London days, c. 1940. René Pleven looking deceptively mousy.
The Fabulous Pleven Boys
P. J. Collins
Many many years ago—say, during the Nixon Administration—I was peripherally involved with kiddy television. Kiddy TV was very hot just then, particularly up in Boston, where they had at least four “educational” kiddy shows running concurrently.
There was an Englishman named Chris Sarson who came up with the idea of having a kiddy show that was entirely written by kids. That sounded like a pretty rotten idea to me—a TV show written, and sort-of produced, by 7-to-12-year-olds. But what did I know? Not only did this ZOOM thing attract a steady following, there were all sorts of people lining up, trying to conceive and produce their own shows along similar formulas.
I recall one old guy, maybe thirty but looking forty, who didn’t even own a TV, had never seen ZOOM, in fact hadn’t watched much television since the Spin and Marty days, and had no connection at all to modern kids (not on any normal, healthy level anyway). Yet he nevertheless promoted himself as a producer/writer of his own forthcoming educational kiddy show: “just like ZOOM but more intellectual”—and it would be called Tops for Tweens!
“Sounds like a t-shirt fashion show,” a lady friend told him. So he came up with other names, equally silly, though none with the same sizzle. I believe he was unemployed at this point.
But our aspiring producer wasn’t entirely without professional experience in the kiddy-show realm. Oh no. For three or four weeks he’d been a staff writer for a children’s “science show” on the educational channel in Boston. The presenter was a hokey old “cowboy” host who’d been doing this sort of thing since 1947. Our new staff writer’s contributions were thought to be quite weird, but that was the point: he’d been brought in to come up with new and offbeat ideas. He proposed that Cowboy Duke’s Science Show do a segment on astrology. He’d invite an astrologer onto the program to show how it all worked. This horrified his midwit colleagues, because their high school teachers had taught them that astrology “wasn’t true” because “there are only twelve signs and there are more than twelve kinds of people.”
A debatable point. Anyway the contretemps amused rather than alarmed Cowboy Duke. Because, as I say, Cowboy Duke was looking to shake the show up a little. [1] And then the new writer proposed bringing General Patton’s daughter onto the show—because, he said, he’d met her and she was a witch. Or at least she said she was a witch—she lived in Ipswich, after all—and the kids at home would surely love to learn all about witchcraft.
It was at this point that the co-producers took Cowboy Duke aside and told him he had hired a madman. And so ended a promising career, so far as I know.
Down in New York we had Sesame Street, which had sort of kicked off the whole educational-kiddy-TV rage in 1969. It was nationally broadcast via PBS, but it was born and bred in Manhattan, hence its charming conceit of having a studio set that looked like a tenement block in Harlem, with a lot of colored people. As you know, Sesame Street was initially conceived as a kind of “Head Start”-style learning boost for poor “inner city” (i.e., black) preschoolers. But it became quickly accepted as a variety program for kids and stoners of all ages. (Oh man, THIS is near…and THIS is far! Dig it!) [2]
The producers eventually cleaned up the slum aspect, at least a little, and also fired Its star Muppet personality, Kermit the Frog. They said Kermit was “too commercial.” It seems he’d made one TV commercial, in Canada. That went against the PBS brand, I guess. [3] Like a blacklisted filmmaker, Kermit took refuge in England, where he eventually found his footing when he compèred The Muppet Show.
The Electric Factory
Meantime the Sesame Street people, Children’s Television Workshop, cloned the basic format—rapid-fire segments mixed with song and humor, just the sort of thing kids with ADHD like (or is that what caused ADHD in kids?)—and came up with a program that was neither set in a slum nor aimed at preschoolers. Six-to-twelve-year-olds were now the target audience. Like Sesame Street, this new show was shot in a commercial videotape facility way up on the Upper West Side, on Broadway near Zabar’s. When I visited the studio I’d refer to the new show as The Electric Factory, which was almost its name, but not quite. The assistant producer, Pat, would always look at me quizzically when I called it that. He’d smile, and correct me. So I kept doing it. I assumed that my position in such enterprises was sort of like being a one-kid “focus group,” an expert on what modern pre-adolescents were thinking. A subject on which I did not have a clue, as I’d put those days behind me.
Pat was a good-looking, slender, dark-haired fellow in his 30s. Great wife, cute kids. He had a very slight foreign accent, hard to identify. He was, or had been, French—Breton, actually. It was an accent so subtle you might not notice it at first. He’d grown up largely in New York. I guess he’d lived in Paris during the War, after which his widowed mother married an American songwriter. By happenstance the songwriter was Cole Porter’s first-cousin-once-removed, though Ted was scarcely as famous, rich or talented as Cole. However he was a pretty normal guy, so it all balanced out.
Anyway they came to America, where Pat went to prep school and college. After that, his career was entirely in television production and film distribution. He produced a “circuses of the world” prime-time show that you may remember. It was hosted by Don Ameche. Then he worked in soap operas and daytime programming. Memorably he was on the production team of that famous “gothic” soap opera of the late 1960s. That show was sort of the Law & Order of its era, in that just about any aspiring actor could get a chance to appear in it. I look down the cast list today and I see Marsha Mason, Harvey Keitel, Abe Vigoda, Conrad Bain…even Wilmot Robertson’s first cousin Cavada Humphrey, daughter of his mother’s sister and a one-armed Romanian nobleman.
A couple of Pat’s friends or colleagues had an off-putting way of taking me aside and telling me that there was a Big Secret That You Must Never Tell Another Soul. I suspected The Big Secret was cockamamie rubbish, although it took me 30 or 40 years to sort it out. The really creepy aspect was: how come, if it’s such a hush-hush Big Secret, you are now telling it to me, a fourteen-year-old near-total stranger? Although I met Pat and his family a few times, and even went with his wife and kids to pick out a Christmas tree one December, way the hell up Fifth Avenue, I didn’t know them well and I was hardly deserving of dark confidences from third parties.
The “Big Secret”
So now we come to the Big Secret which, I again remind you, is untrue. Pat’s father had purportedly been Minister of the Interior in the Vichy France government during the War, and “they” shot him afterwards, after so-called “Liberation.” Only it’s not so; didn’t happen. He died, but he didn’t die that way.
Today you say, “What the hell, why would anyone care to make up stories like that?” Well we were still only 20-something years after the War, you see. Imagine that someone today was telling you about a dark secret from 1997.
The Big Secret was impossible to verify. Back in the early 1970s, it was much harder to research things than it is today. Especially information about obscure things like the various ministries of the Pétain years. Today you can go to Google or Wikipedia, and be fed all kinds of disinformation, but at least that disinformation generally has a trail of references you can chase down. For Pat’s father there was nothing at all. Nothing. You couldn’t look him up in the encyclopedia or in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature; he was too obscure. Besides, I didn’t even know what his name was. It was like being Inspector Lebel in TheDay of the Jackal.
The closest thing to useful information was something I got from a French movie that had just opened at the Little Carnegie movie theater on West 57th Street. French movies were big that year. This one was called Le Souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart). It’s a semi-autobiographical film by Louis Malle, set in spring-summer 1954. This was the time of Dien Bien Phu, when the French finally gave up the ghost in Indochine. The movie’s mainly about adolescents, but at dinner adults are talking politics: “You know what’s happened? Pleven’s seized L’Express. You think the government will fall?”[4]
This Pleven would have to be René Pleven, at that time France’s defense minister. A highly verifiable name: he was at other times finance minister or foreign minister, or minister for colonies…as well as being prime minister twice. Definitely in the encyclopedia, however sparsely. As these were ministries during the musical-chairs governments of the Fourth Republic, René held some of those posts for only six months.
He was on the outs with Gaullists when the Fifth Republic came in, but during the Pompidou era, 1969-73, he turned up as justice minister. He distinguished himself early in that term by signing a pardon for Henri Charriere, the escapee from French Guiana prisons whose “creative nonfiction” memoir, Papillon, had been topping the bestseller lists.
René Pleven was in all the reference books, but none of them ever said he had a brother, let alone a nephew. And, strangely for a public figure and prominent statesman, he neither wrote a memoir of his public life nor saw a biography published during his lifetime. Even now, his travels and adventures are best gleaned from biographies of Charles de Gaulle or histories of the Fourth Republic. Most eminent people donate their private papers to a public archive or university library long before they die, but René Pleven did not. There doesn’t even seem to be much at the Archives Nationales.[5]
So if the figure of René Pleven has never been on your radar, that’s probably the way he wanted it.
And we must assume René was being careful and cagey all along, destroying most of his papers, or at least embargoing them till after his death. I am put in mind of June 1940, when the Germans were approaching Paris, and at the Quai d’Orsay the Foreign Ministry was busy incinerating decades’ worth of confidential documents in the courtyard. Leave no incriminating scraps or bordereaux behind! This instinct must have become embedded in French officialdom.
The only biography of him that I know of was published in 1994, a year after he died, age 91: René Pleven, un français libre en politique, written by a fellow Breton, Christian Bougeard. The author tells us at the front of the book that this is indeed the première biographie. Although it’s a rather circumlocutory and speculative biography, we do finally locate the mysterious brother. His sad story erupts briefly in Chapter VII, when René finally returns to France in late August 1944.
At this point René has spent the last four years with Charles de Gaulle, Jean Monnet and the other Free French in London, as well as in America and Africa. René now pays a visit to his mother in Dinan. He learns that his younger brother Hervé has been arrested and is in prison at Fresnes, south of Paris. A few weeks later, Hervé Pleven meets with misadventure. He is beaten to death or crushed by a crowd until he suffocates.
How Ya Fixed for Ciné Film, Monsieur?
