There are few people in Hungary who have spent as much time in the whole of Ukraine as the Director General of the House of Traditions on his trips to collect folk treasures. Miklós Both about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict:
– It was cleverly devised, we used to sing Soviet songs enthusiastically at school.
– Of course. This music had a bombastic effect on people. Growing up in the ruins of the world war, young people were already part of a superpower, building a better, new world with conviction. The first sound films that reached the masses always contained a song that was then sung in the villages and towns. For youngsters, it was a generational voice that was linked to the experience of winning the war. But at the same time, folk music was also part of their everyday life, part of their musical mother tongue. One was sung in Russian where appropriate, the other in Ukrainian, so there is even a linguistic difference, but they are naturally attached to both.
– How does this manifest itself in their identity?
– In the east, the older generation had an interesting sense of identity: they were proud of the Soviet past, but when we asked them if they would join Russia, they said no. They wanted an independent Ukraine and also a great empire again.
Similar contradictions were common in conversations with older people. On one occasion, I heard a table of older people complaining after the 2013-2014 revolution about how village youth vandals had demolished the village’s tidy park. It had statues, flowers and benches too. Then the young people pulled down the Lenin statue with a tractor, an agrimotor… Why couldn’t they just paint it blue and yellow and be done with it? Now there is no statue in the park.
Older people in the villages surrounded by swamps in the northwestern Polissya lowlands think differently about the world. Here, we see more of a medieval identity structure, where village and religious affiliation, among other things, matter. Among the older people living here, the layers of former imperial and new Ukrainian national identity are barely visible.
– What about young people?
– For them, however, life is definitely organised around a Ukrainian national identity, whether in the north, east or south. Perhaps the 1.2 million people of Transcarpathia stand out. But it can be said that a new nation is beginning to emerge in Ukraine. Whereas before there was a definite east-west division, the election of Zelensky in 2019 was the first time that it was not possible to map the east-west divide in Ukraine on the basis of votes. It has become a common phenomenon for Russian speakers to identify themselves as Ukrainians.
If the current occupation had taken place ten years earlier, the state could easily have disintegrated; in those ten short years, Ukraine has undergone a change that I have seen at first hand. I am not in the least surprised that they have been so heavily involved in the current war. The invasion of Crimea and the eastern region has created such a unified rejection that pro-Russian and anti-Russian have come together on one platform, and the political leadership and communications have united and ridden that and created a new vision.
– How did you live when the war broke out?
– At the dawn of the opening day of the war, I was shocked and it took me several days to realise that it was the end of a phase of my life. The first day was spent processing the shock, but by the second day the messages started pouring in. So many of my Ukrainian colleagues and friends – ethnographers, singers, grandchildren of elderly singers – contacted us to ask for help, what they could do, what we could do, what we could suggest, where they should go, and we have been using our resources to help them get out and find accommodation non-stop ever since.
But from the first family that arrived, I felt the responsibility that the children would soon have to go to school and the adults would want to work. All this amidst significant linguistic and cultural differences. Hungarian society has to see this as an opportunity, but it will also be a heavy burden in the future. In any case, I consider this war aggression, which is destabilising not only Ukraine, but also Russia, to be self-destructive and deeply reprehensible for the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples.
There have also been many irresponsible acts of Ukrainian politics in recent years – for example, the language law, which also affects the Hungarians in Transcarpathia, or the strategy of NATO and EU membership, which ignores geopolitical reality – but for me, this unexpected conflict also clearly shows that the West does not understand the thinking of the Eastern world, few people speak Eastern languages, few people know their culture and history. Without this, we are left with stereotypes, which are inadequate for predicting major events, not to mention the creative power of negative pigeonholes.