Flashback: The Trauma of Survival

"Miss Goo-rell?" the nurse called, tapping me on the shoulder as I circled the cramped family waiting room at Baystate Medical Center, focused on the surge of pain from tearing deep into my cuticle creating a little pool of blood, a practice I'd honed for coping with hospital-wait anxiety.

I jumped to face her. "It's Gur ..." I stopped myself from needlessly correcting her pronunciation.

"Yes, I'm Natasha Gural. Luba (LYU-bah) Gural’s daughter. Is my mother …”

The nurse looked at me strangely and carefully, as if my face had been replaced by a Magritte apple. This constant discomfort I feel in my birth city, where I over-analyze every action of people who choose to expend as little mental energy as possible to get by, particularly at this hospital, is compounded by fear of what she will say next.

“Your mother is fine, medically speaking. The procedure went well and she is awake,” despite what sounded like good news, her troubled expression intensified.

“OK … So can I see her?”

“Well, normally we do not let anyone into the recovery room immediately post-op, but she is calling for you. We don’t know what she is saying, but we think she is calling for you.”

“OK! She’s OK?”

“Yes, medically. But she is awake, and I suppose alert, but she seems to be in some kind of shock and she seems to be calling for you. We cannot understand how or why she is awake. She should be sleeping for hours …”

My mother’s hyper-sensitivity to sedatives and narcotics is bested only by her ability to remain awake on any dose, even as she experiences every other known side effect. I suspect it’s a defense mechanism.

I follow the nurse through giant doors clearly marked to fend off non-staff. I hear my mother. It sounds like a little girl, a voice I’d never heard, but one I’d imagined.

“Natashenka! Natashenka! Natashenka!” she half-cried-half-screamed as she alternated between English and Russian, both in that haunting childlike voice.

“I’m here, Mom,” I said, holding her hand.

“They are trying to kill me,” she said in what must have been an attempt at a whisper. “You have to get me out of here. Look: All the other people are dead! They are laying here dead!”

Every other patient was sound asleep on a cot, some young, some old, all attached to monitors and stuck with needles. All were expected to survive after a few hours following their operations, or else they’d have been whisked downstairs to ICU. But to my mother, the pale, motionless faces were corpses, on their last earthly journey from gurney to grave.

To the typical Baystate employee, my mother’s behavior was irrational, beyond their comprehension and control. That’s why they called in the expert: her daughter, the only one who might be able to perform where Valium conked out. Save for the odd orderly who experienced combat, nobody passing through those daunting doors could possibly understand how terror triumphed over IV-induced catatonia.

Though I had no means of calming her, I could at least empathize. Was I better off pretending she was correct and promising that I was going to get her out before they killed her, or should I try to draw her back to the start of the 21^st century in the United States?

I knew exactly what she meant about the dead bodies destined for a mass grave. As a young child, I had recurring nightmares of a death camp where I, too, lay in limbo as others had already gone cold and rigid. In my dream, I made every effort to appear dead as guards in long, tailored coats and peaked caps, circled around my intended deathbed. My horrific visions originated from the stories my mother’s parents and other Great Purge and World War II civilian survivors shared in sharp detail, supplemented by my fascination with the dark side of my family’s history.

My nightmares were born from my mother’s real-life experience. I could only imagine how horrifying it was for her to relive that trauma, held captive in a cold, soulless depository of patients who were expected to lay lifelessly for a few hours offering the staff a respite from any interaction aside from gossiping about doctors, barking fried food orders to subordinates and creating a patient-less world through insufferable banal banter.

The nurse came by a few times, mainly to grumble that it’d be best if I could get my mother to sleep. “It’s the best thing you can do for her.” The countless shortcomings of the U.S. medical system are second only to its complete failure to recognize and identify the psychological needs of patients who were asked to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork, none inquiring into the unique background of a human being. There I was, the de-facto shrink-crisis manager-untrained Girl Friday left to deal with what the system isn’t willing to address.

If I sound bitter or resentful, it’s because I am. This is the same hospital where I was called upon to fill in where staff had failed, most notably when as a young teenager I was whisked from an ambulance that picked me up at school into an operating room and ICU with my mother’s father, translating orders on how he breathe during a lucid trauma procedure following as car crash “it’s a miracle he survived.” That nurse tapped me on the shoulder in the same room where I learned my father was dying from undiagnosed-despite-all-the-right-tests Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver. This is the same hospital my grandfather once escaped before discharge. The same hospital where both my mother’s parents spent the cruelest of their dying days. I knew every hallway, every exit and every supply closet (since staff often don’t bother with the basic needs of patients who can no longer speak).

No wonder I was treated as unpaid personnel. Besides being called upon to assist with my own family member’s care, I’d once served as a translator in a language I barely claim proficiency when the emergency room supervisor said she couldn’t find a German translator for a Polish man who had apparently broken his leg. Before I came along, they’d suspected he’d suffered a heart attack.

Come and See the Magic and the Horror of Vitebsk Oblast

Marc Chagall called Vitebsk "my second Paris." For him the city neighboring his birth village Liozna is captured in memory that eludes the devastation of the Great Purge and World War II, as he spent those years in France and America. In a large series of works that the artist began after his return to his hometown in June 1914, Vitebsk is depicted as a fantastical dreamlike place.

The magical city of Chagall is radically different from where my mother was born and spent her first four or so years. Both my mother and Chagall were born in small villages outside of the city and bordering Russia, though she never visited the region’s capital.

 

Images: Chagall's Over Vitebsk (at MoMA, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest); still from Come and See

The childlike innocence of Chagall’s work is at odds with my imagined representation of the region of my mother’s tragic early childhood. My mother narrowly escaped one of more than 600 Belarusian villages burned to the ground. The only reference I have that even begins to depict what my mother saw is from the 1985 film Come and See.

In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand field in search of abandoned rifles. Young Flyora finds an SVT-40 rifle and the next day he joins partisans who come and take him from his house against his distraught mother’s wishes. Though members of my mother’s family and close friends were murdered and tortured by partisans, the critically acclaimed film’s central character offers insight into how innocence is quickly stolen, if not from a very different perspective.

A fan of gory horror films, I find few movies difficult to watch. I assumed this one was particularly painful since it depicts the real-life horror my mother experienced of watching a village and its inhabitants burned to the ground in a terrifying mass murder campaign.

“I understood that this would be a very brutal film and that it was unlikely that people would be able to watch it. I told this to my screenplay coauthor, the writer Ales Adamovich. But he replied: ‘Let them not watch it, then. This is something we must leave after us. As evidence of war, and as a plea for peace,’” said director Elem Klimov.

Klimov said ambulances had to be called to remove viewers from theaters in the Soviet Union and at foreign screenings. During a discussion after one viewing, an elderly German man acknowledged: "I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren.”

