* Back in the seventies, a popular slogan expressing Soviet nuclear enthusiasm, “May the atom be a worker, not a soldier” (Хай буде атом робітником, а не солдатом), was installed on the roof of #6 Sergeant Lazarev Street, one of the tallest apartment buildings in the city center of Pripyat, Ukraine. (...) Before the Russia-Ukraine war, a visitor to the Zone of Exclusion might occasionally spot a playful subversion of the ideological slogan: Хуй буде атом робітником, а не солдатом, which can be translated as “There is no way the atom is a worker, but a soldier.” (“Nuclear Cyberwar: From Energy Colonialism to Energy Terrorism”, Svitlana Matviyenko, e-flux journal #126)
Світлана Матвієнко, Ївга Збань та Лілія Юлдашева
Yivha Zban’, a Ukrainian-born decolonial activist and artist, and Lilia Yuldasheva, a decolonial researcher and cultural worker talk to Svitlana Matviyenko, a scholar, whose research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar; media and environment; infrastructure studies; digital militarism, practices of resistance, and nuclear cultures, including the Chornobyl Zone of Exclusion.
While planning this episode, the authors thought that the topics of nuclear colonialism, in particular, soviet nuclear politics and russian nuclear terrorism would be at the center of the conversation. But eventually, it went further and included other trajectories, catching the diversity of the scales and dimensions of colonialism. So, they also speak about how it affects matter (land, air, water, plants, bodies) and various aspects of human and non-human lives such as temporalities, imaginations, emotions, and futures.
Timecode
0:00 — introduction, terms, and concepts of cyberwar
1:55 — interconnectedness, “Savage Ecologies”, life-supporting assemblages/martial assemblages, wars out of nowhere
7:45 — peaceful atom, the distinction between peace and war technologies, “Хуй буде атом робiтником, а не солдатом”
13:23 — instrumentalization of nuclear infrastructure by russia
15:50 — terror; unknown as an instrument of terrorism, (un)logical logic of russian colonialism
24:26 — the labor of witnessing, the Kakhovka dam explosion
33:05 — past/childhood landscapes, future, solidarity and agency
36:45 — external subjectivity, the return of the stolen steppe – ecocide happened much earlier (Vira Aheeva)
49:20 — how to understand colonialism and its actors, (un)importance of languages and heritage/culture, 400 years of resistance in Ichkeria
“BUR’YAN” is a podcast made in collaboration between decolonial researchers and activists from the collectives of feminist translocalities and BEDA. Each episode can have not only new guests but also new hosts.