{"id":309,"date":"2022-06-07T09:55:19","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T09:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/?p=309"},"modified":"2026-06-19T06:57:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T06:57:40","slug":"belarus-and-ukraine-no-longer-russias-hinterlands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/25\/belarus-and-ukraine-no-longer-russias-hinterlands\/","title":{"rendered":"Belarus and Ukraine: No Longer Russia’s Hinterlands"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

John Freedman<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

I am of a generation of scholars educated in a Russia-centric view of the Slavic world. My work curating an international project exploring drama in Belarus and Ukraine corrected this flaw. My views first began changing in 2000 as I observed Ukrainian-born playwright Maksym Kurochkin in Moscow. They continued evolving as I worked with Belarusian playwright Andrei Kureichik, author of two plays about the stalled 2020 revolution in Minsk. The 2022 war in Ukraine, reflected in texts by Ukrainian writers, clearly showed me a nation seeking to define itself and its basic myths fully independent of Russia.

Keywords<\/strong>: Independence, de-Russianization, cultural hegemony, cultural myths, Maksym Kurochkin, Andrei Kureichik<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since September 2020, I have curated something called the Worldwide Readings Project. It arose spontaneously as a reaction to the brutal crackdown against protesters in Minsk, Belarus, following the 10 August 2020 presidential election stolen by Alyaksandr Lukashenka. It renewed itself when Vladimir Putin sent the Russian army into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In both cases I have recruited, encouraged and aided hundreds of theatres around the world to mount readings of Belarusian and Ukrainian plays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idealistic, perhaps even naive, philosophy behind the project is that art, theatre and literature, when mustered in a mass action, can serve, at the least, to raise awareness about important political events that might otherwise either go unnoticed or remain misunderstood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These programs have given me insight into a historical process that has been unfolding for some time, but which is now gaining speed and momentum\u2014the de-Russianization of our world view. What follows is a mix of macro and micro takes on historical events that reveal the evolution of my own experience with, and views on, de-Russianization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ukrainian or Russian? From Nikolai Gogol to Maksym Kurochkin<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

I belong to a generation of scholars that launched careers in Slavic studies in an atmosphere I do not believe we will ever encounter again. The first three universities I attended offered courses only in Russian language, literature, history and culture. This covered the period from 1976 to 1982.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I entered the PhD program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 1983, the choices were greater. In my time there, the department offered courses in Polish, Ukrainian, Czech and Serbo-Croatian. Aside from minor exceptions, all grad students studied Russian language and literature as a major concentration, adding at least one of the other languages and literatures as a minor. Some of my colleagues went on to excel in non-Russian fields\u2014especially Borys Gudziak, who was officially a student of the Divinity School, and who is currently the Archbishop-Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia. But, as the Russian saying goes, the exceptions proved the rule\u2014even an institution as diverse as Harvard was deeply Russian-centric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We came of age in an era\u2014stretching back to the nineteenth century, actually\u2014when the vast majority of us was perfectly comfortable calling Nikolai Gogol a Russian writer from the<\/em> Ukraine. Even fewer would have given more than passing thought to the fact that Mikhail Bulgakov also hailed from the<\/em> Ukraine\u2014that is, a territory in the Russian empire\u2014although he also chose to write in Russian. We had advanced sufficiently to react condescendingly to the condescending old Russian reference to Ukraine as \u201cLittle Russia\u201d (Malaya Rossiya or Malorossiya) and to Ukrainians as \u201clittle Russians.\u201d But how many of us studied the works of Ivan Kotliarevsky, Taras Shevchenko or Lesia Ukrainka? Those of us who studied theatre knew all the Stanislavskys and Meyerholds, but the name of Les Kurbas, arguably Ukraine’s greatest director of the twentieth century, was little more than that to us\u2014a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We knew well of the Holodomor\u2014Joseph Stalin’s enforced, genocidal famine in Ukrainian lands in 1932\u201333\u2014but how many of us thought of it in equal terms with the Purges of 1937?