Each year on May 1, a few curious onlookers witness to an unusual spectacle as a handful of marchers - predominantly medal-bedecked veterans of the Great Patriotic War and other retirees - try to relive the not-so-distant past with a May Day parade.
During the Soviet era, May Day was the international revolutionary holiday; an expression of solidarity for the working people in the world. Across the Soviet Union, a quarter of the country's 270 million citizens took to the streets, forming voluntary-compulsory columns that stretched from Sakhalin Island to the Baltics. All segments of society were included: fresh-faced children in red Pioneers kerchiefs, factory workers, miners, soldiers and retirees each had a place in the procession that marched down countless main streets for review by cheering neighbors and approving party bosses. The holiday was a feast of positive emotions and triumphant collectivism.
Since the end of the Soviet period in 1991, the parades that marked traditional Communist holidays faded. No longer mandatory exercises, they have become important to only a relative handful of the aged, the remnants of the Communist Party and a few nostalgic hard-liners. As they march, the people of a new, independent Ukraine watch with pragmatic indifference and occasional hostility.
If anything about the current May Day parades surprise casual onlookers, it is the participation of a smattering of youths and working-age people. In the new Ukraine, where teens are addicted to mobile phones and young entrepreneurs crave Western affluence, in a capital crowded with autos made by BMW and Mercedes, what draws young people to Communism?
Most of today's university students, born in the mid-1980s, remember nothing of May Day, much less the privation of deficit. Families talk about the past, but few discuss life in the Soviet Union. Technical school student Sergey Davydenko, said that he remembers seeing nothing about May Day in his textbooks except a reference in connection with the 1986 Chernobyl accident. That year, marchers in Kyiv were exposed to radiation after officials failed to acknowledge the danger.
And that suits many young Ukrainians, who like Tanya Naraevska say they are "absolutely apolitical," and more concerned with finding jobs and enjoying life than in revolutionary politics.
But some continue to defend the holiday.
Sergey Mnatsakanov, secretary of Kyiv's local Communist Party committee, says that the current government has engaged in the "merciless revision" of historical facts and portrays the Soviet Union only with a negative bias. In the process, he days, Ukraine is denying its young the opportunity to learn about and engage in some of the "nice customs," including May Day parades, that were practiced during the Soviet era.
"Ukraine's left-wing parties defended May Day, and wanted it to be celebrated as a state holiday," Mnatsakanov said. "But it is ignored by government officials and by most of the massmedia."
Mnatsakanov said that communists are insulted by the "unbridled anti-Communist campaign" led by the government and right-wing parties.
The party that once held a monopoly on ideology is struggling with life in a multi-party state. After independence, the party was abolished. When it was allowed to re-form, only 140,000 rejoined the party that had once boasted three million.
One party member, 42-year-old radio-physicist Vyacheslav Nevolin, said that the party is growing, and he attributes its ability to attract new members on the decline in the living standards of many Ukrainians.
And there are new adherents.
Dmitry Doubenko, 25, is one such recruit, having joined the party earlier this year. After finishing his military service, Doubenko, once indifferent to politics, said that he was unable to find work. Communists, rather than the government, sent him to school to become an electrician, and now he has a job fixing energy equipment.
Nevolin's path to the party took a while. He said that he had avoided joining the party during the 1980s when it still was powerful, claiming that he disapproved of the contradiction between the communists' theory and their actual social practice. He joined in 1996, when, he said, he "had not seen any other force capable of establishing real democracy in Ukraine."
He said that he believes that the Communist Party will rise to prominence again, but that will require a massive propaganda effort, which in turn requires money. And money for the cause, he says, is in short supply. The party collects dues of up to one percent of a member's wages or pension.
During the Soviet era, the communist youth union, or Komsomol, was where the party bred eventual members.
The organization is active today, said Sergey Kirichouk, 22, a member of Ukraine's Communist party and first secretary of the Kyiv's Komsomol organization.
Obtaining exact membership figures from the party is impossible. "Hundreds" and "Several thousand" are as close to precise as leaders want to get. Kirichouk said that there are "several hundred" Komsomol members aged between 16 and 22 in Kyiv.
Political parties are constitutionally prohibited from organizing units in schools and workplaces, so Komsomol members gather in their members' apartments, Kirichouk said. Young people are attracted by the opportunity to work for the protection of civil and social rights.
"Our weapons are glasnost and persistence in the achievement of our aims," said Kirichouk, who added that young people crave social justice.
Valentina Toush said that she was "in search of justice" when she joined Komsomol as a student. After graduating from pedagogical college, she became a member of the party. She remains involved with the youth organization, editing
The Red Carnation, a nwspaper that Komsomol activists distribute to members and other youths they meet. The Red Carnation generally writes about famous communists and Komsomol leaders of the Soviet epoch who are now almost forgotten, she said.
"Some people take the paper, others push your hand away," Toush aid.
To most of the world, the Communist Party of Ukraine has fallen on hard times. The organization used to operate out of the impressive building on Mikhaylovskaya square that is now home to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Today, its Kyiv committee works from a few rooms in an ordinary office building, where its members view the party's misfortune as only a temporary setback, and prepare red bunting for another May march through the streets of Kyiv.
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