'I am a Soviet melting pot'

On Ukraine's multicultural society, its early colonisation, and the ongoing war

- Chintan Girish Modi

Tell us about your grandmother, and what it was like to be her grandson.

It was great to be her grandson. My grandmother was a teacher of literature. She had a huge influence on me, especially my reading.

I chose to write about her life because it had many twists and turns. Her story is very dramatic, and actually quite representative of the lives of people in Ukraine at the time.

In the 1930s, '40s and '50s, Ukraine was a deadly place. In the 1930s, there was this massive man-made famine created by the (Stalinist) regime in Moscow that killed millions of Ukrainians. Intellectuals were executed in the camps. Then came the war, the destruction of Kyiv and other cities by the Nazis, and the Holocaust, in which millions more were killed. After the war, when the rest of Europe was rebuilding, there was the Ukrainian insurgency until the mid-1950s.