Being eastern Ukrainian doesn't make it easy to look for your roots, either.
Two world wars, the Holodomor famine, Stalin's red terror, the collapse of the USSR, decades of isolation from the outside world. But I know from tracing my family tree - as best I could back to the 18th century that the place I was born into is my ancestral home. A small town called Dvorichna and the villages around it in Kharkiv oblast, 30km from the Russian border. Since the war, that home has become a frontline; my parents' house a lair for the occupiers, my school a shooting range and my village a battlefield.
Living on the border, the two identities often mixed, on both sides, without much notice. Dvorichna was at the border with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic since its foundation in 1918. But that border was nothing more than a line on a map.
My father spent half of his 1970s childhood on the Russian side of the border, where people spoke the same dialect of Ukrainian as they did on the Ukrainian side. But back then, everyone was a Soviet citizen.
This story is from the April 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the April 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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