This is the second of two essays exploring the intertwined histories of Russia and Ukraine, told through one family’s history. Read the first essay here.

A thick, dusty file records the progress from life to death of my grandfather Boris Bibikov, an official of the Communist Party of Ukraine, at the hands of the Soviet secret police. The file documents his arrest at an exclusive Party sanatorium in Gagry in July 1937, and records what happened to him until his execution near Kiev, in October of the same year.

I read it on my first visit to Kiev in 1995, in the old headquarters of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the secret police on Volodymyrska Street near the Kiev Opera House. By then the building was the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service.

“Your grandfather believed,” said a young officer who had sat with me reading the file as we took a cigarette break in the gathering gloom. “But don’t you think that his killers believed also?”

The answer is yes, of course, they all believed—in a better world, in a bright future.

“In order to do evil a man has to believe that he is doing good,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “If my life had turned out differently, might I, myself, not have become just such an executioner?”

While much of the world condemns Russia as an aggressor against Ukraine, those of us who are descendants of their fraught relationship understand how curiously history and geography shape the morality of nation states. Extending nearly 2,300 miles from the Black Sea to Belarus, the modern Russian–Ukrainian border, drawn in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR, is a boundary that my progenitors—witnesses to empire, descendants of Russian nobility, faithful Soviet colonizers turned anti-Stalinists, enemies of the Soviet state and finally refugees—would not have recognized or understood.

Like eight generations of Bibikovs before him, Bibikov believed Moscow’s enlightened rule would bring prosperity, equality and happiness to Ukraine. Like them, he reaped the benefits of being a loyal servant of the Russian empire. My 18th-century ancestors were granted estates by a grateful Catherine II, including 25,000 serfs. Bibikov’s rewards were more modest but still giddyingly privileged by Soviet standards. As one of the Russian builders of the Kharkov Tractor Plant, he had a four-room apartment, a peasant maidservant who slept in a closet, a gleaming Packard, luxury holidays, and even as hunger stalked Ukraine under Joseph Stalin’s collectivist dream, food to feed his family.

Undoubtedly, my grandfather bore witness to the horrors unfolding around Kharkov during the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine that starved millions of Ukrainians. He must have known of the daily patrols sent out to collect the emaciated bodies of peasants, the ruthless Red Army units sent out to seize the last kernels of grain from starving people. Bibikov must have struggled to rationalize his place in that nightmare. Perhaps he believed his great tractor factory was going to help grow enough food to feed the shining cities Stalin promised—but maybe just a little too late to help the dying millions around him. Which is why, even Bibikov, until then a loyal viceroy in service to the Soviet empire, made a fateful, fatal choice to push back against Stalin.

My grandfather’s NKVD file sat heavily in my lap, a swollen tumor of paper. It weighed around 3 pounds, and smelled of slightly acidic musk. Most of the pages were flimsy official onion-skin forms, punched through in places by typewriter strikers. Toward the end were several sheets of plain writing paper covered in a thin, blotted handwriting: my grandfather’s confessions to being an “enemy of the people” and sabotaging the factory to which he had devoted his career.

Turning to the end of the NKVD file I found a receipt confirming Bibikov had read and understood the death sentence passed on him by a closed court in Kiev. A scribbled signature was my grandfather’s last recorded act.

My grandmother Martha Platonovna Shcherbak was arrested soon after her husband and sent to the Gulag in Kazakhstan for the crime of being the wife of an “enemy of the people.” She spent 15 years there and went insane.

The Bibikovs’ children, my mother Lyudmila and her elder sister, Lenina (named for Lenin), were sent first to children’s prison, and then to an orphanage in Verkhnodniprovsk. When the German army advanced in 1941, the older children, including Lenina, then 16, were compelled to dig anti-tank trenches. The last remaining staff commandeered two barges on the Dnieper, carried Lyudmila and about 40 of the younger children aboard, and set them adrift. The group then took horse carts and rail cars past Zaporizhia, eastward into the steppes and across the Volga River as the German Sixth Army descended upon Stalingrad (now Volgograd).

