Expanding the Boundaries Of Home:

a Story for Us All

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many believed that all other borders would disappear as well. I remember singing the band Scorpions' song "Wind of Change" at an international summer camp near Pskov, Russia, and feeling like the lyrics truly spoke to me: "The world is closing in/and did you ever think/ that we could be so close, like brothers?" Were we all just "children of tomorrow," dreaming and believing in a better future? Where are we now? 

The winds of change turned out to be nothing more than an illusion, and my belief in it only shows that, culturally and mentally, Ukraine has always been a part of the somewhat naive West. The difference is that the Ukrainians are destined to face the truth eventually. Some learned it from the stories of Ukrainian dissidents like poet Vasyl Stus, who was murdered in a Russian penal colony just five years before "Wind of Change" was released in 1990. Others, like me, had to experience the Russian world firsthand to realize that the border between Russia and Ukraine is not a redundancy or a formality, but an essential need for our survival.

It seems that we all are doomed to constantly make mistakes about where our home, the safe space of trust, ends and which of its borders should be especially well-guarded. 

I was born in western Ukraine in 1986, the year the Chornobyl nuclear reactor exploded and the Soviet Union began to crumble. Despite my birthplace and the timing of my birth, I was educated to be Russian. There was an entire system in place that aimed to make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the center of my universe. I attended a Russian school, performed in a school theater named after the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, and prayed in the Russian Orthodox church. I even enjoyed a summer camp for teenagers in Russia and attended youth gatherings at the Russian cultural center in Lviv, where we sang so-called Russian rock music, which was actually more honest about the changes happening in Russia than the naive compositions of the Scorpions. 

When I was 15, I won a local competition and was chosen to represent my hometown, Lviv, at an international Russian language contest in Moscow.  

I was excited to visit the Russian capital. The last lines of the second act of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, "To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!" could have easily been my words at the time. Moscow felt like the center of what I considered home. My library was full of Russian classics, and even though the Soviet Union had collapsed almost a decade earlier, not much changed in the Russian school I attended, or on Russian TV, which my family had the dangerous habit of watching. Additionally, while I didn't have the money to even travel around Ukraine, Russia invested in my Russianization without any hesitation. 

At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the "former Soviet republics" as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn't need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to the Red Square. 

Hopefully I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments of the Russian Federation. 

In Moscow, a famous journalist from ORT, a top Russian TV channel at the time, approached me for an interview on the evening news. I was flattered and almost felt like a star. The journalist started with a polite question about how I liked the event and the Russian capital, but quickly moved on to her real agenda. She said that we all know Russian speakers are oppressed, and then invited me to participate in the propaganda: "How oppressed do you feel as a Russian speaker in the west of Ukraine? How dangerous is it to speak Russian on the streets of your hometown, Lviv?"

I gasped as I realized that I wasn't a star at all; I was just being used to manipulate millions of evening news viewers. The huge camera was watching me and a big, professional microphone was in front of me for the first time in my life. I was only fifteen years-old. But in that split second, I had to figure out once and for all where the borders of my home were. I wasn't Russian, after all–I was a Ukrainian kid brought to Moscow to reinforce certain Russian narratives. I may have believed that Russia was a great country with peace at its core, but I only felt that way because of watching the very channel that was now trying to manipulate an inexperienced fifteen-year-old like me.  

"After our complex history, it would only be natural for Ukrainians to feel uncomfortable and react at times to the Russian language. However, I don't experience any oppression. Maybe your information is outdated? I am young, and there's no such problem among the younger generation." I replied.  

The Russian journalist, or rather propagandist, tried to ask me again, but my responses weren’t going to change. She has already failed.

I doubt they have ever aired this interview on the evening news. Or perhaps they managed to edit it in a way that suited their agenda. Now, as a Ukrainian writer, I receive requests for interviews from various Russian channels, but I consistently decline them all. I’ve had enough experience with this twenty years ago.  

I remembered this story in 2022, watching an interview with an older man in Mariupol. He was desperate, disoriented, and remarkably sincere. "But I believed in this Russian world, can you imagine? All my life I believed we were brothers!" the poor man exclaimed, surrounded by the ruins of his beloved city. It must be way more painful to realize where your true home is in such a cruel way, and so late in life.  

The man's apartment building was in ruins, and the illusion of home, the space he perceived as his motherland, the former Soviet Union where he was born and lived his best years, had been crushed even more brutally. The propaganda stopped working on him only when the Russian bombs fell. The border between independent Ukraine and the Russian Federation arose in his mind as a crucial barrier, just like it did in mine when I realized I had only been brought to festive Moscow to lie about my hometown in Ukraine, so that the Russian viewers could hate it even more. 

