About this, journalist Olesya Kotubey of Public Culture spoke with publicist and activist of the Erzyan national movement Rostyslav Martyniuk, also known by the Erzyan name Ozhomason Kirdya.
He specializes in the history of the Finno-Hungarian countries, in particular on the history of the Erzians, Mokshans and Vepsians, was the editor of the Ukrainian-language Finno-Hungarian news website “Ugraina” (2004–2016), promotes the concept of the Finno-Hungarian origin of Russians and the indigenization of their identity on the basis of the Meryan language. Vepa and Erzyan substrates.
Martyniuk is the chairman of the Supervisory Board of the “Heroika” charitable foundation, took an active part in the creation of the socio-political movement “Free Idel-Ural” and was a participant in three Ukrainian expeditions to the Gulag facilities of the Republic of Karelia and the Solovetsky Islands.
The enslaved peoples of the Russian Federation and their self-determination
Why is it difficult to count enslaved peoples
The first thing I wanted to ask you about is the count of enslaved peoples. Some researchers claim that there are about a hundred of them, but, for example, the elder of the people of Erzya Syres Bolyaen said in our interview that there are about 190. How many are there according to your calculations?
Can I turn all the arithmetic upside down and explain why? I would like to start not with the number, but with the nature of the Russian Federation and what kind of territory it is. The modern territory of the Russian Federation is illegal – in the actual sense, it is the territory of the sum of regional and continental genocides, the displaced population and the absolute removal of rights from all territories, starting with the Bolshevik coup of 1917, the wars of national liberation and before the capture of the newly established countries of Eastern Europe and Asia by the Bolshevik-Moscow regime.
You ask: how many nations, actually? And what should we do, for example, with Kuban or Circassia , which actually does not exist now, and in the 1860s several million people were deported to modern Turkey, then to the Ottoman Empire, and today they exist there as a diasporic people who claim to return to this territory?
Who is this? Is this a repatriate people who can claim to be the one hundred and ninety-first people in those territories that are now formally controlled by Moscow, or is this already the deep history to which we do not return and reset everything? From some conditional year 1991 – who was in his place, who was in checkers? I believe that this is wrong, and we can talk about complex configurations that concern the deported peoples of the XVIII-XIX centuries.
Or restoration of sovereignty of Belarus over Smolensk. For example, in Europe, the Moscow state was able to carry out three total genocides. This is the genocide of the Karelians, the territory of Ingermanland — around St. Petersburg and to the Karelian Isthmus, together with the Veps and other Finnish peoples in the present Leningrad Region. This is the genocide of eastern Belarus, the center of which is Smolensk. And the largest genocide of Kuban and Cherkessia. These three territories should be considered separately when we talk about the formation of natural sovereignties of these 190 conditional nations that exist today in the Russian Federation.
Regarding, again, this calculation – there is no clear political vocabulary for all these peoples. Someone says that these are nations, someone says that these are nationalities, ethnic groups, compact groups of some ancient tribes in Western and Northern Asia. If we are talking about some kind of condominium, the idea of all these peoples – who are they? Are these peoples who have their native territory, live now in this territory and who claim to create states within their borders with capitals, institutions and representation in the UN? Shall we divide nations into some groups of adults, non-adults, and those at death?
Some that even tomorrow, like Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, become independent, integrate into the UN system and become another European state. And then we say that Europe is from Lisbon to Kazan or from Lisbon to Ufa.
Are we talking about the fact that there are such nations that are in a state of clinical death today, like some exotic nations of the Far East, whose original territories were colonized within the Russian Empire by Ukrainians, and Ukrainians created, for example, on the territory of Asia, two Asian states. As, for example, Britain created Australia and New Zealand, Ukraine created the Gray Wedge and the Green Wedge.
The Gray Wedge is located on the territory of the native Kazakhs, Bashkorts, Mansi and Khanty. Green Wedge is located on the territory of conditional Uighurs, Korean tribes, and so on. That is, such a puff pastry.
We need propaganda today only to delegitimize the Russian Federation in the eyes of the masses, but we will be unable to work with these territories as soon as Moscow disappears. It is after this that the most terrible stage will begin.
Like in the movie “Terminator” – you break a humanoid robot into pieces of mercury and you literally have a few minutes to run somewhere, climb to the highest point, because he will get back together, this conventional “mercury Muscovite”, you know? He will again be of the same strength and power, and will destroy you again.