Many Ukrainians—survivors of Soviet collectivization and the Holodomor—saw the Germans as liberators. The Germans, in turn, enlisted Ukrainian nationalists, including the firebrand Stepan Bandera and his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), to their cause. The UPA rounded up and murdered thousands of ethnic Poles and communist partisans. Some Ukrainians, who associated Jews with Bolshevism, enthusiastically handed over their Jewish neighbors to SS Einsatzgruppe extermination squads.

UPA units continued to fight the Soviet army into the early 1950s. Bandera himself would eventually be assassinated by the KGB in Munich, in 1959, poisoned with a cyanide gun. To this day, one’s take on the UPA is the ultimate political bellwether in modern Ukraine: Is Bandera a great patriot or a collaborating Nazi swine?

There’s not much middle ground. Young post-independence Ukrainians see him as a national hero, commemorated on billboards and flags. My mother, her family, and the vast majority of modern Russians came to see Bandera and the UPA, unequivocally, as fascist traitors. She remembers joining Russians and others fleeing the Ukrainian and German advance. She remembers crossing the Volga River as a young frightened girl on a steel barge, packed to the gunwales with refugees. It must have been shortly after August 23, 1942, when Red Army sappers blew the bridges at Stalingrad. She later recalled to me how their smashed girders tilted into the water.

After World War II, Germans were described as experiencing kollektivschuld, a “national shame,” for crimes committed by their countrymen. No such reckoning followed the Holomodor, the collapse of the Soviet Union or the birth of the modern Ukrainian state. Fatefully, millions of Russians continued to gaze upon Ukraine with the patronizing eye of empire. My mother remembered the victory parade of May 9, 1945 vividly. Tens of thousands of German prisoners of war—ragged, half-starved, but still in impressive marching order—were paraded around Moscow’s Garden Ring road. She recalled feeling sorry for them.

My mother met a young Welsh academic in Moscow in 1963 and eventually married and moved to London. Even after spending years among liberal, passionately anti-Soviet emigres in the West, she struggles to see Ukraine as a truly different country from Russia. She teaches Russian literature. Ukraine’s greatest writers—notably Nikolai Gogol—are an inalienable part of a shared heritage. For her, as for millions of Russians, the idea that Ukraine has broken the bounds of empire to form its own national identity is dissonant and alien.

Of course, most prominent among the Russians who refuse to accept the new reality is Vladimir Putin, who has claimed repeatedly that “Ukraine is not a real country.” Many Russians see Ukrainians as nashi lyudi–“our people” in Russian—in the familial, possessive, patronizing sense. And many citizens of Ukraine in the Russophone East of the country will tell you that they are “culturally Russian,” whatever that means.

Even with such rifts—historical, political, familial—the European-leaning West and Russian-leaning East of Ukraine somehow managed to rub along for 23 years of independence—chaotic, corrupt and dysfunctional independence, for sure. But a new generation of young Ukrainians, brought up to learn their country’s native language and revering its national heroes, placed their hopes for the future in another sort of postmodern empire—the European Union.

As Moscow Bureau Chief for Newsweek magazine, I traveled to Ukraine in 2014 to report on the war that began in 2014 shortly after Moscow-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected calls to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The decision rocked Kiev—resulting, ultimately, in 94 days of escalating street battles, Yanukovych fleeing as protesters flooded into his palace outside Kiev, Putin seizing Crimea, separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk provinces in the Donbas seceding. That conflict was the first act of today’s full-scale war—a war fought over identity, the legacy of empire, and the right of former captive nations to break free from their old masters.

My brain writes the stories of the armed factions and proxies that are tearing Ukraine apart, after bursting into greater war in February this year. My blood thinks this about Ukraine: that among many other things, it has always been a place of new beginnings—for Ukraine, for Russia, for humanity. Ever, as now, Ukraine is where empires are tested, where history turns.