Klimov, who died in 2003, never made any films after Come and See. "I lost interest in making films,” he said in 2001. “Everything that was possible I felt I had already done."

Adamovich fought with the Belarussian partisans as a teenager, and Klimov was moved by a book I Am from the Burning Village, comprised of first-hand accounts of survivors like my mother. Innocent victims – especially young children -- are victims, despite their ethnic background or political inclination.

Klimov also watched footage of survivors recalling their experiences. “I will never forget the face and eyes of one peasant, and his quiet recollection about how his whole village had been herded into a church, and how just before they were about to be burned, an officer of the Sonderkommando gave them the offer: ‘Whoever has no children can leave.’ And he couldn't take it, he left, and left behind his wife and little kids... or about how another village was burned: the adults were all herded into a barn, but the children were left behind. And later, the drunk men surrounded them with sheepdogs and let the dogs tear the children to pieces.”

These second-hand accounts are like those of my mother, who tearfully recalls how so many loved ones were brutally killed.

“My aunt, at that time, was in school in Russia where they had to learn German. The German soldiers took her and another 16-year old, and they were asking who is living in this house and this house, and they had a list of people who they were told to burn down the houses. She was 16, so of course, she's going to say whose house it was. She was lucky because her father was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't there at that time, but he was in their party. And my father was against the Bolsheviks and everything else, and he was in a German zone. And so when the Partisans came after them they told him whose house it was, they came to get my aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother, she ran after her daughter. And then they would go and take them a few miles away from there, but they had to cross some kind of a river, and they were going to be interrogated there by the Partisans, where their headquarters were. But what happened, it became close to nighttime, and they had to get out of that region because I guess that's when the Germans were coming or something, so the Partisans said that we know what's going to happen with them, so they didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess. And so they used the other part of the gun (rifle), the wooden part, and they beat their heads open. That's how they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected his mental state for the rest of his life. And so – [sobbing] then we had to just, I guess, put them in ground and we had to leave there because the fighting between the Germans and Russians would start.”

Most people truly begin to understand mortality and the human condition when their first parent or close relative dies.

For my mother, losing a peer was perhaps the most shattering glimpse into the frailty of life.

“I saw when the fighting was going on between the Germans and Russians -- I'm not sure if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I don’t know, I never asked my parents what army it was. But I know at that point I just saw the Germans afterwards because they're the ones that took us as prisoners after, so I really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And there was a wagon full of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other girl, about my age, was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown, and she was very close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course there were other people that were killed but I remember her because she was a friend of mine, you know? And that was very, very tragic.”

While Belarus remains a deeply troubled nation, widely regarded as Europe's last dictatorship, modern-day Vitebsk Oblast is a thriving tourist destination known as Belaruskaye Paazerye, or land of the lakes, replete with rare plants and wildlife. The wasteland of my mother’s infancy now boasts an excellent infrastructure connecting it with commerce in bordering Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Despite the political and social turmoil helmed in Minsk by (Vitebsk Oblast native) President Alexander Lukashenko, modern-day Vitebsk Oblast is closer to Chagall’s memory than my mother’s.  The region’s two major theaters, philharmonic society, 28 museums and the international Slavyanskiy Bazaar arts festival make it a cultural destination.

My mother’s only travel was to concentration, labor and displaced persons camps in Poland and Germany, while Chagall spent the bulk of his career in Russia, France and the U.S. Still the fragmented images of Vitebsk, “the soil that nourished the roots of my art,” in Chagall’s work disguise, but do not erase, the darkest multiple personalities of a homeland that always has been rife with strife.

Alexander Pushkin, who passed twice through Belarus: in May 1820, leaving for the southern exile; and in August 1824 on his way to exile from Odessa to the village of Mikhailovskoye, died before finishing a novel, Dubrovsky, inspired by a friend, a nobleman of Vitebsk Oblast.

Pushkin’s influence is found throughout Vitebsk, home to at least two monuments, a street, a public garden and a bridge named after the Russian poet. No doubt he contemplated the region’s conflicted character.

"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths." (Pushkin, as quoted by Anton Chekhov in Gooseberries.)

A Moving Image That Captures A Defining Moment Lost In Time

I’m nostalgic for movies like The Mummy. Not the 1999 box office blockbuster starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And not the seminal 1932 horror film starring Boris Karloff that did well in British theaters. I enjoy CGI when done well and especially on the big screen, and Karloff’s portrayal of an ancient Egyptian priest called Imhotep remains forever iconic. But it’s the 1959 version of The Mummy, co-starring Peter Cushing as an archaeologist and Christopher Lee as Kharis, that I saw first and stands as one of the seminal films of my early childhood. 

My father introduced me to the occult (via books on amulets and talisman and not some ritual practice) as well as the early gods of horror like Bela Lugosi, Karloff, Lee and Cushing. We didn’t have cable TV growing up and my childhood friends weren’t (yet) into B horror, so I’d sneak what I could on PBS, which aired British horror films by Hammer Film Productions. I remember sitting cross-legged on the carpet with my nose close to the TV so I could hear with minimal volume and my right hand on the dial ready to switch it off if I was caught.

I imagined myself as Cushing’s John Banning, searching for the tomb of Princess Ananka, the high priestess of the god Karnak. My father also sparked my youthful obsession with all things ancient Egypt. Meantime, I was attending Russian Orthodox liturgies, not only on Sundays, but also on various holy days, with my mother and her parents, who frequently hosted hierarchs and other priests at my childhood homes. To me the two worlds clashed and co-existed, what with all the imagery and relics, though I understood that in the eyes of the church these two worlds were at odds – one pure, one cursed. It made perfect sense to me that Egypt’s Coptic Christians venerated the same icons and used the same calendar as the Russian Orthodox. As a child I was fascinated by the pagan roots of both cultures and how they were intertwined and intrinsically linked to the myths and legends that inspired the stories in the Hammer movies. 

My mother's first movie memory, the one “that stuck with me more than anything,” she says, depicted the coronation of a tsar filmed during the liturgy on the feast day of The Elevation of the Venerable and Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. 

 
This was the second of two films she saw during her early childhood at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, which she describes at the best time of her life. “The only place I remember going was to church, and to a carnival and twice to a movie.” It’s important to note my mother has seen no more than a dozen films in a movie theater during her lifetime, save for free days at the local theater when my sister and I were children. I remember we went to the mall to see the original Arthur, featuring Dudley Moore as a dopey drunkard, because it was free. I was about 10 at the time, and my sister about 6. Our father took my sister and I to see Ghostbusters at the theater when it came out, paying full price. That was a major event for us, but just a typical weekend activity for most of our peers. The few movies I saw in first release before age 13 were mostly at birthday party celebrations or treats from friends’ parents.

The first film my mother saw was Kamennyy Tsvetok (Stone Flower), which was a seminal new release at the time. The 1946 Soviet fantasy film was directed by the pioneering Aleksandr Ptushko, regarded by some as the Soviet Walt Disney, and compared to other legends including Italy’s legendary Mario Bava. The color film, shot on Agfacolor negative film in the Soviet Union, was seized in Germany and entered into the 1946 Cannes Film Festival.

My mother’s viewing of this Stone Flower as a child is a historic event, by all accounts except her own. “I don't remember anything about that movie,” she quips. It was based on a fairy tale by Pavel Bazhov, which also inspired Prokofiev’s ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower. Bazhov’s widely read and influential The Malachite Casket collection of stories told to a young boy by a watchman, who lived in the Ural Mountains, was so popular it was translated into English in 1944. The dark tales of struggle and social relations echo many of my mother’s pains, if not from a very different perspective. She claims to have never read them.

That my mother was able to erase from her memory this groundbreaking film, the first one she saw, seems impossible to my western born psyche.

Her emotional needs drew her to the film about a tsar’s coronation, which she recalls as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” A passion for faith that transcends any other life experience was born from this childhood viewing and has cemented itself in her mind as the ultimate ideal. 

There exists rare vintage film footage of the Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II from 1896, the first film ever made in Russia and directed by Camille Cerf, who worked with the Lumière brothers of France, the world’s first filmmakers. But my mother insists what she saw was the coronation of either Alexander I or II, though I find no record of any such film. My mother says she is certain that the coronation was filmed on Sept. 26 by the Julian Calendar, during the liturgy one the eve of celebrating The Elevation of the Venerable and Life-Creating Cross of the Lord. She says she saw tis film a second time, at Holy Trinity Monastery in rural upstate New York, where her parents and my father are buried. She recalls (and repeats) with a fervor reserved exclusively for the Russian Orthodox liturgy how the choir sings as the cross is elevated. This singular memory trumps any and all other remembrances.

“It was during the big holy day which is celebrated on September 27th, so I guess it was on the eve of it. Because I remember the service, how it was, the church it was decorated and it was so beautiful, and because it was the bishop and the service was very, very wonderful. The only time I had been (to the service) was two or three times in Jordanville, New York.”

Extolling the beauty of liturgy in that film, my mother notes, “I didn’t know anything about any tsars at that time, because we weren’t taught that.”

The hunger for a solid ethnic identity is clearly a result of being born on a disputed borderland and being herded as a very young girl from Belarus to Poland to Germany as a prisoner, watching relatives and friends die along the way. This film was her first glimpse into what defines her Russianness: Orthodoxy.

The other early memories from Lyssenko are happy ones, again this was the “happiest time of my life,” she says, though none rival her emotional bond with the liturgy.

Her memory of carnival is marred by an injury that has stuck with her.

“I was in a merry-go-round I guess, and I didn’t get off of it on time and it started to go and I fell and I still have some pebbles in my right knee. I had a lot of them but most of them disappeared. It was all bloody and everything, but I went with some teenagers who told me not to tell my mother because they would be in trouble because they were supposed to be looking after me. And I got caught, and the only thing I remember going on there was the merry-go-round. And I think there was some kind of thing that we could win something, but I don’t remember if I did win anything, I don’t remember. I didn’t have money at that time, and I think those older boys and girls probably paid for me,” she says, laughter emerging.

Compared with the first four or so years spent dodging bullets and land mines and being taken prisoner by numerous forces, my mother’s time at Lyssenko was relatively normal.

“My father was the plumber for the building that we were in, and I guess for other buildings at the camp. I don’t think my mother had a job. I'm not sure. And my father also was at that time going to mechanic school, and I went to the Ukrainian school, and I think life was just good at that time. Very good.”

While memories of Stone Flower and other non-religious experiences are essentially lost, my mother does recall some logistic details of the building at Lyssenko with the same precision, if not passion, of that liturgy.

“It was tall and big and just like a big box. Our block was number four. And we were in number 4A. …. And my friend, Olga, who lives in Connecticut now, lived on the same floor as we did, but a few rooms away.”

To this day, every life experience is held to the standard of my mother’s first memories at Lyssenko. Nothing can compare with those first tastes that bit into a forced starvation – an early childhood life previously devoid of any spiritual, cultural or social exposure. To this day, she rarely is satisfied by any restaurant or secular activity, and generally shuns them. Essentially why bother? It can only lead to disappointment.

“Hanover looked nice as far as I remember, I didn’t go to too many places,” my mother says. “I went to a restaurant once.”

“Oh, the fish was delicious in there. I had fish, and I had German potato salad and beets and that was delicious. That was the only time I'd eaten in a restaurant.”

‘The Chaos Of Antiquity’ Forever Haunts a Disputed Borderland

The written or recorded history of Belarus gets stranger with modern interpretation, especially with the nationalistic pride that marginalizes its inhabitants. My mother and her parents have never identified as Belarusian, they consider themselves ethnic Russians who were born in Belarus. They all were born and lived so close to the Russian border that my maternal grandmother carried my infant mother into Russia to baptize her.

Belarus literally translates as White Rus, and had for years been called White Russia, a name considered derisive by Belarusian nationalists, but still widely used in many languages and countries. Rus is not short for Russia. Kievan Rus was a powerful East Slavic state dominated by the city of Kiev, which is the modern day capital of Ukraine. Rus dates back to the 9th century and is traditionally viewed as the beginning of Russia and the ancestor of Belarus and Ukraine, though this theory is often disputed. Kiev is regarded as the original Holy Russian Empire, because Vladimir the Great, the pagan Slavic ruler of Kievan Rus, in 988 converted the state to Orthodox Christianity.

Some cite Slavic lore that claims Vladimir chose Orthodox Christianity over the teaching of Muslim missionaries because his people liked to drink wine, a practice prohibited by the Muslim faith. His motive was unlikely a spiritual one, at any level. Vladimir married the Byzantine emperor’s wife and viewed the establishment of a church as essential to development of a powerful state. Kiev traded fur, animal hides, burlap, hemp and hops in exchange for Byzantine wine, silk, steel blades, religious art and horses. Byzantine imperial ideals clearly influenced Russian political life. Kievan Rus was effectively eliminated in 1237, when Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, invaded and over three years the Mongols (or Tatars) destroyed all of the major cities of Kievan Rus except Novgorod and Pskov. The regional princes were not deposed, but were beholden to the Tatar state, which became known as the Empire of the Golden Horde. Both the Swedes (in 1240) and the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a regional branch of the Teutonic Knights, (in 1242), pounced but failed to defeat “Russia” or Rus.

