DIGRESSION: A WALK IN THE AUTUMN OF PERESTROIKA
A little history: Kiev is not only a Ukrainian city. For centuries it was the capital of the Kievan Rus, the centre of the ancient Russian civilisation – but then the Mongols arrived and turned the Slavic princes into their vassals, thus displacing the centre of power. Kreschatyk, the central street, derives its name from the word for baptism in both Russian and Ukrainian. It is the eastward route to the river Dnepr, where the Grand Prince Vladimir’s subjects were baptised into Christianity in 988.
That happened over a thousand years ago, however, and since then many invasions and revolutions have swept through Kiev, bringing with them upheaval, disorder, death. In the three years following the February Revolution in 1917, for example, Kiev was the seat of no fewer than twelve different regimes. The Orange Revolution was not the first time the country had cried out for rebirth.
The most terrible devastation occurred during World War II, after which Kreschatyk was entirely rebuilt in the Stalinist Gothic style. The most striking building on the street was a stunted Stalinist ‘wedding cake’ skyscraper about a third of the way along. There are seven of these in Moscow (eight, if you count the plasticky one recently added to the city’s skyline by Mayor Luzhkov and his cronies in the construction industry). The other buildings, meanwhile, were similar to those lining Tverskaya Street in central Moscow, the start of the road that leads north from the Kremlin to St Petersburg. There were grandiose arches ornately decorated with such motifs as sheaves of wheat, hammers and sickles, and a Soviet Ukrainian touch: plaster friezes of mining equipment, a reference to the workers of the country’s industrial Donbass region.
Kiev, however, had an unreal, otherworldly appearance in my eyes. It was hard, in fact, to ‘see’ it; because Kiev was a weird, parallel city, a shadow, an echo, an expression not of itself but of Moscow’s conception of what it should be. Efforts had been made to expunge this influence, but there’s not much you can do with stone short of tearing it down. Everywhere I looked, there was still Moscow. The impressions of my first ride underground on the metro were only reinforced above ground. Even the modern, post-Soviet Kiev was indebted to the old capital. The design of the street signs was identical to the one used in Moscow, the logo for the metro was identical, the newspapers, magazines and novels on sale in kiosks were mostly Russian publications, the celebrities advertising mobile phones on billboards were Russian, and of course, almost everyone on the street was speaking Russian.
Still, the government’s language policy was as visible here as it had been on the metro when I arrived. There was no Russian signage, and all the government offices had plaques in Ukrainian and even in English on them, thus favouring a foreign tongue over the first language of many of the country’s citizens. The English signs were a gesture towards modernity, an expression of the will to Westernise, even as the very object of Yuschenko’s desire, the EU, was giving mixed signals: issuing praise for Ukraine’s new democracy on the one hand while simultaneously muttering warnings that it would be a ‘long time’ before the country was ready to join.
But gradually, Kiev did begin to appear through the monumental Soviet façade. It was in the trees that lined the street, providing dappled shade, and it was in the cafés set up on the pavement, taking advantage of the temperate southern climate. I walked around, reading advertising posters, losing myself in the laid-back rhythm of the city: one announced that Moby was bringing his brand of anodyne dinner-party pop to some stadium or other. Sin City was coming in a month’s time, as was Batman Begins and the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds. The banners heralding Eurovision still hung across the street, sad like old balloons, slowly leaking air. Street musicians were playing jazz, folk music, heavy metal. Beautiful girls were parading along in cheap T-shirts with messages in English:
I can’t wait I get better looking every day.
I’m not a bitch
I’m THE bitch
And that’s Miss Bitch to you.
