The Elves of Bucha

It was a thousand years ago. It was yesterday. It may have never happened.

I am an Eagle of Manwë. 

I am seventeen. I’m dressed in old jeans, a light-grey jersey that looks a bit like chainmail and—important!—a dark travelling cloak (it may be a badly cut piece of dark brown fabric but, for me, it’s a cloak). My head is adorned with a specially made hat that identifies me as an eagle of Manwë, depicting something that vaguely resembles watchful bird eyes so that everyone knows I am only an observer of the Games. The Hobbit Games.

Of course, to start with, I wanted to be an elf, and I wanted to be on an exciting quest. But I was not camping on-site for the whole week of the event, and thus couldn’t belong to the main races—or camps—of Middle-earth that pitched their Soviet-made tents in the woods near the small Ukrainian town of Bucha, a favourite holidaying spot for the Kyivans. And so, I took up the role of a day-tripping Eagle, the observer-from-above.  

… And there was a lot to observe. My generation was hungry for the newly-discovered worlds of fantasy, a genre which had been banned in the Soviet Union. While science-fiction was deemed to be acceptable, fantasy was dangerously close to mysticism and the supernatural; who knows what ideas it might give the Soviet citizens! But in the early 1990s, the genie of literary imagination was released from its tightly-sealed bottle, and it drove us slightly mad. Its magic was mixed with an intoxicating feeling of chaos and freedom as we, teenagers, watched the citadel of the Soviet Union crumble around us. We were entering uncharted territories and, sure enough, they were full of perils: not at all magical, but perils nonetheless. The fall of the Soviet Empire was followed by a spectacular economic collapse; most of the former Soviet citizens suddenly descended into even deeper poverty. The future was so bright that it was practically invisible. But for us, the young ones, this uncertainty was exhilarating. We wanted to go on our own quests, slay our own dragons, and live happily ever after in our brave new world.

In 1991, when the tanks entered Red Square and the Soviet Union expired after the brief three-day agony of the August putsch, the Lord of the Rings in Russian translation made its entrance into our lives. The empire we lived in broke into fifteen independent countries, governments continued to rise and fall, banks went bankrupt, our money became nothing but useless paper, and the Ukrainians unofficially switched to using US dollars. The idea of professional work and its relation to income was completely re-defined. Professional engineers, historians, statisticians and musicians were losing their jobs overnight, forced to enter into wild post-Soviet “small business” careers, selling all sorts of goods brought by trains from China or Mongolia. They stood from dawn to dusk in scorching heat and freezing cold at the open-air markets controlled by local criminals. We all were on a speeding runaway train, the way ahead covered in a thick fog. The world around us was burning like Mordor after the destruction of the Ring. That’s when we invented the Hobbit Games and started playing them on the smoking ruins of the Soviet empire everywhere from Vladivostok to Crimea.

We changed our names to Elvish ones and made ourselves travelling cloaks. We studied the language of Quenya because our native Russian and Ukrainian were far too mundane and boring. We were an Elven generation who went on a quest to destroy the Ring of the Evil Past.

In the lush woods around Bucha, my Middle-earth brethren were fighting with wooden swords, casting unregulated magic spells right, left and centre, and, in the evenings, drinking far too much homemade vodka while crooning homemade songs about battles, wizards, love and dragons until the camps finally fell asleep. They all were there: the Elves, the Hobbits, the Rohirrim, the Orcs, the Haradrim, and some more obscure Middle-earth people who wanted to be Elves but missed the registration deadline. For my own day-trip, I was assigned to the Lothlorien camp. It was full of sleepy forest Elves who couldn’t muster enough energy to raid the Orcs’ camp that day; there had been too much drinking and singing the night before. A friend of mine, who signed up as a freelance Elf, had invented her own quest which involved a lot of hiding around in the bushes and tall grass; I still don’t know what her quest was and doubt anyone else did. But I remember her perfectly content face, as she was skulking around with a wooden dagger at her belt. 

