The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (36 page)

“We have a pretty good scene here,” Sasha said. In addition to Saturday bicycle polo, they had a soccer team: “We are terrible, true losers. We won one game in our league, the last game of the season. It was against the other team with no wins. Very dramatic.”

The Kyiv punks perhaps were more social club than fount of artistry, and the kind of institutional memory and history that can be a foundation for creative breakthroughs was missing for a familiar reason: drugs, specifically heroin. “I have a friend, Timon, who is forty, and he is like the elder statesman. He was around in the late eighties, early nineties; he saw Sonic Youth play here to like twenty people, saw VV”—Vopli Vidopliassova, a seminal Ukrainian rock band led by singer/accordionist Oleg Skrypka—“when they were a punk band, before they decided to go for commercial success. There was a pretty good noise-punk scene here then. And then everyone got into drugs, and now Timon is the only one [older] than late thirties who comes to shows. It is too bad. The punks now think they are the first Ukrainian punks; but really, because of the Internet, it is just imitations of American punk.

“I like the scene in Greece. They have strong antifascist groups”—for good reason, it should be pointed out. The explicitly neofascist Golden Dawn party took nearly 10 percent of the vote in the 2014 elections, making it the third-largest party in Greece. “They even organized an MMA competition in Thessaloníki. Can you imagine!” Like the Bulgarians, he scoffed at the Greeks' economic woes. “Everyone is always saying, ‘Greeks are so poor,' but all the kids in Greece had money to stay out all night drinking. They had cars. They weren't poor like us in Ukraine.”

That day the Ukrainian parliamentary leadership, led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, resigned. The international media reported this as a fatal breach in the governing coalition, but it had the feel of a choreographed and scripted maneuver—the fall of the coalition allowed the president to call early elections.
The leadership of the government had changed after Yanukovych's flight, but the parliament hadn't: the revanchist Communists and Yanukovych's Party of Regions still held their seats. Yatsenyuk's resignation would trigger a new round of parliamentary elections in the fall, which it was hoped would wipe out the disgraced old guard and bring in a unified, reformist government. (A few days later, President Poroshenko refused to accept Yatsenyuk's resignation, allowing the latter to retain his position while the fall elections went forward.)

Sasha never spent a night on the Maidan, but he was part of groups that brought medicine and supplies. “I didn't agree one hundred percent with their goals, because I don't like the EU. I think we should be independent. But if the choice is EU or Russia, of course I choose Europe. I voted for Poroshenko. Usually my vote is for nobody,” but under the circumstances, he felt, it was important to vote, and Poroshenko was the least worst option.

“Maybe,” he said, echoing the consensus opinion, “he will be a good manager. Oligarch or not, I don't care. It is just money. Give any of those poor people on the square money and they would be the same.”

I asked him what he thought about the rump occupation.

The people left on the Maidan, he said, “have nowhere else to go. They don't want to go to work. Eventually people will stop giving them money or food.”

I mentioned that Sasha Boole had described the Maidan's effect on the Ukrainian psyche as an unlocking of a patriotic sentiment. “I never liked patriotism,” said Grinevich, “but during the Maidan I felt patriotic. In Dnipropetrovs'k, it was a very Russian city—not as much as in the east, but very few people were
speaking Ukrainian in the city center. Now it is one of the most patriotic cities. But it has gone too far. Everyone is painting”—he gestured to a low stone wall painted the Ukrainian flag's yellow and blue. “I think these are ugly colors, actually, but if you say that now, people say, ‘Get out of here, you Russian!'”

I caught a sweltering bus by the McDonald's at the Kyiv train station, bound for Bila Tserkva (White Church), a small provincial city an hour and a half down the road toward Odessa. It's not always easy to figure out where to get off these buses—stops are often requested, rather than reliably made at obvious central stations—and I took a chance and lost. I managed to catch another local bus to the square where I hoped I'd find the Stare Misto (Old City) café.

I found a wide, sleepy commons, with grass growing between the asphalt tiles, and in the center a Mexican-looking enclosed plaza. There was something Graham Greene Mexican, or Hemingway Cuban, about the town in general: the overgrown and bedraggled square, depopulated buildings painted pastel blue and yellow, idling taxis, groups of young men and overdressed women gathered around a motorcycle, a small café with plastic gingham tablecloths. On one end of the square was a low, wide, empty pedestal, obviously the former home of a Lenin statue, that now held only a rusting iron pipe and some crumbled cement. Beside the empty pedestal was a long banner memorializing the Maidan dead. Next to the banner were scattered, wilting flowers and a bottle of Nemiroff “Distinct” vodka. Well, not a bottle, that wouldn't have lasted—just the empty sleeve the bottle came in, with a floral wreath.

Turning back toward the white plaster compound in the center of the square, I ascended the wide staircase and passed
through the arched outer doorway. To the left was Stare Misto: a restaurant with low, arched brick ceilings and rough, sturdy wooden tables. The short, barrel-ceiling stage was backed with generic classic-rock wallpaper images: Jim Morrison, Hendrix, Zeppelin. The café walls were painted in the earthy brown and red Trypillian tribal patterns familiar from Cult Ra, and a red-and-black nationalist flag hung over the sun-drenched back exit. I ducked under the flag and walked out onto the wide inner patio.

At the far end of this courtyard was an empty, festival-style outdoor stage. To my left were café tables. To my right was a crossbow range. A seven-year-old boy with a cocked crossbow in one hand was taking a cell phone call from his mother with his other.

Some local parents had organized archery lessons for the town's children, and young mothers corralled kids, from toddlers to ten-year-olds, while men in tank tops helped the older ones pull, aim, and shoot. At thirty yards stood two straw-stuffed targets—one circular, one a burlap-sack mock torso—mounted on sheets of plywood to protect the building's walls. On tables nearby lay a collection of homemade longbows and crossbows; wooden arrows, some with whittled points, some with dangerous-looking hand-filed steel heads; and eleven- by seventeen-inch color printouts—headshots of Putin and Yanukovych—which the event's leaders stapled to the targets. A balding man in sandals demonstrated an even more impressive piece of artillery, a chest-high stationary crossbow with a ratcheting windlass. It took two young boys to cock and aim it, and the arrow missed the target and sunk half an inch into the plywood. A man picked up a footlong pair of pliers and wrestled it loose.

An elegant young woman named Dasha had opened Stare Misto a year ago as not just a restaurant and music venue but as a “local center for this kind of thinking”—promoting a muscular Ukrainian patriotism for a young generation. The menu offered buckwheat noodles and borscht. A burlap-bound copy of the poetry of the nineteenth-century national icon Taras Shevchenko lay on every table. Light electronica pulsed from the DJ booth, which also was painted in “native” Trypillian designs. They sold local crafts—a great advance, Dasha said, for this “Soviet-style” town. In addition to today's archery workshop, there was a “support our troops” event for kids the next morning: a drawing class, with the results to be sent to soldiers on the front. (Next week, Tim Burton movie night.) She also organized camping retreats to the Carpathians: rafting, hiking, music.

Dasha was slim, dark, and self-possessed, though shy about her English. She had been working in logistics in Kyiv when friends told her that this space in Bila Tserkva was available. The similarities between this open-air building and those in Latin America were no accident, she said: they were both Jesuit. This plaza was a Jesuit market, built some two hundred years ago by a local Polish lord.
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Under the Soviets, the building was a supply depot, then it passed into private hands under the usual shady circumstances in the 1990s and became a haven for drunks.

An elderly man with a Shevchenko walrus moustache and a
shaved-head, Cossack-style topknot ordered a beer. Dasha introduced me to her friend Tanya, a friendly redhead in a loose green dress with an earnest, uptalking lilt. Tanya had been an English instructor in Indonesia and now worked as an online translator. As we talked, she encouraged Dasha in a teacherly way to join in and practice her English.

Tanya, in her own guileless and gregarious fashion, was a fierce Ukrainian patriot. “I think Maidan should be no more,” she said. “Maidan is in the heads of people now. Maybe the people there lost their jobs, or maybe they are from the east and have nowhere to go, but the money and food that is going to them should go to the soldiers now.”

