Марина Демко Maryna Demko

And at about eleven o'clock in the afternoon, he called me and said, "Maryna, I've been wounded, and they're trying to kidnap me." And I told him, "Are you joking or what?" — "Maryna, this is serious, people have come, they are like this." I said, "What about you? Did they let you talk?" — "I closed, managed to [close] the gate, and the dogs — I'm in the neighbor's yard, there are very big angry dogs — and they are holding them back for now, but they will come in soon. So that you know they are trying to take me away. They wounded me with a weapon." I just don't know, there is some kind of an abyss under me. I don't know, I feel like I'm flying somewhere. I do not understand what to do. I asked him, "What should I do?". He said, "Call the police". And he hung up the phone. He told me something, that a car like this had arrived. There are so many people there, "they shot at me with a rifle, and now they want to take me away." I start calling the police, and my entire team is present. We went to our base to celebrate as a team. It's May 8, we have a working day, but we decided to go as a team." — So you were outside the city? — Yes. And everyone realizes that something has happened. I said that I was in a situation where I needed to call the police quickly, I couldn't get through. They give me a number to call, a cell phone number, not 02. And I get through to the officer on duty and tell him. He listens to me carefully and then asks me something, I don't remember what the phrase was. Something like, "Did you smoke something in the morning?" I realize that he doesn't believe me. I understand him now, why he doesn't believe me. Because everything was calm in Makiivka at that time. Nothing was happening there, no rallies, nothing. There were no armed groups going around, and so on. I don't know what to do. What to do with this, what's going on. Then my husband called me again. He said, "That's it, I can't talk anymore. Now, they will come in because they will shoot these dogs. They will come in anyway, so now the neighbor will let them in. She will lock the dogs. But try to do something, call someone, apply somewhere, and even run away. Get out of Makiivka because they will be looking for you too." Then, after a while... I was already trying to find transportation to go somewhere into the city. And a surgeon calls me from the hospital. He said, "Your husband was brought to us with a gunshot wound. Well, he is alive, everything will be fine. But the situation here is complicated. These people are already guarding him here."

And on March 1, by the way, when I came to this rally, the director finally persuaded me that it would not be political and that if I wanted to support him, I should come. I thought, I'll go, I have to support the director. When I arrived, I either didn't hear or didn't want to hear something. I came to Donetsk's Lenin Square, the central square of the city. And I see some event, some scene unfolding near this Lenin [monument]. People are shouting something from the stage, lots of Russian flags. These people are gathering around these, a bunch of them, people in headbands. And they're like dogs in a herd, they're all in a herd, in a bunch. When you look at it from the outside, it's scary. I studied psychology, I have never practiced, but I still have knowledge, because I didn't study for money, I studied with my own knowledge. I remember these techniques, methods of crowd control. I read it only in books, so to speak. I never actually saw it. And here I see it with my own eyes. From the outside, how it happens, this crowd, they gather it. They call out some slogan. And they start to swing like this, these people, shouting. It's such a scary experience. I am so scared. I don't know where to go. I see the police standing there. They are standing separately from everyone else. But they are just watching. They don't take part in it. They are not trying to disperse it. And I stood next to them. It seemed to me that this was the safest place. I'm watching this. I call my colleagues. I said, "What's going on?". They said, "It's a normal rally". But as it turned out, they were in a completely different place. I wandered into the wrong place. But I saw this terrible event on March 1, when they elected the governor, or whatever they call it, this crowd. There were not many of them there, but somehow it looked very strange and scary.

No, when I met them [my husband's parents], it was no longer forbidden. Because it was [19]88, it was already the "perestroika," a lot of things had already appeared, but there was very little of them... — What did they read? — Various things... There were even Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and various magazines, very different ones, and even a lot of printed samizdat. They read all of it. This was such news to me because my father used to tell me that Stalin was a kind of deity. He believed him. And then this world somehow crumbled in my mind and eyes. It was difficult for me. But... I can't say that I was afraid of it. It was interesting. And it was so new and unusual for me.

My grandmother once told me that she had to go to work on a collective farm, but it was very responsible. You couldn't get sick or skip out, or be late. You could even go to jail for that. And she tells how they had a newborn calf living right in their house. It was cold; he was born early, and they had to take him inside to keep him warm. And this calf took her skirt during the night and trampled it into a gap in the floor. And she could not find this skirt and could not go to work, she did not have another one. She told me then how scared she was because if she didn't come to work, she would be imprisoned, she could be [sent] to some camp... They sent them there for this and everything. She had three children at the time. And she was very afraid of this. She found just the edge of this skirt, pulled it out, it was very crumpled, and she went to work, she was on time, she was so happy. I didn't understand how this could happen. It seemed to me that we live in such a great country that it cannot be possible for people to be treated like this. And that there could be such poverty that a person did not have any spare clothes. And my father told me that he didn't have proper pants to wear to school. He had to leave school and start working.