At the time of the Tatar invasion, modern-day Moscow was an insignificant trading outpost, but its remote, forested location buffered it from attack and occupation, and its rivers provided access to the Baltic and Black seas and to the Caucasus region. It was the rule of ambitious princes that gave rise to the state of Muscovy: Daniil Aleksandrovich secured the principality for his branch of the Rurik Dynasty, which was founded by Varangian (Viking) prince Rurik and ruled Kievan Rus after 862. His son, Ivan I, was given the title "Grand Prince of Vladimir" from his Mongol overlords, and he cooperated closely with the Mongols to gain control over Muscovy's chief rival, the northern city of Tver. In 1327 the Orthodox metropolitan transferred his residency from Kiev to Moscow, shifting spiritual power from Kievan Rus to Moscow, even as the Tatars presided over the political state until 1480. While Eurasianism is still emerging in the study of Russian history, the Asian influence and identity have been dominant since the rise of the tsars. A third of Russian nobles had Tatar names and Ivan the Terrible descended, on his mother’s side, from Genghis Khan.

Rather than delve deeper into this part of history, I want only to suggest that while the Vikings may have their roots in my mother’s birthplace -- archaeologists in September 2012 found Viking artifacts from the 10^th and 11^th centuries in Vitebsk Oblast – her national identity may be built on Tatar ideology and bloodlines. This makes the term “White Russia” that much more contested. My maternal grandmother had blue eyes and translucent light skin that had to be shielded from direct sunlight. My maternal grandfather had dark eyes and hair and an olive complexion. My mother has blue eyes and an olive complexion that tans quickly and never burns. My mother knows very little about her father’s parents, other than they were born “somewhere in Russia.” However, a Tatar heritage might explain why my maternal grandfather left the Soviet Army, why so many members of his family were brutally killed by the Belarusians, why he, his wife and children were targets of the Belarusian Partisans, as well as Stalin and the Nazis. It would also explain his loyalty to the Holy Russian Empire, even its seat in Moscow.

In “The History of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia,” Voltaire states: “It is not my business in this place to inquire, why the countries from Smolensk, to the other side of Moscow, were called White Russia, or why (German geographer Johann) Hubner gives it the name of Black, nor for what reason the government of Kiev should be named Red Russia.”  It's important to note that Voltaire wanted to "make myself Russian," and created an alter-ego using the persona of a Russian diplomat, Ivan Alethof, as the “author” of his 1760 poem "The Russian in Paris.” 

“It is very likely that Madies the Scythian, who made an irruption into Asia, near seven hundred years before our vulgar era, might have carried his arms into these regions, as Gengis-Khan (sic) and Tamerlane did afterwards, and as probably others had done long before Madies. Every part of antiquity is not deserving of our inquiries; that of the Chinese, the Indians, the Persians, and the Egyptians, is ascertained from illustrious and interesting monuments; but these monuments suppose others of a far more ancient date, since it required many ages to teach men the art of transmitting their thoughts by permanent signs, and no less time was required to form a regular language; and yet we have no such monuments even in this polite part of Europe. The art of writing was a long time unknown to all the North: the patriarch Constantine, who wrote the history of Kiev in the Russian language, acknowledges, that the use of writing was not known in these countries in the fifth century.”

“Let others examine whether the Huns, the Slavs, and the Tartars, formerly led their wandering and famished tribes towards the source of the Boristhenes (the antiquated term for the Dniepr River and its eponymous river god); my design is to show what czar Peter created, and not to engage in a useless attempt, to clear up the chaos of antiquity. We should always keep in mind, that no family upon earth knows its first founder, and consequently, that no nation knows its first origin.”

 
Many have, since Voltaire’s account from 1857, made exhaustive efforts “to clear up the chaos of antiquity,” generally to rewrite a history that lends to rabid nationalism. But as new genetic data emerges this misguided pride is called into question.

Belarusians together with Ukrainians and Russians represent the East Slavic linguistic group, largest both in numbers and territory, inhabiting East Europe alongside Baltic-, Finno-Permic- and Turkic-speaking people. There have been until very recently only few genetic studies performed on this population.

A June 2013 research article, “Uniparental Genetic Heritage of Belarusians: Encounter of Rare Middle Eastern Matrilineages with a Central European Mitochondrial DNA Pool,” published in PLOS ONE, found that 80% of the paternal Belarusian gene pool is composed of R1a, I2a and N1c Y-chromosome haplogroups, a profile very similar to Ukrainians and Russians.

The Y-chromosome reflects movements of people in central-east Europe, as early as the start of the Holocene (beginning at the end of the last Ice Age about 11,000 years ago and characterized by the development of human civilization.)  The matrilineal legacy of Belarusians retains two rare mitochondrial DNA haplogroups, N1a3 and N3, both of Middle Eastern origin.

As Eurasian studies begin to displace Slavic studies at major universities and more DNA analysis becomes available to scholars, the ethnic identity of Belarusians, or at least the people born there, may help us correct the complicated history of a population that has withstood a perpetual warpath. My own desire to understand why so many members of my mother’s family have been brutalized and killed drives my interest in the science as well as the social history and historical sociology that has yet to gain any wide spread recognition. My own scholarly experience has been colored by either national identity (no matter how subtle) of my professors, as well as myriad incarnations of Slavophilism adopted often by non-Slavs. Much of what I was taught is at odds with what I see when I look at photographs of my mother’s father and grandfather.

Leaving Lyssenko: Displaced Memories

The years my mother spent at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, were “very good.” The young girl who’d spent her first half decade herded from labor camp to prison camp to concentration camp had finally found a “home.” Those formative years at Lyssenko were not rife with killings and rapes and bombs and grenades and constant fear of which enemy would strike next and at what gate.

The notion of leaving a displaced persons for a new life in a faraway land sounds like a dream for most people. To my mother it was an end to the first era of her life that didn’t involve constant suffering and instability. And it meant saying goodbye to people she came to know as family in the wake of losing so many blood relatives. It was horrifying. It meant recalling all the previous tragedies and again losing friends by separation.

“And then people started to immigrate to different countries, and they started to place us. Two of my father's friends went to England. And they had lost their families, too, during the war. Whether they were killed or what happened to them, I don’t know. They sent us pictures from England. They were handsome men and when they got to England, they had sent us rubber boots, which were beautiful, and chocolate candy. I can't find any here like that. It was like a candy bar, but it had crispy part inside of it. That was delicious.”

I’d brought home, from my first trip to England in 1991, what I thought my mother had described but she insisted it wasn’t the same. That time in her early childhood offered her very first taste of joy and nothing since could be sweetening to comparison. It was as if anything from those years was magical, almost otherworldly, and could never be duplicated again. I can only imagine the shifting emotion from a life of desolation and destruction to one that offered her very first creature comforts. They were so simple, yet perfect, those articles of clothing or pieces of chocolate. I think my mother begrudges herself any of life’s comforts, partly because of the guilt, but also because she can never again feel such immense satisfaction that comes with the very first experience.

