Information is everywhere, Insight is priceless

I was standing in Amsterdam’s slick, modern Schiphol airport, looking at my boarding pass. I had for four more hours of flight time to Kyiv; and another hour onward to Kharkov, some 12 miles west of the Russian border. I hadn’t realized until that moment exactly how far out into Europe’s booneys I was headed.

Like getting out of a pair of zip-ties, you can always see the lingering impression when arriving in a place that used to be behind the Iron Curtain. Kyiv’s Boryspil International Airport, smack in the middle of Ukraine, has made an honest attempt at slick and modern, yet it’s interior still has the terminal charm of a port authority bus stop. This is a shame because it’s next to a beautiful bit of country the Soviets never got around to wrecking. It looks like rural Kentucky and, like the Blue Grass state, it is horse country. The heads of dreaming Ukrainian boys used to be filled with images of the Cossacks riding over the steppes the way American boys used to think of cowboys until the Internet came along. Now, like their American counterparts, they stay inside playing video games until hoofing off to college to make themselves obvious.

I arrived in August amid Ukraine’s Independence Day celebrations. After three unsuccessful attempts to vote itself out of the USSR, the 1991 vote actually stuck. Largely because Mother Russia herself threw in the towel and left the union a few months later. Predictably, cracks in Ukrainian society began to appear almost immediately, or rather one massive crack right down the middle. In Kyiv, and west of the Dnieper River that cuts the country more or less in half north to south, people began to tear down Soviet-era monuments and change the names of the streets to sound less Bolshevik. The massive city center Square of the October Revolution was recast as the now famous Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square.

Americans like to discuss national identity on Independence Day, but it is an abstract discussion  involving  freedom, immigration, and apple pie as metaphor for a lost age of plenty with golden, flaky crust. In Ukraine the talk is a little less abstract. Like America, the senior class grumble and the younger indulge in performative activism. In Ukraine these earnest youngsters are called the “Independence Generation”, those who have no memory of the Soviet era. In a public square called Hostynny Dvir – Hospitable Courtyard – the youth were aping their American counterparts by “occupying” the place to keep it from being privatized and developed into a shopping mall. Unlike their American counterparts, however, these kids actually cleaned the place up as opposed to crapping in garbage bags. They declared it a Hospitable Republic. They hadn’t completely thought out the statement they were making. One protester explained that they were focused on forging a new identity “without the Soviet aftertaste.” They wanted a new, prosperous Ukraine where the government provided lots of new jobs. A better way to lose that aftertaste, I thought, would have been to quit gargling with a planned economy and build a shopping mall.

The students of the Hospitable Republic did have a point. After the independence vote, that gritty Soviet aftertaste never really went away. Almost to a man, the officials from the old government got elected to form a new one outlawed the Communist Party and confiscated all its property. The QED being that the government appropriated its own stuff in the name of change. Or rebranding. Throughout the nineties, Kyiv remained broadly pro-Russian and had the corruption to prove it. Yet the government was making a broadly sincere attempt at freedom of speech, and a brand of tidy civil protest the Soviets would have never allowed began to flourish. And with good reason.

That August, it turned out, would be the last one where chatter about Russia would be quite so abstract. Next year’s Independence Day, the talk was “Well, that was nice while it lasted.” Or words to that effect.

Confusion in the borderlands

To be fair, defining what it means to be Ukrainian has proven trickier than just glancing at a passport. The name itself is a corruption of an old Polish word meaning “borderlands.”

This is a draft chapter of Richard Murff’s upcoming book, World War Three Has Started… Dress Accordingly available in 2026 from Burnaby. The chapter runs better than 5,500 words, so it will be easier to simply download and read at your leasure.