I woke this morning to pictures of Russian tanks in the northern suburbs of Kiev, and vast orange explosions blooming overhead. I was shocked, but not hugely surprised. I used to live in Kyiv as Ukrainians call it, 30 years ago, in 1992-3, covering Ukraine’s break for independence, as a journalist. Now the dream of this country of some 44 million is being mortared and rocketed into ashes as the heirs to the Red Army roll through Ukraine’s lush, monotonous wheat fields. As I write, the tanks haven’t yet reached my old home, on Karl Marx Street, ulitsa Karla Marx - where I lived in a white, blue and gold wedding cake above the brand new Lancome shop - but they will, unless a miracle of Ukrainian defiance intervenes. Karl Marx Street is just round the corner from the Ukrainian parliament, presumably one of Putin’s main goals; back then our flat was very handy – considering I’m a journalist - for covering demonstrations.
Ukraine in 1992 was a place of hope, of Joint Venture Capitalism, budding MBA’s and Only Fools and Horses. Yes, there was galloping inflation and poverty, cracked cement, little loo paper, and a country-wide bewildering shortage of matches. But freedom and confused dreams of market economics coursed through the young – even the middle-aged - as they chatted in brand new cafes over endless cigarettes; the private shops springing up, selling random western goods, the men driving battered Ladas who you’d hail down and pay $5 to drive you to a party, where you’d meet more people smoking and talking freedom, travel and business plans. For us westerners, the country was fascinating and absurdly cheap. We lived on salami and caviar, almost the most inexpensive form of protein, bought from the imperial souk of Ukraine’s Bessarabsky Market. We travelled from Chechenya to Samarkand, Moscow to Tiblisi, chronicling the collapse of the former USSR, on Aeroflot tickets that cost a few pounds at the most, even if the flights often didn’t exist.
But I learnt during my time in Ukraine and Russia two completely incompatible things – back then, even the nicest, most civilised Russians often thought Ukrainians were just Russians with funny accents.
“But Ukraine IS Russia! The heart of Russian civilisation began in Kievan Rus,” bewildered Russians would say, as though mourning an amputated limb, as well as their recently dismantled empire. And it was technically true – Kievan Rus saw the start of Slavic civilisation - but it was only part of Kiev’s history, and, being 9 th century, a very long time ago. A senior Russian UN official in Bosnia – with a face like Steven Berkoff, and a KGB reputation, who I got to know when I moved to Sarajevo the following year - used to say when he was drunk: “one day Russia, Ukraine and Serbia will all be one country stretching to the Mediterranean!” Flat and fertile, Ukraine was certainly the breadbasket of the Russian and Soviet Empire, and sorely missed.
Most Ukrainians, on the other hand – and 77.8% of the population identify as ethnic
Ukrainians - truly thought they were a different nationality. Even though many of the people I knew in Kiev in 1992 spoke Russian at home, there was a concerted national effort to work in and speak Ukrainian, which is indeed a different language to Russian, although quite similar. Far from feeling like poor Russian relations, many, on the contrary, HATED Russia – they associated Russia with Romanov and Communist tyranny; in particular, the Holodomor – the Hunger - of 1932-33, an entirely artificial famine, caused by Stalin sending officials to confiscate food from wealthy Ukrainian farmers, in which over 3.5 million people died. The famine was recognised in 2005 as a genocide, designed by Stalin to stamp out Ukrainian resistance to collectivisation. As for western Ukraine, it had never been Russian anyway -
until Stalin grabbed it in 1939 – but part, at various times, of Poland and Austro-Hungary, both of which empires encouraged minorities to speak their own languages, have their own national identities.
For the older generation, the pensioners, the New Ukraine was often cruel – they had their own country, but free-market economics and inflation blasted away the communist-
promised security, the state-sponsored jobs for life and pensions. Outside our front door, by the Lancome shop, bemused groups of tweed-bundled baboushkas would peer at the vast face of Isabella Rossellini, like worshippers faced with an alien goddess. And in the underground stations, where now Ukrainians shelter from Russian rockets, groups of similarly-aged ladies, elegant with the gilt buttons and handbags of former Soviet chic, would beg. I’d give them $10, and I wouldn’t see them for weeks: $10 was enough to keep a professor’s frugal widow for a month, so Ukraine was an easy country to be generous in.
But for the young, who could grab it, the New Ukraine promised freedom, national identity, BMW’s and Armani suits. I once went with a friend who worked for the World Bank – who was finding Ukrainians’ confusion about capitalism increasingly depressing - to change money in a blizzard. We walked down Kreschatik, the main boulevard, where the black- market money changers waited – and up which Putin’s tanks will surely be rolling soon – to find, instead of the usual gang, only one leather-jacketed youth, chain-smoking against the cold. When we squawked in outrage at his absurdly high rate, he waved his cigarette around the empty, snow-blown street: “See anybody else?” My World Bank friend let out a whoop.“YEAAAS! They’ve got it! That’s capitalism!” We paid up and left.
I headed from Kiev to Bosnia in the spring of 1993. But when I returned, after a decade, there were enough German cars and smart office buildings to look as though a lot of those dreams were coming true. And two revolutions later, it seemed to be the case. Ukraine is – or possibly was – a functioning democracy. Its President, Volodmyr Zelensky, may be a former comic actor, but the Ukrainians voted him in, and could have voted him out, if they’d wanted to. And so far, Zelensky’s put up a pretty good show of standing up to Putin.
All this sets up today’s bloody impasse, as Zelensky promises to fight to the end, ordering his civilians to make Molotov cocktails, banning men between 18-60 from leaving the country, while Russian tanks bowl up the road from Crimea - where 30 years ago, I was smuggled under a blanket in a taxi to report on the partition of the former Soviet Black Sea Fleet. It looks like Ukraine is a country both sides maybe prepared to die for. Unless Putin, like the baboushkas and the ladies in the underground, is living in the past and the younger generation of Russians don’t agree. But that’s up to them.
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