If you've got the endurance to handle a trip around from L'viv through south-central Ukraine and on to Donetsk, rather than making the conventional connection through Kyiv, I would suggest taking one. This is not simply, or at least not exclusively, out of a sense of malicious satisfaction from seeing others go through the same discomfort I did. (After twenty-one hours you stumble out of the train either pouring sweat or shivering with cold. Then you find out you're only in Odesa.) I also suggest making the trip because you will be able to spend your sleepless hours on the train watching the countryside itself become more Soviet.
Start in L'viv by first taking a look around. Westerners may find the winding cobblestone streets broadly similar to ones in their own convoluted cities. A Pole coming across the border to see the city, as a hearty few do, can see some more familiar Catholic churches beside the Orthodox ones, and Uniate churches beside both. The statue of Shevchenko in the heart of the city will also bring some comfort to Westerners. This is because looming over the poet is a tall, curving structural abstract which seems to represent culture or national heritage or the like. Though this amorphous culture wall might give you the strange impression that Shevchenko is perhaps surfing the river Styx, it also saves the whole piece from becoming just another representative of the "brooding guy with a beard" soviet statue motif. Now you can get on the train and start your trip.
As you begin traveling through the oblast you will see that the area is well forested. You will have to look with your mind's eye for this one, but you might look also to the west and picture the Carpathians rising up, the only real significant mountains you will 'see' on your trip. During Polish occupation in the mid 18th century outlaws like Oleksa Dovbush were able to disappear into those mountains or into the forests that now surround you. The area is not as fertile as places to come, but on a number of occasions throughout history the trees seemed to shield the area from attack by marauding invaders much as they shield against harsh winds.
Traveling on you go through Odesa. The Russian-speaking port city might be expected to look eastward. That the inhabitants don't seem to do so wholeheartedly may be a legacy of multiculturalism. Named for a city in Greece, its most famous governor was a Frenchman and for a time in the 1800's it was over half Jewish. It looks a bit more homogeneous today, so maybe the real reason is that Odesans dismiss the issue of national identity with their simultaneously indescribable and distinctive sense of humor.
By the time you hit Odesa Oblast you've left the forests behind. Cultural connections to Poland have petered out with the forests and Turkish cultural elements don't really make it out of Crimea. You are in the middle of the steppe, Ukraine's flatter-than-Kansas Great Plain. Invasion could happen quickly over this kind of terrain, and frequently did. You can look out across the endless hill-less expanse and just imagine invading forces getting into a starting crouching on the Volga and then sprinting all the way to the finish line on the forested border of what is now Vinnitsya Oblast.
But it is also some of the most fertile land in the country, which could tempt agriculturalists out of the protective forests, and could tempt the invaders to settle down. The temptation of unparalleled land is still here. Every spring the bounty hits the market and you can watch people's spirits lift as they enjoy, well, the fruits of their labor. Lenin statues are prominently placed once more, but when the spring bloom happens he seems almost as unimportant as the statues dotted around a botanical garden. That outpouring of produce goes on. Up until a couple weeks ago, this year's watermelons could still be had for the equivalent of two U.S. cents a kilo. The consolation for a farmer selling great watermelon for kopeks on the kilo is, I suppose, that things are tougher to the East.
Moving through Zaporizhzhya and into Donetsk the land quality declines but mineral richness increases. In Zaporizhzhya there is a particularly ominous sign of things to come. Khortytsya Island, a great Cossack symbol which might remind people of pre-Soviet history, is overshadowed by electrical power lines running up to the clearly-visible Dniproges Dam.
Along with mineral richness, the number of rusting factories rises relative to farmland. The landscape itself, however, remains flat, flat, flat. In Donetsk you do finally encounter some mountains that form a kind of symmetry to the Carpathians. Only these aren't natural mountains, but huge heaps of slag left over from mining activity. The mines produce coal that no one has the wherewithal to process profitably to run electrical power stations that no one has the incentive to make operate efficiently, to provide electricity to heavy industry up north in Kharkiv that struggles to produce anything with positive value-added. Established as part of an industrial boom in the late 1800's the city has little non-Soviet architecture to compete with the slag. Before that the area was sparsely populated, with most of the focus of Ukrainian history elsewhere until it became an industrial powerhouse. Even though that system may be bankrupt, the human efforts that went into it endowed the area with what significant landmarks it possesses. If not the slag itself, then those monuments of stern Soviets will remind people of fifteen years ago. Lenin stands high in Donetsk.
There is not a lot to draw Westerners, so they are rare sights. The winters are hard, the land not very bountiful, and with Russia to the North, Russia to the East, Russia to the South across the Azov it is not too difficult to understand why so many people from the area identify with their neighbors across the border. Or I might say brothers across the border, considering the large number of ethnic Russians here.
By the end of your journey you will have gone from the cultural, architectural and historical profusion in L'viv to the flat landscape of Donetsk that is only given relief by the products of Soviet effort. The search for historical identity prior to, and independent of, the USSR is critical in L'viv. It is rather a non-issue in Donetsk, which had only a few decades of it. The variety of historical experience, culture, and environment that Ukraine contains within its borders is simply huge, and has broken free of normalizing Soviet constraints. This is unlikely to threaten the existence of the nation. Donetsk residents don't long for a yoke placed on them by the government to the north, but they do sympathize, with the intimacy of family, with the plight of Russians as little as 50-100 kilometers away.
I hope the train trip was informative. Might I suggest flying back to Kyiv?
Editor Note
Dan McMinn is a freelance writer in Kyiv.
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