Валерія Пімкіна Valeriia Pimkina

At that time, all my friends that I talked to — the circle of friends had changed a little bit — were already supporting Euromaidan. Except for my husband. He later changed his views, and he thanked me very much after all that. He said that it was probably thanks to me that he became who he is because, at first, he thought it was all bullshit, "Lera, what are you talking about, what kind of things do you even believe in?" But all of my friends, my social circle, and many people at work supported Euromaidan. And when the gorotdel [city police station] was occupied in Kramatorsk, we had a very symbolic rally near the plane [a monument to a Soviet airplane]. All the supporters of Euromaidan and Ukraine in general gathered there. We gathered near the plane and stood there. We were separated by two lines of police officers, and on this side were all the imported titushkas [pro-Russian hired muscle]. There were a lot of them, they were very aggressive. I left the stroller to my husband and said, “Leave. And I'm going.” And I went to the plane. The air there was thick with enough pressure and tension to cut with a knife. We realized that nothing was stopping them now. Gorotdel was occupied, the police were just... it was unclear who they obeyed. Who were they? Who were they for? Nobody knew. That was the last time we came out with a Ukrainian rally. After that, we did not go out. It was scary. It was really scary because people started disappearing in basements and all these stories. It was the last time we came out. — When was it? — April 17, [2014].

I remember when we did the first renovation with Andriy, we scraped together some money, saved up and put up orange wallpaper. And then my mother-in-law came. She was from Donetsk herself. And she said, “Lera, you're going to get your windows smashed for orange wallpaper.” It was just then, I remember, that the Orange Revolution was happening. I supported Yushchenko. I had an orange jacket. My father would call and say, “Take it off immediately, put on a sheepskin coat. You will be beaten at the institute”. I didn't take it off. I wore this jacket, and then I got pregnant with Masha and wore it too, in that orange jacket, in 2006. And I kept wearing it. And we had orange wallpaper. And everyone around me said that Yanukovych was our president. That he was just “strong and so good”. And only my director, and then the next director, supported Yushchenko from my circle. — What was your motivation for supporting the Orange Revolution? — Because it seemed to me that this was the right European development. Not what was going on at the time. And I said that your Yanukovych is just some kind of a swindler, I'm ashamed to look at him. This man cannot be a leader. Everything he did... Plus, we have the Donetsk region, we saw it all. We produced Pshonka, we gave birth to him, the prosecutor. We produced Rayisa Bohatyryiova, who was the head of the maternity hospital in Kramatorsk. This whole Party of Regions is from our [area], this is where its roots are. It's just a bunch of thugs that I've never liked. — What effect did the Orange Revolution have on Donetsk, the Donetsk region, and the East in general? — I think there was little resonance. In the sense of any vibrations, there were few. There was a lot of disinformation, all this stuff during the elections. Many of my friends went as observers or something else, observed those elections on behalf of different parties. Because we were students and everyone wanted to make money back then. And everyone saw what they were doing, and how those ballots were being planted in stacks. There was a lot of falsification. And the worst thing is that my environment perceived it as “well, okay, what's the big deal? We need daddy [Yanukovych] to win”. And it was really yucky. Many people at my university supported Yanukovych. They used to walk around with these umbrellas... He was handing out beautiful umbrellas with a cane, blue and white, [saying] "Party of Regions”. Almost everyone supported him, and it was considered normal to cheat, falsify, and do other things. For some reason, it was thought to be okay.

