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A Good Story

Volodia Mykhalchyn, Yosyp’s grandson, is standing next to the Palace of Culture, debating something over the phone animatedly: “Well, we’ve got thirty-five meters of extension cords!”

The idea of relocating the village council and creating a hotel is actually being put to life, albeit half a century after Volodia’s grandfather voiced it. The profit from the hotel is supposed to go toward local community development.

Today Volodia is the deputy mayor of Hrushvytsia Persha. He’s twenty-four. He studied in Kyiv but didn’t want to stay there. The city’s too Russian speaking, he says.

“I didn’t like it. I returned to the village in 2015 and switched to distance learning. My parents said, If you’re paying for it, then do it. So I did. Local elections were happening just then, and I decided to run. I was twenty-one years old.”

“Twenty-one?” I ask with surprise.

“I had a yearning for change; I wanted to figure out how everything worked. I’d been interested in politics since school, maybe because my grandpa talked about it a lot. When I was only ten years old, he took me to the Orange Revolution. We spent the night there. People were marching: a whole sea of them! hundreds of thousands of them! I had never seen anything like it. It’s winter, it’s snowing, and everything’s orange.”

And when Volodia was a university student in Kyiv, the Euromaidan began.

“We were walking in such a huge column that we took over the vehicle lanes of Peremohy Avenue. I was in Kyiv, and my grandpa came on his own on a bus from Rivne. We heard that there were protests outside the President’s Administration Building, so we headed there. I inhaled my fill of tear gas there.”

When he returned to Hrushvytsia Persha, the young man, to everyone’s surprise, headed the future village mayor’s election campaign.

“That was the first time debates were held in the village; it was the first time election agendas were printed. The candidates went from house to house, talking to people. It was neat.”

Over the course of one day, Volodia manages to crisscross his way through the village a few times and take care of a dozen things: pick up the tents, sleeping pads, and backpacks bought for local kids; stop by the site of the future recreation center with the outfitted lake and welcome a delegation; poke into the costume room of the Palace of Culture; and drop by the site of an ancient settlement that’s scheduled to become a tourist development center. It makes our heads spin.

He arrives at home as it’s growing dark. But his work isn’t over yet: Volodia pulls out old photographs and begins telling us about the village. He had grown interested in his own family history and started researching it. He brings over a stack of books, and we talk late into the night—up till Grandpa Yosyp reaches for his old bayan and begins a Rusyn song.

In 2015 Volodia made a list of several goals: to construct a children’s playground in the park, to install trash receptacles in the streets, and to build a soccer field and a gym with mirrors for dance classes. Lastly, he wanted to make the local ancient settlement site appealing to tourists.

Almost all his goals have been met.

“I didn’t even think that I’d be able to get so much done. It’s been all of three years,” he says. “But it was still my great-grandfather who had said, ‘You’ll see, it’ll all change someday.’”

1968

“Those revolutions—when I talk about them, my head hurts nonstop. My heart too,” says Yosyp Mykhalchyn, placing his hand on his chest. “I’ve lived through so many of them… In 1968 my mom and dad decided they wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia. I drove them there by car. The Prague Spring was happening just then, and reserve troops were being brought in to Czechoslovakia. We had no idea: We packed everything up in the car, said our goodbyes, and headed off. We had our papers, stamped and with the details of where we were going—everything like it was supposed to be.”

But as they neared the border, their confidence was shattered. Their car was stopped by Soviet soldiers.

“‘What Czechoslovakia? What are you thinking?!’ the soldier yelled in Russian,” the old man recalls. “I replied, ‘Why, what am I thinking? We have all our documents, my parents packed for a permanent move, we have everything we need.’ The soldier trotted off to the sentry box and I heard him saying, ‘Comrade Colonel, sir, these people are going to Czechoslovakia! What should I do?!’ I think to myself, here we go, that’s it. ‘Alright then. I understand, I understand,’ I hear the soldier say. ‘Look,’ he comes back and says to me as if I’m a kid, which I still was then. ‘If you encounter military vehicles, don’t get in their way. Or you’ll find yourself in a ravine!’ We’re driving on, and, just as he had predicted, the Carpathians are full of tanks.”

