“I realized my Ukrainian identity in Moscow” — Pavlo Kazarin

“If the Crimeans were more like me, the fate of Crimea would have been different,” says journalist, publicist, and serviceman Pavlo Kazarin.

He lived in Simferopol, graduated from the Faculty of Russian Language and Literature and, as he says, hardly noticed the first Maidan. In 2012, Pavlo went to work in Moscow. And it became one of the stages of his transformation.

What changed him? What was the Maidan for him in 2014 and why did he get the occupation documents? Also, when and why did he join the Armed Forces and why does he believe that not all men of military age who remained in the rear are evaders?

Pavlo Kazarin told about all this to the serviceman and hromadske host Serhii Hnezdilov in the ++podcast.

2014 and the Maidan

I was on the Maidan more as a tourist. I will not invent a biography for myself that did not exist.

But from the very beginning, the Maidan was something that resonated with me and something that attracted me a lot. Probably because I saw what the Party of Regions members were doing to my native Crimea. And I perceived the Maidan as an attempt by the Ukrainian train to finally leave this post-Soviet depot where it had been standing since 1991.

I realized that if I succeeded, one of the cars of this Ukrainian train would be my Crimea. Yes, someone will occasionally break the stopcock, and spit seeds in the vestibules, but it will not go anywhere, and sooner or later, along with all the other cars, it will follow other rules of the game that give more hope.

And then Russia came and unhooked my native Crimea from this train and attached it to its own, which was not even heading east — it was heading into the collective past.

That's why every year February evokes very strange feelings. On the one hand, there are memories of the emotions with which you experienced the victory of the Maidan. And immediately after that, you remember the uncertainty, the fears with which you watched the annexation of your native peninsula.

Crimea and the Russian myth

If we talk about Crimea in terms of myth (not in the sense of fiction, but as a system of views on different systems of life), then my Crimea had a Soviet imperial myth: Crimea as the summer residence of the Russian tsars; Crimea as a place where imperial writers came and recorded something in their diaries; Crimea as a place where two defenses of Sevastopol took place; Crimea as a place where two hero cities, Kerch and Sevastopol, were on the map.

There was also the Crimean Tatar myth. It was, using Maximilian Voloshin's formula, a trampled Muslim paradise, a story about a stolen homeland. But it was spread mainly within the Crimean Tatar people.

And the Ukrainian myth about Crimea was very much a very uncertain one, on the one hand, and the other hand, very economic. Although in reality, it did not exist. I mean, it could have appeared if you made an effort to do so and said that Crimea was handed over to Ukraine in a very bad state and that it was the Ukrainian SSR that was rebuilding it. But such a myth rarely existed.

That is why Crimea was so important to Russians. It was so ingrained in their imperial identity that they certainly perceived it as theirs.

Crimea appealed not only to historical moments. It was the base of the Russian Navy. This was extremely important for a very militarized Russian society. That's why what happened happened.

In 2014, I was among those who said: “Annexation? Occupation? Military invasion? Come on, it goes against all common sense!” Perhaps it was because I was so burned in 2014 that in 2022 I was ready to blow on water and assumed that anything could be expected from Russia. I was a very pessimistic person, and in the end, as it turned out, a realistic person.

Working in Moscow

I went to Moscow at the end of 2012, around October. I went there to work with the Russian liberal media because at that time Kyiv was full of Yanukovych.

I remember back then my friends from Moscow said: “What's the point of you moving from Simferopol to Kyiv? All the media there either cooperate with the Party of Regions or have been relegated to the margins by the party. Come to us.”

I agreed and went there. And in fact, it was a very important experience, because, for the next year and several months, I watched the transformation of Russian society from “Bolotna Square” to “Crimea is ours”. And on the other hand, at that moment I was watching my changes.

In Russian KVN, there was such a thing as the “right to joke”. Relatively speaking, the conventional Galustyan can make jokes about Armenians, but the conventional Svetlakov cannot. I remember back in 2013 when my colleagues and I were sitting in a bar drinking beer, one of them started telling a joke with a Ukrainian as one of the characters. And I thought: okay, stop, I'm the only one who can tell jokes about Ukrainians here simply because I'm the only person at this table who has a Ukrainian passport.

I realized at that moment that when you find yourself in a different environment, even a familiar one, even a very comparable one to the one that existed in the same Crimea where I come from, this other environment very much defines the boundaries of your own identity. It defines what is important to you, what you can joke about, and what you cannot joke about.

I think working in Moscow was one of the stages of my transformation. I am a Russian-speaking boy from Simferopol, who also graduated with a degree in Russian language and literature and spent his entire life in a purely Russian-speaking, Russian cultural environment. I finally came to the homeland of this Russian-speaking, Russian cultural environment. And suddenly it turned out that even you have a certain Ukrainian identity. And being in Moscow, you find it inside yourself.

I realized how Russian-speaking people who live even in the most pro-Soviet region of Ukraine differ from those who live in Russia. Of course, it all depends on the person, but there was a difference.

I would not want to generalize myself and say that all Crimeans are like me, and they are much more like me than the residents of Tula or Saratov. No, they are not. If they were more like me, the fate of Crimea would have been a little different. But still.

In my evolutionary history, the experience of working and living in Russia occupies a rather important place. I do not invent Russians. I understand what they are really like. I have had to communicate with very different people and I understand how their brains work.

Becoming a Ukrainian and family

I was lucky. I think that my evolution started with my father. I was the person who did not notice the first Maidan at all. At that time, I was finishing my 4th year of university and was a very down-to-earth person.

My father slipped me various magazines, and various Russian liberal publications. He complicated my reality, and expanded it, using materials by authors who later began to play an important role for me, such as Vitaly Portnikov.

So, in my case, the process of my evolution took quite a long time. I think it started somewhere around 2008. I could say until the second Maidan and until 2015, but no. I think we all evolve throughout our lives, and this process is ongoing.

I think some people know who they are by default. They do not have a question of acquiring an identity. Rather, they are faced with the question of preserving this identity.

I have an acquaintance, Sofiia Cheliak. So, for me, the process of searching for my own identity was important, and for her, the process of maintaining her own Ukrainian identity was important. While I and some of my fellow Crimean residents were hesitating to answer the question “Who am I”, it was important for her to maintain her own identity in cities where people who were fluent in Russian, not Ukrainian, were hired first and foremost, discriminating against and pushing Ukrainian speakers away from certain things and certain communities. But Sofiia probably never asked herself which identity she has.

Mood of Crimeans

After the annexation of Crimea, we, journalists from Crimea, talked about the 20/40/40 formula. That is, in Crimea 40% were convinced supporters of Russia, 20% gravitated towards Ukraine, and another 40% of people were focused on the values of everyday survival. For the latter, conditionally, the flag was secondary to the refrigerator, they were more focused on some very mundane things. I have no idea what this ratio might be as of 2024.

Given that we are in a state of full-scale war, I think some things will be determined on the battlefield, not at the level of sociological things. We have no idea how many people will leave the territories with the retreating Russian army, and what percentage will decide to leave the peninsula at the first sign that the ground operation is no longer a theory but something more practical.

In other words, when an avalanche comes down, no one knows what will happen after it has gone. We will be able to understand the entire future landscape, all the new circumstances, only after the avalanche has gone. The main thing now is how to make sure that this issue is not purely theoretical for us. Our task is to arrange the avalanche.

Joining the army

I have always felt a certain debt to the people on whose shoulders I have reached the Year 2022. I was not at war in 2014. I did not fight in the ATO. Thanks to those people who went to defend our homeland during the first phase of the war, I was able to cope with my reflections and understand who I am.

When the full-scale invasion took place, I had the opportunity to repay this debt and solve many other issues.

For a long time, living in Crimea, I was a person with a purely regional identity, who answered the question of who he considered himself with the phrase “Crimean”. Even in 2014, when the annexation of Crimea took place.

At that time, my parents were in Crimea, I quit my job in Moscow and moved back to Simferopol. And if the condition for staying close to my parents was the need to get the occupation documents, then fine, I'll take them, because being close to my parents is much more important to me.

When Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, it was still trying to pretend that it was a country that had not gone crazy but was trying to play by the rules. But if you wanted to stay in Crimea, you had to consider the need to get the occupation documents one way or another.

I got the occupation documents because I thought I would stay in Crimea. But in fact, I stayed only until October 2014. First I left Crimea, then my father left Crimea, then my mother.