Does she, I asked, feel that the Maidan movement was a success?

“There will be a second Maidan,” she said firmly. “We didn't achieve any of the aims.”

It's a line I heard from several activist youth, who seem to have willfully forgotten that the primary stated demand of the Maidan protesters was the removal of Yanukovych. The final government peace proposal came in late February and included new presidential elections, but it was rejected by the protesters on the grounds that Yanukovych must leave immediately. His flight the next day was the cue that diffused the energy of the protest. The belief that the first Maidan achieved nothing was an attempt—like the men refusing to leave the square—to maintain the emotional momentum of the movement, though without allowing anyone the satisfaction of achievement. The dispersal of the Maidan, Larissa in Kyiv said later, put everything back to normal without changing the corrupt system. Sasha Grinevich agreed: “This is the second time we've done this,” referring to the
2004 Orange Revolution. “I don't know when we will learn.” The paradox is, if you won, there's nothing left to do—but if there's so much more to do, did you really win?

“Well, Yanukovych is gone,” Tanya admitted. “But that is just one thing.” Ukraine, she said, needed true independence. “There are people now who want to stop the war so it doesn't come to them, but they don't understand, Putin will just try to move the border closer. We have Russia as a neighbor,” she said, and they can't just wish the Russians away.

I changed into my stage suit in their front office, which Dasha had leased out as a tattoo shop. Tattoos, she said, had become popular in the last year, especially tattoos of Ukrainian symbols. One of the café workers had both the trident and the line “Ukraine is not dead yet,” from the national anthem. Dasha herself received the first tattoo on the new padded bench. It read “Wanderlust,” though she hasn't traveled widely.

The tattoo shop was decorated in revolution chic: a glossy photo of silhouettes against burning barricades; gas masks and other vintage military paraphernalia hanging from the walls; an artist's jointed wooden hand arranged into an upraised middle finger; a poster-size propaganda calendar of “the patriotic year 2014” from the vodka brand Banderivska (a reference to the iconic nationalist leader Bandera), bearing the slogan “бандерібцька територія нескорених” (“Unbroken Banderist Territory”). On another poster, the scowling face of former president Yanukovych was drawn in the style of Shepard Fairey's André the Giant under the title “Lawful Dictatorship.” With a series of captioned, black-on-red icons, it outlined the package of repressive laws the parliament had passed over the winter in a desperate attempt to create a legal framework for a crackdown
on the Maidan (“Participation in peaceful gatherings in helmet, uniforms, with fire—up to 10 days”). And in one corner, confusingly, were paired a European Union flag and a Confederate banner—chosen, no doubt, as a generic signifier for “rebels.” It was another disconcerting example of the resistance of symbols to cross-cultural translation. (Just to muddle the symbolism further, later in the summer, the pro-Russian separatists began to use a version of the Confederate flag as
their
“official banner.” The designer, reported the
Moscow Times
, “stumbled on the flag online somewhere.”)

It was Tanya and Dasha's friends who had pulled down Bila Tserkva's Lenin statue over the winter, with a truck-mounted crane, and then cut him up with a blowtorch for souvenirs.

Tanya said there was a difference between younger Ukrainians and “people forty to forty-five who grew up partly under Soviet Union. They think Donetsk, Luhansk, they are Russian, not really Ukrainian, let them go. Younger people, who grew up in independent Ukraine, believe” in the idea of a unified Ukraine and in its territorial integrity.

She made an interesting demographic point: in many ways, the conflict in Ukraine is generational. Stereotypically, societies troubled by violent unrest have a large proportion of young and unemployed men (see North Africa and the Middle East). The Russian and Ukrainian populations uniquely prone to manipulation by propaganda and populist appeal are likely the middle-aged, the lost generation trapped between the malaise of late communism and the betrayed post-Soviet promises of liberalism and privatization. Without a memory of the Soviet Union, and with the positive example of their peers in Poland, those under thirty are more resistant to Putin's pan-Slavic rhetoric.