Eastern Europe’s Wild West by Pavlo Kazarin

Winner Ukrainian BBC Book of the Year 2022

Eastern Europe’s Wild West explores the changes that have transformed Ukrainian society since the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity. Kazarin was a journalist in Crimea until he left the peninsula following its annexation by Russia in 2014. After the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Kazarin joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The EuroMaidan, the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas resulted in massive changes in Ukrainian society. These changes helped Ukraine build the resilience and awareness that enabled it to resist Russia’s full-scale invasion. This powerful new Ukraine was a revelation for the rest of the world who had consistently overestimated Moscow and underestimated Kyiv. This book explores these changes and their implications from the perspective of a first-person participant and journalist.

Sample Translated by Dominique Hoffman with Andriy Kononenko

64,901 words

Eastern Europe’s Wild West

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Crimea

Chapter 2. Russia

Chapter 3. War

Chapter 4. Media

Chapter 5. Changes

Chapter 6. The Future

Epilogue

Post-script

Introduction

I don’t claim to be a saint. I drive too fast. I talk on the phone while driving. I park in the loading zone.

I could say I pay my taxes, but let’s be real. My job pays them for me. I never actually had to choose whether to pay my share into the government’s coffers or keep it for myself. My strong ethical stance comes for free – I was simply spared the opportunity to compromise myself.

I’ve turned down toxic jobs – but then again, I don’t have any ill relatives dependent on me or major debts to pay off. I haven’t had to balance my own wishes against the needs of someone else. And so it was relatively easy to turn down big money.

I don’t attend neighborhood meetings or join community organizations. I’m fine with paying cash when someone does work for me and I won’t demand a receipt. I can’t claim to make any major contributions to the war effort: I give my time where I think it’s needed as long as it doesn’t ask too much of me.

I didn’t go to the front lines in 2014. For a long time, I hid behind my regional Crimean identity. I was willing to accept occupation documents and identity cards if that allowed me to stay in Crimea after the annexation. My inner Crimean didn’t become an inner Ukrainian overnight. 

Many of my friends turned out to be more principled than me that year. While I tried to continue living in my own little world, they went to the frontlines. While I tried to stay under the radar, they dedicated themselves to volunteering for the war effort. I’m not proud of my behavior in 2014. My friends just bought me time – time I spent on reflection.

I have absolutely no intention of blaming my circumstances. I write my own story, which means I’m responsible for the errors. Without those mistakes, that former Kazarin could hardly have become the current Kazarin. I’m not going to touch up my biography retroactively.

It took me quite a long time to arrive at my current views. I don’t always recognize myself when I read my older texts. I know people change and I know that judging the past from the perspective of the present is pointless. We were different people in the past.

I try not to harbor illusions about myself. Or others. And I have no illusions about the reality around me. It’s exactly what I’ve earned.

I don’t believe in magic and I don’t like it when politicians pose as wonderworkers. I know the limits of my own competence and I don’t trust anyone who claims to have all the answers. I know where money comes from and I don’t respond well when someone promises to give away my tax dollars to support their political career.

I don’t believe in the wisdom of the people, because I’m part of the people myself. And I have some pretty serious doubts about my own wisdom. I’ve behaved badly and I’m not inclined to forget it. I’ve made incorrect predictions and my opponents have ample material to use against me. I’ve also been to a few soccer matches in my time and I know how easily people can be turned into a mob.

I don’t like talking about the “common man.” I prefer people who aren’t so common, who aren’t so simple. People who know more than me, who can do things I can’t, who understand life better than me. I’m capable of taking advice from people who are competent to give it. I despise dilettantes – because I’m a dilettante myself in many areas.

I don’t care for talk about prophets and missions. I don’t expect politicians to be saints. I’m used to the fact that I’ll often have to mark my ballot for the lesser of two evils. And I know that sometimes I’m the lesser of two evils myself – and at other times the greater of two evils.

I’m not inclined to complain about my fate. I’ve made my life out of the building blocks I made the effort to gather.  I don’t intend to take anyone else’s blocks, and I don’t like it when someone starts eyeing mine.

And I don’t need anyone looking at my with hound-dog eyes. My life is what I make of it through the sum total of my own triumphs and errors, my own laziness and my own discipline. If I’m not happy with something, I don’t go looking for who to blame. I can see that person looking back at me every morning in the mirror. 

This book is an attempt to make sense of the people and circumstances that have changed us.

Chapter 1. Crimea.

