Some of you may remember that two weeks ago I started a new series, looking at trolling and trolls. I am interspersing each week: one week on archetypal analysis of what I call the Luhansk archive, and then I move into the trolling.
Trolling as Emotion-Moving Activity
Just to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that definition through the story I am telling you tonight, and that I told you last time — that trolling is about movement, and what binds the use of artillery in eastern Ukraine, which I witnessed a lot, with Donald’s trolling about Iran, or anything else on the internet, with indeed President Zelenskyy’s trolling about his ceasefire offer this week and Ukraine’s great response to that. What binds all of these uses of the term trolling — which do describe the phenomena I have described — is movement, and the movement of emotions.
What unites an artillery barrage with a tweet, or with the kind of way you might communicate with your pet cat, or the way someone you love communicates with you when they are trying to persuade you to do something that initially you did not want to do, but it is in your interests — this is all about a movement of emotions, and there is an activity which moves the emotions. I just wanted to fix you on that as we go through this.
The Journey from Factiva to Eastern Ukraine
What I am doing is bringing you on the journey I went on, which is: how do you link that aspect with the use of trolling as a term — trolls and trolling — for a phenomenon that most of us did not have any awareness of before, say, 2010? I did not have any awareness of trolling before about 2018 as a signifier. I remember the moment I received an email from a friend who just mentioned, oh, they were on YouTube trolling some people. I did not know what he was talking about at the time. I do remember that.
What that signifier describes has been around forever, and I can say that with certainty because I have looked into what it means. The meaning which I deduce from the Dow Jones Factiva database of the uses of the term trolling and trolls — 65,000 uses of those terms in the world’s largest database of media, 33,000 media sources — that was my starting point. My friend used this term, it intrigued me, and I did not know what he was talking about, but I was seeing it a lot around. I wanted to see how this term has been used over time.
That led me on this journey. It was my insight in eastern Ukraine that actually the meaning of this phenomenon — that has a meaning in early computer culture from California, and also with the advent particularly of Facebook and Twitter around 2008, this explosion of the use of trolls and trolling in the media around the world — what united those uses with what I was seeing in eastern Ukraine was the fact that there was a troll: as a person, as a metaphor to describe a person, or as a metaphor to describe a tweet, or what I now understand as any emotion-moving activity. The activity could be a flick of your eyebrow. It could be a tweet by the President of the United States. It could be a piece of legislation. All of these phenomena are united by the fact that they are emotion-moving activity, and they do move others’ emotions.
Two Springs: Fishing and Folklore
Last time I spoke about this, I was talking about looking at the term, how it arose in the Oxford English Dictionary, and how it went from fishing — from the discourse of fishing. It was used as a metaphor to talk about how you troll for souls. That was some of the earliest uses. Then in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive account of the English language, used the term from computer culture for the first time — trolling for bait, in the sense that my friend used it. That was a proposed amendment in 2006.
There are these two springs from which this idea of trolling and trolls comes. One is fishing, and that goes back to the 13th century. The other is folklore. Today I am going to talk about folklore, and the connection there obviously with what I was doing in Ukraine: I was on a bridge with bridge trolls. The troll’s tale described the structural situation that I was in in eastern Ukraine. There were all these colliding meanings and associations which I have spent years trying to work out and work through.
First spring, fishing. Second spring, folklore — the creature under the bridge. On the older of the two streams that fed the word troll, the Scandinavian folk creature: the bridge, the billy goats, the Moomins, and the long moral ambivalence of the figure in the folk imagination, before it met the English verb at the bottom of the hill.
I took you on the first of the two streams that fed the word troll. I took you on the angler on the river in 1606, the clergyman who wrote that God trolls for souls. Tonight I will take you on the second stream. This one is older, it is colder, and considerably stranger.
The Creature of Moral Ambivalence
The creature is not unambiguously malign. The creature is not unambiguously benign. The creature has a long, murky career as a figure of moral ambivalence.
To understand what happened to the word in the last 30 years — because this is really what I am doing, telling you about the development of this word in most of our lifetimes, and the development of the practice of trolling from early computer culture in California, to the use of trolling as a weapon of war by Iran, by Russia, indeed by Ukraine, and by the United States of America — you have to see what happened to the figure across the last thousand years.
When I say that the troll is ambiguous: we do associate trolls with negative connotations, but the literary history we have also has them as positive creatures. Why is this significant to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where on one side you had the Russian bridge trolls protecting their inner realm, Russia-occupied Ukraine?
From the perspective of the inner realm, they were using their Disinfolklore to convince the people inside Russia-occupied Ukraine that those imprisoning them were actually protecting them from Ukrainian bogeymen, from Ukrainian Nazis. From that side, from the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk, you look at the bridge troll and you are being brainwashed into thinking that is a positive creature.
If you are MAGA, you look at Donald as someone who is going to protect America. He is standing on the bridge. He is protecting the inner realm of white-dominated America from the marauding migrants who are coming in over the bridge. From the perspective of MAGA adherents, or those who fall for the Donald troll, he is a positive creature. Obviously, from all of our perspectives — I am making assumptions here, but I think it is a good assumption to make — from our perspectives, he is a troll in a negative sense, and he is destroying the inner realm of America.
That ambiguity depends on where you stand. Understanding that helps us understand the complexity of the act of trolling, where you can very gently troll someone into doing something that is in their best interests, and vice versa. Yet it is the same activity you are really doing. It is persuasion, it is courting, it is expressing love. It is like if your child or your pet is trying to get you to do something.
Old Norse: A Category, Not a Creature
The Old Norse word trolls — spelt troll, without the S, in the sagas — does not, in the oldest attestations, name a single specific creature. It names a category. In Indo-European culture, we have this category with different monikers everywhere. The category is something like: a supernatural being, larger and stronger than a human, not clearly divine, usually hostile, sometimes intermarriageable with humans, often associated with remote places — mountains, forests, caves, the underside of bridges, the far side of rivers.
Every one of those elements can be found in the Prose Edda, which is one of the earliest texts in a Germanic language, and in the Heimskringla, and in the Icelandic family sagas of the 13th century. The creature is pre-Christian in origin, and most of the surviving texts were written down after the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 AD, and the Christian scribes have already imposed a layer of demonisation.
You find trolls who are pitiable or even noble. One of the oldest story types in the corpus that I collected is the story of a human hero who is trapped in the wilderness — on a mountain pass, in a cave during a storm at night, on a lonely road — and is rescued from the wilderness by a troll woman, who turns out, under hideous exterior, to be a supernatural figure of rescue.
Here we have, in the other series I am doing, where we talk a lot about the merciful sovereign — when Donald or Putler create the crisis and then act as the merciful sovereign to get the Hormuz Strait open. This is an essential aspect of the early use of the troll. The troll woman gives the hero food, shelter, a magical object, crucial knowledge. The hero goes on to do his great deed because of the troll woman’s gift.
This is not the story the Grimm brothers would later tell about ogres. It is a story that acknowledges that the creature outside the human community has gifts the community cannot provide, and that the hero who needs those gifts must be willing to accept them from the figure the community fears.
Three Billy Goats Gruff: Moral Simplification
Three Billy Goats Gruff — which is the foundational story for me on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, because I realised that not only was it a structural description of what I was going through there, but it is a structural description of all encounters with the other world and all encounters in interaction zones — in airports, on the Hormuz Straits, wherever you have one community defining itself against an outer realm community.
The Three Billy Goats Gruff is really a moral simplification in the classic Norwegian telling of it. As some of you might remember, I have innovated in the interpretation of it. It was first written down in the 1840s and published in English by George Webbe Dasent in 1859, and it immediately became a success. I know that because I looked at this archive, and you could see references to how important it was. It rose above all the other troll tales by a degree.
The troll under the bridge is purely an obstacle, and the Three Billy Goats Gruff outwit him by scale. The smallest comes first and promises a bigger one is on his way — so deception. The middle one comes next. This is the version of the troll that most English-speaking readers first encounter. It is not the only version.