Yosyp and his parents did make it to Czechoslovakia in their old GAZ. But there, everything was peaceful: People didn’t even suspect what was being readied for them on the Ukrainian side of the Carpathians.

“We arrived in Chmel’ov. My parents settled in, but not in their own house, with my father’s sister. Saying goodbye was hard—because I had married here in Hrushvytsia Persha, had built my own house; I couldn’t just leave. And so the border divided us. My mom and dad both died there in Chmel’ov. I too used to say that I wanted to be buried there. Now I myself don’t know.”

Mikula and Zuzana Mihalčin were far from the only ones to return. After Stalin’s death the laws were relaxed and thousands of former resettlers from Slovakia were given the opportunity to move back. Out of the twelve thousand people who’d left Eastern Slovakia in 1947, by 1967 barely half remained in Volyn. Even with the rocky soil and the more poorly built houses, people felt better on their native land. For most of them, Volyn never did become a motherland.

But for Yosyp it did. What’s true, he saw his parents seldom after 1968.

“How many times did we go there—five? maybe seven?” he asks his wife Valentyna. “We visited Chmel’ov and then another time I was in Prague. That was it, because it cost a lot of money. But there’s plenty to see in the Czech Republic. In 1986 I rented a Zhiguli there, a sixth-model Lada. I was shocked to see car tunnels seven kilometers long there. And specially constructed overpasses on the highways for animals because the highways are walled off—so that not a deer, not a rabbit get run over. You could see that people were working. Maybe our grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren will live to have the same? It’s right next door: How far is it to that Uzhhorod? One of my grandsons bought both an apartment and a car there, and he wants to live there permanently. I didn’t ask about the details, but his life’s good.”

Relatives and friends from Slovakia have also come to Hrushvytsia Persha on more than one occasion.

“We’ve even had people visit us from America—with my godson, Štefan Kruško’s son, who speaks English. They rented a car in Munich, filled up the tank to not have to buy gas here, and drove over. Those were distant relatives! I too had an aunt living in America, my mom’s sister. But I have more ties with Slovakia.”

Yosyp sighs. After a long workday, he still putzes around the house a bit, but finally sits down: His back hurts. The man’s appearance is calm, but there seems to be something pounding inside him, as if trying to break free.

“We have grandchildren and great-grandchildren both here and there. And my parents are there,” he says, and I watch his eyes grow moist. “How many years have passed and I still can’t forget that ‘Forgive us’ of my father’s as we said goodbye.”

“Forgive us, son, for leaving like that. Forgive us,” he kept repeating.

***

“Lord,” Yosyp peers into an old well by the Czech house. “I was down there a few times: One time a rooster fell in, another time a hen. As the lightest kid, I’d get lowered down in there in a pail, and I’d fetch them,” he laughs. “Lordy Lord, my dear little house. God, our childhood took place here! There’s even water in that well still. Two rooms, a stove, a closet. And then, when you headed down into the cellar, it said ‘Jozef Gavliček,’ like I mentioned. It’s a shame I didn’t bring any matches, or I’d light one so you could see.”

Yosyp picks apples in the old garden. He stuffs his pockets full, till the apples are almost falling out. He laughs. He utters not to me anymore, but somewhere past me, in the direction of the door: “Look at this home of ours, Dad.”

IN A RACE AGAINST WAR
І. Dün, or Yesterday

It’s minus nineteen degrees Celsius. Rivulets of February air glide over my fingers—numb with cold—mercilessly drying my silky skin into crumbly parchment. Barely maintaining our balance on the icy road, we stop in front of a low house with lit windows.

A burly man in a dark jacket comes up to the gate. “Hello,” he greets us warmly in Russian and extends his hand to keep me from slipping.

