It didn’t take long for Russia’s invasion to reach Izyum, a city of fifty thousand people on the Siverskyi Donets River, in eastern Ukraine. Within days, Russian warplanes were dropping heavy munitions on residential districts; by late March of last year, Russian tanks rumbled through the town center. As the Ukrainian Army retreated, it blew up the city’s main bridge for automobile traffic, a futile attempt to slow the Russian advance which split Izyum in two: left bank and right bank, with only a pedestrian bridge and a pontoon crossing laid by Russian troops connecting one side with the other. A Russian officer known as Shere Khan, a nom de guerre borrowed from Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” assumed the position of military commandant.
Russian forces installed several locals to run the city administration. A former police officer and failed mayoral candidate named Vladislav Sokolov took the post of acting mayor. He began appearing around town, trailed by a phalanx of Russian soldiers, boasting of repair works and food-aid deliveries. “We have huge plans, and Russia will lend us its support in realizing them,” he was quoted as saying in the Izyum Telegraph, a newspaper published by the occupation authorities. Shelling and air strikes had left much of the city in ruins. Ukrainian officials estimated that eighty per cent of residential buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The electricity was out across town, which also meant that there was no water in the taps. A rocket had torn off a wall of the city’s main hospital; doctors performed surgeries in the basement using a portable lamp powered by a diesel generator. Sokolov urged residents with relevant skills to come out from their bomb shelters and join the rebuilding effort. “We’re experiencing a lack of manpower,” he said.
Across the city, residents faced the choice of whether to coöperate with the new regime. Dozens of municipal employees went back to work for Russian-appointed bosses. A handful of existing cops joined the city’s “people’s militia,” a Russian-backed police force, as did a motley crew of security guards, handymen, and car mechanics. A station dubbed Radio Z appeared on the airwaves, with local voices broadcasting basic information, such as how to avoid stepping on a land mine, and a heavy dose of pro-Russian propaganda. The occupation administration encouraged parents to send their children back to school, and teachers were pressured to return to the classroom with a Russian curriculum that rejected Ukrainian language and identity.
Residents agreed to collaborate for a number of often overlapping reasons: fear, pro-Russian sympathies, opportunism, the hope of doing something productive for the city. Power dynamics were fluid and hard to parse. Russian forces acted as if the takeover of Izyum was permanent and immutable, announcing preparations to distribute Russian passports and to hold a referendum on the occupied territories joining Russia. The Ukrainian government warned that anyone who worked with the occupation administration would face consequences. “I want to address those officials who did not hold their noses at entering into a dialogue with the occupiers,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a national address delivered in March. “If any of you are tempted by their offer, you are signing your own sentence.”
One morning in April, Pavel Golub, the owner of a mobile-phone-accessory shop in town, walked to the pedestrian bridge and joined a large crowd of people waiting for some kind of official announcement. A rumor had spread that able-bodied men might be offered additional food in exchange for volunteer work. Golub was thirty, with close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes, and thick, muscular arms; before the war, weight lifting had been his passion. He lived with his wife, Iryna, and her twelve-year-old son, Danil, in a white brick house on a side street lined with cherry trees. The local economy had stopped functioning, leaving Golub with a storeroom full of product and no customers. His family had to rely on Russian aid, which tended to be sporadic and insufficient. Residents often stood in line for hours only to leave hungry and disappointed.
At the bridge, Sokolov asked for volunteers to dig out bodies from the rubble of a ruined building. Golub and a dozen others stepped forward. The site was a five-story apartment block on Pervomaiska Street that had been hit by an air strike in the early days of the war. The middle section of the building had collapsed and crashed through to the cellar, where residents had taken shelter. Forty-four people were killed. Golub knew many of them, including a childhood friend named Elena, whom he identified among the ruins by a tattoo of a feather below her collar-bone and a silver ring on her finger. Nearby, Golub and the others found her husband and their two daughters, the older of whom had gone to the same school as his stepson, Danil. As the men worked, Sokolov suggested that they form a brigade to collect bodies across the city in exchange for food rations. One of his deputies added, “This is for those who don’t shy away from the dead.”
The group began daily patrols, with Golub as the foreman. Local residents reported the locations of bodies, which Golub and the others loaded into a minibus and took to the pedestrian bridge, where funeral workers from the other side of the river collected them. On busy days, they could transport as many as fifteen bodies before curfew. When they ran low on body bags, they carried corpses in blankets. Eventually, they were allowed to cross the river to dig the graves themselves. The burial ground was situated next to a cemetery, in a dense grove of pine trees. One day, it came under shelling, and everyone jumped into the dirt hollows to escape the barrage.
In late May, a local occupation official ordered Golub’s brigade to collect the bodies of seventeen Ukrainian soldiers at the city morgue. Golub couldn’t tell if they had been tortured, but a number of them had been shot in the head. The official said, “Bury them quickly in a common grave and move on.” Golub complied. He took solace in the advice of an older volunteer in the unit: “Let’s do this job and then forget about it like a terrible dream.”
As summer approached, bodies started to decompose more quickly in the heat. In many cases, people had buried the dead in shallow graves in their yards and by the side of the road. A pair of dirt mounds appeared near a kindergarten in town. Dogs had taken to nibbling on the bodies that hadn’t been buried deep enough. As the brigade’s senior member, Golub was required to write down the names of the dead and to record their passport details. “I wasn’t ready for this,” he said.