Kreschatyk wasn’t overdriven like downtown Moscow, but it wasn’t as dilapidated and dull as the centres of most provincial Russian towns either. It hovered somewhere in between. I liked it, and spent all my subsequent evenings in the city drifting up and down the street, watching the street performers. One night I even caught an Italian 3-D horror movie in the Kino Orbita, a dark poem from another age: it was easy to imagine that here, amid the chandeliers, red velvet seats, and marble pillars, the weary proletarians of communist Kiev had come to watch Stalin’s favourite movie, Volga Volga, and later, perhaps my neighbour Vasily Lanovoi, stoically suffering for love in Officers. Even the dust had been preserved, lying undisturbed for decades.
The city, with its quiet shabbiness, appealed to me. It was an ideal place to spend time if you wanted to rot, unseen, among pleasantly decayed buildings.
The climax of the walk along Kreschatyk was Independence Square. This was the place I had seen on TV months earlier: crowds camped out in sub-zero temperatures in December, Yuschenko with his scarred face, his running mate Yulia Tymoshenko with her ice-cold grimace, and Ruslana, the feisty winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, all standing up for democracy against ballot stuffing, all declaring that they would defend the autonomy of the Ukrainian nation from Russian interference.
It was as if Ukraine had been born at that moment. Until then, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, the country was just an appendage of Russia. Its name even sounded very close to the Russian for on the edge, as if to say it was not something in itself but rather a place on the edge of somewhere else, i.e. Russia. Fourteen years of independence hadn’t much altered this perception. Its most famous city, Chernobyl, achieved fame due to a nuclear accident, and yet how many people knew or cared that it was in Ukraine? And in fact, the disaster poisoned far more Belarussians than Ukrainians. I knew one man who had lived in western Ukraine for a while, which, until Stalin annexed it after World War II, had been a province of Poland. This was the most nationalistic part of the country, and he told me that Ukrainians there were morbidly sensitive to questions of their national dignity. They were (understandably) incensed by those Russians who maintained that Ukraine was not a real country, that it was still Russia, that the two countries were too closely bound together by culture, history and language for an ‘independent’ government in Kiev to make any difference.
But by standing up at that moment, Yuschenko had gone against this trend of nothingness, and had finally established Ukraine in the consciousness of the watching world. He had created an identity that was separate from (or at least opposed to) Russia’s. Even the Russians had to face its reality now. If nothing else, he would be remembered for that.
Some guy on the square had a monkey on a string. I had my picture taken with it standing on my shoulder. There was also a long pole, topped with a golden wedding-cake ornament, that I presumed represented Ukraine or liberty or something like that. Similarly tacky statues occupied the spaces left by departed Lenins on Independence Squares across the former Soviet Union. I much preferred the cheesy digital clock on top of the building across the way. It had probably looked really modern in 1981. Beneath the pillar there was an underground shopping centre that contained a few rubbishy boutiques selling rich man’s crap.
I crossed the street. They had preserved some pro-Orange graffiti on a column of the central post office by placing a square of protective plastic over it. I understood the motivation behind this, but even so, it stuck in my craw. The Revolution had occurred only a few months earlier and this rush to declare it a success before the team that had come to power had actually done anything struck me as a sham. If you had touched down in St Petersburg in March 1917, a month after the Tsar had been deposed, you would have been struck by the dreams and idealism of people who later turned out to be saps, fools, thieves, baby-rapists and mass murderers.
In front of the post office, some women were standing to attention at a line of wooden tables covered with souvenirs. Almost everything on sale was connected either to the Orange Revolution or Eurovision, leaving me to wonder what they had been selling six months earlier. There were DVDs of Eurovision 2004, orange mugs with Tak! (Yes! – the slogan of the Orange forces) written on them, and green mugs with the legend Eurovision. There were orange T-shirts, cards, pens and portraits of Yulia Tymoshenko alongside photos of Ruslana and her ‘Wild Dancers’.
The photos of President Yuschenko, however, were as tragic as they were celebratory. Most of them dated from before his poisoning, as though his supporters could not bear to look upon his ravaged features. They preferred to remember him as a young, confident, strong man, and not the damaged wreck that looked like Two-Face, Batman’s second-best villain after the Joker (though Two-Face was only half-disfigured). Then there was an English pamphlet titled ‘How It Was Done’.
