Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

February 20, Sunday Yesterday, at home in Kyiv, we listened to Boris Johnson’s speech and immediately bought tickets to Lviv. My husband Roman suggested a week ago that S, our three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and I stay with my parents in Lviv, but I refused, despite the American and British embassies having already relocated there (and my mother begging us to come). A few days ago, the older daughter of my husband, a first-year student, left to join her mother who lives abroad. Now it’s time for us. As I’m packing, S is running around, exclaiming “Let’s go to Lviv, to Lviv!” An unusual enthusiasm, which I wouldn’t notice if she didn’t also say: “I don’t want him to kill us all!” “Who?” I ask. “Who’s gonna kill us?” She doesn’t answer, just keeps selecting which things I should pack. I’m astonished: she couldn’t have heard anything like that from me or Roman, as we didn’t discuss the situation in such a dramatic manner. Her kindergarten, maybe? They were preparing children to go to a shelter, and she might have overheard the older kids. During the last month schools and kindergartens in Kyiv and Lviv (I’m not sure about the other cities) taught children what to do in case of an air raid. We were all urged to prepare survival bags, or, if literally translated from Ukrainian, “an anxious backpack.” There were dozens of how-to articles everywhere. Yet we didn’t pack ours until now. I keep telling myself that we will come back in a week, covered with shame. Another voice in my head tells me that we may never come back if the city is occupied or destroyed. We send a couple of boxes with clothes by post to pick up in Lviv later. We take all the documents, many toys, and almost all of S’s clothes with us. What I learn instantly is that you look differently at your belongings when your home may be destroyed or vandalized. I take my diary, which I gave up after I started to write a book last year. I take my daughter’s vyshyvanka (a Ukrainian folk embroidered shirt) for the same reason: I just hate to think anyone may touch it. I take three books: two old Polish books I recently purchased at the Internet flea market, and the first edition of Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Perversion. Not only is it my favorite book, I bought it at a very special moment of my life in 1997, so I guess it’s my most precious possession, when it comes to material objects. One of my duties as a fellow at a Central European think tank — the fellowship is named for Marcin Krol, the Polish philosopher and democratic activist — has been to contribute to a weekly overview of security in the region. And so I’ve been explaining my anxiety by the fact that I have to read all the news. It’s hard to draw a line between my intuition and my information overload. I notice my relief as soon as our train reaches the Ternopil region, officially western Ukraine, the area that is not of Russian interest according to the published maps of future invasion. A canary in a coalmine: No, the Russian invasion was not a surprise. Ukrainians tend to say that we’ve been at this war for eight years, since 2014. That is true: even those not directly affected by the aggressions of the past eight years know someone who was. Almost every morning the war was mentioned in the news: someone was killed or wounded; even in the “quiet” period it was not really quiet. My husband later told me that his heart sank as he was closing our door, thinking of his friends who, in exactly the same way, closed the doors of their apartments in Donetsk eight years ago. At the same time I never felt so much at home in my country as after Maidan. The paradox is that while parts of the country — Crimea and areas in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — were occupied by Russians in 2014, the rest of the country was, as I experienced it, de-occupied; emancipated. I started my own small business, a publishing house, in 2015, since finally I knew that I wouldn’t be persecuted by the tax administration, and that my business would not be raided, as happened before to many people I knew, especially when Kuchma and Yanukovych were our presidents. Of course, many others had businesses in the pre-Maidan years, but I was not as brave as them. In 2014 I applied to the State Security Service to use its archives because I realized that they are my public service now, no longer just the former KGB, politicized and filled with Russian agents. Then, in 2018, it changed for me, when my daughter was born. I became terrified by the images of all possible dangers and risks. I couldn’t see a movie or read a book (except for some non-fiction) if they included a situation with a child in danger. Even fairy tales horrified me: how can any sane person let a child go into the woods alone? Of course, I told myself, there were rational explanations for my outbreak of fear. First, the oxytocin storm, which is normal when you have a newborn on your hands. Second, all survival mechanisms are on. And finally, the family traumas in anamnesis: both of my maternal grandparents were orphans. My grandmother lost her mother when she was seven, growing up mostly with relatives who weren’t particularly kind to her. Her painful memories were among the first stories I heard. And so I felt like I was five again, brimming with the fear of becoming an orphan. My grandfather, too, grew up in an orphanage, after his parents were killed by the Bolsheviks as “class enemies.” It didn’t get better with time. I read so many books about the atrocities of the twentieth century. I wrote and edited articles about