Beyond Ukraine: The West Has an Eastern Europe Problem

Women giving birth in metro stations. Kindergartens bombed. Tanks running over civilian cars. Over a million displaced. Eight years after the territorial integrity of Ukraine was first violated by its aggressive neighbor Russia, a new chapter in Eastern European history is being written in real time.

I will not make this a piece decrying the war in Ukraine. Anyone with a moral compass will tell you that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is wrong. But the symbolic meaning that the conflict occupies in every Eastern European’s mind is that of democratic resistance to tyranny, imperialism, and historical revisionism. The process of rewriting history is not bound to a territory, a country, a continent. Instead, it intertwines with the metaphysical. Our self-perception as Eastern Europeans is constantly defined by others — from analysts in D.C., to Russian scholars on Twitter, or the average American — without any grasp on how the West continuously fails to construct an accurate representation of our identities and the lives we lead.

Take Hollywood as an example. Violence, hypersexualization of women, human trafficking, bad guys — the essence of cinematic Eastern Europeanness. For the entirety of my life, that has been the only representation the West has showcased of me, my cultural space, and the social reality of my home.

This representation is completely inaccurate at the best, and incredibly harmful at the worst. At a time when migrant workers from all across Eastern Europe are exploited for their labor in unsafe and appalling conditions in the West, such stereotyping only perpetuates a negative image of Eastern Europeanness. Take “Emily in Paris” as an example (subjectively, one of the worst TV series on the planet). The only cameo of an Eastern European on the show is of a Ukrainian woman who does precisely three things in the series: steals from a department store, curses at Emily in Ukrainian, and constantly worries over her immigration status.

But there is another, stranger layer to the portrayal of Eastern Europeans in the media: the chronically-online aestheticization of what I call home. The bimbofication of Eastern European women, also known as Svetlanacore and “Dark Eastern European aesthetic” (whatever that means), seems to be competing with Y2K themes online as the West gets acquainted with the sociocultural intricacies of this region in the most bizarre way possible. The popular TikTok sound “Sudno” by Molchat Doma is another example of this distasteful aestheticization of Eastern Europe that has resulted in an overwhelming exoticization and obsession with the region.

Discard the poor and superficial humor, and a more complete picture will appear. We are a region traumatized beyond belief. With our intelligentsia systematically exterminated in the 20th century, our private and public lives under the watchful eye of the state for over six decades, and individual freedom virtually nonexistent during the same time, the consequences of centuries of exploitation, totalitarianism, and bloodshed seep through everyday life. That is partially why homophobia, sexism, and racism are all still so prevalent across Eastern Europe. We have yet to fully cope with the totalitarianization of our private lives as we deal with both shared and individual trauma that spans generations.

But there is so much more than the façade of despair, grayness, and destruction that Eastern Europeanness encompasses. We are rapidly changing at a critical speed, and young people are on the very frontlines. Autocratic takeovers in the region have mobilized the youth and revitalized civil society — something that could for once serve as an example to Westerners themselves. We no longer want to consider ourselves victims as we reposition ourselves along the historical axis. We are slowly deconstructing the tropes of the past as we come to terms with the darkest parts of our history.

I, too, am introspecting about my relationship with Eastern Europe. Three out of four classes my freshman fall were in some way or another related to Eastern Europe. It certainly sounds like a targeted choice — even a weird one — for why would a Latvian study Eastern Europe in the United States?

Ironically, I get to explore myself and my identity, and the politics and society of Eastern Europe, more at Harvard than I do at home. Harvard has an undergraduate Slavic department; the largest university in Latvia does not. I get to read contemporary authors from Eastern Europe I had never heard of and consider literary theories in works that would be deemed unacceptable and immoral by a large fraction of Latvian society.

In real time, I am redefining Eastern Europeanness for myself. With or without Ukraine. Because that is the only way to escape the abyss of perpetual exoticization, oppression, and falsehoods that paint a bleak picture of what I call home.

Ricards Umbrasko ’25, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.