How Russians and Ukrainians get along on New York's Brighton Beach while their home countries are at war

“When they say that Brighton is 'Russian', it's not entirely true,” Anzhela Kravchenko explains. - He is Russian-speaking, but unites many nationalities and ethnic groups. You don’t hear pure Russian speech here very often.”

Kravchenko was born in Nikolaev, Ukraine, the administrative center of the region of the same name. In the 1990s, together with her husband, they moved to America and first settled on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, where a large Ukrainian diaspora already lived by that time. But they failed to get in.

“We were immediately told that Russian [which we spoke] was the ‘language of the occupiers’. Then it seemed wild to me. I grew up in a Russian-speaking environment, I only spoke Ukrainian with my mother and grandmother. Russian is my native language, I have never considered it a sign that I am not Ukrainian. I have an Irish girlfriend. And she speaks English, although this is also the "language of the occupiers." But she doesn't see it as a problem."

After the annexation of Crimea, it became clear to Kravchenko that Putin would not stop. But she could not even imagine what she would read in the news about the bombing of Nikolaev, about the dead, about the rape and torture of Ukrainians by Russian soldiers.

Angela says that when Russia invaded Ukraine, she subscribed to a telegram channel that sends an alert when an air alert is announced in Nikolaev. “It's two or three times a night. I imagine people getting up at three in the morning and running to the basement,” says Angela. Now she arranges charity events and art projects in favor of Ukraine and helps Ukrainian refugees to settle in the United States.

According to Kravchenko, many people who have been evacuated from Ukraine in recent months refuse to speak Russian. “Recently, we have a [Saturday] Ukrainian school, there are already more than 150 students. And people began to complain,” says Kravchenko.

A normal person cannot support a war

Irina Chelnokova, 67, grew up in Soviet-era Dnepropetrovsk (the city was renamed Dnipro in 2016 by Ukrainian authorities). At the age of 20, Chelnokova moved to St. Petersburg, later emigrated to Germany, and in 2005 to the USA. She moved to Brighton Beach seven years ago from the city of Springfield in neighboring New Jersey.

There are many conservatives among the residents of Brighton Beach: those with US citizenship are in the majority voting for the Republicans, and many sympathize with Putin. Chelnokova explains the conservatism of Brighton residents by their age:

Chelnokova's father, Yakov Nekrasovsky, was born in 1901 in a Jewish town near Kyiv. He learned Russian, entered the institute and, having defended his doctorate, received a department at the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg.

“He devoted his whole life to the mines of Donbass and did the greatest work in the deserted excavation of coal. He was awarded three badges of honor "Miner's Glory". What is happening now would be his personal tragedy, because the Donbass was almost completely destroyed,” says Irina.

Irina's brother, Yuri, received an engineering degree in Soviet times from the same Mining Institute where his father taught. And then he was assigned to Mariupol and lived there almost all his life. In Mariupol, the 84-year-old pensioner was caught by the war that began on February 24.

In the middle of spring, the nine-story building in which Yuri lived caught fire after being hit by a shell. The pensioner was carried out of the burning building by two neighbors and taken to a military hospital, where he became a “hostage of the Russians” and went hungry for almost two weeks. Ukrainians were given one hundred grams of bread and a glass of soup with a few pasta and a couple of pieces of potatoes just once a day.

In the hospital, Yuri was not treated, and after two weeks he became so weak that he could no longer walk. Then his acquaintances found him and took him to Zaporozhye. Later, with the help of volunteers, he managed to move near Kyiv - to the relatives of his late wife. Yuri had only one set of clothes left: he lost his apartment, his library, philatelic collection, cat and all his property. Now, according to Irina, Yuri hates Russians.

“My brother has worked at Azovstal all his life,” says Irina. - He lived well and honorably under the Soviet regime. But after the collapse of the USSR, he did not have nostalgia for those times. Nobody missed them. Everyone gladly accepted the democracy and independence of Ukraine. This war is a tragedy. I read the bulletins every day and my hair stands on end. A normal person cannot support a war.”

Irina believes that over time, the views of Brighton residents may change. When the Ukrainians who went through the same thing as her brother move and tell them what is really going on in Ukraine during the war.

