After the Revolution
Words Joe Lloyd Photographs Elena Subach
During the dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, there were some who thought that the world had reached what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history”. Liberal democracy would triumph, gradually erasing civic upheaval and armed conflict. For the people of Ukraine, a country that only gained its independence from the USSR in 1991, it would be fair to say that a new history had just begun.
The story of the independent Ukraine is characterised by economic volatility and rampant corruption. The 2018 Transparency Worldwide Corruption Perceptions Index places it 120th out of 180 in the world. Meanwhile, a series of political scandals since 2004’s Orange Revolution forced a revote after an ostensibly rigged election have seen no president serve more than a single term.[1]
Many of the tensions animating the country came to a head in 2014. In February, the Euromaidan movement — a wave of demonstrations that had begun the previous winter in protest at President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of an EU association agreement — escalated dramatically. As many as 800,000 protestors took to Kyiv’s central square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) and streets to demand the president’s resignation, in events now known as the Revolution of Dignity. Nearly 130 people were killed in the resulting clashes, largely by secret service snipers.[2] Yanukovych fled to exile in Russia, denouncing the “coup” and asking Vladimir Putin for decisive action. After the Russian parliament approved Putin’s request for intervention, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula.[3] Meanwhile, pro-Russian insurgents in the eastern Donbass region, aided by the Russian military, occupied the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk and their surrounding oblasts, where they remain today. Ukraine is thus engaged in armed conflict with both its gargantuan neighbour and a section of its own populace.
For the Kyiv-based designer Victoriya Yakusha, the events of this tumultuous year changed everything. Yakusha had studied at the Dnipropetrovsk Academy of Construction and Architecture and the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Strasbourg, before opening her minimalism-inclined architecture and interiors studio Yakusha Design in 2006 . After the revolution and the subsequent conflicts, however, she decided to embark on another course. “Twenty-fourteen was the beginning of the revival of national memory in Ukraine,” says Yakusha. “When the Revolution of Dignity started, I wanted to contribute somehow and, as an architect and designer, I decided to make a furniture and decor collection that would popularise our culture and put Ukraine on the world’s design map. At that moment it was vital to spread the voice of Ukraine.”
This might sound like a grandiose claim, but it is one with numerous precedents. European nationalism has often led to adaptations of folk traditions, from Finland’s craggy national romantic architecture to the Celtic-style jewellery of Ireland’s Arts and Crafts movement. Yakusha’s particular response in 2014 was to establish the design brand Faina, which has since exhibited at Milan, Stockholm, Paris and London design weeks. Named for a western Ukrainian term meaning something simultaneously visually pleasing and morally good, Faina creates contemporary furnishings that utilise the techniques of traditional Ukrainian crafts. At the brand’s Ya Vsevit headquarters (Ukrainian for “I am all”) in Kyiv — a studio, showroom and event hall that Yakusha designed and opened last winter — there are wall-mounted tapestries made of sheep’s wool, pendant lamps woven from wicker and striated wooden tabletops supported by trunk-like clay legs.
There is nothing doggedly traditional about these objects but their forms and materials echo those found in the country’s rural extremities. A series of ceramic vases, for instance, resembles indigenous instruments: the 3m-long trembita horn and the lute-esque bandura. “When we exhibited them at Milan people were trying to guess what they were,” says Yakusha. “Most of them had never seen a bandura. But many people said one thing: ‘It feels familiar and it’s something from our past.’” Yakusha recounts how one such visitor, originally from Ukraine but resident in Switzerland for two decades, saw the vase in the room and rushed over: “She was very surprised, and thrilled at the same time, to see something from her childhood memories here at design’s epicentre.”
This summer, Faina mounted a “Design Expedition” across Ukraine, beginning in the western city of Lviv, travelling through the Carpathian Mountains and ending up in the capital. The purpose was to witness the crafts of the region and to understand something of Ukraine’s artisan cultures, many of which are under threat.
Nomenclature is important in Ukraine. Since 1995, its capital, long known internationally as Kiev, has been officially denominated as Kyiv. The more common appellation in English, still used by many publications, is a transliteration from Russian.[4] In the country’s east, the second city Kharkov has become Kharkiv, and in 2016 a decommunisation law transformed industrial Dnipropetrovsk into the most concise Dnipro. During its 69-year period as the second largest republic in the Soviet Union, it was often referred to as “the Ukraine”, the definite article denuding it of the autonomy of a nation and instead casting it as a region.
