EVERYTHING MUST GO:
BELONGING AS DISPOSSESSION
by SLINKO
A PHANTOM LIMB
Often used interchangeably with identity, belonging is its own term implying a more expanded meaning than being part of a social group through kinship, ethnicity, or nationality. An “arena of contestation”[1], a “translocational positionality”[2], contemporary belonging is deeply rooted in specific location as well as constant movement across borders, identities, cultures, and ideologies. Belonging is geographically unfixed, socially constructed, politically permeable, and materially embodied. Belonging is at the center of this war. It is a frontline that divides being Ukrainian by choice or being a subject of Russia’s conquest.
For this presentation I will talk about three video works, which closely relate to my roots in East Ukraine. I use myself as a case study, a subject, whose identity can only be defined as in-betweenness [3]—between cultures, countries, languages, ideologies, and even chronologies. Belonging has never felt practical, or applicable in my own life. From growing up in the last throes of the USSR, to immigration and assimilation in the US, there was never a place I felt fully at home. Maybe therefore I kept coming back to Ukraine over the last 27 years—to understand Ukraine, and myself in relation to its trajectory.
As an immigrant, I am a hybrid: I am one of the last Soviet Ukrainians [4], a Post-Soviet Ukrainian, an Eastern Ukrainian, one of many Russian-speaking Ukrainians, a member of the Ukrainian diaspora in the US, and a subject of the Ukrainian state according to its citizenship laws [5]. At once Ukrainian in many ways, and not Ukrainian enough, I feel constantly displaced by my own biography, my identity incomplete, a phantom limb searching for its owner.
MOTHERLAND
The borders of my motherland have very specific outlines: it is a half-acre vegetable and garden plot, with a house overlooking the hills. Behind the hills lies a Ukrainian military base. Located 11-minute drive to the west of Bakhmut, the village Ivanivske has been shelled by both sides since 2014. And yet, my aunt continues to tend to her humble harvest of tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots. She refuses to leave. A humble piece of land with strong gravitational force, I’ve been returning to it since my emigration to the US. In 2009, in this patch of dirt, I dug out a mud pit to stage a video performance Moth- er-Motherland. My maternal family legend has it that in 1860, a landowner of Ivanivske traded her hunting dogs for two serfs. Radkovsky brothers were brought from Poland to Ukraine to work as metal smiths, to fix horseshoes for the landlady’s farmland. After 1861, when Imperial Russia abolished serfdom, the brothers were free to go, but stayed after one fell in love with a Ukrainian woman. For my video, excavating the dirt to insert myself into the landscape also meant exposing my body to potential cuts. Through this breach of skin boundary, the microbial life, which long ago absorbed the bodies of my ancestors, could enter my own bloodstream. This permeability between the body and the land allowed me to reconnect with my land materially, with a mouth full of dirt.
A specific feature of its location, Ukraine’s etymology is theorized to mean ‘okraina’, or ‘borderland’. It is a contextual periphery—East of Europe, and West of Russia, and this state of in-betweenness [6] is particularly visible in the steppes of Donbas. Bordering Russia, and removed from Kyiv, Donbas has a history and reputation of being a free steppe [7], a safe haven for criminals, capitalists, workers, ethnic minorities, and political refugees alike. Belonging in Donbas is fraught with ambiguity and precarity, exploitation and manipulation. It is my birthplace, all my beginnings of self-definition stem from this landscape of coal mines, steel mills, sunflower fields, abandoned lots, bad roads, stretches of weedy growth where nothing more can be plundered. Until recently little known, except for its Soviet era sparkling wine [8] and a nearby salt mine [9], Bakhmut is a small town in East Ukraine, 70 miles north of Donetsk city. It is a place where I spent numerous summers with my cousins and aunts, where from my grandparents’ apartment I could see into the windows of the hospital where I was born. As I write this, Bakhmut is constantly in the news under titles like “bloody vortex”, ‘‘meat grinder”, and “endless mud and death”[10]. The fighting for Bakhmut is often compared to the Battle of Verdun [11], a WW1 trench war between German and French troops. Fought over 9 months, with over 1 million lost lives, the extreme concentration of shelling over a small area produced 6 to 10 ft deep explosion craters. Filled with rainwater, these pits turned the landscape into a field of deadly traps. If a soldier slipped in, the mud pit acted as quicksand, making the rescue impossible [12].
