DEBT TO UKRAINE (1926)

Do you know the Ukrainian night? No, you don't know the Ukrainian night. Here, the sky turns black with smoke, as the coat of arms is embedded with a five-pointed star. Where with horilka, bravery, and blood, the Zaporozhian Sich once seethed, the Dnieper is tamed, bridled with whiskers of wire and forced to turn turbines, flowing as electricity through steel. But Gogol? He needs sugar! We know whether Chaplin smokes or drinks; we know about Italy’s maimed ruins; we even know what pattern marks Douglas’s tie… But what do we know about Ukraine? The burden of knowledge for a Russian is thin—those closest get the least respect. He knows Ukrainian borscht. He knows Ukrainian salo. And from the culture which he has simply skimmed—apart from the two famous Tarases—Bulba and, of course, Shevchenko—nothing else can be squeezed out, no matter how hard he tries. If pressed, he blushes like a rose and comes up with a new argument: a couple of curiosities—jokes about the Ukrainian language. I say to myself: Comrade Muscovite, do not take Ukraine lightly. Learn this language on banners—in crimson lexicon—this language is majestic and bold: ‘Do you hear! The trumpets have sounded, the hour of reckoning has come…’ Can there be a sentiment any limper and more half-hearted than the banal Russian question ‘Do you hear?’ I have invented many words for you, weighing each of them carefully; but I wish the words of all my poems could carry as much weight as those which, in Ukrainian, become a statement: ‘Do you hear!’ It's wrong to pound people into a mass, so don't be so proud of yourself. Do we know the Ukrainian night? No—we don't know the Ukrainian night!

Translation by m.j.o't, 2026.

Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine from 2014–2019, quoting Mayakovsky’s poem at the 2016 Independence Day Parade in Kyiv.

Features a montage in the style of Dziga Vertov. Images of Mayakovsky throughout his life are combined with the art of Aleksandr Rodchenko.

The costume is an authentic Soviet Army uniform from 1987. The images show the last parade held in commemoration of the October Revolution, on November 7th, 1990.

"Do you hear? The trumpets have sounded, the hour of reckoning has come..."

From the Ukrainian translation of The Internationale by Mykola Voronyi, who was killed by Red Army officers along with a group of peasants in 1938,
quoted by Mayakovsky in the poem 'Debt to Ukraine'.

Mayakovsky died in 1930 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart.

"RUSSIA IS A TERRORIST STATE"

A contemporary hashtag used frequently after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.