In Kramatorsk, so that you understand, Machine Builders' Day was celebrated in the same way, on the same scale [as October Revolution Day]. And every demonstration ended with people breaking up into groups and going home to celebrate. There were no such cafes then, no place to do all this — we're talking about the [19]80s, the early 80s. And everyone went home to celebrate. We played records, ate, and the girls made various salads. We always had a lot of people in our family. We had records, my father had a stereo system, and he loved it — he would shake the record like this, blow on it, wipe the needle like this... He had some kind of velvet to wipe the needle. My father was very fond of good music — I probably got it from him. I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, all that kind of stuff — he loved it very much. We also played Russian rock, which came a little later. “Nautilus was still young in those days, of course, the Beatles, that's the story. Yeah, Ihor Korneliuk. Because it was good for everyone else to dance to. My father played the piano, everyone sang and danced. And we always had a bunch of people, like ten people at least. And how many we had after these demonstrations, how everyone came to us. I liked it, we always had music playing, it always smelled like something from the oven, my mom was roasting meat. And that smell was always somehow holiday-like... Now when I am roasting a chicken, I feel like I am going to have guests because I remember the smell from my childhood. There were such holidays, demonstrations, and the city day was very much celebrated. On the city day, the factory workers were always given some extra money, like bonuses. And then people would go on a spending spree. They would buy something tasty for the holidays. — You mentioned the celebration of Machine Builder's Day in the 80s, how did this day evolve, and how long was it celebrated? — It is still celebrated. The evolution was very interesting. In the nineties, when it was very difficult for factories to survive, it was not celebrated very much, people just celebrated in their apartments, and that was it. Later, it became a big deal when the factories were already on their feet. Everyone in the city knew it was Machine Builder's Day. And everyone was given bonuses, and the bonuses were good because [Heorhiy Markovych] Skudar became the director, as I said. He became the president of the factory, a shareholder, bought out people's shares, and became the real owner of the factory through all these stories and schemes. But he gave bonuses to people in the amount of 100%, sometimes 200% of their salaries. And people received these bonuses and went to spend them in the city. The city's economy simply flourished on that day. It was the first Saturday of September and the first Sunday of September, or the second, somewhere around there. And then they paid. Everyone was happy, cafes were booked starting on Tuesday. On Tuesday, one department, a factory; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — it was impossible to go do anything, to sit down in the city. Especially the whole week before Machine Builder's Day, because people booked entire cafes, entire departments and workshops together. Then money appeared, and it started to be celebrated like that. At first, it was the factory that was organizing it. If we're talking about the 2000s, it was the factory that organized it, bringing Taisiya Povaliy and Nastia Kamenskykh, as was the custom on the stages there. By the way, I worked on stage at several of these events. It was paid for by the factory, NKMZ [Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant]. And then, when the city and the director of this plant started to have difficulties with the city, our [constituency] MP Maksym Viktorovych Yefimov started paying for it, and the whole holiday turned into Maksym Viktorovych Yefimov's holiday instead of Machine Builder's Day and City Day.

My great-grandmother Polia and her younger brother... She was five years old when the Holodomor happened, and her brother was a little bit younger. Their mother gave birth to two children, twins. Just at that exact time when there was a famine. And she was lying, my great-grandmother told me, she was lying on the bed and couldn't get up. And those two children died of hunger right next to her. They were small, she was five, so he was four or three, doesn't matter. And they already understood... My mom couldn't even get up, she had no strength. And they dug... There was an earthen floor, they dug a hole right inside the house. They did not go out because my mother did not allow them to leave the house because they could be eaten. Because there was cannibalism in the village back then. And they buried those children. And she said, “I didn't dig enough. And I still dream about that little hand." My great-grandmother died when she was 75. And she said that she still could see that hand. In our house, my grandmother had these cloth sacks with breadcrumbs in the pantry. We didn't throw away any bread at all. Not even for the birds. It was dried so that it would not become moldy, there were these cloth sacks, and everything was lined with these cloth sacks. Even when my grandmother was clearing the table, she would pick up the crumbs and put them in her mouth. She had this habit of putting all the crumbs from the table into her mouth. I said, “Well, there's no famine anymore.” And she said, “I can't unlearn this habit.” That's why the Holodomor was a topic in our family, and my grandmother, when baking Easter cakes, was always reminiscing about it, and it was quite painful for her to talk about it.