POLITICS so dominates everything here now that I instinctively wanted to begin this report with a summary of some resolution just adopted by the Parliament of the Ukraine, or with some conversation with one of the local activists, but then I thought, No, I will start with something else, I will praise the city of Kiev. It is the only large city of the former USSR whose streets serve not merely for hurrying home but for walking, for strolling. Perhaps only Petersburg shares this quality, but there the climate is an obstacle — much colder, windy, rainy, or frosty. Whereas Kiev is warm, quiet, bathed in sun. In the afternoon, in the downtown area, one can see crowds of people, and these are not political crowds, not debating crowds, but simply thousands of passersby, who have left their airless, cramped offices and apartments to get some fresh air. In addition, traces of the old cafés have survived in Kiev. One can — after, of course, having stood in line for the requisite amount of time — buy a glass of tea and a pastry there, something inconceivable in Moscow, for example.
The city lies on hills, and some of the streets are winding and very steep. From the summits of the hills one can see the Dnieper Valley and the Dnieper itself — a river as wide as the Amazon, as the Nile, calm, slow, with an endless number of tributaries, bays, and islands. When the Ukrainians become rich, these waters will teem with sailboats and yachts — but for now all is still silent and rather empty.
The architecture of Kiev is a subject for a separate story. One can see all epochs and styles here — from miraculously preserved medieval cloisters and Orthodox churches to dreadful examples of Stalinist social realism. And in between those two, baroque and neoclassical and, above all, an exuberant, extremely ornate art nouveau. What a beautiful city this must once have been! The devastation of this architectural gem began in 1917 and still continues today. One day I purchased an extraordinary document published by the lovers of Old Kiev — a map of the city and a list of purposefully demolished buildings, churches, palaces, cemeteries. The list names 254 structures leveled by the Bolsheviks in order to erase the traces of Kiev’s culture. Two hundred and fifty-four structures — why, that is an entire city! Fortunately, the incompetence and inefficiency of the system worked here to the advantage of art. The regime was unable to destroy everything, and many beautiful churches and buildings survived.
ONE SHOULD NOT be misled by this enduring external charm of the city, however. In many buildings, in entire housing complexes, people live very badly. The stairwells are filthy, the windowpanes broken, the outbuildings and courtyards dark because the lightbulbs have either been stolen or smashed. In many houses there is either no cold water or no hot water, or no water at all. Cockroaches and all other kinds of stubborn vermin are a universal plague. I stayed in some of these apartment buildings and visited acquaintances in others; I know what things look like. The so-called Soviet man is first and foremost an utterly exhausted man, and one shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have the strength to rejoice in his newly won freedom. He is a long-distance runner who reached the finish line and collapsed, dead tired, incapable even of raising his arm in a gesture of victory.
I mention these trials and nightmares of daily existence because in the torrent of information flowing out into the world about events in the former USSR, there are no portraits of the lives of ordinary people, those millions upon millions of worn-out, destroyed, and impoverished citizens searching for food, clothing, and often simply for a roof over their heads. There is little that can still give them pleasure, make them joyful and enthusiastic.
KIEV’S KRESHCHATIK is something like a local Champs-Élysées. Once there were several well-stocked bookstores there, but now they are empty: the classics of Marxism-Leninism are no longer printed or sold, and there is as yet no new literature. Simply — a transitional period. Everything is now explained with that one key phrase: “transitional period.” Communism collapsed, and what will happen next still remains to be seen. Everyone projects his own vision onto the future — there are as many expectations, hopes, and dreams as there are people. But there are also thousands, perhaps even millions, who have no illusions. They are the ones who night and day besiege the consulates of other countries. (In Moscow I even saw a line outside the consulate of the Congo! The Congo? Let it be the Congo! Just as long as it’s far from this … and here follows a rude, quite unpatriotic word.) The Soviet people are remembering that they are not citizens of the USSR but simply Greeks, Germans, Jews, Hindus, Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and so on, and so they want to return to their countries, to their symbolic homes, to the lands of their ancestors. Do they want to leave and abandon all the property they have acquired over a lifetime? What property? they respond, astounded. In this country, no one ever acquired anything. Well, perhaps several years in the camps, perhaps a dark corner in a communal apartment, perhaps a retirement pension of three dollars a month.
HALFWAY ALONG Kreshchatik lies a square (once it was called the October Revolution Square; now it is Independence Square) where today (it is August 31, 1991) a statue of Lenin still stands. But as of this morning workers have been erecting a crane here — they will be removing the statue. The operation is being observed by a crowd of onlookers as well as by several Western television crews who are colossally bored in Kiev and now, at last, will have something to do. Everything else aside, the statue must be removed because slogans decidedly unflattering to the Father of the Revolution have sprouted on the stone figure: EXECUTIONER, ss, or, the mildest of them, LUCIFER. There is no shortage of Lenin statues in the Ukraine — five thousand, it is said. Where did they get that figure? It’s simple. They just added up all factories, schools, hospitals, kolkhozes, army units, ports, train stations, universities, villages, towns, cities, larger squares, bridges, parks, et cetera, et cetera, knowing that there had to be a statue of Lenin at each location, and arrived at the figure of five thousand.
Erecting the statues of Lenin, incidentally, posed no less a problem than that now entailed in their removal. In nearby Moldavia I met a man who spent ten years in a camp as a result of trying to install a heavy bust of Lenin in a second-floor common room. The doors were too narrow, so this unfortunate decided to hoist the bust up over the balcony, first coiling a thick rope around the neck of the author of Marxism and Empirical Criticism. He didn’t even have time to untie the noose before he was arrested.
IF WE PASS the statue and keep going, we will reach a small, quiet street called Ordzonikidze, where (symbolically) the recent Ukrainian revolution took place in its entirety. At the entrance stands an unprepossessing and rather run-down little palace — the seat of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, the headquarters of the revolution. Nearby, almost directly opposite, rises a powerful, gigantic, oppressive edifice: the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the place of business for all those who were the terror of the Republic — Kaganovich, Shcherbitsky, Ivashko. Two buildings — an architectural David and Goliath — with a history of frequent battles between them and, this time, a favorable outcome: David defeated Goliath.
I HAD VISITED the little palace on Ordzonikidze a year ago because I was told that I would be able to meet the poet Ivan Drach there, leader of the Popular Movement for Reconstruction of the Ukraine (RUCH). The organization came into being relatively late, in September 1989, and included various independent and opposition groups that for years had been persecuted and suppressed, the main one being the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. It is not surprising that the Ukrainian Language Society was among those groups attacked and oppressed. The revolution in the Ukraine, like everywhere else, was waged at least partly over language. Half of the fifty-two million inhabitants of the Ukraine either do not speak Ukrainian, or they speak it poorly. Three hundred and fifty years of Russification have inevitably produced such a result. The ban against printing books in Ukrainian was in force for decades. As early as 1876, Alexander II ordered that instruction in Ukrainian schools take place only in Russian. Several months ago I visited the third-largest city in the Ukraine — Donetsk. The battle to open at least one elementary school teaching Ukrainian was by then already in its second year. Teachers assembled children in the park and there instructed them in Ukrainian. Teaching Ukrainian? Why, that was counterrevolution, an imperialist conspiracy!