What Russia’s Violent History of Occupation Reveals About Its Ongoing War on Ukraine

Unless We Stop It Now, It Will Never End

My great-aunt was not born mute. At the beginning of the second Soviet occupation of Estonia, she, only a child, was taken from her home for a night of interrogations. She never spoke again, at least not in any meaningful way. When she returned home the next morning, she appeared unscathed, but from then on the only two words to leave her lips were, “Jah ära.”  Yes, please don’t. Whatever the question, her answer remained the same: “Jah, ära.”  She never married, never had children, never dated anyone. She lived out the rest of her days alone with her aging mother.

I heard my great-aunt’s story when I was a child growing up in Finland, and although the adults spared us the details of the interrogation itself, everyone understood. Me included.

Years later, I wrote my novel Purge and its precursor, a play of the same name, because I was tracking the progress of the Balkan war crime trials. I was frustrated by the fact that rape camps had been set up in the heart of modern Europe. But the initial impetus for Purge was my great-aunt’s story. What happened to her had been allowed to happen again, and today it is happening once more, once again in the heart of Europe.

My great-aunt never received justice. No one in my Estonian side of the family did. Family farms were lost, many died, and many were deported. Only two of my relatives managed to escape on ships heading west. Of course, no one expected justice during the occupation.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, everything changed. The Baltic states regained their independence and began the process of decolonization that is familiar to all former colonial possessions. In the Soviet Union, the study of history was strictly a political field—its purpose was to spread Soviet propaganda; after the occupation ended, research, science, culture, and the press were freed from this totalitarian yoke, and the public discourse naturally flourished as a result. Anyone could now speak openly and freely about the past. You could now study it, and you could discuss it in the light of day. Words regained meanings that corresponded to people’s experiences: you could talk about deportations as deportations and the occupation as an occupation.

The investigation of Soviet-era human rights crimes began, but the USSR’s legal successor, the Russian Federation, had no interest in helping, let alone apologizing. Western countries did not meaningfully encourage Russia to undertake the process as they had done for Germany after World War II. Perhaps they didn’t consider it necessary because the crimes of the Soviet era were not deemed important enough—at least not as important as shaking hands with Putin or laundering blood money looted from the people by Russian oligarchs. Because these past crimes were overlooked, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caught the West by surprise.

From an Estonian perspective, the war in Ukraine feels like a rehash of the 1940s, as if someone insists on pressing the replay button, because Russia is up to its old tricks. We have seen and experienced the same practices before: the terrorization of the civilian population, deportations, torture, Russification, propaganda, show trials, sham elections, victim-blaming, waves of refugees, cultural annihilation. However, the general astonishment of Western countries revealed that they are unfamiliar with the Russian imperialist playbook. And it is precisely this astonishment that demonstrates why past war crimes must be relitigated, why they must be investigated, and why they must become cemented into our cultural memory. Without an awareness of these crimes, we cannot recognize the warning signs.

Although the history of other former colonial powers is a staple of Western curricula, Russia has yet to be interrogated through the lens of colonialism. The countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which make up half of Europe, experienced the rule of two different totalitarian systems. Yet even so, this experience remains to be recognized in the common narrative of the European continent; nor did it become a historical memory of Europe as a whole.

Memorializing these experiences is also a form of justice.

When the slogan “never again” was repeated in the West after World War II, it rang hollow in the ears of all whose lives included Russian repression. Human rights violations and occupations did in fact continue after the fall of Hitler’s Germany, so the phrase seemed to mock the Eastern European ongoing experience. We found that we had no place in the cultural consciousness of the West.

The Photograph: A Nation Is Destroyed by Destroying Its Memory

On the wall of my study hangs a black-and-white photograph of my great-aunt from when she could speak. Her mother sits surrounded by her children, cradling the youngest in her arms. My great-aunt eyes the camera shyly, and my grandmother is only two years old. Everyone wears leather shoes made by their father. The backdrop is the yard of their home. It’s summer, peonies in full bloom. People who visit my office are never caught off guard by the picture, and there is no reason they should be—it resembles any other family portrait from the last century. There is no Estonian flag, or for that matter any other symbol of independent Estonia, which was forbidden during the Soviet period, but the photo was in fact taken during the time of the “liquidated state.” And that was enough to make it subversive.

The picture didn’t arrive in Finland until the early 1990s, once Estonia had regained its independence, and we finally ventured to pack photos in our suitcases. We never would have dared while the Soviets remained in power, because of border checks. Old photos were included among the customs authorities’ extensive list of goods that could not be brought into or exported from the Soviet Union, so the attempted smuggling of the photo would have led to a volley of questions about why we had it and what the photo’s meaning was.

No matter how carefully we answered, the result would have been the same: the picture would have been confiscated. For Estonian families, the Soviet occupation meant that pictures that could be interpreted as dangerous were removed from photo albums. They were destroyed, buried in the ground, or hidden behind wallpaper, as my family’s were, only to be brought out in trusted company. Remembering family history, loved ones, and the deceased was a private ritual in the Soviet Union. Those photos were how I got to know my family. They existed in those hidden photos and the stories that went along with them. That was what gave them a face.

This contrasted greatly with Finland, where I was born and went to school. In Finland, it is customary to take candles to the cemetery on memorial days, Christmas, and Independence Day. My Finnish grandfather was a veteran of Finland’s wars, and his twin brother a fallen hero. Those wars were also part of my family history, but the funeral candles lit on days of remembrance in Finland also reminded me of the ones we could honor only inside our own heads or among trusted company. The Finnish flags raised on Independence Day brought to mind the Estonian flag, which, like other symbols of the “liquidated state,” was prohibited, including the use of the flag’s blue, black, and white color scheme, even in abstract art. When, like other schoolchildren, I learned the Finnish national anthem to sing as the flag was raised, I was bothered because nothing like that was possible in Estonia under Soviet occupation. For my classmates, the opportunity to learn those words at school was taken for granted.

On the other hand, even in Finland, we could not display symbols of independent Estonia. For Finland, the independent state of Estonia did not exist, since publicly, Finland toed the Soviet line. The Soviet government kept a close eye on Estonians abroad. Conduct that the Soviet Union judged improper would endanger relatives living in the Soviet Union. Even as a child, I understood that falling out of line would mean we could no longer enter the Soviet Union. I would never see my grandmother again.

The Soviet Union sought to erase the history of the territories it occupied, including visual documentation, and now Russia is doing the same in Ukraine. In addition to substituting teaching staff and Russifying the school curriculum, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s cultural heritage. It is plundering public institutions, like museums, where memory is preserved, and their private iterations, people’s homes. On the news, the world has been able to watch as Russian troops devastated entire cities in Ukraine. Cities full of people’s homes—homes teeming with memories and memorabilia.

No memory is too insignificant for the occupier, because sometimes just one photo, just one story, can keep the history of an entire family alive. That’s why Russia has not set its sights just on art collections. Personal photos are also dangerous to Russia. They preserve memories of experiences that Russia wants expunged. They preserve memories of the victims of Russian crimes and of Ukraine as an independent nation.

When the large-scale Russian invasion began, twenty-two- year-old Illia was at home in Kramatorsk. He decided to evacuate with his mother and sister by train. They had made it to the Kramatorsk train station when Russia began shelling the station, which was full of civilians. Sixty people died in the barrage, and 110 were wounded. Illia’s family survived. They tried to escape again, this time by car, but their journey was interrupted by a Russian checkpoint. On Illia’s phone, the soldiers found a picture of him celebrating Ukraine’s Independence Day by holding the Ukrainian flag. They also found a dating app for sexual minorities.

Illia was subjected to sexual violence by eight soldiers of the Russian Army. The soldiers recorded their actions. After weeks of torture, Illia was freed by the intervention of the Ukrainian Army. His only “crime” was that he had kept a memory on his phone.

Today, in the internet age, it is not so easy to dispose of photographs as in Soviet times. But possessing the “wrong” images poses a risk, a threat, something that imperils loved ones, and thus retaining memories becomes dangerous and documentation is stigmatized. This risk alone is enough to suppress visual memory, an essential factor in the construction of identity. This kind of threat incentivizes people to delete photos from their phones and prevents them from sharing them until someone forces them to do so. Such a threat encourages people to clear their phone’s contacts, and sometimes to wipe them entirely.

A friend of mine left Kyiv ten days after the start of the offensive, because he thought he would have to go through a Russian roadblock otherwise, and that scared him more than the bombings. However, he balked at the thought of proactively deleting the data and pictures from his phone, and even if he did wipe his phone, there was always evidence online. Many were trapped in Russian-occupied territory for precisely these reasons. They did not dare to try to get through the Russian checkpoints, like Illia from Kramatorsk and his family.

Russia has succeeded in shaping people’s behavior and memory before. Occupation always involves a reversal in the moral paradigm: what used to be right and respectable becomes wrong and dangerous.

My great-aunt, who grew up as a farmer’s daughter in western Estonia at the beginning of the last century, and Illia, a young man from Kramatorsk, were born in completely different worlds. Yet they shared an experience that changed their lives. Both were civilians. Both were subjected to violence by people acting under a mandate from Russia.

In public discussions about men and sexual violence, we still hear echoes of the age-old excuse that men cannot help themselves, that it’s in their nature. However, this is not the case. These actions occur because perpetrators can get away with them.

The experiences of Illia and my great-aunt also share common motives. Russia has used this same weapon from one generation to the next, and for the same reasons: to degrade the targets, to break any resistance, and to assert Russian dominance, because these victims become a cautionary tale to others.

Illia continues to live in independent Ukraine and is now undergoing psychological therapy. It is uncertain whether the perpetrators will ever be held accountable, but the fact that Illia has spoken publicly about his experiences will encourage other victims of sexual violence to speak out. In my great-aunt’s world, that was not possible. She could not watch interviews on TV or the internet that corroborated her experience. In that sense, the world has improved. Awareness that others have suffered like you have suffered eases self-recrimination. The victims are not at fault for this plight, which has been the fate of so many today and of so many generations before.

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Excerpted from Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women by Sofi Oksanen. Copyright © 2025 by Sofi Oksanen. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins.