The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  It was Tanya and Dasha’s friends who had pulled down Bila Tserkva’s Lenin statue over the winter, with a truck-mounted crane, and then cut him up with a blowtorch for souvenirs.

  Tanya said there was a difference between younger Ukrainians and “people forty to forty-five who grew up partly under Soviet Union. They think Donetsk, Luhansk, they are Russian, not really Ukrainian, let them go. Younger people, who grew up in independent Ukraine, believe” in the idea of a unified Ukraine and in its territorial integrity.

  She made an interesting demographic point: in many ways, the conflict in Ukraine is generational. Stereotypically, societies troubled by violent unrest have a large proportion of young and unemployed men (see North Africa and the Middle East). The Russian and Ukrainian populations uniquely prone to manipulation by propaganda and populist appeal are likely the middle-aged, the lost generation trapped between the malaise of late communism and the betrayed post-Soviet promises of liberalism and privatization. Without a memory of the Soviet Union, and with the positive example of their peers in Poland, those under thirty are more resistant to Putin’s pan-Slavic rhetoric.

  “People around here are speaking suzhik,” Tanya said, referring to the hybrid Russian-Ukrainian pidgin common in the bilingual central regions of the country. “It’s ugly. I didn’t even know until I went to the west for school. I had roommates from L’viv and Ivano-Frankivs’k, and I learned to speak real Ukrainian.” Her nationalism was inclusive, though: “I feel bad for the [Crimean] Tatars, because they have had such a hard history, and the last twenty years”—as a part of independent Ukraine—“have been very good for them. . . . I think Ukraine will accept them, because Ukrainians are very welcoming that way, and I think the government will help them. . . . It is harder to assimilate for the eastern [refugees]. They come and they say, ‘My house is destroyed.’ And women and children, OK, but men, you know, men from the west are going to fight . . .”

  I wondered if she, like Sasha Boole, was sympathetic to the more radical fringes of Ukrainian politics, but like most of the pragmatic reformers, she had supported Poroshenko. “Poroshenko was not the best option. But in fact there is no good option. The three politicians who were on Maidan—Tyahnybok, Klitschko, and Yatsenyuk—people saw that they were not good enough. . . . Before last year, being a politician was a good job: you pressed a button and got money. Now it means real responsibility, and people are dying, and no one wants to take responsibility.”

  Her torrent of opinion slowed. She sighed, afraid I was bored. (I wasn’t.) “This time has been very stressful. I know many people who have become actually ill, from reading the news every day. So,” she said, sitting up as if to physically change the subject, “I am hoping tonight we will just be having a good time.”

  We did. I slept at Dasha’s sparse fifth-floor walkup. It was artist’s quarters, furnished with three pallet beds and an air mattress on the painted concrete floor, no tables or chairs, a painter’s easel by the window, and bathroom fixtures emerging like parasites through the chipped and gouged bare concrete wall.

  Zhytomyr is north and west of Bila Tserkva, in the opposite direction from Kyiv, where Maria and Lesia had stayed. Unfortunately, there were no direct buses, so I first had to retrace my route to the Kyiv station, and then take another bus from Kyiv to Zhytomyr. The Kyiv station was down the hill in a parking lot below the train terminal. Bus drivers held signs listing their destinations, and some kept up a salesman’s patter: “Rivne, Rivne, ne cherepashka!” (“Rivne, no turtle”—a fast bus.) One driver—white crew cut, polo shirt, Adidas track pants, leather purse tight over his shoulder and under his armpit—polished off a bottle of Stella Artois.

  Yura met me in Zhytomyr. He was thin, heavy-browed, with a prominent Adam’s apple and a penetrating, ironic look. He had cloudy light-blue eyes and dark Italianate hair. Like so many of the young people involved in the DIY scene, he did outsourced work for a foreign company—in this case, market research for an ad agency that had been founded by Americans and sold to Indians. He had been putting on shows in Zhytomyr for about five years, mostly foreign acts. “People don’t want to see Ukrainian bands, they think they can’t be any good. Phooey, who you will play with tomorrow, they are interesting noise rock. Most other Ukrainian bands are just trying to imitate European or American bands.” Like Artem, he got a lot of Italian bands. He wasn’t sure exactly why. And Belarusians: “They are not like Ukrainians—they are serious about the ideals. Belarusian and Ukrainian punks have the same ideology, but in Belarus they are serious about it. . . . Now European bands are scared to come here. They don’t know the war is nowhere near.” As Sasha Grinevich had said, “If the shit hits the fan, the Russians are only five hours from [Kyiv], but for now . . .”

