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Among contemporary Ukrainian writers, Yuri Vynnychuk is considered the most versatile, and for a good reason. In a career spanning five decades, the 70-year-old has published dozens of novels, short stories, poems, plays, and adaptations of fairy tales, legends, and sagas, supplemented by a myriad of journalistic works. He has also edited several anthologies with texts of authors persecuted and murdered by the Soviet regime and numerous collections of fantasy and horror literature.

Most recently, he has published "Mary's Keys," a novel together he collaborated on with his long-time friend, the best-selling writer Andrei Kurkov ("Grey Bees"). The only writer who has won the BBC Ukrainian Book of the Year Award twice (for his novels "Spring Games In Autumn Gardens" in 2005 and "Tango of Death" in 2012), the Ivano-Frankiswk native has also been honing his reputation as a perennial dissident throughout his career.

After completing his language studies at his hometown's university in the early 1970s, Vynnychuk quickly became the target of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret service. Its employees and informants made life difficult for the recalcitrant author until the very last days of the USSR – a period Vynnychuk’s German translator, Alexander Kratochvil, and graphic artist Oleg Gryshenko, succinctly summarized in this animated video, published in November last year.

Since Ukraine gained independence in 1991, Wynnychuk has been cementing his role as the most well-known representative of Galician literature, reflecting on the history, society, and culture of remembrance in Ukraine in an ironic and often unequivocally provocative manner.

STANDARD: Mr. Vynnychuk, what is the job of a Ukrainian writer in wartime?

Vynnychuk: I think the most important job for a Ukrainian writer right now is to convey accurate information about what is happening here. Since the war started, I have visited literary festivals in Poland, Scotland, and Romania, and everywhere I went, I tried to answer every question about the war people had. I also wrote several articles as responses to Putin and his politicians’ claim that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, which we never were. Also, when Putin repeatedly called Ukraine a "patchwork country," I responded with an article about the fact that all countries are "patchworks" because they were all assembled from different lands, including Russia.

STANDARD: Today, there are passionate debates in Ukraine about how to deal with Russian citizens regardless of their political stance. Are there "Good Russians"? And if there are, how is one supposed to deal with them, considering the ongoing crimes committed by the Kremlin’s forces in their name?

Vynnychuk: We cannot demand from every Russian that they wish for Russia’s death. How can you demand this from a person who is Russian by blood? I believe we should maintain a dialogue with those Russians who do not support the madness of the Kremlin. People like the comedian Maxim Galkin – who makes fun of Putin and does it very wittily – or the singer Alla Pugacheva, or former chess world champion Garry Kasparov. However, all these people live outside Russia. There, we do not see any significant protests against the war. Sometimes, individuals take a stand but get arrested immediately because most Russians support the war.

STANDARD: If we believe the public polls, support for the war is steadily eroding there.

Vynnychuk: Yes, but the only reason this support goes down is not that they have changed their minds but because their lives have changed. They may have relatives who died, or they may suddenly lack some goods or whatever. Still, they would be perfectly happy if Putin managed to annex Ukraine. The reality is that having a dead soldier in the family is now good business in Russia. Many Russian families do not mourn but rejoice when their offspring dies in Ukraine because then they get cars and money. I personally know tons of stories confirming that.

STANDARD: Much of your work is set in your home province of Galicia, especially in its capital Lviv, which has become somewhat of a safe haven for refugees fleeing the Eastern battlefields. How has the city changed since February 24, 2022?

Vynnychuk: It has changed a lot. I took in several people from Dnipro before they went to the UK, and they were wonderful. Still, there are various people who have appeared in Galicia since the war started who I call aliens. Many homeless and alcoholics have arrived in Lviv. They have no way to return, so they just hang around here. Accordingly, the number of crimes in the city has increased steadily since March 2022. Of course, not everyone is the same. But while the war has united a large part of the country, the reality is that there is still a considerable minority of Ukrainians – nearly all from the East – who claim that were it not for us Galicians, the invasion would have never happened.

STANDARD: Can you elaborate on that?

Vynnychuk: In the twisted view of these people, we Galicians overthrew Yanukovych in 2014, and only after that did the war start. While most of the fighters on the Maidan were indeed from Galicia, that is simply not true. A couple of days ago, I overheard a conversation between two refugee women who egged each other on, saying things like: "I can’t bear to look at their Banderite animal faces anymore." I have also heard many stories from local men who went to the front as soldiers, which contradict the narrative of those touching videos showing how our liberators are met in some formerly occupied villages. While some are really happy getting liberated, others ask them: "Why did you come? We were good without you here."

The bottom line is that these are people from another planet, and they hate us. Not all of them, of course, but a considerable number. Probably 20 percent of all Ukrainians. They are what we call "Sovoks" – people with a Soviet mindset who have not yet gotten rid of the idea that everyone owes them everything. That is literally what they say to us today: "You owe us because you started this war." So, while there are good people in the East, there is still 20 percent that is a problem. These are also the ones who cause trouble abroad. Most of our refugees are trying to get a job as soon as they come to another country, but most people from Eastern Ukraine do not want to work because they think they are entitled to everything.

STANDARD: Have you learned something about your country and its people you did not know before the invasion?

Vynnychuk: The most important thing I learned was just how strong our military is. When my wife and son woke me up at five a.m. on February 24, 2022, and told me what was happening, I could not quite believe it. I was shaking so much that I drank 50 grams of vodka that morning. To be honest, back then, the expectation that Ukraine would be captured in just a few days looked entirely plausible. Only when I saw our people fighting back on all fronts, I started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The other thing I learned, to my surprise, was the international solidarity. I had Czech volunteer fighters staying with me in the first months of the war who went to the front twice. One of my friends picked up four Taiwanese soldiers from the Polish border who also went to the frontline. Recently, one of them got killed. I wrote a short story about him.

I believed the EU would support us, but I did not expect it to happen on such a large scale. At first, we all complained their help took too much time. But I realized that after the Afghans surrendered to the Taliban essentially without a fight, it was logical that the Nato countries were at first afraid that we would also abandon their weapons. But when they saw our people fight so bravely and able to master the complex weapon systems they gave us, the supplies increased, and thankfully, they keep growing.

STANDARD: In your book "Tango of Death," you lament the Nazis and the Soviets turning Lviv from a vibrant, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural metropolis into a gray, provincial backwater and the Soviets aiding and abetting the Holocaust. Can you explain why?

Vynnychuk: Because to this day, it is only Hitler’s Germany that is being blamed for the Holocaust, but Stalin’s Soviet Union actively contributed to it. Why did the Galician Jews die in the Holocaust? Because they were not given transport. When the Nazis came in 1941, all the trains traveling from Lviv to Russia were jam-packed with looted furniture, dishes, clothes, and so on, while the Russians told the Jews: "Stay here and don’t worry, nothing will happen to you. The Germans are a cultured people." Therefore, they did not leave, and all of them died. So if we talk about, say, the tragedy of Babyn Yar and the catastrophe of the Lviv ghetto: I consider the latter a bigger one because hundreds of Jewish writers, artists, musicians, and historians from Galicia were murdered here.

When the Germans retreated, the Russians returned and created a regime of terror. As a result, only ten percent of Lviv’s pre-war population was left at the war's end. All the Jews were murdered, the Poles left for Poland, and the Ukrainians were either arrested, taken to Siberia, or emigrated. The only people moving to Lviv after the war were those from nearby villages, so nothing was left of what was once a great cosmopolitan city.

STANDARD: Concerning Vladimir Putin’s motivation to order the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many people interpret it as yet another one of his attempts to restore the Soviet Union. Do you agree?

Vynnychuk: I agree. Today’s Russia is functioning pretty much exactly like the Soviet Union. There is censorship, people cannot protest, and there are no strikes. The government is the same as it was in the Soviet Union. Back then, the people in power were all pensioners who sat in their chairs for decades, nothing ever changed, and things got worse every day. Also, the Soviet Union constantly waged and stoked wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Asia. Putin does it in Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine. And these are only the most obvious parallels.

If Putin wins this war, he will not stop with Ukraine. He is an old, sick man who wants to become the second Peter the First and unite all the so-called "Russian lands." You must remember that those "Russian lands" he is talking about once included Finland, parts of Poland, and the Baltics. If Ukraine is sacrificed, it will end badly for all these countries, and because they know it, they act accordingly.

STANDARD: As a former Soviet citizen who spent the first four decades of his life in Soviet Ukraine, what do you tell members of the generations born after its dissolution in 1991 what life was like back then?

Vynnychuk: I tell them life was difficult due to a constant shortage of various products and goods. Ordinary people spent their whole lives thinking about how to get something, even basic stuff. I tell them that the KGB followed all so-called "questionable persons" – people like me. They constantly summoned me, searched my homes, took away my books and manuscripts, fabricated complaints against me, and threatened me. I have a philological education, but in Soviet times I was not allowed to work in my field because they ensured that if I got a job, I would get immediately fired.