“I don’t understand how people can behave so meanly”

Margarita Melnik finishes her working day: she wipes the table, takes nail polishes to the shelf, and manicure tools to the sterilizer. She works as a manicurist at a beauty salon in Brighton 34th. Melnik is 24 years old, she was born in Mariupol and lived there almost all her life working as an accountant. She earned herself a car and an apartment, in which she lovingly renovated. When at half past five in the morning on February XNUMX the sounds of explosions were heard, waking up, Margarita did not attach any importance to this.

“I thought it was the cars making noise,” she recalls. “We have trucks loaded with metal on the road all the time and jumping on potholes. So I fell asleep again. And only later, when I opened a work chat, I found out that the war had begun.”

According to Margarita, at first, none of her acquaintances thought that the war would last long. Nobody was going to leave, so she and her mother, Svetlana, also stayed in Mariupol.

“In 2014, we were also shelled, but it ended quickly. We thought that this time it would be the same, ”explains Margarita.

During the first two days of the invasion, which began on February 24, Margarita and Svetlana were afraid to leave the house because of the constant shooting. And when they decided to go to the store for food, there was almost nothing left. On the fourth day, shops began to be robbed: people realized that famine was ahead.

When electricity went out in the city in early March, water and communication disappeared, Margarita really panicked. At the same time, the city began to shell, a little later the gas was turned off.

“My mother and I moved to our friend’s apartment so that it would not be so scary and to learn something about green corridors – he managed to set up an old radio.”

For the next few weeks, they lived in an apartment without water, electricity or gas. The temperature in the apartment was slightly above zero. To get water, they melted snow, but it was impossible to drink it. Such water was used to flush out everything that had accumulated in the toilet at least once a week. “But it was almost useless: the entire riser, starting from the lower floors, clogged up,” Margarita shares her memories.

“I was constantly hungry,” she admits. - And from the cold and the realization that there was no food, I wanted to eat even more. Happiness was to drink at least half a glass of hot tea. We slept from 11 pm to 4 am, when there were no explosions and artillery salvos.”

Throughout the district, houses caught fire from shelling, and on March 13, the nine-story building of Margarita flared up.

“My mother and I managed to run into our apartment to collect two suitcases of things before it burned down. Managed to save the laptop. But there are no more albums with my childhood photos, with photos of my late dad.”

Margarita cries talking about how she loved her apartment, how she still remembers her smell and misses her terribly.

In mid-March, after the assault and siege of Mariupol, the Russian army entered the city. A few days later, Margarita and Svetlana managed to get out of the city. According to Margarita, she was ready to go anywhere: “Can you imagine how it is to not wash for almost a month? All this time we were wearing six turtlenecks and sweaters, as well as several layers of tights and leggings, but it was still cold. I was constantly shivering, my skin was peeling, my legs were sore. ”

Having learned that there would be an evacuation soon (then civilians could go to the territories occupied by Russia), Margarita and her mother went to the bus stop with two suitcases. Along the way, they saw a huge number of new graves in the yards.

“We knew that people were dying, but we had no idea that so many died. The entire school stadium was filled with graves,” recalls the Ukrainian.

A few days later they managed to get to Berdyansk - since February 28 it was under Russian occupation. Then a mobile connection appeared, and Margarita learned about the death of her close friend Natasha, who also lived in Mariupol.

Talking about this, Margarita cries again: “We called up relatives and friends, found out who spent this March and how. I realized that our story is not the worst: we slept at least four hours in bed. And someone all this time lived in the basement with rats.” Margarita adds that she prayed continuously when she lived under shelling, but no longer believes in God.

For a few more months, Margarita and Svetlana wandered: they lived in Krivoy Rog, where the war had not yet reached at that time, then in Warsaw. Due to the constantly changing situation and difficulties in paperwork, plans had to be constantly revised. At the end of April, the US authorities launched the Uniting for Ukraine program. And Margarita's friend, who lives in America, took on the role of a sponsor for her, her mother and several other people. So on June 13, Margarita ended up in New York.

Ten days later, she got a job as an intern at a beauty salon, where she worked for about a month for free. And now he works unofficially, for cash. She does not have a work permit yet, when it will be is unknown.

