Heather Coleman. Warm Socks from the Frontline

Iryna Skubii Blog Post

 Three years ago today, Tetiana Kalenychenko gave me these wonderful warm socks. She had come to Edmonton for a conference I had organized and that we promptly had to cancel once everyone arrived, due to the declaration of the global pandemic. Tania was the last of our guests to leave and I took her around downtown, which was eerily like a ghost town, and she came over for supper with our family. Poor Tania would then have an epic journey home, trapped first in Frankfurt and then in Minsk, and finally making it to Kyiv days later.

These are my Covid socks and my war socks. Tania had been working for years on the front lines of the war in Donbas, researching the role of religion in the war and facilitating religion-based peace-making encounters. Her husband, an officer in the Ukrainian army, was now discharged and recovering from his time at the front. Tania bought these socks from an elderly woman living near the front and gave them to me.

Of course I knew about the war that had been raging in the Donbas since 2014. I'd seen refugees in Kyiv, heard from my grad students about their acquaintances who were called up to fight, attended my colleague David Marples's fascinating international conference on the war, watched the disinformation and worried about the war's long-term effects. But it only became real that afternoon, hearing about Tania's family's experience first hand.

For the next 17 months, and for long periods since, I worked from home, in my chilly basement home office. I may have had a nice sweater or a blouse and jacket on when you saw me teach or give a talk or chair a graduate exam, but on my feet, I was usually wearing Tania's socks. They're big and cosy and fit over your regular socks like slippers.

The war expanded with the full-scale invasion a year ago. I think of Tania every time I put these socks on. And I pray for the woman who knit them.

 

 

Heather J. Coleman

Professor of Russian History, University of Alberta

Director, Research Program on Religion and Culture, 

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Associate Editor, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistesa