In Ukraine, as well as in Russia, poverty fuels nostalgic sentiments. However, there are a few essential differences.
More than half of Russian citizens say their memories of the past are in harmony with the country's policy and religion. Russia revived the Soviet Union's anthem. The Orthodox Church canonized the last Russian tsar. The government solemnly reburies anti-Bolshevik generals. There is even a television channel, Nostalgia, to heal Russian souls with a balm made from Soviet cinematographic myths.
Thus good memories help restore Russia's bygone glory and fame.
No one, however, seems to care about and imbibe memories in Ukraine. Spontaneous and politically motivated attempts to restore our history deepen differences and create many obstacles and barricades, either national or religious, or both.
Hostility blinds and deforms our nostalgia: we accuse ourselves of poverty, being often ready to put Ukraine's independence as a sacrifice on the altar of the late Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
God forgive our sins…
I come to Khreshchatyk Street on November 7 to remember the October Revolution, on May 1 to celebrate Labor Day and on May 9 to commemorate our victory in the Great Patriotic War. I come there because I feel obliged, not out of curiosity. The generation that created these ritual dates will soon pass into oblivion.
Fifteen years ago, the rhythmic noise of military boots faded away on Independence Square. The roar of trucks dragging missiles is no longer heard downtown. Those who built bridges and houses in Kyiv and fed and watered the republican capital used to march before party leaders, saluting them with hoorays. There are no marchers today…
However, on such days, especially on May 9, one can witness an atheistic ritual honoring our past. Mocked by a crowd of clamorous egoists with hotdogs and Coca-Cola, its participants with walking sticks and crutches, their war medals and orders chiming, seem to pay no attention to the young abusers.
These war veterans are the core of the Communist electorate. Party leaders deliver never-changing speeches, accusing oligarchs and democrats of embezzlement and Ukrainian nationalists of betrayal.
Getting ready for the Khreshchatyk march, they wear dentures and do physical exercises, not wishing to return home early. In the middle of the day, they eat traditional porridge and drink vodka. The meal prompts them to find a bench in a park to speak about their glorious past and dreadful future. Both men and women sit in groups and converse about politics.
Here are a few phrases I have overheard in the last couple of years:
"I used to command a tank division. If I had a tank and twenty projectiles now, I would find my enemies…"
"You are wrong! Stalin had one pair of boots, one suit and a plain bed. Lenin fainted from hunger during meetings with his comrades…"
"The Soviet Union collapsed because of shame…"
"Do not touch the Soviet Union. I could study then. The Soviet government provided me with a dormitory room and a job after graduation."
"I lived my life like a workhorse. My kidneys grew into my guts…"
"Ukrainian leaders must repent. They spend what they steal from the people to erect monuments to Petlyura…"
"I still remember practically all the sanatoriums in the country…"
"For fifty years, I have seen in my dreams the red light of the train that took my parents away to Siberia, where they died."
"You cannot disagree that people were kinder back then.
Yes, that's true. But you also cannot but agree that it was necessary to execute as many people as in 1937 to restore order in this country."
"God's children, let God forgive our sins. Let us forgive each other for our malicious gossips. Never!"
The false history
There are quiet places in Khreshchatyk and adjacent streets, where you feel as if in a museum. They are full of souvenir stalls.
A street vendor is demanding that teenagers eat their ice cream before touching any of his things. Judging from what they are saying, these teens must have come to Kyiv with their teacher from some coal-mining town in Donbas. The provincial schoolchildren are touching orders and medals missing their owners. Their enamel discolored, the war memorabilia are on sale. Elite orders depicting Lenin or famous commanders and admirals are kept in collections belonging to speculators.
The Donbas teacher seems to approve of his pupils' curiosity and is speaking of the grandeur of the Soviet regalia.
There is paper money of tsarist Russia and the Civil War hryvnia banknotes among the souvenirs. One of the guys took a banknote and read loudly, "The Ukrainian People's Republic. Ten Hryvnias." The teacher recommended putting "this rubbish" away.
But the boy is eager to make his first contribution to science and thus becomes a kamikaze for the sake of his discovery. Seemingly ready to get the lowest mark in history, he is persistently demonstrating his logic. The boy said the banknote featured a trident and bore a date, 1918. He asked the teacher why he had told them that the trident (Tryzub) was Bandera's invention to torture his foes.
Although Stepan Bandera was still a boy in 1913, the history teacher loves reiterating that a history book must be as accurate as history itself.
Nightingales and the war
Musical associations must be the most powerful mediators of nostalgia.
An eighty-year-old war veteran changes his posture when a song reminds him he is a twenty-year-old lieutenant who has been given a day off and is dancing with a beautiful stranger. She is stroking the shoulders of the courageous warrior tenderly…
Supported by walking sticks, a few veterans are standing around a young guy wearing a T-shirt with a War Songs label. He is holding a cassette in his hand. His products, songs exalting Soviet soldiers, advertise themselves in a tape recorder.
I remember every single line of these songs. I heard them every day and many times when I was much younger.
Stalin loved war songs. He had his own portable gramophone to listen to newly released records. Stalin was an experienced manager and so banned tragic songs about the most tragic of wars. Ukrainian composers must have been afraid of composing a tragic song about the war, even though our losses were enormous.
Russian poets and composers created masterpieces that made their names immortal. Their beautiful tunes compensated glossy, censored texts.
…In those songs, the Red Army soldiers storm Kursk, Warsaw and Budapest; drivers are not afraid of bombings; Don Cossacks whistle merrily when marching through Berlin. An author of one of the popular war songs asks nightingales not to wake up dreadfully fatigued soldiers, who have a new battle tomorrow…
Another guy, a brunette with a Ukrainian moustache, offers songs performed by the Sich riflemen of the Ukrainian Rebel Army. These songs tell a story of a group of brave young men who have no hope to survive. The texts are full of graves and deaths. I wonder how Stalin would have reacted if he had heard any of such songs.
I first heard them in 1990, when I was sixty years old. Wishing to become a Ukrainian patriot, I listen to them but appreciate only their musicality, for they produce no memories and revive no associations. There must be many people like me. The street vendor selling the riflemen's songs has very few buyers near his stall.
The office of bankrupt businessmen
Young men living in my yard do not go to Khreshchatyk to mark military holidays but sometimes remember the May victory at our table.
The table in my yard is legendary. Fathers' of today's forty-year-olds made it. They stole wooden planks at their socialist factories to produce this remarkably strong piece of furniture.
Men of the 1970s and 1980s dreamed of retirement to get high pensions and play dominoes. They play this game as passionately as card gamblers but decorously, as if playing chess.
Workers of a machine-building factory inhabited our house twenty-five years ago. At the beginning of the 1990s, young businessmen with the appetite of piranhas and the grip of criminals gained control over their factory.
Older workers retired to become beggars. Others were made to face merciless economic reforms.
A few changes have occurred in the past several years at our slightly shabby table. Dreaming to earn at least U.S. $300 a month, sons of my old neighbors crowd around the table, leaving little space to their parents. The more illusionary their chances to find a decent job grow, the more the newcomers want to play dominos with their fathers.
They exchange bitter news, hitting the table with domino blocks fiercely. We call these young jobless men with muscular arms the office of bankrupt businessmen.
…A window opens and robust breasts clad in lace appeared in the frame. The woman on the fifth floor noisily demanded that her husband stand up and go to search for a job. He threatened her with a fist… A former turner of a shipbuilding factory is sitting next to him, enumerating his sorrows. Before his factory was closed, he had been producing souvenirs. He then opened a tiny shop to sell household things but was driven to bankruptcy by tax officers. He is now waiting for an official invitation from Norway, where he will have a slippery and wet job - he will process fish.
Wearing a striped navy vest, a really tough Russian man from Moscow is a guest at our table. Train tickets are so expensive today that it is his first visit to Kyiv in the past decade. His sixty-year-old elder brother has been living in Kyiv for years. He worked as a clerk at a machine-building factory. He had a desk and a job with unclear duties but was paid a salary and regularly went to trade union sanatoriums for free. He was selling tire-covers after he had retired but was beaten by strangers one day and forced to give up this profitable business.
The guest from Moscow accepted our no-drinking-when-playing-dominoes rule with understanding. We introduced it after the bankrupt businessmen had a fight during one of the games. The guy, however, left the table a couple of times to go upstairs to his brother's apartment.
Half an hour later, his Russian speech interrupted our awkward Ukrainian-Russian dialect. Four hours later, his accent, fuelled with alcohol, he monopolized our conversation. He said he was
a member of several parties: United Fatherland with No Visas, the Rus Slavic Movement and the Union of Orthodox Christians. Suddenly he said sternly that Ukrainians had offended members of these movements: the rich and generous Russia has been feeding and watering them for three hundred years but Ukraine abandoned its generous feeder.
Their cheekbones pulsing angrily, the bankrupt businessmen said with caustic irony the guest had demonstrated how he fed and watered his neighbors by diving into his brother's fridge secretly. They asked him not to show off and behave modestly.
The angered Kyiv men chipped in to buy vodka and sandwiches. A beggar appeared as soon as they opened the bottle. He was holding a small bust of Lenin. He obviously lied when he said it was his family relic. He must have found it in a garbage container and wanted to sell it to get money for vodka.
The businessmen gave him some money but refused to buy the bust.
A duel of monuments
In Ukraine, destroyers of myths often attack Soviet monuments, whereas the number of Russians renewing their heroic past grows. Our destroyers act primitively and sometimes even scandalously. The Russians rely on cranes but also on the resolution and iron will of their society.
…A priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church rented a car with a crane to dismantle Lenin's monument, which he then dragged to his local administration. The priest later explained that the monument had been erected on an old military cemetery.
Now strangers are threatening to tear his cassock and spit into his face publicly. They have also preventively vandalized a monument to the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko with blue and yellow paints…
In Russia, the problem is being resolved in a civilized manner. Scientific conferences on how to restore monuments are held frequently. One of them resulted in a decision to build a museum of Stalin in Volgograd.
Businessmen support the scientists. The country's biggest travel companies are enthusiastic about "the project of the century:" the government is going to rebuild Stalin's Pantheon in Krasnoyarsk, near which the Soviet dictator lived in exile. The tourism ministry plans to spend millions of dollars of the fellow citizens' money on the project.
The Pantheon was built in the 1940s.
In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev ordered to throw the monument into the River Enisey.
The magazine Tourism in Russia claims that the project has no political implications and cites the growing popularity of extreme adventures and awakened interest in the Soviet era as main reasons to renew the site.
These nostalgic waves are engulfing Russia. Patriotic education of the Soviet kind will contribute to good memories of today's youngsters.
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