Therefore, we should not achieve some kind of temporary disintegration, disintegration into pieces in this territory. We have to look at the complex picture of the depth of genocides, the classification of genocides, the amount of peoples who can return or create states immediately. I fantasize, but to create an office for nations that will not be able to stand on their feet immediately after liberation and will need additional forces in order to form this nation. And, accordingly, then move them to the world community. That is, I will deliberately avoid the number of figures, because we do not yet have an answer to this question that you just asked.
The spectrum of political self-determination of enslaved peoples
My next question was about the formation of political nations, but from your answer I understand that it is a spectrum. Presumably, we cannot clearly divide, say, “these nations are formed, and these are not formed.”
Absolutely yes. Moreover, these spectra are variable. This is not a question for ethnographers or political scientists, it is rather a question for a complex political examination of these territories and the communities that inhabit them. I want to warn Ukrainians and, to a certain extent, our American and British colleagues, who are helping Ukrainians to work with this territory of the Russian Federation as a future territory of freedom, that we should not fall into the trap of the map of the Russian Federation.
In 1918-1920, the Bolsheviks drew a map of Tatarstan, Karelia, the Republic of Komi, Sakha-Yakutia, Buryatia, and a number of Caucasian states, but this is their view.
So. Even the fact that they apply pseudo-ethnonyms to nations that actually have a different name. If we proceed from their catalog of nations, the mercurial Muscovy will reassemble, reassemble all the nations to which we will grant freedom. All the nations gifted by us, as in 2014, will be here — Buryats, Erzyans, and Karels in the form of a terrorist country.
The most famous figure of the first stage of the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014-2022 is Motorola. Motorola, a red-haired guy with some Russian surname. He is Komi by nationality, who studied in Komi primary classes and did not know how to speak Katsap until the age of 12. Where did he end up? He was not just part of the terrorist forces, but became a symbol of the terrorist group’s attack on Ukraine and Europe.
Do Russians exist?
Actually, the same Buryats, who at the beginning of the full-scale invasion became to some extent a symbol of the invaders together with the Russians.
The same buryats. But you know, here you can go deeper with a bathyscaphe – the deeper we go, the more we see and understand where the movements of the water come from, where the lumps and faces of “strange fish” come from. “Strange fish” are actually “Russian” fish.
When we talk about this nation, official statistics will obviously state that all nationalities make up from 7% to 10%, and who will be 90%? Uno. And this uno is “Russian”. Who are the “Russians”? We don’t want to talk about it, because we seem to agree that this is a formed nation that is at war with us today, that has a culture that we are fighting against, that has a “Russian man”, a “Russian people”.
But we are afraid to approach the main issue of the disintegration of the Russian Federation, to split this Koshcheev egg. Inside it will be a needle, and the “Russians” feel this needle only when we start talking about them. When we talk about the Buryats, the Erzians, the Karelians, the genocide, the exclusion zone, the demilitarized zone 200 km from the Russian Federation, which we will need, that’s all good.
But we are not talking about the main, key problem – who are those people, who are supposedly 100 million.
By the way, today I spoke with demographers, they say that the population of the Russian Federation cannot exceed 90 million now, but nevertheless. This can also be said about Ukraine, we formally believe that there are about 30 million of us, but they say that there are 23 of us, or maybe less. But we are still talking about Russia. If we are talking about the Russian Federation and a people that has as many as the population of Great Britain, 80-90 million, then how to work with them? And we have the most questions about the “Russians”. The first question is who are they? Are they Slavs?
Can we ask the question like this – do “Russians” exist?
That’s the best question there is, but since they’re killing us, it’s like they exist. Because they dig holes in Buch, slap our fingers and rape women – they exist. But who are these people who call themselves “Russian”? I immediately put aside arguments about Russia and so on.
I would like to say that the Moscow people exist. Moscow is located in a territory that is not protected by any geographical boundaries, so it takes care of itself in a different way. You can easily get rid of this city, but it exists in the mysterious substance “muscovite” – who is he? Muscovites have experienced and are experiencing a huge diffusion with the peoples they are conquering, but the “place of assembly” of the Muscovite people, no matter how many different blood and ethnic backgrounds there are, is still the central regions of the Russian Federation. These are four oblasts: Moskovska, Vladimirska, Kostroma, plus partly Ivanovska.
Who are the Russians really? Meryan language
There is such a Ukrainian scientist, Orest Tkachenko, the son of the famous linguist Borys Tkachenko, who was killed by the NKVD during the Stalinist era. Orest Tkachenko died in 2021, he was an experienced philologist, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and in Soviet times, in the times of absolute, total control over everything, including scientific and philological ideas, he defended the work, attention, “Meryansky yazyk”.
This language belongs to someone, there is a language – there is a people. “Meryansky yázyk” is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Moscow, Kostroma, Ivanovo, Yaroslavl and some other regions. This language was natural, Tkachenko codified it based on small remnants in dialects and manuscripts. He wrote a doctoral thesis, which he defended in 1986. 1986, you can say that this is Gorbachev, that you could tell everything, but in 1986, people were still imprisoned in Ukraine for mentioning the Holodomor. If you said you were starving, then you go to prison.
At this time, Orest Borisovych Tkachenko, a Ukrainian scientist and philologist in St. Petersburg, defends work on the native language of the “Russians”. The native language of the “Russians” is called “Meryansky yazyk”. He, as a person who introduced the concept of linguistic substrate in philological science, proved with 20-30 facts that those people who today use the Moscow dialect and are “native Russians” are Finns, a Finno-Hungarian people who simply got rid of their language and acquired through the Church Slavonic form “Russian language”. We see that the core of the “Russian people”, who speak the Slavic language, are Finno-Ugric. I can demonstrate to you a few facts that he brought up.
There is a simple grammar for declension of double words. Ukrainians, when they came to Moscow and, for example, wanted to assimilate, to become rather Muscovites, could say: “Well, Grisha, yesterday I was on the Moskve River, I sat well.” And they say to him: “You are a hohol. Not on “Moscow-river”, but on “Moscow-river”. Double words, the first is not inflected, and the second is inflected: this is how Lermontov uses it in his poetry, it is not a dialectal form. And Tkachenko proved , that it is from the Finno-Hungarian languages.
Some specific sounds are also from there, to a lesser extent the vocabulary, but in general, the amount of facts that he cited in his work “Meryanskiy yazyk” gave him the right to say that “Russians” are those who spoke the Meryan language, Finno-Hungarian language until the time of Ivan Mazepa. These are not the Merian times that Nestor the Chronicler mentions in the story about the tribes. Tkachenko proved that people spoke the Meryan language until the 18th century.
And now imagine that those who call themselves “Russian” have a secret – they are Finno-Ugric. They are not nameless, homeless, uncultured, they are not a fake – they are mayors. Marya, in turn, has other neighbors around her, who now also call themselves “Russian”. These are Veps, Mari in the east, Meshchera in the south and the only border connecting the native “Russians” with non-Finno-Ugric people – the west, Lithuania and Belarus.
Now it is impossible to unscrew it all the way back. We can still return the Circassians to the Kuban, return Smolensk to Belarus, we can still come up with a good program for Karelia and repopulate the Karelian nation. But we live with “Russian language”, which is a form of internal expression of the Meryan tribe, the Meryan substratum.
This theory of the linguistic substrate of Orest Tkachenko is the basis of the polyethnic idea, which is under active development in certain circles. It is about the fact that we must disintegrate the “Russians” in the name of rebuilding the “Russians” themselves. In this way, we could solve the problem of the “mercury man” – the “mercury Muscovite” or Frankenstein, whom we kill, burn Moscow, destroy, deport, and he emerges and is stitched up.
The roots of Russian fairy tales
Mascultur allows us to say that even in the 20th century, the current “Russians” of Finnish origin used Finnish fairy tales, traditional culture and thinking. For example, such a popular cartoon as “Cheburashka” is Finno-Hungarian in origin, although it allegedly says such things that relate only to cartoons. Cheburashka, “cheburdems” from Mokshan is one who falls. You know, at night everyone sleeps, and here “boo-u-um!” — the one who does this is a cheburashka, that is, a homeboy.
In the 2000s, I cataloged Finnish items in Russian, Soviet, and communist mass culture.
“Ivanushka the Fool” rides on the stove. Who fulfills all his wishes?
Pike command?
The fact that you can easily answer this question shows that you are in deep contact with mass Russian culture.
Unfortunately.
Unfortunately. If you ask a Pole, he won’t be able to answer. But about the pike. The pike is the totem animal of the wasps and mares, they are the northern relatives of the mares. Vepski noyds, that is, sorcerers, wore pikes on their headbands. And “at the behest of the pike, at my will” is a literal translation from the Vepa language, the construction is the same.