“First, we lived for three months in a two-room apartment with friends: my pregnant friend with her husband and ninth-grader son in the bedroom, and we are on a folding sofa in the living room,” says Margarita. “Then we were allowed to live in a spare room by an unfamiliar woman – for money, of course, until we manage to find something.”

Margarita is trying to rent a room, but most of the tenants are asking for a steady annual income, which she doesn't have.

“Even if I do find a room, I won’t be able to pay for it. The money that I now receive is simply not enough for me,” says the internally displaced person. In Mariupol, Margarita's mother was the chief accountant. Now she takes on any part-time job, including cleaning apartments.

Margarita does not like living in Brighton Beach. She says she watched a video of what the area was like thirty years ago and realized that nothing had changed.

In addition, she is disappointed by the people living here. In September, a woman who introduced herself as Jeanne responded to Margarita's announcement about finding housing. She offered to rent a room. Margarita and Svetlana liked the room, and they gave Zhanna three thousand dollars from their savings - as a deposit and payment for the first month, taking a receipt from her and photographing her documents. It did not help: Zhanna turned out to be a fraud. Margarita and her mother never moved into the apartment, Zhanna refused to give the money.

Soon Margarita became aware that she had already deceived several people. Now the office of the city prosecutor, according to Margarita, is collecting evidence in order to file a class action lawsuit against Zhanna.

“It turned out that she was specifically looking for recently arrived Ukrainians,” explains the Mariupol resident. “I just don’t understand how people can be so mean.”

“Our sponsor is against Russians and even Russian speech”

In early March, 41-year-old Kharkiv resident Marina Stepul, together with her sister Nadezhda, drove by car through western Ukraine to Poland after a shell exploded near her house. Upon learning that her store, which sold camouflage clothing and berets, completely burned down, Marina decided not to return to Ukraine until the end of the war.

Nadezhda heard about the Uniting For Ukraine program and wrote to фейсбук- to a refugee group that she and her sister are looking for a sponsor to go to America. The very next day, a businessman from New York, whose grandmother emigrated to the United States back in Soviet times, responded to her post. He processed documents for twelve refugees and bought them tickets himself. Now Marina and Nadezhda live in his house on the second floor: they have a separate room at their disposal. A family of four from the Lviv region lives in the neighboring one.

In Kharkov, Marina worked as a masseuse. With the help of volunteers in the US, she managed to buy a portable massage table to work from home. For now, she, like Margarita, works for cash, but hopes to get a work permit and open her own massage parlor.

Russian is Marina's native language. But she recently visited a Ukrainian fair in Brighton Beach, where she was reprimanded by other Ukrainians because she spoke Russian.

“I just went berserk. How is it possible? And what about the language I speak?” Marina is surprised.

She says that one of the visitors to the fair allegedly donated $70 to Ukrainian refugees. But when he went on stage and began to speak Russian, he was booed. At the same time, when the son of Angela Kravchenko (she helps Marina get settled in the USA) - a Ukrainian by mother and a Dominican by father - bought a yellow-blue flower wreath at the fair and put it on his head, other visitors began to dig into him, according to Marina .

“Like, why did you put it on, who are you, we don’t need this. What a disgrace! Marina recalls. “I am ashamed of these people.”

Sometimes she has direct conflicts with fellow citizens who fled the war to Brighton.

According to Marina, for the first time she faced discrimination because of the language she speaks, only here in America.

“Disputes about the word Russia on the sign took so much time that we decided to change it”

Although Russian is still the main language of Brighton Beach, many local businesses are refusing to mention the word “Russia” in their names.

Taste of Russia was one of Brighton's main grocery stores. In the thirty years that Taste of Russia has existed on Brighton Beach Avenue, its name has become familiar to every local. There was always a queue at the display case with ready-made food - battered fish, pies, cabbage rolls, beef stroganoff. However, recently the grocery store was renamed. Now it is called International Foods, after the legendary Russian grocery store, which was run by the parents of Taste of Russia co-owner Boris Rakhman from 1976 to 2014. He himself admits that he does not feel a connection with either Russia or Ukraine.

According to Boris, both Russians and Ukrainians work in the store, including those who came to America quite recently, and there is no tension between them.

