How could I miss this masterpiece?
As someone who’s consumed megatons of Soviet movies since the event-packed year of 1980 (Afghanistan, the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, Ronald Reagan, remember?), I’m humbled by history again.
“Здравствуй и прощай” (Hello and Goodbye) left me on a bittersweet note, wondering just how many more time capsules the Soviets have in store for today’s increasingly dicey, table-turning world. And just how time-warpingly relevant and ironically relatable these blasts from the past may appear to Ukraine’s 21st century struggles. If properly deconstructed — propaganda-wise, of course. All of this courtesy of “rotting capitalism” (Soviet cliché) and its collective wisdom engines like YouTube!
So let me tell you about my most enlightening and entertaining Friday movie night in what portends to be yet another year of COVID-induced self-isolationism. Quick note: The film came out in 1972, during a period known as détente, a temporary easing of East-West tensions. Most prominently, that same year, President Richard Nixon made Kyiv the last leg of his USSR journey, marking the first visit to Ukraine by a sitting U.S. president.
Produced by Lenfilm (Leningrad-based), “Hello and Goodbye” treats the viewer to a juicy slice of Soviet countryside life, apparently in one of Russia’s Southern regions, such as Kuban, heavily populated by ethnic Ukrainians. The plotline goes bipolar, zigzagging up and down, from heartfelt drama to hilarious comedy. Long story short, the main character, Shura (Lyudmila Zajtseva), your typical salt-of-the-earth collective farm worker, ends up dumped by her husband Mit’ka (Mikhail Kononov). With three kids to raise. Grigori (Oleg Yefremov), a local cop and a darn good guy, falls in love with Shura and almost mends and steals her broken heart — only to have the heartbreaker husband return.
Now where exactly does Ukraine come in?
One day, a delegation of “comrades from Canada” drops by for a tour of the farm, accompanied by an English-speaking interpreter. (A surprise-building plot twist, as it turns out.) No sooner does Shura, the main character, the worker, the abandoned mother of three, start answering their questions than the supposedly monolingual, English-only guests burst into pure Ukrainian!
Guests (in Ukrainian): We’re from a different land, from Canada, but we’re Ukrainians and we’re very interested. Keep talking, keep talking! Do you have a house of your own?
Shura (another jaw-dropper — flips to pure Ukrainian): I do have a house and all.
Guests (in Ukrainian): Do you have a garden?
Shura (continues in Ukrainian): I do have a garden!
Guests: How about cherry trees?
Shura: Sure!
She then proudly fires off her life story and all the material blessings that socialism has showered her with, flipping back and forth between Ukrainian and Russian. Dazzled by her brilliant bilingualism, the Ukrainian Canadians can’t wait to find out how on earth the Russians do it.
Ukrainian Canadian woman: How do you know our language, daughter?
Shura (in Russian): We have people’s friendship over here! Some of us are Ukrainians, some are Russians. We’re all in this together. You could say we don’t even know who we are. (As if parroting Vladimir Putin’s talking points.)
Ukrainian Canadian man: It’s us who don’t know who we are. We live in a foreign land.
Shura (in a colloquial mix of Ukrainian and Russian, aka surzhyk): Don’t be upset, uncle! Why don’t you come back home so you can die in your homeland?
Ukrainian Canadian man: I can’t. I just can’t. I have a gas station in Canada.
Don’t you just miss the good old ‘70s?
From a communication standpoint, this East-meets-West exchange scene sends two messages.
First, it rather positively portrays Ukrainian Canadians as friendly and curious lost souls, whose identity crisis has them torn between homesickness and materialism. Whatever happened to the Ukrainian Ddaspora being squarely labeled as “bourgeois nationalists” and “Nazi collaborators”?
Well, the official Communist Party line softened sometime in the mid-to-late ‘60s, most notably with regard to Russian emigration caused by the bloody Civil War of 1917-1923. No longer did the majority of Russians who had escaped the pincers of Bolshevism count as “enemies of the people” — an irredeemably alien and irreconcilably hostile class. And no longer did they pose any real threat to the regime anyway. So why not rebrand them as deeply patriotic and introspective castaways suffering from the tragedy of having bet on the wrong horse? This cultural amnesty — granted from a position of power — found its way into countless iconic Soviet action movies of the ‘60s-‘80s. Mostly Easterns, they feature admirable depictions of exceedingly tactful, well-mannered and often high-principled anti-Bolshevik military officers, aristocracy and émigrés.
Second, the “soft power” scene of Ukrainian Canadians being captivated by an ordinary Soviet Russian who thrives off the land and speaks perfect Ukrainian, of course, represents a gigantic Potemkin Village of hype and hyperbole. Hey capitalists, how do you like our Soviet Way of Life? Isn’t collectivization cool? And boy can we beat you on multiculturalism!
Fast forward to today’s Ukraine — almost half a century later — and you can get verbally and physically attacked for speaking Ukrainian. Or demanding that Ukrainian be spoken in public, as often required by law. No kidding. Forget Russian-occupied Crimea and Donbas. Think places like Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv and Dnipro. The latter has become the epicenter of this year’s most cringe-worthy language scandal so far. In a nutshell, a squad of recruiters walks into a high school classroom. Of seven men in uniform — from military academies all across Ukraine — only two deliver their elevator pitches in Ukrainian. The others kindly request that they be allowed to speak Russian instead. Sure, why not? Well, one brave student, Mykhailo Ponomarenko, wasn’t having it: “You represent the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and not the Russian Federation!” A heated war of words ensued.
True, since the collapse of the USSR in late 1991, Ukrainian has regained considerable ground. Laws requiring the use of Ukrainian by staff in public offices, stores and restaurants have been tightened, some as recently as Jan. 16. Even so, the legacy of Russification lives on. You can’t get around the fact that generations of Ukrainians had to embrace Russian, the lingua franca of Pax Sovietica, while generations of Russians living in Soviet Ukraine didn’t have to reciprocate. Asymmetrical bilingualism of such kind elevated Russian to a privileged, dominant “special status,” thus cultivating and perpetuating a painful and harmful inferiority complex among Ukrainians. If any of y’all country bumpkins want to get ahead in life, you better unlearn that stupid second-class sociolect of yours. I sure as hell surprised my elementary school teacher in the late ‘80s when I told her that we spoke mostly Ukrainian at home. Wat? My grades made me too smart to be a Ukrainophone even in the slightest.
As a result, in a broader Soviet context, unlike in the linguistically utopian 1972 movie, you wouldn’t find a whole lot of ethnic Russians who took the time and effort to master the unprestigious native language of whatever non-Russian Soviet republic they lived in. It was the exception rather than the rule. Stripped of its thin veneer of purely decorative qualities, the Soviet brand of diversity boiled down to an uncompromising melting pot of assimilation and subjugation. No, not to some magic pot of cultural enrichment at the end of the progressive rainbow, as some history-challenged Westerners might think. Let’s just say that a Soviet Jennifer Lopez (Sofia Rotaru?) reciting something in a language other than Russian would have been out of the question at Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral.
And by the way, collective farm workers had no right to leave the countryside until 1974. Let that sink in.
Are Russian-speaking, or if you will, Russified Ukrainians inherently un-Ukrainian? Not necessarily. Since 2014, thousands of them have taken to the frontlines. Many have died for Ukraine, the very “Nazi” hellhole that “oppresses” them so hard — if we’re to believe Russia’s weaponized narrative. Among the fallen heroes Oleksiy Durmasenko, my schoolmate, who spoke Russian with a Ukrainian accent and, prior to the war, had worked as a florist. In Moscow.
It’s 2021 now.
Question: Is Zelensky injecting syrupy Russian into his OFFICIAL New Year’s Eve address to reach out to Russian-held Crimea and Donbas the kind of masochistic, dystopian, Stockholm Syndrome-style future that Oleksiy fought for? Can shutting down a few pro-Russian collaborationist TV channels undo the morale-killing damage done by the festering Minsk “peace deal” whereby Ukraine “agrees” to amend its Constitution at Russia’s gunpoint?
Or take West Point graduate Mark Paslawsky, a Ukrainian American who repatriated to his ancestral homeland in 1991 and gave his life for Ukraine in 2014. Shortly afterward, his agricultural business on the home front, in Kyiv Oblast, changed hands in a fraudulent scheme. Now that’s “people’s friendship.”
Trapped by history’s powerful forces, on a collective farm of 21-century geopolitics, Ukraine’s voyage to the West remains pretty much just that — “Hello and Goodbye.”