So Hervé had indeed been in a government ministry, though he was hardly high-profile. He was an under-secretary at a minor Vichy ministry, the Ministry of Information. Not literally in Vichy; it wasn’t actually down south with the spas and casinos. Like most ministries and administrative offices, it was based in Paris.
In spring 1942 we find the following notice in a number of newspapers: «M. Hervé Pleven est nommé chef de cabinet au secretariat general a l’information.» So, he was chief of staff to the secretariat of information, the Information ministry. Some papers add the additional information that “M. Pleven, who is also a lawyer, has specialized for many years in matters pertaining to the cinema.” Hervé had in fact been a prominent film executive. We’ll come to that. In 1942-1944 he was merely a bureaucrat and thus very small fry indeed.
Hervé’s remit at the ministry was ostensibly film distribution and censorship, but I doubt he needed to censor anything. French cinema during the Occupation was not only apolitical, it tended to be fantastical, otherworldly. [6] Besides, according to a colleague in the ministry, Leon Gaultier, M. Pleven’s job actually consisted mostly of helping filmmakers who all had the same problem: they couldn’t get any film. [7]
And now…as the late Paul Harvey would say…the rest…of the story:
Bousculade
Biographer Christian Bougeard explains that the Minister of Information, Paul Marion, was a notorious “ultra,” a former member of Jacques Doriot’s PPF (Parti Populaire Français), a hard-right pro-Milice collaborationist faction. Not only that, but Marion actively promoted recruitment of Frenchmen into the Waffen SS, and at least one member of his ministry (Leon Gaultier) joined. All this would help explain why Hervé was rounded up in the épuration.
The circumstances of his death are explained in Bougeard as «Il mourut tragiquement en prison à l’automne 1944, “étouffé dans une bousculade”»: “Died tragically in prison [27 September 1944], ‘suffocated in a stampede.'”
Presumably that’s taken from the prison death register. Was it during a prison riot? A targeted killing? The screws at Fresnes, probably under Red control in September 1944, wouldn’t say or didn’t know. And René and his mother are unlikely to have investigated Hervé’s tragic end. After all, Hervé had been one of the “Vichy people” (as de Gaulle would say), and in 1944 and 1945 they were shooting people like that. The less said the better.
Action Française and RKO France
Hervé’s career can be assembled only from the tiniest scraps and oddments, mainly from newspapers, film journals, and Ancestry-dot-com. Born in Rennes in December 1903, buried at Père-Lachaise c. October 1944. Like his brother he had been a fan of Charles Maurras and Action Française when he was young. But while René is (suspiciously) insistent in the Bougeard biography that he never joined AF, younger brother Hervé became quite active in the student arm of the society. In an early 1921 issue of the AF student paper, L’Étudiant français, we learn that “In Le Mans, Hervé Pleven will be speaking at the next conference, 13 Feb 21.” Hervé was then seventeen. [8]
His prewar career was an impressive one. Like René he went to law school, became an avocat, then worked as a business executive, mostly for American corporations. During the 1930s Hervé was head of, or at least general counsel for, RKO France. We can only speculate about how this happened.
In America, RKO was a movie studio and theater chain that Joseph P. Kennedy and David Sarnoff assembled in the late 1920s, RKO Radio Films. JPK bought up a chain of 700 vaudeville houses so they could be wired for Sarnoff’s Photophone optical sound system. Thus, almost overnight, around 1928, the industry converted to talkies.[9]
And this American consortium apparently lucked into finding a very young Breton lawyer, fluent in both French and English, to help set up RKO France operations.[10] RKO France was producing films at least by 1931 (e.g., L’Aviateur, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and a mostly French cast) but they seem to be few and far between. Perhaps their main business was distribution, not production.
There is no clear record of how Hervé met RKO. But his brother’s business connections suggest René had a hand in it. For a few years after law school, René worked with Jean Monnet for an American investment bank called Blair & Co. [11] [12] Eventually this led to René taking a job with a London subsidiary of one of Blair’s clients, the Automatic Telephone Company. [13] Meantime Blair & Co. was also financing motion-picture industry offerings and acquisitions for Joseph P. Kennedy and associates in Hollywood. While Blair as a company name was absorbed into Bank of America and Transamerica in 1929, by that point RKO Radio Pictures (or RKO Pathé as it was sometimes styled) was up and running. So it’s reasonable to assume Hervé became acquainted with RKO through the Blair/René connection.
Big Brother, Little Brother
Having no real facility for languages, I find a deeper wonderment in how the Pleven brothers gained fluency in English. I can barely stagger through Christian Bougeard’s biography of René, and that’s written in perfectly clear French. Presumably the Plevens learned English while growing up in Little Britain (Bretagne), where I presume the folk instinctively keep a weather eye out against the Paris-French hordes. Remember what they did to us in 1793, lads! You love your land, but you never know when you might have to jump the Channel («La Manche»).
