Alejandro Kirk
Residents of the city walked to the monuments that highlight both the humanism of the soldiers and the sacrifice of the workers.to lay flowers, or simply to pay tribute to their parents and grandparents. | Photo: Alejandro Kirk
Early in the morning of May 9, 2022, with my colleagues and friends Bruno de Carvalho and Maurizio Vezzosi, we set out for the port of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, to cover the celebration of Soviet Victory Day over Nazi Germany in 1945. In Donetsk, the usual ceremonies had been suspended for fear of a Ukrainian artillery attack on the city center, which, contrary to what we had all expected a few weeks earlier, had begun to intensify.
At that time Mariupol was a city practically in ruins, devastated by the battle, and by the Ukrainian practice of using residential and public buildings as combat points, with the civilian population as a shield. We had been there many times before, and the testimonies overwhelmingly agreed that the Nationalists emplaced tanks and guns in the spacious courtyards of the Soviet-built buildings, and then retreated by setting fire to the residences, with their inhabitants locked in the basements.
As in all Soviet cities, a huge park and esplanade are the site of homage to the 27 million Soviet citizens who fell in defense of their socialist homeland after the German invasion of 1941. They are monuments that highlight both the humanism of the soldiers and the sacrifice of the workers. They are spaces that are moving in times of peace, and even more so being a few blocks from the steelworks, with the constant booms of artillery as a framework for the celebration. Mariupol holds the title of Hero City of the Soviet Union, as highlighted by a red marble wall, which also bears the names of many of the fallen, and where families come to lay flowers.
At one end of the wall a new sculpture was added: the effigy of the famous peasant “babushka” (grandmother) who in the Kharkov area took the Soviet flag out of her attic to salute those she thought were Russian soldiers. But they were Ukrainian nationalists who passed her food and trampled on the flag amid taunts. The woman returned the food and took back her flag, shouting in their faces the significance of that red cloth in the fight against the Nazi invaders. Her image became an emblem of the Special Military Operation, which many Russian soldiers and officers wear on their chests.
In Mariupol, in those days there was no electricity, communications, water, fuel, and people cooked with any piece of wood in the gardens of the buildings that were still standing. In the destroyed buildings, many of them, people lived in basements built precisely for the event of a war, but not between Russians, but possible foreign invaders. For the first time since February, music could be heard, produced with generators. Songs of the Great Patriotic War. Hundreds of city residents walked to the monuments to lay flowers, or simply to pay tribute to their parents and grandparents. There was a march, led by the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin. All that, I repeat, in the midst of the incessant cannonade in Azovstal.
It was a hot spring day. I interviewed many people, asking why they were there. We saw a large family, commanded by a woman in her 60s. When she learned that I was coming from Chile she hugged me and with moist eyes said that she had regretted very much the 1973 coup d’état, and in particular the death of Victor Jara, that she hoped that something so atrocious would never happen again. The whole family surrounded us, telling us of their hardships and their hope that the war would soon be over and they could rebuild their lives. They had walked from afar to get to the Victory rally, and they were glad to be back in Russia.
I found myself there in the strange situation of being consoled for a coup that had occurred in my country of birth 49 years earlier, by a family that was living through a much greater tragedy, but with that very Russian spirit that some call resilience. It would not be the only time I would find myself in such a situation.
“Venezuela! Chavez, the President of the people!”
On another occasion, an elderly couple was cooking borsch, the typical Ukrainian soup, outside their building. I recorded the cooking, not without appetite, and the man asked where it came from. – “teleSUR, Venezuela”, and he exclaims -as it would happen to me many times later- “Venezuela! Chavez, the President of the people!”- to then add that at least this war was serving for the United States to reduce the pressure of the blockade.
Again, someone thinking of the world in the midst of that horror, being in solidarity in the midst of the ruins of his own life. A phenomenon that I would later find to be very Russian.
Several months later, I would be seriously wounded by a Ukrainian shell in the center of Donetsk. Two ribs – broken – prevented a shrapnel from a 155 mm French-made shell from penetrating my lungs. The splinter is now part of my body, as is the memory of that September 17 and the weeks that followed: the public hospital, the doctors, the wounded soldiers, the Donetsk authorities. Another sign of the Russian spirit, which to this day contrasts sharply with the attitude of the press in my country of birth, which ignored the event so as not to have to talk about the Ukrainian attacks on civilians. Also with that of the “progressive” government for which I voted in 2021, which never even asked about my health. How would it have been if I were a journalist of a commercial channel, a victim of a Russian shell on Ukrainian soil? International scandals have been made for much less.
They are political and ideological symbols of the world that has changed, and of the growing inconsistency of terms like “left” and “progressivism”: the communists of Chile and Spain participate in governments that support Zelenski, who persecutes and murders communists. A regime that glorifies Stepan Bandera and the collaborationists with the invaders, that not only does not celebrate May 9, but tears down monuments to its own Soviet heroes, burns books, tries to rewrite history to present Hitler’s genocidal hordes as liberators.
At the end of March, when we arrived in the Donbas, on the very day of our arrival, we attended a press conference of the head of the Government in front of an ATM in the center of the city of Donetsk, where four days earlier a Ukrainian Tochka Uno missile had killed 20 people. There Pushilin launched an optimistic warning that reality later denied: this, he said, would be the last major attack by the nationalists, eight years of constant bombardment against civilians were about to come to an end.
In those days the Russian Ministry of Defense organized press tours of the areas near the battle. Even once in Mariupol, in April, to visit the theater which, according to the Kiev regime, had been destroyed by Russian planes with three thousand people inside. At that time the battle was still raging in the center of the city and such tours were not without danger. On the contrary. Each tour took us to places barely copied by Russia, some without having fired a shot, such as Kherson, Berdyansk or Melitopol, where life was quickly Russified: passports, car license plates, banks, currency, etc. These were places where there were no battles, and there was a placid, normal atmosphere, with cafes and boulevards full of people.
In Kherson I met Kirill Stremousov, young and energetic deputy governor of the region. Enthusiastic, he spoke a little Spanish learned in Central America and Mexico. An admirer of Chavez and Che, he told me. He wore a gray suit and underneath a white bulletproof vest. He always carried an AK rifle. He told me that after the war a just society would be built in that part of southern Ukraine, “even better than the Soviet Union”. Although everything seemed to be under control, it was obviously not so, there was tension in the air. That same night a terrorist attack shook the center of the city. The fact that Stremousov was armed all the time was another sign: shortly afterwards he would die in a confusing road accident. Months later, Russian troops would withdraw from there to the eastern bank of the great Dnieper River.
At that time, in April, almost all of us thought – perhaps foolishly – that a quick end to the conflict was possible. That on May 9 there would be a victory parade also over the Zelensky regime.
On that May 9, my young colleague, friend and companion Nikita Tretyakov did not go to Mariupol, worried about Vladimir Putin’s speech at the military parade. He feared that the president would succumb to the internal forces of the Russian elite that favored a peace agreement that would leave things as they are and allow them to return to their former life, and their business. One year later, that anxiety is still there: the world has changed radically since then, and is, therefore, much more dangerous than anyone anticipated.
The assassination attempt against Vladimir Putin with drones in the Kremlin itself finally brought the war to a modern, cosmopolitan Moscow that seemed to have nothing to do with it. To deal a final blow to the conflict, it is becoming increasingly obvious that more reserves will have to be mobilized and more tensions generated within Russian society, the elite and the bureaucracy. For Russia this is an existential war, which it cannot lose. But it is also a war against a system of unipolar world domination that is visibly collapsing, and whose leaders are willing to do anything to maintain it. Even at the cost of destroying Ukraine and the entire planet.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
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