The Moomins: Recovering the Older Troll
Consider the Moomins. In 1945, Tove Jansson published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first of the Moomin novels. The Moomins are trolls. This is not a marketing decoration.
When you look at the archive, trolls as an entity in our culture really start taking off in the 1950s. A guy in Oakland in California registered the trademark of troll dolls, and trademark disputes over people using troll dolls appear in this Factiva database regularly. Every few years there would be explosions in interest in trolls, usually through troll movies. There would be lots of lawsuits all related to these troll dolls.
In 1945, when Tove Jansson was writing about them, people were aware of trolls and most children would have been read stories about them, but they were not a huge part of our movie culture or popular culture as we call it today.
Jansson is explicit that her round, hippopotamus-shaped protagonists belong to the Scandinavian troll family. They live in a valley. They are gentle, curious, philosophically inclined, and slightly anxious. This is NAFO. This describes many of us who are either NAFO-adjacent or NAFO. Their visitors include the Snufkin, who plays a mouth organ and leaves every autumn; the Hemulen, who is rigid and rule-bound; the Snork; the Snork Maiden; and a variety of other morally ambiguous creatures.
Nothing about the Moomins is frightening. They are 20th-century Finnish-Swedish rewritings — so Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, two different of the great language families alive today — rewriting the folk figure into the tradition of quiet, reflective, slightly melancholy kindness. Tove Jansson is, in effect, recovering the older version of the troll, the troll woman in the cave who gives the traveller shelter, from the moral simplification of Billy Goats Gruff.
The Icelandic Tradition: Trolls in the Landscape
Consider too the trolls of the Icelandic tradition, another great Indo-European culture. In the 20th century, Guðmundur Finnbogason, Sven Lundgren, the folklorists who preserved the Icelandic material, collected stories in which trolls turn to stone at sunrise; in which trolls are tricked by the hero, but sometimes bless the hero; in which trolls are the ancestors of specific mountain formations and rock arches; in which the troll is explicitly connected to the earth itself.
The trolls of this tradition are features of the Icelandic landscape, physical manifestations in the landscape, because the Icelandic folk imagination read the landscape as the petrified bodies of trolls. The figure is not a simple villain. The figure is in the theology of a place. Iceland’s most famous natural monuments are its trolls. This is not a culture that thinks that the troll is merely wicked.
Why Did the Billy Goats Gruff Version Win in English?
Why, in the English language imagination, has the Billy Goats Gruff version won? I have three answers.
The first is the Grimm effect. When the English translator rendered the Norwegian tales into English, he imported them into a Victorian children’s literature framework that already expected moral clarity. Grimm’s Tales had been translated into English in 1823, and the Grimm pattern — I have talked before about the relationship of the Grimm brothers to Herder, and Herder’s call in 1777, where he wanted to find a means of uniting the ten historic mythological German tribes that Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about 40 years after the Common Era. He wanted a means of uniting them around a common culture. Herder, I have spoken about before, asked: where is our Shakespeare? In 1777. Out of this call emanated this great pouring of German culture, which 90 years later led to the first unified German state. The Grimm brothers answered this call, as did Goethe and later Wagner. It was their work — collecting folklore, putting to music these ancient legends — which led to the unification of the German state.
The connection with Disinfolklore here, and with what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine, was that the Russians were doing the reverse of this. They were manufacturing a culture through these stories they were generating in this situation on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where I was for three years, and inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where they were creating this prison, brainwashing everyone in it and saying that they were the merciful sovereign, saving them from the wicked West of freedom and human rights and LGBTIQ equality and justice, all the rest of it. This is Disinfolklore, and the use of Disinfolklore — which Donald obviously uses as well to brainwash people — is the inorganic use of the same methods that Herder and the Grimm brothers used to unite the ten German tribes. That model of creating a national culture out of literature, the literature collected from songs from the folk and stories from the folk — that model was copied all over Europe: Ireland, Ukraine, Greece, almost every European nation state owes its existence to its own use of this model, creating a national culture and then claiming statehood and becoming states from the late 19th century on.
