The Crimean War fascinated me as a child, mainly because of Florence Nightingale who founded nursing on the fields of Crimea.The Crimean War fascinated me as a child, mainly because of Florence Nightingale who founded nursing on the fields of Crimea.

A decade ago, when Malta was in the throes of the EU referendum saga, I taught English as a foreign language. One of the long-term students I had that year was from Kiev, Ukraine.

I thought a lot about her last week. You know how it is when you’re a teacher: some students leave a mark. Her name was Xenia. She was 17 years old, incredibly bright and hard-working and, unlike other EFL students her age, she was not in Malta to party by night and sleep by day.

You could always tell when a student came from a troubled country. They were adults in young bodies.

I always felt a mixture of admiration and sadness for them: fighting for their rights automatically meant they gave up their naïve, carefree teenage years.

Xenia wanted to go to university and become a lawyer. “It’s important to know the law in our country; our leaders are always trying to break it and we need to be, how do you say in English, on tiptoes?”

We had many a political discussion in the classroom, by way of practising her conversation skills. She talked of the rife corruption by then prime minister Viktor Yanukovych.

He was ousted last week, but back then, in 2003, he was campaigning hard for the presidential elections taking place the following year and Xenia would get worked up as she spoke of how he duped and bribed people.

He had subsequently won, only for the elections to be declared rigged, spurning the peaceful Orange Revolution, which brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. You might remember him: he was the one who was poisoned with Agent Orange and suffered acute disfigurement.

In class, Xenia spoke enthusiastically about the European Union and quizzed me endlessly as to why her host family (avid Super One watchers, from what I could gather) kept telling her it was imperative that we stay out.

“You are so lucky! It is what we want – once and for all we can be free of Russia. We won’t be puppets anymore,” she’d say.

The conversations we had in our one-to-one lessons came back to me vividly last week. Xenia would be in her late 20s now. Is she a lawyer? Is she fighting for her country to join the EU? Was she in the square with the protesters? Did she feel helpless that 10 years on Yanukovych is still in the scene? I won’t ever have the answers. I just follow the news.

Countries can’t afford going their solitary ways once again – it would be a mess for stability and peace of mind

As I write this, Yanukovych has fled to ‘Daddy Putin’ and the Crimean Parliament abruptly voted to secede from Ukraine and reposition the peninsula as part of Russia. The US and the EU have slapped sanctions for violation of sovereignty and Putin, meanwhile, is spinning about how Russian soldiers in Crimea are merely figments of our imagination.

The most laughable being that the hundreds of well-armed soldiers in unmarked Russian uniforms positioned outside military sites and administrative buildings across the peninsula were “self-organised local forces of volunteers”.

I am always a bit edgy about that strategic bit of land, the Crimea. My mother grew up with her grandmother narrating real life stories of injured soldiers who came to Malta to recover during the Crimean War in the 1850s.

“The poor souls, they did not always make it back home,” my great-grandma would say.

That war fascinated me. First as a child, because of Florence Nightingale who founded nursing on the fields of Crimea.

I had this illustrated Ladybird book, The Lady With the Lamp, which my sister used to find scary and which, of course, meant that I was forever chasing her around the house, book in hand and leaving it under her pillow for her to find as a last thing before she slept.

Much later, I was taken by the works of William Russell, the first modern war journalist. Because it was 1854 - the telephone would be invented 20 years later – his articles from the Crimean front line took numerous weeks from being written to being published.

But his descriptions make the horror come to life in ways which, to me, no visual image could: “October 25, 1954. At the distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame through which hissed the deadly balls… At 11:35 not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of those bloody Muscovite guns...”

Reading his articles was one of the things that convinced me to opt to read history. In fact, if I were education minister – of any country really – I would make the study of history compulsory. If we know our past, we can see the deadly patterns and stop repeating mistakes.

Also, I would, starting at primary school levels, constantly drill the importance of having one, tight-knit European Union. Countries can’t afford going their solitary ways once again – it would be a mess for stability and peace of mind: Xenia was right all along. I pray that she’s safe.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.