Until this morning I'd never heard of the House of the Word (Slovo Building) in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Hell, until this past month I'd never heard of Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million just across the border from Russia.
The building in question is an apartment complex built for Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1920s with Joseph Stalin's approval. At the time, Kharkiv was the Soviet capital of Ukraine.
Perhaps, as some suggest, the 66-unit building was an insidious way to keep tabs on a growing Ukrainian nationalist spirit within the literary and artistic community.
In 1933, resident actress/writer Halyna Mnevska was imprisoned for 5 years and then banished from Ukraine for life because she wouldn't denounce her husband who was executed for his "bourgeois nationalism" in 1937. Oh, and yes, despite their divorce in 1927.
Soon 33 residents of the building would be executed and 5 would be given long prison sentences. Many of the spying, terrorism, and/or conspiracy charges were made via phone taps during the purge.
The remaining residents were moved to Kyiv in 1934 to reside in the RoLit House (Robitnyky Literatury).
But all of this is old news. Today's news resides in a more current image.
"War is what happens when words fail." Margaret Atwood
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