Anyway, when René had to write his thesis as a final qualification for his law degree, he was persuaded to write it on—and I quote—”the social policy of the Lloyd George government as demonstrated by the situation of agricultural laborers in England during and after the [1914-18] war.” [14] What an odd and dreary topic! I gather his advisor was a professor of rural economics and wanted a fluent English reader to tackle this recondite subject. Same old story of professors getting their grad students to do hard research for them!
René versus Hervé: the two brothers appear to have been very dissimilar physically. If you see a picture of René where he’s seated, he looks like this little mousy, milquetoast character. “Oh, he’s the minister of economics and finance? Yes, I can believe that.” Then you see him standing, and it turns out he’s built like a linebacker: big-headed, big-boned, nearly as tall as the 6’5″ Charles de Gaulle (that’s about 195cm in French) himself. I have no pictures of Hervé and would never have the gall to ask his relatives. But from a 1929 passenger manifest I find him to have been doll-like in comparison, a mere 5’8″ (173cm), scarcely taller than most of the officers and ministers you see here, whom René Pleven and Charles de Gaulle just tower over in 1940s photos. From 1943:
Last session of French National Committee in London before departure for Algiers, May 1943. The unmistakable and unusually merry Charles de Gaulle and René Pleven tower over most of the others.
With the fall of France in June 1940, René joined his old mentor and colleague from Blair & Co., Jean Monnet, and headed for London, to manage the nonexistent finances of General de Gaulle’s new cause. Monnet found de Gaulle difficult and impractical, so he soon shoved off to Washington DC, where he was a popular advisor to President Roosevelt and his administration.
For René, things were different. De Gaulle kept him very busy, sending him off to America to help raise awareness and maybe funds for the newly christened “Free French.” The excursion was not a total disaster, but neither was it a shining success. While FDR liked Jean Monnet very much, he refused to meet René because he perceived him as basically a drum-beater for de Gaulle. Which, Lord knows, René was at that point. President Roosevelt was appointing a very capable ambassador to Vichy France (Admiral William Leahy, later to be FDR’s chief of staff), and relations with the Pétain people were stable and good. Pétain’s government, from any reasonable diplomatic perspective, was the legitimate government of France. Objectively FDR was right. Meantime, most of the possible recruits whom René met were cranks or otherwise unworkable. [15]
After Liberation, René’s public career is pretty much a matter of public record, and I’ve summarized most of it above. Minister for colonies, for economics and finance, premier (or president du conseil—literally, head boy at the ministers’ table) twice; foreign minister, defense minister, etc. etc. A Swiss Army knife of a politician or bureaucrat. His major initiative is remembered as the “Pleven Plan,” a western European defense community that the American State Department, and certain British politicians (mainly Winston Churchill), had been encouraging. Unlike NATO, this “European Defence Community” would not include the USA or UK. France would be the dominant nation. Nevertheless the plan was rejected by the French Assembly in 1954, not long after Dien Bien Phu and the fall of the government in which René had been defense minister. As the Gaullists had turned against him because of Indochina, René went into eclipse for the next 15 years, till Pompidou made him justice minister in 1969.
Meantime…his nephew, Hervé’s son, continued to work in television and film production and distribution. By the 90s he wound up as an executive, or bureaucrat, with the New York City Mayor’s Office for Film, Theater and Broadcasting. Mainly it was all about facilitating film-making in the city. Doing pretty much what his father was doing in Paris fifty years earlier. Making sure movie-makers had access to locations. And, I suppose, enough film.
Notes
[1] Cowboy Duke’s Science Show was not actually the program name, but people familiar with the Boston educational channel in those days will know what I’m talking about. Tops for Tweens! is also a made-up proxy title, as silly as the real ones. ZOOM of course was a real name for a real show that ran 1972-1980 and then was revived in 1999.
[2] And inspired the second-most brilliant comedy show I ever saw on Broadway, Avenue Q.
[4] Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber at L’Express published a secret report about military operations in Indochina, whereupon the magazine’s operations were suspended and all copies of the offending issue were seized. Servan-Schreiber was a persistent opponent of the war in Indochina. A court later ruled that the publication had not violated the penal code. (Source: New York Times, 10 July 1954.) And yes, the (Joseph Laniel) government did fall, in June 1954, as a direct result of Dien Bien Phu.
From René Pleven’s obituary in the Independent, 16 January 1993:
Pleven was Minister of Defence at the time of the fall of the French army base at Dien Bien Phu to Vietnamese guerrillas in 1954. He was manhandled by Gaullists at the Arc de Triomphe and was referred to dismissively as the ‘Duc de Dien Bien Phu’ for some time after.
[5] Archives Nationales has papers from René’s late-career stint as justice minister, but they didn’t come from René. Their inventory date is 1995, with a note that these papers were entered into the Archives by “donations from Michel Worms de Romilly and Louis Andlauer and Patrick Pleven” (nephew and in-laws).
