he had been since the morning. Nothing ever happened to him. 

The agitated woman was sitting in her apartment alone in front of the working TV set. The doctors from the ambulance and the policemen ( yes, they too) glanced each towards the others, sighed simultaneously, and left the apartment. 

‘Did you treat that woman with anything to calm her down?” – my friend asked the doctor who told the fresh story. – “We tried , but she did not want a thing. She was all absorbed by what she was hearing and seeing on her TV screen. It was actually pretty freaky frightening”, – the experienced Russian ambulance doctor said. – “The truth is that we are preparing for more calls like that”. 

The Mean War gets nasty towards Russia’s own population, as well. 

They are about to enter the most peaceful – supposedly – and enlightened – supposedly – time in their calendar, the Orthodox Easter. They are preparing for that. For example, by baking a very appealing special Orthodox Easter cake, called kulich, as this one on the photo sent by my friend. The photo was taken this morning at the bakery of the Russian city of Kurgan in the Urals. What’s more, those Z-kuliches in the bakery are almost twice cheaper than the ones which are next to them with traditional Easter decoration. What shrewd marketing this bakery has.

The point is that it would be bought, brought to the church, blessed there, brought back to homes, and consumed as the sacred part of the Easter celebration starting there in four days. Z-Easter in Z-country with Z-church, and Z-television and Z-media driving their own citizen Z-crazy.  If Hollywood would need an extra pair of script-writing hands for the most absurd and black movies of the third class, and below, they know where to call. Straight to the Kremlin. 

Day 53: April 17, 2022, Sunday

‘The GLOBAL WAR FOR SURVIVING’: The FUTURE OF RUSSIA  

Inna Rogatchi (C). Grey-Zone. War Pictures. 2022.

If one has the nerve to watch a wild military propaganda which is produced and broadcast non-stop by all Russian TV channels and many other media-outlets, one would wonder how people are surviving and keeping their psychological balance in such an electrified, arrogant information environment. This is not to mention the share of truth and objectivity in this hot propaganda avalanche which is zero. This is also not to mention the period of time during which this massive brain-washing is undertaken in Russia which is at least eight years by now.  To think about it, it is a massive brain-damaging offensive against its own population, to start with, in progress. 

I know many people who have not watched Russian television for decades. It became even a certain mark among the liberal intellectuals there, to make the point, emphatically, not to watch it, in a way of a passive defiance. I also have some friends, former colleagues, and brilliant, sharp journalists who are suffering by watching it, professionally,  for being able to educate many others who have no such nerve and determination, and to keep their analyses sharp and updated. One of them just mentioned that after a couple of weeks observing the official Russian TV channels, he had to resort to the dictionary to check how the word ‘tram’ should be written correctly’.

It is true. The problem with the quality of the experts on Russian TV is beyond criticism. As it is the problem with the quality of many important areas of life there, from their army to their decision-making expertise. It is obvious and looming large. Russia has become pathetic in many respects, in front of the world. There were extremely popular writers in the Soviet Union, extremely sharp, often prophetic, highly intellectual, the symbol of our generation, the Strugatsky brothers, both of them extremely knowledgeable people, one was specialist in Japanese language and culture and another was astronomer and physicist. Their canonical books are a unique sample of philosophical science-fiction. But in fact, everything they wrote in the form of science fiction in the Soviet Union, was a sheer truth.  We all knew it. And a warning. Perhaps, that warning should be taken more seriously by a larger number of people living in Russia. 

There is one key-phrase from  a large Strugatsky-wisdom depositary which was very popular in the late Soviet Union: “ Where greyishness ( mediocrity – IR) prevails, power always will be grabbed by the black forces”.  This is literally what is going on in Russia today. 

I am positive that as acid and not easily surprised Strugatsky brothers were, they would be astounded by the degree of greyishness which prevails in many spheres of life in Russia today, and which gets yet more promoted in a defiance mode by the authorities charged by their own war-mongering. 

Unlike in many other countries, a very large part of the Russian population is not internet-savvy, and thus TV is still a main source for information for millions there. For weeks after the beginning of the Mean War, there was virtually no other content on all Russian TV channels than cloned  talk shows with barrages of lies, insults, and war-mongering. Now, some patriotic series have appeared, also cloned, but talk-shows still prevail largely. 

The degree of the hatred instigated by the Russian authorities and media is getting higher with every day of the Mean War. It is not only propaganda. It is the functioning of the society on its many levels: legislators, top officials, heads of practically all organisations there, many officially ‘approved’ journalists, media and public persons, experts , or ‘experts’, even sport commentators, and a certain chank of performing arts representatives, all of them switched into the war-mongering mode and are publicly loud about it. 

Just one sample. My suffering from his difficult mission to monitor the official Russian TV propaganda shows, a top journalist colleague has sent me this quote from the recent TV show on the main Russia’s channel: “Everybody must understand that we would need to have a mobilisation, because the global war for survival is ahead of us. The war for annihilation of all our enemies. And our authorities’ only aim now, as our only aim, is to explain it and to make sure that all Russian people would understand this heroic image of our future: the global war for survival”. This was pronounced with a great aplomble by a Russian nationalist writer Prilepin at the The Time Will Show tv-panel on the TV1 Russia, the prime Russian TV channel, on April 14th, 2022. And of course, he was enthusiastically supported in this outright war-mongering by the other presented there, including quite active nationalistic legislator Tolstoy, MP Morozov, etc. 

Basically, what is done and is in the process there is not only a shameless denial and distortion of truth, but it is escalated militarisation of consciousness among the Russian people and throughout Russian society. And this is dangerous and alarming not for Ukraine only, but for any neighbouring, or not  even necessarily neighbouring countries. For all those whom Russian officialdom and their ready media servants would regard as their enemies. Or ‘not-friendly’ countries, as they have officially listed 48 Western democracies into their ‘beloved enemies’ list. 

 Day 52: April 16, 2022, Saturday 

GREETINGS FROM A HALF OF CENTURY BACK

Amazing story of the Soviet cartoon made in 1973

Inna Rogatchi (C). Vision I. 2022.

At that time, I stopped to watch those stupid and heavily ideologised cartoons which were produced by tons in the blossom of the Brezhnev era. So, I registered the title, Treasures of the Sank Ships, but I never watched that 16-minutes Soviet cartoon made in 1973. Until today. 

Why did I do it? Because, believe or not, it was forbidden by the Russian authorities now, 50 years after its release. How come? The cartoon is full of pioneers, some of their brothers from Africa who were supposed to fight for their liberation from awful capitalists and imperialists, Soviet scientists, Soviet pioneer summer camp, even the Soviet campaign for collecting utilised metal by pupils in schools, our regular compulsory activity. I hated it. Just because it was compulsory. And so idiotic. As if utilised metal could not be collected in an efficient organised way, not by the children at those senseless exercises. 

Anyway. The similarly senseless propaganda cartoon produced in 1973 now is a hit, as it always happened at the moment of censorship. The thing is that several symbols which now seem to be highly -charged for Russian authorities, are featured in the old cartoon. The name of the Soviet marine scientists’ underwater research module in the film is Neptun, the same as the name of the Ukrainian missiles which had successfully hit the sunken Russian Moskva flagship recently. Next, Soviet pioneers in the cartoon sitting inside the module, all of the sudden find some old sunken ship – in the Black Sea, what a horror! What’s more, that sunken ship has a huge Z letter as its name – can you imagine? It is Z29, and the sunken ship is the Nazi ship who sunk in the Black Sea during the WWII, as it is featured in the Soviet cartoon. More, some awful torpedo all of the sudden gets alive and animated from the remnants of the Nazi Z29 ship. It is marked with swastika, and it  attacks small but brave Neptun module in which three pioneers are hiding in a terror. Moreover, the whole story – the Soviet pioneer summer camp, the scientific lab, everything – is unfolding in beautiful Crimea, with unmistaken landmarks of the island. Last, but not the least, for some phenomenally intriguing reason, 50 years back the artists who were working on the The Treasures of the Sunken Ships very Soviet propaganda cartoon, decided to use a lot of blue and yellow colour all over the film and its landscapes. 

As hilarious as it is, the 50-year old Soviet film, absolutely not interesting until a couple of days ago, now has become incredibly symbolic, and not for the Russian side. And it has been cancelled now. You can access the link to the cartoon outside Russia, but inside the country, at the site where it is supposed to be and where it was, at their main and famous Sojuzmultfilm company which was an exclusive producer of cartoons in the USSR, the access to the film does not work any longer. 

It is hilarious, indeed, but not surprising for a bit. But there is one thing which I cannot get from the moment I learned about this another North-Korean-like episode: who on earth there in the bodies who nowadays are taking care of ‘right films, right media’ and everything else  for Russia’s population, who did actually remember about existence of  that cartoon and all those things which what are  in it? It is beyond my capacity, I must admit. Naturally, the old Soviet cartoon has become a hit now in no time. Some people even started to mull about ‘predictions made in 1973’, half-seriously. The only thing in which I am sure now is that even under the sanctions and shrinking economy, there will be no jobless people in Russia, as there is such a massive amount of books, films, articles, etc. which has to be checked out now for all ‘wrong’ symbols in the light of the Mean War in Ukraine and accelerating North-Korean landscape in Russia. 

Day 51: April 15, 2022, Friday

AN IRONY OF HISTORY  

The story of the Russian military flagship

Inna Rogatchi (C). Blue Horizon I. 2021.

The Mean War has its mem, and this mem is a phrase. The phrase was the defiant reply of the Ukrainian marine border officer to the Russian military ship from where ‘the liberators’ demanded a small Ukrainian harrison to surrender. “Russian military ship, go to f-ck yourself’, firmly replied the officer, for what he was in a few weeks rewarded by the president Zelensky in his office with a medal, well worth of. That phrase has become the leitmotif of the admirable Ukrainian resistance.

That phrase has also become the leitmotif of the attitude towards ‘the liberators’ in general, not only in Ukraine, but world-wide, twice so among Russian speakers whenever they live. Another day, I saw a poster with this phrase at a market in Vilnius, and a couple of weeks ago all over Warsaw. 

There is a thing with this simple phrase. It loses a half of its strength in translation. Russian curse slang known as ‘mat’ is a poem of its own, so to say. It originated from tatar and other languages from a Turk linguistic group at the time when Russia was occupied by the Mongol horde, and has enroothed in Russian lingo-life from that time. It is extremely powerful. To give you an idea, what we know as ‘f-ck’ from a myriad of Hollywood movies, among many other things, is a very pale and semi-automatic version of the key-phrase of the Mean War said by the marine border officer on the day one of it. Said in Russian, the phrase is a sort of nuclear ‘get lost’. It says it all. It is absolutely definite. 

As it happened, the Russian military ship which had been sent to ‘go f-ck itself’ was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea navy fleet prophetically called Moskva. As it also happened it was built back in mid-1980s at the ship construction plant in Nikolayev which is now known as Mykolayiv, the city in Ukraine which is bombed and attacked by ‘the liberators’  mercilessly for many days and weeks now. 

As we also know, in seven week time after the prophetic suggestion by the Ukrainian marine border officer, on April 13th, 2022, flagship Moskva was successfully hit by the Ukrainian missiles, and in 22 hours, on April 14th, 2022, it sank. As many people noted, ‘Moskva flagship did follow the order ‘to go to f-ck itself’ dutifully’ .  It was well prepared and well executed for a serious and not simple military operation by the Ukrainian army. 

History knows a lot of ironic smirks, especially in wars. But such precise hits, metaphorically as well, are rarely to be observed. 

Russian authorities did not inform their country’s people of the catastrophe with their flagship for several days. When they did, the reason was given as ‘catched fire’ , without any details at all. Nobody knows from official sources what has happened with the flagship’s crew of 510 marines. Many non-Russian and unofficial Russian sources indicate possible very serious losses. There are no comments, no statements, no analyses, no information. The reality in Russia today with regard to the loss of the flagship, symbol of the fleet –  and of this Mean War, as it happened,  – to the possible loss of many lives,  is exactly as the one in North Korea.  Somehow, they are able to astound the world almost daily. 

Mikhail Gorbachev has said in connection with the Mean War: “Previously, Putin did make me feel ashamed for the Russian people. Now, I am ashamed of myself’. Being said by that person, it actually says it all. 

Day 50: April 14, 2022, Thursday

MEANWHILE IN MOSCOW

A while ago, on March 28th, I wrote about well-known Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov who in his 84 years had to flee Kyiv in the midst of the Mean War and who lives in Berlin temporarily now. Silvestrov is a big master beloved by many musicians world-wide. In Moscow, there was a particular concert on April 13, 2022. Great Russian pianist Alexey Ljubimov played Silvestrov and Schubert in a two-part concert at the Rassvet ( Dawn) hall. The first part of the concert in which Silverstrov’s cycle of songs on the poetry of the great Russian poets was performed, went without any trouble. The second part of the concert in which Ljubimov played Schubert looked like a scene from a Hollywood movie about Russia, always pathetic, unrealistic and hilariously inadequate. 

Two policemen appeared in the music hall full of people, marched straight to the scene where the great pianist was playing Schubert, positioned themselves next to him – like in the photo here – and started to declare:” Ladies and gents, please leave the premises. We have got information that the place is mined. We need to check the premises. Please leave”. Ljubimov played interrupting during all this, including police shouts. Policemen repeat: “ Public, leave the premises now!”. Ljubimov plays. Public sits in their seats firmly, only everyone with a phone in hand filming a memorable scene frantically. 

Alexey Ljubimov, in full composure, played the Schubert piece to the end. Only after that he rose from a concert chair, to the incredible applause by the enthusiastic public. There is an one-minute video about it which tells a lot.

This video, the great 77-year old Alexey Ljubimov whom I always liked a lot, as a musician and as a person, free and above all idiocies of whatever regime it was in that country, and his public, is a prize for us during these bleak days. ‘So now they have mined Schubert’ – people in the audience were reporting to their friends. –  ‘They ( the police) were late to come to spoil the first part of the concert in which Ljubimov played Silvestrov. So we were privileged to listen to that great music with fantastic interpretation. But Schubert was punished, in the end”. The interrupted concert was not allowed to continue. Nobody was surprised. And this ovation to the great Alexey Ljubimov with two pathetic policemen next to him on the stage, sends to us uplifting feelings from Moscow, as a matter of fact. Nobody in Hollywood would ever be able to invent anything like that. 

WEEK 7: April 7 – April 13, 2022

Week 7 Summary: PERSONAL LOSSES, PERSONAL GRATIFICATIONS  

Inna Rogatchi ©. Memory Landscape II. Memory Landscapes. 2020.

With a war, one’s relationships get defined. It is expected. In the case of the Mean War, it actually is a clear-cut. The positions and dispositions are very clear here. When so much evil is demonstrated by the side of a brutal and unprovoked aggressor, there is little doubt where moral inclinations of normal people go. 

If it goes to the side of the aggressor, it says about the person  who is sympathising with evil,  everything I need to know about him or her.  

I am  deeply grateful to the Creator for the grace bestowed upon us,  with most of our friends being on the right side. This moral solidarity and understanding gives one strength to live and work in the time when your mind is up round o’clock, when you are permanently nervous waiting for the news, when you are expecting the worst, and when some cherished parts of your life have been brutally destroyed, annihilated.  

This re-defining of relationships is a vast phenomenon of the Mean War,  specifically so because the human inter-weaving between people in Russia and Ukraine is massive. But there are also other kinds of this re-defining of relationships that goes rather international. It concerns colleagues  and partners in various countries, and it goes from the IT sector to arts, from science and medicine to culture, from space programs to universities worldwide. 

As lucky as I consider that my husband and I are with regard to our circle of friends and colleagues with this important regard, important because it defines not only your personal inter-actions, but often what you do, how, and with whom, there happened some exceptions, as well. 

Among those exceptions, there is one known enough actor in Russia with whom we worked together and were good friends. He opted for  an ostrich position, knowing for himself that it is wrong, and pathetically resorting to finding some sort of humour in the things which are happening but absolutely now important. He refuses to bring out the only important theme which overwhelms our all’ lives. He ignores it, instead coming with some very pale effort ‘to keep calm and be funny’. He is  driven by the fear not to lose his roles in those rubbish ‘historical’ series that Russia produces non-stop, with steady marks of helpless provinciality. I think he is driven by fear in general, too. It is useless to discuss with this kind of selfish cowards the matter of the life and death of others. 

There is also a rather famous writer, granddaughter of a recognised master of literature, with a complicated story of his life in the maze of political loyalties throughout the dramatic early XXth century. She is a good writer, a masterful one. And an absolutely immoral human being. Even prevailing the reputation of her twisty grandfather. She is not twisty. To the contrary, she is decisively and organically for herself steady in her tractor-like navigation through the minefield of the current Russia’s public opinion landscape. We became friends in the late 1980s when we both were enjoying the fresh air of the moment, when everything that has been forbidden for our parents during all their lives, was permitted to us, and when that huge stiff country opened suddenly. What my former friend writer demonstrates now, in the midst of the Mean War, is extraordinary boorishness of self-acclaimed superiority regarding her country, her nation, her-beloved-self, and unmasked contempt for the others. She is so obvious  in her complete inhumanity that it feels as an insult to one’s intelligence to get into any dialogue with this kind of creature.  And I do not feel sorry for a moment for off-loading this monstrous character from my circle of people. 

Among more serious losses, there is an elderly man, once a legendary Soviet investigator , a rare, honest and professional one, who was instrumental in many difficult, dangerous, unpopular and extremely important cases there, such as discovering incredible swindling inside the top of the Russian Orthodox Church,  sheer feudal system with all its crimes that blossomed for decades in Uzbekistan, and many other top cases of the corrupted late Soviet reality. He never was afraid, and his contribution into the positive development of his country is very significant. Now, he stunned me with pedalling the arguments in favour of explaining what he called as “the road to the events today” during the years from 2014 onward, with ‘all those unspoken crimes against the people in Donbass ( under the Russian zone)”.  He is not a cowardly actor, he is not a spoiled writer. I have known him for decades as an honest man, professional investigator. What went wrong in his case? As an elderly and not that advanced internet person, he probably fell victim to that mighty Russian propaganda machine. I have no other explanation.  I feel sorry to lose that person. A sad example of how blindness makes people stupid, in front of your eyes. 

But if it is possible, in the case of those dependable of massive Russian lying propaganda, to find at least very weak, but still reasons for basically good people not to see the Mean War clearly , for what it is, in my opinion, it is simply impossible to give this benefit of slight explanation regarding those in the West who are having all access to the existing mass of information from Ukraine, are eager to pervert the black-in-white picture. Because wars are always in black and white, despite any wishes and efforts to make it grey and deceptive. 

First I was stunned to find the fine Italian musician, a very able and well known violinist from Venice, to express her public contempt towards Ukraine and Ukrainian victims of the Mean War. ‘Well, Ukraine is not the only  war in the world, you know, – she declares. – What about Yemen?” Yes, exactly, what about Yemen at this very hour? 

The other one from Italy, a senior cultural official, allows herself to lament about ‘atrocities from the both sides’, and  ‘much fake news about the alleged crimes in Ukraine’, the last argument being too popular in Italy, notably and unfortunately.  In the case of this official, her true European Communist essence which was sleeping for years being largely unpopular and counter-productive in her work, now manifests itself in stupid unjust arrogance. I never knew about her political beliefs as we never discussed it. It was irrelevant to our joint projects. Now all those good former projects are in the past, and some new ones in the bin.  Neither I, nor none of our organisations would be ever able to cooperate with anyone like this. 

 Among my writing colleagues in many countries, there is only one case when the person with whom I was previously working , but stopped that cooperation over four years ago, did disgrace herself and her publication by publishing an outright piece of Russian propaganda barely disguised as someone’s ‘opinion’.  My personal previous relationships with the editor who oversaw the publication, both professional and personal ones, has pushed me emotionally in this case. I was in torment, protesting vigorously, demanding to take the insulting piece off, successfully. I was deeply taken by this screaming injustice and so blatant manipulation. But then I realise that the experienced editor’s distancing herself from good versus evil, her utter indifference has made me absolutely aloof towards her and her outlet. Media is such a sphere of life that once it shames itself , the damage is hardly cuperable. It also contributes directly to a thing called reputation. Simple. 

Against those handful disappointments and a couple of personal losses, which are perfectly bearable, I am so very grateful to those of our friends, and even not that close friends, some acquaintances who did put so much of their own heart into helping the Ukrainian people that their actions, their attitude, their intentions has brought so much of unexpected warmth and goodness into rather bleaky almost 50 days of the Mean War. 

There is one Italian well-known journalist who lives with his teenage son, just two of them, not living a luxurious life at all. But they were fighting for the honour to host the family from Ukraine, and when one of the families was allocated to live with them, how much of preparation went on, how nervous both papa and son were to meet the family which fled the war, how happy they both are because of the fact that they are helping those people. I always liked this journalist and his writings, but now I simply adore him as a human being who brings up his son in such a right way. 

There is a great couple of our dear friends, also from Rome, the leaders of the large and important national institution there. Not only were they organising the evacuation of the people from Ukraine, but since the beginning  of the war, they were heavily involved into the implementation of unique measures of coordination of real actions of acceptance of the refugees from Ukraine by Italian national medical and emergency situations authorities. It is a huge and very uneasy work, and it was done successfully. I feel so grateful and so proud of our dear friends who conceived it, elaborated the entire mechanism, and implemented it. 

There are endless cases of the applied compassion towards the people from Ukraine by our friends and colleagues in so many countries, in Finland, Lithuania, Poland, the UK, in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, in many other countries. Our friends are hosting refugees, organising the aid, contributing. They are not indifferent. They are active and compassionate. They are kind and understanding. They are just and generous. Our friends in and from Russia are strong to stay with their back straight and their position against the Mean War being articulated and clear. We are proud of them. 

On the balance, there are incomparably more  personal gratifications in the midst of the Mean War for me than sad or outrageous personal losses. I consider myself lucky, indeed. 

 Day 49: April 13, 2022, Wednesday

AIRPORT IN MY CITY

Inna Rogatchi ©. Memory Awakened I. War Pictures. 2022.

On the first day of the war, our close friend from Ukraine, practically a family member who found herself in another part of the world, called me to say that additionally to all the horror of the war, she is thousands miles from home, without a clear prospect to reach there. I was terrified. She was composed. The first thing we spoke about was the airport in her city which is also my city. The airport was bombed in the first hours of the Mean War, along with 11 more airports of a critical importance in Ukraine. 

Almost 50 days, almost two months passed since our conversation on the first day of the Mean War. My friend is not at home yet. She made it halfway, and is in Europe now. At least that. 

But a few days ago, after six weeks of total destruction that Russia brought to Ukraine, they have decided to bomb that airport in my city again, to shell it to the ground. And everything that is nearby. Those strategists.

From a prospect of a single human being, what they’ve bombed and destroyed, is a lot, apart of infrastructure. I cannot count how many times we were getting in and out of that very airport in Dnipro, to visit, to spend time in our native place, to say hello and to say goodbye. Goodbye, not farewell. When you frequently, during many years and decades, get to a certain place, the entrance locally marks your belonging, doesn’t it? And when that ‘certain place’ is your native city, that belonging is organic. 

Places and people have mutual dependability, I believe. Not to mention our transportation hubs which are filled with our emotions.  One’s parents, who are not alive for so many years, went to this place to greet you and to send you off. One’s friends who are so close that they were always there with you upon your arrival and when you were leaving. Years and years of meetings, hugs, departures, kisses, smiles, tears, bits of one’s life. Tiny, special, precious. This is what destruction is about. Not physical buildings, but human emotions and memories connected to it. 

Those who are giving the orders and fulfilling them in that totally irrational country are not privy to such sentiments. We are seeing their qualities , human and intellectual ones, and their skills, military and diplomatic ones  in all the shine of their deadly mediocrity. In their stunning stupidity, they would never get that their brutal destruction evokes the best in people whom they attack. It evokes true patriotism, true stoicism, true intention to help the people next to you by anything you can. This war is lost because it is inhuman. It was lost even before it started. Because moral dwarfs never win wars.  

The landscape which one could see from a plane’s window approaching my city is not extraordinary. There are vast fields and many farms around. As far as it stays in my mind, there is also a lot of sun in the area, most of the year. Human mind is not a fast machine, sometimes. It struggles with facts, at moments like that. It will take some time before it would seem natural for me that we won’t be able to come to my city by air. Previously unremarkable landscape, sunny and calm,  as if fixed in the air, as it is in my memory. It is a soothing image, and now a symbol of comfort and warmth. This is something that no putins, nor armies of putinoids are able to destroy.  

 Day 48: April 12, 2022, Tuesday

GHETTO TODAY. RUSSIA’S MADE

It is bordering on impossible. Completely impossible. But we saw it with our own eyes, the place, the people, all in detail. 

Facts only: there is a small village about a hundred kilometres from Kyiv, called Yahidne, Berries-place if translated. It is a small place, 0,3 square kilometres only, and  people live there compactly. 399 of them, this is the number of Yahidne’s residents. Or it was. 

When ‘the liberators’ came to the village, it was easy for them to collect all its residents, 360 people at the same place. Handy. After the three days of the presence in Yahidne, ‘the liberators’ ordered all residents in the school’s basement. Elderly, young, small, babies, everyone. There were about 50 children there, including babies of a month and six weeks old. 

They all were living sitting, and some standing. There was from 0,5 to 1,5, metres of living space per person. I saw it on the screen. 

There was no electricity, no light, no ventilation. There were no toilets. People were using baskets for the purposes. 

I saw a decent 60-year old man who said that for 25 nights he was sleeping standing next to the Swedish wall in the basement, tightening himself to the wall by his own scarf, blue & yellow, as it happened. The man tried to contain himself while telling about his and his people’s ordeal to the Western media. 

Because of this round-o’clock sitting, many people suffered serious swelling, to the dangerous degree. Their ration was controlled all the time. 

Elderly people started to lose their mind first, and to die next. Twelve people died during those 25 days of ordeal. First the people in the basement could not bury them. They were not allowed to do it. So children had to live next to the corpses for days.

While those savages kept 360 people in the cramped conditions round o’clock, ‘the liberators’ enjoyed a massive, total loot of the village. As we know by now, it is their main activities in Ukraine, apart of murder. 

All this was happening for about a month, for 25 days and nights. 

What does it remind you of? I research the Holocaust and post-Holocaust for over thirty years. My reaction was immediate: we saw the ghetto in front of us, in all and every way. To put people together in impossible living conditions, to ration them in food, drink, medicine and everything else, to deprive them from light, electricity, fresh air and normal breathing. As if by the Holocaust text-book, in its ghetto part.  

What had to happen to human beings in Russia to make them anti-human? To make their army the gang? We all are seeing the results of that process which was overseen both inside and outside of Russia. 

Yahidne was a lovely village. People from Chernihiv, which is nearby, loved to come there for their summer vacations. Now this place would be known as one of the ghettos of the XXI century , imposed by Russia in Ukraine. 

As for my part, I still need some time to absorb everything which unfolds daily in the Mean War. To understand that this is for real.  That all these screaming war crimes are allowed to happen. And to go on. The continuation of the daily horror in Ukraine is the worst part of the Mean War.

Day 47: April 11, 2022, Monday

ELENA OSIPOVA,  The HONORARY CITIZEN OF   MILAN

Inna Rogatchi ©. Memory Awakened I. War Pictures. 2022.

On April 7th, 2022, at its meeting, the City Council of Milan unanimously voted to recognize Mrs Yelena Osipova, the Russian citizen and native of St Petersburg, as an Honourable Citizen of the City of Milan. 

I wrote about this very special woman in the first days of the Mean War, on Day 8th, March 3d, 2022, when she, 77-year old artist, survivor of the Siege of Leningrad, bravely went with herself-drawn large posters to protest the Mean War in the St Petersburg down-town. 

Mrs Osipova was arrested promptly, then released. After which, the inhabitants of St Petersburg are seeing her regularly with new war-protesting large posters which she creates and carries on to her individual protests. These posters are confiscated by the police every single time, but a 77-year artist draws them anew. And goes to her protests in the most visible places of St Petersburg regularly, all this period of the shameful Mean War.

As stated in the decision of the City Council of Milan, “the conferral of honorary citizenship on Yelena Osipova represents a strong sign of solidarity and closeness of the City of Milan to a woman who is a symbol of Russian citizens who are fighting against the war in Ukraine for peace”.

Intelligent, thoughtful representative of the best part of the Russian intelligentsia, Mrs Osipova might be glad to learn that in the whole modern history of Milan, she is only 12th personality on whom this honour has been bestowed, at least during the past 50 years. Among that noble dozen of people from all around the world, there are Charlie Chaplin who was proclaimed the Honorary Citizen of Milan in 1972, the Czech leader Alexander Dubcek who resisted the Soviet invasion to Prague ( he was made a honorary citizen in 1988), Dalai Lama who has become a honorary Milanese as recently, as in 2016. But most of all, the heart of the 77-year old artist who is known for many people in St Petersburg as ‘our conscience’, would resonate with the fact that another Russian person who is recognised as a Honorary Citizen of Milan is Academician Andrey Sakharov who had received the honour back in 1980. I knew Sakharov’s wife and widow late Elena Bonner quite well, and I can tell that from the prospect of honesty, devotion, decency and that incredible quiet courage, the parallel between two Russian Honorary citizens of Milan, Academician Andrey Sakharov and artist Yelena Osipova is absolutely justified. I am very glad that the Council of the City of Milan conceived the idea and voted for that, recognising the power of human decency and  courage exemplified in the 77-year old woman from St Petersburg. Vivat, dear Mrs Yelena. We love you. April 7th is my birthday. This year, the decision by the City Council of Milan was the best birthday present I’ve got. 

Day 46: April 10, 2022, Sunday

TARGET: CIVILIANS AT THE RAILWAY STATION. KRAMATORSK

So, there is an overcrowded railway station in Kramatorsk in Ukraine, a very important industrial centre, with 150 000 population, 30% of which are Russian-speaking. The city itself is 250 – 300 km from the Russian border, in different directions. 

On that April morning of April 8th, 2022,  four thousand people gathered there, refugees. People were prompted by the local administration to leave immediately, due to the imminent danger of ‘the liberators’ attack on the Luhansk region. 

At 7.30 in the morning, those four thousand civilians, with many children among them, were hit by the Russian missile attack. The interception of the Russian army internal exchange tells how satisfied they were about the precision of the strike. “Tochnoje popadanie,  the hit is precise in Russian, is heard clearly. 

So they are satisfied, on their own record, for hitting the condensed gathering of several thousands of civilians who were in the process of evacuation. Their hit resulted with 52 dead people, seven of whom were children,  and over 300 wounded. 

In the horror after the morning strike in Kramatorsk, up to 40 local doctors were operating on those who were wounded in the Russian premeditated strike. The tough female surgeon, absorbed in her non-stop work, could not speak on the TV camera. ‘As far as I am focused on my work, I am OK, – she explained, trying to control her sobs.  – Otherwise, I am not, sorry’. 

We should stop to ask ourselves: who should be a person who gives and those who carry on such anti-human orders? We know who they are, we are seeing them in action daily. Savages who act consciously, and according to their plan, causing as much damage, pain and horror as they could. In their world, it is stimulating development, to cause damage and horror, to kneel and to frighten. To annihilate. We do know whom they belong to, to which forces. They are proud to belong to the forces of evil? No surprise on that. We should be proud to keep them as far from the human world as possible, in contempt, weakened, and defeated. It is not only about Kramators, Bucha, Borodjanka, Mariupol and many other places in Ukraine where those savage ‘liberators’ brought unspeakable horror and committed numerous war crimes. It is about us, all of us. Everyone of us. It is about good against evil. The endless story. And now it is our turn to defend decency against barbarians of our days . 

Missile attacks. Two missiles. For Children, the customary slogan of the savages.

Day 45: April 9, 2022, Saturday

CANNED FOOD FLOWERS ON THE GRAVE 

Ukrainian boy visiting the grave of his mother, with canned food instead of flowers. Europe, 2022.

There is another chilling photo from Ukraine, from tortured Bucha. A six-year old boy visits the grave of his mom who is buried just next to their home in once idyllic Kyiv suburb. I saw the pictures of Bucha before the Mean War. Lovely place. It was. Nice, nit, appealing. 

We all saw what it has become after the savages’ crimes there. Those who are lucky to have their own graves are buried in courtyards. And now we see the visitors to those graves. As that six-year old boy who comes alone to visit the grave of his mom. He brings his flowers to the grave, which are cans of preserves. Two cans and a small package of apple juice which he most likely got from the official delegations’ visits to Bucha after the massacre. 

Do you know why this boy brought these ‘flowers’ to his mom’s grave? Because she died of hunger. In the centre of Europe, in the XXI century. 

I am repeatedly self-protesting because of ongoing usage of this ‘centre-of-Europe-XXI-century’ mantra, but at the same time, I know that we must to repeat it, day and night, until the meaning of it, the screaming meaning of it, would be comprehended to the point of adequate reaction which will efficiently refute the Mean War and those who conduct it.  

Looking at those canned flowers on the grave in a courtyard, brought by a six-year child to his mom, to whom, in her grave, he gave his own small package of apple juice, I wonder: what for we needed the previous twenty centuries, really? What for?.. 

Day 44: April 8, 2022, Friday

SILENT PEOPLE. SILENT CHILDREN

Inna Rogatchi ©. Dialogue. War Pictures. Ukraine. 2022.

We expect children to be talkative, funny, chirping,  laughing. Childhood is associated with sound. Well, not anymore as a general phenomena. Because, a new phenomena appeared as a result of the Mean War. Silent children. It is almost impossible to bear. Just yesterday, a photo of an incredibly sad boy, of approximately 7 years old was posted on social media, with a devastating simple note: ‘Please, this boy was found ( near Zaporizhzha). He does not speak. At all. Please, perhaps somebody knows him to tell us anything about him’.  A little boy’s eyes are fixed and down. Does not matter what we do, around and in connection with him, and in general too, he lives in his own world, being absorbed by what he saw and went through. 

We do not know his name, his age, his address. People who are with him now, and who very kindly care  about him do not know anything about his family and where they live. The boy was just found. 

The same happened a week ago in Switzerland, in a village between Bern and Zurich where locals, being moved by the efforts of the woman who lives there and who is originally from Ukraine,  have opened their homes to some of the refugees. Some of them were seriously traumatised, I was told by a friend who lives in Switzerland. There are two teenage girls who both were raped by ‘the liberators’ , and who does not eat, does not speak, and does not interact with anyone around them in that nice Swiss village. ‘People’s hearts are broken over those two girls who are living here being virtually a shadow. It is extremely difficult to see something like that. The girls do not react even to professional psychologists who are trying to work with them. They are living somewhere else” – my friend mentioned painfully. “ Or not living”, – I said. 

My husband was told by our close friends in Dnipro, Ukraine about masses of the people from Donbass region who managed to get to Dnipro as the place of evacuation from the front-line. Our friends are in charge of organising the relief for those people. They are working 24/7. “We have noticed deafening silence among those people who came ( here). They all are so impossibly silent. Men, women, children, elderly, of any age. They do not demand a thing, not even asking for anything. They come and go, appear and disappear, all in this marked silence. It is heart-breakening, I have to tell you’ – our experienced and tough friend told Michael.

There are so many silent people now around us. Silenced by their sorrow. Silenced by their grief. Silences by their horror. The screaming silence of the Mean War.  

Day 43: April 7, 2022, Thursday

A BOY IN A RED COAT

Three weeks ago, on March 15th, 2022,  the photo of this lovely boy appeared on social media. Friends of his parents tried to reach out in an effort to find Sacha Zdanovich, 4 years old. I wrote about Sacha too, on March 22nd, 2022, when covering the phenomena of the Lost Children in the Mean War.

 ‘The boy is dressed as in this photo’, it was written. He is in a red coat, perhaps, somebody did see him. His coat is so bright. 

Sacha’s coat was bright. It is not anymore. Not after his family madly looked for him all this time. Sacha’s red coat’s colour waded in the cold water in which the body of this beautiful little boy was drowned  and stayed there for a month or so. 

Sacha’s grandma, 60-years old, was drowned together with the boy and their two dogs when a water vehicle in which the civilian refugees were trying to escape from Kyiv via the waters of the huge Kyiv reservoir, was hit by ‘the liberators’ fire, and the vehicle capsided. Grandma covered  little Sacha by her body when the fire started, as did so many parents and grandparents during this Mean War. 

The body of Sacha’s grandmother was found a week or so after the fatal attack, on March 11th, but the little boy in a bright red coat was not to be found anywhere all this time. Until yesterday. 

These tragic red coats of children in various wars. It gets into our consciousness to stay there. 

But little Sacha Zdanovich had big eyes, and such pleasant features of his nice face of just a four-year old child whose life was brutally, senselessly taken from him by savages who are let to murder children, elderly and civilians for over six weeks by now. Incomprehensible.  

WEEK 6: March 31 – April 6, 2022

Summary of the Week 6: WITNESSING AND OPPOSING EVIL

Inna Rogatchi ©. Devilspiel II. 2020.

Anyone who is aware with a minimal security-related knowledge, realised that with his trip to Bucha, president Zelensky risked a lot.  It may look danger-free when Volodymyr Zelensky was walking through devastated landscape in Bucha, but it was not. Not for a bit. The president of Ukraine was not able to leave the place where he has been confined in Kyiv for 40 days and nights, due to security concerns. We know that he is a top-target for ‘the liberators’ and their sickly anti-human leadership. He knows it too. But he just cannot allow himself not to visit the place of horror, the place of suffering, the place of hideous crime so near his country’s capital. Because he is a decent and dignified human being. Because he lives this Mean War with his attacked people, not above them. 

So, Volodymyr Zelensky goes on the ground in Bucha, with his close assistance, and with his good security detail. We saw his face there in Bucha. We saw the moments when this 44-year man who lives 40 most difficult, highly tragic days of his and his country’s life, could barely compose himself. Those are precious moments, to me. Because if we would not see emotions on the face of anyone who is on the ground there in Bucha, I would not regard this person as a human. We saw the clenched jaws and eyes full of pain and fury of Victor Klitschko, Kyiv’s governor, who was visiting  Bucha a day prior president Zelensky’s visit. Those are expected reactions of good people. 

We also saw how president Zelensky and his team  were treating local people in Bucha, how much much needed goods, water, juices, food they  have brought with them. How it all was very well organised, very human-like, very friendly and warm. And – importantly – how low-profiled the episodes of distributing provisions were handled by the Zelensky’s team. In a very tactful, no PR-oriented way. Nothing of the sort at all.  Chapeau to the thoughtfulness and attitude on those small, but not small at all things, to the president and his team. 

We also saw how local people in Bucha were looking at Volodymyr Zelensky.  It was for real. It was a vivid expression of the moments of light prevailing over darkness. 

A few hours after visiting Bucha, probably, the most horrific afternoon in his entire life, so far, presiden Zelensky stated that the meeting with the Russian president ‘could possibly not have a place’. I understand him 101%. He is absolutely right. And it will be only for the better, if he could keep this just and justified attitude. Was it possible for any of the Allies to meet with Adolf in the midst of the war and discuss anything with him? No, it was not. There are boundages. Those butchers, at all levels of their irrational hierarchy, excluded themselves from the relations with normal people and countries.  

The next day after his visit to Bucha, president Zelensky spoke to the UN Security Council. His speech can be seen in full, and it is worth it. 

The President of Ukraine spoke to the UN Security Council practically immediately after witnessing evil in Bucha. There is one thing when you are getting information, even of the best quality and even in a real-time mode, and it is completely different when you see it with your own eyes, on the ground. Simply because a different group of organs works bringing the knowledge into your brain. In some lucky cases, as Volodymyr Zelensky is, heart, too. There is a special quality of people which is emphasised in the Torah and the Talmud – ‘those wise in heart’. He is from that category. 

After witnessing evil, president Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council which some of us find nowadays as limbo-body being wrapped  into a heavy tissue of bitter irony. Or, without metaphors, being effectively paralysed. What on earth that country-aggressor that commits unspeakable war crimes is doing on the UN Security Council? To say that it is a joke is not funny. It is a mockery. 

The same country-aggressor would block any move by the UN International Crime Court, so processes like the one which has been conducted against those who committed war crimes during the Balkan war in the 1990s, won’t be possible. There should be no illusions about this. 

President Zelensky is absolutely right in his addressing the UN Security Council: ‘a veto right ( referring to the Russia’s privilege among the five principals , so to say, at the Security Council) is not the right to cause death’, ‘there were no existing crimes which were not committed in Ukraine during the 40 days of the aggression’,  ‘the most terrible thing in this war is that there is a premeditated extermination of  people of a sovereign country’. As president Zelensky said, ‘Bucha is just one case of many similar ones in other places of Ukraine’. 

And indeed, “if article one of the UN bye-law, is violated in such a devastating way, what far the rest of the bye-law is needed for?”. 

The UN bye-law, and its structure was written back in 1945.  As the League of Nations has been dissolved, the UN can and should be reformed due to the similar tectonic changes in the system of the world’s security. This country shall not enjoy status of a privy state, the member of the Security Council, due to their actions. It is absurd. If they would, the rest of the world would encourage and institutionalise evil. But the essential meaning of human life is  not only to witness evil, but to resist it. To fight it. To overcome it. 

Day 42: April 6, Wednesday

LOOTING-AT-LARGE

Inna Rogatchi ©. Cold Winds I. 2022. War Pictures.

I am receiving various material regarding the Mean War, first-hand reports and information, round o’clock, daily, for six weeks by now. 

One is supposed to get used to at least some features of the war, especially when the war gets extended. Perhaps, I also managed to tune myself in the mode of a receiver, suppressing the emotional reactions as much as possible, otherwise, it would not be possible to do what I am busy with these days, to collect the material, to analyse the Mean War phenomena and features, to extract people’s psychological threats under such tragic circumstances. Sometimes, my self-defence falls, sometimes it happens spectacularly, as after Bucha and with several more episodes or features of the Mean War.  But I am determined to work productively. I know that this kind of work has meaning and is historically important. 

So among the materials I got yesterday, there was a dry list. A full name, postal address in Russia, a telephone in Russia of the postal package’s receiver, description of goods sent via post, and number of kilos of the packages. The list was made in the Belorussian postal office in the place quite near Chernobyl and Pripjat from the Ukrainian side. Actually, Mozyr is where that postal office is located. It is the first city which appears on your way when you drive from Ukraine from Chernobyl, the way in which ‘the liberators’ troops were retreating recently. 

The postal office camera also monitored ‘the liberators’ who queued there with their multiplied packages to be sent to their homes. Greetings from the front, so to say. The surveillance record is three hours long. It all is there.  

The go-called soldiers and so-called looters were sending their loot to home. The packages vary between 30 and 450 kilos. In the descriptions, there are ‘televisors, kitchen supplies, machines for home, clothes, carpets, furniture, conditioners, instruments, accumulators, spare parts, fishing equipment’, as is written in the postal documentation. It is all looted by the Russian army’s thugs in Ukraine. 

Most of the senders from that Mozyr post office sent their packages to Rubzovsk, a mid-size city in Altai, Siberia. The rest of them have sent their loot to nearby places in Siberia as well. 

It was only one group of about 20 thugs and looters whose action was documented. There are much, much more facts about an unprecedented giant loot which the Russian so-called army commits in Ukraine today. 

People from Belarus are reporting frequently about ‘columns of huge heavy military trucks reaching Belarus from Ukraine from tons and tons of all kinds of loot’, from jewellery to carpets, computers, tv sets, clothes, just anything. There is not one, but many spontaneously set markets in many places in Belarus where all this loot is traded. Daily. Many days by now. 

I have got the first-hand information from a person whose family member entered Bucha with the Ukrainian forces on the first day of them taking back control over the tortured town. According to that eye-witness, ‘all apartments in Bucha were bulgared. All of them. Every single one. All were looted”. 

And I will remember a half of a sentence uttered by the president Zelensky about the women who were shot by the animals in the Russian military uniform after they were thrown the hearing off them, in the way of barbarians who they are. 

There are also interceptions of ‘the liberators’ telephone talks with their families back in Russia. In some of those conversations, one hears instigation by their mothers and wives ‘to take everything from them’. One can also hear an amazement by ‘the liberators’ on ‘ how come those in Ukraine live so well’. 

There is a giant-loot, a non-stop loot, an instigated, uncontrolled, total loot which is committed by those in Russian military uniform in Ukraine for almost six weeks by now. 

The scale of this mega-loot by the Russian army in Ukraine, the way in which it is carried on, the totality of it shows that in contrast with their futile dreams about world domination, in fact, they are just low despicable thugs. 

Day 41: April 5, Tuesday

‘TATTOOS’ ON THE CHILDREN’S BACKS 

There is a new habit among Ukrainian parents currently, among those who are living in the areas of the country which are prone to ‘the liberators’ attacks. Ukrainian parents are writing on their kids’ backs their names, the date of a child’s birth, and the contact phones of the parents or family members. The thinking behind its necessity is that in the case parents would be murdered, the child could be found and identified. We have known about many cases by now when a child was saved in ‘the liberators’ attack because an adult who was next to a child, a father or mother, did cover it by his or her body. 

 This new habit is massive in Ukraine nowadays. Just who would have thought about it just a couple of months ago? 

They are writing in a Latin script. They would not come to think about doing it yet a couple of months ago, because their own Ukrainian language uses a cyrillic alphabet, similarly to the Russian and Belarussian ones. But now, the young parents in Ukraine deliberately use a latin alphabet, in the circumstances in which they anticipate their possible murder by the Russian so-called army, in fact, the quasi-gang of murderers. 

Little Vira from the photo on my poster is just 2 years and 4 month old. She starts her life with the experience of being ‘tattooed’ by her mom amidst the bombing and deliberate killing of civilians. Her mom is not alone in doing these precautions. People under extreme circumstances are learning very fast. There are very many families in Ukraine today who have to  ‘tattoo’ their kids, in order for them not to be lost. 

How difficult it is to be self-contained while learning about such phenomena of sorrow which the Mean War brings daily.  

Day 40: April 4, Monday

The ART OF DIGGING 

Due to the shockwave caused in the world by ‘the liberators’  massacre in Bucha, there is one fact which somehow escaped the close public attention which it deserved. According to the Western official military sources, starting from February 1st, 2022, a new, specific intense training has been introduced among the troops. The subject? Digging. 

Why should a matter of  digging be trained in a specific way, and intensely so? Because they started to train the mass of 150-plus troops which they accumulated in the proximity to the Ukraine border, a special kind of digging. They were training their troops to dig  trenches for mass graves to accommodate up to 1000 corpses, the Western military sources have reported recently. The training started three and half weeks before Russia’s ‘special operation’. We saw some results of that recent rapid digging training recently in Bucha. We should be prepared to see it also in the other Ukrainian places, quite possibly. 

If the army decides to train its troops, in advance of an imminent ‘operation’,  to dig mass graves, what does it tell about that army? Its commanders, so to say? Its officers? Those with strips and shoulders who are supervising it all from Moscow? Those without strips and shoulders who are benefiting their army’s advances? Advances in digging and filling mass graves. What does it tell about the army’s objectives in the planned actions, at the stage of planning, let alone the implementation which we all saw with unspeakable horror? 

All the atrocities which the world has seen in Ukraine are beyond comparison. And you know why? Because of the simple fact that these atrocities had already happened, during WWII and during the War in the Balkans. It has happened. It has been punished though inadequately and far from fully. It has been condemned. It has been researched. It is massively aggravated in the public conscience. Somewhere, perhaps, but obviously not in Russia. 

I am researching the Holocaust and post-Holocaust for several decades, non-stop. You cannot research the Holocaust from a distance. This kind of a distant research will be incomplete. You have to be at the place which you research, otherwise, it will be a shallow repetition of the facts you won’t be able to comprehend. I saw many different places connected to the Holocaust.  Extermination camps, concentration camps, cities, villages, forests, ravines. Rationally, extermination camps are encompassing your mind in a storm,  in a process of your brain’s desperate effort to comprehend the scale, methodical approach and sometimes that sick tidiness of the implementation of the operation, so to say. Emotionally, however, it is ravines and forests, an open spaces of genocide which brings your heart on its edge. Here, on the distance of a stretched hand, just under your foot, you are experiencing the horror of the crimes committed at the spot there. That horror stays there. It goes nowhere. Does not matter how many years and decades gone. For those who doubt it, an excursion to the Lithuanian Paneria forest is recommended. This forest is full of trenches there, big and small, the trenches are all over there. Those trenches were mass graves of the Holocaust. 

And now, we have these trenches in Ukraine, just nearby Kyiv. And most likely in some other places, as the training manual for that huge gang of trench-digging specialists was renewed in the beginning of February this year, prior to their march to Ukraine. Everybody involved in the crime of Bucha and alike, should be brought to justice. Every single one of them. 

Day 39: April 3, Sunday

BUCHA. BUCHA. BUCHA.

So you are awakening on Sunday morning. The morning is sunny. The birds are chirping in an exalted way of a spring. You are reaching for the news, as you do for 39 days and nights of the Mean War, and the sun in your window is gone, along with the birds and their happy chirping. 

You are seeing the photos from the town near Kyiv whose name will become a symbol of a terrible catastrophe, the one of the screaming notes in that horrendous ongoing cacophony of the Mean War. Bucha. 

Bucha. Bucha. Bucha. 

You see the bodies on the streets, every few metres, among a lot of litter around. Men. Of different ages. In a range between 18 and 60. Their hands tight behind their backs. They are killed from a very close range. Executed. In a rush spree of the leaving troops of monsters calling themselves ‘liberators’. 

Adult, experienced men were refusing to believe that the massacre in Bucha was conducted  by a regular army. They were thinking that it had been done by a special Russian Einsatzkommandos. But no, we are told by the official sources now. It was done by those who were on the ground and were leaving in a rush. 

The photos are coming. There are women, naked, with plastic sacks over them. Those naked bodies were put on fire. What is left is covered by plastic. 

You see the photo of a man who was tortured and left to die in a sewerage hatchway.

There are photos of the mass grave containing 280 people at least. Civilians. Nobody buried them. Just thrown hundreds of bodies in the sand. Grey sand. With a lot of browned red all around. Here you see a head. In another place, a hand. In the third place you see somebody’s hair. 

Here you see the family. On my poster, there is a family. Mother, father, son, and other members. I know who they were and I know the story behind the murdering them. But the most important thing is that they were people. Human beings. Unlike the monsters who did commit this screaming crime. 

In Bucha, and in many places where the monsters had retreated, they raped very many women, from very young ones, till quite old. It was the hellish, non-stop rape all over those places. 

The world has awakened this Sunday to the terrible reality of Bucha crime. There is no sun for me today despite the weather. And there is no spring either. But the nightmare is that there are and will be more than one Bucha in this extraordinarily cruel, meaningless, barbarian Mean War. 

When on the earth the world, those who are in the position and on duty, will react to this as hideous escalating crimes should be reacted to? 

Day 38: April 2, Saturday

SHAVED WOMEN

There has been a lucky day for Ukraine. On the day, the country was greeting their captured back, in an exchange with the aggressors. We know that the matter of exchange of prisoners has become one of the top priorities for the president Zelensky’s administration from the day one of the war. This leader values human life as we all are seeing for over five weeks of the Mean War. 

The aggressors are not easy to carry on the exchanges with. That we know as well, also from the history of that country, both past and relatively recent one. We were told that despite all efforts of the Ukrainian side to carry on the exchanges of POWs from the start of the Mean War, the Russian side was all the time insisting on ‘equality’ of the personnel to be exchanged.  ‘But where on earth would we get over ten mayors of the Russian cities to exchange them for our 11 mayors which they are keeping in captivity till now?” – president Zelensky exclaimed in one of his recent interviews. Indeed. 

The smile on the face of the Ukrainian vice-PM Iryna Vereshchuk in this photo is justified. In this photo, she who works round o’clock on the most grim matters for so long, meets with the second group of Ukrainians POWs who came home in the second exchange with the aggressor. 86 people were exchanged by each side in this recent second exchange of the POWs. The first one was an exchange of 10 personnel from each side. 

Don’t you worry about anything in this photo where people are smiling? I do. A lot. All females in this photo are shaved. Do you think they did it by themselves? They did not. I have checked. Some of the women in this photo are elderly, meaning that they were members of the territorial volunteer brigades, not regular army personnel. 

What are we expected to say about those ‘liberators’ of Ukraine who shave women they took captives ? Trying to keep calm, we can only refer to the known historical precedents. There are two in the XX century: women who were pushed to the gas chambers by the Nazis, they were millions; and women who were publicly shamed in France for collaboration with the Nazis just after the WWII, those were approximately 20 000. Whose step these Russians who did it to the captive women from their neighbouring country were following? Does it matter? They are marking themselves with indelible marks of manifested barbarism. This is a new material from the XXI century for historians. 

Day 37: April 1, Friday

UKRAINIAN LOCAL LEADERS,  and the IMAGE OF RESILIENCE

Inna Rogatchi ©. Song for Ukraine 2022. Exclusive Art Poster. 100 x 100 cm. 2022. Donated by the artist to the state of Ukraine for public purposes in support of the people of Ukraine.  

Ones of the indisputable heroes of the Mean War are mayors of many Ukrainian cities and governors of many places in Ukraine. Some of them have become not only  very popular public figures, they were popular before, but true leaders, and true heroes. And dignified human beings, most importantly. 

Klitschko brothers, mayor of Kyiv Vitaly and his brother Volodymyr who came to fight with his brother shoulder to shoulder literary, not only doing their job in a great way, in extreme danger, non-stop, for 37 days and nights of the Mean War, but they also have capacity for empathy towards the people around them, and in such physically mighty hands as the box champion brothers possess, it has become their mightiest weapon. One should see and hear how, in which way the Mayor of Kyiv speaks with the people of his city. Tired people, people under fire, under bombs, under round-o-clock shelling. What are the mayor’s intonations, what is his voice. What are his words. This way a well-bred son speaks to his parents, and to his family. The moments of mortal danger provide the most exact litmus test for many qualities. Mayor Klitschko is not only a great sample of fearless resistance against mean hyenas ( this term comes from Moscow, actually, it is how a normal people there attests nowadays ‘the liberators’ and those who support them). He also cares. He does. And people in his big city, the capital of their country, in the city where over 3 million people left under the Russian  bombing, knows that their mayor cares about them. There is nothing more important for the morale of the people under attack than to be sure that they are cared for by their leaders. 

There is also the governor of the Mykolaiv region Vitaly Kim, another hero. Smart, young, resilient, always with a good, but measured pinch of humour which does help people to bear unbearable. Always in his position, day and night, brave, mobile, determined. The people of Mykolaiv and the rest of Ukraine started to call him ‘our Swarzenegger’, and with a good reason. So popular governor Kim has become that ‘the liberators’ conducted a precision attack on his very office a few days back. The explosion went off at 8.30 am , the very moment when the governor’s office started their working day. The damage is colossal. They were getting people out from the ruins of the administration building for four days. They excavated 35 corpses. Vitaly Kim stopped short of his customary slightly joking tone these days, naturally, but he did not stop short neither of his commitments, or determination. His composure and resilience is the best support of the people of Mykolaiv who are under merciless attacks by ‘the liberators’. Kim literally  charges them with the energy to withstand. 

There are many more figures of the local leaders in Ukraine today who are conducting their extremely dire mission whole-heartedly, including the leaders of Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odessa, and many other big cities, towns, villages. 

I do not know anyone like the Klitschko brothers, or Kim among the local leadership of the country which being three times bigger in population has decided to attack its neighbour for no reason, but evil. Pure, premeditated evil. The country whose leaders and whose military has sinked it as a whole to the first ring of the seventh  circle of Dante’s Inferno.  For good. 

Here is my special poster in which I visualised Ukraine as an acrostic. Creating it, I was thinking of those leaders which Ukraine is lucky to have, and whose energy and  determination will get the people of Ukraine to their victory.  I donated the image to the state of Ukraine for public purposes, and dedicated it to the people of Ukraine who fight for their country and for their families. They will win. People always win over the monsters. 

Day 36: March 31, Thursday

CHERNOBYL: MACABRE UNPRECEDENTED

Inna Rogatchi(C). Chernobyl Zone 2022. War Pictures. 2022.

The Russian ‘liberators’ entered the territory of the Chernobyl nuclear station on the first day of their Mean War against Ukraine, on February 24th, 2022. As a matter of fact, this scenario was known to the Western special agencies, and the Ukrainian leadership was warned about it, as we are learning now. It is the shortest way to Kyiv, the Ukraine’s capital, from the Belorussian border. And there also was such a mad trick in the tactical geniuses who has planned ‘the special operation of the liberation of Ukraine’ as a nuclear facility, with a ticking bombing of a tactical nuclear attack. Or an accident. Or ‘an accident’. 

We know the chilling details of ‘the liberators’ take-over of Chernobyl. We know the dreadful, inimaginable situation with people there taken and kept hostages for three weeks non-stop. I wrote about it at the time, in the entry Chernobyl 2.0 on March 9, 2022 in my Diary of the Mean War. 

Now, with ‘the liberators’ being pushed away from Chernobyl, we know more details from the Ukrainian authorities of their behaviour at the nuclear facility. These details surfaced at the time and in connection with an urgent visit to the place for in-site assessment of the director of the IAEA Rafael Grossi. These unbelievable-but-true facts should be recorded, registered and taken very seriously, given the fact of the nuclear materials in hands of these new-time’ pathetic, but very dangerous made-in-Russia ‘robocopes’. 

So, we learn that Russian tanks were moving towards the Chernobyl station site at a high speed, causing huge clouds of heavy and extremely dangerous radioactive dust from the zone which is categorically forbidden for any use, not to mention a military activity. They were warned by the Ukrainian side, but ignored the warning, of course. Their soldiers were without any protective gear at all, even a minimal one. What for? After raising huge clouds of heavily radioactive dust up in the air  – with their own cities being just a 30 km distance, who cares? – their soldiers were commanded by their officers to dig trenches into the 5-km, the most dangerous zone in the whole Chernobyl area, which is not in any use for 36 years by now, from April 1986, and still be extremely dangerous. ‘The liberator soldiers spent quite a while in those trenches.  Naturally, they all were exposed and over-exposed to the radiation in no time. 

As a whole, they were acting in and around the Chernobyl zone as nothing ever happened there, and as they had no idea which kind of place it was. The most unbelievable thing is that this supposition turned out to be true. This information came from Belorussians, not from Ukrainians. The Belorussian media, in a complete astonishment, has reported that after the seizure of the Chernobyl plant, the people from the Ukrainian shift who were taken hostages, and the Russian soldiers who took them hostages and who were guarding them, had had to work together, nearby. So they spoke. And Ukrainian staff of the Chernobyl station have learned from their Russian ‘liberators’ that those who never had heard about the explosion in 1986, and had no clue about what had happened in Chernobyl.  This kind of robocopes. Of a third, or worse, sorts of robocopes. The same as their commanders. Who might remember about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster but did not care about it, and their own soldiers, for a bit. What on earth are we expecting them to care about in general? 

The quality of education. The way of thinking. The level of planning. The way of execution. The damage caused. Barbarians of the XXI centuries. Nothing more. But nothing less. 

Kaddish in the Opera: Odessa 2022 – Essay

The essay was published at Le Tribune Juive ( Paris, France) and The Times of Israel.

Odessa is a very special place not in Ukraine, not in the South-Eastern Europe. In the world. It is a unique universe. There are many books, and some movies depicting it, but none of it is not enough. Nothing is encompassing. In my modest view, it is easier and certainly quicker to describe and present New York and Paris than Odessa. Maybe, I am subjective. A large part of my immediate family is from Odessa, and I am lovingly proud of it. 

It is a warm, chic in its own way and hilariously funny, in its absolutely unique way, rich culturally, colourful, extremely potential, talented, very human, with all our shortcomings seen always through that one and only prism of a suburb irony which is first of all a self-irony, place of immense inner freedom and followed awesome tolerance which has been inherited there from the times of introducing the place as the porto-franco zone in the Russian Empire, the only one, and actually solely because of it. It is the place of great culture and architecture which has suffered a lot, and a lot, and a lot in various periods, but always tried to smile.  

I always remember the scene which was imprinted in my head from the late 1990s. I was  walking through rather sad and severely impoverished Odessa visiting the city’s places special for my family. All of the sudden, among that rather drub landscape, both literally and metaphorically, I heard the singing of a rare beauty. First, I thought that I was mistaken. The singing was too good. Superb opera voice. Superb masterly performance. I stopped under the rain on the main Odessa boulevard, Primorsky boulevard, close to the sea and the monument of the Duc, as the Duc de Richelieu is known there in the city which he has made that unique place on the earth, and tried to find the source of that heavenly-like singing looking to all sides from my wet umbrella. 

Soon, I saw the woman who was staying there in the middle of the boulevard under the cold autumn rain, without an umbrella, and singing one opera aria after another, with a very tired mid-aged face. Very very tired face. More than twenty years passed from that meeting, but for some reason, I do remember that woman’s coat of an uninteresting olive colour. How come? She had very little money in front of her, and it was clear that she was staying there singing for a long while. I became paralysed. I came closer. I wanted to do everything for that woman, but I was cautious not to interrupt her. So we stand nearby. She stayed  singing  heavenly, in Italian, wet, without an umbrella.  I stayed fully numbed, under an umbrella, waiting for her to have a pause. 

She stopped after some while, as she noticed me. I approached, trying to formulate in my head the most delicate way of speaking with her. Without letting me open my mouth, the woman said very simply: “ I am working there – nodding to the side of the world-famous Odessa opera house. – Sorry, I was. Now I am ‘working’ here’. She tried to smile. I tried not to cry. I invited the Odessa Opera soloist to come with me to my hotel which was very near, to get dry and to have some rest. I was already planning how I will invite her to the late lunch and will give her my room to relax a bit. She thanked me but nodded in a rejecting gesture. “No, thank you. I am OK. Honestly. And I will be going home soon, anyway, on the tram’. We both looked at the Odessa tram moving nearby. I asked her again. She nodded negatively again, smiling, This time, without effort, with a very nice, relieving smile. Of course, I gave her all the money which was in my purse. Valentina, it was the singer’s name, as she introduced herself, thank me and said that now, really, she can return home at once. Believe it or not, the rain stopped. We laughed together, and departed. I remember her and her singing ever since. 

Twenty-three years later, the Odessa Opera Orchestra  lives through the war, the Mean War. To mark the first month of the Mean War, the Odessa Opera Orchestra created a very memorable performance. It can be watched here.  

Unlike many musical renditions, which  are perfectly audible, this one is necessary to watch. The people from the Odessa Opera Orchestra took their live performance dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust in January 2020, and combined the record with the current pictures of the Mean War. The outcome is very powerful, with amazing harmony between the terrible current  visual with highly dramatic music by a highly dramatic composer created in 1991. Everyone participated in this heart-wrenching experience created by the Odessa Opera House musicians and directors of the video, the composer, and the conductor of the orchestra deserves a closer look. It is incredible how so many different dramas have amalgamated into the one shown in the video from the Odessa Opera House and dedicated to the memory of the victims of the first month of the Mean War. 

Back in January 2020, commemorating the International Holocaust Memorial Day, the Odessa Opera Orchestra played parts of the Mieczyslaw Weinberg Symphony No. 21, namely Kaddish. Weinberg composed the 21st from his 26 symphonies in 1991, five years before his death. For some reason, this very symphony is regarded among contemporary musicians as the one of the most enigmatic works of Weinberg. 

The Symphony No. 21 and in particular its part called Kaddish, is great, heart and mind haunting music by the composer with a truly tragic destiny.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg was known in the Soviet Union as Moisei Samuilovich Vainberg. He spent there all his life after he managed to get there running from the Nazis being just 20 year old, just him alone from all his family. All his life was the chain of incredible coincidences which of course were nothing of the sort. 

He was a musical prodigy from Warsaw, his family did not manage to get out of occupied Poland in the autumn  1939. His parents and younger sister perished in the ghetto there in Poland. 20-year old Mechek, as Mojse Wainberg was known to his friends, miraculously managed to get to Minsk, graduated from conservatory there a day before it was still possible to be evacuated from there, and he found himself in Tashkent where he became a close, a life-long friend of Dmitry Shostakovich. He moved to Moscow in the middle of the war, and since then was living and composing there, becoming the author of music of such legendary anti-war movie as The Cranes Are Flying which was the first Soviet film ever that received the Golden Palm Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. 

His first wife whom he met and married in evacuation in Tashkent was nobody else but Natalia Vovci, the daughter of the great Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Michoels who was viciously murdered on the Stalin’s order in the most resonated crime of the regime soon after the WWII. Vainberg himself was arrested in the anti-Semitic Stalin’s purge in the early 1950s, and only Stalin’s death in March 1953 released him from the Gulag. 

Stalin’s death, which was a real gift of life to the millions in the USSR, has also saved my husband who was born in Gulag as well, and was just a two month old baby when it happened. Thanks to the happy fact of the deceased monster, Michael’s father was released from Gulag eventually, and the family was able to move to a less deadly place than the Valley of Death where my husband was born, to Kazakhstan. Michael’s father with tuberculosis contracted in the Gulag, died very prematurely, being only 39.

Michael Rogatchi (C). Kaddish. Oil on canvas. 1993.

Metsek Weinberg, as the composer  insisted to be called because ‘this is how my name was written in my birth certificate and how people knew me in Poland’ survived his short imprisonment in the Gulag better, but still always did bear its indelible marks, both in extra- and introvert ways. The genius was thoughtful and very shy. 

Samuil Vainberg, as we know the composer’s name back in the USSR, was very productive, but virtually unknown behind the Iron Curtain. He has become not just known, but phenomenally popular in the mid 2000s, after the international premiere of his now famous The Passenger opera in Poland. Poor Metsek never knew the success his name and legacy enjoys now. 

His enigmatic Symphony No 21 is dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Meaning : to his family, his both parents and little sister Esther. The Kaddish part of the symphony is extremely dramatic, but at the same time is contained. Those who would watch the video, would see that. It speaks straight to one’s soul. 

Musicians’ faces on this video are also very telling. Rarely one can see so many emotions and such dedication among the experienced orchestra members. But Odessa is Odessa, and everything is special about this place. 

The orchestra of Odessa Opera House is led at this performance by Hobart Earle, the conductor of American origin who was born in Venezuela and who studied in Vienna. His case is also very special. Hobart Earle came to Odessa by chance , being a 31-year old fine musician and singer working in Vienna. Earle fell in love with Odessa and its Opera House ( which is legendary, indeed), and started to work there as musician director and conductor for the $ 50 a month salary. 

It is Hobart Earle who did make the orchestra fit, its instruments as it should have been, its sound of a world class. He cared about the musicians, and he brought the orchestra to the world. Hobart Earle deserves serious recognition for his dedication and the results of it. 

I do not believe in coincidences. Hobart Earle decided to work and live in Odessa and to lead its Opera House Orchestra in the year in which Miezyslaw Weinberg created his Symphony No 21 with its Kaddish. In January 2020, Odessa Opera Orchestra performed this Kaddish under the baton of Hobart Earle and with incredible, personal dedication by them all in the memory of the victims of Holocaust. The Shoah in Odessa was horrendous. 

Just one year on, in the midst of the terrible Mean War, the Orchestra created a special video interacting their performance of Weinberg’s Kaddish with the war pictures of the day, dedicating this special musical video to the victims of the first month of the war against their country in 2022. 

As far as I can judge, Metchek Weinberg, as well as his most important friend and inspiration figure Dmitry Shostakovich would not be able to comprehend the reason for the re-dedication of his Kaddish piece. It is still hardly comprehensible for many of us. 

But the fact is that in March 2022, Weinberg’s Kaddish sounds in Odessa in memory of our contemporaries in Ukraine today. After this Mean War will end, this video will stay as one of the most tangible, tragic commemorations of so many afflicted souls. So many. 

Victor, Go Visit Your Embankment in Budapest – Essay

The Essay was published in the FlipBoard, the Newsletter of the Council of Europe, The Times of Israel

Inna Rogatchi (C). Greetings from the Past.

We are privileged to see the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky daily, with various speeches and addresses. Ukraine as a country is truly lucky to have such an energetic young man as its leader at this direst hour. One needs quite a strength to be able to act in such a rhythm for more than a month non-stop. But the Zelensky’s addressing the Council of Europe was something special among many of his various speeches. 

With dubbing in English, you can watch and hear it here.  The President of Ukraine in that particular speech was having all the heads of the European states sitting around that huge oval table, in front of him. He chose to address them not in the capacity of a collective leadership of Europe, but individually. It was the right approach. Because being addressed individually, they were still facing each other around that huge table. So, Zelensky was speaking to them in the way a kindergarten teacher speaks to the senior group of children. Composed, without a slight hint of a hysteric, but knowing, naming and addressing  the faults of each of the children in front of a teacher. 

Such a pedagogical method does exist. I am referring to that, as my mom was a legendary teacher in Ukraine for over 40 years of an extraordinary career there. She never did raise her voice to any of her pupils for all these years, always spoke with them or their parents individually, in order not to humiliate any of them. Until the point when a child continued to misbehave despite many attempts to correct his behaviour. To speak about a pupil’s incurable behaviour in front of a class was, according to my mom, the last resort. Often, it worked. 

In the Volodymyr Zelensky’s family, there are two generations of teachers,  his father is a university senior teacher, and his paternal grandmother was a highly appreciated teacher as well.  So, he knows something about pedagogics, it seems. 

In his interaction with the leaders of Europe, Volodymyr Zelensky decided to make very clear and public who from the European countries are with Ukraine and support her, and who is in the middle, and who is not. He started with praise of Lithuania, and his face, generally concerned, was enlightened, with a good reason. He was happy and grateful to Latvia and Estonia, to Poland and Finland, to Czech Republic and Slovakia, to Italy and Slovenia. He turned personally to the President of France Macron with yet another effort to convince him to be more articulate in the position of his country, as he was towards the Netherlands. There were countries towards which the President of Ukraine was both diplomatic and clear which is also an interesting expression of his youth dream to become a diplomat – “Luxembourg, we understand each other, Portugal, almost there, Spain, we hope  you will be fully with us soon.” 

After that detailed round touching ground with every single head of a state around the huge table, just two countries left. Those for which Volodymyr Zelensky prepared his most serious addressing. Germany and Hungary. With Germany, there was nothing unexpected in what the majority of people in Europe, including the majority of Germany itself,  think about their just impossibly weak position and policy in that deadly Mean War. No rationale can justify this kind of behaviour by the country which has caused such an unspeakable tragedy for so many hundreds of million of people in the XX century, twice so. 

And today, on the 31st day of the Mean War, I have at least 31 times asked myself: where on earth is Madame Merkel? She made a generalised one-phrase statement on the second day of the invasion, after which she disappeared from the horizon as if she never was there. I find her public absence appalling, to stay on a diplomatic tune. 

But – Hungary. When speaking about that country’s position in the tragedy unfolding in the centre of Europe, just on and next the Ukrainian border , the personality of President Zelensky has become open, and his appeal to Victor ( Orban) was powerful, engaging and very honest. Not often in politics, we are witnessing this kind of honesty, this kind of personal involvement, and this kind of open nerve. Victor had no chance against humanity and justice brought by the President of Ukraine to the table of the Council of Europe. 

Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about beautiful Budapest. Very beautiful city indeed. About special Hungarian people. Very true. It spoke to our hearts as well, with my husband’s ancestry right from the Pest bank of the Danube river, from the family of the noble Jewish military and engineers. So, we understood and knew what Volodymyr Zelensky was talking about while praising Budapest and its people. He was sincere. 

And then he remembered about the place in that beautiful city which shocks anyone who was there ever once. Especially if one visits there for the first time. The President of Ukraine was telling the prime-minister of Ukraine how he  visited the Budapest embankment with his family. “With my family – repeated it twice, emphatically. – With-my-family-I-was-there!”  Those shoes at the Budapest embankment, they chills one’s heart for once and for good. Those bronze shoes. That incredible, one in the world memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Budapest who were thrown into the Danube from that very embankment , many of the alive, in one of the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust committed by the Nazis together with their Hungarian collaborators. Not for once. Repeatedly so. Such was the fashion of that crime which was committed in Budapest repeatedly from November 1944 through January 1945, with up to 15 thousand people murdered in this way. 

As president Zelensky was speaking about the one of the kind of the Shoes Memorial on the Danube river, he became really emotional. And I was proud of him. His personal, human engagement into the horror of our both people and its memory, has become the strongest reasoning in appealing to organically pro-Moscow  Orban, and it brought it to a different level altogether. It was not about gas, not about tanks. It was about human lives. And in the way Zelensky spoke about it, one cannot fake it. 

“Victor, do visit your embankment in Budapest again. And think about what kind of destiny can fall upon your people again’. Not only was it the best possible reasoning in the Ukrainian leader’s effort to bring at least some justice in international politics, with regard to Hungary. And actually, anyone else’s position in the current Mean War. It was also the most human, powerful, strong message that one can produce in the midst of irrational vicious aggression allowed to go on in the centre of Europe for over a month. 

