On June 8, 2022, when the world finally recognized the atrocities of Russian troops on the occupied territories of Ukraine, I proposed an intellectual exercise to my Facebook friends: “Imagine that a couple of years have passed. Russian war crimes are discussed less and less. Perhaps some war criminals have even been jailed. Those who survived try to forget and just live a normal life, while the media have turned their attention to other events. And then we learn that there was a writer of genius among the Russian troops in Bucha or Irpin, in the Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions. And he writes brilliant prose about all that happened there. You know, without pathos, without excuses, a bit disinterestedly; he describes the horrors almost aloofly, but without covering up them up. (He himself, according to what we hear, didn’t kill anyone.) His genius is undeniable. His book is widely translated and wins prizes. And in bookstores and in libraries, his prose is shelved under ‘Ukraine.’ Ukrainians are furious, of course, but not as fervidly as they would have been in 2022. And who is listening to them? Everyone agrees, of course, that what they endured, what traumatized them, was horrible. And everyone agrees that this great prose, with its roots in a great culture, no matter how tragic the circumstances were, will outlive this traumatized generation. It will outlive the survivors because it has such a great culture behind it.” If you think that I was being hysterical in my bleak thought-experiment, I should admit that I did make a mistake: the situation that I imagined came to pass sooner than I expected — it was a matter of only a few months. On August 17, 2022, The Guardian published a profile of Pavel Filatiev, a former Russian paratrooper who published his memoirs on his VKontakte social media page and fled the country. The Guardian also published an extract of Filatiev’s account. He describes the looting of Kherson, and the inhuman conditions that Russian troops endured before invading Ukraine, and how the command to invade “turned us into savages.” And while it is unlikely that Filatiev wrote great literary prose, his memoir is reported to have been sold for three hundred thousand euros after he reached France. It was published in English, French, and Spanish. I don’t know of any Ukrainian writer or soldier who managed to sell his or her works so well. (My PEN Ukraine colleagues confirm this.) As in most cases when we in Ukraine discuss Russian and Soviet culture, my Facebook post had addressed two issues, one external and one domestic. The domestic issue was the thorny question of our approach to the cultural legacy of Russia and the Soviet Union. For those few Ukrainian Facebook friends who might not recognize the literary allusion in my dystopian scenario, I added a hint: a photo of the monument to the Bolshevik soldiers of the First Cavalry Budyonny Army near Olesko, about fifty miles from my native city of Lviv. Despite its defeat during the Soviet-Polish war in 1920, the cavalry was glorified and earned a substantial place in the Soviet pantheon. Known as the Red Cavalry, it was founded by Semyon Budyonny and was substantially responsible for the earlier Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. Budyonny later became one of Stalin’s closest associates. The monument was huge and ambitious and technically complicated: an eighty-eight-foot-high sculpture of two riders on the top of a hill that jutted dramatically out of the landscape and rose almost directly above the Ukrainian part of the European E40 route (a major highway labeled “Lviv — Kyiv — Moscow” when it was built). The riders were racing wildly, as if they were about to take flight. Whenever I travelled that road, I felt like I was shrinking before the danger that the colossal cantilevered horse and riders would fall on the road at any moment and crush a car. But this monument does not exist anymore. It was ruined in the early 2000s, when its copper and other metals attracted the attention of ideologically agnostic collectors of scrap metal, and despite its protected status under the Ministry of Culture the local authorities didn’t really care about the plunder. In 2015, when Ukraine adopted its “de-Communization” legislation, the rest of the composition was dismantled. The fate of this statue, and the fate of other Communist monuments, became a focus of public discussion: what to do if a Soviet monument is also a work of art? The case of the First Cavalry Budyonny Army monument was a fine illustration of the problem. Its construction in 1975 was politically driven: in the same year, the nearby Castle of Olesko was finally opened for visitors after decades of abandonment and restoration. Olesko had changed masters many times since the late Middle Ages, but it is famous mostly as the birthplace of the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, the hero of the Battle of Vienna in 1683. In Soviet times, Olesko was the only castle for thousands of miles around that was accessible to tourists; the others were either in ruins or being used as warehouses or hospitals. The official reason for the creation of the great equestrian monument was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the First Cavalry Budyonny Army (and the nearby mass grave of its soldiers who died there in 1920). But it was also designed as an unambiguous message to Olesko’s visitors: we will grant you a brief glimpse of your European heritage, but don’t you dare forget who the boss is here. I have never seen a grosser visualization of foreign domination than those colossal riders. The monument was a kind of visual rape of the bucolic landscape. In the writer whom I invented in my Facebook parable I was alluding, of course, to the case of Isaac Babel, the Odessa-born Jewish writer. Babel wrote in Russian, and he is most renowned for his Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories.
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