When put side-by-side, you can’t really tell them apart. Hot summer day, lots of people, young couples holding hands as they walk in front of a mixture of Soviet and pre-revolutionary buildings that managed to survive to this day. Same Slavic faces, same mannerisms, even the language they speak sounds the same unless you listen really closely. Is this Kiev or Moscow? Are these people defiantly and bravely refusing to yield to the terror unleashed on them by an unjustified war? Or are they apolitical accomplices to the war crimes their country is committing, blissfully escaping their true wartime reality to avoid facing themselves in the mirror?
It’s frustrating to see people online post videos of Ukrainians living their lives and ask questions like “this country is at war?” and “is this what we’re sending billions of dollars to them for?” No, of course you’re not sending your taxpayer money so that the center of Kiev can have events on the weekend. Unless you’re willfully blind, you should be able to see many more videos of a very different, horrifying kind coming out of the frontlines every day. The lives normal people lead far behind those front lines do not erase the nightmare being lived out by their neighbors, colleagues, and relatives serving in the military.
It gets frustrating having this turned around when the topic switches from Ukraine to Russia. Now the same people that shared videos of a street life in Kiev as an example of how people should live during wartimes share essentially the same video from Moscow and say that identical behavior is a sickening demonstration of what’s wrong with Russia, why it’s rotten to the core. The Russians are LARPing peacetime, indulging in escapism, failing to acknowledge that their country is at war.
In both criticisms laid out, a fundamental mistake is made; a false belief that, when faced with trauma and tragedy, human beings break and never recover. The alternative behavior pattern that underlies both cases is something like cowering in fear, hiding in basements, being depressed 24/7, thinking about nothing other than the war, constant self-flagellation, doom and gloom. It is a misreading of how people actually work.
I am not a historian, I’m not going to pretend to be one, but I don’t have to in order to bring up the numerous historical examples of societies at war living out relatively normal lives “back home.” Did Germans and Brits still not go to beerhalls and pubs during WW2? Did Russians and Americans still not go see a movie at the theater? War does not put life on pause, nothing does. People get married during wartime and famine. My own wedding was during the first three months of Covid. Life doesn’t stop just because tragedy happens. If it did, no one who ever lost a loved one sooner than expected would be able to move on with their lives. People get remarried, people find joy in hobbies, people survive and thrive in spite of the circumstances.
Those cases where someone is not able to live past a traumatic event end up being tragic outliers that prove the rule. In a similar vein, the trauma of the war’s beginning or living through rocket attacks or the siege of Mariupol end up being dark moments for a society, but society does not pause itself entirely to endlessly mull over a nightmare it wants to move past. As a matter of fact, escaping the dreary and scary nature of living through a war seems to provoke people to even more partying than normal. I am also not a psychologist, but I can certainly imagine that mental cause and effect.
Summer is a special time of the year. I certainly feel like every weekend is packed with events. Friends want to go there, family wants to get together here. The weather’s nice, it almost forces you to go out and do something. I am not going to judge young people who want to date and party for doing so. I am not going to judge parents taking their kids for a walk. I am not going to judge folks going out to eat at restaurants. As I try to imagine myself in the shoes of Ukrainians and Russians in Russia today, I am having a hard time judging them for celebrating their baby’s first birthday. That baby was born during war, its whole life so far has been lived through war, and the war doesn’t take away from the joy those parent and grandparents feel when they see the kid walk for the first time.
To judge either group for indulging in life’s most basic pleasures is to assume a reasonable alternative behavior, and, as I stated earlier, I am having a hard time imagining any normal human being, regardless of circumstance, wallow in fear, anger, paranoia, or any other negative emotion. Perhaps those who are surprised to see normal nightlife in Kiev watched too many Hollywood movie depictions of war, where a gray filter covers the screen and no one smiles and there’s nothing but death an destruction. That may be the experience in Bakhmut, but I would never expect it to be the case hundreds of miles away in either direction.
I am going to apply the same standard to all cases. If I don’t judge Ukrainians for living their lives in wartime, I won’t judge Russians for doing the same. I recommend you do the same. It should be simple, but apparently the itch to hold hypocritical double standards is too strong to avoid scratching for some people.