I think most people would now agree that a wall between us and Russia is a good solution until Russian society undergoes significant changes. The idea of a world where every neighbor is a friend is a nice idea to sing about, but where Russia is concerned, it is unfortunately not so realistic. 

When we sang along with the Scorpions, we should have made sure the other side understood the lyrics and wasn’t simultaneously bombing Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Otherwise, it might be better to have wiser references than popular songs. We need more complex and productive narratives.  

Despite this, it is always tempting to believe in the simple inspiring concept of welcoming everyone as a friend and brother. But does this approach actually work? 

In a very different winter in 2019, I saw another collision between the imaginary idyll where borders only exist to be crossed in search of miracles and the reality with all its dramatic stories. As my family and I prepared to celebrate Christmas in Boston, Massachusetts, I found myself standing among a forest of trees, promising my son that we would choose the best one. Despite my lack of experience in choosing Christmas trees (in Ukraine, we had always used an old, artificial, but reusable one), I regretted not looking up some advice beforehand. Surely, there must be a guide on the internet on how to choose the perfect Christmas tree.  

I needed to ask the seller for help selecting a tree, but he seemed too busy with other customers and clearly needed to sell all the trees, even the poor-quality ones. However, I knew what would get him to pay attention to us. I simply mentioned that this would be our first Christmas in the United States, which was true. And the "Welcome to America" magic began. The man immediately made us his priority and helped us find the perfect tree. He seemed to be one of those true Americans who believe that welcoming newcomers is at the core of American values. 

I knew of course that this value was shared by many, but not everyone in the US. After all, it was the time when Donald Trump was president. As I walked the streets of Cambridge, I always stopped to look at the picture of a child attached to the church fence-- a photo of one of those children who hadn't survived being separated from their parents and being detained at the border. The only crime of the little girl in the picture was crossing the border from Mexico into the US with her parents, who were only trying to give her a better life.

The Christmas tree seller was just as angry about the family separation policy in the US as I was. But Trump supporters had different ideas about what America was and how its borders should be protected. Considering that those immigrant families never tried to annex parts of US territory or construct a false narrative about the US, like Russia did for Ukraine, it is incomprehensible to me why it was easy for Russian soldiers to cross the border into Ukraine in 2022, yet so difficult for Mexican migrants to cross into the US in 2019.

One thing remains indisputable: humanity constantly messes up with borders.

Much like adolescents unsure about their identity, we let the wrong people in and keep the right ones out. We pay too much attention to appearances, including not only the color of skin, but "the color of passport"; instead we could pay more attention to core values like freedom, dignity, and the rule of law, which we either share or not. Yet so far some of us get easily tricked by strangers, like I was when I admired  Russia as a kid, or get too scared of them, like Americans dreaming of a wall with Mexico. Why are we so wrong in choosing who to trust on the other side of the border? Perhaps it’s because we don't know how to trust each other in our own countries. The incomplete "homework" of creating a space of trust within our own countries sets us up for failure when we deal with our external borders. 

As a writer, I tend to think of home as the narrative shared by its inhabitants. People and places come about in stories: poets, playwrights, ancient prophets, and novelists have all imagined the countries and cities we live in now, and their stories have greatly impacted us and our relations with each other. But what story do we all fit into? Politicians might suggest many incorrect answers. They think that history must be a coherent, simple story that serves the purpose of turning schoolchildren into patriotic citizens. But my answer is both more complicated and more straightforward: the only story we all can fit into is a true one.  

The true history of Ukraine is complex, painful, and dramatic. For example, like many others in the east and center of Ukraine, my family lived through the trauma of the Holodomor and became Russianized. But for a long time, no book reflected my family's experience or explained why I didn't inherit the Ukrainian language from my grandparents. Their decision to protect their kids (my parents) by raising them to speak Russian was inexplicable and made me feel out of place. So eventually, I had to write a novel about families like mine. My hometown Lviv was in the heart of “Bloodlands, as the historian Timothy Snyder calls the lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Yet again, I had to discover that the Soviet army killed thousands of Ukrainians in 1939 or that more than one hundred thousand Jewish citizens of Lviv perished back in 1942. 

In the same way, our grandparents never talked in detail about the Holodomor, also called the Great Famine, which took place from 1932-33. Popular lyrics about love, peace, and brotherhood are always easier to utter than the true story. But only true stories include all of us in a grand narrative that makes up a country and allows us to be truthful with each other and regain each other's trust. 

