Swimming Through History

Growing up, I had this idea of quintessential Canadians who loved picnics and camping and hockey. General outdoorsy types. Remembrance Day stands out in my memory because their great-grandfathers heroically volunteered to fight in a war that wasn’t their own. Wow, I thought, what incredible great–grandpas they had. When I came home, I asked my father about our family.

“We have veterans, but they didn’t serve Canada,” he said, “they served the Soviet Union.” Who cares about that, then? I thought. No one at school wants to hear about soldiers from somewhere they never heard of. I didn’t even think to ask where the Soviet Union was. Not here—that’s all that mattered to me.

When I was young, my culture was a tool for status. A marker used to indicate individuality, that you had something no one could take from you, whether it be a language to impress peers or food kids had only seen online. But no one knew anything about Ukraine, so neither did I. Knowing didn’t serve much purpose. Turns out, kids only cared about immigrants if they came from somewhere famous like France, Japan, or the UK.

On my way to class in grade nine, I passed a poster on my secondary school’s notice board. Something about Ukrainians and Holodomor, or the Great Hunger. It made me curious. I came home that day and watched my mother lay out a plate with a piece of rye bread with a lit candle sticking out of it by our window after dark. “What are you doing?” I asked her. 

“Remembering the family we lost during the Holodomor,” she told me.

“What’s that?”

“A time when the Russians killed millions of Ukrainians by taking their food and locking them inside the country,” she said. But she wouldn’t say anything more about it, so I asked my father.

“The Holodomor was genocide. You know that Russia vetoed the original definition of that word because it would implicate them, right?” Of course, I didn’t, and I told him as much. He told me his favourite phrase whenever I doubted him: “Look it up!” There was a fifty-fifty chance each time that he was outright wrong or misremembering what he was talking about.

“It’s true,” he said. “They stood at the border with gatling guns—you know gatling guns?” and he mimed the motion of shooting one. “Anyone who tried to leave for food—not just to Poland, but to Russia or Kazakhstan—they would be shot. They killed anyone who tried to hide even flour. My grandfather had ten siblings. Ten! You know how many survived after the KGB found the food they’d hid and sent his family to the camps?” I shook my head. “Two. Himself and his father, the one who had hid the food in the first place. Isn’t that ironic?” He made it sound like it was a joke, but neither of us were laughing.

In my last year of secondary school, invigorated by that story, I focused my final history projects around Stalin and his hand in the mass murdering of his people. It was the first time I felt compelled to convince my peers that Eastern Europe mattered. All year, we studied the World Wars and the Holocaust and the starvation of the Irish without a single peep about Stalin or communism. I refused to let my classmates walk away from a European history class with only the West in their minds. I pulled my first all-nighter, showed up to school with a Starbucks coffee and Khrustyky, Ukrainian fried dough dusted with icing sugar, and spent 30 minutes educating them with the promise of dessert at the end. Then, with great glee, I only gave it to the people I assigned to be “Russians” at the start of the class while telling the “Ukrainians,” “Sorry, better luck next time.”  It was my first instance of using my background to demand attention and say, “Look! This didn’t happen to some random person’s great-grandparents; it happened to mine. Doesn’t that make you care?” I’m not sure if they learned anything besides the fact that I would be a cruel teacher, but they listened. I know that.

In my first year of university, during the height of the pandemic, I lived in a house with five others. The owners, Martha and John, were English immigrants in their sixties, genuinely sweet folks who helped run a local Anglican church and were open to telling us all sorts of stories. I learned that they’d gone to protests and raves, smoked weed and did other illicit acts when they were young. Without a speck of regret or shame, Martha had painted each of these scenes to us and laughed about it. “It was the seventies,” she’d said, “everyone was doing it.” Her daughter seemed just as crazy to me, walking around the house in a lace bra and her stomach, chest and shoulders covered in tattoos. It was culture shock. When I called my parents and told them about Martha, they laughed and said, “If the KGB had found anyone smoking weed, they probably would’ve executed them.”  

This was how I learned about my parents’ past, through accidental snippets. Like breadcrumbs left for me to follow when I was older and more curious. 

I couldn’t handle my university program during the COVID lockdown. I took a year off. Lived with my parents again. They were convinced I would never go back to school since they’d already fought hard to get me to go so I’d get a ‘real’ job. That pressure to do something ‘real’ haunted me in that gap year, and had ever since I was a kid watching my older siblings go off to work their white-collars in some shitty, low-paying, 9-5 downtown. Each of them had gone to some good school, came out with their bachelors, and hated their jobs. I’m pretty sure loads of immigrant kids got those kinds of ideas from their parents—the expectations of superb grades and financial windfalls, to push for more, more, more. To succeed in our parents’ stead since they were already ‘too old’ for it when they arrived. In their eyes, we had the potential to be anything, anyone. The country was practically bursting at its seams with opportunities. It didn’t feel that way for me and my siblings. At least, not in the fields we were interested in, which weren’t computer science or med school.

Shortly after my return to university, the war in Ukraine broke out. This was a turning point for my relationship with my heritage. With a sudden, indescribable ferocity, I was seized by a new fear—having no country to hail from, no culture to point to and say, “That’s me, that’s mine.” Once I realized that I had a responsibility to keep our culture alive while it was threatened to be smothered abroad, I became unable to ignore it or leave to others to preserve our history. If I could do it, then I had to. There’s a strange horror in standing, powerless, alongside your family five feet away from the TV as tanks roll through smoking villages towards Kyiv. From then on, my parents’ muffled voices were ever-present in the house as they checked on relatives—did they join the war effort? Was power back yet? Everyone held their breath as the village my grandmother lived in, or another time our cousins’, was bombed. But there was also something haunting about how life went on in Canada. I still worked at my minimum wage service industry job, and felt a complete disconnect from my body. A disconnect where my mask of cordiality kept slipping to indifference until I was kept back-of-house and repeatedly offered a chance to resign. It was only by June that I began to feel like I existed again.

The weight of my people’s history can only continue to push at my back like my father teaching me to ride my bike. My only way forward is through learning and documenting our past. I never understood the need to write about anything in the ways I saw many authors put it: “as necessary as breathing,” or “without it, I don’t know if I’d still be here.” Stuff like that. But I’m starting to get it now. There’s a fervour that itches under my skin like I’m forgetting something important. I’ve found that I can go about a month without writing before I feel like my head will explode. I really can’t stop.

When I decided to go back to school to finish my degree, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had chosen two majors that would give me a wide stage upon which to never shut up about my culture. Creative writing and studio art. My peers didn’t have much choice but to listen to me yap about “Ukrainian this” and “Soviet that” since we always had to talk about our works after we finished them.

My latest burst of investigative spirit came from Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time. That book feels like my Bible. I have so many quotes from those people she interviewed floating around in my head all the time. There’s so much I want to write about, to make art about. Questions about my upbringing, about my parents’ stories, their differences from how other kids’ parents treated them or talked—so much suddenly made sense to me. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like I knew all the steps to bake bread, but none of the ingredients, the temperature or time, what a loaf even looked like. There was just a void in the tin when I pictured the process.

I spoke to my parents a lot while reading Second-hand Time. It connected me to the more troubled parts of my family’s past, including the generational trauma left behind by Stalin. The conversations felt more like winding up a music box, though. You’d start the song, and it’d run on its own. I would mention how I never knew so much of Russia starved after the Soviet Union fell, and my mother would say how her parents in St. Petersburg survived on hardtack from the UN for months. That she cried and wished that her parents had never left Ukraine, where you could go to the farms directly for food. What can her child say to that? Nothing. I wasn’t there, I just read a book about it. So, I’d let her talk for as much as she wanted while I memorized her story.

Conversely, my father had served in the Soviet military and would speak on that. I asked him if people really drowned prisoners in their own shit.

“They shouldn’t have,” he said.

“But did they?” I asked.

“I didn’t see it happen.”

They talked and talked about their experiences to me after I would read a passage for them, often between bites of breakfast or lunch in the dining room and kitchen. It felt like I was participating in their culture when I was divulging horrors of Soviet life next to their stove. I should’ve pointed at the outlet and asked, “Did you hear that, Comrade Lieutenant?” like I’d read the Soviets doing, as if their Comrades were always listening in.

We all learned from those conversations. What always amused me was that, at the end of each one, when they’re heading upstairs to their work computers (they both have white-collar jobs they don’t particularly like), one of them would always exclaim, “But we have nothing to gain from reading this work—we lived through that time, after all!” And I’d wind them up about the book again tomorrow.

All these conversations I share between myself and my parents, they’re important, they keep these memories alive. After the War started (and isn’t it interesting that my family and I call it ‘the War’ and everyone just knows?), I had this fear of my family being forgotten, of everything that kicked around in my parents and oldest siblings’ skulls disappearing within a hundred years. My oldest sister doesn’t remember the Soviet Union, she was too young. But she grew up in its aftermath and loves to talk just like me. So, I recently learned a lot from her, too.

The biggest part of everyday Ukraine I’d learned from my oldest sister was that gangs were a big part of post-Soviet states. They could get people evicted from luxurious city apartments and sent to live in mud huts in the boonies. Mud huts! In a country with cars and cable and internet. Unbelievable. Most people knew someone in a gang if they stayed around their hometown—that’s how it was with my dad. One time (my oldest sister first told this story when I was a teenager), my mother got the shit beat out of her. My parents’ neighbour was building on her and my father’s property without their permission and she went out to the backyard and told the man to stop. And he beat the shit out of her. So, my father called in a favour from his childhood friend. This guy was a hitman and would come over to drink with my father and mother and bounce my sister on his knee like she was riding a horse. She, obviously, had no idea what his occupation was at the time. My father’s friend curb-stomped their neighbour, broke his ribs and a wrist. It drew a line in the sand that said: “Don’t fuck with us” and that neighbour stopped building on my parents’ property. Surprise!

Most of these details I learned after the war started because, in a way, I had no choice. I couldn’t accept letting that part of me or my family go. I needed to learn that history for (what felt like at the time) the betterment of humanity. “What’s the point of having all this culture at my fingertips and just sitting with it?” Ironically, I often struggle to write about my culture, to write compelling characters centred around being Soviet and being Ukrainian. But I don’t see any other way; this feels like my one path. That, if I turn around, I’ll be dragged back to Hades like Orpheus. Besides, my father always taught me that the best opportunities are on the other side of a violent river that you must swim through to reach.

“But actually,” he would say, “that river is just shit, so you must swim through this—this river of shit to get to that green grass, and your head will go under, and your mouth will fill with it, and maybe you’ll want to go back. A lot of people do, because whatever’s on the other side isn’t worth it for them. If you push through, though, you’ll get to those shores. Is it a utopia? Is it everything you ever dreamed of? No, of course not. But you’ll be doing what you love and, hopefully, that will make you happy.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. It feels like I’m swimming in that river of indeterminate end right now. I’m picking up pieces of my family’s myths and stories so often told in Ukrainian that I’ve only recently begun to understand. I’m starting to get what it means to be an immigrant, or at least a version of it. But I can’t envision a future where I make it to the other side of this river, or how the war will shake out, or how I’ll survive ‘in the real world’. I also can’t stop pushing forward. I’m at a point of no return—where I must have faith in my lungs and my limbs to take me to the far shore.