For my mother, all of these places are defined by whatever iconic item she received in a care package or the descriptions in letters written by those who had relocated. She has never left the United States, save for Canada and the Caribbean, since childhood, and to her those places where other families from Lyssenko ended up remain frozen in memory and unchanging by time.

It makes sense that she would hold on to any image or idea from those years, as they were her first happy memories. All my wanderlust is lost on her, and I feel like a criminal, stealing her childhood snapshots of places she’d never visited by informing her of sweeping social change.

“A lot of our best friends, my best friends, my mother's best friends, went to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina. But my father wanted to go to America, because from what he knew from the history lessons in school, it was the best country to go to. And because I was the only child, it was easier for us to choose to go to a different country, and my parents were still young and healthy, so we didn’t have problems. But America was the hardest country to get to because we were in British zone, but we used to get coffee, and we used to (barter and) trade it with the Germans because they didn’t have the good coffee. It was chicory, but they liked it, so we never had drank it ourselves. We always used to trade it for clothes or something. At that time, it was very, very good for us, because we could get beautiful clothes for the coffee, and again berries, we used to go pick berries and trade those. And I sang and we had a church, and I sang in a church choir. We had Christmas parties. It was wonderful. We used to go Christmas caroling. It was a wonderful life, you know.”

My mother’s explanation that her parents were selected to come to the U.S. because of their savvy in trading with the Germans in the British zone is lost in her happy memories. She clings to those early years, which are forever idyllic for their simple pleasures. There is an innocence that overrides any ignorance that may stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge how culture has changed with time.

My mother and her parents ended up in New Hampshire, not far from Dartmouth, but still in a community that hadn’t been opened to the wider world. Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, didn’t offer English as Second Language and there was no public assistance available to her family. They had to toil to pay back every penny to the farmer who had sponsored their trip here via Church World Services. They lived without hot water for years, working at multiple manual labor and service jobs around the clock for a pittance of a wage, and saving to have fewer comforts and concessions than those that were available at Lyssenko or through bartering with the Germans. They traveled frequently throughout the Northeast to visit with friends from Lyssenko and to maintain a dispersed community in the absence of the ghettos that allow most immigrants to retain their culture.

“Some of my friends did come to America. One of them lives in Connecticut now. And the others, mostly all of them, live in New Jersey. I went to eleven weddings and I was a bridesmaid. [laughter] But the camp was actually the happiest part of my life at that time, because we didn’t have any cares. And we had food. We had clothes. It didn’t bother us that we slept on cots in just a corner of a room. We were all just happy. People used to go fishing, and they would get fish and we would have parties and stuff like that. My mother's best friend, the ones that went to Australia afterwards, her husband somehow had good luck of catching a lot of fish. One time when it was my birthday, he says ‘this is going be for Luba's birthday’ and he caught so much fish and since we didn’t have a big stove with hot plates, a lot of women, like five or six, were frying that fish. They had a big, big party for me at that time.”

My mother believes it was her 10^th birthday, but the date isn’t a detail that matters.

“That was the best birthday party I ever had and it was the first one I ever remember. And that was very good. There were a lot of people at the table. I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, I don’t know. A lot of people. And of course, there was vodka but we kids didn’t drink. [laughter] We didn’t have to.”

It is unsurprising that mother’s happy memories are vivid and retold in great detail. She is not one to repress any memory and the abundance of traumatic ones had to be offset somehow, if only to cope.

In the epilogue of The Brothers Karamazov Book XII, Chapter 14, Alyosha offers life-affirming hope for the next generation when speaking to a group of schoolboys at the funeral of their peer Ilyusha. Memory Eternal (transliterated from Old Church Slavonic as Vechnaya Pamyat) a chant sung at the end of Eastern Orthodox funerals and memorial services is heard in the background. Alyosha epitomizes the ideal human being (or, as my father would have said, a human becoming as humanism is a lifelong pursuit) in a Dostoyevskian universe rife with the conflicts and constraints of faith. Identified at the start of the novel by the narrator as its hero, Alyosha is an exemplar by being open-minded and forgiving. The character is named for Dostoevsky's son who died of an epileptic fit at age 3. 

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.  People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. "

Of Guilt and Self Punishment

A testament to how little is written or discussed of the lifelong emotional impact of watching other people die, even a voracious lay consumer of psychological and medical research and studies as myself hadn’t heard the word “survivor’s guilt” used in the context of my mother’s early childhood until seven years ago. Not a single doctor treating my mother has ever expressed it, and the countless doctors who treated my maternal grandparents for a variety of ailments never made any connection. None have ever seemed to comprehend how and why she’s still so traumatized and often acts, by the standards of practitioners of Western medicine, erratically, irrationally or with extreme sensitivity and volatility. As a teenager, my husband watched as someone very dear to him killed herself. This, to me, is an unimaginable horror – the stuff of nightmares, the kind I’ve had. It’s especially challenging for me to articulate empathy in any profound way that would make my mother understand how passionately I strive to recognize the emotions she experiences. Sharing such emotions isn’t easy and it may not be healthy. Those nightmares were chronic in my early childhood and pre-adolescence, and only began to taper in frequency in my mid-teens. Many would be of what I imaged as concentration camps or people hovering over mass graves as their loved ones were piled into pits like compost. Naturally all these images were based on what my mother and her parents had endured.

My mother with her mother, 1949. My mother with her
father, 1947. Both photos taken in Hanover, Germany. No photos exist of my mother before the displaced persons camp in Hanover. 

Sigmund Freud referred to survivor’s guilt following his father’s death, in a letter to his friend, otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor) Wilhelm Fliess, referring to “that tendency toward self-reproach which death invariably leaves among the survivors.

Simply put, it’s the feeling that you have harmed others, especially loved ones, just because you were spared death when they died. The term "survivor syndrome" was coined in 1961 by psychoanalyst W.G. Niederland, who in the 1950s began studying concentration camp survivors.

Among survivors of World War II concentration camps, guilt is sometimes manifested in strange yet subtle forms, such as behaving as if they themselves are dead, inhibiting themselves from success or engaging in self-destructive acts in response to survivor’s guilt in regard to a dead parent or sibling, A H Modell revealed in a seminal article published in 1971 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I recall one instance when my grandfather lied down under his car, acting as if he were dead. I was a young teen. I was horrified. I knew it had something to do with his experiences, and I felt guilty for lacking the psychological study to identify his condition. (I have an unsupported theory that survivor’s guilt is passed down to the next generation more so than other forms of guilt.)