The final document of my grandfather’s file, dated October 14, 1937, was a clumsily mimeographed slip with a casual squiggle by his executioner. Since the careful bureaucrats who compiled the file neglected to record where he was buried, that stack of paper is the closest thing we have to Boris Bibikov’s earthly remains.

The post Ukraine in My Blood and on My Mind appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is the first of two essays exploring the intertwined histories of Russia and Ukraine, told through one family’s history. Read the second essay here.

We like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood. When I think and write about Ukraine, I cannot ignore my deep family connection to that country’s history.

My mother Lyudmila Bibikova was born in Kharkov, a Russian-speaking industrial city in northern Ukraine, in 1934. Her father, Boris Bibikov, was born in Simferopol, Crimea and her mother, Marfa Scherbak, in Poltava in Western Ukraine.

Yet the Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. Quite the contrary. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial rule over Ukraine, first as servants of the tsars and later as lieutenants of Soviet power.

The connection is not a comfortable one. Whether I like it or not, my family story—my blood—is intimately linked to the history of the Russian Empire.

The name “Ukraine” means “by the edge” or “border land.” The territory has always been a marcher country, a frontier. Today it is where the Eastern Slavic, Orthodox world meets the Western, Catholic one. Two centuries ago, it was where the Russian Empire met the Muslim world of the Ottoman Turks. The modern Russian state was formed not in Moscow or St. Petersburg but on the margins of empire. Ukraine is where Russia’s history has always turned, suddenly and repeatedly, on its heel.

Kiev was a thriving city when Moscow was still an uninhabited swamp. The Viking pagan Prince Waldemar of Kiev—known to Russians as Vladimir, to the Ukrainians as Volodymyr— baptized his entire people into Christianity in 988, consecrating the first Christian eastern Slavic state. In 1707 at Poltava, on the plains of Western Ukraine, Peter the Great defeated the Swedish king Christian XII, exalting Russia to the status of a fully-fledged European empire, with a new capital on the Baltic and a toehold on the Black Sea. It was Catherine the Great who brought Ukraine under Russian rule. The conquered lands came to be known as Novorossiya, or New Russia.

The New Russia was very different from the old one. Quite literally, Ukrainians did not speak the same language as their new fellow countrymen. Ukrainian is as different from Russian as German is from Dutch—similar, but mutually incomprehensible. The Russia of the tsars was a society of slaves and slave owners, whereas Ukraine was one of freeholding yeomen farmers, where serfdom was rare. The Black Sea port of Odessa—founded by Catherine the Great’s greatest general and secret husband Prince Grigory Potemkin—was a cosmopolitan entrepôt. The valley of the Don in eastern Ukraine became a land of industry, as enterprising Welsh mining engineers dug out coal to power Russia’s tardy industrial revolution.

Novorossiya was not an extension of the old Russia. It was old Russia’s window onto Europe, and modernity.

My family’s connection with Ukraine began during the reign of Catherine the Great with Captain—later, General—Alexander Alexandrovich Bibikov, son of the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Russian Army. In 1783, the young Alexander accompanied the empress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine and Crimea. He would have seen the great lands then as fertile, empty prairie, ripe for settlement by his countrymen. The valley of the Don River, later known as Donbas, would soon become the Russian Empire’s Wild West, as Catherine’s functionaries encouraged thousands of Russian-speaking settlers to move there to farm and to work in the coal mines. These settlers maintained their separate identity, establishing the roots of the region’s current conflict.

