Jogging in Kharkiv, 2016: 'Why can’t they just let us think for ourselves?'

Michael Andersen writes:

In March 2016, I was filming in Kharkiv. One morning, I went jogging and met Maria, 86, at the central square where the Lenin statue used to stand.

“Molodoi chelovek,” she says to me (these days, anybody who addresses me as “young man” is certain to have my attention), “do you know who used to be up there?”

I said I did - Vladimir Lenin.

“You know,” Maria says, “during the famine, we lived in a village outside Kharkiv. We heard that they still had some food to eat in Kharkiv, so my father brought us here. It was a lie. There was no food, and people died in the streets - because of (Josef) Stalin and what they planned in Moscow. 'The motherland' needed the bread and harvest, they said. Two of my brothers and my grandparents died during the famine. Then the war came, and they told us that we had to fight for the motherland. What motherland? What had this motherland done for me? Another brother and three uncles died in the war; my father was badly wounded. I and what was left of my family ‘enjoyed’ life in the Soviet Union for another 50 years - ha.”

I asked her what kind of job she used to do.

“I was a school teacher,” she says. “I always tried to make my pupils think. But I don’t think I did a good job - I don’t see many people thinking for themselves in this place.”

Maria drags me around to the side of the plinth where there now hangs an enormous religious poster. “Then (Mikhail) Gorbachev came and told us that we had to reform – for the sake of the motherland, of course. We did and got nothing from that. Then we finally got our own, free Ukraine. Ha. Quickly, bandits took it – in the name of the motherland and freedom, of course. Then we had our Maidan also here in Kharkiv. I was too old to go to Kyiv, but I was here in Kharkiv supporting the young people, and they said they liked my soup in the evenings. In 2014, they managed to throw out one group of bandits, but another soon took their place. Then they took Lenin down – fine by me. He never did anything for me. And now this religious nonsense (Maria uses a word I cannot write here). Why?”

She shakes her head.

“Why can’t they just let us think for ourselves?”

(Michael Andersen)