How I Learned to Hate

Coming to Terms with Being an Anti-Russian Russian

“Let them eat sh**.”

This is what my daughter’s piano teacher said to me in Russian over the phone about Ukrainians.

A prim 68 year old woman who wears her hair in a bun, I was taken aback by her statement.

“I’m from the Ukraine,” I reminded her, still shocked by her choice of words.

“The Ukraine of the past isn’t what it is today,” she countered. “But let’s not talk about politics.”

It was too late. The damage was already done, on both sides.

Our shared connection- our Russian heritage, culture, language- was fractured by not just the words but the sentiment that went with them. She is incensed by what she sees as anti-Russia propaganda in America and believes the US and NATO are responsible for the war in Ukraine. Two people from similar backgrounds on opposite ends of reality.

She had hatred, but so did I. With the news coming out of Russia, my shock turned into anger. This past year, I learned to hate. This woman’s response further justified my hatred toward the Russians, and I’m Russian.

I find myself looking at footage of Ukrainians shooting and killing Russians and I don’t flinch, and I usually do flinch. I shun horror movies. I pick up spiders with my bare hands and release them outside. In other matters, I can’t stand violence of any kind. I’ve been vegetarian since March, deciding that if I can’t kill an animal, I shouldn’t eat it.

When it comes to killing Russian soldiers, though, I don’t flinch. I watched as a Ukrainian sniper picked off one Russian soldier after another through night vision goggles. I didn’t flinch. I watched a Russian soldier go down in enemy fire. “Good,” I thought. I found a certain satisfaction with every Russian soldier that fell or was captured. When it’s a Ukrainian soldier that falls, I have empathy that morphs into anger, then a subconscious hatred that, when prompted, rears its ugly head.

I’m reminded of a Soviet film about a young woman recruited in the World War II effort. She protests that she can’t imagine killing anyone, but by the end of the film, when she has witnessed the brutality of war and her friends butchered around her, she picks up an automatic and fires.

I don’t have any sympathy for the wives of Russian soldiers. I don’t have any empathy for anything that happens to them. While there was plenty of goodwill between Russians and Americans at the end of the Cold War, the Russians that supported democracy and freedom of speech are now either in exile or in prison. What’s left is the bottom of the barrel. The scum that attack civilians, then “rescue” the children to their own countries, patting themselves on the back for their good deeds. Those children that are too young to remember may never see their families again. Kidnapping children is a rape of the Ukrainian people.

Ukraine is not Belarus, whose president is supported by the Putin regime. Ukraine overthrew its Russian-oriented president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 after months of protests. Ukraine is more diverse and western-oriented. If Belarus wants to be Putin’s alter boy, that is their right, but that isn’t Ukraine’s character.

“Wage Peace Not War” hangs a longtime slogan in a house I know. The situation in Ukraine is beyond a catchy peace slogan. Early in the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to President Vladimir Putin directly to meet with him- in Kyiv, in Moscow, anywhere. We both speak Russian, he said. We understand each other. Putin refused and went for the jugular- the capital, Kyiv. This wasn’t about protecting eastern Ukraine for Russian speakers. This was about taking over a country to have a sphere of influence.

Bombing Lviv July 6, which is on the other side of the country on the border with Poland, wasn’t about securing so-called “freedom” for Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. It was about terrorizing the country to make everyone feel unsafe, no matter where they lived, and to exert pressure on Zelensky to back off and let Russia have its way, as it often does because of its size and most importantly, nuclear weapons.

When Russia attacks, Ukraine becomes more unified. “We all have to be strong in the face of this tragedy,” wrote my younger brother this week from Kyiv after we connected over Lviv, our birth city. With its diversity of Russian and Ukrainian speakers, Ukraine may not have known who they were, exactly, before the war, but they now know who they are not. They are not Russians. They are not those Russians.

Ukraine has a young president that looks to the future. Russia has an old president that conjures up the past- the repressive regime of the Soviet Union, which he said was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” The demise of the Soviet Union, responsible for millions of deaths and untold number of repressions, is a catastrophe? This is someone who is looking in the rearview mirror and making a u-turn while the rest of the world is running away from the crime scene.

If countries could pick themselves up and leave, Russia would be surrounded by water, an island unto itself. Russia is a corpse that stinks and wonders why nobody wants to be friends with it. On the western front, all of the countries have rejected Russia and run toward NATO. Poland is restocking its military supplies and wants to host a nuclear weapon. The Baltic states are some of the most ardent supporters of Ukraine. Estonia has given half of its defense budget in aid to Ukraine. What do these countries know about Russia that other Europeans don’t? What they have experience with is the character of their former occupier, and they know Russia’s aggression will not stop if it doesn’t stop in Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of Russians, as many as 700,000 by some estimates, have fled Russia since the start of the war. These are people for whom being Russian in Russia is no longer tolerable.

I never thought I would get to this point of despising people with my common language and culture. Like many soldiers on the front lines, families who have lost a loved one, people whose homes were destroyed, lives uprooted, never to return (literally), I never imagined myself here. I do not have the losses they do, but my internal state is the same, or worse. If I was on the front lines, I would shoot the Russians.

I don’t know what to compare this to. The American Civil War? Intense altercations between Americans in school board meetings? How do you explain the feeling of witnessing someone that looks like you and yet is completely, utterly, not like you on some fundamental level?

There is nothing to negotiate. All occupiers out of Ukraine- now. The time for negotiations was when Zelensky was asking to meet with Putin, pissing in his pants probably as the Russians advanced toward Kyiv. Unlike other world leaders that boarded helicopters with their families, Zelensky and his advisors didn’t leave. They were ready to go down with their ship if they had to. Now, when Ukraine seemingly has the upper hand, Russia wants to negotiate, and we know what they want- for Ukraine to give up more land. This is what they did with Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 when they de facto “took it.”

Interestingly, when Chechnya fought for independence, Russia waged a bloody war against it. Apologists for Russia should really look at themselves in the mirror. The prime minister of Hungary, who has consistently opposed aid to Ukraine, should really examine how strong his country would be militarily if it wasn’t for NATO. I never had respect for people throwing rocks from behind their mother’s skirts.

Russia is a petulant child with nuclear weapons at its disposal. Nuclear weapons require responsibility and maturity. Russia has neither, as evidenced by the way it treats its neighbors and its own citizens. Russian propaganda journalists talk regularly about bombing and nuking western cities. If Putin is the bad guy, what’s underneath it is worse.

Russia reminds me of a sumo wrestler swinging his weight around. When my 9 year old daughter asked me why Russia invaded Ukraine, I said because they are “Glutton Zhora,” a boy from a nursery rhyme that eats everything in sight and then complains of a bellyache. Sometimes, when I think she is in another room, she catches me unawares, crying. Sometimes they are happy tears from Ukraine’s hard fought gains. Other times they are from the despair of lives destroyed. When she sees the light blue and yellow colors of Ukraine’s flag, she brings it to my attention, like an “I Spy” game. “Slava Ukraini,” I respond, partly to myself.

We all want peace. The way to peace is not to appease the bully. This didn’t work with Hitler, with Russia in 2008 or 2014, nor does it work on the playground. Russia smells weakness and craves to have more. Appeasement emboldens the bully. The way to peace is to be courageous enough to stand up for what is right. This is what the world did with Germany, and this is what the world needs to do now with Russia.