Simple And Moving: In Ukraine, A Story of Deaths, Not Degrees
CHANGING KREMLIN POLICY SHAPED MY EDUCATION. In the fall of 1984, I went to university in England to study Modern Languages: Russian and French. The Cold War was in its most terrifying stage since the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962. The United States and Soviet Union were engaged in a renewed arms race. My teenage years had been haunted by fears of nuclear war.
I graduated four years later, having in the meantime made my first visit to the Soviet Union, on a study visit in the summer of 1987. In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet leader. His reforms meant change at home, and a rapid easing of tension with the West.
Europe and the world suddenly felt like much safer places.
That is not how history has had it. The generation teaching me then had known war, hot and cold. I remember learning that the head of my college had interrupted his own studies to serve in the armed forces for five years during the Second World War. My tutor in Russian had learnt his Russian in the navy, as a national service conscript who had shown promise as a linguist.
They returned to studies, and careers. Not every soldier does.
From July 21-25, I was at the World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies. That field of study has been overshadowed for more than three years now by the escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
A simple, yet effective and moving photo exhibition was set up in one of the halls. ‘Unissued Diplomas’ remembers students who had been killed in the war–some on active service, others simply by being in the wrong place at the time of an indiscriminate bombing or shelling.
The stories are heartbreaking–and had a particular resonance at a conference where most people attending teach in universities. I had been at a graduation ceremony just the week before, watching students whom I had taught for the last three years collect their degrees.
As at any graduation ceremony, the speakers reflected on achievement, and looked forward to the future. The students whose pictures I looked at a week later, whose lives and deaths I read about, never graduated. They have no future.
My generation–I am in my late 50s now–knew only peace in our youth, though we did live with that fear of nuclear attack.
The generation of Europeans who taught me, and the one that I now teach, know a different world: one in which we are warned to prepare for war; where countries with conscription seek to widen the draft. In Denmark, for instance, women face being called up for the first time.
At the conference there was, as might have been expected, discussion of many aspects of the war and its effects. The deaths of the students were a reminder of the worst of those. Those who had died fighting had truly given everything they could. Too young to be conscripted under Ukraine’s present laws, they were all volunteers.
They made an admirable choice that cost them their lives. Not everyone has a choice: not the faculty members when I was at university; nor some of those Russian soldiers mobilized for Putin’s desire to conquer a neighbouring country (though the money they are offered seems reward enough for many).
I have never had to fight, though as a journalist I have witnessed others’ wars in Gaza; Iraq; Georgia; and Russia. At the exhibition, I remembered some of the soldiers I had met in those different places. In particular, a group of three young men, conscripts, whom I met and photographed in Grozny quarter of a century ago.
No university for them–not then, and probably not ever. I wonder what they are doing now. Enthusiastically sending their own sons off to fight? Sitting forgotten in a provincial town: drunk, bitter and traumatized? Perhaps they did not survive the war.
Russian soldiers in Grozny, Chechnya, Russian Federation, March 2000. © James Rodgers
‘Unissued Diplomas’ records the death of another generation whose education has been influenced by Russian policy–only in the most murderous way. I feel very grateful never to have had to go to war, as so many generations of men in Europe have.
I left the conference fervently hoping that this generation of young Europeans will one day know the peace I have known in my lifetime, and finish their degrees untroubled by airstrikes: in short, to enjoy the kind of world that the students in the photographs wanted, yet were denied.