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This ignorance\u2014for that is what it was\u2014took on real-life implications for me around 1999. By then, I had lived in Moscow for eleven years, first, completing my PhD dissertation, later working as the theatre critic for The Moscow Times<\/em>, an English-language newspaper. At that time, I was introduced to a polite young man who was helping out in the office of a short-lived theatre called the Debut Center. \u201cThis is Maksym Kurochkin,\u201d I was told. \u201cHe’s a playwright from Kiev\u201d (virtually no one in the 1990s would have thought of it in terms of \u201cKyiv\u201d). A year or two later this young man exploded on the Russian theatre scene as the author of Kitchen<\/em>, an audacious, epic, faux-historical drama that merged Shakespeare-like poetry and passions with quotes from Beavis and Butt-head<\/em>. The critics were utterly baffled, and all but two (of which I was one) panned the piece for such sins as \u201cthe writer didn’t know what he wanted to say.\u201d Audiences were more perceptive, packing the house with standing-room-only crowds for the two seasons of its run. Graffiti culled from the play’s witty text showed up scribbled in Moscow metro cars, and, on the internet, the nerdiest of fans compared the most recent night’s spoken dialogues with previous ones\u2014was this a change in the text, or were actor’s ad-libbing their lines?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the New York Times<\/em> asked me to write a feature on a new wave of playwrights in Russia, I placed Kurochkin at the center. His reputation among the cognoscenti, if not the critics, had already solidified\u2014he was a major new writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when I interviewed Kurochkin for the piece in his furniture-less apartment in the Sokolniki region in Northwest Moscow, he said something about Russian icons Konstantin Stanislavsky and Anton Chekhov that struck me immediately, although its full significance did not sink in until many years later. Here is the quote as presented in the Times<\/em>: ”I did not want to deny the importance of such figures,” the soft-spoken Mr. Kurochkin said. ”But I wanted to put them on an equal footing with others. For me, the murder of Siegfried in the ‘Nibelungenlied’ is more important than the fact that Stanislavsky once staged Chekhov’s plays\u201d (\u201cWhere New Theatre\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I may have read Kurochkin’s comment properly as an iconoclastic gesture, an attempt to clear his path of the weight that history and tradition place on any new artist. But I didn’t see the national, even political, aspect of his comment. Had I been asked to provide a cultural reference for Kurochkin’s comment, I surely would have said it was something akin to Mayakovsky’s mini-manifesto \u201cA Slap in the Face of Public Taste,\u201d wherein the poet encouraged throwing \u201cPushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.\u201d And I would have been dead wrong. For I was seeing Kurochkin’s statement in the context specifically of Russian culture. In fact, he was leading us as far from the Russian context as he could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Kurochkin, I was not thinking of Ukraine proclaiming independence from the former Soviet Union on August 24, 1991. I was not thinking of the first presidential election in Ukraine’s history on December 1 that same year. Kurochkin was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew Kurochkin had written plays like Steel Will<\/em>, which toyed with the creation of a general Slavic\u2014that is, not Russian\u2014mythology, and Fighter Class \u201cMedea,\u201d<\/em> in which the ranking officer in a post-apocalyptic war between the sexes is a Ukrainian, his subordinates being American and Russian. I knew there was something very much \u201cother\u201d in Maksym Kurochkin’s writing, his worldview and his frames of reference. He was something quite \u201cother\u201d than Russian, although I often went through all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to explain why that was. The answer to the conundrum was tapping me on the shoulder, or even screaming in my ear, but, for the longest time, it did not occur to me in a full, proper manner that I was dealing with a Ukrainian, not a Russian writer. I went on translating his plays and writing about him in the press and the scholarly sphere as if he were a Russian writer<\/em>. The leading Russian<\/em> playwright, the influential Russian<\/em> writer, Maksym Kurochkin. He wrote in Russian, didn’t he? He lived in Russia. Where was I going wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To answer that rhetorical question, let’s go back to an unspecified day sometime around 2010. I had been presenting Kurochkin as Russian for a decade, but now he approached me and asked if I would stop doing that. \u201cI am a Ukrainian playwright,\u201d he said. \u201cI don’t want to be identified as Russian.\u201d With that request, \u201cMaxim\u201d became Maksym, and the world was introduced to a \u201cnew\u201d Ukrainian playwright, even if the world did not yet fully understand what that meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is worth noting that another Ukrainian-born playwright who wrote in Russian followed a similar path. Natalia Vorozhbyt, like Kurochkin, had studied at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, and she had stayed there to begin her career. Although her first major works were steeped in the Ukrainian mythos, she, too, gained fame and respect as a talented new Russian writer from Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The watershed in Kurochkin and Vorozhbyt fully embracing their status as Ukrainian writers came with the Maidan Uprising, which lasted from November 21, 2013, to February 22, 2014. This massive, ongoing series of protests on Kyiv’s main city square began peacefully as a plea for Ukrainian politicians to seek closer ties with Europe but ended as Russian-backed security forces violently drove protesters away. Moscow followed almost immediately with a rushed, corrupt referendum that was employed to annex the territory of Crimea. The thinking was that Moscow would install a regime friendly to Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Russia’s hegemony over Ukrainian politics, life and culture would return to the good old days of \u201cLittle Russia\u201d looking up to its big Russian brother with love, affection and, most importantly, obedience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Ukraine, a slow-moving war of attrition began in the east of the country. The cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, making up much of what is called the Donbas region, historically had a Russian-speaking, Moscow-friendly populace. Putin chose to exploit this by stirring up separatist sentiments and sending in mercenaries and military support. A hot war followed over the next year, during which large swaths of eastern Ukraine were laid to waste. Things cooled down to some extent after the second Minsk Agreement in February 2015, although the war still continued. Between March 2014 and February 2022 over 14,000 people died in this region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people in Russia could ignore this war\u2014it was not covered in the national news\u2014while Ukrainians, again, as in the past, could not turn a blind eye to what Russia was forcing upon their country. Vorozhbyt returned to her home in Ukraine, Kurochkin pulled up stakes and moved his family back to Kyiv. The Russia experiment for these two major writers had ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I witnessed Kurochkin putting an exclamation point to his twenty years in Moscow in April 2018. It happened at the funeral of his great friend, the Russian playwright and director Mikhail Ugarov. At a post-burial gathering at Teatr.doc, of which Ugarov and Kurochkin were founding colleagues, Maksym stood to leave. He had a train to catch, he said. Someone shouted cheerily, \u201cVisit us again soon, Max!\u201d \u201cGive back Crimea, and I\u2019ll return!\u201d Kurochkin snapped and left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was virtually no reaction to Kurochkin’s bitter quip. It was as though no one had heard him. To my astonishment, I later realized that the writers and actors and directors gathered there, indeed, had not heard him. I was told by more than one person present that day that they never heard Kurochkin say any such thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It began to sink into my consciousness: Russians, no matter how well-meaning, tend not to see or hear Ukrainians when they are thinking, writing or talking about Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Well-known playwright and screenwriter Andrei Kureichik. Photo: Web\/Wikipedia<\/a><\/em>. Accessed 29 Apr. 2022<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Revolution in Belarus, August 2020<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Nothing terrified Belarus president Alyaksandr Lukashenka more than a Maidan-like uprising in his country. Whatever pains and disasters had followed Maidan in Ukraine, that nation had held together, electing one president and then another in free, fair elections. Russia was nipping at Ukraine’s borders; Ukraine stood its ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As usual, in the lead-up to the 10 August 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Lukashenka jailed his most popular opponents. It was a strategy that had kept him in power for twenty-six years. So certain was he of his grip on Belarus politics, that a surprise move by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, wife of imprisoned presidential candidate Siarhei Tsikhanouski, apparently didn’t concern him in the least. She applied to the election committee to be registered as a candidate in place of her husband, and her application was accepted on July 14, 2020. But, in less than a month, supported enthusiastically by charismatic advisors to other arrested candidates, Tsikhanouskaya