Ukrainian philosopher: "We are more respected by people of Western culture"

Philosopher and Logik Natalya Vyatkin about the breakdown of contacts with Russian scientists, on counter claims, about the academic atmosphere in Kyiv, about refugees and relations with European science

The humanitarian corridor is not only legal, legal or military. A person needs to support psychological and medicinal care, warmth and word. There are not only disasters medicine, but also the language of disasters. Several million Ukrainians left their homes. The world community rose to protect the latest exiles. About this picture of the world created before our eyes, the podcast series "Humanitarian Corridor". By the width of this corridor, they will judge the morality and responsibility of our era. The presenters are Ivan Tolstoy and Igor Pomerantsev.

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Natalya Vyatkina: "The philosopher saves a person"

Igor Pomerantsev: Natalia, how and why did you become a refugee?

Natalya Vyatkina: Because in a week, and in two, and on the eve we discussed the possibility of such an event, but for some reason we convinced each other that this could not happen, that such threats were before. But when this happened, it was still unexpected and very scary. It’s especially scary for my granddaughter, because she from the beginning of the pandemic, fell under Lokdown, stayed with me, we lived for the first six months, she studied online, and then we began to live together out of habit. Mom lives on the same left bank, but on birch trees, and we are on the forest. During Lokdown we could not communicate, we were not allowed, but now the war has begun. And she made us change the lifestyle. Firstly, these shelling is constant, it was very close, literally on the second day the tanks were on the Obolon, this is our area, there are our relatives and friends. We sat at home, hid in alarm in the bathroom, equipped sleeping places there, spread all kinds of blankets and litter, dragged a computer there, because as soon as we moved into the room, anxiety was immediately sounded and we had to hide again. We read that the bath and the corridor are the most safe in the apartment due to double walls.

But the reason was also that on the left bank it was very bad with bomb shelters, we had to run very far to school in the basement, we decided not to do this and began to prepare for the departure. Friends from Georgia, from the USA, my friend from Poland, with whom I now live, demanded that we go immediately. We could not go, all the bridges were blocked at the beginning, the usual transport did not miss. We had collected bags in the corridor, we all the time discarded the excess to make it more convenient to evacuate, and in the end my daughter’s school girlfriend helped us get to the station. We sat all day in the news, woke up at night, and this habit was to wake up and look into the phone that is happening in Ukraine - has been preserved so far.

Natalya Vyatkina

We sometimes went to the store for food and hid again in apartments. The dogs were taken out to take a walk in the yard, but there were very few people, only to the draft item that is next to us, there were men of draft age with backpacks. When we went to the station for the first time, and it was a long way through the checkpoints and long lines of cars, we saw how the city changed - these reinforced concrete blocks were lying everywhere when we drove through the bridge to Pechersk and drove along the Ukrainian boulevard to the Ukrainian boulevard, we had to slam a girlfriend to go around the checkpoints that were installed in a short time.

We got, already the commandant’s hour was approaching, the friend left, leaving us her daughter, who had to be betrayed in Lviv to relatives. The girls and I tried to sit on one train, in the other, there were large crowds, one could only stand in the corridor or in the vestibule. And we decided to take a train on Truskavets. He was in complete darkness, the station is not lit and silence is unusual, unusual for the station. The train turned out to be half empty, because everyone who rode towards Lviv sat on trains with the inscription "Lviv", but I knew that the Truskovetsky train also went through Lviv. It turned out that the three of us were driving in one compartment, and even a soft car.

Animals behaved better than people - they understood everything

We arrived in Lviv and, when I saw what was happening there, it shocked me - there were so many people there! But everyone moved so well! Although with young children, with a lost look, everyone helped each other, gave way. We gave the girl to her relatives and broke up. Then we realized that we had to leave for Uzhgorod, there another close friend lives and volunteer, helps refugees, and the UN mission takes part in the placement of people in Transcarpathia. We found a train that came from Odessa, he was late for three and a half hours, and thanks to this we could get into a reserved seat car, in which there were so many people and things that it was impossible to imagine. People sat closely pressing to each other, and sitting sitting. A huge number of people from this car came out in Lviv, and we thought that there were already empty, but when we entered, we saw that there were many people left there. Nevertheless, we arrived, observing the people and animals that they drove, and this was an amazing sight, because the animals behaved better than people - we understood everything.

Igor Pomerantsev: You work at the Institute of Philosophy, this is the focus of intellectuals. Intellectuals understood the situation better, did they predict events better? Have you discussed in general options for invasion, intervention, aggression of Russia?

