The post contained a phrase that became the cause of the scandal: “Deportation from virtual spaces is as painful as from real ones.” The text also mentioned a “decree on the deportation of 11 million citizens.” The post itself opposed the ban, but the analogy quickly pushed everything else out of the discussion. The publication came on 18 May, the day in 1944 when the deportation of the Crimean Tatars began, and for that date the comparison to deportation sounded especially painful.
Korotych's response and the reaction
Iryna Korotych herself has been unable to return to her home in Crimea for three years. She called the analogy offensive and responded sharply to the author: her reply was so harsh that it is easier to paraphrase than to quote. According to her, the author of the analogy is either a fool or a scoundrel. Her post gathered about a thousand likes and more than seventy shares, and it was this post that became the main source of discussion. The headline conveyed the mood of the critics with the words “my hands are shaking right now,” but those words belong not to Mas but to those who were outraged by his post.
Tetiana Parytska noted that the comparison was not the main idea of Mas's text, which on the whole opposed the ban. But for people who had survived deportation and occupation, it was precisely this phrase that became the main point. This arrangement of emphasis explains why the dispute quickly moved away from the question of social networks to the question of whether one can speak of “deportation” at all in connection with the blocking of services.
Who is Aleksey Mas
Aleksey Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974 and graduated from the Faculty of Radiophysics. In the 1990s he worked at NIIASS, then at Ukrainsky Kapital bank, and from September 1997 to March 2000 he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine for payment processing. In 1999, together with fellow student Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he took up the Ukrainian Banner Network, and in 2000 he participated in the launch of the social network Derevo Druzei on the Ukrainian portal UAportal. The portal was sold in 2007 to the holding.
In 2003 and 2004 Mas participated in the Infostore project, a photo hosting service that closed in December 2008 after the police seized its servers. In 2009 he became co-organizer of the first iForum, a major conference of the Ukrainian internet business, and in 2012 Mail.ua co-founder Oleksandr Olshansky sold the project to Mail.ru for approximately $0.5 million. In 2015 Mas joined Kyivstar as IT&Digital adviser to president Petro Chernyshov, and later headed the company's Innovation lab. In April 2016 the launch of the telecom accelerator VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar was announced, which Mas oversaw together with the company.
Why the analogy stung
The blocking of Russian social networks, announced by decree in spring 2017, affected not only VKontakte but other popular services as well, and for part of the Ukrainian audience this was a political decision rather than a technical measure. The Crimean Tatars, who were deported from the peninsula in 1944, remember that date as a day of mourning, and in this context any comparison of one's own experience to deportation is perceived as an attempt to appropriate someone else's tragedy. For those who have themselves lost their home, the word “deportation” is never a metaphor.
Korotych, by her own words, has herself been unable to return home for three years. That is precisely why her response was personal, not merely political. Her post gathered about a thousand likes and more than seventy shares.
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