The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  His mother worked at the chocolate company Roshen, the centerpiece of the business empire of the new president.8 “He is not really an oligarch like Akhmetov, who made all his billions at once in the nineties. [Poroshenko] made it as a businessman over twenty years.” He also thought Poroshenko was a relatively straight dealer in a way uncommon, to say the least, at the highest levels of Ukrainian business. Most companies, he said, paid their employees a different wage in cash than on paper, a tax-avoidance scheme. Roshen, at least in his mother’s experience, paid aboveboard wages. “I voted for Poroshenko because I didn’t want a [runoff]. We didn’t have time as a country for more months and more tax money for more elections.”

  Headline shorthand often referred to Poroshenko as a “chocolate king” or “the Willy Wonka of Ukraine,” though his business portfolio was expansive: The Economist’s satellite magazine Ukrainian Week listed “assets in the food-processing industry and agriculture (confectionery, sugar refineries, large agricultural enterprises, a starch plant, milk processing plants and their suppliers), machine building (the Bohdan corporation, the Leninska Kuznia shipbuilding plant and plants manufacturing car batteries and other spare parts), telecommunications, trucking business, a small bank, an insurance company, commercial real estate, a glass factory, resort centres and mass media outlets (the 5th Channel and a number of regional TV and radio companies in L’viv and Odessa oblasts).”

  His mother had her own political awakening recently. A Russian from the Caucasus, she went to Crimea on vacation. “She saw all the houses, the architecture was Tatar, but there were no Tatars.” (Under heavy pressure, thousands of Crimean Tatars have left the peninsula to become refugees in Ukraine.) “Before that she was a Russian nationalist; then she thought, this is not right.”

  Phooey set up. They were a shaggy trio with a 1990s-revival sensibility. The singer wore thick glasses and a Sonic Youth T-shirt, and they did sound like Sonic Youth, or Dinosaur Jr., or a noisier Smashing Pumpkins. I asked Constantine about the Kyiv punk scene’s involvement in the Maidan protests.

  “I am glad the punks got involved,” he said. One Russian-language news site after another was parroting or succumbing under pressure to the Kremlin party line that the Maidan protesters and the new Ukrainian government were perpetrators of a neo-Nazi coup. “I woke up one morning, and overnight the first website I checked every day had been replaced with ‘Crimea has always been Russian territory.’”

  The Russian propaganda was confusing to some European punks and activists habituated to responding to calls for antifascist action. “Some Italian hardcore leftists wanted to do a tour of Novorossiya”—the separatist name for the southeastern regions—“because they thought it was all anarchists and communists” fomenting antifascist revolution. “Then they got there, and posted one photo on Facebook and nothing more, when they saw the crazy people that were there. . . . Many of the people I work with, their parents are in the east, and I hear them on the phone: ‘We have a checkpoint fifty meters from the house. We haven’t left the apartment in two weeks.’”

  Sure, he said, there are right-wing elements in Ukraine. “There are two different kinds of right-wing: imperialists and anti-imperialists. All Ukrainians are anti-imperialists. There are even Russian nationalists who hate Putin, because all their tax money goes to the Caucasus,” a region outside the ethnic Russian heartland. The lack of a distinction reflected a dangerously vague taxonomy both in the propaganda and the reporting surrounding the conflict, which blurred the differences on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides between legitimate fascists, Soviet imperial revanchists, ethnic purists, pan-Slavic utopianists, Trypillian neo-pagan primordialists, and simple patriots, lumping them all under the multiform adjective “nationalist.”

  “I don’t see why anyone would care,” said Vlad from Maloi. He wore a Hot Water Music T-shirt, rolled camouflage shorts, a backward baseball cap, and sockless slip-on shoes. “It’s not like the poor rising up against the rich. It’s just geopolitics.” He had other priorities and asked if I could recommend a mixing engineer. “We have a new album recorded, and I want to get someone good to mix it. I was thinking to ask the guy from the Posies.”

  What do you want it to sound like? I asked.

  “Kind of like the Posies.”