It wasn’t just the unpleasantness of the work that troubled him—the smell of rot and muck that stuck in your nostrils, the way the decomposing flesh broke apart in your hands—but also the notion that he was coöperating with the Russian occupation. Still, Golub told himself, someone had to collect the remains, and he needed to feed his family. He received his aid packages at the start of his shift, saving him hours in line; occasionally, he got an extra parcel. “None of this was normal,” Golub said. “We understood that we couldn’t just reject this task, but would have to continue, even if we didn’t like it.”
On September 6th, the Ukrainian military launched a counter-offensive across the Kharkiv region. Izyum was liberated four days later, ending a hundred and sixty-two days of occupation. Ukrainian soldiers and police officers soon came across the burial site where Golub’s crew had brought the bodies. The pine grove was pockmarked with dirt mounds and small crosses for the dead, four hundred and forty-six in all. According to investigators and forensic specialists who carried out exhumations, most had died as a result of shelling and air strikes, but a sizable number showed signs of torture. “The world must see what the Russian Army left behind,” Zelensky said, after a visit to Izyum on September 14th. “Another mass burial of killed people—children and adults, civilians and military.” He made reference to other sites of Russian war crimes: “You saw Bucha. You saw Mariupol. Now it’s Izyum.”
I arrived in Izyum a couple of weeks later. The highway from Kharkiv was covered with a spray of charred metal and dotted with black burn marks. The mangled hull of a tank, its turret pointing lamely toward the sky, lay in a ditch by the side of the road. As Russian forces pulled out, they blew up substations and power lines, leaving Izyum once again without electricity or running water. Crowds occasionally gathered when Ukrainian aid deliveries arrived, or when word spread that pensions were available for withdrawal at the post office. Otherwise, the center of town was largely empty.
Before Russian forces captured the city, the mayor, Valeriy Marchenko, had managed to flee to Kharkiv. He returned the day after the city’s liberation. As Ukrainian forces advanced on Izyum, someone had set fire to the municipal headquarters, forcing Marchenko and his staff to set up temporary offices in a building that housed the city’s education department. I found him on the second floor, sitting behind a large wooden desk, wearing a heavy coat to keep warm.
Marchenko, who is fifty-two, with the boxy build of a linebacker and a baritone voice, was elected in 2015. I asked him about the locals who stayed and took up posts in the occupation. Of the eighty or so people who made up the prewar executive committee, the city’s main governing body, Marchenko personally knew four who had worked for the occupation, including an aide who was featured in a propaganda video in which she thanked Russian troops for kicking out the Ukrainian “fascists.” “More than anything, it reminded me of a circus,” Marchenko said.
A few days earlier, the head of the city’s water department, Mikhailo Zubko, who had agreed to work under occupation, repairing pipes and pumping stations, had come to see Marchenko at his office, telling him that he had been forced to coöperate. Russian soldiers came to his office, he said, put a bag over his head, and spent the next few hours beating him and threatening to shoot him in the knees and groin. Marchenko was unmoved. He told me that city officials had offered to help evacuate Zubko, and even sent a car for him, but he had chosen to remain in Izyum. “I understood perfectly well what would happen if I stayed,” Marchenko said. “Either they would have killed me—the most likely option—or forced me to work for them and say how great Russia is.”
When I tracked down Zubko, he remembered the story differently. He said that the offer of evacuation came only after the arrival of Russian forces, and that shortly before Marchenko left Izyum he had told Zubko, “Hang in there, and make sure the people have water.” (Marchenko denies saying this.)
In the end, Zubko and the four members of the executive committee were suspended from their posts. “I myself don’t know how we’re supposed to live with such people,” Marchenko said. “They served the Russians, passed them information, watched them rob and mistreat people—and now they should be allowed to carry on like nothing ever happened?”
Official details on how many people from Izyum and the surrounding area were questioned or detained on suspicion of collaboration are tightly guarded, but the number is almost certainly in the hundreds. Golub was among them. Two days after Izyum’s liberation, a jeep full of men in camouflage, carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing the telltale blue armbands of Ukrainian forces, pulled up to his house. They forced their way inside and searched the rooms, turning over beds and drawers, asking Golub’s wife, Iryna, where her husband was. He wasn’t at home, she told them—he had gone to drop off a package of food for the parents of a friend. Two hours later, Golub returned. One of the armed men asked him whether he’d held a job during the occupation. Golub told them about the burials. “Then come with us,” the soldier said. They put him in a car and drove off. “Gone, just like that,” Iryna told me. “It’s the last we saw him.”
At the city’s administration building, I found a childhood friend of Golub’s, Maxim Strelnik, who was in charge of sports and youth programs. He left Izyum in March and had returned days before. Near the start of the occupation, when Strelnik was in a Ukrainian-controlled city elsewhere in the Kharkiv region, he called Golub and urged him to leave. Golub demurred. “He said he had to protect his warehouse full of goods,” Strelnik recalled. “That if he left it would all be stolen or confiscated, and he’d be left with nothing.”
Strelnik showed me a photograph that had been going around social media. Golub, stone-faced, wearing a black tank top, holds a Russian flag in his right hand. He’s in a small group posing with Zakhar Prilepin, a Russian novelist turned politician who is a vocal supporter of the war. During the occupation, Prilepin opened his own humanitarian-aid center in Izyum, an outpost of Russia’s imperial reach under the guise of a charity project. His organization boasted of supplying medicine for the city’s hospital and rifle scopes for Russian troops. Strelnik was surprised to see his friend in such company. “What was Pavel doing there?” he asked. “We can only guess.”