  “We can’t give Russia those regions,” Yura said. “They will just come for more regions. They will want Kyiv.7 But there won’t be a second Maidan. The same people are in government as before, and the war is good for them, because they can go on stealing” while the country is distracted by the war. The fever, he agreed, broke with the flight of Yanukovych. “Maybe every ten years we will have a revolution.”

  The party line for influential ideologists of Russian nationalism is the reestablishment of Russian imperial borders, including the Baltic states, most of Ukraine, and parts of Central Asia.

  Zhytomyr had a good punk scene, Yura said. Probably the best in Ukraine after Kyiv and Odessa. He had a band himself. “We are playing screamo.”

  What do you play?

  A slight grin. “I am screaming.”

  We joined some friends at a restaurant for pizza. I tried to shake hands around the table. The sullen girl who was lending me her guitar wouldn’t make eye contact. I moved on to her neighbor, a sly hippie.

  “I have no name,” he joked. “Do you smoke weed?”

  I don’t, I said.

  He disapproved. “It opens the window. It is . . . flowers. Alcohol is poison.”

  You have your poison, I have mine, I said. Where do you get your weed?

  “It is growing everywhere. I saw a patch of wild marijuana, twenty meters by ten meters, right in central Kyiv! I smoked ten meters from a cop, and he didn’t do anything.” He luxuriated in the memory. “How are you getting back to Kyiv?”

  I told him there was a bus—maybe tonight, since the show is early.

  He frowned again. “You should hitchhike. Hitchhiking makes you feel more alive!”

  Despite my detour through Kyiv and the early showtime, we had some time to kill; along with some of the other members of Yura’s band, we went on a walk. Zhytomyr is one of the oldest cities in Ukraine, dating to 884 in the Kievan Rus’ period, but, Yura said, it “was destroyed in the war, so now it looks like any Soviet city.” (It was also, briefly, the capital of a post–World War I independent Ukraine.) Like any self-respecting Soviet city, they had, until six months ago, “one of the biggest Lenins, bigger than Kyiv. It took them two hours to pull it down, with chains and a car.” The empty plinth was now spray-painted “Heroes!” and, like Bila Tserkva’s, held a banner with images of the Heavenly Hundred. The side of one office building was covered with a Ukrainian flag: “The biggest in the world,” Yura claimed, substituting the new superlative for the old. “It is now in the Guinness book.”

  What is Zhytomyr known for? I asked.

  A rocket scientist, he said. And socks. “You go around the country, and people say, ‘Where are you from?’ Zhytomyr. ‘Oh, Zhytomyr socks!’” And a serial killer, “a maniac who killed fifty-three people” beginning in 1989. He gained the nickname “The Beast of Ukraine,” and had died recently in the local prison. Yura had brought an Italian band over recently, and their first question was “Where’s the maniac?”

  Across from the venue was a lovely park with a huge stone commemorating the founding of the city. Tanned, half-feral drunks slumped on plaza benches. One washed his face in a sprinkler. Another swung, impassive like a metronome, in an otherwise empty playground. A group of t
attooed kids sprawled on the grass, backpacks thrown on their scattered bikes. “Those are the anarchists of Zhytomyr and Kyiv,” Yura said. “They held a lecture today on Makhno,” the Ukrainian anarchist. “They don’t do any direct action, just talking about their ideas.”

  We climbed a hill toward a weather-beaten column, a World War II memorial on the high ground overlooking a wooded canyon and a dam. Plastic beer bottles littered the overgrown stone tiles of the plaza. We opened our own and passed them around.

