This compelling short-read recounts award-winning author and correspondent Owen Matthews’ journey across war-torn Ukraine in the summer of 2014. But not only is this a professional journalist's account: it is an insightful and personal journey into the history of this blood-soaked land of curses and new beginnings. Matthews retraces the roots of his mother’s tragedy-struck Ukrainian-born family and discovers that "though we believe we think with our rational mind, part of us – a deep part – thinks with the blood.” He understands this country in a way few other foreign correspondents can, and tells the story of Europe’s latest civil war through the eyes of an eccentric cast of participants, from a sic-fi novelist turned general in the rebel capital of Donetsk to a the Jewish leader of an Ukrainian ultranationalist party in Kiev. It is an extraordinary insight into the disturbing political events of 2014 that tore Ukraine apart and sent Russia spiraling into a vortex of reactionary nationalism. Matthews warns of the long term ramifications for not just for the people of the region, but for all of us in the rest of the world too.
Оглавление
Owen Matthews. Thinking With the Blood
Contents
2. Harry Potter
3. Six months that changed the world
4. The borderland
1. The things they left behind
2. What a revolution looks like
3. Will you lead me across the Maidan?
4. The future was Orange
5. Enter the little green men
6. Damaged jihadi peasants
7. Gogolfest
8. America stands with you
9. Dnipropetrovsk
10. Nothing here at all
11. Carve up the Muscovites!
12. The Road to Donetsk
13. And the winner gets a Porsche
14. Onward to victory!
15. The bleeding idols
16. Havana Banana nights
17. Rebel love
18. Let’s do the Time Warp again
19. Heroes
20. We are good people here
21. Edinburgh: Donetsk is with you
22. It's hard to be God
23. Belorussian Parmesan
24. In the distortion zone
25. Nothing is true and everything is possible
26. The suitcase mood
27. Midnight Facebook conversation
28. House 12
29. Moscow diary
30. God save the Tsar!
1. About the author
Отрывок из книги
The kid with the Kalashnikov isn’t happy.
The kid with the Kalashnikov isn’t happy. He scowls at us from under a rain cape, water dripping off the peak of his army cap. He flourishes my passport.
.....
“In order to do evil a man has to believe that he is doing good,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?”
My grandmother, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak, was arrested soon after her husband and sent to the Gulag in Kazkhstan as the wife of an ‟enemy of the people”. You understand why I shudder when I hear that term used, in all seriousness, in today’s Russia. Martha went insane in the camps, but survived. My mother and her elder sister Lenina (named for Lenin) were sent first to children’s prison, and then to an orphanages in Verhne-Dniprovsk before being separated by the advance of the German army in 1941. But that is a long story for another place.