captured the imagination of the Belarus electorate, and as estimated by Chatham House, probably won 52% of the vote, as opposed to the official count of 10%, while 80% supposedly voted for Lukashenka (Astapenia). Angry citizens poured onto the streets of Belarus’s major cities to protest the official outcome. But attempts by citizens to establish a state of semi-permanent protest, in the spirit of Maidan, soon failed. Lukashenka’s forces, reportedly backed by Moscow’s special services, cracked down violently on protesters, eventually squeezing the life out of the revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched the violence in Belarus from afar. Aware that the political situation in Russia was deteriorating rapidly, I had left my Moscow home of 30 years and relocated to Greece in late 2018. But I continued to follow developments in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus closely. Much of the inside information I received about events in Minsk came from the well-known playwright and screenwriter Andrei Kureichik. I eagerly followed his frequent posts on Facebook<\/em>. Responding to my own need to take part in the momentous events unfolding, I midwifed an article that Kureichik wrote for American Theatre <\/em>magazine in late August 2022. There, Kureichik wrote, \u201cIt is now down to us, the people of culture, art, politics, economics and science, who together must establish a free Belarus on the ruins of Lukashenka\u2019s dictatorship, much as the great founding fathers of the United States did at the First Continental Congress in 1774.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He concluded his essay with the words, \u201cBelarus will never be the same. Belarusian theatre will never be the same\u201d (\u201cTheatre in Belarus\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was impossible not to hear in this declaration echoes of words spoken in Ukraine during and after the Maidan Uprising. The Belarus Revolution, failed or not, was the time of a great national awakening. It was a time when Belarusians began in earnest to see themselves as citizens of a country that would be independent of Russia, politically and culturally. They were in search of their own particular history and traditions. President Lukashenka plainly stated, even before the election, that he would not tolerate any such change. \u201cThere will be no Maidans in Belarus,” Lukashenka declared in May 2020 (\u201cLukashenka Warns\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, after a few weeks of heady, mass protests in which individual citizens bearing flowers and draped in white-red-white flags representing the opposition stood up to tanks, to heavily armed storm troopers and to Lukashenka himself, the repressive state machine slowly began filling prisons, especially the infamous Akrestsina detention center, with large numbers of defenseless protesters, and driving the remainder back into the relative safety of their homes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was at this retrograde moment that I received a missive from Kureichik via Facebook<\/em>. The date was September 10, 2020, and he sent a note saying he was attaching a new play, Insulted. Belarus<\/em>, written during the revolution, and about the revolution. He wondered might I translate it and arrange some readings in the West to raise awareness about the dire situation in Minsk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a marvelous Don Quixote-like moment, Kureichik standing tall to tilt at the dictator by waving a newly written play in his face. I was taken by his idea immediately. The play was a creative construct that used bits and pieces of the historical record\u2014interviews, and news reports\u2014to tell the intertwining stories of seven people during the aftermath of the election. The characters included Lukashenka himself, as Old Man; a school teacher whose role in helping the state falsify the election brings her tragedy; a sadistic storm trooper who fought at Maidan and dreams of Putin sending in reinforcements to wipe out protesters in Minsk; an innocent young woman whose optimistic outlook runs up hard against the cynicism of the storm trooper; and a doomed, irrepressible athlete whose strivings for freedom sometimes make a hooligan of him, but always place him in opposition to Lukashenka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The play employs humor and unvarnished honesty to tell a tale that Belarusians\u2014and, ultimately, people all over the world\u2014recognized as a courageous artistic attempt to lay out the truths of a new social order that, given the proper support, just might replace the old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Insulted. Belarus<\/em> gave rise to a rather astonishing international movement that, to my knowledge, has no precedent in the theatre world. By the time just eight months had passed, Andrei and I had curated over 130 readings of Insulted. Belarus<\/em> in 30 countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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