“Wiped off the face of the earth”

For Ukrainians their native land is always embodied in certain landscapes. Natural conditions were one of the factors determining the main features of the Ukrainian ethnos. For the Zaporozhian Cossacks it was the Great Meadow (Velykyi Luh), the Steppe, and the Wild Field (Dyke Pole). These were phenomena writ large, signifying respect and perception of the surroundings as something far more important than home and food, and reaching into the spiritual sphere.

The list of crimes against Ukraine’s environment and the resultant irreparable losses in the last few decades is long. People who were not destroyed or driven away from Ukraine suffered while watching the ruination of familiar landscapes and living conditions that had preserved the age-old economic order.

Ukraine’s population was being swiftly and relentlessly deprived not only of freedom and independence but also the natural environment that had formed their small and large homelands during the period of building “advanced socialism and communism.”

Lev Gumilev formulated the concept of “chimerical ethnos,” when the integral world perception of an indigenous people, aboriginals, is overlaid by another integral world perception of migrants and newcomers, which results in the destruction of the environment of the indigenous ethnos.

The ceremony to launch the construction of the first Dnipro dam took place on Nov. 7, 1927, and the hydroelectric station was completed on Oct. 10, 1932. When construction began on the Dniprohes project, the 73-year-old academician Dmytro Yavornytsky, a distinguished author, historian, archaeologist, and acknowledged expert on the Zaporozhian Sich, was invited to head an expedition to survey the Dnipro rapids.. His book The Dnipro Rapids was published in Kharkiv in 1928. The foreword reads: “In publishing this book, the State Publishing House of Ukraine believes that we are fulfilling our cultural duty to the historical past, satisfying increasing interest in those natural and historic olden times, so that the new socialist industrialized future will soon rise over the flooded age-old glory.” By writing this book, Yavornytsky carried out his duty to both history and posterity.

People in villages near the flooded rapids say that if you listen closely, you can hear their roar from beneath the water. I tend to agree because if you take a closer look, through the surface of the “sea” you can see the old Dnipro riverbed, channels, lakes, and even the steep slopes.

In 1959 Oles Honchar visited a communist construction site and wrote in his diary: “The basin of the Sea of Kremenchuk (the reservoir between Chyhyryn and Novo-Heorhiievsk). A vast verdant space with clusters of orchards and poplars here and there. The place is deserted, the villages have been torn down here; the whole area is awaiting inundation. One village at the foot of a hill was just being torn down. Blue walls, ornate window frames, roof beams sticking out (with the thatching removed), and there are still potted flowers on some windowsills. Sky-blue walls are desecrated by inscriptions scratched with nails, like ‘House to be demolished by May 25,’ or ‘Notice: Home to be sold for building materials.’ Chimneys, chimneys, a total ruin; it is sad. Naked beams, walls gouged to a ruddy color, a stove painted blue, starling-houses here and there, a stork in a brushwood nest. Some poem. People sitting next to their wrecked stoves. The same picture in every village. I never thought that houses torn down during a luxurious Ukrainian summer could look so depressing. Some villages look dirty, unpainted, people must have known in spring that they would be torn down. Here are sky-blue, clean, little white houses; these must have been taken completely by surprise. Trees felled and sawn apart while still green, the leaves are fading.”

The ideology of the giant communist construction projects and Stalin’s plan to transform nature recognized no duties or obligations to the future generations and the cultural and historical heritage. Uppermost on the agenda was the formation of a single Soviet people, who had to be provided with standard, transformed industrial-agrarian landscapes in record time. The Kakhivka Hydroelectric Station dam, completed in November 1955, held back the flood of 1956, and the eradicated and incompletely burned patches of the Kinski and Bazavluk bulrushes of 50 years earlier became the bottom of a manmade sea.

“All winter the waters of the Dnipro kept rising, flooding the patches of bulrushes and lakes. In springtime, when the ice started moving down all the channels, and soon after the ice, the huge flood, the entire Dnipro lowland from Zaporizhia to Kakhivka instantly changed beyond recognition. The Great Zaporozhian Meadow disappeared under water, with the crosses of ancient cemeteries sinking forever. The Pidpilna and Skarbna rivers disappeared...A sea was born, boundless, with a vast sea horizon. A geological miracle! Their childhood perished forever at its bottom.” (Alexander Dovzhenko’s Poem of the Sea). Before the inundation small-scale scientific expeditions quickly crisscrossed the Great Meadow.

In 1959 Dovzhenko’s film script Poem of the Sea was on the list of nominees for the USSR’s most prestigious Lenin Prize. It was about the construction of the Kakhivka Hydroelectric Power Station and reservoir. The prize was conferred posthumously, as Dovzhenko died on Nov. 25, 1956, the year that the sea was filled and the Great Meadow flooded. Filming of the Poem of the Sea was scheduled to start on Nov. 26. So we have another 50th anniversary of an irreparable loss to mark this year.