Whatever will happen as the Mean War is still going on, Volodymyr Zelensky did show many admirable qualities, defined, in my opinion, by his own personal humanity. 16 years of Madame Merkel in power has been nullified by her appalling silence during the first month of the Mean War. 14 years of Victor Orban experience as the strong man of Hungary has been publicly put in question thanks to very timely reminding about it to all of us by the inexperienced politician and young enough 44- year old man who leads Ukraine today. 

The whole Europe has been divided anew, because of the European countries’ individual reaction towards the Mean War and their response to it, as it has been vividly and very convincingly illustrated for us all by President Zelensky. This division goes through the most important of lines, through the line of morale. And it will get into the history book exactly as portrayed by the President Zelensky at the recent meeting of the Council of Europe, on March 25th, 2022. 

Go visit your embankment in Budapest, Victor. And Angela, whichever monument you, Madame Merkel, would prefer to visit. Your country happens to have too many of them. And all those who need any additional convincing, practically all European countries have places of conscience-refreshing visits. It might be useful.

WEEK 5: March 24 -March 30, 2022

Summary of the Week 5: A CATASTROPHE AND A TRAGEDY

Inna Rogatchi (C). Sketch of Rain II. 2022.

Usually, there are a few categories of people who are occupied by the difference in semantics amidst their daily life. A writing folks, of course, then professional historians, and philosophers, always. For example, what constitutes a catastrophe, and what constitutes a tragedy?  But sometimes, there are moments which compulses practically every thinking and feeling human being to stop for a while, to think, to compare, and to make his or her conclusion. As it is now, because of the Mean War. 

The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has made his concern on this topic public recently, in his interview to four Russian journalists, most of them being outside their country. The interview is long, one hour and 32 minutes in its published version, and in fact, is longer, as I was privileged to know.  Zelensky speaks there in his native language which is a colossal factor because he speaks and thinks naturally, organically there.  His interlocutors also speak and think in an organic way. The whole conversation is special and seemingly and understandably very important for both the interviewers, the leading men of free-thinking media in Russia who had to leave the country under the circumstances, and for the president of Ukraine, not only because of a direct possibility to address the Russian audience. Those who are interested in hearing what he has to say do it in any language provided. But mainly because of a rare for him nowadays opportunity to express himself freely, organically, in the natural for him way. This factor is impossible to overrate. 

There are many things to be said about this rarely open conversation. But summarising the fifth week of the Mean War which turned to show not only Russia’s wickedness, but Russia’s weakness,  I would like to emphasise the difference between a catastrophe and tragedy which was brought as a very important matter by President Zelensky during this fifth week of the Mean War. 

“ We are living through a tragedy here in our country” – president of Ukraine said. – “Believe me, we are not showing all the footage from our destroyed to the ground cities and towns and villages. We are not showing it because it is impossible to show, for the sake of our Ukrainian population, for our people here in Ukraine. We cannot do it. It is that horrendous”.  Russia as a state, its leadership and its military has caused a tragedy for Ukraine and its people. 

But there is yet another dimension originated by the Mean War. And the President of Ukraine had the intelligence and vision to note it and to speak about it publicly. 

“What has happened during just one month, would not be repaired in generations. It is not just a military conflict. Everything is much more serious, far reaching, and worse. For just one month, this war has brought a global, fundamental schism between our two people, the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia. This is a fundamental, huge, painful problem. Which will be going nowhere”. 

And if the Russian invasion and the character of the occupation which Zelensky characterised as ‘the worse one then it was during the WWII here, on our territory’, brought a terrible tragedy for Ukraine, the schism which it brought in between two neighbouring nations, he qualified as a catastrophe. 

“The Russian authorities have invoked a catastrophe upon their own people, it is obvious and it will continue for a long while” – said president Zelensky. But not only that. “What has happened now between Russian and Ukrainian people is more than tragic. I can tell you that not only dreadful decisions of the Russia’s leadership, not only horrendous actions of the Russian army, but very importantly, unwillingness of the large part of the Russian society to find out the truth, to succumb to an information bombardment of their official media, that indifference of the large part of the Russian public has become the most terrible disappointment here in Ukraine, not only my personal, but also of our people. This deep, shocked disappointment was transformed into hatred, as concerning, as it is. But this is reality. I can tell you that the adult population of Ukraine won’t be able to forget or forgive the crimes of the Russian side during their aggression on our land.  Simply won’t be able to. We only can think with this regard on the generation of our children and grandchildren and hope for the best. Without much assurance, I must admit”. 

Never before in my life, in the life of the grandchildren of the generation of WWII, the semantic differences were so graphic. And so irrefutable. 

Day 35: March 30, Wednesday

KADDISH IN THE OPERA: ODESSA

Michael Rogatchi (C). Kaddish. Oil on canvas. 1993.

Odessa is a very special place not in Ukraine, not in the South-Eastern Europe. In the world. It is a unique universe. There are many books, and some movies depicting it, but none of it is not enough. Nothing is encompassing. In my modest view, it is easier and certainly quicker to describe and present New York and Paris than Odessa. Maybe, I am subjective. A large part of my immediate family is from Odessa, and I am lovingly proud of it. 

It is a warm, chic in its own way and hilariously funny, in its absolutely unique way, rich culturally, colourful, extremely potential, talented, very human, with all our shortcomings seen always through that one and only prism of a suburb irony which is first of all a self-irony, place of immense inner freedom and followed awesome tolerance which has been inherited there from the times of introducing the place as the porto-franco zone in the Russian Empire, the only one, and actually solely because of it. It is the place of great culture and architecture which has suffered a lot, and a lot, and a lot in various periods, but always tried to smile.  

I always remember the scene which was imprinted in my head from the late 1990s. I was  walking through rather sad and severely impoverished Odessa visiting the city’s places special for my family. All of the sudden, among that rather drubby landscape, both literally and metaphorically, I heard the singing of a rare beauty. First, I thought that I was mistaken. The singing was too good. Superb opera voice. Superb masterly performance. I stopped under the rain on the main Odessa boulevard, Primorsky boulevard, close to the sea and the monument of the Duc, as the Duc de Richelieu is known there in the city which he has made that unique place on the earth, and tried to find the source of that heavenly-like singing looking to all sides from my wet umbrella. 

Soon, I saw the woman who was staying there in the middle of the boulevard under the cold autumn rain, without an umbrella, and singing one opera aria after another, with a very tired mid-aged face. Very very tired face. More than twenty years passed from that meeting, but for some reason, I do remember that woman’s coat of an uninteresting olive colour. How come? She had very little money in front of her, and it was clear that she was staying there singing for a long while. I became paralysed. I came closer. I wanted to do everything for that woman, but I was cautious not to interrupt her. So we stand nearby. She stayed  singing  heavenly, in Italian, wet, without an umbrella.  I stayed fully numbed, under an umbrella, waiting for her to have a pause. 

She stopped after some while, as she noticed me. I approached, trying to formulate in my head the most delicate way of speaking with her. Without letting me open my mouth, the woman said very simply: “ I am working there – nodding to the side of the world-famous Odessa opera house. – Sorry, I was. Now I am ‘working’ here’. She tried to smile. I tried not to cry. I invited the Odessa Opera soloist to come with me to my hotel which was very near, to get dry and to have some rest. I was already planning how I will invite her to the late lunch and will give her my room to relax a bit. She thanked me but nodded in a rejecting gesture. “No, thank you. I am OK. Honestly. And I will be going home soon, anyway, on the tram’. We both looked at the Odessa tram moving nearby. I asked her again. She nodded negatively again, smiling, This time, without effort, with a very nice, relieving smile. Of course, I gave her all the money which was in my purse. Valentina, it was the singer’s name, as she introduced herself, thank me and said that now, really, she can return home at once. Believe it or not, the rain stopped. We laughed together, and departed. I remember her and her singing ever since. 

Twenty three years later, the Odessa Opera Orchestra  lives through the war, the Mean War. To mark the first month of the Mean War, the Odessa Opera Orchestra created a very memorable performance. It can be watched here.

Unlike many musical renditions, which  are perfectly audible, this one is necessary to watch. The people from the Odessa Opera Orchestra took their live performance dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust in January 2020, and combined the record with the current pictures of the Mean War. The outcome is very powerful, with amazing harmony between the terrible current  visual with highly dramatic music by a highly dramatic composer created in 1991. Everyone participated in this heart-wrenching experience created by the Odessa Opera House musicians and directors of the video, the composer, and the conductor of the orchestra deserves a closer look. It is incredible how so many different dramas have amalgamated into the one shown in the video from the Odessa Opera House and dedicated to the memory of the victims of the first month of the Mean War. 

Back in January 2020, commemorating the International Holocaust Memorial Day, the Odessa Opera Orchestra played parts of the Mieczyslaw Weinberg Symphony No. 21, namely Kaddish. Weinberg composed the 21st from his 26 symphonies in 1991, five years before his death. For some reason, this very symphony is regarded among contemporary musicians as the one of the most enigmatic works of Weinberg. 

 The Symphony No. 21 and in particular its part called Kaddish, is great, heart and mind haunting music by the composer with a truly tragic destiny.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg was known in the Soviet Union as Moisei Samuilovich Vainberg. He spent there all his life after he managed to get there running from the Nazis being just 20 year old, just him alone from all his family. All his life was the chain of incredible coincidences which of course were nothing of the sort. 

He was a musical prodigy from Warsaw, his family did not manage to get out of occupied Poland in the autumn  1939. His parents and younger sister perished in the ghetto there in Poland. 20-year old Mechek, as Mojse Wainberg was known to his friends, miraculously managed to get to Minsk, graduated from conservatory there a day before it was still possible to be evacuated from there, and he found himself in Tashkent where he became a close, a life-long friend of Dmitry Shostakovich. He moved to Moscow in the middle of the war, and since then was living and composing there, becoming the author of music of such legendary anti-war movie as The Cranes Are Flying which was the first Soviet film ever that received the Golden Palm Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. 

His first wife whom he met and married in evacuation in Tashkent was nobody else but Natalia Vovci, the daughter of the great Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Michoels who was viciously murdered on the Stalin’s order in the most resonated crime of the regime soon after the WWII. Vainberg himself was arrested in the anti-Semitic Stalin’s purge in the early 1950s, and only Stalin’s death in March 1953 released him from the Gulag. 

Stalin’s death, which was a real gift of life to the millions in the USSR, has also saved my husband who was born in Gulag as well, and was just a two month old baby when it happened. Thanks to the happy fact of the deceased monster, Michael’s father was released from Gulag eventually, and the family was able to move to a less deadly place than the Valley of Death where my husband was born, to Kazakhstan. Michael’s father with tuberculosis contracted in the Gulag, died very prematurely, being only 39. 

Metsek Weinberg, as the composer  insisted to be called because ‘this is how my name was written in my birth certificate and how people knew me in Poland’ survived his short imprisonment in the Gulag better, but still always did bear its indelible marks, both in extra- and introvertive ways. The genius was thoughtful and very shy. 

Samuil Vainberg, as we know the composer’s name back in the USSR, was very productive, but virtually unknown behind the Iron Curtain. He has become not just known, but phenomenally popular in the mid 2000s, after the international premiere of his now famous The Passenger opera in Poland. Poor Metsek never knew the success his name and legacy enjoys now. 

His enigmatic Symphony No 21 is dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto. Meaning : to his family, his both parents and little sister Esther. The Kaddish part of the symphony is extremely dramatic, but at the same time is contained. Those who would watch the video, would see that. It speaks straight to one’s soul. 

Musicians’ faces on this video are also very telling. Rarely one can see so many emotions and such dedication among the experienced orchestra members. But Odessa is Odessa, and everything is special about this place. 

The orchestra of Odessa Opera House is led at this performance by Hobart Earle, the conductor of American origin who was born in Venezuela and who studied in Vienna. His case is also very special. Hobart Earle came to Odessa by chance , being a 31-year old fine musician and singer working in Vienna. Earle fell in love with Odessa and its Opera House ( which is legendary, indeed), and started to work there as musician director and conductor for the $ 50 a month salary. 

It is Hobart Earle who did make the orchestra fit, its instruments as it should have been, its sound of a world class. He cared about the musicians, and he brought the orchestra to the world. Hobart Earle deserves serious recognition for his dedication and the results of it. 

I do not believe in coincidences. Hobart Earle decided to work and live in Odessa and to lead its Opera House Orchestra in the year in which Miezyslaw Weinberg created his Symphony No 21 with its Kaddish. In January 2020, Odessa Opera Orchestra performed this Kaddish under the baton of Hobart Earle and with incredible, personal dedication by them all in the memory of the victims of Holocaust. The Shoah in Odessa was horrendous. 

Just one year on, in the midst of the terrible Mean War, the Orchestra created a special video interacting their performance of Weinberg’s Kaddish with the war pictures of the day, dedicating this special musical video to the victims of the first month of the war against their country in 2022. 

As far as I can judge, Metchek Weinberg, as well as his most important friend and inspiration figure Dmitry Shostakovich would not be able to comprehend the reason for the re-dedication of his Kaddish piece. It is still hardly comprehensible for many of us. 

But the fact is that in March 2022, Weinberg’s Kaddish sounds in Odessa in memory of our contemporaries in Ukraine today. After this Mean War will end, this video will stay as one of the most tangible, tragic commemorations of so many afflicted souls. So many. 

Day 34: March 29, Tuesday

PARENTS AS HOSTAGES

Inna Rogatchi(C). Waltz in Yellow. Tunes About Ukraine. 2022.

Every day of the Mean War brings something hardly believable. We have learned, in a real-time mode, about the trend of abductions carried on by ‘the liberators’ in Ukraine. Not as a separate case, but as a trend, in fact, as a method of war applied by the Russian army consistently. We know about fourteen mayors of Ukrainian cities who were abducted and moved away by ‘the liberators’. We also know that 

at least two of them are confirmed dead. This means murdered. Mayors are civilians, and have an extra responsibility at the time of  war for providing and maintaining a full spectrum of life supporting services and materials for their civilian population. The Ukrainian authority does not know, cannot find out as of today, about the destiny of a dozen of their abducted mayors. To which legal authority should they appeal? To the UN? The Hague International Court of Justice which has no jurisdiction over any Russian official whatsoever?  The International Criminal Court, which is in the same legal position? Just wonder. 

But today, we have learned something new on the theme of an abduction during the Mean War.

There is a town of Primorsk near Zaporizzha, a nice resort town, with just over 12 000 people living there. The town’s history goes back to the Napoleon invasion of Russia, and it also has to do with a legendary Duc de Richeliue,  the Frenchman who made Odessa a pearl of the Black Sea. But who cares in that army of Z-liberators? So Primorsk resort town has a mayor, until recently. 

We were informed that after entering the town as occupiers, ‘the liberators’ were looking for the mayor of Primorsk, Alexander Koshalevich. They were looking for him specifically. The mayor is popular and engaging. When they were unable to find the mayor, they arrested his father. Simple. And working. 

Mayor Koshalevich, who seemingly has a clear understanding about life, unlike the humanoids who occupied his town, decided to give in and to release his father. After the swap and release of the Mayor’s father, ‘the liberators’ moved Alexander Koshalevich towards Berdjansk which is nearby and which they control currently. 

The locals are terrified. And everyone who learns about this, too. Ironically, Alexander Koshalevich is a member of the Opposition Platform party which has been pro-Russian all the time. But some of its members, as the Mayor of Primorsk, dared to believe that they are citizens of a sovereign country. 

The lessons of the war are always painful. The lessons of the Mean War 2022 are barely believable. It is an ongoing surrealist show at large. 

 Day 33: March 28, Monday

 MUSIC  & ITS PEOPLE

Maestro Evgeny Kissin is a world star of piano. Plus a very interesting composer. Plus a very good poet in Yiddish, the language which he learned to the degree to become a poet of it, out of his tender and deep love to his grandparents. Plus a courageous defender of democracy and humanity always ready to give and to participate in meaningful concerts-actions in support of the victims of unjust repressions and cruelty. Plus generous supporter of former Soviet dissidents who were selflessly fighting for justice all their noble lives. 

Zhenja, as maestro Kissin is known in his family and among his friends, is also a dear friend of ours. We have known him since he was a seven-year old prodigy, and we have been closely friendly for the last decade. We love Zhenija and his family. Love never looks for an explanation. But one can add some rationale to one’s love, and in the case of Kissin, we are proud of the human stand of our friend. 

Maestro Kissin made his statement, his The Note of Protest against the Mean War on the day when it was started, on February 24th, 2022. Here is the link to the statement.

Evgeny with his wife and friends participated in the public protests in Prague against the Mean War there. 

On Sunday, March 28th, 2022, Maestro Kissin played at the special event, solidarity with Ukraine musical fundraiser organised by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Walter Steinmeir. It was a very special event indeed. A part of the great orchestra of the Berlin Philharmonic was playing at the President of Germany residency together with Maestro Kissin and the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. 

Naturally, during the last 43 years of knowing the great pianist and following his concerts in many places world-wide, from St Petersburg to New York, we have heard him playing thousands of times. It was always great – and this is undeniable the mark of genius in this simple fact. But never have I heard among those thousands of times Evgeny Kissin playing in the way in which he did while performing the movements from Shostakovich’s Piano Trio 2. That piece was composed by Shostakovich in Leningrad in 1944, just after the siege of the city. Shostakovich composed that deeply painful great music in memory of his close friend  composer Ivan Sollertisky who died in evacuation at the midst of the war at the age of 41. 

That rendition was a very rare moment in meloman’s life when you are privileged to hear, to witness a phenomenon when a musician’s soul is shared with an instrument on which he performs, thus making his instrument personified and literally speaking to us. Here is the link to that very special, very thoughtful, very moving concert.

In the audience at the German President’s residency, in the first row, was sitting a man. He was dressed not up to the protocol. It was 84-year old well-known composer from Ukraine Valentin Silvestrov. His music for the great films of famous movie director Kira Muratova is the serious part of the fame of these movies. His Silent Songs is a modern classic. Mr Silvestrov in his age had to run from his home, very reluctantly, as we know. He was on the road for three days and nights, and  arrived in Berlin with just one suitcase. The suitcase was full of sheet notes with his music. Nothing else.

Maestro Silvestrov approached the grand-piano in the presidential residence hall in his casual great sweater instead of a concert dress, sat in his understated manner, and started to play. For some reason, I could not turn my eyes from his glasses which an 84-year refugee composer placed on the instrument. These glasses were so helpless. Silvestrov’s music was so gentle. We, the musicians, the public, all tried not to cry, the same as the composer, who was moved by everything which cannot be expressed by words, but can be by music.

Returning to our dear friend, Maestro Evgeny Kissin, his concert in solidarity with Ukraine, Kissin and Friends for Ukraine, with participation of the great modern musicians, such as  violinist Gidon Kremer, cellists David Geringas and  Giedre Dirvanauskaite, will  happen at the famed Tonhalle in Dusseldorf on Saturday, April 2nd, 2022.

The same Shostakovich’s Piano Trio 2 which Kissin played with an open heart at the Presidential residence on Sunday March 27th, 2022, will be the focus of the Kissin & Friends for Ukraine concert, according to the organisers. And the piece by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silverstrov, his Concert for Solo Violin, will be played at the concert by great musician and great man with a big heart, Gidon Kremer. 

Who said that muses are silent when canons speak? I always found this truism very shallow. Of course, muses can speak at such time, and they are – when they are tuned by the heart of a fair people.

Day 32: March 27, Sunday

FUEL-CIDE

Inna Rogatchi (C). The Essence of Darkness. War Pictures. 2022.

The aggressor in the Mean War does not spare their missiles to fly from the Black Sea all the way to Lviv to bomb it. Our friends in the middle of Ukraine are also telling us regularly about constant sirens warning people to get into the shelters as those missiles fired by ‘the liberators’ from their ships in the Black Sea are getting into  the various places inside the territory of Ukraine which are very far from the current warfront. Initially, people under the attack in Ukraine did not understand the purpose of those far-range missile attacks. Now we do. Their target? Fuel storages. In Sumy, Rivno, Lviv, and many other places, the fuel storages has become the targets for the massive and intensifying  ‘liberating’ bombing.  

The phenomena has escalated against the news about the critical situation with regard to fuel resources of Ukraine, with some of them currently having fuel storage enough for several weeks only. 

Additionally, at the time of the start of the sowing campaign in the country which under normal circumstances exports between 12 and 17% of various grain crops in the world , such attacks are focused and predominated. What planned killing of the future harvest 2022 has to do with ‘demilitarisation’ of Ukraine declared as the main purpose of the Mean War? Yes, I know how highly declarative this question is. 

When missiles hit such targets as fuel storage, especially big ones, the fires caused are of such scale that despite all the effort, they cannot be extinguished for many days, and sometime, more, as we are seeing it in Ukraine these days. 

To purportedly hit fuel storages, including the places which are off military zone, in the country many places of which civilian population suffers from a siege, with heat, water and electricity cut off, to endanger the existing catastrophic situation further on, is intentional and conscious, planned barbarian way of conduct. No surprise though, but all this should be registered and reacted upon. 

There is an essential teaching in world philosophy and mysticism in the form of a question: “What is the essence of darkness? – Light”. Too bad that the basics of civilization are seemingly not taught at the military academies of the huge country of self-proclaimed Z-liberators.

Day 31: March 26, 2022, Saturday

VICTOR, VISIT YOUR EMBANKMENT IN BUDAPEST

NEW DIVISION OF EUROPE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE EMBANKMENT IN BUDAPEST

Inna Rogatchi (C). Danube Perspective I. 2016.

 We are privileged to see the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky daily, with various speeches and addresses. Ukraine as a country is truly lucky to have such an energetic young man as its leader at this direst hour. One needs quite a strength to be able to act in such a rhythm for more than a month non-stop. But the Zelensky’s addressing the Council of Europe was something special among many of his various speeches. 

With dubbing in English, you can watch and hear it here.  The President of Ukraine in that particular speech was having all the heads of the European states sitting around that huge oval table, in front of him. He chose to address them not in the capacity of a collective leadership of Europe, but individually. It was the right approach. Because being addressed individually, they were still facing each other around that huge table. So, Zelensky was speaking to them in the way a kindergarten teacher speaks to the senior group of children. Composed, without a slight hint of a hysteric, but knowing, naming and addressing  the faults of each of the children in front of a teacher. 

Such a pedagogical method does exist. I am referring to that, as my mom was a legendary teacher in Ukraine for over 40 years of an extraordinary career there. She never did raise her voice to any of her pupils for all these years, always spoke with them or their parents individually, in order not to humiliate any of them. Until the point when a child continued to misbehave despite many attempts to correct his behaviour. To speak about a pupil’s incurable behaviour in front of a class was, according to my mom, the last resort. Often, it worked. 

In the Volodymyr Zelensky’s family, there are two generations of teachers,  his father is a university senior teacher, and his paternal grandmother was a highly appreciated teacher as well.  So, he knows something about pedagogics, it seems. 

In his interaction with the leaders of Europe, Volodymyr Zelensky decided to make very clear and public who from the European countries are with Ukraine and support her, and who is in the middle, and who is not. He started with praise of Lithuania, and his face, generally concerned, was enlightened, with a good reason. He was happy and grateful to Latvia and Estonia, to Poland and Finland, to Chezh Republic and Slovakia, to Italy and Slovenia. He turned personally to the President of France Macron with yet another effort to convince him to be more articulate in the position of his country, as he was towards the Netherlands. There were countries towards which the President of Ukraine was both diplomatic and clear which is also an interesting expression of his youth dream to become a diplomat – “Luxembourg, we understand each other, Portugal, almost there, Spain, we hope  you will be fully with us soon.” 

After that detailed round touching ground with every single head of a state around the huge table, just two countries left. Those for which Volodymyr Zelensky prepared his most serious addressing. Germany and Hungary. With Germany, there was nothing unexpected in what the majority of people in Europe, including the majority of Germany itself,  think about their just impossibly weak position and policy in that deadly Mean War. No rationale can justify this kind of behaviour by the country which has caused such an unspeakable tragedy for so many hundreds of million of people in the XX century, twice so. 

And today, on the 31st day of the Mean War, I have at least 31 times asked myself: where on earth is Madame Merkel? She made a generalised one-phrase statement on the second day of the invasion, after which she disappeared from the horizon as if she never was there. I find her public absence appalling, to stay on a diplomatic tune. 

But – Hungary. When speaking about that country’s position in the tragedy unfolding in the centre of Europe, just on and next the Ukrainian border , the personality of President Zelensky has become open, and his appeal to Victor ( Orban) was powerful, engaging and very honest. Not often in politics, we are witnessing this kind of honesty, this kind of personal involvement, and this kind of open nerve. Victor had no chance against humanity and justice brought by the President of Ukraine to the table of the Council of Europe. 

Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about beautiful Budapest. Very beautiful city indeed. About special Hungarian people. Very true. It spoke to our hearts as well, with my husband’s ancestry right from the Pest bank of the Danube river, from the family of the noble Jewish military and engineers. So, we understood and knew what Volodymyr Zelensky was talking about while praising Budapest and its people. He was sincere. 

And then he remembered about the place in that beautiful city which shocks anyone who was there ever once. Especially if one visits there for the first time. The President of Ukraine was telling the prime-minister of Hungary how he  visited the Budapest embankment with his family. “With my family – repeated it twice, emphatically. – With-my-family-I-was-there!”  Those shoes at the Budapest embankment, they chills one’s heart for once and for good. Those bronze shoes. That incredible, one in the world memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Budapest who were throwned into the Danube from that very embankment , many of the alive, in one of the horrendous crimes of the Holocaust committed by the Nazis together with their Hungarian collaborators. Not for once. Repeatedly so. Such was the fashion of that crime which was committed in Budapest repeatedly from November 1944 through January 1945, with up to 15 thousand people murdered in this way. 

As president Zelensky was speaking about the one of the kind of the Shoes Memorial on the Danube river, he became really emotional. And I was proud of him. His personal, human engagement into the horror of our both people and its memory, has become the strongest reasoning in appealing to organically pro-Moscow  Orban, and it brought it to a different level altogether. It was not about gas, not about tanks. It was about human lives. And in the way Zelensky spoke about it, one cannot fake it. 

“Victor, do visit your embankment in Budapest again. And think about what kind of destiny can fall upon your people again’. Not only was it the best possible reasoning in the Ukrainian leader’s effort to bring at least some justice in international politics, with regard to Hungary. And actually, anyone else’s position in the current Mean War. It was also the most human, powerful, strong message that one can produce in the midst of irrational vicious aggression allowed to go on in the centre of Europe for over a month. 

Whatever will happen as the Mean War is still going on, Volodymyr Zelensky did show many admirable qualities, defined, in my opinion, by his own personal humanity. 16 years of Madame Merkel in power has been nullified by her appalling silence during the first month of the Mean War. 14 years of Victor Orban experience as the strong man of Hungary has been publicly put in question thanks to very timely reminding about it to all of us by the inexperienced politician and young enough 44- year old man who leads Ukraine today. 

The whole Europe has been divided anew, because of the European countries’ individual reaction towards the Mean War and their response to it, as it has been vividly and very convincingly illustrated for us all by President Zelensky. This division goes through the most important of lines, through the line of morale. And it will get into the history book exactly as portrayed by President Zelensky at the recent meeting of the Council of Europe, on March 25th, 2022. 

Go visit your embankment in Budapest, Victor. And Angela, whichever monument you, dear Madame Merkel, would prefer to visit. Your country happens to have too many of them. And all those who need any additional convincing, practically all European countries have places of conscience-refreshing visits. It might be useful.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Danube Step I. 2016.

Day 30: March 25, 2022, Friday

REPLACED CHILDREN

So, we know this boy by now, many of us, from Melbourne to Berlin. He goes alone, sobbing, with that plastic bag in his hand. He is stumbling. He is in agony, actually – which is obvious for anyone who saw the video. The boy is crossing the border. In the centre of Europe, in the XXI century. I am angry at myself for this cliche in my war diary, ‘Centre of Europe, the third decade of the XXI century’. But I am also defiant in reminding this fact in many of my observations of the Mean War. Until the moment when our all collective appaulment would transform into something more practical. 

According to UNICEF, the result of the first month of the Mean War, from February 24th through March 24th, 2022, resulted in the replacement of over four million three hundred thousand children in Ukraine. 4 300 000 replaced kids in one month. Two and half million of them were replaced within the border of Ukraine, with 1 800 000 children becoming refugees beyond the Ukrainian border. Can we, adults, really understand the meaning of this terrible maths?

The figure of 4 300 000 replaced children of Ukraine is compatible with only one period in human history, with the 1940s. 

Before the Mean War, Ukraine had  7, 500 000 children. After one month of the war, 4 300 000 of them were replaced. It is 57%. War figures must be precise. 

For those who understand Ukrainian and Russian, here is a priceless video made and published by Nastojashee Vremja decent media about some of these small and young Ukrainian refugees. Some of our friends have mentioned that to watch it is even more difficult than to see the reports of the shelling. I disagree. My husband has noticed for a while now, ever since we are seeing some of the Ukrainian children coming how different and good they are. It does tell about the country and its people. It always does. Please watch it.

Day 29: March 24, 2022, Thursday

GRAVES AT THE CHILDREN’s PLAYGROUNDS

When you do not see it, it gets into your mind, but because of human self-defence sub-conscious mechanisms, it stays compartmentalised. I mention this as an educated biologist and dedicated psycho-physiologist. When you see it, it gets into your conscience for good. If you have it. 

People, civilians, are murdered in the Mean War daily, for over a month by now. Because of continuing shelling, there is no possibility to bury them properly in many places of Ukraine. Lucky ones are buried in the courtyards of their houses, if their neighbours manage to do it. We have already seen large mass graves in Mariupol with many corpses of the murdered civilians placed there, in a horrendous videos and photos. 

The evidence of the crimes against humanity – because the crimes against civilian population are qualified by the international law as a crime against humanity  – are amassed daily. What a terrible catalogue. 

We have the evidence. We have those photos with corpses of the civilians laying on the grounds of Ukrainian cities, towns, villages, and roads. The most impossible is the photo of the fresh grave at the children’s playground, with a child playing so near to it. What else symbolises the vicious character of the Mean War  that any Kafka of his or her time can imagine? But the point is that we are seeing the document, it all is for real. 

And yet horrific is that the graves at the children’s playgrounds in Ukraine today are regarded as ‘a consoling’ feature  – due to the fact that so very many people who were murdered in the war, had no chance to be buried at all, even in a mass graves. This deprives me of sleep. 

Just yesterday, I saw the story about a very good Ukrainian doctor, well-known paediatrician from Kharkov, the head of the department of a hospital there, who saved during the 40 years of his career thousands children. He was proposed to be evacuated, but refused, because he knew that he was needed there. When he was murdered, there was no chance to bury him, his daughter has told to their friends. Now, that family has to live with it. Instead of burying their father, the doctor’s children are collecting any memories about him by anyone who would like to say a couple of words. That would be his memorial, the family says. 

I know personally about several other cases when family or friends cannot bury their loved ones murdered by ‘the liberators’. I cannot imagine how people who were attacked in this way, can live the rest of their lives. 

Graves in the children’s playgrounds, mass graves, no graves at all for hundreds of innocent people. I am at a loss that the sun rises from the east in the business as usual motto amidst this amok.  

Week 4: March 17 – March 23 , 2022

Summary of the Week IV: The Mean War: Chorus of Dissonances

Inna Rogatchi ©. Dissonance 2022. War Posters. 2022

As hard as it is to imagine, I am now summarising not the fourth day of the war, but its fourth week. This is in the circumstances when the conventional wisdom of modern warfare teaches in the military academies world-wide that a modern  international military conflict is an extremely expensive enterprise, and for that obvious reason, normally such conflicts are quite short, timing-wise. It is also obvious that terms ‘normal’ has zero effect in the current Russian top decision-making, both political and military ones, so normalities are not applicable there. 

What did the world see during the fourth week of the Mean War? We saw a continuing acceleration of a chorus of its dissonances. The Mean War screams its dissonances out, and being solely unjust in its origin, and barbarian in its conduct, it makes these dissonances as graphic, as none of us ever wanted to see it. 

There is expected dissonance between life and death. But this war is largely against civilians, and it is utterly indiscriminate. There is also natural, for a war, dissonance between light and darkness.  But so far, it also gets too far, with such recent exploits of the Russian thugs in military uniform as bombing of a psyhiatric ward in Mykolaiv, and setting a stable with horses inside on a fire, on purpose, with all horses dying there, both evil acts happened just yesterday.  

Many of us – and normal, good people in Russia  –  are suffering  a strong cognitive dissonance from day one of this barbaric ‘liberation’. I do believe that the people of an elder generations than mine, the generations of our parents and grandparents, those who were young adults and children during the WWII, would not be able to comprehend this Mean War for a bit.  Many of us are still struggling with comprehension of it, after four weeks of shelling.  Too many questions, two few answers, if any. 

There is a screaming dissonance between humanity and inhumanity. Ten million refugees during the first month of the war, with 3, 5 million of them beyond the Ukrainian border. With every single refugee, the suffering in this world adds. We have ten million sufferings added during just four weeks. And, in fact, much more – because those refugees have family members, friends who all are suffering with them. 

With everything we saw in a previous wars and military conflicts during the previous decades, when our own perception and senses work for an immediate, personal, the most authentic individual experience, both emotional and rational, only some scenes during the war in the former Yugoslavia can come to comparison with our daily observations during the last four weeks of our life, since when the reality in Europe has been changed in the most dramatic way. This Mean War is inhuman to the core. It was inhuman in its conception, and it is inhuman in its daily conduct. It is inhuman in all and every aspect of it: children, women, elderly, disabled, sick, weak, fragile, homeless, depraved of everything by crimes, lost, maimed, wounded, murdered. This register is filled daily. It is and it will be a big account to get accountable for. 

There is a dissonance between morality and amorality, with a capital M and A in the case of the Mean War. Children cancer patients in a bombed clinic. Maternity wards bombed. Elderly and disabled who were hardly movable and are left behind. There is also a shocking assemblage of genocides practiced daily for four weeks by now: genocide of the civil population, planned ecocide of the Ukrainian forest, catastrophic and often incuperable culture-cide, architecture-cide, medicide, the purposeful destruction of the medical system in Ukraine, urbanocide of the pictures of totally destroyed Ukrainian cities which are  comparable with the historical pictures of bombed by the Allies Dresden , and sometimes are worse than it, plus there are many cities destroyed totally. 

There is a dissonance between values, as well. It is painfully tangible and it is very worrisome. Whom we are dealing with? What are they for? We see what they are bringing with their tanks and bombs. We wonder: what are they defending? 

As president Zelensky said in his recent speech, made during this fourth week of the Mean War, in the Israel’s Knesset, : “The mediation can be between the states, not between good and evil”. Absolutely so.

Day 28: March 23, 2022, Wednesday

 NOBEL and NOBEL

Inna Rogatchi ©. Nobel and Nobel 2022. War Posters. 2022.

On the third day of this Mean War, judging on the behaviour, leadership, morale and attitude demonstrated by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky, I have written and published internationally  that he should be regarded as the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize this year, 2022. This year in which he woke up to the sudden Mean War at 4 am, as from the WWII textbook, and started to lead the admirable resistance of his nation, his country and his people. 

I know the proceedings of the Nobel Committee well. I have participated in some nominations, and have first-hand experience of the process and its details. The Nobel Committee indeed has quite fixed time-framework for the nominations, and the rules are strict. 

But thirty eight first-echelon European politicians, including many former ministers for foreign affairs, some former prime-ministers, recent EU Commissioners, and many MEPs were believing that under such extraordinary circumstances as a war, the Nobel Committee would hear the reason. So they wrote a highly respectable letter to the Committee ( which copy I have as well) giving a compelling reason to the Committee to re-open the process for nomination, due to the extraordinary circumstances. The nomination was not only for one person, importantly. The nomination was for President Zelensky AND for the People of Ukraine. Just who could be more worthy for the Nobel Peace Prize 2022? It sounds like a grotesquely declarative question. To all of us. But not for the Nobel Committee. 

According to the rules, the nominations are closed by January 31st each year. There is a possibility for members of the Committee to nominate their candidate until February 28th. Ukraine was attacked, with the Mean War started on February 24th this year. The Letter to the Nobel Committee by the 38 leading European politicians was sent on March 11th. 

As we learned recently, the Norwegian Peace Institute responsible for the Nobel Peace Prize, decided not to make a minor and technical exemption which would allow the nomination of President Zelensky and the People of Ukraine for the Nobel Prize 2022. They probably think that nothing dramatic would happen if Zelensky would be nominated strictly within the regulations of the Committee the next year. But we’ve got the message. We all did. And if the officials of the Nobel Committee believe that the world did not notice their cold cowardness, they are mistaken. 

The day after this cold, distant, giving in decision, another decision was announced in Moscow. By the most recent Nobel Peace Laureate. The man who was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize last year, quite recently, actually, in October last year, the editor-in-chief of the Novaya Gazeta  Dmitry Muratov. 

I remember how happy we were upon hearing that news a few months ago. For a long time, the Nobel Peace Prize was not that well deserved. I have known Dmitry for over 25 years, and he is a real and steady good force in that society that suffers a catastrophic deficiency of morale and courage. 

So the next day after the telling negative decision of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Dmitry Muratov decided to auction his golden Nobel Peace Prize Medal, with the proceeds to go to the Ukrainian refugees Foundation. Muratov’s golden Nobel Peace Prize 2021 medal is expected to be auctioned at one of the international auction houses. 

It is an unprecedented gesture, with regard to the Nobel Peace Prize medal. There were two cases of selling the Prize golden medals in the entire history of Nobel Prizes previously, both in the mid- 2010s, but those were not Nobel Peace Prizes, and the motivation and circumstances in  the both cases was entirely different, there were practical reasons for those sales. This time, with Dmitry Muratov’s decision to auction his golden medal in support of the Ukrainian refugees, the stiff decision of  the Nobel Institute not to allow the nomination of President Zelensky and the People of Ukraine for their withstanding the Mean War in the midst of it, comes to clearly highly critical and just limelight. There is a Nobel and Nobel. And there is Dmitry Muratov, the current Sakharov of Russia, whom that society does need screamingly.

Day 27: March 22, 2022, Tuesday

LOST CHILDREN

Inna Rogatchi(C). Lost Ones of the XXI Century. War Posters. 2022

On this collage on my poster  are only ten of hundreds if not thousands of children lost in the Mean War. There are so many groups and chats all over the internet created and maintained specifically for this purpose, to help parents, family members and children to find each other.  This poster I have created using the material dutifully spread by Diana Alperovich who is from Ukraine, living in NYC and whose heart is bleeding for her native country, as the hearts of many of us all over the world. Thank you Diana for your steady effort. It matters. Thank you to everyone who keeps these children-search groups and chats in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Germany, all over. 

Daily I am seeing these photos. Daily I am reading these appeals. Please help me to find our son. Please help us to find our daughter. Please, my family is lost. Please, the boy is left alone in the basement for two weeks, his parents were killed. Four years old, eight years old, five years old. My little boy was in touch the last time on March 2nd, at 11.54. My daughter was last in touch on March 3d. My children with their granny should be evacuated on March 9th. Please help find my children, 11 and 7 years old. Our son, 4 years old, is wearing a red coat. Maybe, someone saw him, the coat is so bright. G-d, those red coats of lost children. This girl searches for her family, she is in Hungary now. This girl is lost, perhaps someone knows her? Every single day. Mariupol, Kyiv, Sumy, Kherson, Melitopol, villages all over Ukraine. 

Writing about this ongoing Mean War, I cannot use ‘how on earth’ phrasing any longer, because it does not make sense. Because it is happening, in front of our eyes, every single day, for about a month now, and with a prospect for several more months, at least, of sorrow, tragedies and crimes. 

So, our civilised high-tech society can congratulate ourselves: we are having the phenomenon of the lost children due to the Mean War in the centre of Europe in the third decade of the XXI century. It seems that the third decades of the XX and XXI centuries differed in between largely by the factor of high-tech. Congratulations to us all. 

Day 26: March 21, 2022, Monday

 ABDUCTIONS

Inna Rogatchi (C). Map of Suffering. War Picture. 2022.

Abduction is a part of any criminal modus vivendi. Any mob-prosecutor or expert would tell you that. Abduction is also used at war, for military intelligence purposes, mainly, or for a capturing of a high-ranking military or political commander. This Mean War demonstrates to us the Russian military know-how: abductions of city mayors, town officials, and journalists. They are doing it routinely. By now, after the first 25 days of the Mean War, they have abducted two mayors of Ukrainian cities, several officials of the local administrations, and at least four journalists at the territories now controlled by this army of thugs. 

There is something utterly wrong with their intel for the Russians. Never in modern history, was their intel so poor or/and so poorly assessed. Many experts are amazed by this utter unprofessionalism. I think that in many cases, they simply did not bother to gather any intel regarding certain points, such as the local population’s attitude towards ‘the liberators’.  Otherwise, they would not be so stunned by seeing many people marching against them, in their full robocopy uniform and over-armed, without any arms in their hands but flags. The local people in Ukraine were marching against their ‘liberators’ every single time when the abductions had a place. Every single time. “The liberators’ were completely stunned, I saw all the videos. Every single time, too. They simply could not put in their poor brain-washed heads on how on earth this is possible. They would not go to protest if their mayor would be abducted, dead-sure. So, they genuinely do not know what to do with those people with flags screaming at them: “Release Our Mayor! Now!” They never saw anything like that. They are morally lost. It is obvious. Everyone is welcome to watch those videos that appear daily. 

One of the mayors was swapped by the Ukrainian leadership in exchange for nine Russian prisoners of war. It is not a bad ratio. The mayor speaks with the President Zelensky, both in Russian, by the way, because it is organic for the both, and nobody prevents it there, because such a ban is irrational. The mayor was thanking the president for ‘not abandoning’ him. The mayor is a young man and he has just received a very serious lesson in his life. Zelensky, who is young enough himself, was smiling so  warmly, so authentically. He says very simply to a young mayor: “Abandon? We would never do it. We never will”. He is happy. I was so glad to see him happy. He really deserves it, even if momentarily. He really does.

Day 25: March 20, 2022,  Sunday

The BRIDGE

The bridge between Ukraine and Romania, with toys collected and assorted there by the Romanian border police and volunteers for the Ukrainian refugee children. March 2022.

This is one of the most heart-rending pictures of the Mean War. The historical wooden bridge over Tisza river from Ukraine to Romania has been decorated with hundreds of toys by the local border police and volunteers. The toys have been placed nicely all the way so the Ukrainian refugee children would be able to pick them on the way from their home to the country of their refuge. 

They need a lot of toys on that bridge, as in many other places. As of March 20, 2022, according to the UN, over 1 500 000 children from Ukraine have become refugees. Meaning 55 children in a minute. And the stream flows on. 

This place is one of three places via which the sea of the Ukrainian refugees is crossing the border to Romania. It is Sighetu Marmatei region of Romania, the native place of the Elie Wisel family.  In this ongoing horror, as many, many others I am relieved to think that Elie does not see what is going on there. As do my parents and grandparents, some of my uncles, all of them from Ukraine. They would  not be able to grasp it. Their entire world would be ruined. 

Now it is ruined partially, inside us, witnessing the Mean War daily. But, with G-d’s help, beyond the limit of unbearable,  it also gives an additional strength, decisiveness, motivation and commitment to help the victims of the Mean War. It is not an easy task, saying it from the relief-ground, both personal and public. It brings some disappointments on the way, as well. Perhaps, inevitably so. Human nature has not changed or improved for a bit throughout its history. Not for a bit. But there is one thing which marks these days: willingness or to the contrary, preparedness or to the contrary, to help those who found themselves in an unspeakable horror of the Mean War, is the most correct litmus test not only for the momentarily reaction and response to the utter drama in Ukraine, but in general too. It is an educational thing to remember. Highly useful, for years ahead, if not for good. 

As we are collecting yet another patch of clothes, devices, and utensils to help the refugees from Ukraine which are already in Finland and which are expected to come soon, a six-year old son of our dear friends is busy and serious. He is sorting his own stuff out, in order to share his toys with children from Ukraine running from the war. We were thinking that little Onni, just a child, would sincerely share one or two of his toys. And we were happily anticipating it, because additionally to the help to those who are in an acute need, such things are instrumental for anyone, for any child while he is growing. Our friends’ son is a very smart kid, who loves to play with  his toys round o’clock, Well, this six-year old boy, solely by himself, decided to give to the children from Ukraine not one, and not two, but twelve of his toys, various cars, plush toys, soft toys, the other things. Onni means ‘happiness’ in Finnish. We always knew that our dear friends named their boy correctly. But today, we know it twice so.

Day 24: March 19, 2022

QUEUES

People murdered while queueing for bread in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, March 18, 2022. 

It was an hour before Shabbat when we were speaking on the phone with our dear friends in Ukraine, in our daily check on their life under fire there.  The longer this Mean War continues, the more we admire the strength of the people in Ukraine. We are lamenting, they are calming us down. Many of those who found themselves outside their country, are not lulled by their current safety, but willing to return with all their innermost, to be with their people at this hour. These are not suppositions, I am telling it with first-hand knowledge coming from my dear friends who are morally tortured by their current safety outside Ukraine and the most of all are willing to return to their country as soon, as possible. Under attack. It tells you about people. And it does tell you about this Mean War. 

So we are speaking with our dear friends from Ukraine an hour before Shabbat would start last Friday, when I am hearing: “Imagine, those thugs has murdered the queue of the people who were staying in line for bread.” – “When, how?” – it was all that I could say in disbelief and horror. – “Today, just now, in Chernihiv. There were some ten people queuing for bread in a residential quarter. There is no installation of any sort whatsoever. So they were simply fired at and killed. All of them”.  As most of the Ukrainians since the beginning of the Mean War, our friends are living with TV on 24/7, with all that news getting to them in real time. It is a special psychological trial which will have terrible long-term consequences for millions of people. But it would be appreciated later. Now everyone is concentrating on the war news. 

With the news about the killed bread queue were checked and corroborated, it turned out that there were thirteen people, civilians, no weapons around, queueing for bread in the residential quarter of predominantly Russian-speaking city of Chernigiv, the city with an ancient history starting from the 10th century, which for the long time was the second capital of Ukraine next to Kyiv. All those thirteen people who went to buy bread for their families were killed in a cold, cruel military crime against civilians, which according to the international law is qualified as a crime against humanity. The crimes against humanity have no period of limitation.  And people’s memory does not have it, either.

Day 23: March 18, 2022

 MEDICIDE

Inna Rogatchi (C). Ghosts I. War Pictures. 2022.

Humanitarian catastrophe in Ukraine caused by the Mean War is of such scale that after three weeks of unfolding tragedy, many leaders of the international relief organisations felt that they should visit the ground in a sign of solidarity and concern. All of them made extremely worried first-hand statements. In any direction of life, the situation in Ukraine is catastrophic: food, life supplies, communications, you name it. But there is one sphere which is simply vital and which is damaged beyond repairable. And this sphere is medicine. 

Michael Ryan, the WHO Executive Director of the Health Emergency Programme, at the WHO weekly press briefing on March 16th, 2022, stated the following: “ In the course of the war in Ukraine, so far ( during the first three weeks of the war), we have registered verified at least 43 targeted attacks against medical establishments and medical personnel in Ukraine. The very system of health in Ukraine has become the target of the Russian army. Medical establishments and medicine as such has become a part of strategic and tactical war carried on by the Russian Federation. WHO must state that nowhere in the world, ever, we have not seen such a focused attack on the very system of health in any country’. 

Which means that the highest international medical authority which has quite courteous attitude towards Russia, lost its temper in the face of medicide which Russia purposefully conducts in Ukraine as a part of its Mean War. It is very rare when this kind of organisation as WHO allow themselves to take sides, and state such unprecedented facts. 

Please do pay attention to the head of the WHO Emergency words: nowhere in the world, ever, has this kind of focused annihilating attack on a country’s medicine been ever conducted.  

Those self-proclaimed ‘liberators’  methodically and perfectly consciously are  attacking hospitals, maternity wards, clinics, blood reserve stations. They are also firing and bombing doctors, nurses, all medical personnel. They are bombing pharmacies – there are far too many reports on bombed pharmacies with nothing left there and people who are on the ground in an extremely dire situation with regard to all kinds of medicine, which has a very far stretching effect on huge amount people under siege or under attacks. They are destroying medical storages, with the same purpose. 

I saw many photographs of maternity wards moved in the underground shelters. I was also told about several of them by our friends on the ground, people who were taking part in organising some kind of war shelters for the women expecting to give birth at any moment. Those are not just heart-wrenching, those are fully nightmare-like narratives. 

We also are in touch with our Italian friends, great people who had put aside everything in their busy lives, and rushed to Ukraine to help to evacuate the mortally ill children from the oncological clinic in Kiyv which has been bombed in the very beginning of the Mean War. They succeeded, thanks Heaven, but what can be more terrible than bombed oncological children’s clinic? They succeeded, but anyone with similar experience of a child suffering cancer, or any minimal knowledge, does understand what kind of trauma such attack, and following conditions has caused to a cancer-suffering child. Those children are extremely vulnerable, they can easily die because of the most innocent cold, due to their conditions and the medicine they are treated with. To bomb the children oncology clinic one – ones, actually – has to be a monster. As simple as that. 

The same monsters are decimating medical system in Ukraine in all possible directions of it, carrying on a medicide in Ukraine. The list for the Hague is filled in daily, but why on earth does the civilised world still observe this ongoing monstrosity without stopping it as it should?.. 

Day 22: March 17, 2022, Thursday

LEGITIMATE TARGETS

Inna Rogatchi (C). Broken Lives,. Ukraine.

 Daily, the world is shocked by the newsreels. Once we are shocked, it feels as if there is a limit. But the next day, we were shocked further on. Residential buildings, schools, kindergartens. Maternity hospital, children clinic, theatre. As if destruction of airfields, railways, roads, industrial infrastructure is ‘understandable’ by the logic of a war, making it a legitimate target, so to say. But in fact it is not. Because this war is a sheer unprovoked aggression, and because it is conducted in a barbarian way, not professionally, not discriminately, completely to the opposite. 

But bombed and destroyed industrial objects and airfields are not discussed widely now, because we are living through a daily intensifying shock of bombing and destroyment of the civilian objects in Ukraine, hospitals, clinics, theares, culture centres, even swimming pools. 

All those civilian subjects are bombed not exactly randomly. Most of them host underground shelters. The network of those Soviet-period shelters has been very wide in Ukraine. With the beginning of the Mean War, the first thing that has been done with regard to all those existing and abandoned shelters, was to clean and prepare it for use. 

Our friends in Ukraine have told us about it, as many of them have participated in that largely volunteer work. So now, the ready for use and in use solid Soviet-period shelters are under many residential buildings in Ukraine, and as well as under theatres, culture centres, hospitals, swimming pools, cinemas, etc. There were strict rules for the existence of fully prepared shelters in the USSR, and in Ukraine, in its industrial cities, that rule was applied in full. We used to laugh about it in our youth while in Ukraine. Now we are praying for it, from afar. 

 One should not be that naive to believe that all those daily annihilations of the civil objects, as we are witnessing in a full horror , are random clumsiness of that idiotic army of thugs. There has been several independent verified reports that the aggressor in the Mean War bombs the objects not because they dislike Ukrainian theatre or are irritated by Ukrainian swimming pool, but because there are shelters underground of those building. They also have trained military personnel on the ground to correlate the shelling. 

In the beginning of the Mean War, there have been reports about a special phenomenon: influx of rented apartments in Kyiv and other big cities some while before ‘the liberation’ started. In a period from one to three weeks prior to the start of the Russian massive assault, the quantity of such short-term rentals went substantially higher than usual. Apartments were rented by men predominantly. With those people looking, speaking and behaving quite similarly to the local population, it would be easy for them to operate on the ground correcting the fire from there. And this is what they do. 

Those who are giving the orders in that military gang, do not care about people in the shelters. If there are no people there, fine, if there are, the order still goes on.  It is the very shelter that makes a civilian building the legit target for the army conducting the Mean War. They believe that they should destroy the shelter, aiming  two objectives in one bullet: to destroy a possibility to cover in the cities, for now and for possible next stage of the conflict, and to send a powerful message of fear. 

Their decision-making is graphically self-relieving. And the message that they are sending is of Australian boomerang character: it returns and hits back. And there will be no shelter to take cover.

A Tale of Besieged Cities – Essay

The Essay was published at The Times of Israel and The JerUSAlem Connection Report, Washington,D.C.

Inna Rogatchi (C). Asphyxiation. 2022.

We are seeing it in front of us daily. For the twenty days by now. Beautiful, full of life, cities of Ukraine, one after another are not only bombed, shelled, destroyed, but also sieged. The self-proclaimed ‘liberators’ methodically apply the same tactics as attacking Ukrainian densely populated large cities: they cut off gas, heating, electricity, water supplies, communications, and intentionally impose food and medicine shortages on the places of living of hundreds of thousands of human beings. The key-word here is ‘intentionally’. 

Another day, I saw a video from another Russian state TV repulsive talk-show. It is repulsive in general, but now it is more repulsive. My dear friend, an international guru in the history of music, sent it to me, shocked by what he saw. I was not shocked for a bit, but it was very telling indeed. There, a well-known pianist from Russia Boris Berezovsky, who performs largely internationally, and who lived in London permanently for two decades, sits next to the Russian senior military in full uniform, and gently suggesting, with brotherly referring to their professional skills against his pure amateurish understanding due to his humanitarian occupation, to conduct the siege of Kyiv more decisively: to cut the city off completely, to cut off all their vital communications there so the Kyiv civilian population “would leave the city on their own. Can it be done? It should,” the Moscow virtuoso is suggesting softly with his face beaming of self-appreciation, to the senior military officer next to him. The officer, after a telling pause, turns toward the fat formless pianist with a rather stoned face, saying: “But-we-can-not-make-a-human-catastrophe-by-our-own-hands- there.”. The mug of the pianist did not show anything, anything at all except continuing fixated self-adulation. 

The pictures from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Sumy, many other cities of Ukraine where the aggressor not only bombed to the ground but also besieged, are terrifying us daily. It continues. It is totally, completely, premeditatedly inhuman. For the country which has the siege of Leningrad as a part of its recent history is unpardonable under any circumstances. My maternal great-uncle, legendary doctor Falk Moiseevich Chigrinsky, led the children’s hospital in Leningrad for tuberculosis. He, as all his family, were from Ukraine, from the city known now as Dnipro. With the siege of Leningrad worsening, he and his doctor wife Nina moved with all heavily ill children to Zelenogorsk in the Leningrad suburb. Saving the ill children, they were unable to evacuate their own only son Mika, my uncle. 

Mika, 6 year old at the time, was taken by a sheer miracle to the literally last transport evacuating people from besieged Leningrad. He did not see his parents well until the end of the war. As it happened, he saw only his mother then. 

His parents, my great-uncle and his wife, were saving the sick of tuberculosis children heroically, giving them their own scarce food, and conducting daily exploits with efforts to obtain medicine for them, and some kind of vitamins, as collecting birch liquid in the forest for the children at expense of their scarce sleep. They saved all of the children. But Falk Chigrinsky, the heroic head of the Leningrad children tuberculous  hospital, died at the age of 51, of a heart-attack on the evening of the May 9th, 1945, in St Petersburg,  during the  victory firework. So I thought all my life. 

Until a couple of months ago when I’ve learned from my cousin who lives in Australia, and whose entire family is from Odessa, that the death of our heroic doctor Falk from a heart-attack in an emotional outburst at the end of the Second World War, was ‘the most guarded secret in our family’, according to my cousin. In fact, her mom who is the favourite niece of my late grandmother, who is alive and with whom I have a blessing to speak, did share with my cousin and me this so tightly kept secret. “ Yes, indeed, our Falk died on the evening of May 9th, 1945. Yes, it happened during the victory fireworks in Leningrad. But it was not a heart-attack. He was attacked from behind by one of the adult patients of the hospital, with a huge wooden log. The patient just smashed and crushed Falk’s skull with a terrible blow”, my aunt tells me from Australia, sighing. 

The patient was declared crazy on the spot. There was no investigation ever. “It was impossible to tarnish the reputation of the hospital, especially at the sacred moment of the victory”, the family was told. 

I am speechless. Cannot come to terms with that still. All the years after that awful payment for all Falk and Nina’s sacrifices and saving of all sick children saved from the besieged Leningrad, my family who knew – my great-grandfather, his wife, many of their siblings, all of them from Ukraine, my grandmother, her sister, my grandfather, my mom, my dad,  all adults in our family, lived all their difficult enough lives with that awful knowledge about murdering of their pride, their beloved Falk, the great doctor and humanist Falk Chigrinsky on the night of the victory day, May 9, 1945, in Leningrad, from behind, smashing the heroic doctor’s skull. I do not know how much time it will take for me to absorb it to some degree. So far, I have failed repeatedly. 

And a couple of more thoughts on the theme of besieged cities. The Siege of Leningrad, which is customary in Russia to write as the Siege, with a capital S, the unspeakable tragedy of that in so many details, should teach people and society a couple of things regarding compassion and humanity, shouldn’t it? Why did it not happen? – many people are asking themselves today, justly so. There are many reasons for that.

Just a few observations, some of them of a personal experience: the museum in Leningrad has collected an incredible , priceless archive about the period of Siege immediately after the war. At least two times after that, that priceless archive was destroyed, with many unique documents, evidence, and artefacts simply thrown away. 

The barbarians of the Soviet authorities always terrified me. I always knew that such policy, cruel, shortsighted, and inhuman policy will have terrible consequences. Now we are seeing it, partially. 

I also was very concerned about the way in which the idea about the much needed new Museum of the Siege of Leningrad was implemented in recent years in St Petersburg.  In fact, the authorities have aborted the idea which was supported by the St Petersburg population overwhelmingly. Aborted. They decided that there is no need for such a museum today. No need. It is telling, isn’t it? More than we would like to know, actually. 

One more recent observation with regard to the Siege of Leningrad, from the ground. As it is known, Russia’s boss is propagating emphatically his personal connection to the tragedy of the Siege. It is a sacred matter. More sacred than it is sacred for anyone mortal, in their interpretation. So, this year, a couple of months ago, on the day of the ending of the Siege of Leningrad, the boss went to commemorate the date to St Petersburg personally. Fair enough. 

There he is marching alone with his heavy security detail around, all the way in the memorial Piskarev cemetery, a very sober place for many. 

The next day, we got the information and the photos of the picture which was not shown by the Russian official media. As  it happened, the day of the ending of the Siege of Leningrad is a sacred day for many people there, especially of the elder generations. They also came to the Piskarev memorial with their flowers in hand. It was very cold on that day in St Petersburg, in the middle of January. All those people, many of them elderly and frail, were kept by a heavy guard, behind the cemetery gate – for hours in the freezing cold. Until the boss would not march conducting his own personal commemoration alone, by himself exclusively. The only person grieving the Siege of his city. Just one more telling detail about the matter of sieges. 

As we speak, the priceless historical archives located in the city of Kharkiv have been burned to ashes completely, in a vandalism which prompted many international historians to lament ‘a total disaster for the historical research and its outcome’ for good.

The essence of a siege is that it is not just cuts off,  suffocates, annihilates. It brings insuperable losses. It changes history. It inflicts qualitative changes at many levels simultaneously: life directly, nutrition, medical and water-deficiency  suffering, freezing, moral humiliation, dehumanisation. First and foremost, dehumanisation – as big specialist and enthusiast of a siege application Boris Berezovsky who for some reason occupies himself with piano rendering, knows even better than some of the senior Russian military. What do they think the world would take them for, after ongoing sieges of the Ukrainian cities? We will take them strictly following their own implications: as a repulsive sadists who know how to torture pianos, as well. 

Week 3: March 10 – March 16, 2022

Summary of Week III of the Mean War: March 10 – March 16, 2022

MIGHTY PARIAH AND DIGNIFIED VICTIM

Can anyone get used to war? If one can, there is something wrong with that person. After three weeks of cruel, unprovoked chain of military crimes and crimes against humanity committed daily in the centre of Europe, all transmitted to us in real-time, the one of the conclusions of this ongoing force-major is that a normal human being just cannot get used to it. The first three weeks of the Mean War as this war is going to be written in history books, resulted in over three million refugees from attacked Ukraine, with the capacity of bordering countries doing their best in accommodating the victims of the war rapidly coming to the edge, especially in Poland. The other extremely worrisome standing-by issue is the extreme vulnerability of the nuclear stations in Ukraine, two of them already under control of the aggressor, with daily critical situations there. This is the issue for all of us in Europe, at the very least. Just yesterday, Ukrainian MP Sergey Vlasenko speaking from Kiev, very convincingly, was appealing to the world for an emergency introducing the safe corridors from the skies over the nuclear installations in Ukraine and also over the agreed humanitarian corridors.  Legislators in Kyiv, the Ukraine government see what is going on internationally as the response to Russia’s aggression. They realised by now that there will be no closure of skies ( as it had had the place in former Yugoslavia and in the Middle East recently enough). They appeal to the world now bringing on the table option two for general, not just Ukrainian, security: closure of the skies over the nuclear installations and the agreed humanitarian corridors. They demonstrate understanding , the real application of the known formula qualifying politics as ‘an art of possible’, being in extremely difficult situation.  And us, the world outside the zone of the terrible war in the centre of Europe?  

What we all see after the three weeks of the Mean War is a mighty pariah and dignified victim. It is a dramatic confrontation. It is unnecessary confrontation as this war was completely unnecessary and as it is completely unjustifiable and unjust. The degree of cruelty and inhumanity that Russia decided to demonstrate to the world is stunning. And it will mark the history of that country forever. 

Day 21: March 16, 2022, Wednesday

ECOCIDE a la Russe 

Inna Rogatchi (C). Desolation. War Pictures. 2022.

There is a document that surfaced from the heights of Russia’s power. It is a request from the defence minister to the president. The document has a registering number and the date, March 4th, 2022. The request concerns forest. The forest at the territory which the minister calls ‘the territory of defence’. The minister faced a problem. He writes to his boss that the Russian Federation has no legal procedures regulating ‘usage of forest in the interests of defence’.  Therefore, the minister requests from the country’s supreme commander-in-chief the following: “I ask you to issue the permission for both total and selective deforestation of  any intensity and of any age, regardless of the land plots’ ownership and regardless of the category of land in question”.  This document tells in black on white that the Russian army is planning, and possibly already in the process of total deforestation of Ukraine. Defence minister wrote in his request to the boss that the unused by the Russian army wood would be sold for the money to be used by the army. Naturally.  He also explains that going by the book, the process of authorised selective deforestation takes 10 months. And they are in a hurry, of course. There is also a nice autograph, for those collecting, of the boss over the document. It reads  ‘Soglasen’ ( agree), with expressive, well-practised signature and the date, not so well practised, and showing something of not that brilliant student. The date is March 6, 2022. People asking questions: why was the Russian minister of defence in the middle of such an extremely busy total military assault preoccupied with Ukrainian forest? The answer to be found in recent comments of the ongoing ‘special operation’ by senior Russian officials. A few days ago, some of them expressed the concerns that ‘although we all are hoping for a quick resolution of the hot phase of the current situation, we have to realise that the potential of the other side ( Ukraine) for a low-key resistance is quite high, and it could be quite prolonged’. ‘Low-key resistance’ means anti-Russian resistance of both military and population both in the cities and in the forest. We are seeing what they are doing with Ukrainian cities. They are shelling them to the ground. And now, the document resurfaced from Moscow, tells us what will happen with the forest in Ukraine. And why. If they would be allowed to do it, the damage to nature and the change of the climate in Ukraine will be of a catastrophic proportion. It  is called ecocide. 

Day 20: March 15, 2022, Tuesday

BESIEGED CITIES 

Inna Rogatchi (C). Monologue I. 2022.

We are seeing it in front of us daily. For the twenty days by now. Beautiful, full of life, cities of Ukraine, one after another are not only bombed, shelled, destroyed, but also sieged. The self-proclaimed ‘liberators’ methodically apply the same tactics as attacking Ukrainian densely populated large cities: they cut off gas, heating, electricity, water supplies, communications, and intentionally impose food and medicine shortages on the places of living of hundreds of thousands of human beings. The key-word here is ‘intentionally’. Another day, I saw a video from another Russian state TV repulsive talk-show. It is repulsive in general and always, but now it is repulsive thrice so. My dear friend, an international guru in the history of music, sent it to me, shocked by what he saw there. I was not shocked for a bit, but it was very telling indeed. There, a well-known pianist from Russia Boris Berezovsky, who performs largely internationally, and who lived in London permanently for two decades, stays next to the Russian senior military in full uniform, and gently suggesting , with brotherly referring to their professional skills against his pure amateurish understanding due to his humanitarian occupation, to conduct the siege of Kyiv more decisively: to cut the city off completely, to cut off all their vital communications there so the Kyiv civilian population ‘would live the city on their own. Can it be done? It should ‘ – Moscow virtuoso is suggesting softly with his face beaming of self-appreciation, to the senior military officer next to him. The officer, after a telling pause, turns toward the fat formless pianist with a rather stoned face,  saying:“But-we-can-not-make-a-human-catastrophy-by-our-own-hands- there”. The mug of the pianist did not show anything, anything at all except continuing fixated self-adulation. 

The pictures from Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Sumy, many other cities of Ukraine where the aggressor not only bombed to the ground but also besieged, are terrifying us daily. It continues. It is totally, completely, premeditatedly inhuman. For the country which has the siege of Leningrad as a part of its recent history is unpardonable under any circumstances. My maternal great-uncle, legendary doctor Falk Moiseevich Chigrinsky, led the children’s hospital in Leningrad for tuberculosis children. He, as all his family, was from Ukraine, from the city known now as Dnipro. With the siege of Leningrad worsening, he and his doctor wife  Nina moved with all heavily ill children to Zelenogorsk in the Leningrad suburb. Saving the ill children, they were unable to evacuate their own only son Pasha, my uncle. Pasha, 6 year old at the time, was taken by a sheer miracle to the literally last transport evacuating people from besieged Leningrad. He did not see his parents well until the end of the war. As it happened, he saw only his mother then. His parents, my great-uncle and his wife, were saving the sick of tuberculosis children heroically, giving them their own scarce food, and conducting daily exploits with efforts to obtain medicine for them, and some kind of vitamins, as collecting birch liquid in the forest for the children at expense of their scarce sleep. They saved all of the children. But Falk Chigrinsky, the heroic head of the Leningrad children tuberculous  hospital, died at the age of 51, of a heart-attack on the evening of the May 9th, 1945, in St Petersburg,  during the  victory firework. So I thought all my life. Until a couple of months ago when I’ve learned from my cousin who lives in Australia, and whose entire family is from Odessa, that the death of our heroic doctor Falk from a heart-attack in an emotional outburst at the end of the Second World War, was ‘the most guarded secret in our family’, according to my cousin. In fact, her mom who is the favourite niece of my late grandmother, who is alive and with whom I have a blessing to speak, did share with my cousin and me this so tightly kept secret. “ Yes, indeed, our Falk died on the evening of May 9th, 1945. Yes, it happened during the victory fireworks in Leningrad. But it was not a heart-attack. He was attacked from behind by one of the adult patients of the hospital, with a huge wooden log. The patient just smashed and crushed Falk’s skull with a terrible blow”, my aunt tells me from Australia, sighing. The patient was declared crazy on the spot. There was no investigation ever. “It was impossible to tarnish the reputation of the hospital, especially at the sacred moment of the victory”, the family was told. I am speechless. Cannot come to terms with that still. All the years after that awful payment for all Falk and Nina’s sacrifices and saving of all sick children saved from the besieged Leningrad, my family who knew – my great-grandfather, his wife, many of their siblings, all of them from Ukraine, my grandmother, her sister, my grandfather, my mom, my dad,  all adults in our family, lived all their difficult enough lives with that awful knowledge about murdering of their pride, their beloved Falk, the great doctor and humanist Falk Chigrinsky on the night of the victory day, May 9, 1945, in Leningrad, from behind, smashing the heroic doctor’s skull. I do not know how much time it will take for me to absorb it to some degree. So far, I have failed repeatedly. 

And a couple of more thoughts on the theme of besieged cities. The Siege of Leningrad, which is customary in Russia to write as the Siege, with a capital S, the unspeakable tragedy of that in so many details, should teach people and society a couple of things regarding compassion and humanity, shouldn’t it? Why did it not happen? – many people are asking themselves today, justly so. There are many reasons for that. Just a few observations, some of them of a personal experience: the museum in Leningrad has collected an incredible , priceless archive about the period of Siege immediately after the war. At least two times after that, that priceless archive was destroyed, with many unique documents, evidence, and artefacts simply thrown away. The barbarians of the Soviet authorities always terrified me. I always knew that such policy, cruel, shortsighted, and inhuman policy will have terrible consequences. Now we are seeing it, partially.

 I also was very concerned about the way in which the idea about the much needed new Museum of the Siege of Leningrad was implemented in recent years in St Petersburg.  In fact, the authorities have aborted the idea which was supported by the St Petersburg population overwhelmingly. Aborted. They decided that there is no need for such a museum today. No need. It is telling, isn’t it? More than we would like to know, actually. 

And one more recent observation with regard to the Siege of Leningrad, from the ground. As it is known, Russia’s boss is propagating emphatically his personal connection to the tragedy of the Siege. It is a sacred matter. More sacred than it is sacred for anyone mortal, in their interpretation. So, this year, a couple of months ago, on the day of the ending of the Siege of Leningrad, the boss went to commemorate the date to St Petersburg personally. Fair enough. There he is marching alone with his heavy security detail around, all the way in the memorial Piskarev cemetery, a very sober place for many. The next day, we got the information and the photos of the picture which was not shown by the Russian official media. As  it happened, the day of the ending of the Siege of Leningrad is a sacred day for many people there, especially of the elder generations. They also came to the Piskarev memorial with their flowers in hand. It was very cold on that day in St Petersburg, in the middle of January. All those people, many of them elderly and frail, were kept by a heavy guard, behind the cemetery gate – for hours in the freezing cold. Until the boss would not march conducting his own personal commemoration alone, by himself exclusively. The only person grieving the Siege of his city. Just one more telling detail about the matter of sieges. 

As we speak, the priceless historical archives located in the city of Kharkiv have been burned to ashes completely, in a vandalism which prompted many international historians to lament ‘a total disaster for the historical research and its outcome’ for good.

The essence of a siege is that it is not just cuts off,  suffocates, annihilates. It brings insuperable losses. It changes history. It inflicts qualitative changes at many levels simultaneously: life directly, nutrition, medical and water-deficiency  suffering, freezing, moral humiliation, dehumanisation. First and foremost, dehumanisation – as big specialist and enthusiast of a siege application Boris Berezovsky who for some reason occupies himself with piano rendering, knows even better than some of the senior Russian military. What do they think the world would take them for, after ongoing sieges of the Ukrainian cities? We will take them strictly following their own implications: as a repulsive sadists who know how to torture pianos, as well. 

Day 19: March 14, 2022, Monday

MASS GRAVES

Total horror produced this and similar pictures depicting mass graves in Ukraine, one more terrible phenomenon of this mean war. In Mariupol alone, about 1600 civilians were murdered in merciless shelling. Under the two-weeks’ siege, without electricity, water, food, heating, there is no other possibility to bury the murdered civilians than the one shown in this picture. There are also grim videos of the process. 

In the city of Nikolayev, the corpses are in such a quantity that there is no space for them in the local morgue ( and Nikolayev is not a small city) and the piles of corpses are laying in the morgue’s yard and around it, for days.  

And the situation in Nikolayev, a big industrial city with over 1 million population there has become endangered severely from today on, in a scenario resembling the tragedy of Mariupol. 

XXI century. Centre of Europe. 45-million country under the severe undiscriminating annihilating attack of 145-million country is left alone, to bury hundreds of its civilians in mass graves. 

What Kafka?.. 

Day 18 – 2: March 13, 2022, Sunday 

DISPATCH FROM MOSCOW: “BUT, UNFORTUNATELY, THERE WERE NO  CHILDREN THERE”

Inna Rogatchi (C). The End of Humanity. War Pictures. 2022.

On this, one should be dry.  Our friend from Russia has sent us today the article from the Russian official Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. The article is about boosting morale of the Chechen special division dispatched to Ukraine and their ultimately important purpose – ‘to take Kyiv’. There is also a video which has been circulated today by the Operative Dispatches Telegram channel in Russia, with Telegram code number 30653. In the video, a 8-strong group of special Chechen division stands around the Chechen leader visiting them in Ivankovo village, which is 7 km from Kyiv. The Moskovsky Komsomolets writes that next to Chechen leader on the video is  his Alfa veteran Russian head of the Chechen Special Forces who is known to be in Ukraine for two weeks by now. The video is 45 seconds long.  On the second part of it, starting from 0.21,  the head of the Special Forces, in a soft voice, completely calmly, reports to the leader: “The task on that orphanage was completed. The strategy that you have suggested to us, worked out 100%. We did not bother with the clean-up of that village. We did not encircle it from the flanges, nor were we busy with reconnaissance there. In a brazen way, at full speed we approached that orphanage. [ Sighs]. We blocked it quickly, and went inside. [Short pause]. But, unfortunately, there were no children there’. The end of the video. 

The end. 