The disintegration is not of the Russian Federation, but of the Russians themselves
If someone tells you: send this Martynyuk away, he is telling fables – from the age of 16 I was very close to all those who are called “Russian”, but the language is not Moscow Petersburg, but everything around. I studied the Finnish language professionally, I have articles on Finnish culture and literature. Despite the age difference, we were friends with Orest Tkachenko, he as a scientist, I as a publicist.
It makes no sense for me to entertain people with fables about the pike’s head and Cheburashka. Now is the war, at night I fell off the sofa because it was raining on Poznyaki, my children ran into the bathroom – this is not the time for me to tell fairy tales.
But if you ask me seriously, and I am not wasting my time foolishly, what to do with the trouble of the Russian Federation, which has now become our common trouble, then what I say is the only way.
Yes, according to the contour of the peoples, yes, according to the contour of the genocides of compensation, yes, it is necessary to move Erzian, Siberian peoples, it is necessary to look for allies for this. But the key question is precisely “Russian”.
That is, we are talking about the disintegration not so much of Russia and the republics, but of the Russians themselves?
So. And disintegration is not with a minus sign, but with a plus sign, because Frankenstein’s construct is still called “Russian”.
It is about the fact that this is not a people, but an organized crime group (from “organized criminal group”, i.e. “organized criminal group” — ed.). “Russian” is not an ethnic solidarity, but a criminal one.
And their language is Fenya, Hyperfenya is Russian, even if Pugacheva sings in it or Yevtushenko reads poems.
We deal with “Russians” roughly like the Chinese. The Chinese also do not exist as a nation – they are a conglomerate of peoples, which is now effectively controlled by the Communist Party. The Chinese, if they exist, are on the island of Taiwan. There is a state of Taiwan – this is their real Republic of China, and what has now absorbed Hong Kong on the continent is not a Chinese nation, it is an OPG. So it is possible to speak more broadly about the two largest organized crime groups on Earth – the Russian Federation, which should not be correlated with the Roman and European concept of “people”, and the Chinese. It is a very conventional thing when someone surrounded by borders forms a nation. I believe that you can quote that this is an organized crime group – an organized crime group of the Russian Federation, an organized crime group of the People’s Republic of China.
Looking ahead, Ann Applebom said the following: “We need to save Russia. If Ukraine wins, Russia will save itself.” There is no need to save Russia. We need to take away the fiction of “Russians” and on the basis of the Finno-Hungarian substrate give them a new culture, mass culture, a new self-awareness. And it is possible to balance the situation in the east of Europe in this way. So that we don’t have endless rivers with crocodiles here, but so that we can moderate not the situation, how many tanks, planes and their press they have, but their ethnogenesis, neoethnogenesis.
“Russians are the Incas of Eastern Europe”
Here we can also say that “Russians” are the Incas of Eastern Europe, who, relatively speaking, were not subdued by Cortes, not subdued by Christianity, not subdued by European civilization, but simply continue to practice human sacrifice, like the Incas.
Genocide of enslaved peoples of the Russian Federation
Why do we know little about the facts of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Russian Federation
Information about the genocide that the Russians carried out in the enslaved territories is not widespread, in particular, because the Russians tried to hide it.
Recently, under the video of one Ukrainian blogger who talked about this, I saw a comment from a lady from Siberia. She wrote: “At school, the development of the territory of our region was presented as something natural, they say, Russia brought all the benefits of civilization to the Earth. If the extinction of nations and cultures was mentioned, it was in the context of natural selection, and in general, these nations themselves wanted to Russian.”
My question is this – do the nationalities and peoples themselves remember these crimes? What do they think about it, is this oblivion total?
The term “genocide” appeared in 1947. Everyone understood that there is a sum of actions of the stronger against the weaker in certain circumstances that are not measured simply by criminal definitions. That there is something more than a simple criminal code that exists in all countries of the world. And then Rafal Lemkin created the concept of genocide, that is, the targeted mass killing of certain groups based on certain characteristics.
In order to see the phenomenon of genocide and appreciate it, it was necessary to live until the end of the Second World War. It’s not that simple.
