Ukraine Is More Alive Than Ever, While Its Enemy Is Rotting From the Inside Out – The

The dark shattered wicked winter

silence waits at the door like death.

What will remain of this winter

will be the words and how you said them.

– Serhiy Zhadan, “The Dark Shattered Wicked Winter” (2015)

The Budynok Slovo, or Word House, stands on the corner of Kultury and Literaturna streets in Kharkiv’s northern Shevchenkivskyi district, a C-shaped pile of brick, plaster, and reinforced concrete looming large over the surrounding cityscape, and even larger over Ukraine’s collective consciousness. Built in 1929 to accommodate members of the nascent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s literary elite, Slovo House is rather unprepossessing in its current state, its decaying constructivist exterior pockmarked by weather-blotched stucco, discolored paint, spalled concrete, and corroded railings. A Russian missile salvo on March 7, 2022, further disfigured the structure, blowing out windows and gouging deep shrapnel scars into its already time-worn façade. When it was inaugurated on Dec. 25, 1929, however, Slovo House was an altogether desirable residence, containing 66 apartments of three, four, or even five rooms, and featuring private lavatories, spacious living areas and kitchens, high ceilings, central heating, laundry facilities, and individual telephones. There was a solarium on the roof, a nursery school (and a bomb shelter) in the basement, and even a beauty salon on the premises.

Ukrainian writers had grown accustomed to privation in the early days of the Soviet Union. The poet Pavlo Tychyna, for example, was obliged to live out of his office at the Chervonyi Shliach magazine headquarters, while others eked out meager existences in unheated homes, concealing their manuscripts in lidded pots overnight, lest their precious papers end up lining the walls of mouse nests. When Slovo House opened, offering congenial apartments tailored to the needs of Ukrainian intellectuals and their families, there were consequently dozens of novelists, playwrights, theater directors, poets, essayists, journalists, historians, and philosophers eager to move in. It must have seemed too good to be true, and indeed it was. Little did the new tenants, the so-called Sloviany, suspect that they were falling into a Soviet trap from which few if any would emerge unscathed.

Within a matter of months, residents of the Budynok Slovo had a new name for their apartment block: Budynok Poperednioho Uviaznennia, the House of Preliminary Imprisonment. The telephones were tapped, plainclothesmen from the Soviet secret police stalked the grounds, and the façade entrances were permanently locked to prevent unsupervised ingress and egress. Then the arrests started, beginning with the actress and writer Halyna Mnevska, who was taken into custody on Jan. 20, 1931, after bravely refusing to denounce her ex-husband, the poet and Klym Polishchuk, who himself had been jailed on vague charges of “bourgeois nationalism.” After Mnevska came the historian Pavlo Khrystiuk, who would perish in a Sevvostlag forced labor camp in the Russian Far East, and then came Ivan Bahrianyi, whose provocative historical verse novel Skelka told the story of an 18th-century Ukrainian peasant uprising against tyrannical Muscovite monks. Bahrianyi was convicted of “counter-revolutionary agitation,” but somehow survived an 11-month stint in solitary confinement, six years in eastern penal colonies, and further stretches in NKVD prisons, managing to die peacefully in 1963, albeit in Bavarian exile.

When the daring futurist poet Mykhailo Yalovy (pen name Yulian Shpol) was abducted by agents of the Kharkiv State Political Directorate, his friend and neighbor, the equally talented poet and essayist Mykola Khvylovy, fell into despair, scribbled out a suicide note lamenting “the murder of an entire generation,” and shot himself in the head. Yalovy, the theater director Les Kurbas, the playwright Mykola Kulish, the novelist Valerian Pidmohylny, and the journalist Hryhorii Epik would all meet their ends in the infamous Karelian killing fields of Sandarmokh. Some of the Sloviany would be sent to the Solovki Special Purpose Camp, others to the Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp, still more into exile in Kazakhstan or the Far East. And then there were those spared such a fate, but only when they succumbed to tuberculosis, experienced mental breakdowns, or took their own lives, as in the cases of Mykola Khvylovy and Ivan Mykytenko. Two former residents of Slovo House, the Yiddish poets Itsyk Fefer and Leib Kvitko, held out until 1952, when they were executed by the Soviet authorities on the infamous Night of the Murdered Poets.

What started out as an upmarket “House of Writers” had devolved into a glorified pre-trial detention facility. By the end, it was just called the “crematorium.” Olga Bertelsen, in her comprehensive 2013 paper “Spatial Dimensions of Soviet Repressions in the 1930s: The House of Writers (Kharkiv, Ukraine),” noted that “in Budynok Slovo there were 66 apartments. Three of them were not residential and belonged to the cooperative’s administration, kerbud (the chief of the building) and the kindergarten. The arrests in 63 apartments of the building lasted relentlessly until the beginning of the Second World War. A decade of terror wiped out 59 people who lived or used to live in the House of Writers … Only 7 former residents of Budynok Slovo miraculously survived the gulag.” Mykola Khvylovy and his fellow Sloviany had the temerity to adopt the slogan “Away from Moscow,” declaring their young country to be “in the ascendant,” and one whose cultural “orientation is to Western European art, its style, its techniques.” They would be punished severely, their tragic generation posthumously given the name of Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, the “Executed Renaissance.”

The death toll extracted from Slovo House might pale in comparison with the millions of lives lost in the man-made Holodomor terror-famine that was engineered by Joseph Stalin around the same time, but there remains something particularly terrifying about the dark, doom-haunted corridors and crumbling visage of the utopia-turned-prison that was the Budynok Slovo. Serhiy Zhadan, Ukraine’s modern-day national poet and a resident of Kharkiv, memorably described the dreaded building in one of his most poignant works, “The End of Ukrainian Syllabotonic Verse,” which begins by recounting how:

they once lived in this building

see the fading red paint blistering on the window frames

it’s from those times when someone decided to put

them all into one building so that their breath could be heard

in the hallways

and which concludes:

it’s simple, such buildings exist

where the final border is particularly grim

where hell and the veins of underground ore are unexpectedly close

where time sticks out like lumps of coal from the ground

where death begins and where literature ends

Just as eloquent, perhaps, is the bit of graffito scrawled on Slovo House’s stuccoed exterior, proclaiming “мою культуру розстрілялй,” “my culture was executed.”

Present-day Russian chauvinists, their bloodthirst evidently still unslaked by the monstrous crimes being committed in their name in Ukraine — and as I write this, a Russian 122mm rocket has just landed on a bus stop in liberated Kherson, killing at least six and wounding 12, bodies and blood and bone fragments and brain matter and bits of shrapnel spread all over the street, an everyday occurrence for a year now — like to speak oh so highly of the myriad benefits of membership in the “Russian World.” The war correspondent and propagandist Dmitry Steshin, for one, having determined that “[Y]ou can’t consider them [Ukrainians] as people with full-fledged morality and normal mental apparatus,” has declared that “[W]e need to take what’s ours and make it so that they’re afraid to even think about so much as to breathe the wrong way towards Russia… We’ll see what kind of a beautiful life we’ll create for them and how they’ll want to again rethink their identity.” The best way to see what that “beautiful life” entails is to observe the footage of crimes against humanity from Kherson, Dnipro, Kramatorsk, or Bucha, if your guts can confront it, or your conscience, if you happen to be a Russian fascist or one of their tiresome fellow travelers abroad. Another place to witness Steshin’s “beautiful world” is Slovo House, that sinister lieu de mémoire whose very walls, as Olga Bertelsen put it, “preserve the memory of unmatched state violence that was disastrous for Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian…