Олександр Бабіч Oleksandr Babich

My grandmother and grandfather on my mother’s side worked at the neighboring dairy plant. They were separated only by a fence [from another plant where other relatives worked]. My grandfather was deputy director there, later chief technologist. He was basically a boss. My grandmother also worked in the office. She was an accountant, I think, or an economist. Anyway, an office, accounting job. And that’s how I ended up on the label of Pervomaisk condensed milk. It’s kind of a funny story that my grandfather, being the deputy director, they decided to do a rebranding. In the Soviet Union, everything was standardized, and all condensed milk came in containers similar to our glasses, with white diamond shapes on a light blue background. But they [the management of the Pervomaysk Milk Canning Plant] decided something needed to change. They… drew my portrait, basically. I was little, and my parents had gone to Germany. At that time, military units were recruiting civilians on a contract basis. My parents were gone, and my grandparents raised me in early childhood. They took me and drew me on that can of condensed milk. My grandfather’s own brother was already in Moscow then, he had moved to Moscow, to [work at] the Ministry of Meat and Dairy Industry. And apparently, some Soviet-style nepotism also played a role. They sorted it out among themselves, and I became the face of Pervomaisk condensed milk. Instead of becoming the face of, I don’t know, Longines [a watch manufacturer] or Lamborghini [a car manufacturer], I have remained on that can for 25 years now. What am I saying, 25? It's been 45 years.

I had a girlfriend, my classmate. After the army, I went to the sea with her. Near Odesa, there’s a resort village called Luhove. And to this Luhove is where she and I and my two sisters, we went there with a vacation voucher. Our parents somehow got us a trade union voucher to a resort. It was a real backwater, pretty much cut off from civilization. People get there by bus. There were holiday resorts by the sea. It’s between Rybakivka and Koblevo, in that direction. And we were at the resort, doing what young and foolish people do, going to dances, drinking some… no, actually, I didn’t really drink back then. Probably didn’t drink at all. We kissed, swam in the sea, everything was great. The canteen was like this, and our building was here. In the morning, everyone had to go down for breakfast. The canteen would set all the tables first with these set meals, breakfasts, and only then the doors would open and we’d go in. There was only one loudspeaker at the canteen, hanging on a pole, and it would broadcast some news, some music, basically the radio was on. As we came down, we saw a scene I’d only seen in photos from [19]41. "From the Soviet Information Bureau..." — and all the people were standing under that bell[-shaped loudspeaker], listening. "The State Committee on the State of Emergency reports that..." You know, like — wow, it’s war, the end of the world, the apocalypse. It was seriously unsettling. We listened to all of it — damn, what do we do? I ran to the kiosk to buy newspapers — there was no fresh press. No one knew what was going on. No TV, no... there was no Internet or anything back then. So, we went to the sea. What else to do? We still went to sunbathe, swim. We got to the beach, and people on the beach weren’t lying as they usually do toward the sun, but all lying in the shape of stars around the radios. Whoever had a radio was the king, and people lay around them like sun rays, listening to Swan Lake, or whatever, that same announcement over and over.

The lower you are on the social ladder, the narrower your worldview... For a while, I was interested in politics, in the late nineties, all that fuss, all those Kuchmas and Kravchuks. It was all… Well, whatever. Somewhere out there, something was happening, but in my lieutenant position, I was more concerned with finding something to chew on for my family. The Orange Revolution really hit me. By then, since I was involved in educational work, I had to stay informed. Plus, my background in history and communication with our lecturers, who were connected to history, political and social sciences. When Gongadze was killed, that really outraged me. I took a can of paint at night... We lived in some horrible room, at the corner of Hretska and Polska. It was a half-ruined house. Now it’s completely gone, demolished by a construction company that built a new house. But back then, it was a half-ruined two-story mansion, and in the yard, I had a service apartment, just a little room. It was surrounded by a big concrete fence. I bought a can of paint, took a brush, and on that huge gray fence, right on the corner of Hretska and Polska, I wrote in big letters, "Kuchma is a murderer." At night. While being a police officer. Can you imagine that? An act of defiance! So, when the Orange Revolution began, I think I was the only idiot running around our police station with an orange ribbon on my forehead. Everyone was marching in formation. And me, damn, with an orange ribbon. I strongly supported the Orange Revolution. My superiors looked at me through gritted teeth because, of course, most of them supported Yanukovych.

We [the search and exhumation group of the Memory and Glory Military History Center] arrived in Kryvyi Rih. There was this little morgue shack at one of the city hospitals. We unloaded our guy [the exhumed body of a fallen soldier]. There was this guy, [nicknamed] Khottabych, kind of a Ukrainian Charon, with a big truck marked "Cargo 200" [military jargon for soldiers killed in action]. Later they changed it to a more humane title, “On the Shield." They say Zaluzhnyi personally initiated that. Well, perhaps. Anyway, it was a sensible, proper move. And he says, "Guys, help me load up, I’m here alone." We say, "Of course, no problem." And he backs up his truck, there’s a container, a refrigerated trailer, two of them. The vehicles line up tail to tail. We open the doors, shit. Inside, well, you get it, there’s a refrigerator. And it’s all bodies in there, packed to the top, in bags. He and the nurse check the numbers in a squared notebook. She immediately calls out a number, and we look for the matching bag. To describe the smells, the fluids, the stench — holy hell… We find the bag, luckily it’s somewhere above. Wham, we start dragging it to Khottabych’s side. And he goes, "No-no-no, guys, this won’t do. Look, I need the Vinnytsia region first, then the Zhytomyr region, then the Khmelnytskyi region, then the Ternopil region, then the [Ivano-]Frankivsk [region], then the Zakarpattia region, and only after that Lviv. So put the Vinnytsia ones by the door, the others further in." And we’re like, "Fuck, are you serious, Khottabych?" — "Well, what do you expect? I can’t do it alone later." Fuck. And you start rearranging all that, climbing over bodies, slipping, something falls out, a bag tears open... And some of the guys were only just identified, they’d been there since spring [2022], and some were in such a condition there was nothing left to show. Plus, the bodies weighed 100-120 kg each. At best, two of you could grab and pull one. I remember we spent about two hours there, an hour and a half to two, in that cocoon with death. I came out and realized I was about to lose my mind. And we [the search and exhumation group of the Memory and Glory Military History Center] have a no-drinking policy, we don’t drink there [during expeditions]. And I said, "Guys, if we don’t get some cognac right now..." Night. Well, not night, evening, curfew, no alcohol sales. I remember we drove up to some Zinochka at some kiosk. We said, "Mam, we need it." She looked at us and said, "Give me cash. I’ll put it through the register in the morning." We got back, poured ourselves 50-100 grams of cognac each.