Later that day, I ran into one of the city’s deputy mayors, Volodymyr Matsokin, who was constantly racing up and down the stairs of the administration building, fielding questions and requests from residents. Not long after Golub was detained, Iryna had approached Matsokin and some of his colleagues outside the building. “So, tell me, can you breathe easy in this city?” she asked them. Matsokin looked on, confused. The city is clean, there are no bodies in the streets, there’s no stench or disease, she said. “And do you know who is responsible for this? Pavel.” She added, “And now you’re back in office and he’s in jail.” Iryna said that Matsokin simply turned and walked away.
Before the war, Matsokin had been friendly with Golub. “We used to say ‘Hello,’ ‘Goodbye,’ ‘How’s it going?,’ that sort of thing,” Matsokin told me. “I can’t say I ever peered into his soul.” He stepped into an office and came out holding a document that was recovered when Ukrainian forces retook the city: a handwritten list of personnel for the occupation administration. Sokolov was at the top, followed by his deputies and those in charge of the legal and education departments. On the second page, listed as head of “housing and utility services,” was Golub. “When we learned this story, we were all disappointed,” Matsokin said. “We didn’t expect this from him.”
It wasn’t Golub’s work with the burials that got him into trouble, Matsokin went on: “If he was merely a volunteer who sorted through some ruins, that would be no big deal. But taking a post in this fake administration? That’s a different step entirely.” Matsokin also noted the photograph with Prilepin. “And, excuse me, you should understand under whose flag you’re standing.”
In Kharkiv, the capital of the region, I met with Andriy Kravchenko, a prosecutor who works with Ukraine’s security service, the S.B.U., in identifying and charging suspected collaborators in newly liberated territories. He walked me through the Ukrainian criminal code for Article 111(1), the law governing collaboration, which Zelensky enacted in mid-March. “In general, collaboration is defined as any purposeful act that harms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state,” Kravchenko said.
In practice, that can mean many things. The most obvious cases are those in which a person took up arms against Ukrainian forces or was involved in spying or sabotage to aid the Russian war effort. But assessing culpability can get murky at the level of local governance. “We’re looking for people who worked for the benefit of the Russian occupation,” Kravchenko told me. “But does that apply to a welder or carpenter who maintained buildings or equipment for the occupiers? Or people responsible for critical infrastructure?” There wasn’t an easy answer or policy, he said.
A further complication embedded in Ukraine’s law on collaboration is the question of motive. “Was a person moved to act out of personal belief or under the barrel of a gun?” Kravchenko said. “The first would be a crime, the second not.” In Izyum, government workers stopped receiving their Ukrainian salaries in March. Those who agreed to work for the Russian-backed administration often point to the unforgiving financial reality of occupation. “We have so many of these borderline situations, where it is hard for an investigator to prove not merely collaboration but criminal collaboration,” Kravchenko said. “It requires painstaking work.” He told me that it will likely take years for all the trials stemming from months of occupation to make their way through the courts. “But, believe me,” he added, “every case will be looked into. No one should sleep too comfortably.”
One morning, in Izyum, I spoke with Denys Shokun, a deputy chief of police. He and other officers had been combing through records left behind by the occupying authorities to search for suspected collaborators. Any suspects they found were brought to “filtration” centers set up in some of the town’s municipal buildings. The process shares a name with the fearsome practice used by the Russian military to detain civilians en masse and hunt for military veterans, so-called Ukrainian nationalists, or anyone else they deem suspicious. In the Ukrainian version, investigators from the police and the S.B.U. check a person’s statements against witness accounts, social-media posts, and Russian documents. If the evidence appears sufficient for a criminal proceeding, investigators pass the case to prosecutors, who, in turn, decide whether to file charges in court. “We aren’t orcs,” Shokun said, using the common term in Ukraine to describe the Russian invaders. “We act in accordance with the law.”
Sokolov, the head of the occupation administration, had disappeared, along with his deputy and the chief of the occupation police force, presumably fleeing to Russia. That left collaborators of more middling rank—municipal workers, schoolteachers, a smattering of pro-Russian locals—whose guilt was often hard to prove. “We understand that some people worked purely in exchange for humanitarian rations,” Shokun said. “Or doctors at the hospital who took the Hippocratic oath to save people.” During the occupation, doctors treated anyone who showed up in need of help, whether that person was a local hit by shrapnel from Russian shelling or a Russian soldier injured in fighting the Ukrainian Army. In May, Russian troops shot and killed a forensic pathologist on the grounds of the hospital after he refused to give up his car, making the cost of resistance terrifyingly clear.
Most of the cases Shokun was working on involved residents who directly aided the Russian invasion force. A local pro-Russian politician was charged, in absentia, for giving directions to the Russian Army as it approached Izyum. Another man had pointed out Ukrainian troop positions and used his car to deliver munitions to Russian forces. At least ten cases had been opened against former members of the occupying “people’s militia,” including several who had previously served in Izyum’s police force. Shokun, who had left town before the arrival of Russian troops, said, “I try not to judge people. I wasn’t here living under this occupation. But crossing over to the other side to serve them? We took an oath, and they violated it.”
The largest category of collaborators, though, would likely never face any legal action: people who may have had some contact or relationship with the occupation authorities, but not at a level that made them persons of interest for Ukrainian investigators. They might have shown up in the crowd at events organized by the Russian military, like the celebration, on May 9th, of the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War, or sent their children to a summer camp in Russia. At most, such people now faced suspicion and ostracism. “In a city the size of Izyum, where everyone knows one another, legal responsibility isn’t necessarily the most terrible thing,” Matsokin, the deputy mayor, told me. “Disgust, contempt, the desire of your neighbor to spit in your face—all of that can be much worse.”
Before the war, Mikhailo Dzhos, who is fifty-six, worked in a boiler room that supplied hot water to a group of apartment buildings in Izyum. In the days after Russia’s invasion, he showed up at the local headquarters of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps, only to be told that there were no weapons left. Three days later, the Territorial Defense Forces pulled out entirely. Not long afterward, Russian soldiers set up a base in the school behind Dzhos’s house. A Russian checkpoint appeared at the end of the road; soldiers dug a trench across the street, and several of them crouched inside, day and night, a machine gun jutting out from behind the dirt.
One of Dzhos’s neighbors, Victoria Sidorova, seemed to welcome the arrival of the Russian Army. Sidorova, who is sixty-one, is originally from Lysychansk, a city in the Luhansk region that was briefly occupied by pro-Russian forces in 2014 and captured again last summer. After Izyum’s occupation, Dzhos said, he saw her paying visits to the soldiers at the checkpoint, then announcing to anyone who could hear, “Ukraine never existed. We were always part of one great Russia.” He also recalled her saying, of the Russian troops, “They are at home now. They’ve come to stay.”
On April 7th, Russian soldiers took Dzhos and a dozen other men to a nearby courtyard. One held a knife to Dzhos’s ribs while asking questions about the location of Territorial Defense bases. Dzhos said that he knew nothing about it. An hour later, they let him go. On his way home, he passed Sidorova in the street, standing with a group of Russian soldiers. It looked to Dzhos as though she was pointing at him.
Later that spring, a Russian officer visited Dzhos’s house and asked him a series of questions about his age, his job, his salary. As Dzhos answered, the officer appeared confused about why Dzhos had been marked for questioning in the first place. He stopped Dzhos, saying, “Excuse me, do you happen to have enemies here?” Dzhos told him he had an erratic neighbor. “Ah,” the officer replied, and got up to leave. “Now I understand.” Dzhos told me, “I knew then that she was saying things about me everywhere she went.”
A few weeks later, a Russian military jeep pulled up to Dzhos’s house. Troops searched his yard with a metal detector; one claimed to find a Ukrainian Army uniform buried in the ground. They threw Dzhos into the jeep and drove him to a nearby house that they had been using as their quarters. Dzhos was shoved into the cellar, his hands bound. His captors asked where Ukrainian soldiers were hiding and where they had buried their guns. They punctuated their questions with blows to Dzhos’s temple and his torso. He felt one of his ribs crack. Then he was lifted off the floor; someone pinched his nose and held his head back. A stream of water poured over him, instantly making him feel as if he were drowning. They were waterboarding him. Dzhos told me, “I panicked, tried to break free, screaming, ‘What do you want to hear from me?’ ”
The next morning, the soldiers came back into the cellar. “We’re taking you to the Chechens,” one of them said. “They like the ones who aren’t talkative.” The Chechens were based in another house whose owners had left Izyum at the start of the war. One of them poked Dzhos’s broken rib, then told another soldier to “bring out the spider.” The spider, Dzhos soon saw, was a box that contained a hand crank and some electrical wires. The Chechen fastened the wires around Dzhos’s ankles. Flashes of pain raced through his limbs like a lightning storm. “Either speak up or die,” the Chechen said. “Your heart won’t last.” He added, “You won’t be the only one we’ve buried.” The torture continued for several hours.
Finally, the Chechen told Dzhos that, because he was being so stubborn, they would take him to a field and shoot him. Dzhos was delirious. “Let’s go, then,” he said. Russian soldiers put a black hood over his head, and wrapped it tightly with duct tape. They pushed him into the back seat of a car, tossing in two shovels after him. Dzhos felt a barrel squeeze against his temple. “You’re toast,” one of the soldiers said, cocking the pistol. Then, a moment later, the soldier’s voice shifted in tone: “You’ll live, but don’t say what happened to you or we’ll kill your whole family.” Before letting Dzhos go, the soldier added, “By the way, I forgot to tell you: hello from your neighbor.”
A couple of weeks later, Izyum was liberated. Sidorova is still at home, and Dzhos occasionally passes her in the street. “How can she look at me with a smirk?” he said. “I don’t understand it.” At one point, he reached under the kitchen table and pulled out the black hood wrapped in duct tape, a drooping mask laden with quiet horror. Dzhos has tried to let the events of last summer fade away, to find comfort in tending his garden and working on his car. But then, in the most unexpected moments, feelings of rage rush in. “When I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, I feel like I could kill her,” he told me. “But I’m restraining myself.” One way or another, he said, “I would like her to bear responsibility for my suffering.”
But what should that mean? As I made my way to Sidorova’s house, I spotted the trench left by Russian soldiers. At the gate, I called out to ask if anyone was home. A few moments later, Sidorova, a slight woman wearing a woollen sweater, stepped into the yard. She seemed to expect my questions about Dzhos. “We’ve had a hostile relationship for a long time,” she said, narrating a long saga of arguments with Dzhos and his wife, including a time when their Rottweiler nearly bit her. “It got to the point where we don’t even say hello. I don’t look in their direction, and they don’t look in mine. But, with the war, things went entirely crazy.”
Sidorova told me that she is a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, and that she had been cordial with the Russian troops for her own safety, not out of any sense of political loyalties. “I’m not waiting for the Russian World,” she said, referring to the imperial idea popular among Russian nationalists. “I’m waiting for Armageddon, when God will restore order.” She was adamant that she didn’t do anything to instigate Dzhos’s arrest. “No, of course not, I didn’t give the Russians any information,” she told me. “I tried my best not to get involved.”
