Family histories: The Russian Civil War and Greece

One of the interesting things about being in a family with multiple children - in my case, I have two older brothers - is seeing how your family background impacts each person differently. My brothers and I do not reflect the influence of our parents' lives, and those of their parents before them, in the same way. And yet, I think we all do coherently, each in his or her unique way.

For example, I was deeply influenced by my dad's love of the arts. He spoke many times about how the opera and classical music in particular were a sanity saver when he was a young man in the politically and culturally turbulent environment of Greece. I have always prioritized dance and music and cultural involvement generally in my life.

Something my eldest brother is good at however, and that I am not so good at, is recalling the details of family histories and how they intertwine with historical events. I recall broad themes, but unless I have the details written down, they slip through my memory. I find this troubling (and a bit embarrassing) because as the only one of us with children, I do feel like I have some responsibility to make sure that the stories are passed on. Left to my own devices, however, my children will only get vague outlines, with a good many mistakes included. I will have to encourage a lot of discussion about family history on the occasions that we are all visiting together, in the hopes that AJ and Dani's memories are more reliable than mine. 

Recently I wrote about mine, and my children's, experiences with the Ukrainian community in Canada, in light of the war beginning in February 2022. But, my older brother recently reminded me that our family, on my dad's side, has been involved in Russian/Ukrainian wars before. Surprise!

Andreas, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1893 in Greece. He entered the Greek Army in 1910 or 1912 and left in 1922.  He started as an infantry soldier then became a communications specialist (field telephones) and later became an instructor.  World War 1 and the Russian Civil War were just two of the many wars he fought in.  After his military service ended, he endured World War II as a civilian, and was imprisoned for his activities in Greek Civil War in the 1950s. 

He received the award War Cross (Polemikos Stavros, Kingdom of Greece) while fighting in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War (1918-20). He fought on the exact same ground that is being fought over in the Ukraine in spring 2022 (and previously).

The decoration was awarded on the recommendation of a French officer for action that took place in the Ukraine.  The Greeks were part of an international coalition of armies fighting against the Russian Red Army. The story that was told to me: The Greek army was supposed to retreat from Kherson, but all the telephone wires were down, so there was no way to communicate the message. So Andreas and a fellow soldier crawled several miles through fields in the rain to deliver the message in person. Later, they had to navigate freezing cold rivers with the remains of the army as the bridges had been destroyed.

The wars destroyed him physically and psychologically and he spent most of the remainder of his life as an invalid.

Russian Civil War - Foreign intervention | Britannica

Southern Russia intervention - Wikipedia

I grew up with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall on the news, and the doctrine of multiculturalism in school (Canada). So half-consciously I absorbed the belief that I lived at the "end of history" (Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about that, which I never actually read.) In school, we studied different historical periods and ideologies and ended with "Globalism" like that was the final thing one needed to know about. (The curriculum is much the same now as when I was in school, because these things take forever to update and it is super controversial to do so, whoever is trying to do it.)

Of course I also grew up with stories from my family's history, so it's not like I never had an alternate perspective. Nevertheless, as you are becoming a young adult, it seems natural to look beyond one's family experience for knowledge and socialization. Without necessarily intending to do so, I paid more attention to the broader culture around me as I grew up, instead of the micro-culture I grew up in.  Myself and my peers were all well-off enough to lead a more or less self-absorbed life where our career and personal choices were the central concern of our existence, not somebody else's wars and struggles. At best we felt a vague sense of gratitude to our forebearers who endured a bunch of uncomfortable stuff so we didn't have to.

9/11 was the first shock that disrupted this world view for me (other friends also identified the Columbine shootings). It wasn't like I immediately transformed, but as the years have gone by I've gradually come to view the decades following World War II as a short historical moment, part of a much larger context, rather than the culmination of All History so that me and my generation could live out our fortunate existence. I've come to realize that I am not indeed entitled to a life free of trouble and political, culture and religious upheaval.   I don't see my contemporaries quite the same way, either. I think it is very important to not assume the worst of people, but at the same time I see enough disturbing behaviours (individual and group) that the crimes and misapprehensions of the past are actually quite comprehendible. I will not see world peace in my lifetime or my children's (I used to believe I would.) At the same time, I am reading authors and observers of history and psychology who actually have discussed and to some degree understood what people are like. So I am not alone in trying to understand what is going on and how I should orient my life.

I'm also, slowly, coming to the realization that we can't, entirely, help who we are. Another way to say this is we don't completely choose who we are. I have a fractured cultural background because both my parents wished to leave key aspects of their birth cultures behind. So, they (sort of) were fully on board with the individualist focus of Canadian society. They didn't want to raise us to be a specific identity. So that made it kind of OK to not pay a lot of attention to our cultural backgrounds, to embrace "multiculturalism" (which I interpreted as "you can identify as what you want!) and to "assimilate". None of this however, turned out to be simple, and I think my parents far underestimated how complex it is. You don't just leave your family home and teach yourself to be a certain culture.

For myself, while I am grateful for all the opportunities that an open, peaceful country provided me, I have also come to the conclusion (if conclusions are possible) that I need to understand and in some sense "heal" my own background. I can't just brush it under the rug. It does matter where I come from. I am not the same as all the people who I went to university with, or that I work with, or who make roughly the same amount of money as me, or who have a similar family structure. At the same time I don't want to ghettoize myself or other people. Of course I have things in common with my contemporaries, of course we can be friends and colleagues and share goals. If anything I want to pay more attention to the people around me: I want to have tighter connections, more shared intention, more goals to accomplish. So it's complex, but I feel more and more the relevance to step back and look at the puzzle pieces that are my history, including the ones with jagged edges. I see in them a microcosm of the pieces of the world that divide, grind each other into sharp edges and sometimes draw blood.