The Bibikovs, in the meantime, became a leading family of Russian ascendancy on its frontier—the sort of elite Mikhail Bulgakov described in his 1925 novel The White Guard. “Kiev,” he wrote, “was a Russian island in a sea of Ukrainian life, of which the well-born inhabitants knew nothing.” Alexander Bibikov’s great grandson served as Governor-General of Kiev in the 1830s and 40s, ruthlessly enforcing Tsar Nicholas I’s cruel restrictions on Jews. Kiev’s main thoroughfare was named General Bibikov Boulevard, for a time. Another Bibikov fought the British and French at the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War of 1853-56. The defeat in Crimea evinced the inability of the old feudal Russia to function in a modern world—another turning point for the Russian Empire that pivoted in Ukraine. Within five years Russia abolished serfdom, liberating 23 million people from chattel slavery. (By comparison, four million African Americans were enslaved on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation.)

It is with my grandfather, Boris Bibikov, that my family’s involvement with Ukraine comes into sharp, personal focus. The Bibikov family remained prominent nobles in 1902, when Boris was born—but he became a passionate communist, and the latest member of the clan to try to impose the Kremlin’s imperial vision on this unruly borderland. Boris was one of the builders of the Kharkov Tractor Factory, a centerpiece of Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan to bring Soviet agriculture into the 20th century. Boris, in his turn, saw the giant fields of Ukraine and his great new factory as anvils for hammering out a new kind of society. The tractors Boris built would free millions from the drudgery, ignorance, drink, and viciousness of village life. The land would become a “grain factory,” in Vladimir Lenin’s phrase, for great cities and a new civilization. Work in these factories would turn backward peasants into honest proletarians.

The steppeland of Novorossiya, plowed and sown, had become the breadbasket of the Russian Empire, and the people who worked these lands had prospered alongside powerful, mostly Jewish grain trader clans in Odessa. As free-holding landowners, Ukraine’s peasants became wealthier and more independent-minded than their Russian counterparts. During the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Ukraine emerged as a hotbed of anti-communist resistance.

Under the tsars, Jews and Ukrainian intellectuals who tried to revive Ukraine’s language and non-Russian culture had been considered suspect. So it was again under the Bolsheviks, who saw Ukrainian nationalism as an existential threat to the Soviet project. Stalin’s solution to the problem was a systematic campaign of “Russification.” He invested in coal- and steel-producing areas of the Donbas to create a proletarian and, crucially, Russian-speaking heartland. And he set about crushing Ukrainian nationalism and the people most likely to support it, Ukraine’s stubbornly independent and capitalist-minded peasantry.

Ukraine became the scene of Stalin’s most horrific crime—the Holodomor, or “hunger-death,” a man-made famine remembered in modern Ukraine as a national genocide akin to the Holocaust. Between four and seven million Ukrainian peasants starved to death after Stalin confiscated their land, grain, and livestock in 1929, in the name of setting up collective farms.

“There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,” Boris Pasternak wrote after a trip to the Ukraine at the time. The young Hungarian communist Arthur Koestler found the “enormous land wrapped in silence.”

As children starved, the Soviet state sold Ukrainian grain abroad to buy machinery to fuel its crash industrialization. And Boris Bibikov, my grandfather, was at the forefront. He married a peasant girl from Poltava. He wore striped Army shirts and played the bluff proletarian. As the Party and Kharkov factory boss, he edited the factory newspaper and organized “storm nights,” accompanied by brass band, where workers scrambled to meet brutal Kremlin deadlines. “Lads, lets meet the Plan!,” he scrawled in chalk, on the lavatory walls. He wrote editorials in Izvestia and garnered praise in Pravda. For his work, he received the Order of Lenin, the highest Soviet honor.

But as the Holodomor unfolded, even Boris rebelled. He attended the 17th Party Congress—the so-called “Congress of Victors”—in Moscow in 1934, backing Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s main rival and an advocate for slowing the pace of collectivization. The Congress marked the last time opposition to Stalin was voiced in public. Kirov was assassinated in December 1934. When Boris heard the news, his daughter Lenina recalled, he threw himself on the sofa and wept. “We are lost,” my grandfather said. He was right.

