The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (39 page)

The approach to the estate was through a suburb of McMansions and imported cars, and the road dead-ended in a lacquered gate. Yanukovych's neighbors constitute the cream—if that's not too positive a word—of the political and financial class. If their neighborhood, once an exclusive community of baronial privilege and access, had been transformed by a clutch of bike rentals and microwaved blintz, shashlik, and beer stalls, it was hard to feel sorry for them. Once they lived by the lion; now they lived by a zoo. Handmade plywood signs painted with the flag and slogans of national unity were tied to the fences around their properties. A few drunks in camouflage uniforms ate ice cream at a pop-up café, and two old vendor ladies with some ancient grudge abused each other: “Fuck your mother!” “My mother already met her truth, fuck
your
mother!”

Like Peterhof, Mezhyhirya was a wide, landscaped estate (Yanukovych had the tops of the trees shaved down to improve his river view) with a castle at its height, accented by faux Grecian ruins and an oversize statue of a horse. A buffet of fountains led down to the water. If you ignored the admittedly tacky monstrosities like the fake-gold-plated toilet brushes and pirate-galleon-
cum
-banquet-hall, most of the estate constituted
a rather nice park of the sort that the Ukrainian public, who likely would have chosen to spend the millions used to create it on other priorities, might never otherwise enjoy.

But the anonymous protester who took a dump in the sentry box by the yacht dock expressed an efficient and eloquent rebuttal. The twenty-foot corrugated metal fences topped with electrified wire and security cameras (justifying the press references to Mezhyhirya as a “compound”) reinforced that this was a pleasure dome for the head of a mafia state fearful of his security. The separate “Putin Building” underscored the identity of the real boss of bosses.

At the private petting zoo for exotic animals at the southern end, two baby ostriches (one month and two weeks old, respectively) roamed the sidewalk nipping at clover. A pair of reindeer languished in the dust and sun. There was an in-house dairy, a pig farm, and a greenhouse that was selling flowers, tomatoes, honey, and plants to raise money for upkeep. Hopefully it'll just be a short-term program, said the lady who sold us a small cactus. We dubbed it the Yanu-kaktus.

It was a sweltering summer day. We ran, yelping, through the lawn sprinklers, then took a tour of the two main residential buildings: the palatial wooden “hunting lodge” and, connected by an underground passage, the “health spa.” The latter contained a virtually unused gym and boxing ring and room after room of massage chairs and tanning booths, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, alligator-skin couches, a salt-encrusted sauna, a life-sized stuffed lion.

Our guide was a Maidan protester from L'viv who had come to Kyiv in November. He and two others had appointed themselves in charge of maintaining the Mezhyhirya residence complex. He
slept in the house, he said, but didn't use any of the facilities. He was meticulous about turning the lights off as we left each room. The government had retained the staff, and he was trying to get the workers to say what life had been like under the old president, but they were “still too scared to talk.” He wore a traditional Hutsul vest and sandals and a red-and-black nationalist flag draped over his shoulders like a cape. “Get your damn feet off the bed!” he scolded one young man who had gotten too comfortable in the former president's bedroom. There was a framed $100 bill on the nightstand. The closets were empty—most of the clothes had been taken by the curious Ukrainians who flooded Mezhyhirya in the days after Yanukovych's flight. “I have a couple pairs of monogrammed underwear,” said the guide. The hardwood-covered toilets had been helpfully accessorized with the Yanukovych-face toilet paper, which was captioned “I Feel Each One.”

It was a sense-deadening menu of excess, in which only the most egregious ironies stood out: The scale model of the castle, in a gazebo-sized cage for hamsters. The infamous gold loaf of bread. In the foyer, the white limited edition “Imagine” Series Steinway, promoted as “like the songs of John Lennon . . . the perfect harmonization of music with creativity to achieve an end result that is much greater than the sum of its parts . . . modeled after the white Steinway grand piano John Lennon presented to Yoko Ono on her birthday in 1971,” and decorated with a Lennon sketch. Speakers on the balcony blasted a Ukrainian hip-hop song about having a president who wasn't a crook; the literary icons Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka got shout-outs in the breakdown, then a children's choir took over for the hook.

In the Mezhyhirya spa's guestbook are entries anonymously
labeled “Neighbor 1” and “Neighbor 2.” One of them, the caretakers suspected, was the former opposition politician and current prime minister Yatsenyuk, who lives five hundred meters away. The battle cry of the rump Maidan, and the young activists who claimed that the Maidan had achieved none of its aims, is “
Lustratsiya
”—lustration, or the removal of anyone associated with the old regime from the new government. A spray-painted banner to that effect hung from a statue on the Maidan when I went to walk around the square one more time on our last day in Ukraine.