Although most of the new immigrants from Russia prefer to settle in other areas of New York, some still remain in Brighton. Dmitry Sorokin moved here in 2016, he immediately settled in Brighton Beach. Sorokin was born into a family of Russian geologists in Kazakhstan, studied in Kyiv as a beekeeper, worked in the Crimea as an apiary manager, and in 1999 moved to Pskov and opened his own business there.

He says that when he first saw Putin on TV that same year, he “immediately knew what was going to happen next.”

“I never went to rallies,” Dmitry says. - I understood that they did not change anything at all. But I openly expressed my point of view in social networks and rather harshly. When [Boris] Nemtsov was killed, Lev Shlosberg, whom I met shortly before, invited me to a rally in his memory. And I couldn't help but go there. Seeing three operators with cameras, I asked who they were. Lev replied: “One chamber is ours, the Yabloko party, and the others you yourself understand who they are.” It turns out that I “lit up”.

In 2015, Sorokin was going to go to his daughter's wedding in Germany and found out that he had become restricted to travel abroad. According to the court decision, about which Dmitry knew nothing, he remained in debt to the tax for an individual entrepreneur, which, according to him, according to all the rules, closed the year before.

“That is, I was tried without informing and depriving me of the right to defend myself in this court. The tax office did not notify me of this alleged debt, either before or after. In fact, I was simply deprived of the right to leave.”

Dmitry says that even this did not silence him. He continued to write on social networks everything he thought about the regime, and he began to receive threats.

“They put notes under my door, for example, “Liberals must die.” Or a drawing of a rope loop and soap with the inscription “We are already on our way to you.”

Then Dmitry realized that it was time for him to leave Russia, and in July 2016 Sorokin was in America for the first time.

Dmitry said that it was not easy to start making money in America. He went through a huge number of professions, from a builder to a disinfector: he destroyed bedbugs and cockroaches in apartments. For a year and a half he worked at RusRek radio as a host.

Sorokin applied for political asylum almost immediately, but his case is still under consideration. “I have a work permit, in this sense everything is fine. But I can't leave the country. During these six years, my grandchildren have grown up, whom I have not seen live, ”complains Dmitry.

Sorokin tried to prove to his American friends that Putin was not only the richest, but also the most dangerous person in the world, but until February 24 they did not understand Dmitry. Those who knew Americans considered Trump to be such a person. But in recent months, Sorokin has already spoken several times at anti-war rallies in Brighton. And, according to him, he has never heard anyone speak out loud in support of Putin or his war.

“This war cannot be justified, but it can be explained”

However, judging by the heated debate in the “Brighton Beach is Our Neighborhood” Facebook group, there are plenty of people in Brighton who support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For example, under a post announcing that on August 24, part of Brighton Beach Avenue was named Ukrainian Way, more than eight hundred comments. And a significant part of them justify the war (comments slightly edited by Meduza to keep the meaning):

• Now Ukraine is a danger to the whole world, trying to drag the whole world into a world war. She, along with [President Joe] Biden, has already brought inflation to the United States, high prices for gasoline, food, building materials, houses and apartments, electricity. And America needs cheap gasoline, no matter where it comes from.
• Aid to Ukraine is now directly harming the people of the United States. Money is [spent] on Ukraine when there is inflation in the country. American taxpayers should not pay for your war in Ukraine.
• What did Zelensky do to avoid war?! Shelled Donbass the day before?! (from OSCE report: the number of shellings increased from February 14-16 to February 22 from 40 to 2000 per day!) [Zelensky] completely and publicly refused to implement the Minsk agreements, which he personally confirmed twice, agreeing that there was no alternative [to settling the issue in other ways]. And in Munich, something was blathering about the deployment of nuclear weapons, contrary to the Declaration of Sovereignty of Ukraine.
• Not everything is so simple... If I love Ukraine, am I obliged to love a gang of hucksters who came to power under [44th US President Barack] Obama and [George] Soros and turned Ukraine into a quasi-state of “Saloreich”, brought a once huge country with enormous human, industrial, and cultural potential before the catastrophe?

People who hold such an opinion categorically do not want to communicate with journalists. Only one person who believes that the Ukrainian authorities bear part of the responsibility for the fact that the war was started agreed to speak with Meduza - this is Brighton Radio Davidzon host Vadym Yarmolynets. He explained why people are wary of speaking openly about their position.