The second answer is the 19th-century folklore collectors’ project, which I will give its own talk on. Men like MacRitchie and Kennedy, an anonymous correspondent of The London Magazine — I read many of these from the 19th century, who travelled to Scandinavia, to Ireland, to Greece, to the Orkneys, collecting folktales and writing them up for a metropolitan Victorian audience. Their interest was explicitly archaeological. They wanted the creature at its most pagan, the troll that most resembled a pre-Christian demon, so it could be analysed as a relic. The ambivalent troll woman of the older sagas was not interesting to them. The frightening underground creature that had to be defeated by Christianity was interesting to them. The collectors filtered the figure through their own theological needs, and the figure that emerged was darker than the folk had ever painted it.
The third answer is the one I have been circling in this series and in all of my work: the English verb troll already had a pejorative hook inside it. The 1567 Fenton “trolls and corrupters of youth” reference that I talked about two weeks ago; the 1575 Awdeley Orders of Knaves, which I will take up in the next talk. When English readers encountered the Scandinavian folk creature, they had a verb waiting — a verb that had already named a category of bad person. The creature and the verb fused in the English imagination in a way that they had not fused in the Norse imagination. In Scandinavia, the troll was a class of supernatural being with a complex moral life, whereas in England, a troll was a kind of knave, and the folk creature arrived to be slotted into the knave category. This is why the popular English-language troll is the Billy Goats Gruff troll. It is not because the Scandinavian original was unambiguously evil; it is because the English reception system wanted a simple villain and had a category to put them in.
My Innovation on the Three Billy Goats Gruff
The interpretation I add to The Three Billy Goats Gruff is the one I have hinted at earlier: whether the troll is the hero, or the three goats crossing are the heroes, depends on your perspective. If you are in the inner realm and you do not want people to come in and adulterate your culture with their different aspect — you do not want them to adulterate the sovereignty or the security or the fertility of your inner realm. You do not want them to come in and steal your sons or your daughters in marriage and adulterate the bloodline. Then the troll is a hero.
It is interesting to me that it is the troll most people, most children focus on, and yet the troll loses in this interaction. For the average MAGA voter or an England Reform voter, where the migrant goat coming over the bridge is the enemy, the troll should be the hero. It is quite a complex tale in that sense, where you have the goats as economic migrants just wanting to get some food on the other side of the bridge. Of course, when you tell that to your child it sounds so innocent — but that is the precise tale that Donald spoke at the bottom of the gold escalator in Trump Tower in 2016. That is the tale we hear a thousand times a day. That is the archetypal troll tale we hear among politicians.
Politicians who, in many cases with good justification, are talking about the complexity of the migration debate. I listened to Meloni this week talk about all the different relationships between migrants and democracy and sovereignty and security and being manipulated by malign forces, and how this undermines our democracy — a really sophisticated critique. This troll tale does have that sophisticated critique, but I accept that most people do not see that when they first see films about it.
The Moomins are not obscure. The Moomin novels have been translated into more than 16 languages. These are positive trolls, avant la lettre — positive trolls, way before NAFO. Tove Jansson was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966, and won it. They are very much part of the establishment. Finnish state Moomin-themed stamps have been issued. They have sovereign authority in every decade since 1992. The Moomins have their own theme park in Naantali and an entire museum in Tampere. There is also a small museum in Covent Garden in central London. Millions of Scandinavian children grow up with the Moomins as their primary image of what a troll is.
In Finland and Sweden and Japan, where the Moomins are immensely popular, the word troll, in its folkloric register, retains its older sense. I mention this because when the English-language culture war of the last 20 years imported the pejorative troll into global usage, it imported a moral simplification that many of the cultures that the word passed through already knew was wrong. When a Finnish reader encounters the headline “Trolling Jail Terms” in 2010 — these are pop culture references to English pop culture, and Moomin trolls sitting by the fire. The cognitive work required to let the first picture override the second is real. In much of Scandinavia it has not entirely been done. The older picture is still available.