“Survivor's guilt constitutes the failure of the psychological immune system to grapple with tragedy of great magnitude. Like an infection that overwhelms the body's immune system, survivor's guilt overwhelms the psychological immune system. Instead of exaggerating the difference between oneself and a victim, the similarity is what strikes people as most obvious. ‘That poor guy was no different from me; it could just as well have been me instead of him.’  With survivor's guilt, the differences between oneself and another person shrink, and so too do the differences between what actually happened and what could have happened. As with a bad infection, the best recourse is medical treatment,” writes Neal Roese, Ph.D., in his 2005 book, “If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity.”

I find this fascinating, as I've often wondered if there was any correlation between people of my mother’s (and grandparents’) immigration and a proliferation of autoimmune diseases. I rarely share this premise, as finding Western medical professionals who even discuss something that’s not published in a study they read or wrote is generally impossible. In any case, I know more than most people outside of endocrinology about autoimmune diseases as it took decades for me to find a doctor to properly diagnose mine. I'd been confident for years that I had some form of autoimmune hypothyroidism, as my maternal grandfather suffered from hypothyroidism and my mother had a thyroidectomy. My grandfather wasn’t diagnosed until it was too late, when he was hospitalized for what may have been delayed symptoms of a nearly fatal car crash that he “miraculously” survived, doctors and first responders told me at the time. (At 15, I was in the ambulance and in the operating room with him.) My mother’s hypothyroidism also went undiagnosed and untreated for decades. Doctors blamed my symptoms on anything else, even my own behavior, and refused to send out blood work for a quick, simple and cheap test of free levels of triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4), which together regulate your body’s temperature, metabolism and heart rate, because my "TSH (or thyroid stimulating hormone) is fine." Finally, I found a doctor who’d written an article on a study that articulated exactly what I’d been telling other doctors, and he immediately diagnosed me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a genetic disease. My mother’s mother had rheumatoid arthritis, and my sister is afflicted with RA, along with Lupus and Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) – all autoimmune diseases.  So many people I knew growing up from the same immigration also suffered from various autoimmune diseases, while diabetes and heart disease was extremely rare in this community. These people grew their own vegetables and fruits, fished and only bought meat if they knew how the animal was slaughtered. This was in the third-largest city in Massachusetts and fourth-largest in New England. My grandparents kept hens in a perch of shelves that my grandfather build into a one-car garage, grew dozens of vegetable varieties and berries, and even kept and slaughtered their own pigs. I often went fishing (at a nearby lake) and mushroom picking (at a nearby forest) with my grandfather. I picked berries from the small yard and helped collect eggs from the hens. My grandfather volunteered as a beekeeper at the monastery where he’s now buried on his vacations from factory work and brought home the equipment to keep hives in the yard.

My unexamined autoimmne hypothesis aside, there’s been even less done to psychologically diagnose these people and treat their obvious survivor’s guilt and often posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is an unforgivable failure of our mental health system and our society at large. America has welcomed the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” but it has done nothing to help those huddled masses heal from the incomparable suffering of surviving war after war. PTSD and survivor’s guilt is so rarely used in conversations about anyone but U.S. military veterans. Unarmed civilians suffer far more than soldiers. PTSD and survivor’s guilt are often confused, even by trained specialists, but they are very different phenomena. While PTSD is psychopathological phenomenon, survivor’s guilt is more of an expression of a normal concern for other human beings, both as individuals and as a society.

My intention is never to undermine the struggle of soldiers. My father was a decorated veteran who served in the South Pacific and in Korea, and is immortalized in The New Orleans D-Day Museum. Many men in my family have served in numerous wars and conflicts. But when they volunteer or they’re drafted or recruited, soldiers are warned of the trauma to come, even if they cannot effectively prepare for it. Even the most distressed societies make an effort, and often a promise, to protect civilians, yet no adult or child ever is warned of the sudden terror that leads to destruction of what was a civil society. My mother also was robbed of a childhood, adding another level of stress to her guilt.

“The various effects that adults who were child survivors experience can be attributed to many aspects of their traumatic exposure. Children and adults were treated differently in the camps and consequently their emotional reactions were different. Children were likely too traumatized during the war to experience ‘true’ childhood,” writes Fara Kaplan in “Holocaust Survivors and Their Children: A Search for Positive Effects” published by The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. “Also, because the child's identity had been in a state of development, their experiences may have remained buried in their memory (i.e., unconscious). This may have impeded their ability to empathize with others and likely negatively affected their adjustment to their own offspring.”

For my mother, the survivor’s guilt from early childhood is compounded by the losses of her parents and my father, all of whom she cared for at home until their deaths from very serious illnesses. The Russians (and Eastern Slavs) I knew growing up did not sentence their sick and old to death in nursing homes. “How can I do that to my parents when they didn’t let me die?” my mother has said, or stated, many times. Of course, she was equally compelled to care for her dying husband. My grandfather’s illness was, mercifully, short-lived: he died about a year after he became bed-ridden, his wife and his daughter as his constant bedside companions. After he died, my grandmother was bedridden for nearly nine years, her (long undiagnosed) brain atrophy prohibiting her from speaking. She would, however, sometimes cry in a chanting tone that clearly signified the mourning of her loved ones, especially her infant sons.  My father was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, metastasized to the liver, shortly after my grandmother died. I’ll spare the details of what such care involves, as I know most Americans lack the palate for visceral reality. But my mother completely gave up her life from 1987 until 2002. She hasn’t recovered from that trauma enough to indulge in what are very basic creature comforts for the average American, such as treating herself to a movie or a vacation – ever.

In a 1972 article in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Stephen M. Sonnenberg, M.D., cites a case study involving a patient who felt guilty that her husband had died during surgery she authorized, after caring for him during a nine-month illness. “She also expressed feelings of guilt concerning the murder of her parents and younger sisters by the Nazis,” notes Sonnenberg.

“With (her husband’s) death, she not only felt guilt concerning him but she lost the opportunity to expiate her long-standing guilt by being a good nurse. In her unconscious, it was as if she had willed the suffering of her past loved ones in an effort to be close to them. Thus, guilt over past events became overwhelming. It would seem that this patient was a guilt-laden woman who lost a guilt-expiating object and at the same time underwent an experience that confirmed her past and present guilt. Signing for 'experimental' surgery was perhaps the final burden, and her obsession over it became clear in her treatment. While she insisted that her husband's good health had been her goal, she also felt that she was a 'murderer.’ Depression was present when anger at the lost object was conscious and when identification with the lost object did not exist. It was the strength of her guilt that made her feel so hopeless and depressed.”