[6] Notable French films of 1940-44 include La Nuit Fantastique, Le Corbeau, and Les Enfants du Paradis.
[7] Leon Gaultier, Siegfried et le Berrichon: Parcours d’un “collabo”, 1991. Gaultier served in the Information ministry with Paul Marion and Hervé Pleven, joined the Milice, later the Waffen SS.
[8] L’Etudiant français (Action française student paper), issue date of 15 Feb 21.
[9] Kennedy himself soon sold off his interest in RKO and got out of the film business by 1930, except for occasional advisory work for Paramount and others. The story is told in many places; one is Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years (2010).
[10] I cannot tell when Hervé joined RKO France. However in 1935 we find him as general counsel, on a business trip to New York, in a trade publication: Film Daily for Friday, April 5, 1935.
[11] Jean Monnet (1888-1979) was a polymath financier, diplomat, politician, often called a founding father of the EEC/EU.
[12] There seem to have been many financial institutions with the approximate name Blair & Co. This one, a New York-based investment bank, merged with Bank of America/Transamerica in 1929. Like J. P. Morgan & Co., Blair specialized in international loans to foreign governments. As an interesting aside, biographer Bougeard notes that the young John Foster Dulles advised Blair & Co. (including Jean Monnet and René Pleven) when negotiating a loan to Warsaw. Dulles and Pleven would again meet up during the Fourth Republic, when Pleven was variously prime minister, foreign minister or defense minister, and Dulles was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. There is a famous but unsubstantiated legend that in 1954 Dulles offered «deux bombes atomique» to foreign minister Georges Bidault, who refused the offer on the grounds that the bombs would kill the whole French garrison. M. Bidault claims this in the Peter Davis documentary, Hearts and Minds (1974).
[13] Automatic Telephone Company, Europe, was the London-based subsidiary of an American firm that pioneered telephone switching equipment for direct dialing. I have read that René also worked in Canada, and perhaps America, but the record is unclear whether he worked in situ or simply reported there or attended business meetings.
[14] Christian Bougeard, René Pleven: Un Français libre en politique. Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1994.
[15] William R. Keylor, Charles de Gaulle: A Thorn in the Side of Six American Presidents. Rowan & Littlefield, 2020. A good description of what proved to be René’s fool’s errand in America 1940, in one of the few books on de Gaulle that give more than brief mention of René Pleven.
Moscow claims Kiev handed out counterfeit money infected with tuberculosis to children in a village in the Lugansk People’s Republic in 2020
Moscow claims Ukraine tried to infect the pro-Russian population in the Lugansk People’s Republic with tuberculosis (TB) and allowed the Pentagon to carry out human experiments at Kharkov’s psychiatric wards.
During a briefing on the findings of the Russian Defense Ministry’s investigation into the purportedly US-funded bioweapon labs in Ukraine, Chief of Russia’s Radioactive, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov claimed that Russian forces had obtained evidence suggesting Kiev attempted to infect residents of the Slavyanoserbsk district of the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) with a highly pathogenic strain of tuberculosis in 2020.
“Leaflets made in the form of counterfeit banknotes were infected with the causative agent of tuberculosis and distributed among minors in the village of Stepovoe,” Kirillov said, adding that the organizers of this crime took into account the behavior of children, which includes “putting things in their mouth” and handling food without washing their hands.
German confectioner Haribo has reportedly announced plans to suspend supplies to Russia, as its recent economic difficulties there have been seriously aggravated by the military conflict between Moscow and Kiev.
“An already tough economic environment” in Russia has been recently exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine strife, sending prices for primary produce soaring, supply chains changing and prices for logistics increasing, according to a message sent by the company to retail chains, as quoted by Russian business daily Kommersant.
Russia’s daily need of Haribo’s Gummi Bears will soon need to be satisfied by domestic production, say media analysts.
“The company’s management decided to suspend production for the Russian market until further notice,” the message, signed by Haribo CEO Walter Nikolaus, reads.
Recipes for Gummi Bears may be found on the interwebz.
Just a few days before Russia launched its special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, the heads of the then-unrecognized Donbass breakaway republics reported publicly that tensions were rising and called for the evacuation of the civilian population. Since the start of the offensive, Russia has reportedly accepted around 200,000 people from the republic, while the UN estimates the total number of people fleeing Ukraine at over 2 million people.
A lot have been accommodated in Rostov Region bordering the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Local hotels are used for shelter, and food and supplies keep coming through the humanitarian effort. I got in touch with one of the organizations helping with the refugee program and have been able to interview a number of people in a hotel located on the left bank of the Don River. This is where you can meet women and children who fled from the war that tore up their homes.
Abandoned child’s toy sits unhappily in unnamed courtyard in far-away country of which we know nothing.
Natalya is from Gorlovka, a town not far from the city of Donetsk. Gorlovka, as is well known, was the sight of the most gruesome and devastating battles a few years ago. On the morning of the interview, I was looking through the reports, and they made it clear that both Donetsk and the surrounding areas were again an active war zone that even most war reporters were no longer allowed to enter. As we talk, Natalya keeps drinking coffee, smoking one cigarette after another, and trying to keep in check a sturdy boy of about five years old. Natalya is here with her younger son and a grandson. Her husband, who serves with the DPR People’s Militia, thought it best to send them away to a safer place.
“On February 18, we were shelled at night. A bomb exploded not far from us. Thank God none of us were hurt, but we got really scared, especially the little one. As soon as evacuation was announced we packed and left. It took us no longer than 15 minutes.
“My husband has been with the militia since May 2014. Last year we were in the thick of things and saw everything with our own eyes. Our son is 14, and he is a very scared boy. He was only 5 when the war started. He learned to respond to air raid alerts before many other things. When we shouted ‘corridor!’ it meant he had to go hide in the corridor that instant, because it had no windows and was the safest place in the house. We used to hide in the corridor all the time. We didn’t have a basement we could use.
“There has been a lot of shelling over the past few years. It almost feels like we were bombed every day. Back in 2014 and 2015, Gorlovka was shelled a lot. Then it became less intense and the mines mostly landed on the outskirts, while the central parts of the town remained safe. But now it’s bad again, and no houses have any windows left in place. There’s some massive shelling going on. We’re really scared for the lives of our loved ones who are still there. I have trouble getting in touch with my husband. He calls me whenever he can, and if I pick up right away, we can talk. If I miss his window of opportunity, I keep waiting till the next time he tries to contact me. I’m scared.
“It was a very scary experience. You learn to recognize the threat by the sound. You can hear the launch, the projectile coming and you count one, two, three, four, five, explosion. “That’s when you have to hide in the corridor. If the projectile takes longer before it explodes it may land further away, but you never know, it may land closer. If it’s making a whistling sound, it’s a 120-mm gun. If it’s making a rustling sound, it’s a 150-mm one. But you can’t really guess where it’s going to hit. After each round, we get 10 to 20 minutes of silence. That’s when we can move.
“You always have to be on your toes listening, you can’t let your guard down even in your sleep. You have to walk carefully. When you hear explosions, you’d better get down immediately and hide; you have to always think where and how you can duck and hide.
“In 2014, we weren’t ready, so many were killed or injured. And now people try to stay safe and they know how to do it. My neighbor even fought on the frontline in the trenches. She had three concussions and can’t serve anymore for health reasons.
“When we arrived at the hotel here, there were fireworks. It was beautiful, there was some party not far from here, I guess. My son jumped to the floor from the bed – it’s a habit with him already. My grandson got nervous, ‘Grandma, what is it?’ So we had to take him outside and show it really was the fireworks, not the bombs.
“Airplanes also scared us at first. The last time we had to evacuate here briefly was after air raids. It’s a reflex – you see a plane, even a civilian one, you crouch, get to the ground and look for cover.
“We always tried to take our children to school and back. Sometimes the shelling wasn’t that intense and children could play outside freely.”
Foreign people climbing steps for exercise.
When asked what people from the DPR and LPR were thinking about the current events, Natalya answered in a heartbeat; she knows where her loyalty lies and why.
“People are happy. They are scared, of course, but happy. That’s progress, finally. For eight years, we’ve been living surrounded by enemies. And now they shell us more, people die, but that’s a start, we’ll punish those… monsters. Yes, monsters, I can’t call them anything else.
“We are mad. We are tired. We are waiting for them to finally get pushed away. The farther the better. Best if they were driven into Poland and got locked up there. We want to be home, more than anything else. It’s fine here, people are helping us, but we have homes. I was born in Gorlovka.
“Before the war, my husband was a coal miner. He worked in a mine until the House of Trade Unions was burned down in Odessa with people in it. It happened on May 2, and on May 5, my husband finished his shift and went off to war. And since then, I haven’t seen him much. He rarely visits us. Now they’re firing Grad missiles at Gorlovka. I’ve seen the explosions with my own eyes, it’s better to stay away from there.
“In 2014, a family was killed in a building next to ours. A shell hit the 8th floor of an apartment building. A husband, a wife, their son who’d just started the first grade at school and their 5-year-old daughter. Four floors collapsed after the shell hit. The building has been repaired, but people are too scared to live there.
“Why is it happening to us? Is it because we refused to speak and teach our children Ukrainian? Is it because we wanted to celebrate Victory Day? Or respect our elderly and history? Why did they have to kill us for that?
“I don’t understand Ukrainian. I was born and raised in Ukraine, but I mostly have Russian roots. My son knows history well – he likes to learn about these things. And he knows for a fact that we are not a part of Ukraine, and we’ve never been. It’s our region with all its resources that has been ‘feeding’ Ukraine, and now they say that we are poor and need to be subsidized.”
