I am on an aeroplane, bound for the Leipzig book fair. Waiting for me at the airport will be my old friend Mikha, who will take me to the Nordic Hotel. This morning, I had time to drop the children at school. Afterwards, I went for a walk on Vladimirskaya Street: employees outside the bureau de change were putting up the latest currency exchange figures. The hryvna continues to fall, the dollar and the euro to rise. I passed a dozen or so adolescents marching in line, wearing camouflage clothing with badges. Among them, two young adults, the same height as the others. The permanent revolution continues.
But, overall, the situation in Kiev is normal, except for the Maidan and Khreshchatyk Street. Everybody goes to work, drinks coffee, talks politics and rails against Russia. During breakfast, before they went to school, Theo and Anton recited a nursery rhyme that is fashionable at the moment among children, listing the colours of the Russian flag: Vodka’s white, face is red, sky is blue, life’s the best.
Yesterday, at the request of my former teacher, I went to Obolon to make a speech to children in a secondary school. All the schools in the city have planned literary events recently in honour of the bicentenary of Taras Shevchenko’s birth. But now, of course, it would be more accurate to reclassify these events as ‘politico-literary’. I have already spoken at one such event, in School 91. That was simply a conversation about war, fear, the ‘heavenly sotnya’ – the hundred who died in February – and the future. A conversation with teenagers who asked questions that were not remotely childlike: ‘What is going to happen now? How can we influence the future of Ukraine? Can the new Ukrainian government drag the country out of its current rut?’ At the school in Obolon, the questions were slightly less political and slightly more focused on Taras Shevchenko. But I could see the same anxiety in the eyes of the children, as well as in the eyes of their teachers.
In the evening, we inaugurated the Turkish–Ukrainian cultural centre at 3 Saksagansky Street, opposite the National Film Centre. There were about fifty people, gathered in a small room. Children from the Meridian international school recited poems by Taras Shevchenko in Turkish, Korean and Azerbaijani. Enver Izmaylov played two songs on the guitar: one inspired by popular Ukrainian songs, the other by traditional Crimean Tatar music. Then we drank tea, ate eastern sweets, and had a long chat.
I left the centre with Mykola Kravchenko and Volodya from the publishers Nika-Tsentr. We decided to walk to the Khreshchatyk metro station. Across from the former Znannya bookshop, the pavements on Khreshchatyk Street have been ripped up and transformed into a series of walls and piles of bricks; the whole thing looks like a paintball field. It is time now to make the centre of Kiev look normal again, but the revolutionaries refuse to leave the city hall and go home.
Volodymyr Bondarenko, the temporary head of Kiev’s local government, complains without rancour that he cannot, for the moment, restore order and free the city hall from the revolutionaries who are living there. There are too many different groups, incapable of getting along; some revolutionaries are demanding a free apartment, others a proof of residence, and yet others help in finding a steady job in Kiev. They took Kiev, didn’t they? They got rid of Yanukovych. Now they want to be rewarded. But isn’t a normal country, freed from corruption, the greatest prize any normal citizen could ask for?
The fact is, though, that revolution radicalises normal citizens, and – once radicalised – those citizens hardly seem accountable for their own actions. We need time. The country needs a period of calm, like all convalescents. But there is no calm, for the moment, because next door to us is Russia, with Putin, who is terrified by the Eurorevolution. He will do all he can to prove to the people of Russia that a government cannot be changed through revolution. And consequently, Ukraine is still facing a mountain of problems that will be very difficult to resolve.