Наталія Терамае Natalia Teramae

No one really believed it, because I was planning to leave every year. First Mark's contract was extended, then I was pregnant. When the child was born, he decided to take parental leave, and they extended it again, then COVID started. And they [the Ukrainian community in Helsinki] were like: "My God, Teramae, you're leaving every year and you still stay here." And I'm like: "No, I'm getting out of here." I think that until the very end, they didn't believe I would just leave. Many people said, "Where are you going? Think about the children. It's dangerous. What will you do there? Here, everything is stable. Where will you work there?" But two Ukrainian women also told me… One said, "That's very good." She's from Kharkiv, she said, "I can't bring myself to do it, because my child reacts very badly to all this, but it's good that you are returning, to set an example for the Finns that our country and we are worth something, that we aren't just some people here, that our territory doesn't exist." And some girls wrote that I was very strong, that it was a big decision, that they would also like to, but can't bring themselves to do it at the moment. There was, in fact, concern in all of this. Concern not about how we will fare here... Again, we understand that when you follow this from a distance, you haven't lived through the experience and you don't know, so it seems, it just gets demonized. When I was already here and living, and my children and husband came several times, he's more or less familiar with this experience — it's clearly scary. It's scary, yeah, so what? It's true. But I just realized that it was now or never. Because my eldest is eleven, he's putting down strong roots, I see that the children are just becoming foreigners, as I had predicted might happen. Because my husband and I talked about this a lot, and I had been thinking about it since my time in the States, because again, America, and he has many friends of different nationalities, and we talked about this, how children want to distance themselves from their parents. In his case, they want to be Americans. They don't want to be Korean, or from wherever, or Jewish. In the same way, I understood that I would simply lose that moment and I wouldn't have a connection with my children, because the children would be foreigners, and I won't become a foreigner. Excuse me, but I just don't see the point in having children if there's no emotional closeness with them. You will be living on different planets.

There wasn't that kind of patriotism. I was already dating my first husband, who lived in Kyiv, we lived together. I was in a more international crowd, meaning they were guys of different professions and different nationalities. And we lived in an apartment with [journalist] Ivan Yakovyna. It just so happened that Mark and Ivan were renting an apartment in the Tatarka neighborhood. And Ivan and I had a lot of discussions. Ivan's mother is Russian, his father is Ukrainian. Ivan was working for Lenta.Ru at the time. Ivan is generally such a... I'm saying this in the sense that we didn't notice many threats. There was this creeping... this takeover by Russians. For example, [political technologist Kazbek] Bektursunov, who was at Kommersant, launched this project and then gave an interview to the BBC Ukrainian Service. I even printed out his interview and kept it. He was saying that Ukrainian journalism didn’t exist, that Ukrainian journalists were uneducated, they didn’t go to theaters, they didn’t even know how to use a fork and knife in a restaurant. I read this interview and thought, “How could he... Seems like an idiot has to be shown that he's an idiot.” But it was always like that from their side: they would hire managers from there, producers, they would come and say that you're shit, and then they would come… And I worked in culture. This was especially noticeable with Russian stars. I remember when [Russian actress] Alyona Babenko came, "Oh, what stupid questions, when will this be over?" And you go to the Molodist [film festival], and some Western star is sitting there, and to the most banal question, they say, "My God, what a wonderful question, you are such great journalists." By the way, I should also mention [Russian actress Alla] Demidova. She came to Molodist, Russians were often brought over too, and there was Alla Demidova, our star, too. I don't know why she [was there], there was some press conference with her. And this was already when Putin was in power, by the way. And I asked her, "How do you, as the cultural intelligentsia, resist this?" Because in Ukraine, it's about protests, a protest-oriented layer of society. She really laid into me then, she just lost her temper, saying she wouldn't talk about politics, "culture is beyond politics," and that she had done enough to have things to talk about with her other than politics. And I remember that my colleagues looked at me then like, "What are you doing?" But these were all, let's say, warning signs that we most likely ignored, where it was all heading. This language from Russia, Russian, had a devaluing effect: that you are not educated enough, you are a subpeople — this "failed state" narrative that they later promoted very heavily.

We were on the Maidan a lot as correspondents because, again, Ukraina Moloda [newspaper] supported Yushchenko. We handed out our newspapers for free to people there, wrote reports from there. There was just an incredible sense of elation. My family was there too, and part of my family came from western Ukraine then, all this was described, about the people. It was a carnival atmosphere. Maybe because I was still young. How old was I… 24. You felt that we could do it, we would do it. And your slightly older friends were all heavily involved in this struggle. And then, when Yushchenko won and when his inauguration took place — it was an incredible high. We were on Independence Square, there are photos left, I kept a lot from all of that. I have a whole album of these artifacts, I need to flip through and read it. It’s just sitting there, and I don't have time to do it. So that should be a separate conversation. Memory, to be honest, erases it all so much that I had completely forgotten, for example, about that "night of the long knives," I think that's what it was called... When there was a clash near the CEC [Central Election Commission] on Lesi Ukrainky Boulevard, and then Volodia Semkiv wrote about it on Facebook, and I remembered that we were there together. Indeed, I was there, I remember it, it was a bit creepy and scary because the security forces were there. But again, you have to dig this up, read the articles you wrote then, and look at all these archives, because, I don't know, maybe it's a psychological feature that lets you suppress the bad things, you suppress these scary moments. I remember mainly the elation. And when we were on the Maidan during the inauguration, there was champagne, we drank the whole bottle with friends there. With Lyubysh, by the way, with Ivan Lyubysh-Kirdey. And we wrote notes — our expectations — to open and look at later. I was looking through them somewhere recently. There were, of course, a lot of... back then, for some reason, there was this — placing hopes and trust in the president. Like, “We believe in you…” Was this cult created by political technologists? Or did we create it ourselves? It's very wrong, absolutely. We all understand this now, because you can't put everything on one person. In any case, it's a failure. Either the person can't handle it, or the person usurps power. But those were great hopes for the future.

It's Surzhyk. That is, it’s the Kyiv region, it's the kind of Surzhyk that lingered there a bit: “dielat” [to do, in Russian]… Although the school was Ukrainian, and I knew the language very well. And if we're talking about language, we spoke Surzhyk, and at school, Ukrainian as well, but there was this moment when we, as high school girls, for instance, would go to Kyiv (we used to go to Kyiv to hang out, the commuter train was a quick way to get there), for some reason, just stepping onto the platform, we would abruptly switch to Russian. We didn't plan it, nothing, it was a given. And Russian was present if you were going out in public somewhere. I had a diary, which I most likely wrote in Surzhyk, but I destroyed it. But I looked, for example, at the keepsake notebooks we wrote in our last year of school, those stories, most of them are written in Russian. Some wrote in Ukrainian, but most were in Russian. And again, I'm thinking now that if it weren't for Mohylianka [Kyiv Mohyla Academy], then probably… I look at my classmates who went to other universities and jobs and became some sort of managers in Kyiv or in the Fastiv tax office, and they mostly [speak] Russian. Although at home, it's Ukrainian, Surzhyk.