“Ukraine” itself can be etymologically traced to the Polish “ukraina”, meaning “borderland”. One border, invisible to visitors without an understanding of Cyrillic script, lies in language. Kyiv has a slight Russian-speaking majority, while in the southern seaport of Odessa, 78 per cent of citizens speak Russian at home, many in a distinctive dialect with Yiddish and Ukrainian influences. Lviv, on the other hand, by far the largest city in Ukraine’s west, is dominated by the Ukrainian tongue, and as such is often figured as the country’s ethnic heartland. Even here, however, more tangible borders have made their mark. Situated less than 50 miles from Poland, Lviv was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia before Sovietisation. Founded as Lwihorod, it has successively been known as the Polish Lwów, the German Lemberg and the Russian Lvov, before arriving at its present-day Ukrainian cognomen.
The face Lviv presents to the world belies this past, while clearly linking it to its erstwhile overlords. Architecturally it seems arrested in 1914. Its urban core is a warren of bulbous baroque churches encrusted with gilded putti, and motley-toned Polish mannerist guild halls supported by atlantes and caryatids. Grand boulevards break through the maze, themselves lined with the sort of spectacular neo-renaissance institutional buildings and art nouveau apartment blocks that characterise Vienna and Budapest. At times, Lviv can feel like a (not unpleasant) open-air heritage museum, riddled with themed eateries. There is a coffee house, purporting to be Europe’s oldest, sitting above what is ostensibly a coffee mine, with beams stuck to the walls. Inside, baristas in welders’ masks caramelise sugar with industrial-grade blowtorches. There is a restaurant devoted to oil, decorated with hundreds of oil lamps, as well as street entertainers dressed in everything from traditional dress to vampire costumes and even a bar themed after local author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who lent his name to masochism.[5] Inside, customers can be whipped as they drink.
It is only from a higher vantage point — the castle hill, or the tower of the town hall — that one can see the tranches of 1960s and 1970s mass housing projects that surround the inner cityscape. But within that nucleus, there are abundant signs that speak to contemporary Ukrainian concerns. The country’s azure-and-yellow flag is omnipresent, flown outside shops and flats (less common, but still widespread, is the deeper blue-and‑yellow of the EU). Posters in café windows depict Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, the country’s most popular rock star and a future pro-EU candidate for president. Perhaps the clearest sign that you are on the fringes of the West is a set of stands outside the renaissance city hall that attempt to explain the benefits of NATO membership to passing locals.[6] The city’s creative scene is very much orientated around local production; one of the aims of Dzyga, for instance, the oldest contemporary art centre in the country, is to promote Ukrainian art at home and abroad. It was here, in 2004, that the Vienna-based historian Harald Binder founded the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, a not-for-profit initiative that aims to “contribute to Lviv becoming a central site for intellectual, academic and cultural life not only in Ukraine but in Europe”.
Lviv’s economy — which comprises banks, electronics, machine-building and a burgeoning information-technology centre — is modern, but it remains the capital of a region still transitioning from an agricultural past. In the mornings, elderly countrywomen crouch on the pavement selling heaps of home-grown herbs and vegetables, featuring a profusion of spindly dill and prickly cucumbers. The neat streets of the outer residential districts are punctuated with shrines, a sign that religion — Lviv is 57 per cent Catholic and 32 per cent Orthodox Christian — retains a hold.
Outside the city, in the hamlet of Havaretsky Hutir, I visited a farm specialising in gavarestska, a type of ceramic created from natural clay gathered from the surrounding woods. Thrown on a foot-operated wheel, the ceramics have a smooth black surface that gives them a curious atemporality — somewhere between museum artefacts and minimalist design. There were around 70 potters in the district in the 1930s, but now only a handful follow the tradition. It is at severe risk of dying out within a generation.
Lviv’s borderland feeling — between urban and rural, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, West and East — is a distillation of that of the wider country. “One of the key peculiarities of Ukrainian culture,” explains Natalia Kryvda, professor of Ukrainian culture at the Taras Shevchenko National University, “is that it’s been formed, and still is being formed, on the splinters of various empires.” Its ancient history is one of difficult-to‑pin-down Nomadic tribes such as the Scythians. If it had a golden era of self-definition, it came between the 9th and 11th centuries, when it was the centre of the Kyivan Rus’, a highly literate, curiously liberal federation of Slavic peoples regarded by Belarus, Russia and Ukraine as their ancestor state. The area fell to the Mongols in the 13th century. Then came several centuries of rule by Poland, Lithuania (from 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) and Russia. When the Commonwealth was itself partitioned in 1772, the remainder of the present-day country, bar Galicia, ended up in Russian hands. And in 1922 its entirety became part of the Soviet Union.
Shunted back and forth between surrounding powers, Ukraine had little chance to develop the sort of national consciousness that raged across Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Russia did its best to quash nationalism. Under the Russian Empire, the poet and artist Taras Shevchenko,[7] regarded as pivotal to the development Ukrainian literary culture, was imprisoned and shuttled around the empire’s territory, dying aged 47 from the strain. As part of the Soviet Union it was subjected to the Holodomor (literally “to kill by starvation”), an artificially stimulated famine that killed somewhere between 3.3 and 7.5 million Ukrainians in 1932–33. It is considered by Ukraine’s government to be an act of genocide, planned so as to forestall any potential challenge to Moscow. In this context, the eruptions of 2014 read like a new volume in a prolonged saga.
With the nation having experienced such a fragmented past — a nightmare from which present-day Ukraine is trying to awake — discovering a solely Ukrainian cultural identity is not easy. Before the events of 2014, some designers had little impetus to do so. “I think that we were all in search of an identity,” says Yakusha. “There was no such thing as ‘Ukrainian contemporary design’, nobody could describe or name it. And it was the same in fashion, cinema, visual art.”[8] Not everyone concurs, however. “Fifteen years ago,” says Sergey Makhno, one of the country’s most established architects and designers, “we stated at the very start that Sergey Makhno Architects was a Ukrainian company. Our uniqueness began with Ukrainian traditions.” But Makhno, too, was affected by the annexation. “I am trying hard to be apolitical,” he says, “but it is impossible to shield yourself from the war in your country; it is impossible not to see it, not to hear, not to feel.” His current projects include the Ukrainian Museum of Ceramics, which he describes as his “long-cherished dream”.
For others, the revolution provided an incentive to remain in the country. In 2013, Masha Reva, a young artist and designer whose works to date include paintings, garments, jewellery and body arts, was studying for an MA in Fashion at Central Saint Martins in London. She decided to spend a deferred year in Kyiv, which coincided with Euromaidan. “I took part in demonstrations and sensed the change,” she recounts. “Suddenly Kyiv attracted my attention as a chaotic — but really close to my heart — place to live. I feel inspired working here. The fact that I witnessed the revolution itself and the transformation of national awareness in our society has definitely helped to better identify myself as Ukrainian and to be proud of that.”
Reva’s practice is not integrally linked to traditional craft, but it draws from her experience of her country’s cities. “I do get inspired by it,” she says, “but more by the environment I live in, the chaos and imperfection of Kyiv and Odessa. I like to see beauty in not-so-obvious things.” Nevertheless, Reva has turned to a traditional medium. In 2018, she collaborated on a ceramic collection with the young Ukrainian brand Nadiia. The result was a series of plates and vases hand-painted with fluid black lines and patches of colour; they have since been exhibited in Milan and Eindhoven. “I learnt all the traditional potting techniques,” Reva explains. “It was interesting to look at the craft as a tool we can use to produce a modern product.”
In the perceived absence of a strongly defined national culture, design or otherwise, artisanship has provided the imprimatur of authenticity. Faina’s Design Expedition ranged into the Carpathian Mountains, which pass through Ukraine’s westernmost flank. Less heavily industrialised than the east, it is a region saturated with local craft traditions, although, as with gavarestska ceramics, many are at risk of abandonment by younger Ukrainians.
Driving south from Lviv, one quickly reaches immense planes, almost featureless but for the foothills rising in the distance. Golden flashes betoken churches — onion-domed mounds of indeterminate age. I tried to count them but gave up after reaching the mid-40s in barely half an hour. As you rise up into the Carpathian foothills, the gilded domes give way to squatter structures clad in elaborately scored aluminium. The people here — many of whom belong to the Hutsul ethnicity,[9] an East Slavic group alleged to have moved to the mountains to escape the Mongol invasion — often live in traditional wooden dwellings fringed with numerous outbuildings and encircled by a fence. In the evenings, the burning of household waste leaves the sky streaked with pale smoke. Many houses are guarded by fearsome dogs, encased in wooden cages. The precaution is necessary: there are wolves here. And bears.
