THE BEAUTIFUL CITY

On the road from Kyiv’s air­port to the heart of the city, which I vis­ited in 2016, I first saw thick snow-cov­ered for­est stretch­ing for un­count­able kilo­me­tres on both sides, then glimpses of the enor­mously wide (and 2,200 kilo­me­tre long) Dnieper river, fol­lowed by a view of the golden-domed monastery of Saint Michael. The city it­self was sur­rounded by re­cent, sleek high-rise blocks, the city cen­tre was full of el­e­gant nine­teenth-cen­tury build­ings with all the usual brands of ho­tels and shops, and some Ukrain­ian ones, at their feet. On my first night I took the metro, its sev­eral es­ca­la­tors lead­ing deep into the ground, to get to the Babi Yar ravine, now in a built-up area, in which 33,771 Jews were shot to death on 29-30 Sep­tem­ber, 1941, when the city was oc­cu­pied by Hitler’s forces. I met up the fol­low­ing evening with a Ukrain­ian friend of a Barcelo­nan one at Maidan Square’s Free­dom Mon­u­ment (in­side which some gig­gling teenagers in leather jack­ets were shel­ter­ing for a smoke) and we went to a local restau­rant where we ate local food and drank local (and de­li­cious) wine. Among other things, we talked about the far right in Ukraine, which was much in the news as some of them were then fight­ing in the Don­bas with a sin­is­ter mili­tia called the Azov Bat­tal­ion. My guide snorted, and told me they had vir­tu­ally no po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion and were so stu­pid that they held their meet­ings at the foot of the huge statue of a woman hold­ing up a torch that stands next to the war mu­seum, both statue and mu­seum being sym­bols of the Ukrain­ian fight against Nazi Ger­many. Duh. On the way back he pointed out Kyiv’s first hip­ster bar. The next day we vis­ited the Holodomor Mu­seum, which keeps alive the mem­ory of the three mil­lion plus Ukraini­ans who starved to death when Stalin or­dered his NKVD to con­fis­cate seven mil­lion tons of grain to make up for short­falls else­where in the USSR: the names of the dead are kept in dozens of leather bound books and doc­u­men­tary footage from the time (1932-33) shows peo­ple dying in the streets and armed guards stand­ing out­side the gra­naries. When my friend asked the staff if they had a DVD about this en­forced famine, I no­ticed he was speak­ing in Russ­ian, and that they were re­ply­ing in the same lan­guage. Kyiv, after all, is a fric­tion-free bilin­gual city, like many oth­ers in Ukraine (later he proudly showed me a statue of Taras Shevchenko, a major 19th-cen­tury Ukrain­ian lan­guage poet).

As I write this, Kyiv’s res­i­den­tial dis­tricts are being pounded by Russ­ian mis­siles. The mon­u­ment ded­i­cated to the Nazi atroc­i­ties at Babi Yar has been blasted to bits. The deep metro sta­tions have be­come crowded shel­ters. The Azov Bat­tal­ion, thank­fully, no longer ex­ists as such, hav­ing been re­trained, screened and vet­ted and in­cor­po­rated into the reg­u­lar Na­tional Guard, as a unit spe­cial­is­ing in re­con­nais­sance and ex­plo­sive dis­posal. (There is also an an­ar­chist bat­tal­ion, pos­si­bly fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of the 1920s an­ar­chist Nestor Makhno and his army, which once con­trolled large swathes of Ukraine). In other parts of the coun­try, the sit­u­a­tion is far worse than in Kyiv, with con­stant bom­bard­ments, thou­sands – as yet un­counted pre­cisely – of dead civil­ians, refugees being shelled and shot at as they try to walk or drive to safety, Russ­ian sol­diers throw­ing grenades and fir­ing at un­armed civil­ians as they enter the smaller towns and vil­lages. And in the west, Cat­alo­nia in­cluded, there is the usual flock of use­ful id­iots, who blame NATO or the US (how orig­i­nal) for what is the worst out­break of mil­i­tary crime in Eu­rope since World War Two, in­stead of point­ing the fin­ger at the ob­vi­ous per­pe­tra­tor, whose very in­va­sion of a peace­ful coun­try is a war crime in it­self, let alone the in­nu­mer­able ones being com­mit­ted with every day that passes (Putin, by the way, isn’t both­ered by ei­ther NATO or the US, who let him dis­mem­ber Geor­gia, Mol­davia, and bits of Ukraine with­out bat­ting an eye­lid, but is both­ered, or even men­tally dis­turbed, by a para­noid vi­sion of the loss of Russ­ian in­flu­ence in the for­mer So­viet Re­publics).

Walk­ing around Kyiv in 2016, I felt sure that this beau­ti­ful, dy­namic place would be the next to join the pan­theon of Eu­ro­pean cities which have be­come pop­u­lar and much-vis­ited after being lit­tle-known for years, like Barcelona and Prague. Maybe, when Putin is fi­nally sit­ting in the dock and the builders and re­stor­ers have done their work, Kyiv will be just that.