  “It is a joke around here,” said Yura, “any time there is a pause in the conversation, a cop is born.”

  One of the young men said the Nazis had called this river canyon “Ukrainian Switzerland.”

  He pointed. “Over there, that rock? That is the head of Chotsky.” In local legend, a Cossack named Chotsky, galloping away from his enemies, came to the edge of the cliff and dove off rather than surrender. His horse kicked the rock on the way down and formed the profile.

  “I’m having a feeling of déjà vu,” I told them. I had done virtually this same thing in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, two years before, hiking to the dam and drinking beer with my hosts.

  Yura laughed. “I think it is common,” he said, “drinking by the dam and the monument.” In the typical post-Soviet city, what else are you going to do?

  I sang my songs in a neon-lit basement bar, under the gaze of pictures of David Bowie, Lou Reed, and David Lynch and in front of a pair of disembodied plaster hands clutching an American flag. Some of the crowd knew my song “This Is Not a Pipe” and sang along, filmed by a cameraman from a local TV station. In the rest of the country, violence was spreading: the house of the mayor of L’viv was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, and the mayor of Kremenchuk, downriver from Kyiv, was shot dead. I caught the bus back to the capital, the sun still up, at the stop where the tank rested atop a stone pedestal.

  We had all day to wander sweltering central Kyiv before my last show that night. Descending Andriyivsky Uzviz, the cobblestoned souvenir-stall district, we heard a crowd chanting. A revival, perhaps, of the dormant protest? A demonstration of Ukrainian patriotism in the face of foreign incursion?

  No, it was a live taping of MasterChef, a television cooking contest. Behind barricades and a temporary stage holding a dozen or more full stove setups, an assistant producer urged a group of tired-looking chefs to shout into a camera: “MasterChef! MasterChef!”

  We reached the bottom of the hill, approaching the student district. A loose stream of international flags processed toward a statue of a man on horseback, a Cossack named Hetman Petro Sahaidachny. I asked Maria what she knew about him.

  “I guess he won some battles. Probably lost eventually, like all those guys.”

  The flags, we learned, belonged to expats—Europeans, yes, but also Indians, Sri Lankans, and Brazilians—marching “against terrorists.” The small crowd was doubled by a swarm of scruffy cameramen and thin, pretty TV reporters, pressing the marchers for quotes. Someone struck up a set of bagpipes. A table of Sunday drunks heckled them: “Slava Ukraina!”

  None of the cab drivers knew the address of that night’s venue—because, it turned out, it wasn’t a venue so much as a graffitied warren of self-storage units nestled in the hills. I trudged up the dirt road, past a napping stray dog, into the abandoned-looking alleys of locked gates. Up one alley, I found a band practicing; up another, an open fire and a makeshift plywood bar. In one unit a silver BMW sat on blocks next to a trash pile that crept toward the neighboring unit like a man-made landslide. The Kyiv punk scene was beginning to gather: tattooed young men in shorts and band shirts, canvas shoes and no socks, sat on stoops and drank beer; hip young women in nice dresses sipped wine (as usual, the women were dressed way up and the men ostentatiously down). Two shirtless older men, sarcastic and amused, washed the roof of their storage unit, lugging buckets and gas cans of water up a homemade wooden ladder; after pouring, they swept the excess water off the ledge with a straw broom. They were re-cementing the roof. Once it was clean, they started the mixer turning, poured water in its rotating mouth, and began carrying the cement up bucket by bucket, trowel by trowel, and spread it over the sheet metal and tarpaper roof while the young people milled around, drinking and smoking. A lone black dog roamed and lurked ingratiatingly. On the cliff on the other side of the valley sat the concrete hulk of an administrative building; behind a latched gate, another shirtless man in navy sweatpants scythed at weeds with the dull edge of a shovel.

  The center of the scene was a steamy and nondescript storage space with a PA at one end. A couple of people from last night’s show were already here, one with his young son, who rocked back and forth on a derelict office chair while one of the opening bands set up. Sasha bantered with the muscular soundman. “We were remembering the old days,” he told me, “when people would come two hours early to shows and get drunk. That was before the Internet age.” Now people are just off on Facebook and the Russian social network VKontakte? “It is more fun, I guess.”