And thanks to them for educating us on the current quality of that military force. 

Day 18: March 13, 2022, Sunday

The GENOCIDE OF CULTURE

Inna Rogatchi (C). Ukraine Culture Ruined. March 2022. War Posters. 2022.

We are living through the 18th day of the mean war against Ukraine. 44 million people, 41, 5 now after 2, 5 million refugees left, are living through it literally. Many of us who are watching  itin despair and anger, passively. But as passive smoking damages one’s lungs, a passive observation of mean war damages one’s soul for those who are not indifferent. Elisha Wiesel, the son of Elie Wiesel, has noticed recently that he is terrified to think of what his father would think and tell about this ongoing slaughter. People working with Rabbi Sacks are saying the same. I think I know what both our dearest friends and role-model figures for decades, great Elie and great Rabbi Jonathan would say. They, in general very warm and kind men, would be stern. When humanity is attacked, the towering humanitarians are becoming the soldiers of civilization. 

During the eighteen days of the mean war, the aggressor has destroyed so many objects of Ukraine’s cultural heritage that this purposeful shelling can be qualified as the genocide of culture. In dominantly Russian speaking Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, beautiful, well developed and rich with cultural and architectural gems, not of Ukraine only, but of an European calibre, university, libraries, museums, and culturally  important buildings are totally destroyed. In Chernigiv, an ancient, important cultural city with very rich history, and also quite Russian-speaking, the Museum of Antiquities, which is absolutely important, has been raised to the ground. 25 paintings of Ukrainian well-known artist Primaichenko stored in the historical museum  near Kyiv have been burned, simply. Historical buildings, many beautifully restored, in all attacked cities of Ukraine, have been destroyed completely. Such ‘military objects’, by the Russian army standards, as museums, libraries, schools, universities, cinemas, are not anymore all together in all attacked cities. People in Odessa, the pearl of Ukraine, are working hard and frantically trying to protect their world-famous statues. The same as people in Lviv are doing with their superbly rich historical cultural heritage important for Europe and the world. Many of the destroyed buildings were cultural objects protected by UNESCO. Hello, UNESCO.  There are at least several churches, of the same denomination that prevails in Russia, Orthodox, have been attacked and destroyed. Another visibly ‘military targets’ by the views of the Russian army. The attacked part of Ukraine is nothing more than rubble. The architectural damage is total. The conduct of this war is barbarian, literally so. What is the aggressor aiming to achieve in this cultural genocide? It is conducted in the neighbouring country, with many people speaking the same language, with many other people speaking close Slavonic language. It is conducted in the country with long Slavonic tradition and heritage which was – until now – the part of Slavnic history and culture. Not anymore. Forever. But those criminals who are giving such orders and those morons who fulfil it, are seemingly willingly to ignore it. They are knowingly obliterating both the material culture of their neighbour Ukraine, and its cultural heritage. This is intentional cultural genocide. 

Day 17: March 12, 2022, Saturday

LIES

Inna Rogatchi (C). Skies Dialogues. Challenge I. 2021.

During military conflicts, the value of correct information is a top priority. During the mean, unprovoked wars, cruel premeditated aggressions objectivity is vital. But it would be never understood by those for whom lying is natural. There are many kinds of lies, many of which are used during wars: strategic, tactical, smaller or bigger, lie for outmanoeuvring an enemy, lie for boosting spirit. Operational lies, intelligence lies. And a queen of lies, propaganda. There is not without  reason that the first draconian measures against freedom of speech in the country-aggressor were taken immediately and against the media. It worked, to a large extent. For analysts, it is important to always see the news and coverage of a conflict by both sides. Well, it has to be said that it gets progressively impossible to read the Russian media, except literally a couple of those who try to preserve dignity. Even supposed to be neutral ones with a previous bearable reputation, are lying stunningly. Balck is white, and white is black. No other options. They do not even realise how utterly stupid they now look, in this doomed exercise, because the whole world is able to see satellite pictures. I am not that naive to speak about shame. This category is not in use in this mean war. Not by the decision-makers, nor by the legislators, and certainly not by the 99% of their officially accepted media. Shame is a luxury for all those individuals, their organisations, and their outlets. Compassion is another luxury. Mercy is luxury. Decency is luxury for the officialdom of the aggressor. We all are witnessing it, we all are realising it. How utterly stupid one should be for not realising that the world sees the unfolding mean war projected not by their manipulated media, but by satellite pictures that relays to us what is going on in real-time. To live in a bubble is comfy, possibly, but how defective it is. 

When I grew up in the country called USSR, the first awakening came to me when I was a teenager. And I remember that very moment all my life. Nobody taught me that, nobody told me anything specific, or anything at all. I have not read any forbidden literature yet, although a close friend of my mom was producing ‘samizdat’ tirelessly, and soon I will join her by typing Mandelstam and other forbidden writers on my mom’s typewriter, her most precious possession. Our other precious possession for all the family were books. That’s it. I have not heard much of the BBC and Voice of America transmissions yet, although my parents, especially my father, were clinging to the jammed transmissions in our old radio often. But he did it usually in the night, on purpose. I took Soviet history text-books in school with a good pinch of scepticism, as some of my school-mates did, simply because of conventional wisdom. But one afternoon, I remember it absolutely vividly so many decades later now, I stopped in the middle of my home-work, and started to think: “But it is a lie what is written here, in this text-book”. And then, on the spot, many samples of outright lies started to pop up in my teen-age head: the lies printed in the newspapers, transmitted via radio and tv, the lies which were so obvious even to a teenager in a sharpest possible contrast between the realities of life and stupid agressive propaganda we all were wrapped into day and night, years on. In a paradoxical way, as it happens often, that blatant propaganda did open my, and so many other eyes, to the injustices of the totalitarian system. The system which we started to doubt first and to despise next. 

And now, after 31 years of post-totalitarian Russia, I cannot see the official media of that country again. Its outright lies are not just shameless. It is despicable. They are building the new Iron Wall around their country again, by themselves and enthusiastically so. Following their choice, let them have it. And stay behind it.  

Day 16: March 11, 2022, Friday

The  SPECIAL FORCE OF SHABBAT AND THE PARADOX OF CONVICTION

Inna Rogatchi (C). Expectation I. 2022.

I woke up this night not at my usual time.  I woke in subconscious self-defence, not willing to continue to watch my dream. In the dream, some strangers, mid-aged men, were working quite clumsily, trying to fix something in their own way, destroying in the process a big old good tree. The tree meant nothing to them, and they were genuinely surprised by my husband’s and my negative reaction, and did not understand what we were complaining about. But the damage was done. The half of the tree was gone, being chopped by those people whom nobody invited to that work, in the first place. I woke up knowing that something was wrong at the place of ongoing war. I glanced at the clock. It did show 5.40 am. Two hours later, I learned that my native city was bombed at 5.26 am. 

So you woke up to learn that the city where you have been born was bombed. The city where you grew up, where your family lived in generations. The city where you went to a school, to the university. Where you have been formed. The place where the circle of your family’s friends and your first friends are from. So your personal landscape of memory gets bombed as well. 

I know that many people in the world have experienced it, sadly, dramatically and tragically, because of different circumstances. I am a historian who deals with the Second World War, Holocaust and post-Holocaust for over thirty years. I am a foreign policy adviser who is professionally busy with modern history and conflict resolutions for several decades, as well. To be able to work on these topics, one has to build an inside protection wall, and we all are doing it in our individual way, but all my colleagues would recognise what I am talking about. 

Still, when it comes to witnessing , even from a distance, a bombing of the craddle of one’s life, these walls crumbles in no time. I do not wish to experience anything like that to anyone. 

And in a surprising move, the conviction of an ultimate victory over this evil, this modern-day Amalek, has become my dominating feeling on the day of the bombing of the city of my family. When it comes to the worst, the best is born inside adequate people. For two weeks, I was anxious, nervous, perplexed, often unable to comprehend this mean war. Out of all adjectives, I do believe that first and foremost of it, it is mean. After two weeks of a daily crimes we all are witnessing, on the morning of bombing of my city, I has become calm, collected and determined. I know by all my innermost that the light will prevail this darkness. That good will beat this evil. That attacked ones and us all who are supporting them will win the stupid, unable bandits who destroys life with no reason. I am positive about an ultimate victory over these forces of darkness. Russia will get its Versaille, as Germany did a century ago. 

I cannot agree more with President Zelensky who spoke about the same thing in the beginning of the war that shocked the world. We all were not quite getting where his defiance was coming from with his country being in such a disadvantageous military position. I saw that he was sincere and meant what he was saying. He has had too little time in politics to pretend so blatantly. But I did not get the source of his defiance. Now I know. And I am proud of this 44-year old Jewish man who found himself as the leader of the 45-million country under brutal massive attack, and who found in himself the best of our people. I am grateful to all the people next to the president of Ukraine who are helping him and who are withstanding the barbarians together and well very indeed.  In front of our all eyes,  the whole country is fighting and holding bravery and with admirable commitment. 

There cannot be more graphic contrast between defenders and aggressors who are really laughable. That so much praised, so much talked-about ‘super-force’ after two weeks of unbelievably clumsy military exercises had had to reduce themselves to the need of ‘inviting’ ( frantically recruiting, in fact) thousands war mercenaries from Syria and Central African Republic ( my favourite) to fight in Ukraine for them. I do not remember when I laughed since the beginning of the mean war. But upon hearing the news about the African and Syrian mercenaries to be urgently dispatched by Mosvow to fight Ukrainians, I did. Thank you, geniuses. They so much resemble those ignorant, uneducated, clumsy mid-age men who destroyed half of the wonderful tree in my dream last night. But: my husband in that dream did save half of the tree, threw away those idiots whom nobody asked to come in the first place, and, most importantly, the root of the tree was left undamaged. We’ve checked. 

Shabbat Shalom. 

Day 15: March 10, 2022, Thursday

MURDERED FAMILIES

[ I wanted to post the photo depicting entire murdered family near Kyiv, but the picture was too much for Facebook and it was censored. It went ‘against the FB community standards’, you see. I am sorry that such a gruesome photo exists, but the fact is that it reflects committed crime. ]With my life-long experience in journalism, I do believe that there are such moments when publishing the near-extreme images of the crucial events is justified. 

As the war against Ukraine escalates, cruelty accelerates. To the degree that we are now seeing not a separate case of an unspeakable tragedy of killing an entire family, but the phenomenon, the tendency of it. How about such a ‘trend of special military operation’, in the XXI century? Pictured on the photo was the family from Irpen near Kyiv. They relocated there in 2014 from Donetsk. 43-year old mother Olga, 18-year old son who has just started his first year at the university, and 8-year old daughter were trying to escape in their car in effort to join the so-called humanitarian corridor. With them were Olga’s parents, with her mother suffering the Altzeimer. They were assisted by the great man from the church who has returned to Kyiv to help people to be evacuated after sending his own family to safety. He could have stayed there with his family being safe. But he returned. At a certain point of the family’s way, it was impossible to continue to drive. They had to walk. And were all killed by the beasts who were sent with their super-’special operation’ of wide undiscriminating shooting of civilian targets in a neighbouring country.  The father of the family went to care of his mother who got covid and was seriously ill. He went back to Donetsk in mid-February. Then he could not return to his family. He learned about their deaths from social media when he recognised the family’s suitcase on one of the photos posted there. In order to get back to bury his entire family, he actually went to Russia, flew to Kaliningrad which is the Russian territory next to Lithuania, crossed the border with Poland from there and got back to Irpen near Kyiv in the devastating mournful  journey which took him four days and nights. After which he still is waiting to get all necessary papers for the burial of his wife, son and daughter because people who are issuing these papers are overloaded with the necessity of doing it. They are working round o’clock, the morgues are overloaded with the corpses, and around the morgues the relatives are waiting in patient horror for their turn to get the papers for burial. The husband of Tatyana, Sergey Perebyinis, has been looking at those black bags on the floor with his family inside, for a couple of days already, as I understood.

Two days ago, another family has been murdered in Sumy, also the place where that the so-called humanitarian corridor  was announced – father, mother, grand-mother Pryimenko and three boys, 16-years old Artem, and two of his younger brothers, Egor and Kirill, all were hit in their house.

In the beginning of March, yet another entire family of Fedko was murdered in Kherson while ‘the liberators’ from a normal life were seizing the control over the city – young mother with two children of six years girl and just 6- weeks boy, and both of her parents.

There are countless cases of children murdered along with fathers, or mothers, or grandparents when adults were covering their kids by their bodies.

We saw the bombed children hospital and maternity hospital in Mariupol yesterday night. Some of us also saw yesterday that lonely small boy in a blue overcoat, not older than five who was moving on the refugees road, alone, stumbling, frightened, and sobbing. We are seeing another horror daily. We are registering. We will certainly remember, I do hope. But when will these crimes be stopped? When entire families will stop to be murdered, whipped from life and earth, without even a possibility for a proper burial? Just when?

Week 2: March 2 – March 9, 2022

Week 2 Summary: March 3 – March 9, 2022

Michael Rogatchi ©. Psalm 55. Indian ink on cotton paper. 40 x 50 cm. 1991.

During the second week of the war, we have seen real heroes and terrible tragedies. We all admired an 11-year old boy who travelled alone for more than 1000 km from his Zaporizzha city towards the Ukrainian-Slovakian border with a small plastic bag, passport and a telephone number of his relatives outside Ukraine written by his mom on the child’s left hand. I will remember the photo of that hand for a very long time. The boy’s mom was unable to be with him on the way because she is the only carer of her bed-ridden mother. I know several cases like that when people in the bombed Ukraine are not able to leave those who are depending on them. Our close friend is left behind in the commitment to care for her adult son with cerebral palsy who is in a special need care house which now totally depends on the direct care of the families of their patients. Our other friends decided not to leave their elderly parents behind. They are staying being extremely busy with preparing the bomb shelter for days now. 

We saw an incredible heroism of the people in Ukraine who went against armoured military vehicles with bare hands and pushed them away. Yes, they did. We saw several men in independent episodes who did lay down in front of the tank columns. And the columns did stop. We saw people with flags instead of guns in their hands who did make the gang of the aggressor’s soldiers, all with guns, to retreat. Yes, they did. 

We also learned about the entire family exterminated by the bombing of their home in Sumy: father, mother, grandmother, and three boys. Entire family. In one hit. Because of what, actually? 

As a summary of the second week of the war, comes the figure of 2 160 000 refugees from Ukraine in the crisis that the world did not experience since the end of the Second World War. The pictures of the human see, suffering, fleeing, attacked are amassing in a terrible pile of crime. So far, without punishment. As a matter of fact, Dostoevsky himself was not that sure in his own formula. He somehow knew that applied fairness  is a wishful thinking, largely. In the place where he collected the material for his ultimately gloomy, disillusioned, desperate writings, for sure. 

Day 14: March 9, 2022, Wednesday

CHERNOBYL 2.0

Inna Rogatchi (C). Insomnia. 2019.

Not in my most horrific nightmare would I ever imagine that I would be in need to speak about the threat of Chernobyl again. As a matter of fact, I do not quite do it. The same, as I just cannot watch the Chernobyl series. It gets too close to me. Our family suffered the most terrible, insuperable blow due to the Chernobyl catastrophe. We lost two dearest members of our immediate family because of that, of different generations. We lived that catastrophe through and what it inflicted, too. We still live it. We will always live with these unimaginable losses through and because of it. Some of our friends are still worried about us on that day of the Chernobyl catastrophe 36 years back, they are writing us warm messages and they call, telling us that they always think about us on that day.  In a self-preserved psychological mechanism, I tend to ignore the very date. What fixation on the date would add to what we went and going  through every single day of our lives?

But now, in the context of the most idiotic  and most gruesome war which I know about and which unfolds in front of us, I find it necessary to speak on Chernobyl 2.0 in the script which reaches far beyond any serial.

On the 14th day of the war, the IAEA announced that they have lost communications with the Chernobyl nuclear station and cannot monitor the situation there. In a couple of hours after that supremely alarm statement, the official information from the Ukrenergo stated that due to the military actions at the seized station, the Chernobyl is completely de-energised. It means that the massive system which provides cooling of the reactor does not function. Which means that the prospect of the leak of radiation is real. It also means that depending on the time of de-energised status of the station, the nuclear explosion is also real.

The station is occupied and controlled at the moment by the Chechen battalion of Rosgvardia, all famous nuclear physicists, Einsteins-en-masse. Under their control, 210 people who were working at the station at the day of the seizure, which was the second day of the way, are not allowed to be rotated all this time. Two hundred and ten people had started their shift a day before the station was seized. Almost two weeks by now. They are working under the guns round o’clock. They are not allowed to rest. They are sleeping something like two hours daily sitting at their desks at random moments. They are allowed one meal a day all this time. If they are lucky, they can get a bit of extra bread. They have a serious shortage of water. People were reduced to the necessity of breaking-in their colleagues’ personal lockers in order to steal from there whatever they would find, water, food, hygiene items. What does it remind us of, one wonders. So literally.

Is it all for real? How on earth do the world powers allow this to happen? This is a capitulation of the worst sort. Of the worst.

Additionally, according to the IAEA, the nuclear facility in Kharkiv was damaged by the Russian missile. This facility is new and scientific. It has a subcritical mass of plutonium which means that the consequences of this damaged nuclear reactor are of a different category than now very possible Chernobyl 2.0 Armageddon-in-Making. But there ARE consequences, inevitably. Any slightly educated person realises that a nuclear reactor damaged by a direct missile hit is leaking. Period.

Who on earth gives such orders? Who attacks nuclear reactors situated in a large Russian-speaking city full of civil population? We know the answer. And we will remember it.

Additionally, the situation at the largest in Europe Zaporizzha nuclear plant in Energodar is also quite alarming. The station has been seized by the aggressor forces completely last night, the 14th day of the war. According to the IAEA, it is controlled by Rosgvardia forces. In fact, the Chechen battalion of the Einsteins-with gun-machines is an official part of Rosgvardia. It has been reported that a couple of days ago, they killed several people at the station in a demonstrative spree-killing, in front of everybody else on the shift. They killed namely those specialists who were responsible for nuclear safety at the station.

I wonder: who on earth can put in one’s place under one’s skull an idea to order the Chechen battalion to specifically target and seize nuclear installations? What does it tell the world? Can the world read the message? And make the adequate conclusions of it?

Ukraine has four large nuclear stations on its territory, with 15 large nuclear installations among them. Ukraine’s nuclear plants’ capacity  is the fifth largest in Europe and is the tenth in the world. IAEA seems to be extremely worried and similarly helpless at the moment. I have just one question on this 14th day of the bloody war: what are the world’s leaders waiting for? Is it not clear enough already?

Day 13: March 8, 2022, Tuesday

WOMEN’S DAY-2022

Michael Rogatchi (C). Faces of the Shoah. Indian ink on cotton paper. 50 x 40 cm. 1991. The Rogatchi Art Collection.

Some strange people have sent to me today festive photos of flower  bouquets, with a Women’s Day congratulations. Thank Heaven that there were really few of them. Only one of them was with an additional  ‘Best Gift is Peace’ stick. What on earth are these serene pictures at the time like this one? I completely agree with President Zelensky who said in his daily address from burning and bombed Kyiv that he won’t congratulate women with a holiday today. Not the time for anything like that. Exactly. That’s why my picture for today, the 13th day of this devastating war, is the work of my husband depicting a woman in connection with the Holocaust. Created 30 years ago, this drawing exemplifies the sense of the Women’s day-2022. It is sorrow, worries, anxiety, tears, reflections on everything lost and quite a bleak future, especially near one. As my best friend who has spent all her life in Ukraine told me today: “Most of the time, I feel as if I’m under a bulldozer, almost literally so’. 

On this day which is still weirdly celebrated by some people who live on some other planet, I think about one girl. Her name was Tanya. She was eight years old. She died of dehydration in Mariupol, being alone under the rubbles after the bombing and after losing her mother who was killed in the raid. 

We do not know for how many days Tanya, an eight year old child, was fighting for life under the rubble. President Zelensky said this morning that after the end of the World Second War, no child in Europe died of such a horrific death. There is a photo of the dead girl, but it is too gruesome to publish. But there is a potential instance where that existing photo should be added to the other evidence. I do hope that humanoids responsible for this war crime and crime against humanity will be taken to the front of the special Tribunal for War Crimes in Ukraine which has all objective reasons to be established. 

What flowers? What congratulations? What celebrations? Women’s Day-2022 is the Tanya’s from Mariupol day.  

Day 12: March 7, 2022, Monday

HUMAN SEA

I realise that this photo will be published world-wide. And it should. A similar picture was seen at the railway station in Kyiv. A  similar picture was seen at the railway station in Dnipro. I am saying only about the places which I saw and know personally. Kharkiv is predominantly Russian-speaking second-largest city in Ukraine. I wonder how many people in Russia have seen this one photo. I just wonder. There are 11 million people in Russia, conservatively, who have relatives in Ukraine. Plus friends, colleagues. It should be 20 million at least, probably, more. I do not know if I will ever be able to forget this very picture.  Plus many many more which we are seeing daily, round o’clock. There is another picture which does not get out of my head since the moment I saw it, of small children, hundreds of them, sleeping on the floor in the shelter. So disciplined, so quiet, so well behaving. There is another photo of the children who just arrived in Germany, straight from the bus, all under seven, bewildered, lonely, without parents, each of them holding a toy they were distributed by volunteers, clinging to those large enough toys with their innermost, with their eyes in some other place, of all of them. The enemies of the large soulless state which never truly knew or really recognised the concept of a value of a human life. A-single-human-life. Our close friends moving through Ukraine for more than three days by now in that all women small convoy, are telling, tiredly,  that several girls whom they are moving from the war zone, have been sleeping in a shelters on the way on the beds in groups of five or more, with all boys, including even small three-year old boy who is in their group, are sleeping on the floor, on very thin matraces, or some rugs which is placed on the floor. Nobody complains though. I have not heard a single complaint from the escaping human sea during these twelve days by now. Only recommendations, like the one our other friend was given in that incredibly overloaded train in which she managed to get into , from the third attempt: “ you better do not get off [the very small place of the wagon’s bench], as you won’t be able to get to your place back”. She texted that “there is an enormous amount of  people in the wagon, tens, hundreds of them sitting, staying next to each other”. Nobody is complaining. Just figuring out how not to get out of your seat even if it is absolutely needed during all the very long way, because you simply won’t be able to get to your tiny place, a part of a seat, back.  

Day 11: March 6, 2022, Sunday 

INVOLVEMENT

Inna Rogatchi (C). Entering I. 2019.

I have about three and a half thousand contacts on Facebook alone. To  my warm gratitude, there are very few of them who have ignored the tragedy of this war. So few that each of them has placed him- or herself into the limelight of ignoring. I honestly cannot understand what measure of humanity there is left in each of those individuals. Or was it ever present, really. To face such a tragedy and to be concentrated on one’s idiotic dinners, or travels, or keep so stick to one’s usual routine is beyond humane, under the circumstances. Yes, not everyone should be involved. But any humane person should react to the screaming inhumanity and horror committed in the centre of Europe today, for the 11th day non-stop. It is such a cliche that people are tested by difficult times or situations. But there are cliches and cliches. There are cliches which indicate the essential truth without which those enthusiastic diners-travellers would be seen as those who they really are: cold fearful egoists, unworthy ones, does not matter how they are regarded in their corresponding fields professionally. Pathetic, despicable schmucks of both sexes. They just need to know that there would be no one to help them in their daring moment. And that would be absolutely fair.   

Day 10: March 5, 2022, Saturday

LOGISTICS OF THE WAR

“Inna, you just cannot imagine what is going on here at the railway station’ – our close friend, practically a family member, is saying to me in a tired voice from Ukraine. – ‘ Not just the railway station itself ( which is rather big – IR) but the entire plaza in front of it ( which is really huge), and every inch in a proximity to it is packed with people, people, people. It is really frightening” – our friend says. And he is not the one who is frightened easily. 

The wife of the other close friend who was trying to evacuate with two children, one teenager and one three year old, had the tickets for one of the special trains evacuating people. She tried very hard, with two children and some minimum luggage to get into that train – for two days, in many desperate events, for 48 hours. They could not reach the platform through the impenetrable wall of people. Those who can, are packed in the trains with 200, 300 and 400 people in the wagons which normally take 50 people. 

There are dramas, no, tragedies, over the places available on the buses ready to evacuate people. The mother of the family we know for life is left behind because there are no places left in the bus in which the family of one of her sons is leaving. The family of her other son is moving away in a small convoy of private cars full of women and the only man, a three year old boy. There is no place for her in those cars either. She is 70 years old and quite ill, with injured back and knees. I cannot stop thinking about her since the minute we have heard about this one human story. One of so many. And all these stories are piling up, and up. 

There is one more story which does not get out of our heads. In the beginning of the war, in a village near Kiev, a 14-year old boy was mortally wounded in the head by a shell fragment. His family was not able to take his body from the place where it had happened because of intense fire there. In a couple of days, his aunt, a female doctor from Kiev, got into her car and drove there, to take the body. She managed to do it, and was driving back home with the dead body of her 14-year old nephew and his parents. Her car was hit by fire, with the doctor killed momentarily and the boy’s father seriously wounded. Somehow, the boy’s parents, caring his body, managed to get out of the car. They moved to the closest village and buried him there. After which they tried to get back to the hit car to take the body of their sister-in-law from there. They were not allowed to do it by enemy fire. The latest I have checked on the situation, they were unable to do so for- a- week. It does tell you all about this ‘special operation’, does it not? 

Day 9: March 4, 2022, Friday

COMMUNICATIONS

Inna Rogatchi (C). War Dialogues. War Pictures. 2022.

In no time, we have transferred from a morning and evening catching up with the news from the war in Europe to almost 24/7 mode of news gathering. From early morning to late evening, we are on the phones speaking -organising-finding up-checking-speaking, trying to help our friends in and from Ukraine, and those who need help urgently now. Trying not to cry while relating what we are hearing to each other. Just a small pause of a few seconds to hold the breath and to control tears. No, tears you cannot control, really. Sobs you can. Days through, we are speaking with people and institutions in Ukraine, Finland, Italy, the Caribbean countries, Ireland, Germany, the UK, Latvia, Belgium, the USA, Estonia, Israel, Lithuania, and so on, back and forth, in rounds.  The progress is slow, and there are so many new cracks of sorrow. Close friends had to divide their family in three in order to be able to move out of Ukraine, all three are in different directions. Additionally to the terrible fact of being forced to leave their homes, would they be ever able to see each other again? The mother of the family is stranded far away without any real hope to be able to return to her family any time soon. People frantically trying to get out of the war zone leaving behind everything. For some people, even this awful prospect is not realistic and they realise that they just had to be left behind. How on earth to get over all these daily episodes of lives of close to one people? The episodes of essential importance which are amassing over you as that growing dark giant cloud? And those frantic communications which are a dimension of its own. Every time when somebody’s phone is not answered, your anxiety is rising, however you try to control your emotions. These are the realities of the war, in its immediate manifestation, in its routine. Human suffering. A drop, a spring, a river, a sea, an ocean of human suffering which is pouring all over Europe, and reaching beyond it. The truth of the day. 

Day 8: March 3, 2022, Thursday

ELDERLY ARRESTED

My black & white coverage is coloured again. But it is in black & white indeed. 

Here is the video of Mrs Osipova’s arrest. You do not need to know Russian to understand both the video and the posters this 77-year old woman has made herself

Mrs Osipova is well-known in St Petersburg. She carries on her single-person’ protests from 2002, every time drawing her own posters which are destroyed every time. She does it again. Non-stop. 

Her family lived in St Petersburg for generations. Her grandfather died during the Siege of Leningrad. Those people lived the sorrow of a war through.  For twenty years, this woman protests, alone, without fear, on the streets of her native city, injustice, the various causes of that. She was 57 when she started it. Now, twenty years on, she protests war which is forbidden to be called its name by the regime which is thriving in its inhumanity, and accelerates it on a daily basis. To the degree that after arresting children they continued with arresting a 77-year-old woman in a matter of fact, routine way of conduct. The state fights its own children and its own elderly with full-scale police actions. Unf-ing believable. But it’s true. The gloves are off now. 

Week 1: February 24 – March 1, 2022

Week I Summary

Inna Rogatchi (C). Multitudes I. 2022.

During these seven days and seven nights between February 24th and March 2nd 2022 we all were transferred into another life. The life of horror, non-stop massive bombardment in the centre of Europe, barbaric destruction, mortal danger 24/7. The time of ongoing war crimes. The crimes against humanity committed perpetually in front of our all eyes. 

We all united indignation and  condemnation. We all united in solidarity and  humanitarian aid. And still, we all – not only Ukraine – are hostages of those who control a semi-activated nuke button.  It is not only Ukraine which is in peril. Europe, West, the US, the UK, Canada, Australia etc. are in peril. 

The script of this catastrophe movie is truly bad. It has been never worse in the history of mankind, in the history of our civilisation. It has to be re-written. There is no alternative to that whatsoever. 

Day 7: March 2, 2022, Wednesday

CHILDREN ARRESTED

Children arrested in Moscow.

My black & white design for this war 2022 diary has changed, for today. It turned to rose & blue, the colours of girls and boys, because of the subject in my today’s dispatch – the arrest of children in Russia, a new feature of that regime. 

These children, five of them, were arrested yesterday night with their mothers when they all came to the Embassy in Ukraine in Moscow with flowers and the slogans they made and drew. The children are 7, 9 and 11, two girls and three boys. We have their’s and their moms’ names. The photos are from the police department. We know that in the police department, the mothers were verbally attacked, they were screamed at, and threatened with depriving them of their parental rights.  But before that, they were thrown with their moms into police cars for arrested people known in Russia as ‘avtozak’, a car for arrested ones. This is a short video from that car.

After several hours spent at the police station, the children and mothers were freed. Now, the mothers would be fined with substantial fines. 

This is what we are dealing with, what we are facing. Those responsible for things like that should be taken accountable. Otherwise, the civilization will be defeated. 

Day 6: March 1, 2022, Tuesday

BABY YAR 2.0

Inna Rogatchi (C). Value of Life. 2020.

I was about to write about some positive and meaningful phenomena which entered our all lives because of this bloody war, such as solidarity, help, humanity in action. I will do it in the days to come. But now, I have received the information about the massive missile assault of the Baby Yar. The place of sheer horror of the Holocaust, the open – for ever – wound of the Shoah  is near the Kiev TV centre which has been bombed by the agressor. As a result, the territory of Baby Yar has become victimised again. Now. Today. 80 years after the horrific annihilation of over 70 000 people, conservatively, there. Doesn’t the Russian army’s genius leadership have maps of the areas in which they have waged the war? They have. Do they care? They don’t. As one of my friends and colleagues who lives in Israel wrote today, yet before it has happened: ‘Now, the people have been divided not into the right and left, not into the conservatives and liberals, not into belonging to us and strangers, not even into good and bad ones. But it has been divided into human and inhuman ones”. He wrote this before the missile attack on Baby Yar happened. How on earth anyone, just anyone can bomb Baby Yar? We are now seeing a gruesome re-defining  of the term  ‘barbarian’, too. These things are not to be forgotten. Neither will it be forgiven.

Day 5: February 28th, 2022, Monday

A GENRE OF A DAY: HYPER-SURREALISM

As so many of us, we are starting a day now by immediately checking the news from a front-lines. Those front-lines are not only so unbelievably many places of bombardment, missile firing, fires, assaults, distraction in Ukraine. There are also lines of civilians with so many children on the way out the military zone. Those giant lines of cars, many of the abandoned, with people walking for 30 km with children towards the border. Thirsty, hungry, with no possibility to recharge the batteries of their phones, the main and only means of their connection to the world, in an utter need of many  practical things to handle. I will remember forever a photograph which I saw, one of so many. There is a platform at the railway station in Ukraine, absolutely full with men. Men only, with their hands in the air waving toward the train in which their children and wives are living. Every day of this war brings to me a new image, case, phrase, situation re-defining the term ‘heart-breaking’. Maybe, because I study the Holocaust for over thirty years, the details and signs of human catastrophe caused by the war, speaks to me in a very graphic way. And surrealism as we know it  is not enough anymore to define the struggle of a reason versus reality. It-is-in-com-pre-hen-sib-le. This mean, mean, mean war has introduced to us a new genre, a genre of the day – hyper-surrealism. The time of Goya’s Los Caprichos, real-time. 

Day 4: February 27th, 2022, Sunday

Part 2 – SOMETHING ABOUT CONTRASTS:  HUMANS VS GHOSTS

Inna Rogatchi (C). Contrast I. 2022.

As we all are watching with anxiety and emotion unfolding tragedy in Ukraine, we cannot help to think about the drastic difference between human qualities of the sides of this mad and mean war instigated in the centre of  Europe.  From one side, the aggressor, who played an emperor to the worst of amateur theatre, and who virtually disappeared hiding in a bunker after failure of the mission as he was imagining , copy-cating the previous criminal leaders of the same country. On the other side, an inexperienced politician who turned out to be a man, brave, collected, visible, active, acting, human, president Vladimir Zelensky who has become a sample to the world in no time, and, indisputably,  the best possible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize 2022, too. Next to him is Kiev’s mayor Vitaly Klichko who simply is not afraid and is great both in leading people and communicating with them – and the other side can see it as well, as the rest of us. Well, they do not have anyone as the mayor of the Ukrainian capital on their side, at the moment. 

There are many other people in visible positions in Ukraine who behave bravely today. One mayor has handed its authorities to his deputy and went to fight. Other mayors all stay in their positions and do care about their population being visible and active non-stop. There are political opponents of Zelensky who have put aside their differences and who are defending their country with weapons in hand. Many leading Ukrainians who we see are remarkably collected, and calm. They are visibly convinced in their rightfulness and they do deserve our all respect. They took it well.  I was impressed by how people behaved at the critical moments at the railway stations and being inside the subways for shelters. Our personal friends are also behaving in the same way, being collected and measured. 

From one side, we can see weirdly looking troops, unshaven, in dirty uniforms, sloppy, with empty eyes, without real understanding of what they are doing there. Those are the aggressors of the XXI century. On the other side, we see the entire country with weapons in hand, a good looking, clean, shaved, well equipped, motivated army who knows precisely well what they are doing and why. We can also see unified people who are knowingly resisting by all means, and in an organised, not chaotic way. 

In short, this despicable war has provided the whole world with the tragic real-life spectacle: humans against ghosts. I am sorry, but such is the fact of the day. Russia is a huge country with a vast population, there is a lot of talent, a lot of brain-power,  a lot of people with hearts in the right place, and with critically important levels of conscience, many of whom we are proud to have and call friends.  It really deserves better. 

Day 4: February 27th, 2022, Sunday

 Part 1 – DECENCY

Inna Rogatchi (C). Against the Wind. 2021.

There are a lot of protests against this mean war, globally and in Russia, too. Protests there are essentially important. Nevsky Avenue in St Petersburg was completely full with thousands of people on the day one of the Kremlin assault. People are individually protesting in Moscow and in about 30 more cities of Russia every single day. Those individual protests are more daring, and it is great that so many people did find it necessary for themselves to protest publicly in a hostile environment. All those people are normal people, with a normal sense of decency. And this is what counts at times like this. Decency keeps civility up, against psychopathological barbarity and dangerous delusional war-mongers. 

I cannot tell enough how proud we are of our colleagues and friends who keep their back straight and their opinion articulated. Two Lithuanian theatre directors who worked in Moscow leading the best theatres there, Rimas Tuminas and Mindauskas Karbauskis, have left their highly-paid and prestigious positions in the protest. A leading world-famous  choreographer Alexey Ratmansky not just left the work on his forthcoming premiere in the Bolshoy, but flew to his parents in Kiev to be with them, and conducts a daily campaign in support of Ukraine. Many leading theatres in both Moscow and St Petersburg, including the famous BDT and MHT theatres, plus Alexandrinsky, Gogol-Centre, and some others have all changed the official logos of their theatres inserting a dove of peace into existing logos. Our dear friend, maestro Evgeny Kissin has recorded two-minutes addressing his public world-wide, calling things by their real names, plainly, simply and powerfully. 

Within Russia, several top actors, directors and producers whose work and income depends on their position towards the state directly, wasted no time protesting this psychotic war publicly, on the first day. Among them are Maxim Galkin and  Ivan Urgant. Urgant’s program on the Russian main-stream TV Channel 1 was removed immediately. Same seems to be the case with Galkin. 

Other big names of the Russian theatre and cinema have issued a public protest as well. One after another, private gallerists and serious art centres are closing down the planned vernissages. A very good Russian artist from St Petersburg whose artwork is on our wall is keeping her stand against this madness nobly from day one. I am not naming her here to avoid the persecution against this friend.

As I write it, a new open letter protesting this mean war, came in. It is from many leading Russian musicians. 

There are over 6000 Russian doctors who have protested the war, and separately many distinguished academics from all spectrum of science, from physics to philology. There is another public letter of the hundreds members of the Russian culture elite who all have signed the protest. There are many journalists and the entire media who all turned publicly against the war, among them are not only ‘a few usual suspects’, but quite many new members of the League of Decency in Russia. 

 After three days of horror and tears, today we are energised and proud of our friends and colleagues, and all those decent people in Russia who not only understand what’s going on from behalf of their country, but who opted not to keep silent about it. Decency is the denomination of the day. Always, yes, but at the time of mean destruction twice so.

Day 3: February 26th, 2022, Saturday

QUIET TEARS

Inna Rogatchi (C). Snowy Voice. 2020.

Just before the start of the Shabbat previous evening, a message appeared on my FB page. A friend from Kiev was saying farewell to all of us whom he could reach that way. Just in case. I was staring at the screen in total disbelief. I have known that man for about 40 years. He is a sober individual, a strong, commanding personality, not a hysterical type. I was in stupor from that disbelief. And terrified. Then I learned that several more people who are in Kiev currently also have sent their farewell to us, their friends, before the night during which the city was expecting a heavy bombardment and attack. When the Shabbat ended, right now, I found a message in my Messenger, from another friend who has sent another farewell, recorded one, from the gabbai ( a person who acts as a sexton in a synagogue) of the Odessa synagogue, with a huge and thriving Jewish community there. The gabbai, a very nice, quiet and kind man, was wishing Shabbat Shalom to all of us. He did it from a completely empty synagogue behind him, telling us that they have just completed the evacuation of the community, including all kids and pets, too. As the gabbai was saying his farewell to us all, people in Odessa were warned of a massive bombardment to come. Ariel Alhor, it is his name, was fighting tears, and trying to smile. That quiet tears, and that nicest smile is just completely heart-breaking. 

Day 2: February 25th, 2022, Friday

HELPING FRIENDS

Inna Rogatchi (C). The Storm of the Days. 2021.

This is a new reality in which we all are learning to live. The life is altered, and it is focused on the news from Ukraine and around it exclusively. The news is bleak. We are consoling those of our friends who found themselves far from families in Ukraine and who all, both those people and those families are crazily worried about each other. We are personally involved in getting some assistance and all support we can mastered to the friends who are stranded in the Dominican Republic without a possibility to reach home due to the destroyed airports and  closed skies over Ukraine, those who are living in Germany with the vast part of the family is Ukraine and poor communications which are worsening on a hour basis, those who were working in Estonia and now cannot return home and have no means to stay in Estonia, and so on. Additionally to the general world extremely worrisome crisis, this war has brought so many personal crises in so many families, and not just Ukrainian ones. The German husband of our Ukrainian friend is so nervous that he was close to a heart attack, G-d forbid. And there are many husbands, wives, and other close relatives of the people who have become affected by the war directly. The waves of human anxiety, worries and sorrow are expanding. Such is the reality of the day. The storm.  

When I made the artwork which is featured here, last year, I thought that I would never use it. I am struggling now to realise that it has become so acutely actual.

Day 1: February 24th, 2022, Thursday

CRACKS THROUGH HEARTS

Inna Rogatchi(C). Grey Rain. 2020.

Our thoughts and our hearts are with our dear and beloved friends in Ukraine. We are worried for all of them and are hoping and wishing that all of them, and every one of them will be well. There are many people about whom we are thinking with love and worries now, and do nothing more except trying to be in touch with them and to hear that they and their families are well, with G-d’s help.

The graves of our parents, the graves of many of our family members and friends are there, as well. We are thinking about these graves with trepidation, every single day. And especially now.

A war is a war. It is a horror, anxiety, and bewilderment. It is tectonic cracks which go through people’s hearts. And which never mends leaving damaged, wounded existence ever after. In one life, in many lives, in a tissue of life.

Now, after all those decades of unlearned lessons, we are living through war, as well. This is terrible. This is awful, heavy, damaging and destroying experience, first of all morally. Infrastructures are mendable. People’s hearts are not. We are praying that this horror will be resolved soon. But scars in hearts and minds will stay for good. This is the reality, a sobering reality of war-inflicted wounds.

ADDIO, MAESTRO. In MEMORIAM: ENNIO MORRICONE

Tribute to Ennio Morricone

Windy Morning

On July 6th, 2020 morning, I woke up at 5.21 am, almost three hours before my usual awakening. There was no reason for that, I thought at the moment. We still have a white nights at this time in Finland, so the sun was up for an hour or so. The air was completely clear, but without that special morning serenity. I heard noisy and persistent rustling of branches all around our house, non-stop rustling. The wind was mighty, the weather was stormy. Strange morning, I thought, not quite July-like. I felt like the wind was as if saying something. Not trying to say, but saying in articulated way. I could not sleep back at all.  

Some music was still whirling in my head from the previous night when my husband and I were listening to our usual pre-bed concert. Yesterday, we opted for the record of a great concert given back in 2006 by two outstanding Italian musicians, trumpet player Paolo Fresu and pianist Danilo Rea at Auditorium di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Fresu and Rea were improvising playing some of our favourite music by great Ennio Morricone, a very special person for us both.

We started to speak about Maestro Ennio, how is he doing, hopefully now everything is fine, after our all’ fears for him and his wife because of severe epidemic of Covid-19 in Italy recently, how much we are waiting for his book sent to us by his family, what a great music that great man have created, and so on. Our evening of July  5th 2020 was ending with our thoughts on Ennio Morricone.  

In a couple of hours after my unusual awakening next morning, my Inbox did show the terrible news: Maestro Morricone passed away this morning, at the dawn in Rome ( 5.42 am), at hospital there. The same time when I awoke that morning, under noisy rustlings of the trees in our garden. 

Just four months ago, in mid-February 2020, we were seeing Maestro’s son Marco, the one of his four children, and his wife Monica in Rome where we all were participating  together at the  Il Volo di Pegaso Italian National Arts, Literature and Music Award ceremony in which the Maestro Morricone’s Armonica Onlus Academy was taking a prominent part, and our The Rogatchi Foundation is traditionally participating as well. When Marco Morricone was invited to the stage to speak before awarding some of the laureates, we were stunned by his goodness, his modesty and his sensitivity. We should not be stunned, actually: Marco is so much the son of his great father in that great modesty, that rare and organic attitude towards people, that fineness of sublime soul. 

Sea of Light 

I saw Maestro Morricone in person for the first time  in the end of August of 2009 in Rimini, during the important Meeting di Rimini high-end cultural and humanitarian festival. Maestro was giving a special concert in an unusual concert-conversation format. I was invited as a special guest, as well as another dear friend, the great public figure, late Harry Wu. We all were staying at the same historical Rimini Grand Hotel, famous largely thanks to Fellini who had a special bond to the place, who immortalised it in his films and  who actually died there. 

Both Maestro Morricone and his wife were gracious, elegant, organically polite and friendly disposed toward people they were meeting at Rimini Festival, but not only. To talk with them, to be near them was like one was entering the sea of light. Very calm, serene sea which is organically generous with you – and you, and you, everyone – in sharing its light, in wrapping it around you absolutely effortlessly. 

Luckily, I have met many special people in my life. And many very special ones among them. But I never met anyone quite like Ennio Morricone. That man had such extraordinary substance which he consciously and very graciously  kept very much inside himself that his presence was a quiet but very deep celebration and a gift. Never in my life did I have that sensation when a brief friendly encounter lasts over many years and is present in one’s life in a sustaining and tangible way as if it had happened just yesterday. 

I remember the Maestro’s face, his smile, his attentive eyes, very sharp eyes but without any edge in his outlook, his wise and elegant words very vividly during all twelve years that have passed since our personal meeting. I cannot explain it, but it is with me on a daily basis. I treat it as a very special personal gift in my life. I always will.

Inna Rogatchi with Michael Rogatchi (C). Rome Blues. Homage to Ennio Morricone. Amarcord Forever original series. 2012

As a culture figure, Ennio Morricone was a gift to mankind: his enormous productivity and fortunately long life ensured his music to over 500 films, many of them mile-stones of cinematography, and much more great music by that brilliant composer. I do not know any other cultural figure whose impact was so mighty, unexpected, wide and universal. Not only Morricone’s music is great, but to very large extent, it did made the films for which he was composing, unforgettable and distinct ones, from all eight classical Westerns by Sergio Leone to Once Upon the Time in America, Sicilian Clan, Cinema Paradiso, and so many others. 

Morricone’s scores for all those exceptional films always was much more than a score, even the best one. It was a vision laid not in words, not in pictures, but in music, in melodies. Because of philosophical depth and the beauty of Morricone’s music, this vision has been perceived universally, by millions. Because of its pure harmony and depth, that vision has enriched our individual perception of the world and it has enriched our own lives. Morricone’s music is an unique phenomenon in the history of culture, and palpably so in modern cultural history. This music is more than words. It is deeper than words. And it stays longer than images on the screen although they all are engraved in our memory very much because and thanks to that so unique, so special and so original music.

Ennio Morricone was a gift to mankind. 

Not only was his productivity simply phenomenal, but his artistic responsibility was exemplary one.  Maestro Morricone started to conduct his own music quite late, in the mid-1980s when he was 56 year old. His concerts were always a great success. During those concerts, the sea of light that he did emanate was transformed into the ocean of it. The waves of goodness were embarrassing Morricone’s huge audiences at every concert he ever gave, and those were many in major places and different corners of the world. He was very generous towards the people in anything he did. It was his principle of life conduct. Amazingly, he gave fantastic concerts conducting brilliantly as recently, as just two years ago, in 2018, being 89. 

True Renaissance Man

In the best of Italian modes, Maestro Morricone was a true Renaissance man. Additionally to his inherited and developed musical supreme talent, he had a brilliant mind and great intellect. After learning about Morricone in more detail, I realised why his music is so unique and so universal. It is because it was also a product of his might intellect and outcome of his deep spirituality. 

Maestro Morricone was an exceedingly modest person, he never bragged on his brilliance and depth. But  it all is in his book, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, which is a sheer intellectual pleasure to read. It is the one of the best books ever.

Inna Rogatchi with Michael Rogatchi (C). Don Quixote’s Echo. Homage to Ettore Scola and Ennio Morricone. Amarcord Forever. Original art series. 2012. 

When I was reading the parts of it, I was having an impression that Leonardo had returned to our midst, this time as a composer. “Music is mysterious, – wrote Maestro in his incredibly engaging book, – it does not offer many answers”. Indeed, Ennio Morricone’s music did originate much more lasting questions for millions of people than all those great films itself. And questions are the salt and beauty of a life landscape, the more, the better. 

As a person, Maestro Morricone was simply amazing in his modesty, his friendliness, his kind attitude towards the people. I wish we would have much more people like him, but the reality is that he was a rare sapphire of a man.

His deep faith was never shaken and for those who knew him and the family, it was evident that this kind of faith was a very firm ground for his outstanding and far reaching humanity. 

His and his family’s generosity and philanthropy maybe not that well-known widely – precisely because of supreme modesty of Morricones – but there was, is and will be steady stream of it in many directions of life, including their help to children, families in need, musical education, science, medicine, you name it.

When we at our The Rogatchi Foundation have started the Culture for Humanity global initiative facilitating cultural support to people world-wide at the smashing time of Covid-19 pandemic, it was Maestro Morricone and his wonderful family who did respond the first ones to join and to lead the effort. We were touched and grateful to those wonderful people who always share their talent and their heart with this simplicity and understatement, in the way the real giants do. 

As we all know, because of a number of reasons, some of great masters of arts can be quite complicated characters. Ennio Morricone, additionally to all his extraordinary professional qualities, was simply a wonderful man. True humanitarian whose humanism was an organic part of his nature. He is a giant in all and every sense. 

It would take time for me to write about Maestro Ennio in the past term.  Such light like his never dims. 

 Addio, Maestro, e senza fondo grazie, bottomless thank you. 

Chi Maia By Ennio Morricone 

July 6th, 2020.

Inna Rogatchi’s The Route Inaugurational Event at the European Parliament

Exhibition at the European Parliament – May 2012  Inaugurational  Exhibition of the Inna Rogatchi’s The Route Special Collection and Project – the European Parliament, May 2012.  

More about the event – at The Rogatchi Foundation site News Archive: www.rogatchifoundation.org