In 2006, Ukrainians came to a consensus and decision of the Verkhovna Rada that genocide was committed against us in 1932-1933. Before that, there were any number of discussions, both from below and from above. From below, in my village, they said: “This is not in our village, they were not ours, who ate whom? It was not our place where people were eaten, don’t tell.” The second is the communists, a certain Petro Simonenko: “What are you talking about? A bad harvest, it’s even written in the Bible. It was a bad harvest and they died.”
We remember that the knowledge of Ukrainians about genocide and famine was criminalized until 1988. The last person who went to prison for mentioning the famine, not even the Holodomor, was a man of Ukrainian origin from Ukraine, he was an officer of the Armed Forces of the USSR in the Far Eastern District. He was imprisoned because he drunkenly said that there was a famine, he knows for sure, his grandmother told him. It was 1988. Imagine! And how in these circumstances, when it was necessary to hide everything, because they would be imprisoned, and here the communist scum refers to objective circumstances – how to arrive at this concept of “genocide” derived by Rafal Lemkin?
These are Ukrainians – 40 million nations, institutions, diaspora, connections, this is a heroic act of many researchers who collected all this and then presented it to the Verkhovna Rada as the concept of “genocide”.
Recognize and prove genocide
And if the genocide is carried out by such a pro as Moscow, which in the 1930s used the vast experience of genocide by the Russian Empire in Ukraine? She knew the main law of any criminal – to cover the tracks, to silence the witness. And she did it, they had the opportunity to do it until today.
So how can, relatively speaking, a Tatar, who was subjected to genocide at a certain moment, or an Erzian, or a Buryat, come out and say as a national consensus: “Boys and girls, we were genocided!”. He won’t say that. And if he does, he will be condemned by his own people as a person who has exaggerated his rights.
There can be no personal feelings, stress or knowledge only about one’s own and the neighboring family, that this is genocide. It takes collective knowledge, and then forensics gets involved.
It is they, not demographers and not historians. And criminologists determine that this crime was exactly genocide. Therefore, when you ask whether they understand, they are on the way to understanding, they look at the numbers and say: “Here is the number of Erzians in the 20s of the XX century – one million, but now it is 100 thousand. Where are the 900 thousand?”. Something is wrong. But where exactly – you have to work, it’s hard work.
And here we, with our experience of proving the fact of genocide in Ukraine, are a terrible beast for them. They fear us like fire. Therefore, if we – and we are the nation that in the 21st century best proved the fact of genocide of itself – follow the same path, with our experience, our algorithms and contacts with these nations that are there inside, – to them khan.
“Silent” genocide
But again, the circumstances of the genocide against each nation currently occupied by the Russian Federation are different, have shades, nuances, they are scaled differently. What to do with it? It was not the case that Muscovites ran into the territory, occupied it and immediately committed genocide. They could annex some territories peacefully.
Remember the Republic of Komi – a huge territory that everyone knows because Syktyvkar is there and Valery Leontiev is from there. By the way, few people know that he is a Komi by nationality. He also spoke in coma in his youth and worked for a long time with his letter editors so that they would show him the “correct Russian language”.
Komi was integrated after the Golden Horde fell, and, relatively speaking, the vassal status of this territory of Parma with the capital in the region passed to Moscow. As if there was no genocide, everything was fine plus or minus, by the 20th century 90% of the Komi population was Komi. Who had the highest literacy in the Russian Empire after the Germans, Estonians and Finns? In a coma. They developed their own philosophy, had their own sociologists. That is, where is the genocide? Although no one contributed to the development of Komi’s statehood.
During the Second World War, the German Wehrmacht, knowing that the Bolsheviks had organized huge Gulag camps on the territory of the Komi Republic (Vorkuta, the capital of the concentration camp), in 1942 dropped a landing force on the territory of the Komi in order to raise a national rebellion of the Komi in the rear of Moscow, at the Bolsheviks, and create Republic of Komi. There was a project to evacuate Gulag prisoners across the Arctic Sea to Norway after this uprising. After that, the Russians come, as, by the way, with the Crimean Tatars after the Second World War, and they say: “What was wrong with us?”. Before the Second World War, 90% of the population was Komi, how many now? About 20%.
Is this genocide? Of course. How it was carried out is “covered in darkness”. Although, of course, darkness is darkness, but when we know the habits of the OPG of Muscovites, we know how it all happened, but it must be proven, one cannot simply say: you committed genocide. There is a result. The Republic of Komi suffered a genocide at some point and today the Komi people have lost, relatively speaking, ¾ of their population. There are some reasons. It is a great political, scientific and forensic work in order to then bring it to the court of the world.
