We’ve come full circle: from a childhood in Cold War Europe to Russians on the border. What ever next?
History really does repeat itself.
It wasn’t funny then, it isn’t funny now, but has reached theatre-of-the-absurd proportions.
For long-time loyal readers, this is all familiar ground, covered multiple times before. But let’s start from the beginning.
Or rather, now: as most of you know, I am here in Ukraine. You might be aware that Ukraine is in the news rather a lot these days. Or rather, these hours.
Let’s rewind: I spent much of my childhood, much of the 80s and early 90s in Europe, where a slowly simmering Cold War was fizzling out. I didn’t grow up with any type of existential fear, but there was always that looming concern that something might kick off between the US and the Soviets. I grew up in an American military household, and my old man’s mantra was ‘better dead than red’. The Soviet Union, and the lurking threat of communism on our doorstep, was the big enemy. In 1984, just before going on air to give his weekly radio address to the American people, Ronald Reagan said, in jest:
"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
This was during the soundcheck…or not. Apparently, millions actually heard it and started panicking. This was well before the internet, well before Twitter (I mean, obviously?), and our news sources were pretty limited, to put it mildly. Reagan was known as a jokester, but still, that got a lot of people rattled.
My family moved to Germany in September 1989. Two months later, the Berlin Wall fell. And just over two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. It wasn’t like we’d been living in everyday dreaded fear of the Soviets, but for many decades, from the end of World War II up until Christmas day, 1991, it was a bipolar world: the US v the USSR, for global supremacy. And then, suddenly, it was all over, and independence came quickly, like dominoes for all of the former Soviet states, including Ukraine (editor’s note: in Ukraine’s case, it was before the collapse, on 24 August 1991).
It was a brand new world. The Cold War was over. We had entered a triumphant new post-Cold War world order.
I went off to university in the US a few years later. Stayed there for a total of eight years. And that was it, life went on fairly peacefully.
[An aside: before going to the US, I’d spent the formative years of my childhood, from ages 10-17, in Spain, Germany and England and the American inside me played baseball. When I went off to university, I thought I’d continue with that, but the passion had gone and I gave it up not long after arriving. I also grew my hair long and got a couple of earrings. When I came back home to England the following summer, my old man took one look at me and said ‘great, you’re a communist now?!’ I can’t emphasise enough the level of epithet that ‘communism’ evoked.]
And then 9/11 happened and we were definitely into a new world order.
But the Soviet/Russian threat…that was one last thing to worry about, right?
September 2005: I arrived in Lviv, western Ukraine, for my first teaching English job. This was shortly after the Orange Revolution. Stayed for nine months, had a splendid time, but that was enough.
September 2007: Riga, Latvia. On the fringes of the former Soviet Union, yet again.
January 2009: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Back to the [former] USSR, yet again. (And the start of my first blog.)
September 2010-present: Kyiv, Ukraine.
And here we are again: the threat is lurking and things are tense and on edge. The world is watching and waiting and life, for now, just goes on here. What else can one do but get on with things and try not to think too much.
But it’s so surreal. I might be teaching a lesson and lost in the flow of things and then it ends and suddenly I’m confronted with reality again.
It’s kind of fucking scary.
Diving back into the past
From the start of this blog in February 2011 until now, I’ve shared a few personal stories about my background and home and they’re all out there somewhere if you trawl through my archive. But for now, let me just share these two from February 2014, during the Revolution of Dignity on Maidan, which seem fairly relevant now:
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