In my daily scouring of Telegram channels on war updates, I came across photos of Ukrainian soldiers knee deep in mud, in the cold and gloomy outskirts of Bakhmut. The comparison to WW1 is striking. The battle for my birthplace, has been waged since August of 2022, with both sides encountering heavy losses, it appears to be a violent attrition of land into uncontrollable mud.
HOMO SOVIETICUS
In the fall of 2013, I traveled across Eastern Ukraine to document Lenin monuments and to understand why they remained after two decades of independence, and several decommunization laws [13]. Unlike Western Ukraine with a strong sense of Ukrainian identity, Donbas has a largely Soviet identity. For decades, its coal mines attracted a largely Russian-speaking workforce, concentrating in urban centers. And, while Donbas’ countryside remains largely ethnically Ukrainian, an overwhelming majority of Donbas residents speak Russian. Donbas’ borderline location, multi-ethnic make up, and a long history of extraction and exploitation of human and natural resources, contribute to the nature of its local politics.
Even long before 2014, the pro-Russia Party of Regions14 called for special status, or even autonomy of Donbas. During the 2014 conflict many Donbas residents, especially those who identified with Ukraine were forced to flee, becoming internally displaced. But the image of Donbas as a land of heroic Soviet miners still evokes nostalgia here, even though the coal mining industry is no longer profitable, and is outright dangerous for the workers and the environment. Belonging in Donbas is an arena of divergence between the familiar past and unknown future. Russia co-opts shared Soviet history to project a sense of belongingness. And goes even further back, repackaging Donbas as Novorossia [15] to offer belonging in a form of re-colonization.
In the video Homo Sovieticus, I turn to the 1908 sci-fi novel Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia [16] to think about how ideologies go awry, and yet idealism persists. Set as a Bolshevik utopia on Mars, Red Star’s fictional society has ample resources, voluntary 2-hour work, and a perfect educational system freed from familial bonds. Although poorly written, the text holds some clues to understanding the resilience of Soviet appeal. In this paradox, the idealized past brings about the desire for its resto- ration. It does not require careful examination of history; it absolves from learning about its dark parts. The past is an endless resource for extracting legitimacy [17], and in the hollowed-out coal mines of Donbas, Soviet and colonial past offer a ready-made filler.
As part of Homo Sovieticus project I visited Soledar [18], a salt mining town located a 20-minute ride from Bakhmut. Descending 600 meters I could imagine an austere, yet utopian seclusion, where everything remains far above the ground. Unlike the narrow and dangerous tunnels of coal mines of Donets Basin, the shafts of this salt mine are wide and tall, able to withstand geological pressure. At the time of writing this, one of the fiercest battles takes place right above these salt chambers. Soledar is a frontline between the Ukrainian armed forces and Wagner group, a paramilitary company run by Putin’s mercenary and confidant Prigozhin.
On his social media, Prigozhin extolled the salt mine as an ‘underground city’ [19], able to house an entire army. It is unclear what use can tanks, artillery, and soldiers have 600 meters below the ground, but the idea of an underground city is interesting to consider as a metaphor for today’s Russia—an isolationist society, heavily dependent on an extractive economy. Without evolution to something qualitatively new, it constantly excavates its own past, polishing and gilding the rough spots to present it as something essential and eternal.
Interestingly, the Red Star author, Alexander Bogdanov, was not only a fiction writer, but a prominent political activist, and a physician. A contemporary rival of Lenin, in 1924 Bogdanov experimented on himself with direct blood transfusions searching for eternal youth. Lenin’s death in the same year prompted attention of the Soviet authorities in hopes that Lenin may be revived in some distant future. Lenin’s body continues to be displayed at the Kremlin mausoleum, perhaps awaiting eventual resurrection. After Euromaidan [20], in 2014, as the fallout turned deadly, many of the Lenin statues were toppled by protesters, prompting a popular term ‘Leninopad’ [21], meaning Lenin-fall. Some of the monuments documented through this project still coincide with the frontlines of the fighting in Eastern Ukraine. The monuments continue to be reanimated, falling in Ukrainian towns, and surreally returning in the occupied territories.