This is Jasim. Jasim Yasinovych Iskondarov is the head of the community of Meskhetian Turks in the village of Vasiukivka outside Bakhmut. He ushers his unexpected guests inside and invites us into the living room. His family has been living in the Donetsk Oblast for twenty-eight years already. It’s here that Jasim found shelter when he was fleeing from pogroms in Uzbekistan, where his parents had moved to after their deportation from the Meskheti region of Georgia in 1944. This house became a home for his three children and fifteen grandchildren.

I hear muffled clattering in the kitchen. Jasim’s wife, fifty-eight-year-old Marpula, ties up the checkered headscarf on her head and carries tea and sweets into the room. We sit down cross-legged at a low traditional table, a sofra, decorated with images of the moon and stars against a red background. Now and then younger women from the family join us.

“Meskheti,” the man begins the story and for a moment holds his breath. “That’s what our land is called.”

This cultural and historical region on the border between Turkey and Georgia has been divided between the two countries since time immemorial. In 1921 the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet Republics on one side and Turkey on the other concluded the so-called Treaty of Kars, as a result of which a portion of the Armenian territory went over to Turkey and five Turkish regions were incorporated into Georgia.

“Yes, my parents were born in the already Georgian Meskheti,” Jasim explains, “but in 1944 Stalin got the idea of relocating us because of a concern that our people could collaborate with Turkey.”

And he relocated them.

On the basis of a State Defense Committee resolution, on November 14 Jasim’s people were herded onto freight trains and taken across the Urals.

“The journey to Central Asia took forty days,” Jasim describes, his eyes seemingly blacker than soil. “People died in the train wagons. Children cried. How many people died? No one knows and no one counted. Some say 100,000, others say 120,000.”

This same story is recounted by both children and grandchildren in every house.

“Would you like to go back to Meskheti?” I ask.

“I’ve wanted to my whole life!” Jasim replies without a hint of hesitation. “And my parents wanted us to return there their whole lives. I remember how in 1966, when I was seven, my uncle traveled to Georgia, to Tbilisi, but that was as far as they’d let him go. He wanted to take a look at his motherland. In 1989 Moscow also dismissed the idea of the Meskhetian Turks returning home. Last year my brother was driving to Turkey and stopped by the neighborhood where our parents were born—seventy-two years after the fact. Our father used to describe it to us: the third house from the school, the one with a garden… The village my parents were born in is now a border crossing point to Turkey.”

These days everything is different.

ІІ. Bugün, or Today

From Meskheti, the Soviet government deported the Meskhetian Turks to Central Asia, largely to Uzbekistan.

“We lived in Samarqand. It was the first capital of Uzbekistan.” Jasim talks as he breaks ekmek, Turkish flatbread. “I had a good job: I worked in a factory. Our lives were very peaceful. I don’t know what happened.”

What happened in May of 1989 is known as the Ferghana Pogroms. An ordinary quarrel at the bazaar grew into an interethnic conflict. If you were to ask around about the underlying causes of the tragedy, very few would be able to explain much of anything.

“We share one religion, we share one faith,” Jasim reflects aloud. “In Islam there are Sunnis and Shi’ites. We’re Sunni. And Uzbekistan is also 95–96 percent Sunni. There were no disagreements over language. Moscow had given the directive to cultivate the chornozem, the fertile black soil. The Ferghana Valley was the most densely populated region in Central Asia. Maybe we should have booted out the nonessentials. But we’re peaceful and hard-working people: We quietly worked and minded our own business. I don’t know.”

The story goes that some Turk was rude to an Uzbek saleswoman at the bazaar and knocked over a crate of her strawberries, some other men jumped to her defense, and a fight broke out.

“In the seventies or early eighties, they honestly could’ve stabbed someone to death and gotten away with it, but here they had a fist fight and the whole thing got blown up into an international fallout,” the community elder recalls.

In an article for the news portal Krym.Realiyi, Gulnara Bekirova writes that the events of May 1989 were preceded by rallies in Tashkent in December 1988, marked by calls of “Russians, back to your Russia; Crimean Tatars, back to Crimea.” Perhaps hatred toward resettlers expanded to include the Meskhetian Turks too: “…the agitation didn’t abate; conversations circled among young Uzbeks that the Turks needed to be ‘given a good lesson.’”