Of the 1,277 Congress delegates, over 800 who spoke against Stalin died in Stalin’s Great Purge of the Party in 1937.

Boris Bibikov was one of them.

The post The Russian Empire, My Soviet Loyalist Grandfather, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She has visited the country six times since 2016, reporting on the war there between its internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.

Recently, Waguih went back again.

She wound her way through both Sunni-dominated government-controlled territories and Shiite-aligned Houthi controlled areas. She arrived in Seiyun, in Yemen’s government-controlled eastern region, on February 25. From Seiyun, she travelled 30 hours by road to Sanaa, Yemen’s traditional capital in the Houthi-controlled north, then to Mocha, where she visited a large camp for internally displaced people, and finally another day’s drive to the government’s entrepot capital, Aden.

Along the way she passed clusters of settlements across Yemen’s mountainous arid terrain, each distinguished by an array of hillside towers, archways, rainbow-colored windows, and earthen walls. Yemen is a landscape of small towns, villages, and a few larger cities, mainly along its coast. Roads across its desert expanses are often unpaved and remote. Waguih travelled in crowded, unreliable mini-buses.

Throughout her journey, she saw the impact of war and the fractured movement of civilians and goods. In much of the country, life carries on—fishermen cast their lines, bookstores sell their tomes, devotees go to mosque. But everything is under threat, anything that still works is fragile. And there are pockets of immense suffering.

Yemen is facing a humanitarian disaster. More than 377,000 deaths are attributed to the conflict, including 150,000 people who died as a direct result of military actions. Yemen’s people are starving. The United Nations is seeking $4.3 billion to stave off hunger and disease for an estimated 23 million people—nearly three-quarters of the population, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children. Yemen imports nearly all its provisions; Ukraine and Russia supply 40 percent of its wheat. Food prices have risen approximately 150 percent since the invasion of Ukraine, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Despite the staggering scale of the seven-year catastrophe, Western news media describes the conflict (when it describes it at all) as a “forgotten” or an “invisible war,” tropes used to justify Western neglect of complex intrastate or proxy conflicts, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

So deep are divisions between the warring parties that each runs its own fiscal and administrative systems. Waguih had to carry two sets of Yemeni banknotes, or rials. Older and newer bills have different values, exacerbating runaway inflation.

In Yemen, women are rarely seen in public without a full abaya or burqa. The fact that Waguih is a journalist and an outsider afforded her more freedom than most Yemeni women enjoy. Even still, her movements were always negotiated. In Houthi areas evening trips to convenience stores and restaurants were accompanied by a Houthi agent.

Waguih visited Sanaa’s largest orphanage and hospital, a fuel station, a bank, and other businesses and institutions in the city’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed old city to gauge the war’s impact.

“Yemen is a place where it is very difficult to see actual conflict but impossible not to see its effects everywhere,” she said. “You will see, for example, a building that has been destroyed, and you don’t know how long it has been that way. Maybe it was recently. Maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

There was no difference, she said, between the destruction she saw in government-controlled areas and that in Houthi areas. During her previous trips, she said, violence seemed to be localized around particular areas. Now, due to an estimated 25,000 air raids, Yemen’s ruined infrastructure is highly distributed.

And everywhere, Waguih said, from the streets in Sanaa to Yemen’s squalid camps for the internally displaced, she gazed upon the gaunt face of hunger.

There are some developments toward peace. The internationally-recognized government and the Houthis announced a two-month ceasefire in April, to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan. Many hope the truce will allow all sides to consider proposals for a permanent end to the war.

Nations at war are also nations at work, at school, at play, at rest—at all the places that make up daily life. War often occurs in places with vitality enough to sustain many years of degradation. Waguih’s photos show everyday reality in a nation experiencing one of the world’s longest running wars. The conflict may not be visible in every frame but it infuses all of the images.

The post A Fragile Livelihood in Yemen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.