Shulamith Kreitler, Frida Barak, Yasmin Alkalay and Nava Siegelman-Daniel conducted study of 195 family members of cancer patients who had been involved in the care of the patients and had a continuous relationship with them, which found that that survivor’s guilt is prevalent among the caretakers of cancer patients.

“It is distinct from the experiences of guilt and of remorse,” they wrote in paper “Survivor’s Guilt in Caretakers of Cancer” based on the study. “Survivor’s guilt is an affective response rooted in deeper layers of the personality. Most importantly, the observations about the correlates of survivor’s guilt six months following the patient’s death support the theses that survivor’s guilt exerts a pro-social impact on the person’s behavior and that it helps maintain the presence of the deceased in the life space of the survivor. Both of these effects led the deceased a kind of metaphorical immortality, thus helping the survivor preserve his or her own sense of immortality and the sense of continued contact with the deceased. In these respects survivor’s guilt contributes to overcoming death, at least on the psychological level.”

This desire to commune with the dead also plays into my mother’s religious beliefs and practices. Russian Orthodox Christians do not close the casket until it is taken from the church to the cemetery. My grandmother’s body was returned to my parent’s home where she died after being taken to the funeral home. A wake was held at home, with many non-Orthodox Christians in attendance, and kept my grandmother there until being transported 166 miles away to the monastery church. (I drove my mother’s car, following the hearse, which was nearing speeds of 100 mph. It was exhilarating.) Psalms are read over the body continuously and throughout the night until the funeral begins. In the words of the fathers of the seventh ecumenical council: “God re-created man in immortality, thus bestowing upon him a gift which could no longer be taken away from him.”

Nietzsche said Dostoevsky was “the only person who has ever taught me anything about psychology.” In Dostoevsky’s work, guilt and sin are existential conditions of man, and each of us is somehow guilty of everyone’s sins. Nietzsche began reading the work of Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, in 1887, finding inspiration in a fellow challenger of the fundamental world view of the Enlightenment. Religious belief is what divides the two. Dostoevsky ultimately believes in salvation and therefore an afterlife, a view Nietzsche boldly rejects. But they share a very similar perspective on guilt.

The confession of Raskolnikov, which leads the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to prison, clearly had a profound impact on Nietzsche’s philosophy.

"Throughout most of human history, punishment has not been meted out because the miscreant was held responsible for his act, therefore it was not assumed that the guilty party alone should be punished: but rather, as parents still punish their children, it was out of anger over some wrong that had been suffered, directed at the perpetrator, but this anger was held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent which can be paid in compensation, if only through the pain of the person who injures. And where did this primeval, deeply-rooted and perhaps now ineradicable idea gain its power, this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already let it out: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the very conception of ‘legal subject’ and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade, and traffic." _ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

It’s impossible for me to imagine a guilt more “primeval, deeply-rooted” than survivor’s guilt.

On Being (Bela)Rus(s)ian

I’ve been struggling to figure out the story behind the photos I posted of my grandfather and his father holding numbers. Online research is useless, and none of the dozens of professors and other experts of Slavic studies and history I reached out to have any clue. The replies, at least have been cordial, save for one from a non-academic that raised an irrelevant point that plays into something I’ve been meaning to write about.

“Those men on them (the photos) do not look like Belarusian types very much,” said the would-be source, a journalist who covers Belarus and other countries for a global news organization. 

His reply, for a number of reasons, offended me. As I attempt to let go of my toxic emotional response, I recall so many random and unrelated comments that have rattled my own cultural identity.

Just four days before receiving this journalist’s email, my son Michael Alexander, who is half Italian-American, and I were at a Japanese restaurant in Dumbo where we have lunch every Monday after school and before his art class.  It was packed that day, so we sat at the sushi bar. As Michael Alexander grabbed and devoured a piece of white tuna from my plate, the sushi chef smiled and said: “Russian boys are good and strong because they like fish.” He looked shocked when I told him we both were born in the U.S., insisting that “you both look very Russian.” His observation was meant as a compliment, applauding me for “teaching him right, even in America.”

Dozens of times I’ve been approached by people, usually blonde women around my mother’s age, who speak to me in Russian, asking for subway or walking directions. They’re all surprised when I tell them, in Russian, that I was born here. When I first moved to New York and was apartment hunting, the longtime Ukrainian landlords in the East Village called me only Natali, the Ukrainian diminutive for Natalia. (Natasha is my legal name, but I was baptized Natalia.) They’d assure me “you don’t look Russian at all. You look only Ukrainian.” Meantime, the well-heeled Russian-born brokers wanted me to move to the Upper East Side, insisting that’s “where all the Russians are. Don’t worry, you do not look Ukrainian or Polish at all, just Russian.” I won’t even get into what all of them say when I mention my mother was born in Belarus.

I joke that I was born to hate myself, the embodiment of Slavic ethnic strife. My father was born in the U.S. to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father.

Few non-Slavs even knew what a Belarusian or a Ukrainian was throughout my early childhood. I recall few things from what I considered to be a lousy “world cultures” class in 7^th or 8^th grade at a private girls’ school in 1980s Massachusetts. I hold a grudge to this day and blame the teacher for perpetuating myths about cultures he apparently hadn’t studied beyond the simplistic and poorly written textbook we used. “All Russians look like this,” he told the class pointing to a photograph of a young girl with dark hair and dark eyes. I stayed after class to tell him that there isn’t an archetypal look that is Russian, since the world’s biggest country is home to some 160 cultures and very few, if any, inhabitants can trace their heritage to just one. He laughed and patted me on the back, but said nothing other than “you’d better not be late for your next class.” I’d risked a “red dot” for being late for my next class, but the other teacher wasn’t the petty type who made such threats and enforced Soviet-inspired punishment. My grade in his class slipped slowly after that, even if my test scores never dropped.

Naturally there is more to being Russian or Belarusian or Ukrainian or Polish, or a mix of those and likely other ethnicities, than appearance. Escalating national and ethnic tensions are making headlines now, after protesters in Ukraine's capital Kiev knocked down a statue of Vladimir Lenin on Sunday. But Belarus is an even stranger place with far more strife and instability that’s fueled by corruption and its repeated role in war after lengthy and gory war.

My grandfather may have interpreted the journalist’s comment that “Those men …  do not look like Belarusian types very much” very differently as he identified himself as a Russian, not a Belarusian. As I’ve mentioned, he, my grandmother and my mother all were born in Belarus, just over the Russian border. That they were persecuted and that many family members and close friends were killed by Belarusian nationalists, is clearly part of the staunch Russian pride.

It is challenging for me when people attempt to claim me as their own, based on ethnicity as well as religion and cultural heritage. Living in New York, I hear “you’re Jewish like me, right?” as much as “you look Russian, “ or “you look Ukrainian” or “you look “Polish.”

I grapple with what all this means, as it pertains to my mother’s history.