Fight corruption, I thought, but be mindful of the American experience with the lustration of Ba'athists in Iraq: it encourages petty vengeance and creates a new class of disaffected unemployables in opposition to the new government out of a caste who, while perhaps dangerous in their banal way as agents of intransigent corruption, are just as likely to be apolitical, asscovering bureaucrats. The process of nation-building is no less messy and heterogeneous than the political life of the nations built. The idea of a politically uniform, self-sacrificing polity of parallel ideals is a communist one—the liberal-capitalist-social-democratic idea requires jostling room for the pacifist left, the militarist right, the pragmatist center, and the 99 percent who just want to get on with their lives without unnecessary hassle because everyday life is hard enough. The Ukrainians now had a politically awakened populace aware of its strength. Few, if any, nations have had two successful liberal revolutions in a decade. That distinction also contains a criticism: they're getting good at the revolutions, but not the follow-through—you don't need a second revolution if the first one worked. And Ukrainian history (including its statuary) is on a battle footing, full of doomed
or pyrrhic characters (exemplified in the anthem's “Ukraine is not dead yet”). Many of the Ukrainian national heroes are men on horseback with a club, or up in the hills shooting all comers: valuable icons for revolution, but perhaps unhelpful in encouraging a stable, relaxed democracy.

But Ukrainians seem to be accepting pragmatism. The 2004 Orange Revolution elected the charismatic, populist savior-candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who failed to implement reforms. In 2014 the people elected Poroshenko, basically their Mitt Romney, with all the enthusiasm Americans mustered for the original article: “He's probably not a crook, and the alternatives are the laughable or the implausible.” Now the new civic sensibility—as every good politician knows, war has its drawbacks, but there's nothing like it for uniting a country—stands in contrast to that of the cynical, stagnant Russians.

Unlike the nouveau bourgeois Russian protests of 2011–12, the Maidan movement engaged people across class lines. Begun by the usual Occupy demographic of college students and young hipsters, it spread to include the unemployed working class, yet brought to power a billionaire president. As our friend Larissa in Kyiv said, “It's like the war of independence that [Ukraine] never got to have. Because independence in 1991 came so easily, the country never had to make a positive decision, yes, we want to be independent. And now, people have to decide, do we really want to live in a different way?”

To zoom in on one minuscule demographic tranche, it pointed toward a role for the college-age punks and DIY activists in creating the future of Ukraine as a society in reform. Punk is largely a bourgeois phenomenon (some base-level security is a prerequisite for rebellion based on ideals) mostly
staffed by students or people with mid-level creative-industry jobs, with decent English and Internet access. And there tend to be three kinds of punk politics—the “no borders, no war” pacifists, the revolution-porn radicals, and the generic center-left liberals—none of whom, for the most part, will be personally involved in the fighting, and all of whom want or assume, like most middle-class kids, the privileges of Western liberal society. But those sorts of assumptions have a kind of power too, in that they breed a powerful resentment when unfulfilled. And punk and DIY on the American model constitute training wheels for the kind of self-organizing civil society pundits long for in developing countries, taking the unused semi-public space the former communist world is lousy with and commandeering it for the common good. Or if not good, at least enjoyment. Or if not enjoyment, at least the feeling of doing something in common, with the idea that it might push the ball an inch toward a better society.

As an American and as a musician, I found something affirming in the opportunity to play for people for whom music and politics were meaningful in a concrete way, for whom the act of congregating and the investment of feeling in performing music were all serious business. It is a relief and an antidote to the prevailing sense in the West of the inherent valuelessness and disposability of both music and the people who make it. In her writing, Maria calls this “the privilege of political ambivalence”—in a context of economic stability and cultural freedom, people who make and consume art have the freedom to be apolitical. Before that zone of freedom is established, though, the mere act of gathering, independently, underground, in a condition of joy and fellow feeling, is inescapably a political act in itself.

There was a small noon rally in front of the now-empty festival stage in central Kyiv from which, at the height of the protests, the anthem was sung hourly. A “commander” in a beret and aviators took the wireless microphone and sang, tunelessly, a patriotic song to a mismatched and motley line of three dozen “soldiers” (and a handful of patriotic tourists) standing at semi-attention in camouflage, Hawaiian shorts, striped tank tops. The donation boxes mostly stood empty. A bearded young man wandered over to the upright piano, which was painted the flag's blue-and-yellow with an EU circle of stars, and picked out a tune. The cobblestones, ripped from the streets and sidewalks that winter for use as projectiles, were stacked neatly, and some workers had begun to replace them. Toward the center of the square, some cobblestones had been painted—yellow and blue, of course—and set out on the ground to spell out messages for some theoretical airborne viewer: “Patriotic Idea Maidan,” “Stop Propaganda: Here Is Not Fascism!” and, simply, “Ukraine.” Ten days after we left, the square was finally cleared by government forces.

I walked up Institutka, past the moldering barricades, stacks of rusting homemade shields, and flower-draped memorials to protesters shot by government snipers. At the top of the hill, a black-on-yellow mock street sign sat propped against a wall of tires. “Changing the country,” it read. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

We boarded a plane to Istanbul that night, and woke at dawn to the contrapuntal tangle of the call to prayer, the muezzins like a hundred hands knitting from the same yarn. It was five years since I'd decided to stake my supper on songs. I took on the troubadour life as a single man in a windowless urban closet
the size of the loft bed I slept in. I wrote these words from the second floor of my house in a village, a married man with a car and a young daughter. I looked at my hands and at the instruments hanging on the wall. The thought of putting them on my back again struck no spark: the restless impulse had once again moved in me, now from the stage to the page. I had lived by the maxim that I could stay one step ahead of myself but found that the old itch would still be waiting for me when I finally arrived at a home. As Socrates said to the man who complained that travel had not improved him: “Not surprising. You took yourself with you.”