Still, as messed up as the Soviet Union was, I spent my youth in it. Therefore, of course, I sometimes get nostalgic thinking about those days. While life in general sucked, there were these special moments I will remember forever. For instance, when I was young, I engaged in the smuggling and purchasing of foreign goods. Experiences like buying denim from a Polish smuggler and then narrowly escaping the cops chasing me are impossible to forget. Stories like this provided a lot of material for some of my works.

STANDARD: Does the kind of nostalgia you are describing – even if your experience was different from that of the average Soviet citizen – also explain why there appears to be a considerable number of people populating the post-Soviet space who want the Soviet Union back?

Vynnychuk: Yes. But the key to understanding this particular brand of nostalgia is this: these people are not really nostalgic about the system they lived under, even if they think they are. What they are really nostalgic about is the time when they were young. That is what they want to go back to.

STANDARD: While his popularity was in sharp decline before the war, today, Ukraine’s president Wolodymyr Zelenskyy has become immensely popular at home and abroad. What do you think about his leadership?

Vynnychuk: He does his job, and, in principle, his messages are correct. However, when Zelenskyy performs his appeals to the West, he acts like there is no shared history between Ukraine and Russia whatsoever. His speechwriters take great care that he never touches on our historical relations with Russia, which are sometimes as problematic as complicated.

STANDARD: Speaking of complicated: You are famous for your biting criticism of your country’s presidents. Under Yanukovich, you were jailed for publishing a poem whose lines became a rallying cry for Euro-Maidan supporters. Have you ever considered writing one about Zelenskyy?

Vynnychuk (laughs): Actually, many readers asked me to do just that before the war, but now it no longer makes sense. You see, Zelenskyy is just a puppet with good speechwriters, but he fulfills this role quite well, so be it. I had made fun of him ever since he decided to run for the presidency. I used to call him "Baby Zaches," after the character from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel. Zaches was an evil dwarf who conquered a bunch of people, and he had this one hair in which his power resided, and when that hair was pulled out, all his power disappeared. Funnily enough, when Zelenskyy was asked to give his hair for a drug test during his presidential campaign, he refused to.

So in some ways, he is just as bad as those who came before him. There was supposed to be a film adaptation of my novel "Divas of the Night," but when his culture minister came in, he immediately made the screenplay disappear. That was his way of taking revenge on me for my criticism. So, while under Yanukovych, my books were withdrawn from the list of public library purchases, under Zelenskyy, my movie adaptations were canceled.

STANDARD: While Zelenskyy appears untouchable since the start of the invasion, some of his advisors have been getting a lot of criticism within Ukraine and abroad for their controversial statements and for spreading misinformation, namely the recently sacked Oleksyi Arestovich and the former journalist Mikhail Podolyak. What are Western supporters of Ukraine supposed to make of them?

Vynnychuk: Many people Zelenskyy has been surrounding himself with are horrible indeed. The truth is that the only thing preventing them from doing the worst is the European Union watching their dirty fingers very closely. Thank god for that. Still, at the end of the day, none of these people matter, as many followers as they may have on social media. The only one who wields real power in Kyiv is Andrii Yermak (ann.: a former film producer who is now the chief of the president’s office).

He is the pump, and Zelensky is his bicycle. It is not exactly a secret that it is Yermak who makes the decisions in all policy areas, and some journalists write about it accordingly. So while there are no rallies or strikes against the domestic policies Yermak and his allies in government have put into place while everyone’s attention is focused on the war – for instance, the new labor laws – I am convinced there will be many in the future.

STANDARD: One hypothesis why today’s Russia is acting like it is is because neither Czarist nor Soviet Russia ever had to atone, let alone pay for the crimes committed under these dictatorial regimes. Do you share this sentiment?

Vynnychuk: I do. There must be a trial in The Hague after the war ends, just as in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. The fact is that Soviet Russia alone killed 90 percent of all Ukrainian writers, artists, and musicians and continues to do so today. But if you look at the peoples who are now fighting for it – Buryats, Tuvans, Chechens, and so on – of their creative intelligentsia, one hundred percent got killed. Therefore, we cannot negotiate with them or make any concessions because otherwise, it will never end. They will continue to build strength and threaten us and the rest of the world, just as they have done with impunity for centuries.

As we know now, the gravest mistake the West made was not to confront them in the past. After World War II, US Army General George Patton wanted to fight the Soviet army, but unfortunately, he got restrained. If men like him had been allowed to destroy the Red Hydra back then, we would likely not have the problems we have today, and the world would be a much better place. Therefore, this time we must fight to the end, and then they must pay for everything they destroyed and be held accountable for every single life they took and every other crime. (Klaus Stimeder, 16.2.2023)