  Phooey finished their set, and I dropped my tuner and cables on the floor in front of the center mic. The singer, Nikita, approached me after packing up his guitar. He had, it seemed, an agenda and a message he wanted me to receive. “Do you need help setting up?” he asked. “Sorry, maybe that sounds condescending.”

  No, I said, my setup is pretty simple.

  “No, to play acoustic is simple,” he said. “They asked me about putting on your show last night in Zhytomyr, but you needed too many mics. I don’t know anyone with that many mics, so I declined.”

  I use one vocal mic and lines for one, two, or three instruments.

  “I think maybe there weren’t too many people?” he continued, with a kind of deadpan smirk.

  Actually, I said, there were a couple dozen. Not bad for me.

  “Uh-huh, yes, shows are not as good there these days.”

  If that night was any indication, shows actually were quite good in Kyiv these days. After the show, Nikita had some more opinions. “It was really great the way you combined humor with sadness and anger. I usually go outside. I am like an old person. I only like my own music. Maybe that sounds egotistical.”

  I had to agree, though only to myself—maybe it did.

  “So, you’re going to come have a drink?” Sasha asked after we’d cleaned up. Maria and Lesia were already in bed, so I said yes. “Then drop your accordion,” he said, “and let’s drink.”

  “This is a classic old Soviet bar,” he said after a short walk. “Just beer and dried fish.” It was a utilitarian, brightly lit room, a cross between a bodega and sports bar. It was prosaically named Podil, after the neighborhood (not that you would know from any signage). The proprietor was round and balding, with spectacles low on his nose. His shirt was unbuttoned and his chest hair was gray.

  “No vodka, and there never will be!” advertised signs Sharpied on cardboard and posted throughout. An old propaganda poster showed a handsome man rejecting a shot of vodka: “Nyet!” While it looked like the owner had furnished and decorated the bar entirely with promotional items and branded miscellany from multinational beer companies, the handful of taps all poured local brews. TV screens on every wall played soccer highlights.

  The real innovation—practically a sellout, Sasha’s friends agreed—is that the bar had started selling chips.

  “These chips, they are Soviet invention,” said one, a long-haired hesher with a flat-brimmed Chicago Bears cap. “You can set them on fire. I have the right equipment.” He demonstrated with a lighter. The paper-thin wafer indeed burned like a taper.

  Sasha’s cell phone sprang to life: Queen’s “Flash.” I raised my eyebrows at the melodramatic riff.

  He shrugged, picking up the phone. “It’s just . . . epic!”

  The hesher had a tattoo of a boom box on his right bicep. “I heard you played with Leftover Crack,” he said, referring to the infamous ska-punk band. I had, and told him a story about their singer, Stza (né Scott Sturgeon): The last time I’d seen him was at a punk festival in Blackpool, England, where he was supposed to play with his new touring band, the Star Fucking Hipsters. It was the first day of their UK tour, but the drummer hadn’t got a visa and the guitarist had a court date in the States. When I ran into Sturgeon in the hallway, I hadn’t seen him in years, but he picked up as if we’d been interrupted in the middle of a conversation.

  “Yeah, man, our driver is gonna play drums,” he said in his high-pitched rasp, like an ingratiating parrot. “Maybe you could do the lead guitar parts on your accordion? You remember those songs, right?”

  The two songs I’d recorded on piano years before and never played again? Sure . . .

  “Ah, don’t worry about it.
We just need to fill forty minutes to get our guarantee. So we’ll play, like, five songs, and make ’em all like ten minutes long. Maybe you can play one of your songs!”

  I don’t know if your fans of cop-killing crust punk are going to be interested in my neo-cabaret stylings, I told him.

  “Well, anyway, if we need to fill more time I’ll just pick a fight with the crowd.” All of these things came to pass, and they got paid in full.

