The Dutch solidarity with Ukraine is heartwarming, but Maxim Dolganov was soon forced to cover the windows of his Russian supermarket with black foil, to remove the flags and other Russian decorative material. Now the name of the facade and the website: the clientele is already declining visibly.
Angry e-mails came – the Dutch are good at cooling their anger in writing. Calling and cursing: the usual repertoire. But it was mainly the customers who carefully inquired whether that was still possible, a Russian supermarket in wartime, ‘and they ask that in an emotionally heightened tone’.
They themselves come from Ukraine. Maxim’s father opened the shop nearly twenty years ago, calling it “Nostalgia,” and pasting old Soviet newspapers and stickers on the window as a gimmick. Maxim is 24, born and raised from Eindhoven with a half Ukrainian girlfriend; last weekend he drove 2,400 kilometers back and forth to Warsaw to pick up his aunt, nephew and niece who had fled from Lvov. They now live with him temporarily. His uncle’s house in Kyiv has been bombed, ‘the neighbor’s roof was hit’, ‘luckily he was not at home’.
They were, says Maxim, mainly concerned with the fate of the family after the Russian invasion when it became clear that something had to be done with the store.
Suddenly the word ‘Russian’ on the facade was a problem, ‘the switch came all at once’. It was black or white. ‘You can do a lot wrong then, it’s a fragile moment, it can make or break your store.’ They removed all the Russian flags, but also the Armenian and Kazakh ones. ‘Everyone should feel welcome here, so we are now creating a neutral atmosphere.’
Most people are good, but the Russians are not right now.
The Russian church in Nijmegen was defaced twice (‘a confused man and a confused woman’, says Archpriest Sergi Merks, who also sees that ‘the Russians are not looking good now’). Got angry reviews on Google and threats a Russian store in Groningen for choice. In the Gelderlander tells a Russian medical student, who had fled from the regime, how he always have to explain ‘that I’m not a bad Russian, I’m a good Russian’.
The Russian School in Nijmegen took her website offline – a peace sign is now visible. “Hey dirty Putin supporters,” began the first hate mail. Full of spelling mistakes, says François Loermans, ‘don’t take it seriously, we thought’ – he and his Russian wife Erika also felt vulnerable. Their forty pupils are children of Russian parents, but also of Ukrainian, Estonian and Uzbek. “People think that the Russian language is only spoken in Russia.” The app group of the Russian language schools in the Netherlands now deals with incidents with children who are called names, ‘cancer Russian’. “That was at an elementary school.”
Erika’s family is partly Ukrainian, ‘we are in constant contact with Charkiv’. It’s sour. “People have no idea about Russia. And now suddenly.’
Maxim explains that ‘Russian supermarket’ is a broad and international term for shops with items from Eastern Europe. Actually, the name ‘Slavic supermarket’ would fit better, but nobody knows what that means, just like ‘Ukrainian supermarket’. There are also Chechens who operate a Russian supermarket. “Then they don’t have pork.”
dried fish, matryoshkas, tорог, icons, books in Cyrillic script. Russian vodka, Ukrainian and Polish side by side. Moldovan brandy, Armenian. ‘We are there for all nationalities’. Nice all that support for Ukraine, but the flip side is the anger the other way around.
‘It was a good running store’, says Maxim, ‘now you notice that our name scares people off. If this continues for a few months, it will become a concern.’ Later he says: ‘A lot is exploding in my head right now.’
In Amsterdam, the Hermitage museum closes; there is an exhibition with work by revolutionary avant-garde artists. in Haarlem the Philharmonie cancels a mini festival about Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, ‘even though they are undisputed composers, it didn’t feel right’, the director said: art that can’t help it is complicit in a war. The Nijmegen Four Days Marches does not accept hikers from Russia and Belarus unless they have a ‘double passport’.
‘I understand’, Maxim finally says, ‘you get emotional, it is blind emotion. I’m in the middle of it myself. You see it happening and want to do something – but you can’t fight fire with fire.’
Every war sacrifices the nuance, because it is easy to abolish. But will you ever get her back?