Natalya Vyatkina: Of course, and discussed for a long time, we have been going on for eight years for eight years. We had all kinds of expert interdisciplinary round tables at the institute, when employees of other institutions and public organizations were invited. We also discussed among themselves, our magazine "Philosophical and Sociological Thought" printed round tables, they can be read over all these years, there are very serious questions, including dedicated to the war and the situation of the "Russian world", we have one of the departments, they released a monograph. And there are still such interior organizations that invite our employees, including me, “Aspen Institute of Kyiv”, where experts from Ukrainian universities, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Institute of History, which discussed these issues are gathering.

Kyiv. Institute of Philosophy

Ivan Tolstoy: The intellectual world is abroad and surrounded. Nevertheless, we hear about the cliff of academic contacts, about the boycott of one or another side. How does this happen in your area, what happens to your colleagues in Russia?

Natalya Vyatkina: The following happens with our colleagues in Russia. Firstly, even when the invasion of Crimea and east of Ukraine occurred, some of my colleagues-mathematicians and logic-have already printed on Facebook rather aggressive statements about Ukrainian fascism. It is strange that this came from one of the famous mathematicians. And when acute issues were discussed, some of the logicians showed such professionalism by caricature: where is the evidence? This must be proved! And some well -known very Moscow logics have been frained from me because I said that Russia is a country of eternal repression, such a gloomy, bloody story after that. "Why are you writing about this, Natasha?" -And they broke our relations, which were very friendly both professionally and humanly.

At that time, they were massively planted for Ukrainian nationalism

These relations ceased with many from that invasion and with the fact that “Crimea is ours”, because these disputes acquired such a sharp character in networks that in the end someone could not stand it. And a egregious example was our former employee, already deceased, who was once invited to head the department at one of Moscow universities. For some reason, he began to write that in 1973, when he worked in our logic department, he was forbidden to speak Russian. This is a lie. They turned to me, because I even had an opponent of the dissertation, and I wrote that it was not true, on the contrary, they forbidden to communicate in Ukrainian and at that time was massively planted for Ukrainian nationalism. He called us - together with my supervisor, chef on the logic department and director of the institute, Miroslav Vladimirovich Popovich, that Popovich and Vyatkin brought fascism to Ukraine.

This began before the invasion of the Donbass, the Lugansk region and the Crimea. And it was not our initiative to raise such hysterical disputes and accusations of fascism. For some reason, this happened. Therefore, I simply stopped all kinds of relations with many of them, although not with everyone. When I came to Prague to the International Congress by logic, methodology, philosophy, science and technology, there I met people, with some of whom I am quite closely friends. This is the person who arrived at the Maidan settled in the hostel and participated in all this. He can be called a citizen of the world, he is a defender, he goes to the demonstration anti -war in St. Petersburg and Moscow. And there were those who were silent and did not maintain a relationship, but they were offended when I did not go to the pen. "What, you don’t even greet us at all?" - one lady asked. I was even amazed, because I could approach me and say hello, I am a normal person. This is no longer an exchange of opinions, not an exchange of scientific ideas, it simply became uninteresting. They already had such an aggressive attitude, it was not our initiative, but we just took it as a signal to the fact that we would not maintain a relationship.

Natalya Vyatkina

And I stopped riding my Smirnov readings. Vladimir Alexandrovich Smirnov is a very large scientist-logic who headed the sector, raised a huge number of students around the world. He and his wife Elena Dmitrievna Smirnova, I deeply respected, they have been gone for a long time. And I just stopped accepting invitations to their conference, and stopped traveling to Moscow since 1996. Even then I felt some strange mood when I was delayed by the American Council employee, with whom I began to work in parallel with the institute, who was just a girl with a scythe, a tennis player-she was detained on the street, taken to the police to find out a personality why she has no registration. I felt that some kind of air here is not the same in Russia. Our contacts scattered for a long time. We have already established contacts with the foreign scientists of Poland, the Czech Republic and further throughout Europe, this has long begun. We realized that these are primary sources, more interesting contacts, we are more respected by people of Western culture. And we continue to engage in the development of these contacts.

Igor Pomerantsev: Let's get back to the refugees. In Ukrainian history and culture, there is an image of a refugee. What is this image?

Natalya Vyatkina: What I know is from my grandfather and grandmother. We know that people left before 1917 and before the First World War. The First World War, Hunger, was the cause of migration. Since the end of the 19th century, like my relatives in my grandmother, the Bulgarians came to the south of Ukraine, they settled there, so people from the Western, Central, Southern Ukraine settled in neighboring lands and also left for America and Canada. I have known this from a very early age. It was not customary to talk about this at school, and I had such an underground life in a family with my grandfather and grandmother, who raised me for the most part. I just knew that once my grandmother said: "Now, if I had left for Canada, I would have become such a capitalist there." Because she was very economic and entrepreneurial, worked a lot, made, by the way, the beautiful wine in the naked pier of the Kherson region and, in addition, went through school, worked in Crimea at the champagne wines factory, so she also knew some technologies. She shot perfectly, like a sniper. For me, grandmother's example means a lot in life. It was already impossible to leave, but she talked about distant relatives who managed to leave.