Around the town of Kosiv there is wooden vessel-making and hand-drawn ceramic tiles, a Hutsul tradition given to exuberant religious scenes and floral patterning. Further up in the mountains I meet Mykhailo, both a musician and a maker of the instruments that inspired Faina’s cases. His house is one of many that, since 2014, have been painted with the colours of the Ukrainian flag. When he sings apocryphal tales of Christ, accompanying himself on a hurdy-gurdy, his conviction in the continuing relevance of this heritage is stirring.
Craft, faith and politics are tightly bound. The Pysanka Museum in Kolomyia, a small city almost 200km south-east of Lviv, is the only institution in the world devoted to the collection and study of patterned Easter eggs (pysanky), which are decorated using melted wax and colouring dye. It contains more than 10,000 of them, housed within an egg-shaped structure.[10] Though some examples are preserved from the 19th century, many collections were destroyed during the Soviet years, when the practice of painting eggs was banned. In independent Ukraine it has become customary for presidents to sign their own eggs at the museum.
A less historically charged product is the lizhnyk: thick blankets made from sheep’s wool, which are used as decorative tapestries and enclosing bedspreads. In winter they can even be wrapped around the body like a cloak. The Kopilchuk family, in the village of Yaroriv, weave these bushy textiles on hand looms.The stylistic variety is astonishing, from simple blue and grey to eye-searing psychedelic patterns that resemble the paintings of Hilma af Klint; over the years the family has adapted their practice to suit contemporary aesthetics. Unlike pysanky, lizhnyky were encouraged by the Soviets. Technological advances in the 1920s lent themselves to mass production and lizhnyky were exhibited across the world and made in factories of up to 1,000 weavers. After the fall, interest faded, although there are still around 70 weavers, many of whom use looms that were requisitioned from the factories.
Of all the many practices in the region, this one has a fighting chance. The Kopilchuks have appeared in international news media, and their young son speaks English, and takes orders online and by phone. There are now socially responsible package tours taking well-heeled foreign travellers to Yaroviv, where they can weave their own blankets over a week.
Not all artisans are so willing, or able, to adapt to the present day. “At the beginning, it was really hard,” says Yakusha. “We went with our unusual ideas — to make a table with durable ceramic feet, or sliding doors for a sideboard made out of clay — and they were not ready to take a risk with us.” Yakusha had to seek out those who would. But as the region’s craft expertise dwindles, such risks may prove imperative.
For all the charms of western Ukraine, Kyiv is the epicentre of the county’s contemporary design scene. It feels another world entirely from the placid villages of the mountains. A city of almost three million — although the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbass has reputedly added another unrecorded two — it has a messy splendour, characterised by magniloquent historicism, though one does not have to stray far to stumble into mass-housing schemes. There are tenements with makeshift extensions, bulging like pustulous growths on a wrinkled face. Kyiv’s greatest glories — a series of Orthodox churches from the time of the Kyivan Rus’ — contain mosaics that more closely resemble the eastern-influenced Ravenna or Palermo than the Russian iconostasis. Its commercial heart, the Khreshchatyk boulevard, combines East and West in a different way, with Nike and Zara stores occupying a suite of Stalinist hulks.
Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central site of the 2013–2014 protests, initially seems to bear little trace of those events; the crowds have been replaced by shoppers, hawkers and street entertainers.[11] On the eastern end, however, around the Independence Monument, there is an open-air exhibition explaining the “Facebook Revolution” on boards that simulate the social-media platform’s windows. Tucked away around the side are a series of makeshift shrines for some of the Heavenly Hundred, those killed during the demonstrations.
There is little sign, however, that this is a country engaged in civil war. Kyiv instead feels like it is tenuously enjoying a boom. Recent years have seen the opening of a spate of restaurants, hotels and bars, fuelling an incipient interiors sector. To the south, near Faina’s Ya Vsevit studio, there is a vast new residential development resembling those the world over. More alarmingly, just to the north of the centre, there is a new-minted estate of uncannily accurate art nouveau flats. The ground floor hosts burger bars, hair salons and a prodigious number of Hackney-esque coffee shops.
