Article published in the Sunday Post on 18th Dec 2022.
“The blackouts are constant,” says Nikolai Kotlyarov, a retired engineer, from his Kharkiv flat. “When the electricity goes, so does the heating, the water, the light, internet, everything. The ‘dead zone’!”
We’re talking by video call, but in November, just a few weeks ago, I was sitting on that same sofa with Nikolai and his wife Lyubov, also an engineer, on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The couple, in their 70s, remained in their much-loved fifth-floor home all the way through the last nine months of hell – through the air raids, the missile attacks, the near-encirclement of the city by Russian forces. If all that couldn’t persuade them to leave, they’re certainly not letting power cuts get to them, they tell me.
On the day we speak, the blackout lasts five hours. Sometimes it’s much longer. Snow is falling – as it is outside my window. But Kharkiv, the big industrial city in north-east Ukraine, could soon be much colder than any Scottish city. Temperatures of –10C, or even –20, are not unknown. If heating becomes unreliable, it’s not a question of “putting on another jumper”. It’s suddenly very dangerous.
The problem for Nikolai and Lyubov at the moment is the darkness. They said: “Now it gets dark early, even at half past three it’s dark, the ground’s slippery, and we old people try not to go outside.”
Negotiating a pitch-black city is a daunting thing, let alone with snow and ice underfoot. The Kotlyarovs live on the edge of Kharkiv, next to a big pine forest. “There used to be lanterns, lights, everything,” Lyubov recalls. “But now it’s so dark, just the glimpses of lights from passing cars.”
Indoors, they have candles on hand for the unpredictable blackouts. A big LED lamp with a battery helps, too. “But if the gas is cut off, it’s unclear how we will live,” Lyubov admits.
The shops and services try to stay open during the blackouts, bank tellers writing things down by hand, and shop clerks accompanying customers around the aisles to make sure no one steals. “We have bread, the products are all there,” Lyubov says. “But the prices have doubled. Everything is very expensive now.”
“Well,” shrugs Nikolai, “that’s war”. His wife agrees. The state, they say, is still paying their pension on time, for which they are grateful. Local government still functions: workers have been clearing the snow and ice. The lift was repaired recently.
Their son, Dmitry, a university lecturer, is there, too. He recounts how they went to the family dacha – a country cottage, the bolthole of many Ukrainian families – to get warm clothes and blankets. The dacha is in territory to the east, which until September was occupied by the Russian army. Miraculously, the house survived intact.
Nikolai has been getting the flat ready for whatever comes this winter. “I’ve insulated all the doors, and the windows, and put a heat reflective panel under the radiators. If glass gets blown out in an explosion, we’ll board the window up with plywood. Bought nails, got some tools,” he says, matter-of-factly, even chuckling a bit. “We’re not going to die!”
“Just as long as the house doesn’t get blown up, as long as the walls are intact,” he adds.
This isn’t a far-fetched worry: a rocket hit a street nearby in late summer and blew out all the windows on the other side. The area is residential, quiet, sleepy. What, exactly, the Russians were aiming at isn’t clear. But most of the people on Nikolai and Lyubov’s stair have come home, they say. Except for the children. And little ones might be the biggest miss this Christmas. Their grandchildren are in Poland with the couple’s daughter. There would normally be up to 10 people around Lyubov’s table for the big family meal: this year, just four. The festivities take place on December 31: Hogmanay came to be the big date during Soviet times, when Christianity – and thus the January 7 Orthodox Christmas – was suppressed. Trees, tinsel, and a groaning table – their 31st is much like our 25th.
“As hostess I’ll try to make all our favourite dishes,” Lyubov insists. The table has to include a Napoleon cake: a mountain of pastry and cream, like a custard slice on an epic scale. “A big one”, she adds, grinning. Her son Dmitry loves salad with orange slices; Nikolai likes the herring and beetroot shuba. So these things are obligatory. Plus, of course, a big plate of meat in aspic – similar to Scottish potted hough.
It might not be easy, though. “Look: we’ll try, we’ll do our best,” says Lyubov. “There has to be a celebration,” adds Nikolai, and she cuts in: “It won’t be like before. But thank God we are just alive, alive and hoping to keep living.”
“And we’ll take joy in that,” her husband says. “That’s something to be happy about.”
I ask how they keep spirits up when the news brings constant horror. The de-occupation of the region east of Kharkiv revealed torture chambers and mass graves; more of the same comes from Kherson in the south, recently liberated and now relentlessly shelled.
It is hard, Lyubov admits. Painful. Her husband talks of his growing anger, the fury and bewilderment which everyone feels towards what used to be the “brotherly nation” next door. “I will never forgive them,” he says quietly. They both believe, utterly, in Ukrainian victory “by summer, definitely”.
Dmitry then makes me laugh by noting that Pretty Woman and Home Alone are popular in the family right now – “peaceful, family movies. Our tastes have become different”. He mentions silly, 1980s US comedies like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s exactly what would be playing in my childhood home over the holidays. I tentatively ask if the old Soviet classics like Irony Of Fate are still watched, given the complicated relationship with that era.
“Of course we’ll watch them – with pleasure!” retorts Lyubov. “We lived with them for so long.” Cooking in the kitchen, turning on the TV and seeing those familiar faces – it “means the holiday season has arrived”.
“We lived in that era,” she says, and her son adds: “It was our country then. Not Putin’s Russia.”