After Izyum was liberated, investigators twice came to speak with her. On their third visit, she was detained. Sidorova described seeing her neighbors lining the road, watching her being led away. “I told them, ‘It’s not me,’ ” she said. “ ‘Look for the guilty somewhere else. This is all some kind of nonsense.’ ” Sidorova described being driven to a school north of town that had been turned into a detention facility. She handed over her phone and her personal identification and was left alone for the better part of two days. Finally, she was briefly questioned and then released. “I believe this matter has been closed,” she told me. As for Dzhos and the rest of her neighbors, she went on, “I don’t think there can be any relations after this. They’ve ganged up on me. But what can I prove? It’s just my word against theirs.”
Farther down the road, I came to the house of Iryna Slabospytska, an optometrist in her forties. In September, a contingent of Ukrainian troops had come to the neighborhood looking for a man who, during the occupation, distributed Russian humanitarian aid to those who were running out of food. He was on a list of suspected collaborators. Slabospytska defended him and urged the troops to arrest Sidorova instead. “I told the soldiers to leave this one alone—I’ll show them the one who really did something foul,” she told me. She used a Russian-language expression to describe Sidorova’s profile around the neighborhood these days: “Quieter than water, lower than grass.” Sidorova may never face legal sanction, Slabospytska went on, but her actions carry consequences all the same. “She is an outcast,” Slabospytska said. “At least she committed this treachery openly, so we know the enemy’s face. Lots of people did similar things but quietly.”
Izyum was the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the Second World War. In the spring of 1942, in a catastrophic loss for the Red Army, the German Wehrmacht surrounded and killed thousands of Soviet troops near the city, which fell under Nazi occupation for the next seven months. Throughout the region, German forces rounded up and executed Jews and hunted down suspected Soviet saboteurs. Tens of thousands more Ukrainians died of hunger, cold, and disease; nearly as many were removed from their homes and shipped to Germany as slave workers. One such person, a teen-ager named Borys Romanchenko, was sent from Ukraine to labor in a German coal mine, before being interned in the concentration camps in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He was freed after the war and moved to Kharkiv, where, last March, at the age of ninety-six, he was killed in his apartment by a Russian rocket attack.
At certain points in the Second World War, some Ukrainian nationalists viewed the German military as situational allies in the fight against Soviet power; at others, they ended up targeted by Nazi forces. In 1942, for example, Volodymyr Bahazii, the Bürgermeister of Kyiv, as German-installed mayors were called, was shot by the Nazis at Babyn Yar. Meanwhile, German occupiers kept intact many local institutions—the postal service, collective farms, the tractor depot—which were staffed by their prewar employees. “It was impossible not to come in contact with the occupation regime,” the historian Franziska Exeler writes in “Ghosts of War,” “and willingly or unwillingly, some people became complicit or entangled in Nazi crimes.”
Once the Kharkiv region was liberated, on February 5, 1943, the Soviet state moved in to reëstablish its authority and punish those “servants of the Germans,” as a top Communist official called them. Stalin regarded the war as a “test that revealed people’s true loyalties,” Exeler writes, and “showed no understanding for the moral gray zones of occupation.” Across the Soviet expanse, several hundred thousand citizens were prosecuted for their actions under German occupation. Many village heads who coöperated with the Germans were simply shot by Red Army troops as they swept through the Kharkiv region.
Elsewhere in Europe, sorting through questions of guilt and responsibility—not only for the most ghastly crimes of Fascism but also for more humdrum, day-to-day coöperation—was part of the larger project of forging a new sense of national identity and unity. “If postwar governments’ legitimacy rested merely on their military victory over Fascism, how were they better than wartime Fascist regimes themselves?” Tony Judt writes in “Postwar.” The Nazi and the Allied armies had clashed not only as duelling military forces but as representatives of opposing models of civilization. In the aftermath, the victors would have to settle whose cause was just; those who lent their energies to the unjust side would have to face punishment.
This process could be scattershot and inconsistent, rife with excesses in one moment and inexplicably lenient the next. The Norwegian state, for example, put the entirety of the country’s pro-Nazi movement on trial, prosecuting tens of thousands of people at once; the children fathered by German soldiers were stigmatized, committed to psychiatric hospitals, even deported. In France, on the other hand, trials were far less common. “Since the state itself was the chief collaborator, it seemed harsh and more than a little divisive to charge lowly citizens with the same crime,” Judt writes. Notably, three of the four judges deciding French collaboration cases had themselves served the Vichy regime.
In Poland, collaborators and partisans were often one and the same. The Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski writes of one police officer, Władysław Królik, who, in November, 1943, tracked down a number of Jewish families in hiding near the village of Gałki. He and his fellow-officers took them into the woods and shot them. And yet, throughout his service, Królik also carried out secret reconnaissance and intelligence missions for the Polish Home Army, the country’s main resistance movement. When he was put on trial for war crimes, in the early nineteen-fifties, his neighbors asked for leniency, sending letters to the court citing his partisan activity. Królik was released after seven years.
Outside the courtroom, a spasm of vigilante violence erupted against those suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. Italy saw the lynching of more than fifteen thousand people; in France, some ten thousand were killed by roving gangs of resistance fighters. Frenchwomen accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German soldiers had their heads shaved and were forcibly marched around towns and villages to be harangued and mocked. “The popularity of the charge and the vindictive pleasure taken in the punishment is a reminder that for men and women alike the occupation was experienced above all as a humiliation,” Judt writes. Still, far more wartime collaborators escaped justice than faced it: “The majority of people in the lands recently occupied by the Germans were more interested in putting uncomfortable or unpleasant memories behind them and getting on with their fractured lives.”