The Code of Positive Trolls and Distinguishing Folklore from Disinfolklore
How do you distinguish folklore from Disinfolklore? Mockers’ mocking tone, and the way she tells these stories of doom — that is folklore. The Code of Positive Trolls, this six-element test: generosity — is it generous? Right — is it ethically disciplined? Patient — does it provoke us into making urgent decisions, or is it a bit chilled? Mana, energy, and focus — i.e. mindfulness. Should we let this into our brain, into our inner mind, to affect us? Is there any wisdom in it?
The Code of Positive Trolls can draw on the positive residue. I am not going to try to rescue the negative meaning of troll in our contemporary culture. I will stick with the Code of Positive Trolls because we all troll all the time. If you accept that as part of the definition, then we need a means to decide what is positive and what is negative. I use the six-element evaluative framework.
When I wrote at the end of March 2022 in my “Let’s Compare Trolls” tweet — of President Zelenskyy as the arch 21st-century troll, compared to Duncey Putler as the arch 20th-century troll — I was using the Code of Positive Trolls to distinguish between the two of them. It is simply not right to sign into law and into international law, as Putler did in 2003, the state border of Russia and Ukraine, and then invade it and claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia. That breaches law. It breaches right. Therefore, he is the negative troll in that sense.
The Moomin, the troll woman of the saga at the beginning, the petrified giant of Þingvellir in Iceland — these are folk figures that contain the possibility of a troll who is the giver of gifts to the traveller in the wilderness, not merely a taker of tribute at the bridge. All of us who have been following NAFO since its inception, and have been helping to keep NAFO in everyone’s minds, understand this. They are positive trolls, not merely takers of tribute on the bridge.
If you are building a practice, you can build it with that residue. If you are fighting the public meaning of the word, you cannot win, but you can behave properly, and accept that you are trolling — for instance, if you are a NAFO member.
The Troll Predominantly Negative, Even in Scandinavia
The negative evidence is really not about rescue in the Scandinavian folk record itself. Even before the Grimm filter, the troll is predominantly negative — predominantly, not universally, but predominantly. Most of the sagas treat the creature as something to be defeated. The benign troll woman is the minority case, not the majority.
The troll’s association with bridges is an association with toll-taking, with the forced extraction of resources. We go to the Strait of Hormuz with the forced extraction of resources from travellers who cannot go around. The troll’s association with darkness is an association with inversion of the sun’s moral order. In the Eddas, when Thor fights Hrungnir and Þrymr and Skrymir and the other giant trolls, the fight is presented as the legitimate defence of Asgard against encroachment. The moral geometry favours the gods. The trolls lose.
In the moral folkloric reading that Janteloven codifies — Janteloven, some of you, I know I am not pronouncing it correctly. Is anyone there? We have a Tove. We have proper Scandinavians there who are going to correct me on all of this. I cannot pronounce Janteloven properly, but since I was introduced to it, it is amazing.
Janteloven was first codified by a novelist, but the rules which it represents are the dominant means of keeping community together in Scandinavia. It is the Scandinavian social principle that nobody should think of themselves as special, that the community is the unit of moral reference, that outliers are suspect. The troll is the figure who lives outside the community. The troll rejects Jante. In the Scandinavian moral imagination, this is not neutral — it is the definition of deviance. The troll under the bridge is not just a robber, he is a heretic against the commune.
When Scandinavians invented Facebook comment moderation tools and began prosecuting trolls under the Swedish penal code in the 2010s, they were acting on a folk intuition about the commune heretic that is more than a thousand years old.
To be honest, the folk record shades slightly towards the negative, even in Scandinavia. The Moomin and the troll woman in the cave are real, but they are the minority. The Billy Goats Gruff troll, the mountain ogre, the bridge toll-keeper are the majority. The English reception system did not distort the original. It selected for the dominant moral reading.
When the Two Streams Met: Negative Gravity Pulls Neutrality Down
The two streams that fed the word — the fishing stream of the angler’s running line and the folklore stream of the Scandinavian creature — had different moral centres of gravity before they met. The fishing stream was morally neutral. The folklore stream was morally ambivalent in the sagas, morally polarised in the Grimm-era reception, and morally recoverable only in pockets like the Moomins, the Icelandic landscape tradition, and indeed in Disinfolklore, the tradition I created.
