The death of a city (Kiev)
I was not expecting to feel this impending catastrophe quite so keenly.
Watching the live coverage coming from the streets, it’s easy to see that the Kiev of today is very different from the dusty, glumly Soviet city I visited for a few days in the summer of 1978. (I’ve written a longer piece about that trip here.) But the scenes call up some ghosts for me.
Despite its near-destruction in the Second World War, it was still a beautiful, ancient place back then, a city poised on a bluff overlooking the Dnieper River. Kiev’s oldest neighborhoods still contained numerous wooden houses, like something out of Tolstoy’s time. Under the Soviets, there was no public advertising of any kind, aside from the occasional billboard put up by the regime. (Premier Brezhnev’s anti-smoking campaign of the time featured quotes from Chekhov, Tolstoy and the premier himself.) Relatively few cars were evident on the streets.
Our little tour group scattered out, some of us choosing to walk through the historic Podil neighborhood, winding cobblestone streets, crumbling pastel facades, and old trams. We watched babushkas sweeping the streets with straw brooms and we stopped to translate a sign in Russian and Hebrew affixed to the front of an old synagogue. A multi-lingual fellow traveler translated for me: “Museum of Religion”. We found a caretaker inside who explained there really was no longer a congregation here: it was more like a memorial site. I remember coming upon a wedding just ending at a large Orthodox, the priest changing, choir singing, old ladies outside selling candles and shiny new icons.
Ukrainians approached us frequently, conspicuously American as we were, with all sorts of pretexts, including sheer friendliness. (This was back in the time when a pair of blue jeans was a kind of unofficial currency.)
One man stopped us, eager to explain to us English-speakers his theory of Shakespeare. Another anxious-looking fellow wanted an introduction to TV journalist Martin Agronsky for some reason. At another moment, we were accosted by a little group of Gypsies in hippie attire eager to invite to a clandestine private flea market.
It is difficult for an American to comprehend the waves of suffering which have rolled over these people for so many decades. Between Stalin’s terror-famine (the Holodomor) and purges, followed by Hitler’s invasion and atrocities such as Babi Yar, this nation’s last 21 years of independence looks to be another brief respite before darkness closes over everything once more.
One thing we’ll not hear on the news is the story of this country’s post-Cold War insistence on treating the former U.S.S.R. as a vanquished enemy. Reminiscent of the Versailles Treaty’s impact on Germany in the 1920, the fall of the Berlin Wall was held up as a triumphalist vindication of U.S. policies rather than as an opportunity to help Russia take a path of social democracy. (Neoliberal shock treatment was just the thing, we were quite sure.)
In the aftermath of that enormous error, there has been a reaction. The French word here is revanche, i.e., revenge, and revanchisme is the term for Putin’s program to make Russia great again.
There are some nations which must long for nothing more than to simply get out of the path of history’s endless catastrophes for a time. Like its neighbor Poland, Ukraine is surely one of these. Resembling a terrible scene from those grainy black-and-white newsreels from the 1940s, we are once again about to witness the death of a great city, caught between the historic mistakes of one great power and the imperialism of another. In Europe, the recurring nightmares of the 20th century were supposed to be over.