In Izyum this fall, the lingering trauma of occupation left many residents with conflicting emotions. Relief and gratitude for the city’s liberation commingled with a feeling of grievance and offense, that the relatively well-off and well-connected had managed to flee. It wasn’t unheard-of for residents to lash out at their liberators. When I asked a Ukrainian soldier stationed outside the administration building about loyalties in the city, he said, “Fifty-fifty.” He told me that he left his car parked on the street overnight and in the morning its tires had been punctured.
One evening, I came across a small group in a courtyard cooking dinner on an open flame. Elena Evmenova, the local kvartalnaya, was ladling out bowls of food for her neighbors. A kvartalnaya is a position akin to a neighborhood superintendent; during occupation, Russian authorities tasked people in this role with distributing humanitarian aid and compiling lists of who remained. A hundred and seventy-three people had fallen under Evmenova’s care, she told me: “We had to find a way to survive.” A Russian military station was set up at Izyum’s S.B.U. headquarters, not far from her building. Soldiers would bring out leftover food to share. “Yes, we ate Russian canned beef,” Evmenova said. “What were we supposed to do, die of hunger?”
Evmenova saw the position of someone like Marchenko, the city’s mayor, who had evacuated in the spring, as hypocritical and unfeeling. A small crowd had assembled around us in the courtyard, and some of its members murmured in agreement. “He abandoned us, ran away like a rat, and judges us because we didn’t do the same,” she said. “We lived through something that not many people would be able to bear, and now they call us collaborators?”
The next day, I drove to a neighborhood of private homes on a hill in the eastern outskirts of town, where residents had recently accused their kvartalnaya, a seventy-three-year-old named Elena Tur, of collaboration. By most accounts, Tur, who had been kvartalnaya for twenty-five years, had long lorded her small degree of authority over her neighbors. Petro Koptev moved to Izyum four years ago from Toretsk, in the Donbas, and bought a plot of land beside Tur’s, where he raised cows, chickens, and pigs. As Koptev relayed, Tur laid out her rules from the beginning: “ ‘Just make sure I never run out of milk or meat and you won’t have any problems.’ ” He never gave her anything, which he suspected made Tur furious.
According to Tur’s neighbors, her penchant for petty imperiousness grew into something more menacing with the arrival of Russian troops. She embraced the occupation, boasting of her ties to Shere Khan, the military commander. “She knew all the bosses,” Koptev told me, and alleged that Tur used her connections to gain concessions for herself and to take punitive actions against her neighbors. “She told everyone quite clearly, ‘You start acting too clever, I’ll see that you end up in a cellar.’ ”
One day in August, a resident in her fifties named Olga Solomka complained to Tur that the bread she was handing out, which was supposed to be fresh, was stale. Two days later, Solomka was detained by Russian soldiers and taken to a police station for questioning. She was locked in a cell, where, she said, guards showed her a complaint from Tur instructing them to “bury” her. The next morning, Solomka was released. “Frankly, she’s dead to me,” Solomka said of Tur. “God is her judge.”
Ukrainian law allows constituents to remove their kvartalnaya through a majority vote. A week after Izyum’s liberation, a hundred or so residents gathered by a well on Cosmonauts Street and overwhelmingly voted to replace Tur with Natalia Solodovnik, a forty-one-year-old worker at a nearby bread factory. “I wish Elena Petrovna prudence and health,” Solodovnik told me, using Tur’s patronymic. “But everyone has their own boiling point.” The mayor’s office was notified of the result, ending Tur’s reign. “People see that the courts and law enforcement aren’t always so quick to deal with those who coöperated with the occupiers,” Matsokin, the deputy mayor, said. “But, by exercising their democratic right, they can nonetheless demonstrate their attitude toward such people.” He compared the process to a “healthy organism fighting off infection.”
When I pulled up to Tur’s house, I found her sitting on a wooden bench under a lilac tree. She was dressed in a floral robe, her white hair combed back. She insisted that she had only wanted the best for her neighbors. “Call them occupants,” she said of the Russian soldiers in Izyum. “But they handed out food, and not a single person in my neighborhood died of hunger.” She called Koptev’s claim that she had tried to extort him “absurd”; Solomka was detained, she said, for public drunkenness; and she had no personal relationship with Shere Khan. “He asked, in a very calm, cultured way, for help cleaning up the city, putting things in order,” she said. In exchange, Tur told me, she asked for his help in providing such essentials as bread and milk. “For this I don’t consider myself a criminal,” she said. Her only regret was acting on behalf of her neighbors at all. “Because, no matter what, people turned out ungrateful.”
Perhaps no aspect of life under occupation in Izyum was more fraught than education. The Russian invasion was predicated on a chauvinistic reading of history, in which Ukraine didn’t exist but, rather, was assembled from the borderlands of larger empires. It was the Russian state, whether in the form of the tsar or the Communist Party, that gave Ukraine its place in the world—an ideology that had implications for the teaching of history, language, and literature. Vladimir Putin made clear that schoolchildren in territories occupied by Russia should be taught that Russia and Ukraine were historically united, and that Ukraine has no legitimate claim to independence. In Izyum, at least two school principals and dozens of teachers agreed to return to the classroom and teach the Russian state program.