When the two streams met at the bottom of the hill — first in Elizabethan London, with Fenton and Awdeley and Fulwell, and then again in Usenet in 1992 — the folklore stream’s negative gravity pulled the fishing stream’s neutrality with it.
Remember the meaning of neutral. The tra, the movement in there — neu-tral. It is no movement against this axis between right and the dream state, or right and trickery. The neutral is neutral: no movement.
The angler of 1606 who fished for souls became, 400 years later, the troll under the bridge demanding his toll. The gospel bait — remember where the clergyman was comparing trolling for sinners to fishing — the gospel bait became the flame bait. The river became the comment thread. The strike remained a strike.
The word, which could hold both the positive and the negative as late as 1891, when Andrew Lang was editing fairy tales and writing angling sketches and using troll in both senses without confusion — the word, in our lifetime, collapsed into the negative. It collapsed not because the language changed, but because the behaviour the word described had, at industrial scale and with state sponsorship, become negative in a way it had not been before.
The rest of the series is the story of how that happened. In the next talk, in two weeks’ time, I will take you back to three English books in the 1560s and the 1570s, when the negative was already in the word, 300 years before the Grimm brothers picked up a pen. The Elizabethans had a whole taxonomy of troll knaves before Iceland was Christianised in any way that mattered for English literature.
The Grandmother at the Checkpoint: The Luhansk Corpus
I will leave the trolling at that. If you have the patience, I will quickly switch streams back into the archetypal stream and look at one of the archetypal readings of the Luhansk corpus, this 10,000 propaganda items which I collected and which is the empirical basis of Disinfolklore.
From the Stanytsia Luhanska footbridge — back to the bridge between 2015 and 2018 — I watched the same woman cross a thousand times. Not literally the same woman: a grandmother-shaped, headscarfed, thin-coated, plastic-bag-carrying woman who came across at first light, stood in the queue to have her papers inspected by men with rifles, crossed into Ukrainian-controlled territory, went to Oschadbank — who thankfully got its assets back from Hungary today — went to Oschadbank in Stanytsia Luhanska to collect her pension, bought her medicine, visited the grave of her husband, and crossed back before dark. 10,000 of her crossed every day. I was the diplomat on the bridge, me and my colleagues, helping to secure her passage.
She is an archetype. The grandmother at the checkpoint is the third most common character in the Russian occupation propaganda repertoire, after the folksy colonel and the Ukrainian Nazi. In my corpus of 10,000 items, 144 of them are tagged pensioner, grandmother. The occupier uses her in a very specific way. Because I was there for three years, every day, I can tell you she was not just an archetype. She was a real person that I interacted with, and had thousands of conversations with, and I still have the notes of those conversations. She was both a real person and an archetype in the propaganda, in the Disinfolklore the Russians were using to brainwash her and her neighbours in Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Let me read one of them, 24th of May 2016, lug-info.com. This is a story I participated in several different times. “A man died in a long queue created by the Ukrainian Customs Service in Stanytsia Luhanska — People’s Militia. An elderly man died while waiting in a queue artificially created by the Ukrainian Customs Service at Stanytsia Luhanska crossing point, said People’s Militia representative Major Andrei Maroshko.”
The man is real. The death is real. I walked that bridge. I may well have been around the day he died. I may well have been part of this episode. This bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska was in this biosphere reserve, this idyllic place which was not a border until the Russians invaded. The Russian occupiers are claiming this man died because of an artificially created queue by the Ukrainians. For a long time it was very confusing for me to understand. Being on the bridge every day, seeing the different tempo on different periods, it was very hard to know who was causing it. Eventually I did work out that the entire scene was created by the Russians in order to provide a platform for all of these stories, and to provide content for these stories. This is what they do. They create the distress and then they purport to solve it. We recognise that in a lot of these chaos merchants.
