The city of Voroshilovgrad, in the Soviet State of Ukraine, differed from the images presented in my State Department pre-departure debriefing. The buildings were not massive and block like, there was no hustle and no bustle, and more greenery existed than the gray drab photos I had seen. Furthermore, churches and onion domes decorated more of the skyline than I expected the Soviets to allow. There were many pleasant things about this city, but the details of those city buildings and historical monuments are not what I remember most. I remember a single day, or more exactly, a single place. A place I think about now and again.

I entered the Young Heroes Museum looking for a distraction from the speeches and conditioned interviews with various city officials. I knew nothing about the museum and knew not what to expect. The bright red carpet, typical of many patriotic buildings, covered the floor. A few dioramas interrupted the empty feel of the sparse interior. Portraits hung on the walls. Just beyond the entrance a giant statue greeted visitors. Below it, a plaque outlined the contributions of young people from this city during the German invasion.

My eyes rolled – another war memorial. I usually avoid war memorials. I understand the sense of loss felt by the families, but I cannot ignore that many become soldiers by choice. All soldiers receive training on how to kill and avoid being killed. Their trainers often provide them with weapons to carry out their duties. The format of most memorials vary little: lists of battles, statistics about lives lost, medals won, plaques and busts of those who died, and quite frequently treatises on the justness of the war to ensure that no one died in vain. As a pacifist, I derived little value from such commemorations. However, I was in the door and my Kopecks paid.

There did not seem to be much, and I believed would be quick, so I continued onward.
As I moved closer to the pictures, instead of seeing portraits of soldiers who died in battle, I saw faces of young boys and girls. With the docent’s help, I read that they ignored the evacuations and used acts of sabotage to thwart the German advance and occupation. Far from being conditioned and hardened Soviet soldiers with orders or training, they were children doing what they could to defend their homeland.

Unlike other museums, seeing the faces of those who died allowed me to establish a connection. Theses faces seemed similar to the faces of my old classmates – the bully, the popular kids, the outcaste, the clown.

I spent most of the day examining the faces. Some appeared in old photographs, while others were in paintings or sketches. Each face beamed with innocent earnestness. Some looked mature and ready for adulthood, others looked young and mischievous. Eyes full of dreams, and dreams lost, looked back at me. Captions below the faces spelled out their names, dates of life, accomplishments, family history, and quite frequently method of death.

Here the horrors of war and the depths of man’s inhumanity toward man revealed themselves. Girls prostituted themselves for information. Boys and girls stole foodstuffs, made makeshift fire bombs, and used stolen guns to kill the invaders. When caught, the lucky ones were executed quickly while the others, like Klava Kovaleva were tortured to death.

“Klava Kovaleva, 17 years old is taken swollen, the right breast is cut off, left leg burnt and left foot cut off,….to be buried in a communal grave of heroes on the central area of Krasnodon.”
Not all stories ended in hideous torture. Some died in battle, like Vasily Borisov who died the day after his seventeenth birthday trying to disrupt German communication lines. These children attempted to shoulder the defense of their homeland. Hundreds were killed, nearly a hundred were identified and immortalized in this museum. Although posthumously awarded various medals, as if to point out that their sacrifice was not in vain, I spun from the realization that too many of these children were too young: Seventeen, Sixteen, Fifteen, Twelve.

At the end of the day, I walked out of the museum with my feelings of disgust for war reaffirmed yet subsumed in conflict. The actions of the invaders were cruel and horrific. In the final analysis the sacrifices made by the youth were futile – not affecting the outcome of the war. So were the children courageous or foolish? Did they have resolve or did they lack self worth? World events thrust these children of Voroshilovgrad into making decisions without the orchestration or manipulation of some lofty principle. They acted on elemental feelings of self preservation and defense. They organized themselves and fought back. Do these reasons alone merit glory and commemoration? What of those who feel so marginalized that their only course of action, their only way of defending their way of life, is to explode themselves? The faces and questions plagued me then as they do today.

The most passionate amongst us are youth. Without knowing all that life offers, they frequently set their own well being aside for the sake of a cause. Forces of good and evil tap into this reservoir of eagerness to fulfill the most expendable positions in their schemes. From suicide bombers to front line war conscripts, the best hopes for any nation’s future often ends in brief acts of violence which in turn breed more hatred and resentment.

In the years since, the city changed its name to Lugansk, the Soviet Union dissolved, and a stable peace developed among the USA and Russia and the previous Soviet states. However, the world still knows war and the devastation it brings. As I hear reports of young people who fight and die fulfilling someone else’s vision of the world, I think not just about the justness of the struggle, but also about the cost. Some are on the right side of battle and some are not. Sometimes, there is no right side. Regardless, I have faces to put to the young that die in battle. They are the faces of boys and girls hanging on the walls of the Young Heroes Museum.

Some of the stories from Wiki:

Ulyana Gromova

Ulyana Matveevna Gromova was a Ukrainian Soviet member of the Soviet underground resistance in World War II, executed by the Nazis. She is a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union. Gromova was born to working-class family on 3 January 1925 in the village of Pervomaysky in what is now Luhansk Province of the Ukraine. Gromova’s father, Matthew Maximovich Gromov, was born in 1880 in Poltava Province of Ukraine part of the Russian Empire. Gromova’s father served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 moved to Krasnodon and worked as mineworker, retiring in 1937. Gromova’s mother was housewife. In March 1940 Ulyana Gromova joined the Komsomol. At the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Gromova was 17 years old and in tenth grade. Like many of her classmates, she worked in agriculture to replace farm workers and took care of wounded soldiers in the hospital, she was graduated from high school with good to excellent marks on 3 June 1942. When her home province was occupied by German troops, which began on 17 July 1942, Gromova was not able to evacuate because she needed to care for her sick mother.

Together with Maya Peglivanovoy and Anatoly Popov, she organized a group of patriotic young people in her village of Pervomaysky who became part of the “Young Guard” of the underground resistance Komsolol organization in September 1942. In October 1942, Gromova was elected a member of staff of the organization, she took an active part in the preparations for armed resistance, the creation and dissemination of anti-fascist leaflets, collecting medicines, campaigning among the population, urging them to not obey the enemy and to disrupt plans to supply the Germans with material and impress Soviet youth to work in Germany. On the night of November 7, 1942, Gromova and Popov hoisted the red flag on a pipe shaft at Mine Number 1 in occupied Krasnodon. Mass arrest of suspected underground figures began in the city, the Young Guards developed an escape plan for Gromova, but she was arrested by the German authorities on 10 January 1943, she was beaten and tortured during interrogation, but she stayed true to her oath to her motherland and comrades and did not reveal details of the underground’s activities.

She was hung by her hair, burned with hot irons, had a five-pointed star cut into her back and the wound rubbed with salt, suffered a broken arm and broken ribs. She endured her suffering stoically, cheered her imprisoned comrades by reciting Lermontov’s epic poem Demon, which she knew by heart. In the note which she managed to pass secretly to her relatives, knowing her death was near, she expressed faith in victory and called for her brother Elisha to stand for his homeland. On 16 January 1943 Gromova, along with other Young Guards, was executed, her body thrown in the 58-meter pit of Mine Number 5 in Krasnodon. After the liberation of Krasnodon, Gromova was buried with military honors on 1 March 1943 in a mass grave of patriotic heroes in the central square of Krasnodon, where a memorial to the Young Guards was erected. Hero of the Soviet Union Order of Lenin Medal “Partisan of the Patriotic War” 1st Class Gromova is a character in Alexander Fadeyev’s 1946 novel The Young Guard, included in school curriculums.

Oleg Koshevoy

Oleg Vasilyevich Koshevoy was a Soviet partisan and one of the founders of the clandestine organization Young Guard, which fought the Nazi forces in Krasnodon during World War II between 1941 and 1945. Born in Pryluky, a city in the Chernihiv Oblast of present-day north-central Ukraine, Oleg Koshevoy’s family moved south to Rzhyshchiv and Poltava before settling in Krasnodon in 1940, where he attended secondary school. In July 1942, Krasnodon was occupied by the German Army. Under the leadership of the party underground, Koshevoy organized an anti-nazi Komsomol organization called the Young Guard, becoming its commissar. In January 1943, the Germans exposed the organization. Oleg Koshevoy was soon apprehended, he was tortured and executed on February 9, 1943. On September 13, 1943, Oleg Koshevoy was posthumously awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, the Medal “Partisan of the Patriotic War” 1st class. Many mines, sovkhozes and Young Pioneer groups in the Soviet Union were named after him.

citation: https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Young_Guard_(Soviet_resistance)

We visited Cabo Matapalo on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica.  It was great.  We met a fabulous guide Rodolfo.  He described how his family owned a large tract of land (finca) in which they grew many fruits and vegetables for sale.  However, his family sold the land to pay for school for his seven brothers and sisters.

“Do you look at the land now and regret that.   There seem to be smaller lots and more resort style tourists moving in”

“No, because I have so many more opportunities now. Also, many of the new land owners coming from rich countries allow the land to return to a forest state which provides more habitat for native wildlife.”

It seemed like he was ok with the changes; however later we passed a house and scowled: “Some of the people move down here for Costa Rica, yet they change everything, they pull out native plants and trees and plant things that are harmful.  Look here this vine is killing everything it grows on.  And there, look, there is no path for arboreal mammals to move from tree to tree.  Why move here if you want to change everything about it.”

And later we had this exchange: “People complain why I charge so much.  I ask them to go shopping.  They comeback and tell me everything is so expensive.  Right I say, that is why I have to charge a lot for my services.   I have to live.  The change is like upgrading from 3G to 4G, it costs more, and you can’t stay at 3G if everyone else goes to 4G.”

Towards the end of our time with him he also noted: “There are less and less Ticos here.  I don’t even say ‘Hola’ when walking down the street anymore.  And granola?  No one would have wanted granola 20 years ago, now our stores stock food that is not typical.  This also drives prices up.”

He was describing a process of gentrification.  Many of the for sale signs we saw said that: “For Sale” by USA firms such as Century 21 or Caldwell bankers.  Many did not say : “Se Vende Lotes”.  Many of the hotels, AirBB, and were owned and operated by ex-patriots. All with stories of finding their way to Costa Rica and falling in love with it and staying.

“I finished my last tour with the Grateful Dead, and decided to come here.”  “I’ve always dreamt of the of the Jungle, and when I came here, I found what was in my dream.” “I left home at 16 to surf. I came to here, and never left…that was 30 years ago.” “I was hired for a a director position, and decided to take a vacation before getting behind a desk.  I got here, and decided I didn’t want to leave.”

We went to local’s market on Friday night.  We expected local goods and wares for locals.  Instead of a farmer’s market-like environment, there was jewelry and handicrafts, homemade soaps (proudly bragging they were now in the airport), and ice cream.  All but two vendors were Tico, the rest had relocated there from up north.  Moreover, the market resembled Telegraph Ave in Berkeley rather than a local market where people bought and sold items  they both grew and needed.  We saw mostly gringos, talking English, who were shopping for trinkets rather than weekly needs.

A lot of people we met who relocated there seemed to have been broken and looked towards Costa Rica for healing.  Were they in turn draining Costa Rica?