  Sasha put a record on the PA—one of my old bands, World/Inferno Friendship Society, though a record from after I’d left. The soundman smoked a bowl with his girlfriend, a Louise Brooks manqué with oversize black-rimmed glasses, like a Berlin gallery intern. The owner of the space pulled up part of the floor and disappeared into a crawlspace beneath it. The venue had been open since February and had hosted just a few shows, including the “DIYstvo” festival, which had been organized like a street fair: bands in one unit, bar in the next, workshops down the street. We could have done the show at a bar, Sasha said—he had had Eugene Hutz’s downtown Gogol BARdello in mind. “But at a club, you have to deal with the manager, they want to have a say [in] who are the opening bands. . . . Here, maybe I pay a little more—to rent the space and the backline is maybe two-thirds of the budget—but at least I know them, and I know this is how they make their living, and my friends who don’t have any money can come. Most bars around here don’t want to book any show if you say it’s punk rock. If you say it is a garage show, they say, ‘Cool.’ Or post-rock. Or even post-punk, they are into it. Anything ‘post-’ is cool.”

  So you do punk in a garage, split the difference.

  “Ha, ha, yeah! When I came here on the tram, I saw an ad that you can rent out a tram car for weddings or parties. I think we should do an acoustic show there.”

  When the World/Inferno song ended, one of the older men fixing the roof next door asked Sasha, “Who is this band? Can you write down the name for me?”

  We walked to the supermarket to pick up bread, cheese, warm beer, and wine for the bands. I tried to order a mushroom salad at the deli counter, but Sasha nudged me aside. He had a muttered exchange with the woman behind the cooler and shook his head. “Don’t get these salads. These are things that are old and they can’t sell.”

  On the way back, we ran into two women from Ai Laika, one of the opening acts: Nastia, thin, dark, in a cutoff Blink-182 shirt, wearing round black sunglasses and conveying a distant air; Lera, friendlier, in sandals and a yellow fanny pack, wearing anchor earrings. They would play first, followed by Phooey, the band Yura had recommended the night before.

  “Phooey is the best Ukrainian band,” Lera agreed.

  “We are probably second-best,” her bandmate added drily.

  “Maloi is great too.”

  I played with them last time, I said.

  “They are even better now.” (“All of those guys are in like six or seven other bands,” Yura had said of Maloi. “It makes them better, I think.”)

  Odessa, the girls agree, had the best punk and hardcore scene in Ukraine. A big festival had just happened there. “Also the kids are younger. Here we have a good scene, but there are no younger bands.”

  Why?

  “Maybe they see they can’t make a living at it.”

  Back at the venue, a folding table had appeared, strewn with a few demo cassettes, zines, and a handful of vinyl for sale: Fucked Up, Government Issue, a Hot W
ater Music seven-inch. I asked Sasha what were appropriate prices for my merchandise.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let me ask around. I haven’t done a show since the currency changed.” He meant the post-crisis inflation that devalued the hryvnia from about eight to eleven against the U.S. dollar (the value would halve again by the end of the year).

  I went outside to do some people watching and greeted Constantine, whom I’d met at my last Kyiv show. He was earnest, with a hardcore crew cut. He’d been in a band on the American hardcore label React, and had recently been touring in Belarus. “I really like Minsk—it is like Kyiv but easier. I don’t like Moscow or Saint Petersburg because everyone is moving really fast and pushing.” He mimed throwing elbows.

  Ai Laika began their set—upbeat, melodic pop punk, including a cover of Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.” I asked Constantine what he thought of current Ukrainian bands. He mentioned Dakh Daughters and DakhaBrakha, a pair of female-fronted acts centered around the Dakh Theatre in Kyiv, whose Dresden Dolls–esque “freak cabaret” had made them viral video sensations. DakhaBrakha “are doing really cool things. They did a soundtrack for” Земля, a classic Ukrainian silent film. “I took my dad because he liked this film, and he said, ‘Get me all this band’s records.’”