Even a cursory scan of the history of Belarus should quickly dismiss any claim to a pure ethnic identity or “look.”

Stone Age settlements have been discovered in the Gomel region, with sites from the Palaeolithic period unearthed in the village of Yurovichi (Kalinkovichi area) dating back some 26,000 years. Bronze Age artifacts have been found throughout Belarus and at the start of the Iron Age there were three main settlements in Belarus around the basins of the Dneiper, Dvina and Pripyat rivers.

Colonization by the Slavs began in the early centuries AD, eventually replacing the Baltic culture. East Slavs formed the first political associations, or unions of tribes, in the 6^th and 9^th centuries. The first records from the Polotsk Duchy in what is now modern Vitebsk Oblast and the northern part of the Minsk Oblast date back to the 9^th century. Polotsk dominated until the 13th century when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Rus and Samogotia – which spanned modern Belarus, Lithuania, the Kiev, Chernigov and Volyn areas of the Ukraine and western Russia from the Baltics to the Black Sea – rose to power in the 13th century and only began to crumble after multiple wars in the 16th century.

In 1569 the Grand Duchy and the Kingdom of Poland signed the Union of Lublin to create Rzeczpospolita (the traditional Polish State). This ushered in a period of turmoil, which included a war with Russia (1654-1667) and the North War with Sweden and Russia (1700-1721). Battered by its rivals, Rzeczpospolita eventually lost and in 1772 the western provinces of Belarus were annexed to the Russian Empire. In 1795 Rzeczpospolita was divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Under the first Russification efforts, what was Belarus became a place of ongoing conflict and confusion with revolt under Tadeusz Kostushko’s leadership (1794), the Napoleonic invasion of Russia (1812), the Polish Revolt (1830–1831) and the Great Rebellion, headed by Kastus Kalinovski (1863-1864). During this period, Belarusian students in Saint Petersburg began organizing what set the foundation for the first Belarusian national political party formed in 1903. The Stolypin agrarian reforms, a series of changes to Imperial Russia's agricultural sector launched in 1906, resulted in mass displacement of the peasant classes until 1914, including 33,000 people who were moved from Belarusian territory to Siberia.

During World War I, German and Russian forces fought bloody battles on Belarusian territory, until March 3, 1918, with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then came the Russian Revolution and the Belarusian People’s Republic declared independence in March 1918, which lasted until the German withdrawal at the end of the year. The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic was created Jan. 1, 1919.

After the Russo-Polish War (1919-1921), the Riga Peace Treaty resulted in the partitioning of Belarus between the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic and Poland. All of Belarus was under the New Economic Policy (NEP), implemented by the government of the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928 and representing a temporary retreat from its previous policy of extreme centralization and doctrinaire socialism. Meantime, the Polish part of Belarus was subjected to Polonization from 1921-1930s. In 1922, the Belarusian SSR became a part of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

It only got worse ahead of my mother’s birth. Soviet economic policy and the introduction of collective farming caused famine in Belarus from 1932-1933. During the Great Purge (1936-1940) more than 86,000 Belarusians suffered political oppression and more than 28,000 were sentenced to death. (My mother was born in 1936 or 1938.)

The Red Army moved into West Belarus on Sept. 17, 1939, two weeks after World War II started. In June 1941, the Great Patriotic War began and by September Belarus was fully occupied by the German army. By the end of 1941, the Belarusian Partisans surfaced and ballooned into the biggest movement in Europe before 1944.

Little has changed, at least in terms of attitude and perception.

A new analytical paper "Belarusian Identity: The Impact of Lukashenka's Rule" released today by the Centre for Transition Studies suggests that President Alexander Lukashenko rejected the ethno-national model of state suggested by his predecessors in the early 1990s and restored a Soviet style “statist nation” run by a centralized bureaucracy. After being elected in 1994, Lukashenko launched a policy of Russification, selecting Russia as a strategic priority for foreign relations in a supposed effort to recover from the economic crisis. A year later he initiated a referendum to introduce Russian as a second official language in Belarus, with the vast majority, or 83.3%, of voters supporting the initiative. The Constitution of Belarus declares the equal status of both languages, but Russian dominates all facets of life and public organizations and officials generally speak Russian.

Since the early noughts, all major Belarus-based media broadcasts are aired in Russian, and there are no all-Belarusian language universities. The study data shows the even as more residents identify themselves as Belarusians, the use of the Belarusian language has eroded, and a Russian-speaking Belarusian nation has emerged. When asked “What unites you with other people of your nationality?” Belarusians refer more to territory and state, than to culture and language. The majority consider the origin of Belarusian statehood in mediaeval Polack and Turaŭ princedoms and the Great Duchy of Lithuania, not in the Belarusian SSR. Still the same people have embraced symbols, such as national holidays and the red-green flag, introduced by Lukashenko’s regime.

“The Belarusian nation, unlike most European nations, did not emerge along ethno-national lines, with an indigenous language, culture or a solid nationalist historical narrative. Rather, it consolidated as a result of a Communist experiment which lasted for 70 years. It experienced many of the major disasters of the 20th century, including both the Stalinist terror and the horrors of World War II. This turbulent path has impacted Belarusians profoundly and, after 20 years of independence, the Belarusian nation is still trying to find its way,” wrote the paper’s author, Vadzim Smok, a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies 'Political Sphere' based in Minsk and Vilnius.

Smok looks to people like my cousin Tanya, who just began teaching after graduating from Minsk State Linguistic University (MSLU) to effect dramatic social change.

“Younger generations will play a crucial role in the future development of the Belarusian nation. They communicate by the Internet, which remains a free and open space for communication and exchange of ideas in Belarus. They did not undergo Soviet indoctrination or experience its relentless propaganda and tend to prefer to work in the private sector, meaning they are less and less tied to the state. These people look much more free and democratically minded then their parents, and quite soon they will rule the country,” Smok concluded.

For now, I’m still entangled in what my mother’s birthplace means for my family’s identity. Do I have a Belarusian “look”? Do I care? Apparently I do.

My Marvel Avengers’ obsessed (his father’s student) son, the one who was mistaken for a “boy from Russia,” had wanted to be Spider-Man this past Halloween but I insisted he also try on a Thor costume. The saleswomen swooned, with two singing in unison “He IS Thor!” Perhaps that means that he has the “Bealrusian look,” which could be more Old Norse than anything else. In 2010, archaeologists found the remains of an ancient Viking (or what East Slavs call Varangian) settlement in Vitebsk Oblast, where my mother and her parents were born. 

                                                   (Photo credit: Dave Stewart Photogrpahy)

Said Marc Chagall, the Vitebsk-born artist with an extremely complicated ethno-cultural identity, “The soil that nourished the roots of my art was Vitebsk."