Oleksii Bezkorovainy, the head of Izyum’s education department, evacuated in the spring, returning days after Ukrainian forces retook the city. “Those who went back to teaching all have the same story, like a carbon copy,” he said. “ ‘We had nothing to eat, we were forced, we felt sorry for the children.’ ” But the majority of teachers in Izyum, Bezkorovainy noted, refused to work under the Russian flag. Many were harassed repeatedly; some were threatened. “They say, ‘We endured six months of occupation, and the ones who worked for the Russians treated us like second class,’ ” he said. “ ‘Now we should go back to school under equal conditions? Shoulder to shoulder?’ I don’t know how to answer these people, because they acted like true patriots.”
During my time in Izyum, one name came up more than any other: Lubov Gozha, the director of School No. 2. Gozha, who is fifty-three, had been its director for seven years. School No. 2 had a long history: in the Soviet era, it was Izyum’s only school with Ukrainian-language instruction, and through the years it became known as a center of Ukrainian culture and identity. Gozha kept up the tradition, wearing a vyshyvanka, an embroidered Ukrainian folk shirt, on the first day of classes every year, and setting up a small exhibit on the school grounds with handmade artifacts that reflected Ukrainian history and customs. A few years ago, an alum who had joined the Ukrainian Army was killed in the Donbas war; Gozha put up a memorial plaque near the entrance and held an annual ceremony to commemorate him and other veterans. “We would stand next to each other singing the Ukrainian anthem, and I could see she had tears in her eyes,” Bezkorovainy said.
That is what made the scene that took place on August 16th all the more unexpected. In a large hall at Izyum’s House of Culture, Gozha stood onstage, surrounded by Sokolov and other occupation officials, handing out Russian-issued diplomas to several dozen local high-school students. “Congratulations from the bottom of our hearts,” Gozha was quoted as saying to the assembled students and families, in the occupation paper Kharkiv-Z. “We are counting on you to raise up our city and help in its stable development.” The article also noted that Gozha’s school was among the first in Izyum to be accredited by Russian education authorities. “It’s strange and painful that she sold herself out like this,” Bezkorovainy told me. “I guess I’m not as good a judge of people as I thought.”
I found Gozha at her home, in a troubled state, a coil of nerves and fright. She was sitting at a folding table in her yard, barely able to speak, her hands shaking. Her husband, Anatoly, was trying to tend to her, but he, too, seemed in a state of shock; he’d start to tell a story, then trail off, or interrupt himself to rub tears from his eyes. It has been like this for weeks, Anatoly said. He pointed to a line of pill bottles on the table. “Thank God we found these,” he told me. “She was in some faraway place, lying there like a cutlet. I thought she was done for.”
Gozha began to tell me of her years at School No. 2. “It was my whole life,” she said. “I was devoted to the school, and still am.” Her house is on the edge of town, and had ended up between Ukrainian and Russian troop positions. The booms were loud and frequent. A shell landed right in the garden, blowing out the windows of the house; another slammed through the front gate. Anatoly’s mother, who is eighty-three, lives nearby and is virtually bedridden. It would have been impossible to evacuate her. So Lubov and Anatoly spent most of their time in the cellar, which fit only an old mattress and shelves of pickled vegetables. “I would come up to wash myself, and then hear a blast, and Anatoly telling me, ‘Luba, get down!’ ” She added, “I can’t describe the fear.”
In July, a group of Russian soldiers, led by a former accountant in the city administration named Yulia Babaevskaya, who had taken up the post of education director, showed up at the house and instructed Gozha to return to work. She refused. A few weeks later, they came back; Gozha got the feeling that saying no a second time wasn’t an option. “They had guns,” she told me. “They didn’t so much pose a question but simply said this was how things would be.” She went back to school, but said that she mainly focussed on routine matters: cleaning the yard, fixing the windows, stocking supplies. Russian soldiers were everywhere. Gozha referred to their presence as “control”—“control” at school, “control” at home, “control” around town. Some mornings, she said, she would sit frozen on her couch, unable to get up and go to work, and then, by eleven in the morning, “control” would come looking for her. Even when she complied, the soldiers taunted her. “ ‘Oh, so you’re the big Ukrainian patriot, from the pro-Ukrainian school,’ ” Gozha recalled them saying.
Gozha understood that it was impossible to avoid questions of ideology and loyalty. Earlier in her career, she had taught Ukrainian geography, showing students a map of the country. Crimea, the Donbas, Izyum—all of that was and is Ukraine, she said. “And now you should say something different? If you remain a patriot, then no, you can’t.”
But Gozha felt that she didn’t have a choice. “You either do as they say or they can kill you,” she said. “It’s hard to call that comfortable.” At a certain point, Babaevskaya instructed Gozha to clear out the Ukrainian-language literature from the school’s library. “I told them I won’t do any such thing,” she said. By late August, she had stopped showing up at the school, and Russian soldiers largely left her alone. Less than two weeks later, Izyum was liberated and they were gone. Many people in town had seen a photograph of her at the graduation ceremony. Her husband began receiving nasty text messages, calling her a collaborator. Her contract, along with those of many other teachers who coöperated with the occupation authorities, was suspended. “So I’m a traitor?” Gozha asked. “Whom did I betray? My home? My mother? It feels like I’m guilty for the fact that I survived.” In the days after Izyum’s liberation, an armed unit of investigators came to Gozha’s home, blindfolded her, and drove her away for an interrogation. “At first, I thought they were going to shoot me,” she said. She was eventually released, and no charges have been filed. “Still I’m scared,” she told me. “I can’t sleep. I scream at night, you can’t believe.”