In creating an epic about the Ukrainian people, Dovzhenko’s talent selected historically and socially significant events that concentrated the philosophy and psychology of an entire age. He could not have ignored an event as important for his people as the creation of that sea.

While working on the script, Dovzhenko traveled to Nykopil oblast, visiting historic sites dating back to the Zaporozhian Sich, which were doomed to be flooded. In an entry in his diary he writes: “Actually no one in Pokrovske told the people that half the village had to be resettled. No explanatory work was conducted. They would simply step into a yard, take measurements, record them, and then inform the owner that the place would be flooded and the family had to resettle. Moreover, all those who were unable to resettle before the deadline were told: ‘We warn you: if you don’t move out before such-and-such a date, we’ll tear your home down with a bulldozer, whether you’re living there or not.’ The nation whose previous generation had been deported beyond the Ural Mountains without prior warning could be treated this way.”

The motivating force behind Dovzhenko’s creativity was a yearning to renew the world; its sources were concealed in the mysterious depths of the dreamy forest-steppe, on the banks of the enchanted Desna River, where he hungrily absorbed all the treasures that he took into his life. To understand this artist and his perception of the era and its events, one must recall that his Poem of the Sea was begun as soon as he completed the Enchanted Desna script. Dovzhenko had become aware of the need to create a lyrical autobiographical work even during the war.

In his diary he wrote: “I am writing the Enchanted Desna as a light and transparent reminiscence of the past...Why is the Desna enchanted? The magic and bad times of my barefoot childhood; without an understanding of its sacredness, man’s work is meaningless and colorless.” The Desna and its scenic environs enchanted young Sashko for the rest of his life; it gave him a real legend about human joys and sorrows; it brought him a miracle, teaching him to “see stars in the ordinary puddles on the pathways of life.” He wrote the Poem through his light and transparent memories. The holiness of his barefoot childhood ran like a thread throughout his life.

Why was Dovzhenko attracted by that “sea,” and why did he use the word “poem”? The reason is that all those grandiose plans to transform nature were aimed not only at transforming Ukraine’s nature. In order to answer the question of why he chose the word “poem,” it is necessary to remember what the times were like: Dovzhenko was also a resettler, living in Moscow against his will.

This cinematographic poem conveys the moods and feelings of people who were destined to see their homes destroyed by the Dnipro and move to new places. The poem tells the story of a chairman of a collective farm, who sends invitations all over the country, summoning all the former residents of the village to say good-bye to their homes before they are flooded. It is about an army general instructed by his old father to cut down an old pear tree from which his cradle once hung and beneath which lullabies were sung to him. It is about a foreman from the hydroelectric station’s construction site, a ladies’ man, and negative character. It is about many other things, but my advice is to read Dovzhenko’s works and watch his films.

When this film script was being written, our fathers held “public hearings” in the bulrushes, when the children were fast asleep. After the Dnipro rapids were flooded, there were plans to start on the Desna, Vorskla, Psel, and other rivers. These plans are still on the agenda because today’s nuclear revival requires new water reservoirs, new resettlements, and more victims. The gaping windows of empty homes in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone are the end result of the continuation of demolishing villages and settlements that were submerged beneath the waters of the Dnipro “seas.” Unfortunately, our nation has once again been denied an opportunity to assert its national self-consciousness and become stronger.

Today, the scenic Dnipro banks that were not flooded by those “seas” are being privatized and appropriated by the new masters of life. The prospects and threat of the native ethnos, resettled away from its familiar bands and pure waters, being replaced by another, even more chimerical one, are taking on an increasingly clearer shape.

At one time Dovzhenko, an artist by the grace of God, naively believed in the slogans about freedom, equality, and brotherhood. When the ideological veil lifted, when every schoolchild and student knew that “knowledge of one’s national history is a passport to death,” he was horrified and oppressed by the reality. Until his dying day he was haunted by thoughts about his people, what would happen to them, and he wondered who would tell the world the truth about their sufferings and hopes. Today, 50 years after his death, Ukraine’s very survival and future are still at stake.

Unfortunately, our society continues to acquire “chimerical” features. Here is a graphic example: in Nykopil the authorities initially renamed the Dovzhenko Movie Theater “Premiere.” Then it was closed and put up for sale. Meanwhile, representatives of the chimerical ethnos are making plans for new nuclear power units and water reservoirs: these are the descendants of those who destroyed the natural environs, peoples’ homes, and the heart and future of the nation.