Since 2016, Ukraine’s economy has been growing cautiously, after the war with Russia caused a localised recession that saw the national currency, the hryvnia, lose around 70 per cent to the dollar. This uptick has been beneficial to designers, though it is not the only factor in design’s rise in popularity. “Our people began to travel, listen and talk about the way they understand contemporary design,” says Makhno, “and supporters of the classics switched to modern solutions that they wouldn’t have before.” Makhno has seen a dramatic change from when he began in 2004. “At that time there was no market. When I came to a client and said that I was an interior designer, I heard the answer ‘What? We can arrange the furniture by ourselves.’”
The war has also led to an increase in cultural promotion, both externally and internally. The Ukrainian Cultural Foundation for instance, a grant-awarding public body that supported the Design Expedition, was established in 2017. “For the first time in history, we have a support from government for creative initiatives,” says Yakusha. “We have a demand from an audience for made-in-Ukraine products, services and concepts.” There are still many challenges, of course. On both institutional and private levels, a robust infrastructure has yet to develop. Education is limited, with only the Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design offering a fully fledged design course. There is one awards programme, but it relegates product design to a single category amidst numerous digital, television and graphic honours. “There is a positive dynamic,” says Reva, “but compared to Europe, the art and design market is still extremely poor. And there’s still a lack of independent galleries and cultural spaces.”
There are several significant barriers to improving the situation. As in several other post-communist societies, Ukrainian designers have trouble convincing manufacturers used to working on lower-value products to switch to their schemes. The web of globalisation is gradually creeping over, bringing with it the allure of international brands. And the recent economic upturn does not erase the country’s status as the poorest in Europe. But Yakusha is hopeful. “We are educating the market by showing them new opportunities and pushing the boundaries,” she says. “The process will take some time, but we are going to get there.”
The Herculean difficulty of teaching a not entirely Russified Ukraine to be proud of its culture is everywhere apparent. A short walk from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a bewitching religious complex that retains a powerful hold over the national imagination,[12] stands the towering Motherland Monument: a 62m-tall statue of a sword-bearing goddess of victory, completed in 1981 as a belated memorial to the Great Patriotic War. It brandishes across the River Dnieper a shield that still bears the emblem of the USSR. To residents of the prefabricated khrushchyovka on the other side, it is visible every day — a relic of the most recent episode in a history of subjugation. It will take a lot to escape its shadow. That Kyiv’s designers are rising to the challenge, though, offers some hope.
_______
[1] Earlier this year, the country elected the anti-corruption populist Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor famous for playing a fictional president in a long-running TV satire, as real-life president. His predecessor, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, was nicknamed “Chocolate King” for his confectionary empire.
[2] The exact cause of all the fatalities has yet to be determined.
[3] This region, almost completely surrounded by the Black Sea, was granted to Ukraine by Russia in 1954, as a symbolic gesture of thanks for 300 years of partial then complete subjugation to Moscow. Henry Kissinger later claimed that Khrushchev had signed it away while drunk.
[4] Some scholars claim that “Kyiv” is also closer to the name favoured by its East Slavic founders.
[5] He was also a socialist, an early advocate of women’s rights and a campaigner against anti-Semitism — aspects often ignored in favour of his salacious preferences.
[6] During a particularly frantic cab ride in Kyiv, I glimpsed a floral clock with the letters NATO spelt out in flowerbeds but subsequent attempts to locate it have failed.
[7] One of central Lviv’s few modern monuments is a phantasmagorical bronze memorial to Shevchenko, erected in 1992, soon after independence, which was donated to the city by Argentina’s several-hundred-thousand-strong Ukrainian diaspora.
[8] It should not be forgotten that several major figures of the 20th-century avant-garde often categorised as Russian — among them Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Sonia Delaunay — were Ukrainian.
[9] Hutsul culture has long inspired Ukrainian artists and writers. In the Soviet era, they were often cast as mystics, a view propagated by Sergei Parajanov’s extraordinary 1965 film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
[10] But for two unfolding wings, it would be a perfect Venturi-Scott Brown duck.
[11] A shopping arcade beneath contains perhaps the most jocular expression of Ukrainian nationalism I encountered: rolls of toilet paper printed with the smirking visage of Vladimir Putin.
[12] To experience this, climb up its 96.5m bell tower at the right time, and you’ll see young and old alike standing beneath its deafening bells for almost half an hour, in order to receive their blessings.
_______
This feature originally appeared in the Autumn 2019 edition of Disegno, the Quarterly Journal of Design.
Enjoyed this story? You can find more like it on Disegno’s website. Or why not subscribe to the journal?
