Who we are supposed to hate

First, let me tell you a story, a real-life adventure in the “Wild East” of the early 2000s.

I was backpacking through Ukraine during a frigid March with American freelance photographer Kirt Vinion on the trail of a rumor about illegal coal mining operations in the Donetsk region. We’d been on the rails and the cold streets for three weeks and my stamina was wearing decidedly thin. A contact of a contact of a contact finally led us to the apartment of a woman named Svetlana in a mid-sized, out-of-work coal-mining town.

She’d agreed to put us up for the night and get us connected to local people who knew about the mafia operations in the old mine tunnels. Kirt offered her money for her trouble, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Svetlana was educated and she knew a couple of foreign journalists, thread-bare as we might be, could be important in the struggle for a better future for her town and region.

The heat had been off for months and Svetlana kept all four burners of her range stove going, trying—mostly futilely—to heat her apartment. She said the future would be bleak unless the mafia could be brought under control. She took us to a local pub in search of food, and several rough-looking men surrounded us and loudly stated that they were going to kill us. Svetlana played cool, said her “Papa wouldn’t like that” and they melted away.

Creative Commons image by John Karwoski

“Everyone has connections,” she shrugged. “It’s how we survive.”

The next day a local writer friend of hers smuggled us out of town, lying down in the back of his hatchback. The “Papa” trick hadn’t quite worked well enough, they said. Vasya, the writer, dropped us off at the edge of a leafless woodlot as snow began to fall again and told us to walk down the track to the right for two kilometers, then turn left at the fork and we’d find “it.” He sped away before I could get clear on what “it” was.

There was no cell signal out in Eastern Ukraine in those days. This was all low tech, so we shouldered our packs and hiked. I could tell Kirt was uncomfortable and doubting my language interpretation skills. I was, however, much happier out in trees, away from too many people. Snow or no snow, this I could handle.

Sure enough, after some anxiety and floundering around, we came to a tiny, dilapidated village bordered by towering slag heaps. We stumbled out of the trees and a wirery old man came out of the nearest house, grinning from ear to ear with delight.

“Valeriy,” he told us his name was. He gave us hugs and double-cheeked Russian kisses and hustled us into the warmth of his “kitchen,” which was an open-sided shed in his garden enclosure. There he had a fire going and he started to fry up a small pile of potatoes. My hunger was almost overpowering. We hadn’t eaten a decent meal in a week and we hadn’t had anything to eat all day—with our escape from death threats and all.

When I thought I couldn’t stand it a second longer, Valeriy divided up the fried potatoes, sprinkled on salt and we fell to ravenously. “Yes,” we’d found the right place, he confirmed, bobbing his head up and down. “Yes,” someone had told him to expect us.

“Svetlana?”

Well, he didn’t know her exactly, but through someone else, a grape vine, one way or another, he knew about us and wanted to help.

“Tonight, you sleep!” Valeriy boomed heartily. “Tomorrow you will see the mines.”

“Will the mafia be upset that we’re here?”

“No, no, silly worries,” he guffawed. “Don’t worry. You’re safe here.”

The next day, true to his word, Valeriy introduced us to his relative-of-some-sort Vasily, who led us into the woods and introduced us to two different teams of illegal mine workers. One group was crawling in and out of a ventilation shaft in the a wooded draw half a mile outside the village.

While Kirt got outfitted to accompany the miners underground, I sat talking to the young women who made up a good part of the crew. They were in their late teens, little more than girls, but their faces were hard and black with coal dust. They showed me the hundred-pound sacks of coal they had drug up out of the shaft by hand without equipment beyond old helmets and headlamps.

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Of course it is, but there is no food here without money... The state controls all the farmland. If we don’t work, we don’t eat and neither do our children.”

Where were the older people? I asked. Mostly anyone over thirty was so sick with lung diseases from breathing the coal dust that they could no longer work. The crews got younger and younger every year, the girls told me.

The second shaft we visited went straight down like a well. There was a twelve-year-old working there, squirming into places the adults were too large to reach. “Yes,” they worried. The women in that group showed me the shrine for a group of colleagues who had died in a cave-in a month earlier. But here the same desperate explanation was repeated, and their gaunt faces and the fact that we could barely find food to buy despite our hard currency made it very believable.

We returned to Valeriy’s house exhausted that night but excited to have finally found what we had been looking for all those weeks. Valeriy had more planned for us the next day. He talked animatedly about how good this land had once been to his family. Showing me a portrait of Joseph Stalin, he kept in a place of honor in his living room, he explained that his parents had been resettled here from some place in northern Russia. They’d been hungry all the time and here the land was open.

“No one living on it,” he smiled, thinking back to his childhood. “The soil grew food as easily as weeds, and there was coal and good jobs for everyone.”