People who got the occupation documents

Those people who lived in the territories occupied by Russia had very different fates. I would not pay much attention to the presence or absence of Russian passports among Crimeans, because, according to my feelings, by the time we have to talk about this, everyone will have these passports.

I officially got rid of my Russian passport in 2020 or 2021. Because the process of collecting documents to deprive you of occupation documents and Russian citizenship, when you cannot stay on the territory of the Russian Federation, takes a long time.

“If you need to explain something to someone, you don't need to explain it”

There is a certain proportion of people who do not even know how to change. This is primarily a matter of age. Because for some people, changing after the age of 65 means a total breakdown, a total devaluation of everything they have lived their lives within. It's not that I'm going to be sympathetic to such people, but I understand why they don't want to change in any way.

In 2014, when the annexation of Crimea was happening, I remember how hard I worked, and how many texts I tried to write from my own Simferopol. At the time, I had a feeling that the main problem was that someone did not understand what was happening around them. And if I can explain everything to everyone, then there is a chance that everything will come to a certain order.

In 2022, when the full-scale war began, on the second day of the war, I went to the military enlistment office and enlisted in the 112th Kyiv Territorial Defense Brigade. At some point, I just realized that everything that was happening around me was so crystal clear that if someone needed to explain something, there was no need to explain it. And I have some hope that there are not many people in the country who still do not understand.

Extremes

We are a country burned by war. A country that has been scorched by war and is in such a traumatic psychological state is tempted to divide the world into black and white. A country that has been scorched by war will not always be able to understand certain shades.

I used to be ready to say that we shouldn't generalize anyone, and this is still my credo. But now I understand my citizens' need to generalize.

The psychological necessity of a person at war is to figure out what is ours and what is not.

Mobilization, evaders, and territorial recruitment centers

We are in a situation where the state is forced to live under the optics of wartime. If the optics of peaceful life is when we focus on personal freedoms and personal values, then in wartime the state has to take its citizens, put them in military uniforms, and send them to the front line to defend the state. Of course, this transformation is extremely painful and traumatic for a citizen, and, unfortunately, not everyone is eager to do it.

No war gains popularity over time. In most of the wars I've read memoirs about, there are always queues at the beginning of the war for the conventional military enlistment offices, and then it all comes to naught.

But I'm not sure that it's worth saying that all the men of military age who are now in the rear are just evaders. In general, I think that most of these people live within a fatalistic paradigm. That is: if they call me, I will go, if they don't call me, I won't be the first to go to the territorial recruitment center.

That is why we finally need to pass a law on mobilization, which should have been adopted in 2014 or 2015. And it should provide for some kind of effective responsibility of citizens for neglecting their constitutional duty to defend their homeland. In some large processes, it is sometimes important to prescribe not only a list of carrots but also a list of very effective sticks.

Secondly, we need to provide the territorial recruitment centers with an up-to-date database. I was in Bakhmut a year ago, in February and March 2023, and the territorial recruitment center called me to come in for a data reconciliation. And I said: I'm not against it by any means, but the battalion commander won't let me go.

I just mean that now the employees of the territorial recruitment centers are people who just live surrounded by papers. And all they have to do is go out on the streets and stop people there. Because their databases simply do not allow them to communicate with their customer base in any other way.

Demobilization

I have been in the army since February 25, 2022. Technically speaking, my discharge for three years should take place at the end of next February. Imagine: this deadline approaches and the entire Russian Federation, knowing that so many thousands of people will leave the ranks of the Armed Forces, is simply preparing for this somehow.

If there was a possibility to specify the terms of service very clearly in the law on mobilization, I would be a very happy person. Our unit would draw ourselves a calendar of the year and we would come in every day and cross days off like this.

But I would not be surprised if Russia now announces something similar to mobilization and starts to saturate its own army again. And when the 3-year term comes, our military command will just look at it and say: “Guys, sorry, we can't let you go now.”

On the one hand, my friends and I, who serve together, talk about this more often than we should, psychologically preparing ourselves for some kind of conditional demobilization that will eventually happen in our lives. On the other hand, I am preparing myself for the fact that in a year I will blow out the third candle on my own army cake, realizing that I need to stay for longer.