EVERYTHING MUST GO
I have been moving between Bakhmut, Ivanivske, Soledar and Donetsk to trace my own belonging right along the frontline of the current fighting. A very small area in Donbas, I’ve been returning this plot of land since 1996. In August of 1991, I was sitting in the field of Ivanivske village, listening to my grandfather’s radio. The programming suddenly stopped. The coup, which attempted to seize power from Gorbachev, had failed by August 24th. Shortly, the radio announcement stated that Verkhovna Rada adopted the Act of Independence of Ukraine and called for a referendum. By the end of the same year Gorbachev made closing remarks announcing the end of the USSR. The trajectories of Ukraine and Russia began to diverge. While Ukraine set out to work on its long-desired nation-state project, Russia kept looking for its lost glory. By 2000, the Russian Federation under Putin had returned the national anthem to its Soviet melody, officially signifying nostalgia as Russia’s political direction. Reading the old Soviet anthem one can easily spot the language of colonialism with Russia at its center:
Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics,
Great Russia has welded forever to stand.
Created in struggle by will of the people,
United and mighty, our Soviet land
(USSR, 1977–1991 lyrics)
Be glorified, our free Fatherland,
The age-old union of fraternal peoples,
Ancestor-given wisdom of the people!
Be glorified, country! We are proud of you
(Russian Federation, 2000 lyrics, 1939 music)
The new Russian anthem continues its claim over peoples and lands disguised as brotherhood, and legitimized by vague, but indisputable ‘ancestor-given wisdom’. In contrast, the anthem of Ukraine represents direction toward the future: the continuing struggle for independence.
The glory of Ukraine has not yet perished, nor the will.
Still upon us, young brothers, fate shall smile.
Our enemies shall vanish, like dew in the sun.
We too shall rule, brothers, our country
(Ukraine, 1862 lyrics, adopted in 1992, and again in 2003)
Language has been at the center of this war, its pretext and its medium, as two post-Soviet scholars write: “languages are not something human beings have but what human beings are. As such, languages are embedded in the body and in the memories (geohistorically located) of each person.” [22] I grew up in Donetsk, an hour drive from Bakhmut, and less than two hours’ ride from the Russian border. According to the 2012 census, the population of then thriving Donetsk was 493,392 Russian, 478,041 Ukrainian, and around 40,000 inhabitants identifying as Greeks, Belarusians, Armenians, Tatars, Jews, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians. An overwhelming majority of Donbas residents speak Russian as their first language. Russian speakers are targeted, that is they are the targets of Russian imperial conquest for repossession. The ‘Russian world’ claiming to liberate and protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians, has already dispossessed them from homes, livelihoods, and life itself. Here, the Russian language is both an identity and a liability. Using language as a loophole for propaganda, and backing up local militia, Russia has succeeded in creating a break away Donetsk People’s Republic. After 2014, it was not advisable to travel to Donetsk as an American citizen. I could no longer return to my hometown and see some of my family.
Growing up at the end of USSR in the borderlands of Donbas and emigrating to the US at the beginning of Ukrainian statehood, I am used to feeling between places, languages, and ideologies. I have been preoccupied with the idea of belonging because, there is a paradox in this word. It implies simultaneous possession and dispossession, lack and fulfillment. In the case of Ukraine, it means belonging to itself, separate from Russia. In the case of being Ukrainian, it can mean identifying as anything but Russian. This idea of dispossession in relationship to belonging is at the root of my project Everything Must Go. In 2019, I came back to Ukraine to conduct a sort of fieldwork across various flea markets, to patch together my own belonging to Ukraine through observation, travel, and research. I was particularly interested in how a sense of belonging manifests itself in the everyday. How humble objects traded at flea markets tell a bigger story of a changing country. The title Everything Must Go borrows its meaning from a term used by US stores that are going out of business and need all inventory to be cleared out. In this project, it serves as a metaphor for the structural and societal clearing out in Post-Soviet Ukraine.
Flea markets across Ukraine represent an intensely rich fieldwork, cutting across class, economic status, political affiliation, and even nationality. Born out of necessity to make a living after the difficult post-Soviet transition of the 1990’s, these markets allowed the most vulnerable parts of the population to survive. In the pre-war time, flea markets continued to exist as a main source of livelihood for older or unemployable citizens. Enclaves of both the past and the present, flea markets are negotiating public forums for a still ongoing transition to a new Ukrainian citizen. Populated by fascinating bric-a-brac items and no less fascinating characters who sell them, a flea market is not just a trading place, it is its own social organism. People who sell and buy here often engage in topics of conversation as varied as the current price of bread, or a political course of an entire nation. Opinions, memories, personal experiences are traded along with old crystal goblets, chummy figurines, spare car tires, clocks, and radios. When I traveled across the flea markets in Lviv, Kyiv, Odessa, and Kharkiv, I paid close attention to conversations about a newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. A perfect example of multivalent identity—post-Soviet, Russian-speaking, Jewish Ukrainian—Zelensky won elections by a 70% majority. With a background as a comedian and an actor playing a fictional president of Ukraine in a TV show titled Servant of the People [23], even those who voted for him were not sure what to make of him.
I AM UKRAINIAN
At the markets, I heard people expressing great hopes for eradicating endemic corruption, bringing about more fairness. I overheard an argument that Zelensky would never stand up to Putin. And one person revealed that, although they were originally from Moscow, they patriotically embraced Ukraine. It was fascinating to observe citizenship and nationhood in these granular everyday forms. Zelensky has surprised almost everyone with his bravery and resilience by standing up to Putin and galvanizing the West to aid Ukraine. But just as importantly, Zelensky gave Ukrainians a concise and unambiguous message, that reads large across his sweatshirt: ‘I’m Ukrainian’.
In response to the severance and dispossession that war inflicts on Ukrainians, belonging is not a default condition of kinship, linguistic or local membership. Belonging in today’s Ukraine is a choice, a form of agency exercised by those who identify with being Ukrainian. They can be spread across the globe, and have differences in beliefs, customs, and even language, but they are united by belonging as a form of resistance, a commitment to define being Ukrainian on their own terms.
Footnotes:
1 Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging—Intersectional contestations. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi. Cited in A Conceptual Shift in Studies of Belonging and the Politics of Belonging, Eva Youkhana. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/150
2 ibid.
3 Anthias (2006, 2008) Anthias, F. (2006). Belongings in a globalizing and unequal world: Rethinking translocations.
In N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, & U. Vieten (Eds.), The situat-ed politics of belonging (pp. 365–388). London, UK: Thousand Oaks. Thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: An intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. Translocations: Migration and Social Change, 4(1), 5-20.
Cited in A Conceptual Shift in Studies of Belonging and the Politics of Belonging, Eva Youkhana. https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/150
4 Alexievich, S. (2016) Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, 2016, Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
5 A Ukrainian citizenship has to be renounced through a written request with the office of the president of Ukraine. Otherwise, an emigre remains considered a Ukrainian citizen by the state.
6 In-betweenness is a border theory term in colonial and post-colonial studies. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/01419870.2018.1544651?needAccess=true&role=button
7 Kuromiya, H. (1998) Freedom and Terror in the Donbas, A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland 1870s-1990s. p. 11, Cambridge University Press.
8 Soviet Champagne, renamed Artemivsk Champagne after USSR’s collapse, is produced in Bakhmut (formerly Artemivsk) since 1950. See: https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2017/different-sort-champagne-socialism/
9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakhmut
10 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/world/europe/ukraine-war-bakhmut.html https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-bakhmut-russia-assault-invasion-analysis/32174980.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/trenches-endless-mud-and-death-the-battle-of-bakhmut.html https://kyivindependent.com/national/hell-in-high-definition-inside-front-line-aerial-unit-surveilling-battle-of-bakhmut
11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun
12 https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-troops-rescue-french-soldier-1916/
13 https://www.kmu.gov.ua/en/news/248062005
14 The Party of Regions was a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, and the party of former president Victor Yanukovich.
He fled to Russia after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, a long series of protests in support of closer ties with the European Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_of_Regions and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yanukovych
15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya_(confederation)
16 Bogdanov, A. (1908) Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia
17 Appadurai, A. The Past as a Scarce Resource. New Series, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 201-219 (19 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2801395
18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soledar
19 https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/wagner-boss-says-he-wants-bakhmut-in-ukraine-for-its-underground-cities/
20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_attempt
22 Tlostanova, M. and Mignolo W., (2012) Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflection from Eurasia and the Americas. (p.61)
23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_of_the_People_(TV_series)