Andrew Harding’s slim book, A Small, Stubborn Town, telling the story of a Ukrainian town’s resistance against the hulking Russian war machine across a number of days in March last year, perfectly encapsulates the phrase “punching above your weight” – and perhaps shows in microcosm why Ukraine hung on in the initial fight for longer than many thought possible.
Ukrainians answered their nation’s call to arms following Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion on February 24th, 2022, and the citizens, both young and old, of the farming town of Voznesensk became symbolic of this fighting spirit.
Facing vastly superior Russian forces, a kind of Dads’ Army was quickly formed in the southern Ukraine town as tanks and helicopters approached. Harding notes many of the volunteers had never held a weapon, never mind fired one: “They were given AK-47s and a box of 20 grenades. Now they are supposed to stop an armoured column, or several columns, from entering.” An extraordinary tale of heroism unfolded, as most of the community rallied to stall the Russians until assistance arrived from their own army.
A small bridge in the town proved crucial in the course of the war. If the Russians had planned to push west to the important port city of Odesa and beyond, they needed control of the bridge over Dead Water River in Voznesensk, and another bridge on the outskirts of town. If they had done so, they would have cut off the main road from the capital Kyiv to Odesa. The locals had to defend their homeplace at all costs; and they paid a cost. Harding tells their remarkable story concisely – it zips along – with an underlying mixture of admiration, affection and astonishment.
Harding is an experienced BBC foreign correspondent and writes with such a lean style that he could almost be moving through Voznesensk with a camera crew in tow
“I didn’t steal these stories,” he writes. “But I did, sometimes, snatch at them, in the middle of an all-consuming war, from people who had too little time on their hands and far more urgent business to preoccupy them.” Once Harding seized the narrative, he never let go, recreating it through the eyes of 20 or so characters: be it grandmother Svetlana, who stood up to Russian soldiers as they seized her home for a HQ, or conflicted Russian soldier Igor Rudenko, who is Ukrainian and grew up on the Crimean Peninsula (“My soul hurts,” he said upon capture).
Harding is an experienced BBC foreign correspondent and writes with such a lean style that he could almost be moving through Voznesensk with a camera crew in tow; this is the book’s propulsive, televisual effect. A Small, Stubborn Town is not afraid to linger over the macabre elements of war either, showing horrors which could not be broadcast: a mother seeking her son after shells hit town; dead and wounded left by Russians for Ukrainians to clear away; in one instance Ukrainian soldiers find an elderly man and woman lying in the dirt, repeatedly shot by a heavy-calibre machinegun: “Like they [Russian soldiers] are on a f***ing safari,” a soldier scowled.
A Small, Stubborn Town proves people are resilient; it’s also notable how desperate they are to get back to their daily routines after the “interruption” of conflict, impoverished as some of their lives appear. War fell on them, but they did not buckle, as we realise from Harding’s telling. Carrying the burden strengthened Ukrainians, whereas the Russians in the book come across as indecisive, ambivalent in what they are doing. This snapshot of a small Ukrainian town goes some way toward explaining why the war has developed like it has.
Long view
Harding presents us with a rough-and-tumble, clenched-teeth pocket of resistance, whereas Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar takes a long view of what led up to the full-scale invasion in War and Punishment, a sweeping, ambitious and impassioned chronicle of the cultural and historical relations between Russia and Ukraine from the 17th century to the present.
Zygar puts Russian-centred history and culture in the dock with a forceful cri de coeur: “Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour,” he writes. (Zygar includes himself in this, calling his book a “Confession”.)
He accuses a Russian society “infected” with wrong-headed imperialist views of engendering sufficient myths, arrogance and hostility to enable Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine (following the initial incursions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014).
“We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, ‘great Russian culture’ belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them,” says Zygar.
Zygar parses Russian propaganda on false historical narratives, beginning in 1670 with the contentious book by the monk Innokenty Gizel which set out a common history shared by Kyiv and Moscow. He then gallops towards the second World War in little over 100 pages. In a selective reading, the author runs through numerous historical figures and epochs, tracing historic fault lines: from Catherine the Great and Peter the Great to Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Ivan Mazepa and complicated figures such as Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera.
We soon end up at the mythology incorporating Lenin and Stalin, and the all too real Holodomor of 1932-33, when an estimated five million people died (four million of them Ukrainian). A large scattering of poets and writers and their roles in reinforcing or refuting national stereotypes and ideas are considered throughout, too. It’s an emotionally charged run-through and Zygar impressively relates early formative history to recent political agendas (who owns Crimea, for example), even if some expositions get boggy at times, especially when the Russian Orthodox Church is thrown in.
Zygar remains optimistic that change is coming. He remains defiant... Defiant enough to write: ‘Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war'
With a long career as a journalist and filmmaker, and having worked in Ukraine for the past two decades, Zygar is assured in the second part of the book as it moves into contemporary history, beginning with Ukraine’s place in the shadow of the late Soviet Union and running up to the war.
This section of War and Punishment is loaded with details of the rollercoaster recent history between Russia and Ukraine, with Zygar attaching welcome memoirs to much of it. Plenty here will be familiar to anyone who has read any of the numerous books on Putin’s Russia (including Zygar’s own absorbing All the Kremlin’s Men). Where War and Punishment is particularly enriching, though, is in outlining the life and career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy before his emergence as a wartime leader. Zelensky’s past in TV and cinema poking fun at Ukrainian and Russian establishments features strongly, until, of course, he became part of the same establishment after election as Ukrainian president in 2019.
The author set himself quite a challenge covering such a swathe of complex events in under 400 pages, and while he admits War and Punishment is not a conventional history, it nonetheless makes for compelling reading with its searing portrayal of the “long road to war”. It’s a fiery, informed reckoning of past and present relations that justifies its unambiguous Tolstoyan title.
Zygar remains optimistic that change is coming. He remains defiant, like the townspeople of Voznesensk. Defiant enough to write: “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war.” A bold prediction from a brave writer.
Beautiful blend
It’s unlikely that Christopher Miller, working as a journalist in hipster paradise Portland, Oregon in the noughties, would have predicted his being in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, in February last year when Russian bombs started dropping. Yet this is how the highly regarded reporter begins his excellent The War Came To Us, which is a beautiful blend of memoir, reportage and history.
Miller is Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times, having covered the country for more than a decade for BuzzFeed News and Politico. But there was a time when he was part of the United States Peace Corps, a government body offering international aid, which assigned him to Ukraine in 2010 – a place he admits he knew only from the board game Risk – and to the Donbas specifically. He worked as a teacher and settled well in Artemivsk (as Bakhmut was known between 1924 and 2016), a landlocked city of 70,000 people, helped by the friendliness of the locals and his own openness and curiosity. He writes evocatively of the area, its people and culture, and from the initial part of the book you sense he’s falling in love with Ukraine. Friendship with local journalists quickly had him working alongside them.
After a sojourn back in the US, Miller returned to Ukraine as a reporter for the English-language Kyiv Post in 2013, and not long after – as is many an aspiring journalist’s dream – he walked into a revolution with the eruption of the Euromaidan. A year later, Putin ordered his covert military invasions of Crimea and Miller’s old stomping ground, the Donbas. His writing on the inner workings of the Maidan, and wider Ukrainian politics, is illuminating, as are his investigations of the referendums of the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk and the cut-and-thrust cultural backdrop in which they took place.
One unforgettable moment after the battle of Donetsk Airport comes when Miller asked a Ukrainian soldier: ‘This is a war now, huh?’
What follows is also superb: a pulsing, immersive narrative of boots-on-the-ground reporting, recreating the sense of seismic upheaval and chaos that filled the Ukrainian air in the 2010s, until it eventually popped with the start of war (which Miller admits he did not see coming; like many of his Ukrainian friends and contacts he had grown used to living under the shadow of its threat).
The War Came To Us is full of action, with Miller reporting on countless incidents of turmoil and tension from places now familiar to us: Bucha, Bakhmut, Donetsk, Mariupol, the Black Sea shores of Crimea, etc. He often showed great courage, walking into areas that appeared lawless (and found himself on plenty of sticky wickets).
Considering his job, it’s almost redundant to say that much of what Miller describes is terrible and terrifying (I had to set the book aside with his description of arriving at the crash scene of the shot-down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, in which 298 people perished in 2014). One unforgettable moment after the battle of Donetsk Airport comes when Miller asked a Ukrainian soldier: “This is a war now, huh?”
Thankfully, his observant eye frequently finds small, colourful humane details, little moments of levity, and he forms warm connections with ordinary people doing what they can while living through hell. It is a welcome counterweight to the carnage.
The War Came To Us is an important book, and a testament to the importance of quality journalism. Miller is dogged in his reporting, and a fine writer. He has the right amounts of courage, intellectual honesty, chutzpah, self-effacing humour and talent, reminding this reader of AJ Liebling’s superlative collection of second World War writings.
Reading this book is a strange, conflicted pleasure considering the circumstances. The writing is always undercut with a sense of foreboding. Maybe because it’s a love letter to Ukraine, although hammered out in the hellish heat of war. At its end you realise exactly what Miller means when he says, “In many ways, this is the book I always wanted to write about Ukraine. In other ways, it’s the book I never wanted to write about Ukraine.” It’s our good fortune he did.