On the contrary, silence creates cracks so deep that it is hardly possible to feel at home. When such stories as of Holocaust or Holodomor are not fully revealed, we're bound not to trust each other. Who were you? The hungry one or the one taking all the food in 1933? The one who shot Ukrainian activists in 1941 or the one who searched for their loved one among the decomposing bodies? The scared one watching from the window when Jews were taken away or the one who took them? The one who wrote to the KGB about your neighbor or the one who really helped Ukrainian dissidents? There were silences instead of the much-needed stories. And where there's a lack of true stories, there is a lack of trust. We are bound to believe the propaganda and draw all the wrong borders again and again, never feeling completely home. 

In Ukraine, everything changed in the first days of December 2013, at the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity. After the police severely beat students on Independence Square in Kyiv, it became clear that this was a time to prevent Ukraine from turning into an authoritarian state like Russia or Belarus. Everyone who felt like a free Ukrainian had to take risks and head to the streets. But what if others didn't have the courage to join the demonstration? Then the few brave would be powerless against police violence. To go to the streets of Kyiv, we had to take the risk of trusting each other.

Eventually, up to half a million people showed up. That’s when we knew we could count on each other. Ukraine finally felt like home to me too. Home isn't a magical, perfect place, but a place where, if you are being beaten, you can be sure that your neighbors will show up to take a stand for you.

The old silences didn't disappear miraculously, but we now trusted each other enough to build platforms and institutions that deal with our traumatic past as well. And there was a new true story, in which the question "Who are you?" was being answered by everyone every day since the Revolution of Dignity and Russian invasion in 2014. There was war at our doors, but our vision was as clear as ever.

In the spring and summer of 2014, I was sure a full-scale Russian invasion had already begun, and that the brutality would intensify and gradually spread throughout Ukraine. I packed my three-year-old son's belongings into an emergency backpack so we would be ready to hide in a bomb shelter at any moment. At that time, the bombs didn't fall on us; Russia annexed Crimea and ruined the lives of Ukrainians in Donetsk and Luhansk but didn't go further in full force. The world didn't react. So the borders of my home were clear: they coincided with Ukraine's borders. No one had our backs but us.  

We had each other, and that was priceless. But what about the beautiful vision? If we can’t yet achieve the perfect world where we all support each other, what about our cozy continent, Europe? Those years of the initial Russian invasion, 2014-2015, were a time when many Ukrainians felt betrayed not only by Russia but also by the West. We were Europeans under attack, but it was mainly our problem. 

Milan Kundera started his famous essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” with a message from the Hungarian News Agency director sent via telex in November 1956, shortly before Russian artillery wrecked his office: "We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe."  

As a Czech writer and one of the leading figures of the Prague Spring, Milan Kundera deeply understood what the brave Hungarian had meant, in Budapest in 1956, by dying for Europe. As a Ukrainian writer in Kyiv in 2022, I can’t stop thinking about the essay written in 1983 by the Czech author, in exile after the Prague Spring failed in 1968.

We, Central Europeans, are ready to fight for Europe, even if at times our love may be unrequited. This readiness to die for Europe despite its betrayal and indifference is what makes us Central Europeans in the first place, be it in 1956, 1968, or 2014. 

"We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe," said the Hungarian News Agency director, but Europe didn't come to his country's rescue. It also didn't come to the Czechs’ rescue during Prague Spring in 1968, or the Ukrainians in 2014. If being a Central European is to be betrayed by Europe, Ukraine is certainly a member of the club. 

However, when Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe did take Ukrainians in and accepted us unconditionally.

I was out of the country at the time of the invasion. My flight from Egypt back to Ukraine was scheduled for 7 a.m. on February 24, 2022. The flight got canceled, of course; Russia was bombing Ukrainian airports from Kyiv to Ivano-Frankivsk. "Do you know what happened?" the Egyptian official asked me as soon as we entered the terminal. I didn't reply for a moment, so he kept repeating as if allowing me to realize: "You cannot go to your country."

After an hour in a desperate crowd of Ukrainians, we were the only ones left in the tiny airport. The rest of the Ukrainians left the building, heading to the buses brought by their tour agency.  

That day, I bought overpriced tickets from Egypt to Prague, where Milan Kundera had fought for his home and Europe in 1968. At Hurghada airport, citizens of the European Union checked in casually and headed to the security control area; all Ukrainian citizens were asked to wait on one side. We tried to explain that Ukrainians have been able to travel to the European Union without visas for several years. But the airline workers replied that that didn't matter now: Prague had to tell the Egyptian side whether they were ready to let us into the country.  

"And what if they won't let us in?" my ten-year-old asked me quietly.

I didn't know what to answer and just squeezed my son's hand. I was thinking about the Hungarian News Agency director sending his last message in 1956. Nothing is guaranteed; like the protagonist of Robert Frost's poem“The Death of the Hired Man, we are inherently homeless: no one “has to take us in.”    