Archetype Reversal: Kyiv Starves Its Own Grandmothers
Every word in that sentence is aimed at a specific target: the listener’s protective instinct towards grandmothers and grandfathers. The Ukrainian state grammatically creates the queue — not climate, not war, not the failure of both sides to staff the checkpoint adequately, or the fact that Russia wanted to create the queue so that it would have stories to tell, Disinfolklore in order to brainwash the population, so that seven years down the line they would be able to use them in meat assaults, because they would no longer see their Ukrainian neighbours as human beings. Not the fact that Russia shelled the bridge to rubble in 2015 and blocked its repair for years. Ukrainian Customs Service creates the queue, and the queue kills an old man. Therefore, unspoken but inevitable, Ukraine is the killer of Luhansk’s grandfathers.
This is a classical archetype reversal. In any Indo-European folktale tradition, the elderly are untouchable. To threaten a grandmother is the blackest possible crime. Russian Disinfolklore uses this sacred category by positioning Ukraine structurally as the entity that threatens her. Every pension-queue death is folded into the narrative: Kyiv starves its own grandmothers.
What is left unsaid? That Russia’s occupation created the need for the queue in the first place. That before 2014, Ukrainians crossed no checkpoints in Luhansk province. That the queue is the shadow of the occupation itself. That the woman in the plastic bag and headscarf cohort is crossing out of Russian-controlled territory because the Ukrainian state is where she can still collect a pension, see her doctor, buy medicine she trusts, bury her sister, visit her parents’ grave in the ground where her mother lies.
Every one of those 10,000 daily crossings was a vote. They walked, carrying plastic bags and patience across a bridge under gun-sights, away from the Russian occupation, because life was better on the other side. No referendum in the occupation ever recorded this vote, but the bridge recorded it every day for years, and I was there and watched it.
The counter story is what I saw: the dignity of the queue. The jokes told in it. The people who fed a cat — one of whom I managed to get out of there, Henry the checkpoint cat, who I wrote about in one of my first stories on Substack on Decoding Trolls. The chocolate slipped into a grandchild’s pocket at the checkpoint. The whispered message to the friend at the other side. These grandmothers were not Maroshko’s props. They were Ukraine’s witnesses, and real people. I will leave it at that for today, and the next time we will come back to a few more archetypes.
Why People Stayed: Brave Refusal to Leave
You have probably read this story, because especially with older people, it is their home. They were being boiled quite slowly in water by this Disinfolklore. I thought at the beginning, when they had to cross over into Stanytsia to get their pension, that they would then realise that their fellow Ukrainians were not ogres. The power of Disinfolklore is to convince you otherwise. They had to cross over because their life, their pension depended on it, but it was made such a vastly unpleasant experience by the Russians that it was not a very pleasant operation for them.
Of course, over a million and a half people did leave, and they left within days of the Russian occupation in April 2014. There was, for instance, the last fast train. I do not know whether you have seen these amazing trains — they are much more comfortable than trains in most parts of Western Europe. The last fast train left Luhansk city probably around the 15th of April 2014. I knew people who were on that train. It is quite a famous train. A million and a half people did leave. Some of them left with their parents, their families.
I met one amazing family who had this massive house and horses in Crimea, which they left — just left everything immediately, took as many horses as they could and headed to Luhansk in early March 2014. Then the Russians kind of followed them to Luhansk and took over, and they had to go to Kyiv with their horses. There are literally a million and a half stories of people who did leave, but a lot of people did not leave, for a whole really complex set of reasons. They would go over for their pensions.
Certain people we know — at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I was encouraging friends of mine to leave immediately, and trying to help them find places in western Europe to live. These people, who recently were terribly affected when my apartment building in Dnipro was bombed two weeks ago, that I talked about, and my neighbour’s mother was killed in that attack — I often reflect on how brave these people were. These are younger people with the means to leave, with the financial means and the cultural means to go, but their attitude is: this is my home, I am not leaving. The Russians — this is why the Russians are still stuck a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv: because so many people refuse to leave. It is just friction for them, quite apart from fighting. I admire it greatly. It would not be my intuition, but it is a really interesting question, Wendy.