  “Some people, they just have trouble in their veins,” the hesher said. “We have this friend, from Artemivsk in Donetsk Oblast—he’s living in Moscow now.” He asks one of the others to translate. “He is this thrash-metal guy,” he explained. At one show “they formed a ‘corridor of death,’ the neo-Nazis and the Russian special ops with their batons, and he called the special ops faggots. They dragged him to their van, and said, ‘Why did you say that? We will put this ammunition in your pocket, and take you down to the station.’ And he said—there is this thrash band in Russia, they are called Corrosion of Metal, they are crazy, they have ugly naked girls on stage, and will fuck them; everybody knows their fans are crazy—he said, ‘I am Corrosion of Metal fan.’ And they said, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”9

  Their thrash-metal friend, in addition to demonstrating that he was a crazy motherfucker, might have been signaling a common interest to the neo-Nazis. Corrosia Metalla, aka Corrosion of Metal, was active in the late 1980s. In a familiar story, the band’s Wikipedia entry states, “In [sic] ‘90s, [singer] Pauk (“Spider”) eventually fired all the original line-up and gradually shifted to right-wing ultranationalist lyrics. . . . The album 1.966 even featured a stylized version of a swastika on the cover and the song ‘White Power.’ During the promotional tour for Computer Hitler album, Corrosia even employed a Hitler impersonator for their live shows. Pauk indicated his interest in politics when [he] nominated himself for mayor of Moscow in 1993, and for mayor of Khimki in 2012.”

  He sensed that that the thrust of the story was perhaps deteriorating in translation. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have lots of stories, but you won’t understand.”

  A man approached our outdoor table, recited a stanza of poetry, and got a round of applause for his troubles. Another tried to sell us an electric cigarette lighter: “It’s Russian,” he offered.

  The abuse was instant and general.

  “OK, OK,” he said, backing away. “Slava Ukraina.”

  “I would have overthrown the crass fuckers too,” as I had thought while at the tsarist vacation retreat Peterhof, outside Saint Petersburg. In the wake of Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, his compound, a palatial 350-acre private park on the banks of the Dnipro north of Kyiv called Mezhyhirya, was nationalized and opened to the public. Shuttle buses labeled “Mezhyhirya: Residence of the Citizen of Russia Yanukovych” left from Maidan.

  “I don’t need to see that shit,” Sasha had said the night before, when I told him that Maria, Lesia, and I were going to visit Mezhyhirya. But I did: the shameless exploitation of a country for the benefit of a ruling cadre, it bears remembering, isn’t a relic of a picturesque history.

  The approach to the estate was through a suburb of McMansions and imported cars, and the road dead-ended in a lacquered gate. Yanukovych’s neighbors constitute the cream—if that’s not too positive a word—of the political and financial class. If their neighborhood, once an exclusive community of baronial privilege and access, had been transformed by a clutch of bike rentals and microwaved blintz, shashlik, and beer stalls, it was hard to feel sorry for them. Once they lived by the lion; now they lived by a zoo. Handmade plywood signs painted with the flag and slogans of national unity were tied to the fences around their properties. A few drunks in camouflage uniforms ate ice cream at a pop-up café, and two old vendor ladies with some ancient grudge abused each other: “Fuck your mother!” “My mother already met her truth, fuck your mother!”

  Like Peterhof, Mezhyhirya was a wide, landscaped estate (Yanukovych had the tops of the trees shaved down to improve his river view) with a castle at its height, accented by faux Grecian ruins and an oversize statue of a horse. A buffet of fountains led down to the water. If you ignored the admittedly tacky monstrosities like the fake-gold-plated toilet brushes and pirate-galleon-cum-banquet-hall, most of the estate constituted a rather nice park of the sort that the Ukrainian public, who likely would have chosen to spend the millions used to create it on other priorities, might never otherwise enjoy.

  But the anonymous protester who took a dump in the sentry box by the yacht dock expressed an efficient and eloquent rebuttal. The twenty-foot corrugated metal fences topped with electrified wire and security cameras (justifying the press references to Mezhyhirya as a “compound”) reinforced that this was a pleasure dome for the head of a mafia state fearful of his security. The separate “Putin Building” underscored the identity of the real boss of bosses.

  At the private petting zoo for exotic animals at the southern end, two baby ostriches (one month and two weeks old, respectively) roamed the sidewalk nipping at clover. A pair of reindeer languished in the dust and sun. There was an in-house dairy, a pig farm, and a greenhouse that was selling flowers, tomatoes, honey, and plants to raise money for upkeep. Hopefully it’ll just be a short-term program, said the lady who sold us a small cactus. We dubbed it the Yanu-kaktus.