On May 23 violence broke out in the streets of Quvasoy, with several hundred people involved on each side. The crowd tried to force its way into the neighborhoods of the Meskhetian Turks and other ethnic minorities to launch a pogrom. Over three hundred police officers were needed to quell the riot. Fifty-eight individuals were injured; of them thirty-three were hospitalized.

Rumors were flying in the region that the Meskhetian Turks allegedly beat up Uzbeks, rape their women, and torture their children. In the morning of June 3, a group of Uzbeks raided the Turkish neighborhoods in Toshloq. They set houses on fire and assaulted residents. The following day houses were burning not only in Ferghana and Toshloq, but also in Margilan and other settlements where Meskhetian Turks lived.

“People started showing up in Samarqand and threatening us: ‘Either you leave, or we’ll do the same thing to you as happened in Ferghana,’” Jasim recalls, his voice even. “I remember the moment that we understood our life there was over. So we left in search of a new home.”

Even though the head of the family narrates all of this with detachment, the young women struggle to remain unemotional and leave the room.

That’s when men from different families got together in groups and traveled from region to region in search of a new place to live, hoping that elsewhere someone would welcome them.

“Eight of us set out,” Jasim says, remembering the events from twenty-eight years ago. “First we had to find a place where our families wouldn’t suffer. It was June. We were told that there were houses available in the Stavropol region of Russia. But when we arrived there, they didn’t let us in. Next we headed to the town of Prokhladny. It was right when the Adler train had started running through all of Kazakhstan. Through Kalmykia, through Dagestan, we traveled to Grozne, to Bielorechensk. We took a look—not bad, but we weren’t used to those kinds of conditions. Heavy June rains, dirt everywhere, sludge beneath our feet—how could we live there? So we headed back. On the Baku-Krasnovodsk ferry we met a family traveling to Turkmenistan for medical treatment. The husband says to us, ‘There are a lot of collective farms in our area, you can come and have a look. I’ll be home in fifteen days.’ He gave us his phone number. He says, ‘Let’s agree that I’ll meet you at the station. Give me a call tomorrow.’”

ІІІ. Yarın, or Tomorrow

The man turned out to be the mayor of the village of Vasiukivka in the Donetsk region, which was still Soviet at the time.

“He met us at the train station and showed us around the collective farm,” Jasim continues his story. “He showed us the houses that stood empty. We liked it here, and we decided to move.”

Eight men made the decision to relocate their families here to Vasiukivka. For over four days they traveled by train, through Volgograd and Artemivsk (today’s Bakhmut)—with their children, their belongings, their emotions.

“It was difficult,” the man admits. “They supposedly gave each family 10,000 rubles of government assistance. But the Soviet Union was collapsing, the currency was depreciating. I was given a check, but there was no cash to be had! The Soviet money had expired. I had just finished building a house in Uzbekistan. I didn’t even get to live a month in it. Not even a month! I had spent my entire life building it…”

At that time, in 1989, almost all the Meskhetian Turks left Uzbekistan. Some 90,000 of them moved to Russia, over 30,000 left for America, and around 10,000 moved to Ukraine. Here in Ukraine they settled in the Henichesk, Chaplynka, and Kalanchak Districts in the Kherson region, as well as in Poltava, Bila Tserkva, and Kharkiv. In the Donetsk region they primarily live in the settlements and villages belonging to the Vasiukivka Village Council, where 440 of a total 690 residents are Meskhetian Turks.

“Between 1989 and 2004 many Meskhetian Turks were denied residency permits, so they lived without them, without any rights. But we were genuinely welcomed in Ukraine. Not a single time were we told, ‘You’re a Turk, but I’m a Ukrainian.’ The people of Ukraine helped us with everything!” Jasim says loudly and confidently.

Initially, most of the resettlers worked at one of the two collective farms in the area, Lenin’s Banner and the farm named after Illich. But in 2001 the collective farms were liquidated, and people took to small-scale gardening. There’s a greenhouse today in almost every yard.

“We love working the land,” Jasim’s son Akif says, and the women nod in agreement. “Earlier, the locals here barely planted anything other than potatoes, corn, and pumpkins. Because nothing else grew. ‘Why?’ we asked. ‘It doesn’t sprout,’ they’d reply.”

“But for us everything sprouts,” Akif’s wife Gulmira chimes in. “Everything grows for us: bell peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, carrots. We could gather two harvests in one season. We’re creating order, making our own jobs.”

If you stop by the farmers’ market in Bakhmut, everyone will tell you that the vegetables grown by the Meskhetian Turks are the best. That’s the mark of quality.

“No one oppresses us here,” Jasim says about life in Vasiukivka. “We had our own folk band, we’d get financial subsidies… If there are ten representatives in the village council, three or four of them are always ours. The only thing is that we have problems with water now. In the past there was a well in every yard. But now the water’s salty.”

There are salt mines outside Vasiukivka, and because the mines are being developed in the direction of the village, the water in the wells really has become salty. This problem is stressed to us in many a house.

Jasim sits in the room surrounded by his wife, their twenty-nine-year-old son Akif, and his grandchildren, ten-year-old Lachin and three-year-old Yusuf. An eight-month-old girl, Orzugul, babbles in his daughter-in-law’s lap. The house is encircled by a well-tended yard, neatly laid-out paths, and young fir trees. The family of Meskhetian Turks is fully rooted in local life. Nonetheless, the realities of war have changed everything once again.

When the fighting broke out, Meskhetian Turks from the towns of Sloviansk, Mykolayivka, and Debaltseve fled to Vasiukivka. In the summer of 2015, there were two or three families of refugees living in every house in the village. People were putting up tents and constructing shacks in the streets. Right now, as you walk around the village, you’re likely to come across people in uniforms or protective clothing, just as we encountered technicians, who were demining the fields. The land is strewn with shells.

Yet even under the most difficult of circumstances, the Meskhetian Turks are unusually open and hospitable. We exited the community leader’s house with two three-liter jars of pickled tomatoes and freshly baked flatbreads.

Strangers are also treated like family in the home of Zakaria-aqa (the suffix aqa is an honorific used for respected community members). Hot dishes, tea, and sweets instantly appear on the table. From the first sentences, the conversation flows as if between the best of friends. Warmth envelopes us, like in the coziest nook in the world.

“War has never brought anyone any good and never will. People should have peace over their heads,” says Zakaria-aqa.

He embraces his wife, with whom he’s been living for forty years. Children run around the house as the man counts off, “I have five children, fourteen grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.”

There’s enough love in him for all of them.

Every Friday he goes to pray at a small mosque that the community built in Vasiukivka. During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the community prays there every day. A problem has arisen in the village recently because there’s only one mullah left. Many people have begun to move to Turkey.

The Republic of Turkey adopted a resolution to accept Meskhetian Turkish refugees from Ukraine. In the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv regions, only 676 Turkish families remain. In the Sloviansk, Lyman, and Velyki Novosilky Districts, there are 150 families. Prior to last year, there were 364 Meskhetian Turks living in Vasiukivka; today only 222 remain.

The social services of Turkey organized the first wave of resettlement in December 2015. Jasim’s daughter Maleka has been living on the other side of the Black Sea for a year already. In the city of Erzincan in northeastern Turkey, the Turkish government issues 150-square-meter cottages to the resettlers.

“They give you everything you need,” says Zakaria-aqa. “Spoons, forks, a washing machine, a fridge—just walk into the house and live! Because of my daughter, I have one foot there, one here.”

The second wave of resettlement of Meskhetian Turks from Ukraine is expected to take place in the near future. They’ll be flown from Kharkiv by planes to Erzincan.

“I worked hard here, and I retired here. My soul doesn’t want to leave this place,” the man admits. “I want peace for my grandchildren’s sake. I want this war to be over.”

Zakaria-aqa stands up to walk us out. My photographer and I, lulled by the warmth of Uzbek tea and the sincere conversation, amble to the entryway. Our host opens the door and, as if remembering something important, adds melancholically, “They’re coming for us in March.”