“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation….” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [What a Freedom, 1903 - Ilya Repin]
• “I was born at Kislovodsk on 11th December, 1918. My father had studied philological subjects at Moscow University, but did not complete his studies, as he enlisted as a volunteer when war broke out in 1914. He became an artillery officer on the German front, fought throughout the war and died in the summer of 1918, six months before I was born. I was brought up by my mother, who worked as a shorthand-typist, in the town of Rostov on the Don, where I spent the whole of my childhood and youth, leaving the grammar school there in 1936. Even as a child, without any prompting from others, I wanted to be a writer…” More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/biographical/
• Ilya Efimovich Repin was born in the town of Chuguev near Kharkov in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. His parents were Russian military settlers. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter named Bunakov and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. More: https://www.ilyarepin.org/biography.html
Today is the Remembrance Day for the Victims of the Crimean Tatar People Genocide. I’m not that good at English to talk about this tragedy. But you can watch this or read this. Nothing changes for decades and centuries. The rashist empire continues to commit crimes against humanity. My Ukraine is struggling with absolute evil. Crimea is my homeland. I was born and lived there for 25 years until the rashist occupation in 2014. Therefore, the deportation of 1944 is a very understandable pain for me, as well as for the millions of Ukrainian citizens who were forced to flee their hometowns because of the war. World recognition of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people, as well as the current genocide of the Ukrainian people, is very important. And no one in the whole world should experience such horror.
It is always good time to talk about love and human rights. Especially if your country is literally fighting for the right to live now. So love and be loved, y'all! Love wins. Love always wins️
mashareva Today I’ve got a message from previous life where I was working as an artist on the latest @harrystyles video directed by @tanumuino and wonderful talented team !
It feels surreal.
A month before the war began I rented quite spacious space in order to transform it to my art-studio in Kyiv, renovation was in full mode, I dreamed of moving in and how I’ll be working there creating this kind of big scale artworks.
I have no doubt this will happen very soon when we win and Ukraine will blossom like this magic forest on my drawing !
I want to share with you my favorite Ukrainian singers
1. ONUKA (literally: granddaughter) is a Ukrainian electro-folk band. It was created in 2013 by Ukrainian musicians Yevhen Filatov and Nata Zhyzhchenko
2. Kazka is a Ukrainian band that performs pop with elements of electro-folk. Since its creation in 2017, vocalist Oleksandra Zaritska.
3. Max Barskih is a Ukrainian singer and songwriter.
NEBO is my favorite song, he wrote it in Ukrainian.
After russia invaded Ukraine, he joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine, left his little son at home and defends our homeland. This is his last track dedicated to the war in Ukraine in this music video you can see real footage of the destruction of russian fascists, who came to our land to commit genocide of the Ukrainian people.
4. The Hardkiss is a Ukrainian rock band.
They participated in the Ukrainian national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 with the song “Helpless”. The band placed 2nd in the national final. The Hardkiss were formed in 2011 by wife and husband - lead singer Julia Sanina and guitarist Valeriy Bebko.
