Author: Kasia Swierad-Redwood

From Warsaw Chopin Airport my time in Armenia already seems like a distant dream. Or maybe that’s because my first flight back to the US was delayed over 27 hours, and I haven’t slept more than 12 hours within the last 60. In other words, perhaps the summer feels like a distant past because I’ve been trapped in an airport nightmare for far too long; like I’ve been subjected to some sort of back-to-reality prank. Or because having left Armenia, Russian is no longer the default language.

As I reflect on my time in Armenia in this half-asleep state, I feel really proud of how much I’ve learned. I am proud of the confidence I gained speaking Russian; of the fact that in my last days I had been consistently mistaken for a native speaker (don’t be fooled I’ve just learned to mask my issues with Russian phonetics), and the fact I was able to offer my fellow travelers simultaneous Russian-Polish-English translation in a time of crisis, even after being awake for 24 hours. The airport staff made quiet, almost secret, announcements about the long delay exclusively in Armenian, and I had to pry the information out of them in Russian to pass it along in other languages—like a game of испорченный телефон, or broken telephone, only I got it right. It was a true test of my skills, and I am proud to say I passed!

In some ways, Russian comes more easily to me now than Polish, and I’ve noticed that under pressure I’ve started using Russian conjugation patterns for Polish verbs. Is this because I know more Russian than Polish? No, of course not! Polish is my native language, my first language. Rather, it is the result of a language immersion program, in a city where the language is spoken everywhere, where you can hear it everywhere you go—and I am so grateful I got to experience that.

But, will every immersive language program yield this kind of result? The short answer is, это зависит от ситуации—it depends on the situation. Most importantly, it depends on you, the learner. I left my husband, dogs, and cat this summer with a mission: to get as close to fluency in Russian as humanely possible in two months. I thought eight weeks away from my family needs to bring me to a comfortable level of speaking and reading Russian, if it’s going to be worth it. So I spent almost every waking minute working on my Russian: small talk with staff in the local cafe where I ate every day; more small talk with the staff and other guests at my hostel; watching interviews with Russian journalists and politicians; reading and listening to (audio)books; carefully doing my homework every day; engaging in long and serious debates on various issues in class; joking with Alyona, our teacher, about Eastern Europe; going to every event I had the energy for. It was draining, truly exhausting. But I will miss it. I will miss speaking this language every day. I will miss the friends I’ve made in this language. And I will miss thinking in this language, as I transition out of Slavic syntax and back into English.

***
On my last evening in Yerevan, I went to the Ukrainian charity with Alyona to eat proper homemade borscht, to donate money to the shelter for war refugees, and to hang out with her one last time. As we sat in the garden, sweating from the hot soup in almost 40 degree heat (that’s Celsius, google it), we talked about what we dream of. We talked about the uncertainty of planning for the future in this day and age, and how you can do everything right and still not get to where you want to be—and sometimes that’s just how it is. For both of us, the dream is to live and work in Ukraine at some point in the near future. This wasn’t the first time we talked about it, but it was the saddest, as we tried to figure out when and how we can meet again. If Ukraine were possible, we’d both be friends there; and when it becomes possible again, I’m sure we will be.

And as we said our goodbyes and hugged by the gates of the shelter, we both cried. We cried for having met in the circumstances we did, and how they brought us to this inevitable goodbye. Alyona is truly one of the kindest and most generous people I have met in recent times. I cannot be more grateful for having spent the summer learning from her, and getting to know her on a more personal level. I will miss her.

But we’ll keep in touch in the language she taught me this summer, and I’m sure we’ll meet again, in Armenia or perhaps in Ukraine.

As I’m approaching the final week of my language program I find myself walking around Yerevan more and more, exploring its corners, committing them all to memory. Every evening after classes I go for a long walk—the kind of walk where a purpose would get in the way.

As I walk I become a part of city life.

This city lives in the evenings. The evening crowd is a city landmark sui generis as it moves through open squares, parks lined with art, and streets where elderly men and women sell fruit out of tired baskets. Everything is open: restaurants, coffee shops, pharmacies, supermarkets. Major city buildings, shop windows, streets both wide and narrow light the way around the city. Strong evening winds rustle the leaves of the many trees that line the streets of Yerevan. Stray dogs come up to people looking for love and tenderness. They lean into open palms as people offer them the little bit of time they have on their way to joining city life. The evening walk seems like a ritual event. Men, women, and children dress up just to roam around this city. This city thrives on their energy. And it’s so safe here.

This city sings in the evenings. There’s so much talent on the streets, both immigrant and native. Every few meters a new artist catches your eye. A young band living on a prayer; a group of older men playing traditional Armenian music on traditional instruments; a young classically-trained man trying his hand at street performance. Music blaring from bars and restaurants: Armenian here, Russian or English there, occasionally Persian in between, as city life and history blend into one. The fountains on the central Republic Square put on a show every evening from 9pm for an hour. Lights, water, music—and every night the crowd is huge as people laugh, talk, and celebrate this city against the backdrop of the National History Museum.

But this city also protests in the evenings. Every few days crowds with banners, flags, and megaphones gather on one of the major streets and make their way around this city. Because while Yerevan lives, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh face violence and famine. The lives of Nagorno-Karabakh haven’t been safe, or even guaranteed, in decades. And so few people in the world know of their plight, and even less care. “A tiny place in constant conflict since the 1990s,” said Vice News about Nagorno-Karabakh just a day or so ago. It’s not a tiny place “in conflict”. It’s a place that is home to around one hundred and fifty thousand people—real lives, who have been resisting genocide for decades. Those are Armenian lives, constantly threatened by Azerbaijan who is currently blocking humanitarian aid to the region. People have started dying of starvation and related illnesses. Trucks with food and medicine wait to be let through into the area. But Nagorno-Karabakh lies within the borders of Azerbaijan, and their answer is “no.” So when Yerevan comes out to protest it shouts for those whose voices are silenced by Azerbaijan and the oil money it hands out to critics like ear plugs.

And when Yerevan lives in the evenings, it lives loudly—because it lives in protest.
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“Hearts with one purpose alone   
Through summer and winter seem   
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,   
The rider, the birds that range   
From cloud to tumbling cloud,   
Minute by minute they change;   
A shadow of cloud on the stream   
Changes minute by minute;   
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   
And a horse plashes within it;   
The long-legged moor-hens dive,   
And hens to moor-cocks call;   
Minute by minute they live:   
The stone’s in the midst of all.”
—W.B. Yeats Easter, 1916

As an Eastern European, a historian of Eastern Europe, and a speaker of three Eastern European languages, it is impossible not to think about and see Russia’s war on Ukraine in everything. As an immigrant it is also impossible not to think about the migration effects of this war every time I meet a new person.

Alyona, my Russian teacher and a doctor of Slavic linguistics in Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish, hails from Komsomolsk on the Amura, a city in the Russian Far East, a seven-day train ride from Moscow and 24 hours from Vladivostok. She’s a dedicated expert teacher of all three languages whose dream it was to live and work in Ukraine—her first love. In January 2022 she was getting ready to leave her job in St. Petersburg and move to Ukraine. She had spent the past few months working on her CV and applying for university positions across the border. Yet, on the morning of February 24th 2022, it was the Russian army crossing the border into Ukraine, aiming to destroy, rather than academics like Alyona, who were hoping to build. Instead of Ukraine, Alyona picked Armenia, where, apart from teaching in the Russian Language Summer School, she teaches Ukrainian to Russian immigrants who want to build bridges with Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression in their own language.

Olena, a Ukrainian woman from Odesa, runs Dom Ukrainskyi/Ukrainian House—a charity focused on providing aid to war refugees from Ukraine. Unlike in many other places around Europe, the Armenian government provides no financial support for Ukrainian war refugees; the Ukrainian House is funded entirely by donations from the well-meaning public. In a past life, Olena was a professor of economics in Odesa, living Alyona’s dream life of working in higher education in Ukraine. When the Russian troops invaded Ukraine, she too picked Armenia as her home. Alyona and Olena met at the Ukrainian House, they’ve become close friends through their shared dedication to Ukraine and to peace, and they’re both building something powerful here in the basement of the Ukrainian House.

A Russian tourist in his fifties (we’ll call him Kolya) came to Armenia from Khabarovsk, only a few hours from Alyona’s hometown, and a place where she also lived for nine years. Armenia wasn’t Kolya’s first choice either. He initially wanted to travel to Southern Europe: Croatia, maybe Italy. But Russian tourists, those without much money that is, are not allowed in those places since the war began. So Kolya had to recalibrate, and eventually settled on Armenia. A school janitor from the Russian Far East, so far from the centre of Russian decision-making, he too feels the effects of the war. He has no internet or digital TV at home, only cable news: Russia One, RT, RIA Novisti, the greatest hits of Russian propaganda. But he’s very aware of it all, a curious, sensitive man—“teach me something Polish and something Ukrainian!” he asked me when we first met and I shared my vareniki and sour cream with him. He wrote everything I told him down in tiny cursive in a purple notebook. He asked me why I’m studying Russian and recommended me scores of Russian writers. Sergei Yesenin, he said, a great poet. “I’m no patriot,” he said when we were saying our goodbyes, gifting me a white, blue, and red ribbon.

***

During my first visit to the Ukrainian House I bought a necklace in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. During my last, I picked up three Russian books and carried them home in a blue and yellow knitted bag. The charity had to fight their building administration to keep the Ukrainian flag in their window, yet Russian flags are everywhere in the city, both on official and private buildings, just as Russian is heard on every street corner and in every shop—Ukrainian only a fragmentary distortion of the city’s aural scape. Most people here engage with Russian culture and history every day: free theatre performances of “Master and Margarita;” Russian expat performers playing in bars; Russian film screenings at the Armenian “Golden Apricot” Film Festival. Yet the majority don’t think about their love for all things Russian in any depth. The people who do are learning Ukrainian at the Ukrainian House.

***

“Moya liubimaya strana” or “my favorite country” is a new book by a daring and accomplished Russian journalist, formerly of Novaya Gazeta, Elena Kostiuchenko. The book has had difficulty finding a Russian publisher. “It’s too critical,” she said in a recent interview. The message of this book, too radical for regular Russian media, is that only love for your country can save it from fascist dictatorship. That loving your country means loud criticism—means fighting for it in the trenches, not with other peaceful nations but with those who want to shoot down all critical voices. That patriotism without loving criticism is fascism, and that Russia descended into it long ago. The way out, Kostiuchenko argues, is radical love. The premise reminds me of Svetlana Aleksievich’s “U voiny ne zhenskoe litso,” or “war has an unwomanly face” rendered in official English translation as “the unwomanly face of war” a translation which, in my opinion, lacks the power of the original grammatical construction. Aleksievich wrote about the suffering, dirt, death, and radical love that Soviet women gifted their country during World War II, when they worked as snipers, medics, drivers, radio liaisons. Ukraine has already gone through this radical love phase in 2014, during the Maidan Revolution of Dignity. Russia hasn’t. Not only that, but it is also punishing Ukraine for that radical love with war.

When Kolya said he’s no patriot he meant he does not support Russian aggression in Ukraine, and when he pressed the ribbon into my hand quoting Yesenin he meant he still loves Russia—just not yet radically.