Nelly Ivanovna, another Gorlovka resident, has been evacuated to Rostov with her grandson. She still has relatives and friends living in Donetsk and other towns in the DPR. As she is talking to me, Elena, a younger woman from Donetsk, occasionally joins in on the conversation. There are other women, all with young children, who have something to say.
“We have been living under artillery fire ever since 2014. We keep talking to the media about it, but nothing changes. This isn’t normal. We’ve been living in a constant state of fear and anxiety. When they fire at us during the day, at least we know where to run to, but at night it’s a lot easier to give in to panic. You have to go through it yourself to understand – I could talk about these things for hours, but no words can describe what it’s really like out there.”
As the war dragged on, the women of the DPR have mastered ways of keeping themselves safe during shelling. They tell us how to move from shelter to shelter, talk about the range of fragments from shells, etc. This seems to be the first thing that comes to mind when asked about life in their hometowns.
“I used to be good friends with a family from Poltava. They speak Ukrainian. I love the language, I really do – it’s so rich and melodic. You must never use language as a pretext for war! Before, I would call my Ukrainian friends and tell them about our situation, about all the shelling. It seemed like they heard our plight, it seemed like they sympathized. And now that they heard some explosions outside their own city, they started to panic: ‘The Russians are invading our land!’ We have been living like this for eight years, and it’s still like that for us,” Nelly says.
“I called my relatives the other day. They said that on February 3, a shell hit a house on Korolenko Street. That’s the central part of the city. A family, including two young children, was hurt. People are afraid to leave their homes in fear of new attacks. It’s a nightmare.”
Nelly brings up ‘the Madonna of Gorlovka’ – the name Kristina Zhuk came to be known by on social media after she was killed by a Ukrainian shell in July 2014, along with her 10-month-old daughter. When it happened, Kristina was walking in the park with her daughter. A journalist who happened to be there witnessed the woman’s last agonizing moments, providing one of the first pieces of photographic evidence that Ukraine was using weapons indiscriminately against the people of Donbass.
‘We will never go back to Ukraine’: DPR fighter jailed for his views by Kiev talks to RT
An interview with a pro-Russian DPR militant from Odessa
With the military operation taking place in Ukraine, some might ask – how will the locals react? Eight years ago, the general consensus was that the southern and eastern regions were pro-Russian, but then the Kiev regime started to brutally repress activists who wanted closer ties with Moscow. An aggressive war propaganda campaign was launched targeting Russia.
RT spoke about this with Vladislav Dolgoshey, an activist from Odessa who spent four years in jail after being charged with “pro-Russian subversive activities” without any proof. In 2019, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange. After this interview, Vladislav went to the frontline as a volunteer and joined the People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
— What was your path to your pro-Russian political views?
I wouldn’t call my political views pro-Russian, they are just Russian. You have pro-Russian views when your position on certain issues reflects that of Russia as a state. I consider myself Russian – ethnically, spiritually, nationally. Yes, I was born in a different country, foreign to Russia, but that’s just my circumstances.
My views were shaped by my surroundings. Odessa is still the most Russian city in Ukraine. The Russian language is absolutely predominant, and even Ukrainian nationalists complain that when a Ukrainian comes to Odessa, they start speaking Russian. And the residents are very protective of their Odessa identity. That facilitates assimilation.
My upbringing also played its part. My father was a pro-Russian politician, but, to his credit, he never imposed any of his views on me, just recommended reading books. I read books written by Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historians.
— How did the Russian movement in Odessa react to the Euromaidan events?
The situation wasn’t great for us in 2014. President Yanukovych didn’t like the Russian movement very much, and this was his attitude to both nationalists and Orthodox activists. Despite this, more and more people joined our events every year. And these were very diverse groups – nationalists, Orthodox Christians, leftists, all united by one idea – their Russian identity.
Our reaction to the Euromaidan events was negative from the very beginning. First of all, we knew who was behind it. We understood which side Euromaidan turned to and knew for a fact that the West was not the political community we wanted to belong to.
We began to form militia units in February, but we were too late. Maidan had already happened, it had its hit squads and money. We acted fast, like in that saying about Russians taking their time to prepare for something but then moving fast. But we still were unprepared for what was to come. Russians are kind people. We had no idea something like the tragic events of May 2 could really happen. (Ukrainian nationalists murdered 50 pro-Russian demonstrators in the Trade Unions House during the protests. Vladimir Putin promised to find and punish the perpetrators in his 21st February speech — RT.)
The leaders kept saying that it was a peaceful protest, just people defending their rights and fighting for democracy. But once the West comes, there can be no democracy. All pro-Western revolutions were not about democracy – their goal was to create a corrupt system of colonial control. Democracy is something the West wants only for itself. And the West turned Ukraine into an unstable structure vulnerable to outside influence.
— What’s changed after the May 2 tragedy?