An American, the middle-aged beneficiary of a rich, well-organised society, walked up to the table and started leafing through the pamphlet. He was tall, handsome and still athletic. The stallholder, on the other hand, was a dissolving heap of flesh and rags. A misshapen hole flopped open in the bottom part of her head and she barked a few English words at him. ‘It tell story of Oranzhevaya Revolution.’ He nodded, smiled, flashing a neat row of burnished white teeth at her.
Remarkable, I thought. I’ve never seen one of these before. Though of course, it made sense that they existed. Here was a freedom tourist, come to see the new, independent, happy Ukraine. Indeed, I had read about a team of Canadians who had travelled throughout the country during the stand-off between the blue and orange camps, promoting the Orange cause. These lovers of liberty had actually gone into pro-Russian strongholds and lectured the Yanukovych supporters on how wrong they were. Apparently it hadn’t gone down too well. Even the Orange side was reportedly a bit baffled by these rubbery, exfoliated humanoids telling them how to run their country.
I left the freedom tourist to it. He couldn’t read the Cyrillic alphabet, so he didn’t know what the books on the other side of the table were about. One of them was called The Jewish Yoke. Another was called The Yid Conspiracy. And let’s not forget Masons, and my favourite, Russian Gods. Later Edward told me that this last one revealed that Christianity was a Jewish invention intended to separate the Slavs from their true pagan gods and thus weaken them, so that the Jews could do all those things that diabolical Jews like to do, such as drink the blood of Slav babies, slaughter Slavs in huge numbers, that sort of thing.
Numerous pogroms swept across Ukraine during the Tsarist period, and evidently there were still plenty of foaming anti-Semites around. That didn’t surprise me. I was, however, a little startled that no one had thought to clear this stuff from the centre of town. It might put some of the freedom tourists off, if they ever managed to decode what the covers of the books next to the orange Tak! mugs said.
The crone saw what I was looking at, and realised I understood. She cackled.
‘I just came from a meeting,’ she said. ‘We were debating: is the God of the Jews Ukrainian?’
I followed a path that led up a hill to a monument of Soviet workers standing under a metal rainbow. Beyond this, the path twisted round into a wood. I crossed a bridge, passed through some more trees and then stumbled upon something startling – a tent city. What were tents doing up here? The revolution was over, and the Orange side had won. There was no need to camp out any more. Then I realised that these tents were not orange, but blue. They belonged to supporters of Yanukovych.
This was startling. Tent cities of the Orange forces had been reported in the Western press, but the continued presence of Blue protestors had not. It was, of course, inconvenient for the George Lucas-derived Rebel Forces vs. Evil Empire framework our news media favour when reporting on struggles in galaxies that are far, far away. The life of a foreign correspondent is very exciting, after all. There’s always a war or disaster going on somewhere, so you are constantly parachuting into strange lands you know little about. Then you have to establish an easily understood context for the people watching at home who know even less. Then, as soon as the drama is over, you have to parachute into the next famine/revolution/war/alien invasion, and quickly cobble together some more footage of devastated corpses and exploding cities. There’s no time to reflect or analyse. Besides, that might bore people into switching over.
I walked through the tents. They were all empty, but the settlement was not abandoned. There was still a presence at each encampment, someone watching over them, as if the tents were only temporarily unoccupied and would soon be filled again. Or perhaps the protestors had gone home to make money, but had left their tents behind, to perform a virtual protest for them. At one encampment I spotted nuns praying for union with the Holy Rus that had been torn away from them by Yuschenko’s victory.
The slogans posted around these Blue tents declared again and again that the election had been stolen from them. Robbers and capitalists were taking Ukraine in the wrong direction. Yuschenko was a stooge of the US, spreading prostitution, drug abuse, strip bars and thievery. Before, in the Soviet period, there was sport, a space programme, Ukrainian cosmonauts, a good education system and friendship with Russia. Then there was the ‘Grand Hotel Yanukovychgrad’, a simple blue tent, but next door to it a cardboard coffin was suspended from the trees. A sign on the coffin mourned the ascent of the Orange forces which had brought about the death of democracy, law and human rights in Ukraine.
Vanquished Yanukovych supporters prepare to lay their human rights to rest
It was interesting that so many of the protests of the Blue side were identical to those of the Orange. I would not presume to get involved in proving or disproving the truth or falsity of these claims; I was hardly there long enough for that. But at the very least it suggests a great, unreported other half to the story of the events of December 2004: a murky world of accusation and counter-accusation, of complexity and greyness.
And later, of course, Yuschenko was forced to accept Yanukovych as his prime minister anyway – mixing orange with blue, which, if I recall correctly, creates brown.
Back on Kreschatyk I followed a series of signs that led me to a wax museum of horrors that was located in the basement of a Stalinist building. The guide wore a little baseball cap with a Ukrainian flag on it, and his eyes were bulging out from behind the smeared glass of broken plastic spectacles. The wax models in the display were replicas of real freaks of nature. He looked as though, when no one was around, he liked to rub them against the naked blubber of his torso.
Slowly, very slowly, he led me through the display, holding the dirty dummies out to me, inviting me to touch their yellow, brittle forms. It was hot and difficult to breathe down there with the freaks. With each freak came a story, and if he’d been speaking Russian I would have made my apologies and left. But his mangling and splintering of the English language led to a weird, broken poetry that fascinated me. It was as twisted as the limbs and bodies of his exhibits; terse, brutal, and somehow evocative:
‘Zis is nature’s Siamese twin.’
‘Zis is nature’s hydroencephalic.’
‘He born in Poltava two years ago, live two days, then go dead. His mother drinkman. His mother drugman. Zis Cyclops with one eye, penis on head and no cherep.’
‘You mean skull.’
‘Cherep skull?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sank you. Zis one, he let’s go work in circus. People smile. He let’s go work in army. He live thirty-two year. Then take gun and flash in head. Go die.’
Some teenage girls joined us. Our guide handed a fossilised six-week-old embryo to them. It was not wax; it was real. ‘Go, touch, feel,’ he said. They squealed, and ran outside. My guide continued, merciless, moving from freak to freak, offering each one to me also, that I might leave my own fingerprints on the filth-encrusted effigies.
‘Zis man have two heads, one big, one small. Big head drank tequila in circus. Big head no get drunk but small head smile. People very like how small head smile.’
‘Zis man fish man.’ He took the wax dummy and demonstrated it swimming. ‘He let’s go work in circus. People go smile.’
‘Zis little girl from Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Many radiation. One head, two bodies. Live three minutes then dead.’
‘Zis three-headed baby from New York. Lived three hours. Parents give names Peter, Paul, John. And zis Grace McDaniel, most ugly woman in planet. She had head colour of fresh meat …’
I was particularly struck by the little girl from Semipalatinsk with two bodies. Semipalatinsk is an area in Kazakhstan from where the Soviets tested nuclear weapons. She had lived for three minutes only and yet here, thousands of miles away, that tiny story was being retold in a strange basement. She even had her own little wax monument. I suppose that the three-headed baby with biblical names that lived for three hours was more sensational, but that happened in New York, and sensational things are always happening there. In Kazakhstan they are less commonplace.
The memory of the little girl had been preserved because of Ukraine and Kazakhstan’s common history as Soviet republics. The wax museum too was an echo of the Kunstkamera in Leningrad/St Petersburg, a collection of real freaks. These cultural links were part of a past from which the Orange Kiev above ground was struggling to break free. Standing in that basement, I was glad that for now, they persisted. For the little girl’s sake, at least: because if they were erased, then the memory of her short, tortured life would be erased with them.