Writing

Do you want help with writing your life story? Or a more punchy web site?

As a writer/ghost writer I work from Russian to English (and of course, English to English).

Whatever your requirements, I specialise in writing on topics related to Russia and the former Soviet Union (see my books page).

Below is my review of the RSC's performance of Natalia Vorozhbit's play The Grain Store about the 1930s terror famine in which an estimated 7 million starved to death in Ukraine and Southern Russia. Published in the November issue of Ukrainska Dumka:

Three years ago my Ukrainian father-in-law Mykola came over to spend the Christmas holidays in London with my husband and me. One evening I started to tell him about the book I was writing on the siege of Leningrad. Mykola put down his cup of tea and leaned forward, his blue eyes holding mine. ‘My mother was a blokadnitsa,’ he said. ‘But my father Petro – he suffered even worse.’ I asked how that could be so. Mykola continued, ‘My father lived through the famine of 1933. He was the only one left alive in his family. His parents and seven brothers and sisters all starved to death. Left alone at the age of ten, he survived by begging at railway stations.’

‘Did you know?’ I asked my husband later. He shook his head. This was the first time Mykola had spoken about his family’s experience. As a boy, my husband had been extremely close to his grandfather, who died in 1995. He knew that Petro had been imprisoned in a German concentration camp during world war two. “At least they fed us, was all he had said, without bitterness.”

Since that evening I have been haunted by the story of Petro, who suffered so much in childhood that he could later look back on a Nazi concentration camp with equanimity. And yet he grew up to become a loving father and grandfather. My husband recalls his calm nature and self-discipline. He would walk 10 kilometres a day to work and back, never ate more than two bowls of soup a day with a piece of bread. He had a profound love of nature which he passed on to his grandson. But he never spoke of the holodomor.

I could understand Petro not wanting to talk about his experiences to his young grandson, but Mykola had never spoken about his father’s experience to his family. He only broke his silence with me, an outsider.

And this, I believe, is symptomatic. The silence within my husband’s family was part of the silence that surrounded the famine of 1932-3 and continued until the fall of Soviet power. At the time of the famine, the Soviet government imposed a news blackout. Walter Duranty, the influential New York Times Moscow correspondent, denied the fact of starvation. The British government was aware of the famine but blocked publicity and backed the USSR’s refusal of aid. They were afraid of alienating Stalin, and certainly did not want their electorate to know the true price of the bread on their tables. As a result, few people in the West are aware of the severity of the famine, and that it killed more people than the Nazi holcaust.

This makes the play The Grain Store (translated by Sasha Dugdale) all the more welcome. The RSC commissioned it from the Ukrainian writer Natalya Vorozhbit, who herself lost ten aunts and uncles in the famine.

The play opens with a middle-aged woman suspended on a swing above the darkened stage. She recites a prayer for her family. The lights come on over a Ukrainian village in 1929, where Party officials have come to ‘educate’ the peasants, to encourage them to join the collective farm. While this scheme exploits local resentments, a love affair develops between Mokrina, the daughter of a so-called kulak and Arsei, a party activist. As the years unfold (the play ends in 1933) the terror intensifies, grain is seized and stored in the former village church. There it rots while the villagers starve. Arsei defies Party officials to save Mokrina from death.

The Grain Store’s poignancy is enhanced by music – the peasants sing mournful Ukrainian folksongs; the activists exhortatory Russian marching tunes. The play would have been even more powerful had some scenes been shortened, particularly the tragi-comic dance in Act 2, when the activists force starving peasants to rehearse a welcome for Walter Duranty. He never turns up, so the dancers go hungry.

In the epilogue, Mokrina’s daughter returns, descending on her swing to repeat her prayers. This time she is seated between the silent presences of her father and mother. As Mokrina recites the names of her dead aunts and uncles I found myself crying. She could be Mykola, I realised; she could be one of millions of Ukrainians alive today.
The RSC’s artistic director Michael Boyd, who also directed The Grain Store, said: “It just wouldn’t have been put on in Moscow; it is too much of a touchy political issue.” In her interview on the BBC’s Today programme Vorozhbit agreed. She did not want her play to be politicised by having it staged in her homeland. She says she would feel “uncomfortable” with the consequences. “There is a big difference between ordinary people, who do not really want old memories stirred up, and the political classes, for whom it would become a propaganda issue. And I don’t want to be involved in that.”
This strikes me as a great pity. Of course it is hard to relive personal trauma – my in-laws are evidence of this – but I think of Britain’s Harry Patch, ‘the last Tommy,’ who was unable to talk about his experiences in the trenches of the first world war until he reached the age of 100. Then, for the last years of his life, until he died this summer aged 111, he bore witness to the horror of that time, and became an advocate of peace. Our country would have been the poorer without him.
The Grain Store deserves to be staged in Ukraine and Russia as well as in Britain. The holodomor needs to be openly addressed from a human rather than a political standpoint. Survivors have a unique story to tell which both warns and inspires future generations. The resilience and strength of spirit of Petro and his peers transcend time and place. They have experienced the worst that humanity is capable of; they are examples of the best of it.