Thoughts on Russian Army and Ukrainian Culture

Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko once wrote:

“Cruel Russians rob and pillage

What their eyes can notice.”

Taras Shevchenko wrote about something very mundane, the cruelty of the empire, the place where nothing really belonged to anyone, atrocities were a norm, and where the tsar could take anything at any moment. Therefore nothing really mattered, and the people doomed to live under constant threat of destitution, felt like their behavior wasn’t directly connected to consequences.

The army recruited soldiers who had to serve for 25 years. It wasn’t a willing recruitment as you can imagine. Lesya Ukrainka in the story The Only Son described the horror of a Ukrainian mother whose son is being randomly chosen via a kind of a lottery, to go to the army. As she cannot pay off, the woman’s son is “shaved into soldiers”. It meant the man would spend his best years away from the household. It often meant he would have no property, and in a rare chance that he survived the service he would no longer know how to cultivate land, and will end up living alone in an urban area, drinking himself to death on a pension money. In Kharkiv there is a district called Moskalivka. It was a swampy area where people didn’t normally want to settle as the vegetable gardens were often…