  It was a sweltering summer day. We ran, yelping, through the lawn sprinklers, then took a tour of the two main residential buildings: the palatial wooden “hunting lodge” and, connected by an underground passage, the “health spa.” The latter contained a virtually unused gym and boxing ring and room after room of massage chairs and tanning booths, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, alligator-skin couches, a salt-encrusted sauna, a life-sized stuffed lion.

  Our guide was a Maidan protester from L’viv who had come to Kyiv in November. He and two others had appointed themselves in charge of maintaining the Mezhyhirya residence complex. He slept in the house, he said, but didn’t use any of the facilities. He was meticulous about turning the lights off as we left each room. The government had retained the staff, and he was trying to get the workers to say what life had been like under the old president, but they were “still too scared to talk.” He wore a traditional Hutsul vest and sandals and a red-and-black nationalist flag draped over his shoulders like a cape. “Get your damn feet off the bed!” he scolded one young man who had gotten too comfortable in the former president’s bedroom. There was a framed $100 bill on the nightstand. The closets were empty—most of the clothes had been taken by the curious Ukrainians who flooded Mezhyhirya in the days after Yanukovych’s flight. “I have a couple pairs of monogrammed underwear,” said the guide. The hardwood-covered toilets had been helpfully accessorized with the Yanukovych-face toilet paper, which was captioned “I Feel Each One.”

  It was a sense-deadening menu of excess, in which only the most egregious ironies stood out: The scale model of the castle, in a gazebo-sized cage for hamsters. The infamous gold loaf of bread. In the foyer, the white limited edition “Imagine” Series Steinway, promoted as “like the songs of John Lennon . . . the perfect harmonization of music with creativity to achieve an end result that is much greater than the sum of its parts . . . modeled after the white Steinway grand piano John Lennon presented to Yoko Ono on her birthday in 1971,” and decorated with a Lennon sketch. Speakers on the balcony blasted a Ukrainian hip-hop song about having a president who wasn’t a crook; the literary icons Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka got shout-outs in the breakdown, then a children’s choir took over for the hook.

  In the Mezhyhirya spa’s guestbook are entries anonymously labeled “Neighbor 1” and “Neighbor 2.” One of them, the caretakers suspected, was the former opposition politician and current prime minister Yatsenyuk, who lives five hundred meters away. The battle cry of the rump Maidan, and the young activists who claimed that the Maidan had achieved none of its aims, is “Lustratsiya”—lustration, or the removal of anyone associated with the old regime
from the new government. A spray-painted banner to that effect hung from a statue on the Maidan when I went to walk around the square one more time on our last day in Ukraine.

  Fight corruption, I thought, but be mindful of the American experience with the lustration of Ba’athists in Iraq: it encourages petty vengeance and creates a new class of disaffected unemployables in opposition to the new government out of a caste who, while perhaps dangerous in their banal way as agents of intransigent corruption, are just as likely to be apolitical, asscovering bureaucrats. The process of nation-building is no less messy and heterogeneous than the political life of the nations built. The idea of a politically uniform, self-sacrificing polity of parallel ideals is a communist one—the liberal-capitalist-social-democratic idea requires jostling room for the pacifist left, the militarist right, the pragmatist center, and the 99 percent who just want to get on with their lives without unnecessary hassle because everyday life is hard enough. The Ukrainians now had a politically awakened populace aware of its strength. Few, if any, nations have had two successful liberal revolutions in a decade. That distinction also contains a criticism: they’re getting good at the revolutions, but not the follow-through—you don’t need a second revolution if the first one worked. And Ukrainian history (including its statuary) is on a battle footing, full of doomed or pyrrhic characters (exemplified in the anthem’s “Ukraine is not dead yet”). Many of the Ukrainian national heroes are men on horseback with a club, or up in the hills shooting all comers: valuable icons for revolution, but perhaps unhelpful in encouraging a stable, relaxed democracy.