I don’t remember who won that game but it was definitely not the Elves or the Hobbits. I think it was one of the “dark” camps who found and appropriated the Ring of Power; it all ended in more drinking and singing and cloak-swishing under the ancient oaks and pine trees, with everyone being quite happy. Did anyone destroy the Ring? I don’t think so. What happened to it? I don’t know. The morning after the Game, the peoples of Middle-earth packed up their tents, their cloaks and wooden swords, and headed for the Bucha and Irpen railway stations. It was only a forty minute ride back to the Kyiv Central station, where former engineers and museum curators were selling cheap T-shirts (I LOVE NEW YORK) in underground pedestrian crossings… 

Like most dreams, our Middle-earth wasn’t destined to survive. Less than a decade after starting my career as an Eagle of Manwë, I packed my suitcase, boarded a plane and immigrated to New Zealand, my personal Middle-earth. It all started with an accidental glance at a Ukrainian newspaper: it told me that Peter Jackson had discovered the true Middle-earth of our world somewhere in the Southern hemisphere. So, why not? Eagles can fly, and so did I: away from the terrifying instability of post-Soviet Ukraine, on my new fantasy quest. It has been the longest quest of my life; there were dragons, but not as I imagined them. There was magic in the most unexpected places. There was hope: it flickered, promised, burned bright, died down, and sprang back to life again. It kept changing shape like all flames and shadows do, and it kept being elusive. 

February 2022. Bucha. A thousand miles away. Right here.

Bucha, Irpen, Vorzel. Small towns to the north of Kyiv, towards the border with Belarus. For centuries, Kyivans linked these names with the images of picturesque woods, spring carpets of bluebells, wild strawberries and forest lakes with sandy beaches. And, for my Tolkien-crazed generation, the camps of Elves, Hobbits and Gondorians. Our Middle-earth. The place where we once tried to destroy the Ring of Power, the Ring of the Evil Past. And failed.

… It all started suddenly, late winter 2022. When the first delicate snowdrops showed their hopeful faces in the forests around Bucha, they were squashed beneath the toothed wheels of military tanks. In early March, it rained bombs. The land was violated, scorched, and ruthlessly dug up to make space for mass graves, for mutilated, scorched bodies of people who had lived near the forests and commuted to Kyiv. The bodies of people who planned their first spring picnics just days and weeks before the sudden invasion. The bodies of people who used to dream, hope, love.

“It’s all a fake. Surely, it can’t be true? Surely?”-–asked my Mum, whose own mother barely escaped a concentration camp and certain death back in the 1940s. My Mum, who grew up in a small Ukrainian town haunted by the memories of unspeakable Nazi war crimes. Now, from their New Zealand home, my parents watched the news and did not want to believe what they saw and heard. “But it can’t be true! Surely…?” I didn’t answer. I thought of the human bodies lying in the mud, mixed with dirty snow. Of the people crowded in their neighbours’ cellars, standing room only. Of the patients from the local hospital who didn’t survive without medicine, food, heating and water. In my mind, I could hear the gunshots aimed at family cars trying to escape. I could see the armed men at roadblocks on the forest roads, waiting. I could see the shallow trenches, hastily dug into the frozen ground, to bury victims. If they cared to bury them at all. They. The invaders. Humans, just like the rest of us. “But surely, it can’t be true…?”

Many Ukrainians nicknamed them the “Orcs”—another legacy of the nation’s obsession with Middle-earth. But they weren’t Orcs. Those who committed the Bucha massacre were people. Or, shall we say, “the military”: armed people trained to follow orders. Any orders. All orders. They killed and burned their way through Ukrainian forests, villages and towns towards Kyiv. In April, unable to progress any farther, they turned back, leaving behind the ugly, distorted metal corpses of their tanks. And the dead. And grief. So, so much grief.

It’s a shame we didn’t take the quest of destroying the Ring of Power seriously back in the 1990s. Perhaps it was because we did not take any power seriously; we believed that it would perish by itself, that it had already perished together with the Soviet Union, and we had nothing to fear. And there was plenty of time for singing, drinking and falling in love. “But surely…”

Grass is slowly growing over the sites of mass graves. In spring, there might be bluebells and wild strawberries. After all, the soil was generously fed. But no one will venture out into the woods for picnics yet. There are bad memories. And there are ground mines. Hidden under the lush carpets of bluebells and lilies-of-the-valley, undetected. Those woods are haunted by the dark shadow of violence and will remain so for generations to come.

The Bucha massacre happened. It was true. It wasn’t fake. The Hobbit Games are over. But I am still an Eagle of Manwë. I keep observing. Watching. Remembering. 

Bucha is far away and long ago. Bucha is right here and now. Our lost Middle-earth, our violated dream, our rude awakening. Did some of the invaders, the creatures who committed the unspeakable in Bucha, also play the Hobbit Games back in the 1990s, somewhere near Moscow or Novosibirsk? But surely, that is not true. Surely…?

The forest grass and bluebells keep growing. Far away, in Ukraine. Right next to my heart.