Facebook’s Parallel Realities Explored: Ukrainian War Diary (120)

21.3.2023
‘Really, you’re really not on Facebook?’ the Czech film director wondered at a party in Prague, where I was DJing. I didn’t know what she was talking about, and it wasn’t until weeks later that I found an invitation to open a Facebook account in my emails. I accepted it – and was surprised at how many friends and acquaintances of mine were already there.

A great way to keep in touch and also to occasionally see what’s going on with whom, I thought. You could also follow your favorite artists and, even better, create a page yourself in just a few steps and communicate directly with your followers without having to learn web design.

A few years later, in the days of the Maidan revolution, Facebook became a substitute for a news portal for me. I followed my friends in Kiev, Kharkiv and other cities in Ukraine – although their reports were often chaotic, they gave me a clearer picture than the news, which often either did not keep up with current events or tried to provide images and information manipulate.

Gil-Scott Heron certainly didn’t mean Facebook when he wrote this poem in 1970, but I still had to think of his lines often: “The revolution will not be televised, the revolution will be live”.

In the months since February 24, 2022, my Facebook feed has become the live ticker of Russia’s expanded war of aggression in my homeland. It is difficult to read – and impossible not to read. The posts of my non-Ukrainian friends also appear there regularly. The contrast is often striking.

Tetiana from Kiev, whom I subscribed to years ago after she posted a hilarious review of an old Talking Heads’ record, today recounts her conversation with a barista at a Kiev cafe. The 20-year-old was born and raised in the Ukrainian capital but has a Russian passport. His father, a Russian citizen, returned to Moscow a year ago.

Today, the barista said, he called his father. A few minutes before their conversation came the news of the brutal rocket attack on a residential building in Zaporizhia. “A little patience, son,” said the father, “then we’ll finally free you”. The son hung up and deleted father’s phone number. “I never want to speak to him again,” he said.

Peter from Hamburg is upset about the Deutsche Bahn – the train didn’t come, no rail replacement service.

In the photos of Olia from Vinnytsia, whom I met two years ago after the concert with Vladimir Kaminer and Serhiy Zhadan at the Kiev Book Fair, you can see her and a young man with a neat triangular beard, both beaming, in the right picture he is kissing her on the cheek. “Damn ironic, that,” she writes underneath, “we should have gotten married next Saturday – and here comes the message from your commander. I don’t want to believe it! IT. CAN. NOT. TRUE. BE.”

“He’s here! We’ve got him!!!” writes Oleksiy, a Kharkiv musician with whom I first heard Bob Marley when I was 15. In the comments it says that Oleksiy’s son was found in a cellar near Bakhmut. He was in Russian captivity for 42 days, all this time he lay next to his dead and wounded comrades, without food and water. He drank from the puddles.

Only a handful of my Russian friends remain on Facebook. These are people I know personally, such as Galia from Moscow, a singer. She has recently become an Instagram influencer and is currently in India with her boyfriend. In the current post she raves about her new sandals. “Girls, you won’t believe this! Handwork – and only 330 rubles! I go nuts!”

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