Why did Rostyslav Martyniuk take the Erzyan name Ozhomason Kirdya
I also wanted to ask in what context it is correct to mention your name Ozhomason Kirdya, what is its history?
I have been in the national Erzyan movement since the early 90s. I joined the Erzyan movement precisely with the motive with which you are now interviewing me.
I understood that an independent, independent, comfortable Ukraine is impossible if you have slaves on the eastern border.
And I simply fell in love, due to the fact that I lived in Voronezh, with the territory that opened up for me in a fabulous way through Pushkin’s fairy tales, through substrates, through people who were my fellow students at the university.
With them, I learned that the people sitting in front of me are not “Russians”, but Erzyans, that their grandmothers speak an ancient language, that Tambov and Voronezh are territories with Finnish roots. I used the library of Voronezh University, which was stolen by the Bolsheviks in 1917 as the library of Tartu University. There was a lot of literature related to Finno-Hungarian subjects.
And I physically already felt the presence of another dimension, another world, not as flat as the world of the “Russians”. And this picture was not even opposed to the Russians, it deepened the understanding of these territories, that there is a history, a national mentality, a language that should be known and from which I later drew an understanding of some things, for example, Cheburashek. What is another example of popular culture?
Teremok
Teremok Where does the word “teremok” come from? Why not a “house”? Because “tere” is a greeting in Finnish, and “teremok” is a living room.
This topic is so taboo in Russia itself, it’s like undressing them, exposing them naked. It is considered extremely impolite to talk about the Finno-Hungarian origin of Russians. They know it, but they don’t know what to do with it. “We are Finns, but we won’t tell anyone about it. We are Russian, the capital is Kyiv.”
If you are “Russian”, Gagarin flew into space and so on. And what is a mayor? This booklet was written by a Ukrainian, “Meryanskiy Yazyk”. What to do with it? Here you have a chamber of treasures, looted, but treasures, and here they bring you a green book of 1986 – and what to do with it? “I don’t want to be a beggar, give me back!”.
And you are poor, because everything you looted is not yours, you do not know your own name. And with this book you will grow as a person, you will be able to become happy. You will grow into a full-fledged culture. This book is enough for that. And everything that was there about Tchaikovsky, Bulgakov , all this rubbish – you don’t need it, it’s not yours.
And if we work with him correctly, carefully, we can remake this group of 90 million, breed them according to their cultures, like Estonians and Finns, like other peoples. And in this way to build new relations with these peoples. They are afraid of it.
Returning to your name, it turns out that you took it out of respect for yourself?
Yes, in this way I wanted to show the Erzyans themselves that the situation when they are called by false Slavic names is an abnormal situation. They were told, by the way, by many Estonians and Finns that the first thing they should do in order for this case to go away is to officially register “Sires Bolyaen” in the passport , not “Aleksandr Bolkin”. For various reasons, it is difficult even for Oleksandr Bolkin to do this, because of property or something else.
But I show that I am like a Ukrainian who does not have Erzyan roots – and I was asked: “Maybe you are Moksha after all?” But no, not moksha, I’m Ukrainian. Then I found out that my stepfather on my mother’s side was an Erza, but that’s another story. Ozhomason Kirdya – “Ozhomason” means “blooming land”, and Rostyslav, “to grow in glory”, is the closest equivalent in the Erzyan “Kirdya”.
In this way, I was officially signed in the Erzyan press, even given official diplomas in state bodies, when it was still possible. It was extremely honorable for me. This is such a non-banal and inviolable game of dignity. The fact that you are worthy people and I am the same as you, I do not flatter myself, I do not want to play it, I can be an Erzian until the end. It was my choice, in the mid-2000s they started treating me like an Erzyan. But I stopped when they started talking about Ukraine in the third person: after all, I am Ukrainian.
Can this name of yours be called a performance, a certain artistic action?
Yes, you can, but only to say that Ukraine will one day thank Syres Bolyaen and we will be with the Erzians until the end. That is, not jokingly, but like peoples who share a common border. We will have a common border with them, with Erzyan-Mastor, and everything will be fine.
These goals must be set. If you don’t put them on, but think that this is a fantasy, a performance, then Bucha will come to us. Now our country has got an absolutely clear idea of what will happen if we do not deal with it – Bucha, Bucha, Bucha, there is no other way.
Olesia Kotubey
Суспільне-Культура
