How can you break the mental manacles of an empire that has occupied not only your physical world but also your education, publishing, media, high culture and popular entertainment? In his endearing memoir of Odesa, Undefeatable, Julian Evans quotes the Ukrainian author Viktoria Amelina, who describes growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine surrounded by all things Russian. She attended a Russian school, acted in children’s Russian theatre, listened to Russian rock and prayed in a Russian Orthodox church: ‘There was an entire system in place that aimed to make me believe that Moscow, not Kyiv, was the centre of my universe.’
When she was 15, Amelina felt flattered to be invited to Moscow for a Russian language contest. She was thrilled to be interviewed on state television. She felt like a star. But when the interviewer began to interrogate her about whether she felt downtrodden as a Russian speaker in Ukraine, Amelina realised:
I was just being used to manipulate millions of viewers of the evening news… I was only 15 years old.
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