When my grandfather boarded an ocean liner destined for Quebec City in the spring of 1929, he must have been terrified.
He was only 19 years old and had no formal education. He spoke neither English nor French, just Ukrainian. He had no idea what awaited him in the new world.
His older brothers had gone to school and received an education, but William Diduck was considered stronger than he was smart, and so he was kept home to work on the family farm, where his hands grew calloused from tilling the wheat fields. He didn’t play and laugh and have fun like other children. Even as a kid, he was a gloomy and solemn and hard-working sort.
As terrified as he might have been crossing the Atlantic, his experience probably wasn’t as terrifying as the fate that met his older brothers who stayed behind. When the Russian army swept through Ukraine in the early 1930s, they showed no mercy. Those who opposed them were dealt with harshly, swiftly.
Two of William’s brothers were shot and buried in mass graves, and a third was sent to Siberia to work in a forced labour camp. It is unlikely that my grandfather knew what happened to them at the time, as communication was limited to hand-written letters that would have taken months to arrive — if they arrived at all.
By 1939, Hitler had invaded Poland and was moving Westward, and Ukraine was stuck between two forces of evil: the Germans on one side, and the Soviet army on the other. Within a few short decades, famine and war decimated an ethnicity one thousand years in the making.
William was spared this fate. He lived. But his culture was lost, too.
He was also forced to work by colonial masters in another country that was foreign and, at times, no less hostile. He went from Quebec to the Northwest Territories where he worked in a Uranium mine and was beaten for speaking his mother tongue. And the mine would eventually cause his death from silicosis.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony was completed in the Summer of 1943, immediately following the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad. Hitler was adamant about capturing the city for its strategic importance; Stalingrad was the largest industrial center in Russia and sat along the Volga River, a major transportation hub for provisions, troops, and oil. But Russia, throwing all of its might into the combat, ultimately prevailed.
The Battle of Stalingrad is regarded as among the bloodiest in all of warfare. Estimates of casualties range from 1.25 million to over 4 million people.
Russia commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad on February 2nd each year in one of the country’s most celebrated in its Days of Military Honour. These ‘Days’ serve as a significant propaganda tool to glorify the Soviet empire, and still today, Vladimir Putin uses this particular battle to drum up national pride.
Nazis were unconditionally bad, and Russia beat the Nazis, therefore, Russia must be categorically good. But after the battle was won, the Soviet Union embarked upon decades of repression against their own people, as well as of the citizens of the annexed Soviet Socialist Republics. Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony was banned from public performance until 1956.
What Russia did in Ukraine in the 1930s horrified even the Germans. Holodomor, or the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide, killed more people than the Holocaust did — and in much messier fashion. Grain was deliberately destroyed in order to drive up its price on the international market, and in the process, millions of ethnic Ukrainians starved to death.
As borders were closed, there was simply nowhere else for people to go. The Breadbasket of Europe was emptied on purpose. My family’s once abundant wheat fields were first stolen, and then intentionally destroyed. Nearly 100 years later, that land once again is drenched in blood.
How is it possible for a culture to endure genocide twice in one century?
The only way is the mass erasure of history. Because, as Winston Churchill said, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And if we are repeating that history, then the worst is yet to come.
Our global amnesia is picking up pace. Just two years ago, the front page of The New York Times declared in horror that Russia was using torture and rape as weapons in their war to take Ukraine. Now, those same headlines report that Hamas weaponized sexual violence against Israeli hostages on October 7th, 2023.
The U.N. certified the Ukrainian invasion as genocide; now, there is no denying that genocide is occurring in Gaza, too. Meanwhile, the West, as it did during Hitler’s Polish conquest, is sitting on the sidelines, appeasing evil, arguing over whether or not and how to intervene. If history is any lesson, there will soon be no choice.
Listening to Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony is a stark reminder of history — the history of repression during the Soviet reign; the history of genocide that Russia inflicted upon Ukraine, and the history of fascism reincarnated in its own ancestral victims.
It is impossible to miss the tragedy audible in every note that the USSR censored, in every crash of the cymbal, in every drumbeat. And it is vital to hear those notes again in the context of today’s conflicts, which portend to spiral into another World War.
Putin has already threatened to use nuclear weapons to destroy the globe’s communications satellites, and now he has straightforwardly said he is prepared to use them against earthly targets as well.
In the Ukrainian language, ‘diduck’ refers to a sheaf of wheat bundled together. It also means ‘grandfather spirit.’ My grandfather, William, was stronger than he was smart. But he was smart, too. He was smart enough to educate his children, and his children’s children — to study music, to appreciate art, and to learn from history.
The history embedded in Shostakovich’s tremendous work is everyone’s history. Listen closely, lest it again become our future.◼︎
The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal performs Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony March 7th and 10th, 2024, at Maison Symphonique.
Cover image: Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal
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