Tim Judah > Quotes

“For as long as anyone can remember, the history of Kosovo has been a battlefield pitting Serbs against Albanians. Each believes different things because each has been taught different things, and as they reach further back into time it becomes easier to argue whatever they want in order to find support for their view of the present.”
― Tim Judah, Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know

“Today, what you think of this past, how you relate to it, determines what you think about the future of Ukraine. And what you think of the past is quite likely to be bound up with the history of your own family and where you live. This is true for the Donbass, a mining region, just as it is for anywhere else. People came from all over the Soviet Union to work and settle in this flat land pockmarked by pyramids and hills of slag and scruffy little mining and industrial towns. Donetsk was a working-class mining town. For many of its inhabitants then, Ukraine, which had been part of imperial Russia, was not a land where they had roots. With the demise of the Soviet Union it was harder for many of these people, almost all of whom spoke Russian as their first language, to identify with or to love Ukraine as their own country”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Novorossiya or the New Russia of Catherine the Great and some of the Donetsk Republic of 1918. Hardly anyone in the Donbass noticed these people or what they were doing on the far fringes of political life.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“In a country rich enough to provide its inhabitants with very decent lives, the EU deals were seen as some sort of lifebuoy to grab on to. By linking their fate to the West, many thought that the gradual implementation of the agreements would create the thing that had been missing in their lives—a state of law.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“In Ukraine, however, communists were the perpetrators and many of them were Ukrainians. Among the security men who prevented peasants leaving their starving villages could have been people to whom those about to die were actually related. There is another element which acts as a break, to a certain extent at least, in discussing the Holodomor. That is the issue of cannibalism, which some of those crazed with hunger resorted to. It is not exactly a forbidden topic, but it is one that any Ukrainian would understandably feel uncomfortable discussing.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“With the inauguration as president of Viktor Yuschenko in 2005 after the Orange Revolution of the year before, the position of the Holodomor in Ukrainian life and politics changed significantly. Yuschenko took a far more explicitly nationalistic stance on history than his predecessors had done, and the Holodomor memorial is one of the products of his otherwise disastrous time as president.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“The battlefields include Facebook, Twitter, vKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and YouTube. On news and other websites tens of thousands of people “comment” on articles in such a way as to make them feel as though they are doing something useful. They are, as a boy who was about to start military training in Kharkiv told me, “sofa warriors.” But some it seems are mercenaries too. According to numerous reliable reports, the Russian authorities contract firms to employ people to “comment” and spread, among other things, the central line of Russian propaganda, which is that the Ukrainian government, after the Maidan revolution, is nothing but Nazism reincarnated.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“One commemorates locals who fought in the Red Army during the Second World War, and includes a Soviet flag. On the other side are panels and information on the “Communist Inquisition,” the Gulag and the Holodomor. Those who glorify and honor the Soviet past in Ukraine usually ignore or deny the dark pages of Soviet history; likewise, those on the other side of the historical barricades in Ukraine glorify those who fought the Soviets and often collaborated with the Nazis. This exhibition is a little unusual then, but actually reflects what many ordinary and unideological people think: it is possible to honor those who fought the Nazis and fascism without denying the evils wrought by communism in Ukraine.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Just before this the Verkhovna Rada made a cardinal error. It voted to pass a law to downgrade the official status of the Russian language. This was immediately vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, but the damage was done. It frightened many Russian speakers and gave Putin and the “anti-Maidan” and pro-Russian constituency just what they needed in terms of “proof” of their claims that neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists had taken over.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“In the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany and supplied it with the raw materials it used to make war on the Western allies. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union everything changed of course, but officially the Soviet account could only say that the war had begun in 1941.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that “for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.” And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“For this reason much of Ukraine’s threadbare army was positioned in ways which reflected its old Cold War Soviet background, i.e., prepared, albeit barely, to fight a war on its western flanks—not its eastern ones.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“The war had started and Aleksandr and Volodymyr were among the first to die. That is why their names are remembered, why journalists wrote about them and why they are recorded here. After that, those who died became a statistic to everyone but their families and friends.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“The story of the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Second World War and the struggle against Nazism has been detached from the years 1939 to 1941, which saw the conquest and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland; from Romania, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Based on what Grossman knew, his character Anna Sergeyevna recounts her experience in a Ukrainian village where she was working as a bookkeeper in the kolkhoz, or collective farm. First, she explained, had come the period of “dekulakization” when the richer peasants, known as kulaks, were dispossessed, arrested and deported. Quotas of the numbers to be arrested were drawn up and names selected by the village soviet, whose members could be bribed, and because there were “scores to be settled because of a woman, or because of some other past grievance…Often it was the poorest peasants who were listed as kulaks, while the richer peasants managed to buy themselves off.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Tens of thousands were deported from the conquered Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were sent to the Gulag.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“The Nemtsov report claimed that to that date some 170 Russian regular soldiers, as opposed to volunteers, had died, and a large proportion of them died in and around Ilovaysk.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Everything that Baryshnikov believes is consistent with the beliefs of Alexander Dugin, the influential Russian philosopher and proponent of a Russian-dominated Eurasian empire which would not only reunite ethnic Russians but dominate the West too. Dugin has chastised Putin for being too soft on Ukraine, and is a visceral opponent of anything that smacks of Western liberalism.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“For too long Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent’s most under-reported places. For most of the last century, what little reporting in the foreign press there was, was done in the main by foreign correspondents living in Moscow, who inevitably absorbed some of the imperial and then former imperial capital’s patronizing attitudes.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“He also spoke of his admiration for Alain de Benoist, the French far-right philosopher, whom I was beginning to realize had fans on both sides of the line.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“People said, ‘When the Russians come, they will give us gas, double our pensions and make our life better.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“So, what about the other parts of the map? Again, he did not know. “We are part of the industrial Ukraine that includes all the southeast,” and here he mentioned Kharkiv to the north, Odessa, the regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk and the industrial city of Krivoy Rog. “We really hope that somehow we will be united with the rest of this industrial part…Moreover, we hope that in the future we will somehow be able to help those people who are now left in Ukrainian-controlled territory and who are now persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.” Clearly the most important target for the DNR is the port of Mariupol, but, “sadly,” so far it had proved impossible to take it. He pinned his hopes on Ukraine going bankrupt and it being very hard to keep Mariupol’s angry and then unpaid people “under the barrel of a large-caliber machine gun…I think in the end the people of Mariupol themselves will decide its fate.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Still, 71.48 percent of those who voted in Ukraine did so for a renewed USSR and, although this was the lowest “yes” figure in the Soviet Union among all those who voted, it was still overwhelming. However, in Ukraine, people were asked some separate questions as well.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“The rebels, however, wanted them out of two places in particular—Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, through which local roads and railways run. The airport, named for the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), who was born nearby, was gleaming and new, having been among those rebuilt for the 2012 Euro soccer championships.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Debaltseve were certainly defeats for the Ukrainians, but the fact that it took the rebels and the Russians months to achieve these victories demonstrated two things: first, that the Ukrainians were no longer disorganized and that their military was getting stronger by the day; and secondly, that the rebels and the Russians were reaching the limits of what they could do unless there was a lot more help from Russia.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“It is a monument erected in 1887 by the Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute, which the locals claim marks their discovery of the center of Europe.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Freedom House is a human rights NGO that has long worked closely with USAID, which distributes U.S. government money for human rights promotion as well as regular aid and which has been condemned as Russophobic by Russian officials. As far back as 2004—before the founding of Donetsk Republic—it was also accused in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. of indirectly supporting organizations working to promote the election of Viktor Yushchenko.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“As the crow flies Karapyshi lies midway between Donetsk, proud of its Soviet heritage, and Lviv with its Galician, Austro-Hungarian and Ukrainian nationalist one. What makes Karapyshi quintessentially Ukrainian is that historically Ukrainians were villagers, while Russians and Russian-speakers, Jews and others tended to be the townspeople. It is a generalization of course, but basically true. Karapyshi sits in the middle of Ukraine, forty minutes’ drive from the mighty Dnieper River which physically divides the country, flowing from the north and out into the Black Sea. But more than that, it also sits squarely at the center of Ukraine’s modern history and experience. Its stories echo those of thousands of other villages and small towns.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

“Roads are notorious the world over for providing an easy opportunity to skim off extra profit. You are contracted to lay asphalt with a certain thickness, which you say you do, but you do not, pocketing the cash for the materials not bought or sharing it with whoever secured you the contract. The problem for those who use the road is that the surface quickly deteriorates, as it is not thick enough—just as it has here. Then a maintenance crew can go out to resurface it once again and more money can be shared between those in on the deal.”
― Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine