of renegades fleeing the old continent infested with plague and famine? At the very least, this would imply inquiring once more about the uses and languages specific to this place, which would become foreign once again through our stay.
But above all, to assume our immigrant past could lead not to national appropriation but to a secret passage between indigeneity and exile. Because the continent, rediscovered by exiles, might very well approach the freshness that was always already felt by the first. Whereas the Indigenous people see themselves as sojourning in the territory, no less than exiles, beyond—or rather below—all property, at the root of indigeneity, there is perhaps no self-sufficiency but rather the constant need to renew the link, to keep contact. And thereby becoming-people, irreducibly minoritarian.
1. Inspired by the Chilean cacerolazos, hundreds of people took to the streets every day banging pots and pans in protest against police repression.
2. Particularly in the century between the 1840s and 1940s, terroir designated a specific set of values promoted in Lower Canada’s literature, emphasizing a rural lifestyle centered on land, family, language, and religion.
3. The Great Darkness was a period of Quebec’s political history marked by patronage and corruption, during the conservative reign of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959.
4. An inquiry would be needed on the role of tonal and verbal languages, largely present in the Indigenous world and in which intonation plays a determining role in meaning, which marks the recalcitrance of these worlds to colonization. The agglutinant or polysynthetic character of these languages suggests that a non-ownership conception of territory could be carried within their structure, which presents a surprising absence of subjects as much as objects. These are replaced by a potentially infinite agglutination of adjunctions, prefixes, and suffixes, which situate the expressed reality in relation to a series of symbolic orders: temporality, localization, gender (often much more numerous than the two sexes), position of locution, etc. Thus, these languages might well conjure the possibility of landing on a substantive noun having full ownership over itself: they would discern their object by its contours, a game of mirrors and cross-references where narration identifies the living reality.
A VERY LONG WINTER
On a warm summer evening in Kiev, my friend told me a story about his grandfather. The story takes place during World War II in Ukraine. As a peasant, his grandfather found himself in German-occupied territory after yet another German offensive. His grandfather wanted to fight Nazis, but needed to figure out how. There were two options: he could stay in occupied territory and look for a partisan unit, or could try to join the Red Army. He decided to find the partisans, which is how he stumbled upon a strange unit fighting the Germans. The story doesn’t mention how, but he figured that these were Makhnovists.1 My friend told me how his grandfather would vividly recount how he decided to stay as far away from them as he could, because those people would be crushed by both the Nazis and the Reds. The chances of survival in such a battalion were virtually non-existent.
Very little is known about this battalion today, but it was likely led by Ossip Tsebry—a well-known Makhnovist who fled from the Bolsheviks in 1921. In 1942, Tsebry returned to Ukraine in an attempt to build an anarchist partisan movement to fight both Nazis and Bolsheviks. While little is known about it, this unit did exist and was eventually defeated by the Nazis. Tsebry was captured and ended up in a concentration camp, then was liberated in 1945 by the Western Allies, and subsequently managed to escape the Bolsheviks once again.
We remembered Tsebry at the dawn of the fall of 2014. Russia had already annexed Crimea and was advancing troops in Donbass. At that moment, no one would have been surprised to hear that Russian tanks were moving on Kharkov, Odessa, or even Kiev. I had just arrived from Saint Petersburg, where I had seen how Russian society would actually fully support the invasion. There was no antiwar movement in sight, and as we exchanged words of remembrance among friends, our emotions matched the intensity of the situation.
TROUBLED WATERS
In the time that followed, the discussions revolved almost entirely around fascism and antifascism. All the other debates were overshadowed by the question: who is fascist and who is antifascist? Since the beginning of the Ukrainian uprising, Russian state propaganda stealthily resurrected the old Soviet vocabulary, declaring that those who were part of the movement were either fascists or Nazis, or were at least manipulated by them. Anarchists and leftists from the Ukraine responded by noting the Russian state is actually the region’s most fascist state. “Fascist” volunteer battalions and the “fascist” Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) were all over the news. Antifascists from Belarus and Ukraine, Spain and Italy, Brazil and God knows where else all went to fight. Some ended up on one side and some on the other.
At first, Western leftists, seduced by images of Soviet Berkut2 buses ablaze on the icy streets of Kiev, largely supported Maidan. But when they realized that the diagonal black and red flags were actually those of the fascists, they had a sudden change of heart and started supporting the “antifascist popular uprising” in the East. And then they saw VICE’s feature about pro-Russian antifascists, who actually turned out to be fascists. This was all a bit too complicated for them, so they turned away from the Ukrainian situation all together. Yet the West was not the only site of confusion. Anarchists and leftists from Russia were arguing to death over who exactly was fascist and antifascist in Ukraine, as if this could explain everything and summarily resolve the matter at hand.
No one had any clear idea of what to do in fact, even on the ground. We were all desperately looking for guidance, especially in stories from the past. But the reality of war, and the general mobilization it entails, was not an object of analysis for us. Most of us grew up with the feeling that war wouldn’t happen here. We felt like these things could only happen on the periphery—a space that we usually ignored or to which we gave little attention.
The only war story we were familiar with was the story of the Great Fatherland War.3 That story, like all myths, was clear and self-explanatory. There wasn’t much to debate, which made the war a powerful tool for manufacturing unity. That is how my friend and I came to remember the story of Ossip, today a story so neglected and forgotten.
THE GRANDFATHERS’ WAR
Our generation, which came into the world near the end of the Soviet Union, still remembers the myth of the Great Fatherland War. When we were children, we played at war—and it was always the same war. It was a war between us and the bad guys, the German fascists. We knew our enemy from the old Soviet movies. The new streets of my neighborhood, built in the eighties, were named after Soviet war heroes, and in the street you could never escape all the monuments of the great Red Army and the martyrs of the war. Some of our cities were even considered “heroic cities.” My grandfather was a veteran, and for big events, he would proudly take out his medals to wear.
During the nineties, when the news was filled with strange camouflaged men with guns, I couldn’t connect these images with the story of my grandfather and the monuments to the heroes. That war—the war of all the movies and the songs—was the sacred war. That war was full of heroism and purity. What we saw on television just seemed like a nameless bloodbath, a war full of confusion.
In “the country that defeated fascism,” oddly enough, no serious theory of fascism ever emerged. For the common Soviet citizen, fascism just meant the epitome of evil and abjection. But in the subculture of prison gangs, for example, tattoos of swastikas and
