Maybe The War Made Me A Cynical And Bitter Person But All Of The Eurovision Discourse This Year Makes

May 18 is the 80th anniversary of the deportation of Crimean Tatars from the territory of Crimea in 1944 by the Soviet authorities. It is also a remembrance day for the victims of this genocide.

Thread on deportation of Crimean Tatars

The mosaic by the Sixtier Opanas Zalyvakha is almost completely laid out with natural stone. On the sides, there is the inscription "Чим хата багата, тим і рада". ("With what the house is rich, with that the house is happy). One of the most beautiful mosaics in Ivano-Frankivsk.

20 Days In Mariupol (2023), dir. Mstyslav Chernov

What Ukrainians ate to survive Holodomor

(translated excerpts from an Історична Правда article): + images source

The villagers would dig up the holes of the polecats to find at least a handful of grain hidden by these animals. They pounded it in a mortar, added a handful of oilcake (from hemp seed), beetroot, potato peelings, and baked something from this mixture.

Those who managed to hide at least a little grain would grind it in iron mills made from wheel axles and cook "zatyrukha" (a concoction made from a small amount of flour ground from ears of grain).

Acacia flowers were boiled and eaten raw, and green quinoa was mixed with crushed corn cobs. Those who could - and this was considered lucky - added a handful of bran. This food made their feet swell and their skin crack.

The peasants dried the husked ears of corn and millet husks, pounded them, ground them with weeds, and cooked soups and baked pancakes. Such dishes were impossible to chew, the body could not digest them, so people had stomach aches. Pancakes, the so-called "matorzhenyky", were made from oilcake and nettle or plantain.

It went so far that peasants would crumble straw into small chips and pound it in a mortar together with millet and buckwheat chaff, and tree bark. All this was mixed with potato peelings, which were very poisonous, and this mixture was used to bake "bread", the consumption of which caused severe stomach diseases.

There were cases when village activists took away and broke millstones, mortars, poured water on the heat in their ovens. After all, anything found or saved from the food had to be cooked on fire, and matches could only be purchased by bartering for their own belongings or by buying them in the city, which was impossible from villagers that were on "black lists".

Chestnuts, aspen and birch bark, buds, reed roots, hawthorn and rose hips, which were the most delicious, were used as food substitutes; various berries, even poisonous ones, were picked; grass seeds were ground into flour; "honey" from sugar beets was cooked, and water brewed with cherry branches was drunk. They also ate the kernels of sunflower seeds.

Newborns had the worst of it, because their mothers had no breast milk. According to testimonies, a mother would let her child suck the drink from the top of the poppy head, and the child would fall asleep for three days.

In early spring, the villagers began to dig up old potato fields. They would bake dumplings from frozen potatoes, grind rotten potatoes in a mash and make pancakes, greasing the frying pan with wheel grease. They also baked "blyuvaly" (transl. "vomities") from such potatoes and oatmeal mixed with water, which was so called because they were very smelly.

They ate mice, rats, frogs, hedgehogs, snakes, beetles, ants, worms, i.e. things that weren't a part of food bans and had never been eaten by people before. The horror of the famine is also evidenced by the consumption of spiders, which are forbidden to kill in Ukrainian society for ritual reasons.

In some areas, slugs were boiled into a soup, and the cartilaginous meat was chopped and mixed with leaves. This prevented swelling of the body and contributed to survival. People caught tadpoles, frogs, lizards, turtles, and mollusks. They boiled them, adding a little salt if there was salt. The starving people caught cranes, storks, and herons, which have been protected in Ukraine for centuries, and their nests were never destroyed. According to folk beliefs, eating stork meat was equated with cannibalism.

The consumption of horse meat began in 1931, before the mass famine. People used to take dead horsemeat from the cemeteries at night, make jelly out of it and salt it for future use.

Dead horses were poured with carbolic acid to prevent people from taking their meat, but it hardly stopped anybody. Dead collective farm pigs were also doused with kerosene to prevent people from dismantling them for food, but this did not help either.

After long periods of starvatiom, the process of digestion is very costing for the human body, and many people who would eat anything would drop dead immediately out of exhaustion.

If a family had a cow hidden somewhere in the forest, they had a chance to survive. People living near forests could hunt/seek out berries and mushrooms, but during winter this wouldn't save them. People living near rivers could fish in secret, but it was banned and punishable by imprisonment/death.

When I see some foreigners wholeheartedly say that Ukrainians shouldn't judge all russians by the actions of the russian army, I think they miss a couple of points.

Firstly, Western belief that there is good in every person leads to self-deception and naivety. Many people still want to believe that russian society isn't different from the ones they live in. "Well, of course they are just like us. Look at their cities, at their youth, look at the things their activists write and say. Army gets the orders from the government, that's it. Ordinary people are against this war" Well, I don't know about you, but in my country army IS a part of the society. In fact, it's a scaled down version of the society. Soldiers aren't grown in laboratories where they gain their own, separate mentality.

Of course, if you are lucky/unlucky enough to speak russian, you know that the image and the essence of the russian mentality are two different things. russians are extremely good at creating an attractive and somewhat alluring image of their country for those who don't go in too deep. People who still try to judge russians from their own, West-oriented perspective, make a huge mistake. They conclude that the ordinary russians strive to the same values and civilizational goals as a common folk from, let's say, Berlin or Copenhagen.

The second thing has to do with us, Ukrainians. For us it's not the time for the shades of gray. To survive and to gain the victory, we need to look at the enemy through a white and black lense. Here are us and there are them. If we start pondering which russian is better and which is worse, we risk to lose everything. Every living russian at this given moment is an enemy - either a current or a potential one. Those russians who were kids at the beginning of the war in 2014, grew up and came to kill us in 2022. So we don't have the privilidge of going through all of the life details of those russians who beat themselves in the chest and proclaim they are good. Besides, in most cases after a few crucial questions 'good' russians turn into the ordinary ones. And thus we return to the first point once again - it's improtant to understand that russians are extremely good at hiding their ugly core from those who don't study the topic deep enough.

BISAN HAS CALLED FOR A GLOBAL STRIKE

January 21-28th

🇬🇪 Police brutality at protests in Georgia (Sakartvelo).

INKTOBER

Day 21: Rhinoceros. Nova Kachovka.

Day 22: Camp.

The solovki special camp was the largest soviet concentration camp. Nowadays, russians have created a lot of concentration camps, where they send Ukrainian POWs and civilians to torture or kill them.

Meanwhile, Polish farmers continue to block the Ukrainian border. While Polish government, authorities and society as a whole does absolutely nothing about it, so i guess they're all fine with it.

Does Poland really want to share the border with russia, after all? Miss being a russian colony no matter what?

Poland has provided a lot of help to Ukraine, which is important and matters a lot, but now it looks like they really are trying to revert it as much as possible.

PLEASE WATCH AND REBLOG - DON'T JUST LIKE - THANK YOU

BISAN IS AFRAID THIS MAY BE HER LAST VIDEO. THE OCCUPATION IS PLANNING TO INVADE NASSER HOSPITAL IN KHAN YUNIS, THE LAST FUNCTIONING HOSPITAL IN THE GAZA STRIP.

SHE WANTS PEOPLE TO SHARE THIS. PLEASE, PLEASE REBLOG.