Not blood or soil

Only the Personal

The Era of Conspiracy

Pandora’s boxes

Horizons of the “Russian World”

The Evolution of Lancelot

Patriot Games

Inner Deportation

Three Myths for one Crimea

The Silence of the Occupied

Don’t Judge Your Enemies By Your Own Standards

Negative Selection

If There Were No War

A Requiem for Myself

Not Blood or Soil

It’s easy to be Ukrainian if your mother’s from Lviv and your dad’s from Poltava. When your lullabies were in Ukrainian, with an embroidered towel hanging in the kitchen and Shevchenko’s Kobzar on the shelf. When you’ve understood your own identity since childhood and know exactly where you fit into your country.

That’s not how it was in Crimea.

Almost none of our parents were born on the peninsula. We were a generation of immigrants. Crimea’s “Golden Age” was the Soviet 70s and 80s. When we lived behind the Iron Curtain and under the command economy, Crimea was the most popular Soviet resort – which is why it was doomed to suffer decades of nostalgia after 1991.

The nostalgia was omnipresent and the link between cause and effect was severed. Many of my neighbors failed to recognize the collapse of the Soviet system either as the logical result of losing the Cold War or a natural consequence of the ineffectual socialist economics which were never actually competitive. They saw independent Ukraine as the source of all their problems,  independent Ukraine, whose trident had come and tacked Crimea to the seafloor of society. 

The fact that Crimea was Russian-speaking wasn’t the problem. The bigger problem was the peninsula’s preference for living in the past. People longed for the past. They idealized everything Soviet. It was hard to find yourself in those conditions. Nonetheless, some people did try to find common ground. Common ground that could link the peninsula with the mainland.

And then came the Maidan.

The Maidan was about values. The idea that personal choice was more important than “blood and soil.” That the Ukrainian nation would no longer focus on ethnic categories.

For me, the Maidan was about the Ukrainian train trying to pull out of the post-Soviet station. Our Crimea should have been one of the wagons on that train. Crimea might have pulled the “stop chain” every so often but eventually would have arrived with all the other wagons at the “West” station.

But then Russia arrived and detached my native wagon and connected it to a train that was headed straight for the past. A past that had no more real long-term prospects than a war galleon. That is to say, none whatsoever.

Crimeans are different from the residents of Donbas and Luhansk in that we left occupied territory for political reasons. There were no shells hitting our houses, we weren’t fleeing a war. When we Crimeans encounter each other on the mainland, we already know that we’ve found a like-minded person. There’s no place for a pro-Russian Crimean in Ukraine. Our official address does not signify allegiance to Russia.

It’s a cruel irony. The annexation of my home served as a defibrillator for my country. It forced Ukraine to crawl out of its post-Soviet slumber. The occupation of the peninsula stole our small homeland from us, but gave us the gift of the greater homeland. The one in which what matters isn’t “blood” or “soil,” or the sound of your last name, or the language of your lullabies. Ukrainians aren’t only born. They are also made.

And here’s what I know for sure: the future can’t be held hostage by the past. It took me thirty years to figure that out. More than long enough.

Better late than never.

Purely Personal

In October 2014, I threw everything in the trunk and headed for Kyiv.

At that time, occupied Crimea was like the eye of a hurricane. On the mainland, MH17 had been shot down, the battle for Ilovaisk had been fought, and the first Minsk Accords signed. But the peninsula was entirely calm.

Chapter 4. Media.

A Fake Future

We love to invent ethical placebos for ourselves, formulas to convince us that truth and justice will triumph over lies and manipulation. In reality, genius and villainy are frequent bedfellows and there is no guarantee that truth will conquer lies. The battle between facts and fakes is raging now and the outcome remains uncertain.

The joke about the “second oldest profession” is popular with people who don’t realize that journalism is only five hundred years old. It is a consequence of the “Gutenberg galaxy” – the world the printing press created. And not only journalism. In his book with that title, Marshall McLuhan writes that Protestantism, capitalism, individualism, democracy, and nationalism all became possible only due to the invention of the printing press. The world as we know it is a product of the culture of book publishing that arose five hundred years ago.

Over the following centuries, changes in journalism kept pace with changes in the world itself. In the mid-seventeenth century, the first print ads appeared. In the mid-nineteenth century, paid advertisements became the foundation of the business model. And then everything changed again at the moment we discovered that we’re now living in the “Internet galaxy.”

In 1993, there were 130 websites. In 2007, that number had reached 1.2 billion. Today approximately four billion users are using 45 terabytes of data. The internet is not just a means of communication: it has changed the very nature of communication. Over the course of centuries, humanity became accustomed to viewing the world through the keyhole. Now technology has blown the doors wide open and we are standing at the threshold, battered by the winds of information. And we have to learn to live in this new reality.

The arrival of the internet was initially perceived as the ultimate victory over censorship. Everyone would be able to communicate with everyone in a space of freedom, freed from the vise grip of governmental control. Instead, institutional censorship was replaced by voluntary censorship.

People turned out to be not so much rational, as rationalizing. Form an opinion first, and then find information to confirm it. The information space came to consist of isolated bubbles where everyone lived in their own information realities. Instead of a space for everyone to communicate with everyone, the worldwide web has fragmented into isolated interest clubs. Their members legitimize their own convictions and only discover the existence of other perspectives during surveys or elections.

The space of communication has changed. Technology has deprived the media of its monopoly for mediating between the one who speaks and the one who listens. The institutional layer has disappeared and the effectiveness of traditional forms of censorship has seriously diminished. Of course, the censorship of fakes has weakened right along with the censorship of truth. Anyone can find exactly what they want on the internet and it needn’t have any correlation with reality. 

It turns out that in this new reality, facts do not always triumph over fakes. In fact, they frequently lose badly in the contest. 

Emotions are the oil of the human soul; whoever can extract them will grow rich. Fakes are appealing because they have nothing to do with rationality. Their function is to construct around their adherents the reality they wish to see. 

Facts are dry and mathematical. Fakes are vibrant and emotional. To internalize a fact, you have to understand the context. Fakes will rush in faster to deliver a simple picture of the world with a heavy admixture of conspiracies. 

Notably, fakes don’t just ‘sell’ well. They also reproduce at an alarming rate.  

Russian journalist Leonid Bershydsky has written that people want information primarily to support small talk. He writes, “People tend to discuss either things that are directly relevant to their lives or issues that will allow them to appear smart and well-informed. The media loves to say they help with important decisions, but in reality, they only help the reader keep up with small talk. Among the biggest immediate benefits publications bring to the reader are an opportunity to shine in conversation, avoid looking like an idiot, and be in the loop about whatever everyone is talking about.” 

But who said conspiracy theories can’t be small talk? Of course, the demand for fakes and facts will depend directly on the audience’s taste. The lower the bar, the less chance a boring fact has against a sparkling lie. As a result, we once again find ourselves in a situation where the astronomy of facts loses to the astrology of fakes. For a long time, it was assumed that facts are packaged up with the label ‘respectability’. That’s not enough anymore. When well-to-do Western countries increasingly vote for populists it means that fakes sell better than accurate descriptions of reality.

This creates new challenges. Maybe truth just has really bad marketing and we need to devote more thought to how to package it. Otherwise, we run the risk of offering a quality product that loses in the battle for the average consumer. The one who enjoys full access to all electoral privileges. The one who defines the future of the country to no less a degree than university professors. 

The large established media in developed countries have already been attempting to find answers to these new challenges. They create interactive, playful products and experiment with various formats. They create different content for different platforms. They learn to sell facts to new audiences. They work on their ‘packaging’ and do not shy away from the word ‘marketing’. And all this still doesn’t protect the developed countries from the hucksters of stupidity.

In the past, news had to pass editorial control in order to reach an audience. Today, there is no such thing as control. And in this new reality, trading in emotions is far more profitable than trading in actual knowledge. Demand now dictates supply in the media market.

Well it won’t be boring. Fortunately. Unfortunately.

Getting to Know the Country

The analogue age had a particular feature. If you looked at any developed democracy and imagined its media and their audience as a mathematical fraction, then the numerator would be made up of a wide range of people. They might differ in the views and income, education levels and social status, but they would all be equalized in their shared picture of reality. This was because the denominator was made up of the same media outlets for everyone. 

Television channels and print media could have different target audiences, editorial positions, party preferences and values, but only within a limited range because the number of outlets was inherently  limited. And since they were relatively few in number, they all had to obey some shared professional guidelines and universal values. The media was an institutional mediator between content producers and consumers. The only way to reach an audience was to convince an editor of the value of your perspectives. The Internet has canceled the old reality and given birth to a new one. We now live in an era where anyone can speak to their audience directly, without intermediaries. The blogosphere is the child of social networks and online platforms. 

Until recently, any freak who believed the planet was flat would have been doomed to solitude. He could imagine that he was the only one who knew the truth and everyone else was either hypocrital or deluded. Now the Internet has given the freaks the opportunity to find each other, build content for each other, and promote their ideas. The Internet has allowed disparate freaks to come together and create political demand. And the market responds with political supply.

Media that was ‘for all’, has been replaced by media ‘for us.’ Even Facebook indexes the news based on our preferences and we’re shown the authors whose posts we ‘like.’ Everyone else eventually disappears from our feeds. And so each of us exists in an information reality different from that of our neighbors. Rather than becoming a communication platform for ‘all-with-all’, the internet and social networks segmented the information field – and society along with it. Dialogue has ended and we now live in a world of endless monologues.

Ukraine is no exception. We are bewildered when we read the results of sociological research –  “Who are all these people?” Then we just accuse the researchers of corruption and assume they are fulfilling someone’s agenda. In reality, we are just falling prey to our habit of viewing ourselves as the norm, assuming that everyone around us views reality as we do. 

All of this presents a rather formidable challenge. The sustainability of any state is based on mutual trust of its citizens. If they trust each other, then by extension they can trust the procedures which govern the system. If I believe that my neighbors are not so different from me, that we have more in common than not, then I can recognize their right to vote as they please. And if I see my neighbors as strangers whose interests conflict with my own, then I have no reason to trust their choices. Or election results.

And no, it isn’t just a problem for Ukraine. Even the most stable countries which we used to look up to are dealing with this issue. The old boundaries of identity have become blurry. New ones are emerging before our eyes. It becomes difficult to talk about a shared vision when our descriptions of reality don’t even match and this mismatch results in the most exotic phobias. And these are the very conditions in which Ukraine must reach agreement about its future and its identity.

You know, history has a rather bizarre sense of humor. 

The ABCs of Manipulation

In the early 2000’s, Russian spin doctor Oleg Matveychev published the (untranslated) book Ears Wag the Donkey. The Uses of Poitical Technology. The author described how to win the battle for public opinion and the most effective methods of manipulating the media. 

He emphasized the role of self-fulfilling prophecies whereby expectations influence behavior; ‘influencing questions’ - in which giving voice to the question is more important than the answer; and the deliberate use of fake smear campaigns so that revelations of actual wrongdoing lose their power in a sea of absurdity.

Matveychev notes that journalists are particularly easily manipulated, simply due to the reactive nature of the profession.

‘Journalists are congenitally incapable of recognizing the agenda due to the nature of their work. They take pride in how creatively they reflect and present something, turning black into white, or white into black, but they have little comprehension of what they are painting black or white or whose interest it serves. The difference between journalists and good spin doctors is the same as the one between builders and painters. However, the painters don’t imagine that if they paint the other person’s house black it will fall to ruin, or if they paint their own white it will stand for one hundred years. Journalists also often struggle with distinguishing which is actually their own house.’ 

Matveychev writes that setting the agenda is more important than how you cover it. As an example, he mentioned a story about mayoral elections in a small town. The incumbent mayor had a 30% positive approval rating and a dozen competitors, including a local businessman who declined the services of local journalists. The jilted media decided to take revenge. They consistently and eagerly criticized his every step. The mayor hoped that his 30% approval rating would allow him to win while the rest of the votes were distributed among his opponents. Instead, the businessman won with 40% of the vote.

The journalists had successfully convinced 60% of voters that the businessman was bad. But they failed with the other 40%. And they created the sense that there were no other alternatives: the whole issue was about choosing between the mayor and the businessman. 

Similar situations don’t only occur by accident. The media is ‘reactive’ by nature: why buy off a journalist if you can manipulate them instead? It isn’t difficult to create events for them to report. It doesn’t matter how they perform your agenda – what’s important is that you control the agenda. 

The fact is that a modern man lives in a state of ‘permanent referendum’. He must constantly determine whether he agrees with this or that fact or statement, whether he is in support or opposed.

The main battle is actually for the agenda. Here we are talking about issues on which people are asked to have their say. For example, in the 1980 US presidential election, Reagan and Carter were neck and neck. It was impossible to predict the winner. But then, on the eve of the vote, the hostage crisis dominated every channel, and foreign policy issue became the yardstick of choice for Americans. Foreign policy was Reagan’s strong suit and he won.  

‘When you see dozens of comments with different opinions, do not rush to rejoice that you are dealing with a free press. The main thing isn’t the comments themselves, the ‘for’ or ‘against’, the main thing is the issues that are introduced.’

Matveychev writes that a request for comment is one of the easiest ways to ‘blow up a topic’ and bring it to the top of the agenda. When a top official is asked to comment on an issue, it triggers a chain reaction and then additional media and pundits will begin to engage with the same topic. 

The commenter doesn’t have to have a broad audience to push forward an issue; the value of information has long ceased to depend on the value of the original source. Any random freak can launch the news, as long as his information makes it to the audience.

“The value of information doesn’t lie in the source of the information, but in how rapidly it can reproduce. Information isn’t knowledge or facts, it isn’t a finished product with inherent value. Information is a stimulus to action or the justification of action. It gains its value solely from action”

We should add that the value of information can also be in inaction. Whether you go to vote for the candidate – or you stay home. Whether you attend the protest – or sit it out. Whether you donate to a project or remain indifferent.