Other Ukrainians and I waited for the decision from Prague for about an hour, discussing rumors about a Ukrainian man who wasn't allowed to board his flight to Germany earlier in the day. Then the verdict was announced to us: "You can go."

Even when we were already at the Prague airport, I wasn't sure what would happen. I was remembering the picture of the Syrian boy washed up onto the Mediterranean shore. Were we luckier than the Syrians or the Kurds? I didn't feel lucky that day at all.

Yet the Czech border officer glanced at our passports and then looked at us. She was more interested in the expressions on our faces than in our passport details: maybe she was new at the job and hadn’t yet seen people whose country was being bombarded by the Russian Federation. I think she was looking at us with compassion. Then she just stamped our passports without asking any questions. And I realized that she knew; the whole world was looking at us. I started crying and couldn't stop, and when my son asked why I was crying, I replied to him:

"Because we are home."

"But this is not Ukraine," he argued.

"This is Europe," I answered, as if this word "Europe" should explain everything to my child.

We were falling, and our fellow Europeans were ready to catch us. The limits of home may have just expanded, I thought.

I wasn't lucky that day; none of us Ukrainians were. But I was still thinking of the Hungarian News Agency director in 1956, Milan Kundera in 1968, and Oleh Sentsov in Crimea in 2014, wondering if the pattern was changing. Did the boundaries of the home move?  

A bit later, I learned that train tickets in the Czech Republic and in Poland were free for Ukrainian citizens who had just fled their homeland.  I traveled by train from Prague to Poland and on the third day of the invasion, finally crossed the border back into Ukraine.

At the Polish-Ukrainian border, I witnessed indescribable desperation and fear. Little kids were pulling heavy suitcases, their frightened grandmas and mothers looking even more disoriented than them. I heard the screams in the crowd as someone was getting squeezed, and the loud voice of the border guard trying to catch the refugees' attention and prevent a tragedy. Yet all these people were going to be accepted and even welcomed into the EU. They might not have known it at the time, cold, hungry, and fearful at the border, but at that very moment the boundaries of their home, Europe, were being expanded to include Ukraine. 

Europe was home, and it proved to be a space where we could count on each other, as Ukrainians counted on each other at the Maidan in 2013-2014.

We Ukrainians are well aware of the discussions surrounding the "exclusiveness" of the Ukrainian refugees. While I share the concerns about racism and Islamophobia, I believe that what happened to Ukrainian refugees was more than just an act of kindness. It was a change in perspective, a change in the story of Europe, and ultimately a change in the borders of what Ukrainians and other Europeans consider their shared home.  

The story told by Milan Kundera in “The Tragedy of Central Europe” is still true, but no longer relevant. Unlike 1956, 1968, or 2014, Europe did come to the rescue of one of its own, expanding the borders of home. Ukrainians are now fighting not just for Ukraine, but for Europe as well.

This may not have much of an impact on refugees from Syria or Sudan, unfortunately. But I believe that acts of kindness towards one group of refugees can teach us all, including Ukrainians, to be more kind to all other people fleeing wars. We can choose to demand or sing about utopian brotherhood, or we can work diligently to expand the limits of the fragile shared space of trust we have. Despite all the obstacles, I still believe that the dream of a world without borders should be our inspiration. After all, even corporate strategies often start with an idealistic vision. So we have a right, or an obligation even, to "have a vision now and then of a world where every neighbor is a friend," as ABBA sang in another sad but hopeful song. We may never fully realize this vision, but it can turn into a strategy that changes reality for the better. 

No one is obligated to take in a stranger or show them love, yet it happens. This love becomes a true story that changes all future stories, including those of refugees.  

In June 2022, I arrived in Brussels and took a bus from the airport to the city. I was headed to a meeting at the European Parliament to discuss accountability for Russian war crimes. The bus was full of men in suits, all clearly headed to European institutions as well. However, I was perhaps the only one who noticed the irony of the song that opened the bus playlist: "I follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park…" the frontman of Scorpions sang into the air of one of the European Union capitals in 2022. The bureaucrats in their expensive suits kept typing on their laptops, not paying attention to the song and the story it conveyed. I knew I didn't fit into this story. But I knew that we came to Brussels to write a whole new narrative for everyone, not to change some lousy playlist on an airport shuttle.  

Victoria AMELINA is a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist. Having founded the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region, her team has in 2022 launched the "Fight Them with Poetry" initiative to help supply the Ukrainian Army units defending that region. An author of two novels, a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel Дім для Дома [Dom's Dream Kingdom], she is at work on a non-fiction project, "War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War."