GREGORY WARNER, HOST:
You're listening to ROUGH TRANSLATION from NPR.
On the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Naira Davlashyan called her parents
back home in Russia, at first just wanting the comfort of her mom's voice.
NAIRA DAVLASHYAN: I couldn't get through to my mom, so I called my dad.
WARNER: Naira lives in France.
Because of the pandemic, she hadn't seen her family in more than two years.
And when she got through to her dad, she expected him to act shocked.
DAVLASHYAN: Like, oh, my God, what the hell is happening?
Why is Russia bombing Ukraine?
How terrible it is.
That was my expectation.
And the reality was like, oh, but this NATO - did you hear what Stoltenberg said, you
know?
WARNER: That's NATO's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.
DAVLASHYAN: What's your Stoltenberg saying?
I'm like, he's not my Stoltenberg, OK?
WARNER: In this conversation where they were both speaking Russian, of course, her dad
had switched his word for you - not you, the singular familiar form, but you...
DAVLASHYAN: As the plural you in the West and us as, like, people in Russia, you know?
I'm like, dad, what are you talking about?
I am from Russia.
I literally came from you.
WARNER: And then her dad hands the phone to her brother.
DAVLASHYAN: And my brother has never even been political, you know?
He's never even cared.
Now he started to speak with all these phrases from TV, you know, like a zombie or something.
WARNER: I started talking to Naira because she is a listener to our show and she reached
out.
Naira is a journalist, but she called to tell us a more personal story about her own struggle
to share information and find some common language with her family.
DAVLASHYAN: And then basically, my dad took back the phone and we started talking about
something else.
And then my brother was basically trying to force my dad to drop the phone - you know?
- to hang up.
WARNER: To hang up on her.
DAVLASHYAN: And that's where I got really scared.
WARNER: Was her brother protecting himself?
Was he protecting their parents?
Was he protecting her?
And then an even stranger thought came into her mind.
DAVLASHYAN: Oh, my God, are they going to think that I'm a, you know, national traitor,
like in the Soviet Union, you know?
What's like - am I going to be a foreign agent to them?
What is happening?
Like, how could this happen?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WARNER: This is ROUGH TRANSLATION.
I'm Gregory Warner.
So the fact that people inside Russia, at least those who watch mostly state TV, are
living in a different reality - that should not be a surprise, right?
We appreciate the power of propaganda.
Actually, on this podcast, we've covered some of those Russian propaganda techniques.
What is, I think, though, still hard to fathom, is just how impenetrable that wall of falsehood
can be.
Like, Naira's parents - they had access to information, their own daughter is a journalist,
but as soon as she spoke, the wall seemed to go up inside them.
They acted like she was some kind of state agent.
So when Naira called to tell her story, I had so many questions for her.
We ended up talking for several hours.
And this episode is basically a condensed version of that conversation.
It's about her journey and these sets of calls she had with her family - two separate calls
one week apart - and what changed in between.
It's a story about what to do when language itself seems to put up a wall.
Where do you find the words to break through?
DAVLASHYAN: These so-called letters of happiness - (non-English language spoken).
Do you know?
WARNER: Naira's story and the power of chain mail, when ROUGH TRANSLATION returns.
We are back with ROUGH TRANSLATION.
I'm Gregory Warner.
Naira grew up in Sochi in southern Russia.
As an ethnic Armenian, she never felt like she quite fit in.
DAVLASHYAN: Coming from an Armenian family already, I didn't feel, you know, like, Slavic
basically.
And living and working in Moscow, I didn't feel Russian either, you know?
WARNER: People would look at her face and her clothes and address her in English, the
language you'd use with a foreigner in Moscow.
DAVLASHYAN: It's only when I moved to France that I started to feel like I know who I am.
WARNER: It felt easier to love her Russianness (ph) outside of Russia.
DAVLASHYAN: But now, with this war again, I'm like, who am I?
What the hell is happening?
WARNER: It was like the war had poisoned something.
DAVLASHYAN: Yeah, I feel like I was basically deprived of a country that I love.
And I feel, can I love this country now?
Can I love the language now?
Yeah.
It's shaken me to the core, I think.
WARNER: Recent speeches by Putin have only exacerbated the sense of us versus them, West
versus Russia.
He said that Russians with so-called Western values are traitors - the fifth column.
DAVLASHYAN: When I heard that fifth column, I got so scared.
Oh, my God.
It's like they're deliberately dividing us, you know?
And I wrote about that on Facebook saying that I don't know how to speak to my parents,
so I decided to not speak to them.
And a lot of my friends said that was completely the same for them.
And then there was one of my Ukrainian colleagues.
She said, like, well, I still think you need to talk to your mom about what's happening
in Ukraine.
That comment was, like, the most hurtful to me because she thought I would not talk to
my mom about it at all, but, of course, I would.
WARNER: She would talk about Ukraine if she could find the words.
But all the words she used seemed to just trigger her dad into echoing lines from state
TV.
The harder she pressed, the more he pushed her away with this plural you.
DAVLASHYAN: What am I going to do?
I mean, I will not change my mind if they decide I'm a national traitor.
What does it make of our family in the end?
This could, like, mean that we will never see each other.
And the fact that politics can destroy this love is very scary.
WARNER: Right.
Right.
DAVLASHYAN: It's very scary.
WARNER: She didn't know how to break through this wall of us and them.
And then she learned about a letter that was reportedly making the rounds on Russian social
media.
DAVLASHYAN: Let me open it on my computer (reading in Russian).
WARNER: The letter begins with this ominous sentence - if you don't forward this letter
today to seven acquaintances, the next years of your life will be neither happy or peaceful.
It's a chain letter, basically.
And in Russia, these kind of letters are called letters of happiness.
But then it changes.
It says...
DAVLASHYAN: (Reading in Russian).
WARNER: "You're reading this letter because Russia attacked Ukraine at night while civilians
were sleeping.
People in Ukraine sleep in bomb shelters.
Among the victims, there are children."
DAVLASHYAN: (Reading) Our sons, husbands and fathers are already dying.
And the Defense Ministry of Russia is not naming them.
WARNER: It's a letter of unhappiness.
DAVLASHYAN: (Reading) This letter of unhappiness is calling for you to act against the war;
if not for the Ukrainians, then for yourself.
WARNER: And here's where this letter started feeling unexpectedly relevant for Naira's
own mission to talk to her family because the whole second half of this letter, in very
colloquial Russian, it doesn't speak with the you but very much with a we.
DAVLASHYAN: (Reading in Russian).
WARNER: "And the fate that will befall our Russia, if this war isn't stopped, our country
will become a beggar," it says, "our children won't have food to eat."
DAVLASHYAN: (Reading) This letter has a spiritual force.
It has absorbed the sufferings of millions of people.
That's why we don't recommend for you to ignore it if you read it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WARNER: The author of this letter is a member of a Russian feminist antiwar collective known
by the initials FAS.
The collective, it's organized in a kind of guerrilla cell structure, so members of one
cell may have no contact with another.
If one woman gets arrested, she can't name names.
But Naira did speak with another activist in the collective.
DAVLASHYAN: The person I spoke to about this letter who wasn't the author either, she said
that they reported that they could speak to many people thanks to this letter because
these people were comfortable enough to respond and to have a conversation, you know.
WARNER: Well, why would a chain letter make it easier to have a conversation than news
clips?
This letter doesn't seem kind of hokey to you?
DAVLASHYAN: No, no.
It's like - it's - I don't.
I just see a Russian woman.
If we turn this letter into a woman, it would be a Russian woman wearing a headscarf, maybe,
because she's religious.
This would be a woman who's afraid and who's trying to tell her truth.
It's a woman so desperate she doesn't know what to say to make this work.
So she's using her last resort, you know, faith and curses and, yeah, things that are
illogical to make other people listen.
WARNER: Yeah.
DAVLASHYAN: I really felt that the woman writing this is part of this culture.
She is more educated or maybe she's even nonreligious, but she deeply connects with this part of
Russian identity.
By writing this letter, she undressed herself from this, let's call it, Western clothes
and she just became more Russian.
WARNER: This letter, it wasn't the only antiwar message to reach for the language of faith
and enchantment.
Remember that state news employee who held up an antiwar sign on live television - Marina
Ovsyannikova?
She prerecorded a video where she apologized for her work on state TV.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
MARINA OVSYANNIKOVA: (Speaking Russian).
WARNER: And ended with an invocation.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
OVSYANNIKOVA: (Speaking Russian).
WARNER: Ten generations of Russians would be washing off the blood of this war.
It was this kind of language and the ease with which the writers of this chain letter
reached for it that resonated with Naira.
OVSYANNIKOVA: I just felt supported.
I felt like I'm not alone.
And I felt grateful to these women to feel the same with me.
WARNER: As hard as she'd worked to leave Russia and make a life in France, she felt like the
only way she could connect with her parents was to reconnect with a side of herself she
thought she'd left behind.
DAVLASHYAN: Turning into a simple, ethnically Armenian Russian woman who's trying to talk
to her parents, more simple ethnic Armenian Russian people.
WARNER: Does that feel comforting or does it feel like a mask?
DAVLASHYAN: It feels like a state of desperation.
I desperately want to be heard.
WARNER: Those first painful calls with her parents in the first days of the war were
followed by a week of silence.
And the silence was hard, too.
DAVLASHYAN: After almost a week of no calls, I spoke to my dad again.
And we didn't talk about Ukraine at first.
And then he said, oh, I'm so worried about you.
He's like, oh, in the West, they don't like the Russians.
You should be so careful.
If you feel in any way threatened, like, please get on the plane and come home.
WARNER: Naira said she had this realization that he'd probably been watching a lot of
Russian state TV again, probably a segment about rising Russophobia in the West.
DAVLASHYAN: My response could have been, what the hell are you watching?
And et cetera, et cetera.
No.
Like, I decided to also let my guard down and tell him no, Dad, I'm actually OK.
Actually, all the people that I know here have been so supportive and so understanding
of the, you know, the situation.
WARNER: But she said the situation, not the war.
DAVLASHYAN: I didn't add that part about the war or anything because I tried to sort of
not enter again in this, like, conflicting language.
WARNER: And by simply saying I'm safe and leaving it there, she gave her dad an opening.
DAVLASHYAN: And he actually said, yeah, yeah, of course, they exaggerate so much on TV,
he said.
I'm like, yes, yes, Dad.
WARNER: Wow.
DAVLASHYAN: It's true.
It's true.
(LAUGHTER)
WARNER: And then she took it a third step.
What was happening in Ukraine was wrong, she said.
DAVLASHYAN: When I made it clear to him that this is happening and this should not be happening,
I think he agreed with me because on a deep level, I think he thinks of me as his daughter
first and everything else second - for now.
WARNER: For now, you said?
(Laughter) Oh, gosh.
I was about to end this on such an optimistic note.
(LAUGHTER)
DAVLASHYAN: No.
We never know what will happen, but I'm hopeful.
But I'm also afraid because the stakes are getting higher.
This war is not ending.
And from this perspective, I don't know what will happen to our family in the future.
I can only think about now.
And now I'm hopeful, but I'm also afraid.
WARNER: Well, that seems like the right note to end on.
So thank you.
DAVLASHYAN: Yeah.
Well, thank you for listening.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WARNER: Today's show is produced by Rhaina Cohen, edited by Luis Trelles.
The ROUGH TRANSLATION team includes Justine Yan, Adelina Lancianese and Pablo Arguelles.
Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer.
Bruce Auster is our senior supervising producer.
The ROUGH TRANSLATION executive high council is Neal Carruth, Didi Schanche, Chris Turpin
and Anya Grundmann.
John Ellis composed music for our show.
And if you are still listening to my voice right now, consider sending this show or really
any of your favorite ROUGH TRANSLATION episodes to seven acquaintances.
OK, so it's not going to give you good luck, per se, but it will certainly help more people
discover the show.
And that really does translate to us being able to do more in-depth reporting, bring
more ROUGH TRANSLATION stories to you.
So it is kind of like a chain - sort of.
And do send us your letters.
I mean, Naira reached out.
Thank you to Naira for telling her story and spending time with us.
Your ROUGH TRANSLATION moments have really guided the kind of questions that make us
curious.
We can be reached at rough translation@npr.org or we're on Twitter @roughly.
I'm Gregory Warner, back in two weeks with more ROUGH TRANSLATION.