There were some legal political activities allowed by the Kiev regime. They were carried out by old people with Communist and religious views. But Ukrainian radicals had the nerve to attack even these grandmas and grandpas. Many healthy strong men went to the frontline, to the Donbass. Of course, not everybody made it. 100-150 inmates would be incarcerated in the Odessa jail at a time – these people were arrested as they tried to make their way to the Donbass.
There were also underground groups operating in Odessa and the Odessa Region. The indictment against me – and I would like to stress that the charges have never been proven – said that the allegedly sabotage unit under my command perpetrated terrorist attacks and sabotage activities across several regions in the southeast of Ukraine. The underground movement existed for around 18 months, engaged in this invisible struggle. Trust me when I say that 18 months is a really long time for an underground movement with no experience, no bases and no resources.
— Why have there been no tragedies comparable to the Odessa one in other cities across the southeastern part of the country?
You have to understand that Odessa was a stronghold of the pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. We’ve always been very vocal about it, and even now our people are not happy about the Ukrainian government. There are rumors that the current mayor of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov, has a Russian passport and actually holds pro-Russian views. I don’t think these rumors are true, even though Trukhanov did make a speech at Kulikovo Pole Square not long before May 2 happened. So, in this period, between the Euromaidan winning and the tragedy, he was on our side. Then he made a U-turn, which is pretty typical of politicians.
Moreover, not many people know that they used force to crush pro-Russian movements in other Ukrainian cities as well. Take Zhitomir. Nothing like May 2 happened there, of course, but Zhitomir is not Odessa – it’s closer to the western part of the country. It was bad in Kharkov, and in Nikolayev they burned a makeshift camp. But it wasn’t on camera and the media didn’t cover it, though it was a real struggle, a street war and there were casualties.
To give you a better idea of what was happening, I can tell you that one Euromaidan supporter who later became part of the Azov Battalion (forbidden in the Russian Federation) claimed that even the war was less scary than Kharkov in 2014. You never knew what direction you could be hit from, you were always on the lookout for a sneak attack. It was the same in Odessa. We had a literal war in the streets, with cars and houses set on fire. People were being killed, some went missing. That was the civil war – it was back then.
— So why did the ideas of the ‘Russian Spring’ fail to triumph in most of the Ukrainian southeast in 2014?
They didn’t fail in 2014. The ‘Russian spring’ ended in 2015, after Minsk II. Until then, even though there were no military hostilities and no frontlines, hundreds and thousands of people were politically active and involved in the underground movement in Odessa and other places. It’s obvious if you look at the sheer number of political prisoners in Ukraine that were later swapped for POWs.
US hints at what would happen were Zelensky to be killed
Washington confirms “continuity of government” plans exist for Ukraine
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said on Sunday that the Ukrainian government has “plans in place” to ensure the “continuity of government” should President Volodymr Zelensky be killed. Zelensky insists he is still in Kiev, but western officials have already reportedly planned to set him up as a leader in exile.
“The Ukrainians have plans in place that I’m not going to talk about or get into any details on to make sure that there is what we would call continuity of government one way or another,” Blinken told CBS News when asked about the prospect on Sunday, adding “let me leave it at that.”
The US’ top diplomat then called Zelensky and his cabinet the “embodiment of these incredibly brave Ukrainian people.”
Blinken, President Joe Biden, and a broad array of NATO and Western leaders have offered Zelensky similar messages of support, as well as shipments of arms and humanitarian aid. However, decision makers in Washington and Europe have explicitly ruled out direct military intervention, and refused to implement a “no-fly zone.” The latter, which Zelensky has repeatedly requested, would see the US and NATO commit to shooting down Russian aircraft over Ukraine, a move that Moscow has said it would consider an act of war.
Although Zelensky’s military is receiving a steady stream of western weapons, Russia has been advancing through Ukraine in the 11 days since its forces first crossed the country’s borders. Some cities have been taken by Russian troops and others – including Kharkov, Mariupol, Volnovakha and Kiev – are currently encircled.
This encirclement has given rise to speculation that Zelensky might have already fled Kiev. While the president has appeared in nondescript surroundings during most of his recent video addresses, he released a video on Instagram on Friday purportedly shot in his Kiev office, saying that “nobody has fled anywhere.”
Despite Zelensky’s declared commitment to the fight, US officials have already brainstormed plans to extricate the Ukrainian leader. Days into the conflict, Zelensky was reportedly offered an evacuation from Kiev, which he said he refused. According to reports in multiple American news outlets over the weekend, Western officials have discussed supporting a possible Zelensky government in exile, as the Trump administration attempted to do with Venezeulan opposition leader Juan Guaido in 2019.
Plans mooted reportedly include Zelensky governing from the western Ukrainian city of Lvov, or from another European country. Some political figures in the US and Europe, most notably former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have suggested supporting a possible Ukrainian insurgency against Russian forces in this evantuality.
