The moments were cinematic, recalls Lieutenant Oleksandr Bevziuk-Voloshyn. Almost two years ago, just before 3pm, he and nine other newly minted privates on patrol in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine turned off a road in a picturesque village into a partially walled garden, on the other side of which was a road that led out of the village and towards other farmsteads.
It was a terrible mistake.
When Bevziuk-Voloshyn heard: “Give up, you’ll be fine” in Russian, and saw 30 Russian soldiers step out from behind the walls, he realised his patrol had blundered into an ambush.
A month earlier – one month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – Bevziuk-Voloshyn, a sociologist working at the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology with expertise in global and micro-terrorism, had enlisted in the Ukrainian Border Guards.
When his rifle dropped by his side and his arms were raised in surrender, under the budding trees, with more than two dozen Russian rifles trained on him and his comrades, he told University World News: “I felt like I was transported into a television screen.”
As the Russians advanced, Bevziuk-Voloshyn saw the unmistakable black and orange of the St George’s ribbons pinned to their chests. Established by Empress Catherine the Great in 1769 as Imperial Russia’s highest military award, like the “Z” Russians painted on their tanks and trucks, the ribbons symbolise Russian irredentism.
“When I saw these ribbons, there was a feeling that time had stopped and this would be my last moment alive,” he said.
After taking their side-arms and bulletproof vests, the Russians ordered the Ukrainians to kneel on the ground.
“I’d heard the stories of Russian atrocities. And I thought they might simply shoot us and leave our bodies right there,” said Bevziuk-Voloshyn. Instead of the sound of rifle fire filling the air, it was soon filled with the thuds of the kicks and rifle butts being slammed into the Ukrainians, and the screams of Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s comrades.
His own cries of pain were silenced after a Russian kicked his head so hard that he fell unconscious on the cold, damp ground.
Sense-making
Bevziuk-Voloshyn – who did not have to enlist in Ukraine’s armed forces but did so because he had “decided to help my people, it is my mission” – regained consciousness the next day in a warehouse in occupied Kharkiv Oblast. They were held in the warehouse for two days, guarded by the Russian military police who fed them.
During that time Bevziuk-Voloshyn realised that the sociological skills he had learned in the Conflict and Mediation Programme at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI) would be vital to his emotional and intellectual balance because they provided a way to make sense out of what otherwise would be phantasmagorical world of pain, deprivation and powerlessness.
Drawing on lectures, including those given by British and Colombian trainers with real-world experience of dealing with conflict and mediation, Bevziuk-Voloshyn established a critical distance between himself and his captors and interrogators.
“In my captivity, in this situation, I could see through the eyes of my enemy very closely. And I had the chance to have short dialogues with Russian interrogators who were looking for support for the actions of the Russian army,” he said.
Two days later, Bevziuk-Voloshyn and his comrades were shoved into a bus and driven four hours south east, deeper into occupied Ukraine, to a police station in Svatove, a city in occupied Lugansk. As he and his comrades would experience each time they were moved to another prison, upon arrival in Lugansk, they were savagely beaten: “They do this to make prisoners malleable,” he says.
From the interrogations in the warehouse, Bevziuk-Voloshyn knew what the Russian interrogators wanted and, despite the pain of the beatings and the gnawing feeling of hunger in his stomach (they were fed a small amount of porridge and weak soup once a day which left them still hungry), he recalled his readings about prisoners of war (POWs) in World War II and university lectures on hostage negotiations and devised a strategy that allowed him to cope with the increasingly sophisticated interrogations.
“I was trying to create my history for this interrogation that would help me get through the experience. I created a biography that left out the fact that I was a volunteer and said that I had been forced into the army,” says Bevziuk-Voloshyn.
As did the men I interviewed for a book on escapers and evaders in Europe during World War II, Bevziuk-Voloshyn did not weave his story out of wholly imagined cloth. Rather, it contained just enough truth that he could remember it and it could be believed.
Shortly after the Russians invaded on 24 February 2022 and with Kyiv under bombardment, Bevziuk-Voloshyn, along with his ex-wife and 6-year-old son, went to Chernivtsi, where his son and his mother were to stay with relatives because this city in south-west Ukraine was judged to be safer. He told this to the interrogators because it grounded the central part of his story.
“I told them that the police stopped me in Chernivtsi because I had a car with Kyiv licence plates and money, and that they forced me to join the army,” he said. The bit about joining the army at that time was also true, as the military registration papers, he had (fortuitously) forgotten in his apartment, showed all too clearly.
“I also told them that we [Ukrainians] are against the war because it’s bad for all people in our countries. Nobody wants to take part in it,” words, that Bevziuk-Voloshyn knew, fed the narrative broadcast every day on Russia Today TV. (One of the few joyous moments Bevziuk-Voloshyn recalls occurred in the fall of 2022 when Russia Today, which the prisoners were forced to watch, “showed that the Ukrainian army was advancing in the Kherson region and the hosts of Russia Today, like Vladimir Solovyov, were in “panic and started to cry”.)
Starvation ‘on our skin’
On 25 April 2023, Bevziuk-Voloshyn and about 50 other Ukrainian prisoners were transferred to a POW camp in Russia itself (Rzhevka in Belgorod Oblast), where he and his comrades were beaten, not just on the day they arrived, but regularly, “so that they have more control over you”.
At this camp, the Russian guards sought to break the POWs down by humiliating them, by calling them Nazis and fascists.
“We were told we hate the Russians because we were controlled by Western powers. They said we were marionettes in the hands of Washington. And they said that Ukraine and Russia should be one country,” he said.
Food was also a weapon the Russians deployed. The Geneva Convention, which applies in this case because both Ukraine and Russia are signatories, stipulates that POWs are to be given the same rations as nearby garrison troops. The three meals a day mocked the idea of nutrition.
“It was prisoner food with no meats, no butter, no fats,” he said. What food they were given also lacked Vitamin B1 (Thiamine), which caused some prisoners to swell with edema.
“We were hungry and when we spoke [to each other], we did not worry about the world situation but about food,” he said. Hunger is more than a biological fact, he explained, recalling what amounted to a phenomenological description, born of his sociological training. “It’s scary because all you can think about is food,” he said.
Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s description recalled, for me, the interviews I had conducted with Canadians who had been starved when they were prisoners of the Japanese after the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941. Even with this background, I could scarcely imagine his next words.
“We started to understand the stories of the Holocaust and the Ukrainian Holodomor,” Bevziuk-Voloshyn said slowly, referring to the 1930s famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin. “We wore it on our skin.”
Control over the narrative
Even as Bevziuk-Voloshyn felt gnawing in his stomach, sociological insights allowed him to stay one step ahead of his interrogators.
At Rzhevka, when a guard began calling him “Sociologist”, Bevziuk-Voloshyn assumed that he had learned this from his prisoner file because a guard in the previous camp had asked him what a sociologist does; Bevziuk-Voloshyn answered by talking about surveys. The guard at Rzhevka, by contrast, asked about Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s civilian life, which gave Bevziuk-Voloshyn an opening that he hoped would lessen the torment.
“I started to create, for him, some great fairy tales. I know a lot about Russian culture. Sometimes I started to tell him Russian poems and he got some pleasure from this,” he said.
What Bevziuk-Voloshyn calls fairy tales were, in fact, important details of his life that his sociological training told him would resonate with Russians. He tried to counter the Russian narrative that Ukrainians hate Russians by telling the guard that his ex-wife’s mother was born in Russia.
“I tried to manipulate him by telling him that as a sociologist, I try to get an overview of the situation – and I couldn’t be a Nazi or fascist because I knew the history of World War II or, as the Russians call it, ‘the Great Patriotic War’,” he said.
Whatever favour Bevziuk-Voloshyn hoped he might curry did not amount to anything tangible, for example, more rations for his cell. However, the act of telling these ‘fairytales’ did, at least for the time he was speaking, allow Bevziuk-Voloshyn some control over the narrative he was living through just as it afforded some, albeit limited, control over his experiential horizon.
A sense of mission
In his play No Exit (1944), written shortly after he was released from a German POW camp in April 1941, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Hell is other people.”
Bevziuk-Voloshyn echoed Sartre when, with his right forefinger tapping his head, he told University World News: “You are only alone here.” And in his head, he fulfilled a promise he had made to his friend Serhii, whom he had met at a sociology conference some years earlier and who was mobilised at the same time. “I decided that my role was to carry out sociological observations from captivity. This sense of mission sustained me in times of despair,” he said.
Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s first analytical project focused on the social reality in his kamera, the Ukrainian word for prison cell.
“When you are in a room with four people for a long time, you understand that this is a microsociety. You have to accommodate yourself to both the other prisoners and, equally importantly, to the society that they (and you) constitute,” he explained.
The understanding of how communication between parties with diametrically opposed interests and backgrounds that Bevziuk-Voloshyn learned while studying conflict and mediation at KPI was important to communicate with the other raw recruits, many of whom were from small towns and villages scattered across Ukraine (that is, rather different from himself, a Kyivan).
Now, in the university lecture hall of his mind, he discussed how these same skills facilitated communication with his cell mates and, equally importantly, with the Russian prison guards, one of the paramilitary forces of his country’s enemy.
Further, Bevziuk-Voloshyn explained that in prison “the information vacuum and isolation made the atmosphere in the cell very sensitive to the emergence of domestic and ideological conflicts”.
He was able to help defuse conflicts by drawing on his study of conflict resolution and mediation at KPI.
For instance, some months later, after he’d been transferred to a penal colony near Tula (south of Moscow), where, despite the gnawing hunger, Bevziuk-Voloshyn lay awake anatomising both the need for what he called a ‘Bread Chef’ (that is, the prisoner entrusted with the responsibility to ensure that their ration of bread was distributed equally, and ensuring his accountability).
“We needed some kind of structure in this cell because we had to deal with limited resources, for example, bread. Bread is gold in this situation. [The loaf] had to be cut for 24 people. All the parts had to be equal. We had to create some model to share the bread,” he recalled, noting that there were constant complaints that this, or that, man’s ration was larger.
At first, the man chosen to be the ‘Bread Chef’ was honest and divided the bread equally. Then, said Bevziuk-Voloshyn, he started abusing his power and gave his friends larger shares. While predictable when you have a population of 24, these ‘micrographs’ or cliques destabilise the larger group.
Ultimately, some men came forward and insisted that the ‘Bread Chef’ be replaced. “We voted on this and a new, more honest guy, became ‘Bread Chef’,” he said.
A study of power
As frightening as the POW experience was, Bevziuk-Voloshyn saw it as a unique opportunity to study power as exercised in a space where there were few restrictions on barbarity. His inquiry consisted of ‘essays’ composed in his mind that were informed by Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
“I had the chance to verify from my own experience, from a very real situation, what is punishment and what is discipline,” he said.
Broadly speaking, Foucault defines punishment as pain the state inflicts on a prisoner’s body, including the pain of incarceration. Discipline is the process by which individuals internalise the idea that their every move is watched – that they are an ‘object’ to be studied and shaped – which results in the creation of “docile bodies” exemplified by factory workers, soldiers in modern armies, students in classrooms and prisoners.
Under the Russian prisoner of war regime, Bevziuk-Voloshyn saw himself in Foucauldian terms. There was the pain inflicted on prisoners’ bodies. There was surveillance by Russian guards. There was the adoption by the prisoners of behaviours set out by the Russian guards and the prison administration.
Forewarned by Foucault, Bevziuk-Voloshyn explained: “I was like an object [acted upon and observed by prison guards].” But, through his analysis, Bevziuk-Voloshyn demonstrated to himself that he was more than an object. He was, rather, “a subject who can think about this situation, about how to link theory and practice when looking at the monster”.
Bevziuk-Voloshyn, who has experience as an amateur actor, also composed sensitive poems in his mind, which, after he was liberated, he wrote down. One middle stanza of one that concerns loss reads: “Here you see a pile of sawdust on your hand/This is your suffocating fear/That cuts the hearing, tickles the nose and tears the eyes/Because you are the master of your fear.”
Another, which belongs to a cycle about mirrors, begins by asking: “Why do you need a mirror when you are no longer there?/But the needs of the body, which you call devil/Pulls you there/But, old habits rear your head/And you stare.”
Psychological torture
On 2 July 2022, Bevziuk-Voloshyn and several dozen Ukrainian POWs were transferred to the penal colony at Tula, Russia. Once again, their arrival was heralded by beatings, which did not stop.
“We were made to stand all day, every day, and were beaten again and again. Some men’s ribs were broken and there were diseases like typhus,” he said.
In this ‘hell’, in addition to the small bread ration, they were fed a little bit of cereal in the morning, some soup for lunch that sometimes had a potato. Dinner was potato or cereal with some small pieces of unidentifiable fish.
Despite their weakened state, the Ukrainians were forced to do 2,000 squats each day.
The guards at Tula did not ask about Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s civilian life. Instead, they engaged in psychological torture. They told the Ukrainian soldiers that they would be tried and convicted by a Russian court for taking up arms against Russia. And, once they were in the regular prison system, they would be gang-raped. Bevziuk-Voloshyn was able to sociologically parse the guard’s strategy and the sociological purpose of these threats. That, however, did little to lessen the effect of this psychological torture.
While at Tula, Bevziuk-Voloshyn was allowed to write to his parents, which, it turns out, was the one and only time he would be allowed to do so. “Did you,” I asked, “try to send a secret message to your parents like those you read about in POW memoirs from World War II?”
Bevziuk-Voloshyn answered no. “We had to write a couple of sentences. ‘I’m okay. This place is very good for me. Have a nice day’.”
Perhaps it was better that these words never reached Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s parents. For, while in his handwriting, they had nothing of Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s cadence and would have easily been seen as being dictated and would have made them worry even more, he said.
The Church of the Slaves
In February 2023, Bevziuk-Voloshyn was transferred to a penal colony near Poleana, in the Russian republic of Mordovia (400 km south east of Moscow). Here too, the beatings continued. The guards also used cattle prods to shock Bevziuk-Voloshyn and the other prisoners. A number of times, they were ordered to remove their pants so the guards could send hundreds of volts directly into their testicles.
In other prisons, the medics “were not bad people”, Bevziuk-Voloshyn said. But in this penal colony, the doctor meted out pain using a “small shocker” that he used on men seeking medical attention.
While at Tula, Bevziuk-Voloshyn, who had not been religious since entering university twenty years earlier, joined a few men who started to pray. He remembered the prayers from his childhood.
“I surprised myself. Maybe it’s some specific moment of crisis in the world of the prisoner that starts him trusting in God. It’s very helpful,” he said.
Bevziuk-Voloshyn sees no contradiction between his return to religion and his commitment to the sociological method and his reading of Foucault, who was an avowed atheist. Rather, in its own way, each provided a way of knowing, of coping with and understanding the horror he was living through. If sociology gave him the tools to create order in the theatre of his mind, religious practice gave him emotional comfort, both from the act of recalling prayers and on a spiritual level.
Both at Tula and in the penal colony in occupied Moldova the bonds the men who prayed together formed were different from the bonds between the men in the prison cell who had to act to ensure the equal distribution of bread.
“During prayers, we felt we were on an island of safety. There were eight of us there. It seemed to me we swam through frozen time, as if our whole lives were leading us to this moment.
“We had the most democratic church in the world. You could say whatever you thought about God or about religion. I suggested that we start to speak about this situation [being POWs and their treatment] and what the situation was with bread, with food, and all the pain and what it could teach us” he said. “We called our church the Church of the Slaves.”
‘We deserve this’
Just before we finished our second interview, Bevziuk-Voloshyn said something I had never heard from the more than 50 men I interviewed for my books on Canadian prisoners who had been held by the Germans or the Japanese during World War II – including being systematically tortured and starved in the latter case. Neither had I come across it in the hundreds of accounts I had read about being a POW written by men and some women who survived the experience.
In the existential crisis he was living through, Bevziuk-Voloshyn came to know that the reason he was half-starved, bruised and deprived of even the comfort of books was because of himself, because he fundamentally deserved this treatment.
“I deserve this. I deserve this situation. The reason I am here is because I am bad. I deserve to be treated like this,” he explained.
“You believed you deserved to be tortured with a cattle prod?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes. Every one of us thinks that he deserved this, even the torture,” he replied.
According to John Samarah, a retired professor of psychology and a counsellor who lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Bevziuk-Voloshyn was experiencing ‘toxic shame’ akin to that experienced by a person in an abusive relationship.
“Healthy shame and toxic shame have nothing to do with each other,” said Sumera. Healthy shame, which we all experience when we realise we have done something wrong, leads to humility and the effort to make amends, to apologise, for example, for not being more attentive to someone.
“Toxic shame, by contrast, leads to a very dark place where the abused thinks he or she deserves the abuse. It’s an identity issue – and the identity is that you are bad. It can even go so far as feeling that the perpetrators are doing you a service by their abusive actions,” he said.
In Bevziuk-Voloshyn’s case, he accepted that he deserved what was happening to him in Russian penal colonies and in Moldova because he had been a “bad person” because of his divorce or because he had not been a more dutiful son.
Breaking this cycle of thinking was a two-step process that Bevziuk-Voloshyn both underwent and observed as a sociologist. First, it required, in an odd way, accepting the belief that, as he put it: “I’m bad, I’m bad” and deserved the hell of the Russian prison system.
Then, it required that he ‘repent’ his actions. Though, importantly, Bevziuk-Voloshyn stresses, this act of contrition was not achieved through prayer and did not get its meaning from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Rather, it was internal. In other words, repenting to himself had the psychological effect of redefining the brutal treatment meted out to him as being just that: Russian brutality. In Samarah’s model, by repenting to himself, Bevziuk-Voloshyn severed his identity from the calculus of Russian pain.
The second step, Bevziuk-Voloshyn describes as “building plans for a new life.” Or, as he put it in the aide-mémoire, he acted on the “realisation that aspects of personality that I considered integral and an inseparable part of myself can easily be changed under the influence of circumstances”.
He concluded: “I started to think about a new marriage and what I will change in my new life if I will have a chance. I thought about my future and about my creativity. I thought about my parents; I had not been a very good son, and I thought I would take more time to talk with them. And, I thought about my son [whom, he imagined saying good night to every night and good morning to every morning] and being a good father.”
A permanent reminder
On 11 June, Bevziuk-Voloshyn and 94 other Ukraine POWs were exchanged for 100 Russian POWs being held by Ukrainian forces.
After being repatriated, Bevziuk-Voloshyn was given two months’ leave. He now works in food security for the Ukrainian armed forces.
Whenever he looks at his right forearm, he is reminded of his captivity and the importance of his freedom, for he has tattooed there the number of days he was a prisoner of the Russians: 425.
Nathan M Greenfield
