Today, I wanna talk about the ussr regime, Ukraine and what actually happened during the period of living under the iron curtain.
I still see people arguing whether the regime was serious or not, whether everything they know is a so called "western propaganda" or not etc. I do not honestly know what to add or prove about the regime, for no matter how hard you try to prove something — human stupidity always wins. Plus, because of the stupidity I always feel like I am absolutely gaslighted, that is tiring. However, let me try to be clear about everything and just tell some stories of my family, so you can make your own conclusions.
So, let us start from the main members of my family tree.
Father.
I don't want to talk much about him, for I know little about the pressure he faced in the childhood for not being an ordinary boy and not wanting to be a komsomolets; also, about how many traumas killed his personality and mental health completely. The people I want to talk about are first of all my grandparents and his parents. My grandpa (I never met him, he died because of the beautiful free soviet medicine) lost his parents at the age of 11 or 12 in 1947 or earlier. He was adopted by his uncle. He had a beautiful surname before the adoption: Ostrovsky. However, despite the fact that he was born in the Ukrainian family (maybe even half Jewish one), his very passport stated that he was "ruzzian", as at the time it both granted more privileges and put a lot of questions to rest. All I know about his temper is that he was a very strict and, time by time, tough man. My grandmother is (she is still alive) a Ukrainian and, probably a bit Belarusian. She lost her siblings because of the famine and post war poverty. The irony here was that the people that fed her during WW2 were German soldiers. After WW2 she had multiple traumas: fear of famine, fear of speaking Ukrainian and Belarusian (she was bullied for that), she still suffers from panic buying and a fear of budget deficit.
Mother.
My mother somehow coped with the life under the regime; still, she faced ostracism for her distrust of the regime, her independent views, and her loyalty. My grandparents, her parents, had different experiences. My grandpa is Ukrainian and Jewish, he somehow he remained immune to the propaganda: although he lived in a deeply propagandised setting, his older family members always sought to deprogram him. Plus, he is a boomer, stalin luckily was dead at the time he was born. He hates the regime, poverty, deficit and hardworking he faced, he hates everything that leads to genocide and poses a threat to the lives and safety of his loved ones. Lol, and he loves Lady Gaga's songs plus classic rock. Because of the Chornobyl he often has to check his skin and to remove cancerous skin tumors.
My grandmother is a half Tatar and Ukrainian. She is a very complex and broken person whom I found really tough and mean back in my childhood. She has serious health issues because of the endless stress and anxiety she experienced, plus thanking fucking stalin for supporting women that tried to give birth after endless famines and WW2. It was incredibly hard for her back then to care for her sick mother while somehow managing a mountain of her own problems. Now, because of the war, she has also started sleeping and eating poorly, and barely has the strength for anything.
My great grandmother, her mother, was a Tatar woman from modern Tatarstan Republic, that also lost a sibling because of the famine and beautiful soviet medicine and had to assimilate to the rest of society called soviet people to, as she said, "shield her and her family from those who wished them harm". Being a Tarar was forbidden even back then, so all the family members had to hide their real names and identities from the regime. She had a beautiful name Khairul-Banat, which means "the most beautiful among women", but she had to introduce herself as Valya (its Valentine or Ukrainian equivalent Valentyna). I remember not much about her personality, for she was old when I was born and died when I was almost 14 at the age of 85 or something like that. She was a caring and hospitable woman, deeply empathetic and generous—a genuine, inherited Tatar trait that is sadly dying out today. However, in her later years, she developed dementia, having had to leave school at the age of twelve (roughly equivalent to just five or six years of education, which would be considered unacceptable in Ukraine today) and toil her entire life for the sake of her children and grandchildren. She was also left with a lingering fear and anxiety stemming from scarcity, war, and repressive measures. I remember how shocked she was when my mother told her that ruzzians started the war in 2014. She thought those were Germans again...
My great grandfather was a half Polish, and all I remember about him is that he became an abusive drunk because of the beautiful soviet regime. No wonder my grandmother got her mental issues. He died before I was born.
To put it broadly, almost all of my relatives have survived famine, scarcity, political persecution, ruzzian chauvinism, and ostracism for being different—with some of them living through as many as two full-scale wars. Nearly all of them carry deep-seated traumas and disorders that severely impact their lives. And there are countless families like ours in Ukraine, each harboring harrowing stories and details that some still refuse to speak of. Only by comparing its experience with those of other nations and through the access to independent sources of information was Ukraine finally able to articulate and comprehend the permanent crisis and trauma that entire generations of its people had to endure. Only recently have we begun to grasp the devastating consequences on the mental and physical health of Ukrainians left by life behind the so called iron curtain . One can only wonder what the current war will leave in its wake.
