Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

207 Pages·2016·1.76 MB·English

by  Sophie Pinkham

CONTENTS
Preface
A Note on the Transliteration
PART I: NEW WORLDS
1 The Paris of Siberia
2 Resurrection
3 City of Gardens, City of Ravines
4 Men’s Day
PART II: LIVING TOGETHER
5 Buckwheat and Rye
6 Carpathian Cowboys
7 The People’s Music
8 The Last Jew in Stalindorf
9 The Kingdom of the Dead
PART III: REVOLUTION
10 Dreaming of Europe
11 Are You Alive, Brother?
12 Masks and Monuments
13 Reunion
14 The Wild Steppe
PART IV: WAR AND PEACE
15 Heroes Don’t Die
16 Crashing
17 New Year in Kiev
18 Rocket City
19 Victory Day
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
For my friends in Ukraine and Russia,
with love and gratitude.

PREFACE
I
was seven years old when the Berlin Wall fell. Watching the news with my
parents in New York, I wondered how a simple concrete barrier could be so
important. Why hadn’t people just climbed over it? Newscasters discussed the
“Iron Curtain,” which sounded scary, but also confusing. Didn’t curtains, by
definition, ripple and fold?
I was sixteen when NATO bombed Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. I
assumed that Clinton had good reasons for intervening. Despite his sexual
indiscretions, our president seemed like a kindly, paternal figure. At school I
knew a nice Serbian boy who wrote poetry; he and his brother got into fights
with the Albanian kids on the basketball court, but I couldn’t quite understand
why. Anyway, we were teenagers; we had better things to think about.
I graduated from high school in the year 2000. A year earlier the seniors had
chanted ninety-nine; as we celebrated that June, my friends and I chanted zero
and laughed. Panic about Y2K had come to nothing; the world hadn’t ended with
the old millennium. But disaster arrived the next year. From her high school
classroom in downtown Manhattan, my younger sister saw two planes hit the
Twin Towers. She and her classmates watched tiny figures leap from the burning
buildings. Outside, FBI agents told the students, “Don’t look back, and run”:
north, away from the fast-moving cloud of dust and death. Soon the United
States was fighting a war, and then a series of wars, that became the permanent
backdrop to our young adult lives.
It was an inauspicious start, and I often wished I’d been born in some other
decade. But I had the idealism and longing for adventure common among young
people. I wanted to fix something, to help someone. AIDS had gotten its name in
the year I was born, and I had grown up with its threat; in high school and then
in college, I volunteered with health groups. On a whim, I studied Russian. After
college I applied to volunteer at the Red Cross in Siberia, in search of something
I could not yet name.
My choice of destination, however haphazard, was deeply appropriate. When
I arrived in Russia, the young countries of the former Soviet Union were still
struggling to establish their places in the world, to define their identities. In
Russia, as in the United States, the year 2000 had lived up to its millennial
billing. It was the end of the 1990s, which had been a time of chaos, hope, and
violence, and the beginning of the Putin era. Russia’s new president stood for
stability and prosperity, and he had wide support; in 2004, in Moscow, I was
surprised to see Russian girls my age carrying Putin key chains. But this
perceived stability came at the price of the civil liberties promised by the
collapse of the USSR, and Russia was becoming an increasingly authoritarian
state. In other countries of the former Soviet Union, the future looked brighter:
“color revolutions”—Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s 2004 Orange
Revolution, Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution—promised peaceful
“transitions to democracy” led by activists, students, idealists.
After Siberia I got a job working for George Soros’s Open Society Institute,
a foundation dedicated to promoting democracy and “civil society” in the former
Soviet Union (or overthrowing anti-Western governments, depending on your
perspective; blamed for the “color revolutions,” the Open Society Institute was
pushed out of Russia and authoritarian Uzbekistan). I met activists who were
only slighter older than I was, members of the first generation to come of age in
a post-Soviet world. In 2008 I moved to Ukraine, where I became close friends
with many other members of this generation—not only activists but doctors,
musicians, artists, teachers.
My family and my friends at home had trouble understanding why I had
fallen in love with Ukraine, a country that most Americans could hardly find on
a map, famous only for Chicken Kiev and mail-order brides. I tried to explain
that I loved the dreamlike quality of a place where the resolutely premodern—
horse-drawn carts and babushkas afraid of the evil eye—survived amid the ruins
of Soviet utopian modernism, a place that had not yet caught up with the
anonymous global marketplace. I was fascinated with life on the other side of the
Iron Curtain, in a world that had served for so long as America’s nemesis, the
mirror in which the United States confirmed its own identity. And then there was
the charm of getting to know a foreign culture, as the unintelligible becomes the
startlingly new.
I had already moved back to New York by the winter of 2013–14, when
Ukraine had another revolution. This one wasn’t assigned a color; more
spontaneous than the Orange Revolution a decade earlier, it came to be known
simply as Maidan, for Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s Independence Square, the
site of mass protests that lasted for three months and ended with the flight of
Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, to Russia. When I first lived in
Ukraine, I was preoccupied with its ideas of the past and future. Once Maidan
started, there was nothing but the present; every hour held the possibility of
transformation, and of terrible violence.
Before Maidan, I had a lot of stories about Ukraine and about Russia, but I
wasn’t quite sure how they all fit together. After Maidan, a series of curious
adventures became a historical trajectory, and the individual search for meaning
—my own, and that of my Ukrainian and Russian friends—became a collective
one. The Bildungsroman intersected with revolution, as tens of thousands of
people converged on Kiev’s central square.
IN 1915, A CENTURY before Maidan, Kazimir Malevich painted a black
square on a white background. When it was first exhibited, the painting hung in
the upper corner of the room, the place traditionally reserved, in Russian homes,
for a religious icon. The Black Square became the icon of the Russian avant-
garde, hanging above Malevich’s body when he lay in state in his Leningrad
apartment in 1935. (He was lucky to die of natural causes before Stalin’s 1937
Terror.) Malevich was born to Polish parents near Kiev; his work was influenced
both by the black and red patterns of traditional Ukrainian textiles and by the
stark black crosses on the garments of Russian saints. Today, like many heroes
from the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, he is claimed by Russians, Poles,
and Ukrainians alike.
For Malevich, the Black Square represented the end of time, the culmination
of history. He would have liked my high school graduation in the year 2000; for
him, truth began at zero. (In 1915 he cofounded a journal called Zero.) His Black
Square was meant to evoke “the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white
emptiness of a liberated nothing.” By the time the Russian Revolution and
ensuing civil war were over, in 1922, this “emptiness of a liberated nothing” was
painfully real, with everyday life shattered by the conflict between the Red
Army and the anti-Communist White Guard.
Over the next decades, the Soviets built a new world, with millions of
casualties along the way. But by 1991 the countries of the former Soviet Union
found themselves at another zero point, forced to reinvent and rebuild yet again.
And then there was Maidan. More than a hundred people were killed during the
protests; some ten thousand died in the war that followed. Ukraine and Russia,
which supported and prolonged the conflict, descended into paranoia and rage.
As a physical space and as a historical moment, Maidan was a kind of Black
Square, a ground zero. Maidan is the place where history ends and returns and
begins, the moment of liberation that lays bare the uncertainty of the future. The
Black Square contrasts with Moscow’s Red Square, the center of Russian power
and the emblem of Communism, but black and red are also the colors of
Ukraine’s radical nationalism, of fertile earth and spilt blood. The Black Square
evokes both utopian dreams and the threat of anarchy. Malevich’s icon was
worshipped by some, but denounced by others as a “sermon of nothingness and
destruction.”
For many Western observers, Maidan confirmed the ineluctable movement
toward liberal democracy, the “end of history” that was celebrated after the fall
of the Soviet Union but later slipped out of view. The Western idea of Maidan
was the negative image of the Russian one: the Russian government and its
media portrayed Ukraine’s Revolution as a neo-Nazi coup, a fascist junta. But
history never ends; our world is composed of many colors, and many voices.