Several former students and parents have stopped by to offer words of encouragement. Recently, a man who graduated from School No. 2 and is now fighting in the Ukrainian Army greeted her warmly in the street. But Gozha has the feeling that many of her former colleagues, not to mention a sizable number of people around Izyum, would prefer it if she simply left town. “I love Ukraine—I haven’t changed at all,” she told me. “And so it pains me that some people have changed how they feel about me.” One thing was clear, she added: “There’s no future for me here.”
When Golub was being detained, one of the Ukrainian soldiers told Iryna they would bring him back that same evening. In the car, the soldiers covered Golub’s head with a hood and tied his hands. They came to a stop by the river, where Golub was forced out. “Why is this one so clean?” a voice asked. Fists landed on his legs and his torso. He was then put onto a bus, which drove around Izyum for an hour, stopping occasionally to pick up more people—two dozen suspected collaborators, Golub eventually learned.
That evening, they pulled up to a prison near the city of Pervomaiskyi, seventy miles from Izyum. Golub and the other detainees were thrown on the floor, their hands still bound. Two days later, he was taken down the hall for an interrogation. One S.B.U. officer told him, “If you don’t want to end up being shot or being made to walk across a minefield, make sure to tell us everything so that we really believe it.”
Golub insisted that he had told his interrogators the whole story: Sokolov’s offer, collecting bodies from the streets, the burials at the mass gravesite. During the summer, Golub went on, the occupation authorities asked his brigade to take part in reconstruction works and to clear an area for a new sewage pipe. Golub said that Sokolov offered him the post as head of housing and utility services for occupied Izyum—the job I saw listed in the personnel file left behind by Russian forces—but he declined the offer. “I’ve never done this kind of work,” he told them.
He also provided an explanation for the photograph with Prilepin. One day, a friend invited him to take part in a meeting to discuss sports programming. When he showed up, a small crowd of people was gathered around a man dressed in a khaki shirt and white sneakers—only later did he learn that this was Prilepin. A Russian soldier handed him a flag and told him where to stand. “His tone was basically ‘You have a family, so do this quickly and fuck off,’ ” Golub said. “But, honestly, when people with guns are standing around, you don’t have the strong desire to think a lot about what they’re saying and why.” Afterward, Golub told me, he tried to limit his contact with the occupation authorities. “I basically disowned them,” he said. By July, he was done clearing bodies. He set up a small stall at the city’s outdoor market to sell some of his remaining inventory of cell-phone accessories.
When the interrogation was over, Golub was taken to a cell where thirty other people suspected of collaboration were being held. Some of them described how they had joined the Russian-installed police force in their towns; others had willfully led Russian troops to Ukrainian military veterans. One man told Golub that he’d identified the homes of well-off families who had fled so that the Russians could help themselves to whatever remained.
There were also more ambiguous cases. Golub recognized an acquaintance from Izyum who had a large warehouse in town. Russian soldiers had forced him to lend them the space to store humanitarian aid. This had landed him in trouble, but after a month he was freed. The guards treated everyone in the cell the same, Golub told me. “They would tell us, ‘You are scum, you are traitors, sit there and be quiet.’ ”
One day, an S.B.U. officer confided to Golub that he would be set free in the next day or two. “Don’t be afraid, all questions have been answered,” he said. But, the officer went on, Golub was considered a witness to Russian war crimes and was being held for his own protection. “Excuse me, but witnesses are treated better than this,” Golub said. The officer apologized, and explained that, in wartime, the prison was one of the few places where so many people could be housed and processed at once. Then he made a request: Would Golub be willing to speak to Ukrainian journalists about his burial work once he was back home? Golub agreed. Later that day, he was driven to Izyum, where he gave an on-camera interview at the gravesite in the forest.
He thought his ordeal was over. But afterward S.B.U. operatives told Golub that they had received an order to take him back into custody, and returned him to the prison in Pervomaiskyi, where he spent another four weeks. Golub lost fifty pounds; his joints ached from sleeping on the floor. He complained to the guards about severe pain in his abdomen, the result of a hernia he had developed while hauling rubble. After forty-two days in custody, he was transferred to a hospital in Kharkiv. As he was being led out, one of the guards said to him, “Just don’t tell anyone about your time here.” (An S.B.U. official told me that suspected collaborators like Golub often appeal to the agency for protection in a secure environment because they fear for their safety.)
Golub returned to Izyum last November. He went to his storeroom, only to discover that the lock had been broken and all his inventory, worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, was gone. The police showed little interest in the case; one day, Iryna asked some soldiers from a Territorial Defense unit about Golub’s ransacked space. “That’s the guy who coöperated with Russians,” one of them said.
His friends are mostly supportive. Strelnik, from the city’s administration office, said, “I believe him.” He went on, “It’s an instructive case. We thought a person might have been a collaborator, but it looks like he was under pressure, forced to take part.” Matsokin, the deputy mayor, wasn’t so sure: “It’s not like this person was tied up and had no choice.” Golub had heard rumors that police officers in Izyum had discussed finding new charges to bring against him. “I was detained without any documents, and was released without any documents,” he told me. “Seeing as there’s nothing that says I’ve been officially cleared of all suspicion, what keeps them from detaining me again?”
Golub’s parents, who are in their fifties, ended up in Germany, part of a mass exodus of Ukrainians across Europe. After Golub’s release, his father, who uses a wheelchair, came to see him in Izyum. Men who are of fighting age are typically not permitted to leave Ukraine; Golub received special dispensation to accompany his father back to Germany. He has since taken a job in another European country, which he asked that I not disclose, where Iryna and Danil have joined him. During Izyum’s occupation, he said, “I imagined that our guys would come and I could finally exhale. Things turned out more complicated than that.” ♦
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