I was practiced at not showing my shock. I’d interviewed on both sides of grisly wars before and I knew how to keep an interested, open expression and just ask questions. But I picked at his memory a bit, tried to ferret out any concern over Stalin’s image in the rest of the world. Nope. Nada. If Valeriy had any clue that Stalin was not widely considered a working man’s hero, he was a better poker face than I.

We bedded down in the living room, covered in beautiful Russian wool carpets, paintings and antique furniture. Obviously this household had once known much better times.

Then, at five o’clock in the morning, as light was just breaking through the trees, Valeriy shook me awake. His face was drawn and ghostly white. His hands trembled and his voice rasped in a terrified whisper.

“Get up! You’ve got to get out now! Go! The FSB is coming for you! Someone snitched.” The FSB is supposed to be the Russian secret police, but colloquially that could mean anything from paramilitaries to mafia to rogue state actors.

Valeriy’s terror was all the more contagious because of his certainty of safety the day before. Kirt and I threw on our packs and ran through the trees on a trail behind Valeriy. We burst out of the woods along side a narrow highway and Valeriy flagged down a bus with letters spelling out Kyiv across the front.

“Don’t come back,” he called out as we swung aboard.

That was my experience in Eastern Ukraine in a nutshell. The most important theme across the whole week we were in the region was the incredible kindness of complete strangers, who—usually for no self-interest that I could discern—risked everything to help, shelter us, smuggle us from place to place or direct us to the next contact, all because they knew the medieval system of mafia-run, black-market coal mining that employed the labor of starving children was terrible and untenable.

The chain of good-hearted, brave people it took to get Kirt and me to that story was humbling. We published it in a major feature for the international newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. It inspired other researchers, but sadly it likely didn’t lead to any immediate improvements in the lives of the people of those desperate villages.

We tried, but the work of a journalist is to highlight one crisis after another. Usually, the follow up falls to others.

But today that story takes on new significance, and my knowledge of Eastern Ukraine—such as it is—is sought out due to the current war. I’m always hard pressed in these conversations to explain, “No, really these people were Russians. They spoke Russian… Yes, they helped us. They probably saved our lives a few times… Yes, they had portraits of Stalin… Yup, they were clueless… Yes, they literally shared their last remnants of food with us.”

And damn it! That is not a political statement. It is just a fact.

Yes, the Russian invasion is wrong, illegal and unwarranted. Yes, even in the East where there are a lot of “ethnic Russians,” it’s still wrong. Putin is a madman. So many Russians are duped by propaganda. Valeriy was. He thought Stalin saved his family. Heck, maybe Stalin did save his family, after he murdered a third of the Ukrainian population, which was why all that good farmland was empty and waiting for Russian resettlement back in the 1930s.

That doesn’t make it less of a fact that Svetlana, Vasya, Valeriy and Vasily risked their lives to help us, a couple of shoestring American journalists, get the word out about the excesses of their mafia overlords, That doesn’t erase their kindness and courage. And it does not mean I will ever hate all Russians or feel comfortable around the online vitriol and hate speech about ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

It’s understandable, and if your family or friends are under bombardment or held hostage in a blockade, you get some free passes to emote, in my book. But don’t ask me to go along and laugh at sick jokes about killing scared young recruits who don’t know where they are. I’ll work on planning routes for refugees and aid workers until I am sleep deprived and tottering, but hate has nothing to do with it.

I know there are Russians who do know the truth of the matter and they are horrified and ashamed at their state’s actions. They have my sympathy, not my hate. I’ll help them too, if I can.

And those who don’t know… Those who are taken in by the propaganda? I hope they’ll get out of that and force this war to stop. I’ll help there if I can too, and I know to be careful, because those guys who threatened to kill us in the pub, they were ordinary small town Russians too.

This isn’t naïveté. It’s just realism. People are people here or over there.

If given a chance, some people will go to extremes, grab all they can for themselves no matter who it hurts, hurt others just for kicks or a sense of power, scream hate and even kill. People here have that capacity, when they think they have the backing of those with power, as they did on January 6, 2021. And people there do too. The greater the feeling that violence is condoned, the greater the atrocities.

It isn’t a fundamental difference in humans. It’s just whether or not we let the bad wolves in our midst be in charge with guns or whether we insist on good wolves and the rule of law.

No matter the times or the conflict, there is always someone we’re supposed to hate. Most often, it seems like it’s right-wingers and rural “conservatives” preaching hate against this or that group, sometimes someone we’re at war with, sometimes someone coming to work the hard, dirty jobs they don’t want.

But the war in Ukraine has seemed to give educated, liberal folks a weird kind of license to hate. And the terms and jokes I’ve heard out of people I thought were level-headed and kind are sobering.

It’s one more reminder that no category really matters, not left or right, not ours or theirs. What matters—and it matters a great deal—is what kind of person an individual chooses to be right now in the moment, relating, thinking, talking. That line you cross when you let a little hate speech go because it feels good to release some of the pent up frustration, that’s the line that matters.