In August of 1991, I was at a summer camp on Catalina Island off the coast of California. When the bus pulled up in front of the YMCA back in Santa Barbara after the camp was finished, my Dad was there waiting for me. We walked back to the jeep as I rambled on about the exciting week I'd had hiking, kayaking and snorkeling in a Garibaldi-saturated paradise. I asked Dad how his week had been. Just fine, he said. Just work, and planning a wedding. Oh, that and the Soviet Union dissolved while you were away.
The Soviet Union was part of all our lives as Americans during the 80's and we'd all only known a bipolar world. But being a TV tube kid of quiet middle America, I'd not known the Cold War as it was; a war fought and suffered by real people in coups, uprisings, escapes, invasions and revolutions around the world. For me, the Cold War had been waged on the movie screens of the 1980's: Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III, Spies Like Us, Red Heat and of course, Bond flick after Bond flick. The Soviet Union, according to Al Broccoli, was a dark and mournful place, like a modern day vision of Mordor. The Head of the KGB had his desk in a location reminiscent of a cave or dungeon, while the British Secret Service office was in a bright and happy Edwardian office with mahogany, green leather couches, flowers, whiskey in crystal decanters and warm cups of tea.
I was in deep shock. The collapse of the Berlin wall did not affect me, because I never grasped its significance at the time. I recall my grandma saying "I remember when they put that wall up." But that was the bulk of my memory of the end of the GDR.
What would the world be like without the USSR? Who would Hollywood put in the dark cave now? Eventually, aliens, asteroids and terrorists would fill the void, but for the time being all of us in the Western world looked eastwards in trepidation.
In my blog post in March 2008, I walked along the cliffs of Laspi in Crimea and looked down on a red roofed dacha on the spectacular aqua blue coastline of the Black Sea. There, Gorbachev and his family were held hostage, and in a failed coup the Soviet Union fell apart.
In Kyiv, the Ukrainian Parliament drafted an Act of Independence, and on August 24, 1991 the nation of Ukraine was born. Thousands joined in the Square of Independence, singing and dancing in both traditional and modern clothes. Ukraine would be a bridge between East and West, on the border between old and new, the past and the future. The blue and yellow flag, banned for a long time in the USSR, now flew proudly all over the new nation.
Ukraine's twenty year transition to a independent country with a market economy has been turbulent and difficult, and this is putting it extremely mildly. Indeed, building a new country and a national identity is not a neat process. When my Ukrainian friends and colleagues level exasperation and frustrated remarks about the current state of development or government in their country, I try to remind them that the United States twenty years after its independence, 1796, or more accurately, twenty years after the Constitution was ratified in 1807, the United States was far, far from stable. There were several periods around 1800 that it looked like the union would fail; that special interests and parlor intrigue would tear the young state to shreds. But it's easy for me and others, who have never had to experience the tumultuous birth and awkward early years of their nations to impart advice of patience and fortitude on a people who have already suffered and endured so much.
Things are changing quickly here though, and even after only two years absence I have seen enormous improvements. I often wonder if, absent an affectionate expat's detached view, Ukrainians can really grasp how fast their country is changing.
In the Square of Independence, twenty years after the sunset of the hammer and sickle, people sang and danced, protested, sang pop songs and ate ice cream. There was a breakdancing competition in front of Kreshatik metro, a place that has become the veritable Shinjuki of Kyivan youth and fashion. Several kids performed stunts on motorcycles and performed gymnastics. Vendors sold their wares in white tents and old men sipped kvac.
It might occur to somebody walking through the Maidan, that dissent is very Ukrainian. Indeed, over several years, one can see that demonstrations are a fact of life here no matter what party is in power. Perhaps this attribute of dissent is not only healthy for a young democracy, but it is also very European.
On Kreshatik this day, there were still many who weren't thinking always about politics. Young performers in traditional dress enacted traditional Ukrainian plays and dances on stilts. One of the plays was about a timeless theme of human circumstance: a young woman, her suitor, and a disapproving would-be mother in law. The play neither used nor required any words, just some accordion-drenched theme music. There watching the performance, I allowed myself to drift slowly into daydream, there emerging with some embarrassment a retrospect on Hollywood's twisted discourse on this place, and the forests of kelp and herds of blue fish off the California coast that existed between the Cold War and the hoisting of the flags of independence. Then all of sudden a vision came over me - I was sitting on a fence post watching this same ancient Cossack performance on the plains outside Zaporizhiya. Echoing off the yellow fields of golden wheat and swaying sunflowers, under crisp blue skies filled with waning summer, were the distant sounds of... ...grasshoppers sounding off like smart phone ringtones and wolves howling the name of Ruslana, the Ukrainian pop legend...
