Олена Руденко Olena Rudenko

At that time, the factories gave out — I don't know what it was called — they gave out things to people. And so the Novokramatorsk people [employees of the Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant] were given Mawin jeans. It was so cool! And my parents were already working in the North [Russian Far North], and they did not get Mawins. So I was very jealous that my friends had those. And then my dad brought me jeans, they were called pyramids. And a denim skirt with zippers. This was a high-waisted denim skirt with zippers. Oh, yeah! Ping leggins, Karlsson bangs. — How did you do the bangs? — I curled my hair, braided it at night, and then styled it, applied hairspray. And when we ran out of hairspray, we would beat sugar with water. And I remember we were already in the 10th or 11th grade, going to discos with my girlfriends. And when we got together, there was no hairspray! What to do? So we used that sugar and put it on everything. Would it dry? It was cold outside, we needed to dry it. Where to dry it? You can't dry it with a hair dryer, it will [spoil the hairstyle]. We would turn on the oven, sit by it, and then go outside, and we would have sugar crystals in our hair, like glittering, beautiful.

At first, people, you know, they had a pension there, yes, a thousand hryvnias, and here they were given a pension of ten thousand rubles, which is three thousand hryvnias. “Oh, we have such a good pension, such a pension!” Only from June to July 2014, all prices tripled overnight. That is, instantly. Those Crimeans who were employed, who had some kind of business, were not happy at all. That is, they were all against it. And those who were just hired laborers, who rented out some sheds, they didn't care. They ran to that referendum and shouted, "Now we will prosper! We'll be raking in the money with a shovel." And in 2016 — when they declared a tax holiday, no one demanded anything from anyone — in [20]16, the tax authorities began to demand payment of taxes very harshly. And then people started [complaining], “Why should I pay taxes? I'm just renting my apartment.” Well, you rent it out, it's income, you have to pay. And one of the neighbors said, “What did they expect? They wanted to live in Russia under Ukrainian lawlessness!” And I said, “But you are the same! You didn't observe either those laws or these laws." Well, there are many people who are very dissatisfied, many people who were forced to take this citizenship. That is, people were not allowed to run their businesses, although no one talks about it, not even a single [Crimean]. “Oh, we have it so good now!” No one says that the Simferopol-Yalta road was built before [20]14, and that's it, no one else has been building it. That is, what has been done is what it is now. Yes, they built the Tavrida highway [the Kerch-Simferopol-Sevastopol highway built during the Russian occupation of Crimea]. But it was not built for people.

My son and my husband insisted that my child, my daughter and I leave. My son told me that he wouldn’t leave Kharkiv until we got out of Kramatorsk. — When did this happen? — It happened on April 6 [2022]. I kept delaying, postponing, and for some reason, I wanted to leave on April 8 [the day the Russians struck the Kramatorsk railway station where people were waiting for evacuation trains, killing 61 people]. We were heading to Kryvyi Rih, where my son’s university classmates were. They called, “We’ll take you in, come on over, we’ll meet you.” Evacuation trains didn’t go through Kryvyi Rih, so we had to take the Odesa-bound train through Dnipro. And I said to my husband, “Let’s go on the eighth.” We went to the station to buy a ticket, and the women [at the counter] said: “There are no tickets for the eighth. Here, we’ve got some” — the train ran on even dates — “for the sixth.” Since it was the morning of the sixth, “Okay, let’s do it.” So we hurriedly grabbed what we had, got the tickets, and I said to my husband, “Come with us.” But his mother was still there. He said, “I won’t leave my mother. I’ll stay with mom.” So I left with the younger child. We reached Dnipro. We put on everything we could, put some things in the bag, and left. We spent the night at the train station in Dnipro, it was hard. There were six or seven air raid alerts [that night], and every time there was an alert, they made us go down to the underground parking areas from the waiting hall. There were many people, many with kids, so there was almost no space at the train station. And then some guys — police officers and the girls at the ticket counters — advised me, since I didn’t know how to get to Kryvyi Rih, we’d managed to reach Dnipro, but that was it, “Why pay for the buses? At six in the morning, there will be an elektrychka [commuter train]. You can sit comfortably and go.” They immediately gave us free tickets for the elektrychka. We arrived in Kryvyi Rih, and [my son’s friends] met us there. They gave us their apartment — the one they had rented to live separately from their parents. They just gave it to us. But my son tricked me and didn’t come. He still stayed in Kharkiv because, he said, “Mom, at work, in our basement, we have about 160 people. I just can’t. How can we abandon them? They all have to be evacuated from here. There are women, children, entire families.” And only after they got everyone out, evacuated them all, did he come to us. Then we were together. I finally calmed down.

While I was still in Kyiv, I got in touch with some girls, we wrote back and forth. The Sewing Unit is a group of volunteer women who sew for our military, especially for the wounded. They sent me patterns, I can sew a little. They sent me patterns for sewing underwear for the guys, for the wounded. I [used] some of my own sheets [as fabric], then we went to secondhand shops to buy T-shirts, remade them, when there were sales, sewing underwear for the guys. Some nice soft fabric. Then my daughter and I — she’s a little girl and needs to learn something, to be kept busy with something — so we sewed underwear and delivered it. The first time we went to a hospital in Kyiv, I asked [for someone], and the head nurse came out, and I gave it to her. We kept sewing bit by bit and delivering. When we returned home [to Kramatorsk], there wasn’t really any work. Almost everything was still closed. It’s only now, a year later, that many things have reopened — stores, cafes, some production facilities. But back then, there was nothing, and we needed something to do. And right then, the girls from the Sewing Unit posted [patterns for] gloves for the guys [military], so we started sewing gloves. Simple gloves. I wrote to some girls [I knew before] — once I took some tailoring and sewing courses, and they have their own fabric store. They sent me some subpar pieces, just fleece scraps and other materials for lining, to make the gloves warm. Our teacher, my daughter’s homeroom teacher, even sent over her own fur coat. And there were three or four girls here, classmates of my Myroslava, and I said, “Let’s learn. I know you won’t make it right away.” I made cardboard patterns for them, and they would trace them, cut them out, and stitch them together. Afterward, we would just walk around the streets and hand out these warm gloves to the guys, the soldiers. The guys didn’t want to take them at first, “No, no, no, we won’t.” But the girls insisted, “Take them!” — they were quite persistent. And from the scraps, they started sewing little hearts — so many scraps left over — and they cut them up and made some charms for the guys. These charms the soldiers gladly accepted, with real pleasure.