She was also familiar with Bogdan Gavrilishin, this is the famous Ukrainian who got into the concentration camp during the war, the Americans liberated them, he was still a boy, and they had a choice: either returning to their homeland, to the Ternopil region, or go further to America. They decided to go to Canada. He was there a lumberjack as a very young man, then he went to study, graduated from college, then became a famous member of the Roman club, an economist in Geneva, founded the famous Institute of Management, which his son continues to engage in Ukraine, he headed the Suros Foundation in Ukraine and founded in Kyiv, together with his son, the International Institute of Management. This fate very vividly indicates that if he returned to his homeland, he would either be deported or shot, he would have died and the world would not know that there is such a smart and wise person. It was unusually interesting to communicate with him.

Bogdan Gavrilishin

How can you say about culture or some kind of refugee? I think that this is not entirely correct, it is a necessary and completely unexpected situation for a person when he has to decide to leave.

Returning to the beginning of our conversation, for me, for example, a question is worth leaving only because my granddaughter is our treasure, and the family delegated me that I should go to my friend. We knew where it was, I lived in this house more than once, I know a good Schezin, here my mother once taught a philosophy at the Schezzinsky Polytechnic for three years. Poland and I have a lot in the family, I have chosen Poland unmistakably for myself.

Ivan Tolstoy: Let me ask you such a personal question about your impression. Running from Kyiv to the west, in Poland you come across a variety of people, you see the most unusual scenes and what is happening before your eyes. Which person or what human act made the biggest impression on you in a good and bad sense?

Natalya Vyatkina: I practically did not meet any manifestations of something negative, because mutual assistance and mutual understanding reigned. I mentioned animals because they allowed to go with animals without any vaccinations, passports, without carrying. Carries were deficiency in Kyiv - everyone needed carrying. What makes a completely unusual impression - this is volunteering, which began in our country for a very long time, from the first revolutions, before 1991, this volunteering has grown during the last Maidan, and it continues. This is an incredible dedication of people, youth - people do who can help with money.

They said in social networks that some people are leaving, they have enough money, they use the help of the state where they came, sit in restaurants, and arrange feasts. This was probably, but I did not meet and did not encounter it in Poland.

Schezzin. View of the old city

Igor Pomerantsev: You are a doctor of philosophy, you have a certain kind of philosophical view of the emergency circumstances of all kinds. What is a war from the point of view of a philosopher, for you?

Natalya Vyatkina: For me personally, this is not only a professional view of things. I talked with Oleg Homa, the historian of philosophy, the editor -in -chief of the magazine "Sentence", who in Vinnitsa leads the department at the University of Technology. When I started talking about whether the war is possible, he said: "Natalya Borisovna, you are a logician, compare the situations, facts. Well, no." I answered him that, besides the fact that I am a logician, I am also a mother, a grandmother, a woman who is simply afraid for the life of her loved ones, for her house, out of town, for the country. This is such a complex of experiences, regardless of which profession is a person. But the philosopher saves a person, because professional quality is rational to analyze what is happening. When you say to yourself that this should be so.

At the Days of Science, I recently made a report called "war, information and problems within references." References are a logical problem, but it is clear that war is not a logical problem, and information is somewhere in the middle. And this is related to critical thinking - how to analyze what the concepts of war are. I analyzed the concepts of war and how the media filed, according to Niclas Luman, the German sociologist and the theorist of the mass media and the systematic approach to these phenomena. And when you understand that on the picture that is created on television, on the radio and in the networks, someone specially works, and someone involuntarily plays along that this may affect, this creates a second reality that has nothing to do with direct facts, but builds some layer between what is shown and the world. And facts are checked not in relation to reality, but in relation to this intermediate reality that mass media creates. And there is always a trap for the viewer and listener, who cannot figure out this relationship.

Luman has a very good guiding thread to understand what role mass media plays. We know this from the war in Iraq, which was such a production, a picture was necessarily given in mass media. And then there were such provocations about the Russian-Georgian conflict. And the Russian-Ukrainian gas conflict-the nature and the cause of this conflict is completely distorted. Until now, the truth has not been published. I know about this because my uncle, director of the Gaza Institute, explained to me, he was aware of all these situations that there was no guilt of Ukraine there, it was still under Yushchenko.

And these topics related to the war, when you know these concepts, you compare them, find some explanations, analogies, listen to the arguments of colleagues, experts, extoling to the current situation, and this analysis allows you to understand. We give certain models of explanations, there are many of them, but we are isolated those that are the most relevant in relation to the current situation.

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