Speakers: Anastasiia Lapatina & Jakub Parusinski
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Jakub: Hello, dear subscribers, welcome to your bonus episode of Power Lines: From Ukraine to the World.
Anastasiia: I am Anastasiia Lapatina.
Jakub: And I'm Jakub Parusinski. In this episode, you'll be hearing an extended interview with journalist and author, Andrea Chalupa.
You'll remember from our main episode, that Andrea is the host of the podcast Gaslit Nation, and wrote the screenplay for Mr. Jones, a biographical thriller about the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. Let's hear what Andrea has to say.
Hi, Andrea.
Andrea: Hi, Jakub.
Jakub: Thanks so much for taking the time. So, I wanted to talk a little bit more about Ukrainian identity. From what I know, your parents are both from Ukraine, but you grew up in California. What was your sort of journey to discover your Ukrainian identity like?
Andrea: Well, I grew up in a small farm city by the name of Davis, very agricultural. We had fields of sunflowers. So, a lot of it felt very Ukrainian at heart, and we knew like all three Ukrainian families in town.
And if you wanted to go to a Ukrainian Orthodox church, you would go to the capital of California, which is Sacramento, or you'd go to San Francisco if you wanted either a Ukrainian Catholic or Orthodox church. So, you'd have to go to the big cities to get the real Ukrainian flavor.
And the town was very white, but somehow, my family felt like a loud ethnic immigrant family. My parents were born in refugee camps after World War II, but they grew up in New York city in Little Ukraine in the Ukrainian village, which is of course, where Veselka, the famous 24-hour Ukrainian diner is today.
My mom and dad met for the first time in the Ukrainian east village restaurant. So, they had a very typical Ukrainian upbringing, whereas I did not, but my parents tried as much as possible to surround us with Ukrainians.
And our home, growing up in Davis, had beautiful embroidered Ukrainian pillows throughout the living room. We had a giant bowl of Pysanky year-round on display. So, you had all these Ukrainian symbols throughout our home, and that made a big difference.
And then on top of that, I was raised by my grandfather, my dedounya, who was from Donbas, who was born and raised in Donbas. He grew up thinking in Ukrainian, speaking Ukrainian, writing in Ukrainian.
And of course, all of that changed when Stalin came to power and completely transformed Ukraine, unfortunately, through the genocidal famine, the Holodomor of 1932/1933.
But my grandfather spoke Ukrainian and he was a proud Ukrainian patriot. He was a survivor of the Holodomor and therefore, an important witness of the atrocities. And he gave hours of testimony to a researcher for the U.S. Congress on the congressional investigation into the famine.
So, there's recordings of my grandfather's voice telling horrific stories of what that genocide was like, the horrors that he witnessed. And that's an important record today being used by researchers.
In fact, some of my grandfather's testimony in the congressional investigation was cited in Anne Applebaum’s book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.
So, my grandfather was the world to me, and he was really my anchor in life. My anchor of what's morally right, my anchor in what it means to be a decent human being. He was just very lovely and centered and generous.
And before he passed away, he prepared a package for me, which included a framed photograph of himself and a gold necklace of my name, and his memoir typed in Ukrainian, which he left with me.
And when I was old enough, I studied Soviet history with a focus on Ukraine in college. I went to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. And then from there, I just showed up in Ukraine, and did all sorts of cultural language programs, and had my grandfather's memoir translated into English, and wrote a book based on excerpts of his story, which show the real events that George Orwell allegorizes in Animal Farm. And that book is called Orwell and the Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm.
And I of course, went on to research and write Mr. Jones, the historical drama, the journalistic thriller about the real-life Welsh journalist that risked his life and career to expose Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine.
And there's a scene in Mr. Jones taken directly from my grandfather's memoir, which was a heartbreaking scene of Gareth Jones, stumbling upon a body collector, many existed in those days.
And this body collector pulls over to the side of the road and picks up a dead mother on the ground. And the mother's young child, this infant, is pawing at the mother trying to wake her up.
The body collector throws her body in the back of his cart like trash on a pile of other bodies, and throws the still living infant on the pile of bodies as well, and then rides off to bury them in the mass grave. My grandfather witnessed that.
We put it in the film to give people an idea of just how deep this horror ran, how evil this genocide was, just the level of cruelty.
Jakub: That's an incredible story. And your grandfather sounds like an amazing person. One thing that I'm curious about is the Holodomor was hidden for many years, for decades, in fact.
Even in official Western academia, it's something that wasn't really out in the open up until the nineties. Did you have a feeling that this was something that was very unknown, very sort of, this hidden dark secret?
Andrea: Oh, without question. I mean, growing up in California, people didn't really understand what Ukraine was or that it was its own country. They kept mentioning, “Oh, you're Russian. Oh, you're Russian.” No, I'm Ukrainian. It's an entirely different country.
So, I don't understand Ukrainians that have come over, who, for convenience sake changed their identity to Russian because it's easier for a westerner. I don't understand that at all. It's the weirdest thing.
I had no problem correcting people all my life, saying, “No I'm from Ukraine, my family's from Ukraine, it's a different country. It's the bread basket of Europe.” All of the discourse now, of all of these Ukraine experts, all of these Ukrainian journalists, Ukrainian analysts, Ukrainian authors, Ukrainian historians.”
What you're seeing them do now, especially on social media where this information war is being waged, is you're seeing all these Ukraine experts saying, “Actually, borscht is Ukrainian. It really did come from Ukraine. Actually, this painting of Ukrainian dancers, that's really what Ukrainian dancers look like. That's actually us, that's Ukrainian.”
And so, what I'm saying is that there's this big pushback reclaiming what's already ours. And it's so refreshing to see that because all my life, it was my mother and father pointing that out to me.
And I always thought, I'm like, are they just exaggerating? Are they kind of like that family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where they claim everything great is from Greece?
But it's nice to see that it holds up to the scholarly scrutiny, that there are so many things that have been taken from Ukraine to give sort of greater credibility to Russia when it's been Ukrainian all along.
And I think when I first started working on Mr. Jones, it was really for my grandfather first and foremost, to get his story out, to build some greater justice in the world for the millions of victims of Stalin. And it did feel like a tremendous uphill battle.
And the response I would get from producers in the early years, especially, they would write me back and say, “Wow, did this really happen?” Like they were just completely shocked. They'd never heard of this before.
And I think for a story like this, it's a difficult movie to make because it's a genocide film, it's not a Marvel movie. And as much as we have a young strapping hero in the form of Gareth Jones played by James Norton, it's still a difficult sell because of the difficult vile carnage of the mass murder.
It's so gut-wrenching, it just makes you feel helpless watching this. All of that combined, made it a very tough package. And so, I knew inevitably I would have to build the film around a coalition of allies. And that's why I took the project to Poland because I saw what extraordinary allies the Poles were to Ukraine when Putin's invasion first broke out in 2014.
As soon as I did that, the project came together very quickly. My producers in Warsaw basically held me hostage in their office. And they're like, “We're not letting you go until you sign a contract with us. We're going to make this film no matter what,” they just wanted to make the story.
And they felt such an affinity for Ukraine. They felt a sense of anger at what had happened to Ukrainians. Poles, of course, suffered under Soviet occupation, but not as greatly as Ukrainians did. And that was sort of their feeling, of like we need to get justice for what was done. And they were just as angry as I was.
So, all of us came together in this coalition of demanding justice, and one powerful way of reclaiming truth, reclaiming justice is to bear witness, and to say, “This happened, no one did anything about it. Here are the people who were responsible for this happening, and it could happen again.”
And so, all of those years when we were working on this, we never thought that this history would repeat ever. This was never supposed to be what it turned out to be, which is basically a movie about right now.
It was supposed to be a historical monument to pay tribute to the past, to a little known genocide. And then instead, it turned into, unfortunately, a story about today as history is repeating.
Jakub: Absolutely, history is repeating itself. The war, which absolutely can be described as colonial, as genocidal, as an attempt to erase Ukraine as a nation, and a number of authority figures in Russia have said that very explicitly.
And then when you look at the story of the Holodomor, the genocide, it's something that absolutely surpasses imagination, we’re brought up in a world where the Holocaust was the darkest thing to have happened to humanity. And it seems so overwhelming that nothing could be even comparable, but I think the Holodomor is as big, and it's almost impossible to grasp.
I don't think there's any point in really comparing genocides. Each one is tragic and unique in its own way. But what I mean, is this story is so big that it takes a long time to just understand it.
And it's kind of amazing to see that Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian culture is being built at the same time as people sort of are starting to understand the depths of both the tragic, but also, the positive aspects of it.
Andrea: I wanted to go back to the Holocaust and the Holodomor because I think it's important for people to understand how those genocides, the links between them.
So, 1932, Stalin gets away with mass murdering millions of Ukrainians. There were German colonies inside Ukraine, and those Germans escaped during the famine, went back to Germany.
And as a result, news of the genocide famine came out in Germany, and the Nazis used it in that election in 1933 to attack their opponents from the Communist party and saying, “Don't vote for the communist, they're killing their own people, vote for us.”
And then when Hitler came to power, one of the very first things he started to do was build his first concentration camp. I don't think people understand how quickly the Holocaust started, as soon as Hitler came to power. He likely got to work on his final solution because he just saw Stalin get away with killing millions.
There were absolutely no repercussions for the Stalin regime for what they did, instead, Stalin was rewarded.
That year in 1933, the U.S. finally granted official recognition to the Soviet Union. And there was a huge banquet between Russian leaders and American leaders at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. We had that scene in my film, Mr. Jones.
So, Stalin essentially got rewarded for his genocide of Ukraine. The world looked the other way, and that gave a green light to Hitler to do what he did.
It’s just a warning to all of us that when you have a tyrant on the scene who is driven by genocide, he absolutely must be stopped. He must be stopped. We failed to stop Stalin, we failed to stop Hitler. We cannot fail to stop Putin because so many more lives are at stake beyond Ukraine. That's what people have to understand.
He's not going to stop in Ukraine. If he wins there, he's going to keep going. That's what they do. And that's just a lesson for always.
Jakub: I see that you're very active in mobilizing people. I'm sure that as everyone who's deeply in love with Ukraine, you spent the last six months on Twitter and on social media, trying to mobilize people.
How do you sort of see that Ukrainian identity evolve and what role do you think it's taking on in your life?
Andrea: I felt personally destabilized when the total war broke out. That turned around very quickly when I saw how Ukrainians were fighting back and how much they've come back. They're now pushing through in Kharkiv, in Kherson, and Donbas, and it's just a testament to the Ukrainian spirit.
And I wish people all over the world could feel that, could really tap into that because it's such an inspiring power.
All of the Ukrainian journalists and the Ukrainian human rights activists, and the Ukrainian anti-corruption reformers that are leading the way on social media that I take leadership from, they represent everything my mom and dad raised me on in terms of understanding how beautiful of a culture Ukraine is, inside and out.
The creativity, the generosity, the love — it's just a really beautiful feeling. It's a country where people argue. If you want to start two clubs in Ukraine or among Ukrainians anywhere, you start one. People can really be at each other's throats.
But when it comes to Russia, everybody unites. It's the most extraordinary organization suddenly. And the patriotism comes out in such a big way, because in Ukraine, patriotism means survival.
Jakub: One of the big questions that Ukraine and Ukrainians, I think, the world over will have to deal with; how do you live through that trauma? How do you rebuild the society that strives for a sort of normality?
Andrea: Well, I know that specifically with the Holodomor, the Ukrainian refugees that were stranded in displaced persons camp after World War II, they were given basically anything they needed from the refugee organization, which came out of the United Nations, and that allowed them to flourish in the safety of these refugee camps, where they were no longer under Soviet repression.
They were basically free and they lived and blossomed in freedom, and they were able to bring back their culture, they would have Ukrainian theater, they would have Ukrainian conferences, they would have Ukrainian music recitals, and Ukrainian libraries.
So, the whole point is that you have to support people. You have to allow people a place to reclaim their dignity, reclaim their sense of self, support them in that freedom, in those efforts.
My uncle, he was going to a Ukrainian school in his Ukrainian refugee camp in Germany. And he was old enough when his family was escaping the horrors of World War II and Ukraine. He was old enough to understand and see horrific things, like a soldier getting his head blown off and the body's still dancing and moving.
And so, when they first got to the refugee camp, he spent about nine months or so in the hospital just to deal with his nerves. And that helped him tremendously. And I think we have to treat people's minds and souls and PTSD and trauma. That's an extremely important investment to make.
So, all the aid that's going to Ukraine, it has to deal with mental health. You read about that today, where there's one article that came out about a rape survivor, a woman who her husband was killed by a Russian soldier, and she was raped by a Russian soldier.
And she's now getting her life back because of the therapy that she's undergoing and it's helping her tremendously to function in the world and to reclaim her life. So, I think the important lessons from the last great war, World War II, is that we really need to invest in people's minds, and we really need to invest in people allowing to blossom, give them the cultural freedom to express themselves safely, wherever they are.
Jakub: It's kind of comforting to hear that this Ukrainian life and culture was reborn within these refugee camps. And that as the anthem says, Ukraine has not perished yet, it will persist. And the only thing we can hope is that it doesn't have to be in refugee camps. It can be in a freed, strong, and independent Ukraine as soon as possible.
Andrea, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing this incredible story. Thank you so much.
Andrea: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for all the work of the Kyiv Independent.
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Jakub: Thank you for subscribing to Power Lines. Your support helps us make this show possible, so we really appreciate it. See you in two weeks.
Anastasiia:Power Lines is a partnership between the Kyiv Independent and Message Heard. It was produced by Bea Duncan, Harry Stott, and Talia Augustidis. The executive producer is Sandra Ferrari. The theme music is by Tom Biddle and Alfie Godfrey.