A Curious Face

When Kyiv is stripped of its roads, buildings, bridges, and other man-made features and is seen from up high in satellite view, it is said to resemble the face of God in profile. At least that is the central argument of a somewhat wacky but surprisingly interesting 2010 book entitled Kyiv: Sviaschennyi Prostir (Kyiv: Sacred Space) by two environmentalists/landscape architects: V.V. Kolin’ko and H.K. Kurovskyi. The photograph at the start of the book is quite striking in this regard: we see very clearly the face of a handsome man faithfully outlined by the combination of the right bank of the Dnipro River where Kyiv was founded, the contours of high bluffs that face the river, the other hills of the city, and its various deep ravines and stream valleys. When we add place-names to the photograph, we see that the district called Pechersk and its ancient monastery, Pecherska Lavra, form the forehead, Stare Misto (Old City) shapes the left eye and eyebrow, while the centuriesold church of St. Sophia, still the central-most historical landmark in Kyiv, is the iris. St. Michael's Church, also a prominent architectural landmark, is between the bridge of the nose and the forehead. We also see that the nose itself is the storied river-flat neighborhood of Podil, that the highlands of Sirets form the contours of the chin, and that the contours of the ear are shaped by the uplifted topography of Sovki and the network of small ponds that are located between Sovki's hills. It's bizarre, and anyone who knows Kyiv should be awed.

On the other hand, we have to remember that stripping a satellite photograph of man-made features means manipulating that photograph so that only selected natural features are shown. Who knows what other enhancements were made in the process? Some strategic selection of orientation with respect to cardinal directions and colors for the photo at the outset, a dash of extra shading here, a deeper ravine there, and an inconvenient highland or stream course subdued or removed from some other place, and we have a human face. With more manipulation, we could perhaps present the city as a kolach (traditional Ukrainian braided ring-shaped bread) or as the face of a healthy Ukrainian sunflower.

Castle Hill

It is good to get high, so we climb Zamkova Hora (Castle Hill), a high promontory in the center of Kyiv, to reflect on a city rich with history and promise, and on the predicaments of today. The hill is also known as “Lysa Hora,” (“Bald Mountain”). From there we gain a panorama of the city and various places that we will discuss in the pages ahead, as well as have a close-up look at the hill itself and its peculiarities. An entire book can be written about this place. Indeed, the hill has inspired many: Nikolai Gogol (1819-1898) used Castle Hill as the setting for his haunting short story “The Eve of Ivana Kupala” (1830); which in turn was the inspiration for the classic symphonic poem called “Night on Bald Mountain” (1867) by Modest Mussorgsky (1839- 1881); which in turn was presented in a new arrangement in 1886 by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) as a “fantasy for the orchestra” called “Night on Bare Mountain”; which in turn was incorporated by Walt Disney (1901-1966) as a scene in his popular animation film Fantasia (1940). Nowadays, the Rimsky-Korsakov rendition of the original piece by Mussorgsky is heard widely as “Halloween music.”

The panorama is indeed a representation of Kyiv. We are on the city's Right Bank, beside the hills where the walled city of Prince Volodymyr the Great stood and where his son Yaroslav the Wise enlarged Kyiv and built additional walls of his own. Those ramparts are gone, but we can still imagine their courses along the ridges that we see across the deep ravines 100 to 200 yards (91 to 183 meters) away in the directions of Kyiv's historic core. We also see the domes of churches and high bell towers beyond, some dating from the city's early years and others the recent work of Kyiv's postsocialist “rebuilding of religion.” The distinctive green-and-gold domes of St. Andrew's Church are the closest. These various churches, however, do not rise alone and are being increasingly crowded by the high-rise office buildings and apartments of New Kyiv. Some of them, in turn, are capped with domelike shapes of their own – the “oligarch domes” of postsocialist urban-architectural fashion.

One of the main themes in this book is the anger of the Ukrainian people at the corrupt political system that they have been forced to endure since the time that their country became unexpectedly independent in 1991. The first edition of Kyiv, Ukraine was being put together as the people's anger mounted specifically against the president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, and his close cronies in government, all members of the Party of Regions. Both the president and most of his inner circle are from Donetsk oblast (province) in eastern Ukraine, a part of the country where the Russian language is more prevalent than Ukrainian and where many citizens identify fondly with Russia and/or long for the old days of the Soviet Union. When on November 21, 2013, Yanukovych announced that he was pulling back on an earlier promise to move Ukraine's future in the direction of the West and the European Union, and would instead seek to ally the country with Russia, a new wave of protests turned against him. This was the beginning of “Maidan” or “Euromaidan,” a grassroots protest movement that was centered on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the Independence Square in the center of Kyiv, the national capital. The first protesters were mostly college students, but when riot police descended on Maidan on the night of November 30 and began beating protestors and journalists, the nation's anger quickened, and soon there were thousands of people on the square, and then hundreds of thousands, as well as protests in cities across the country. As the world knows, Euromaidan reached a crescendo on February 18-20, 2014 when riot police attempted to liquidate the tent encampment in the center of Kyiv by setting it ablaze. Even worse, trained snipers fired into the crowds from behind trees on hilltops and from rooftops, killing more than 100 civilians. Those who perished are referred to as the Nebesna Sotnya, “Heaven's Hundred.” The public's anger ignited still more, and as speakers on the Maidan stage began to urge the protestors, many of whom were now armed for all to see, to rush uphill and storm the presidential office building, Yanukovych abandoned the presidency and fled the country.

The Killing of Oksana Makar

Oksana Makar lived a difficult life and, at age 18, died a horrible death. How she lived and how she died give insight to aspects of life among the poor in Ukraine, and perhaps also to special privileges enjoyed by the nonpoor. Put simply, this child of Ukrainian poverty and the social miseries that often accompany poverty had some questionable associations in her life, and in the end she was gang-raped by three young men and was then set afire and left to die. She survived for three weeks afterwards, but barely so, and then on March 29, 2012, succumbed to her horrible injuries. The next day she was buried in a wedding dress according to local tradition. The specific detail that these events took place not in Kyiv but about 480 kilometers (298 miles) away in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv is not very important for us; Oksana's story is a tragedy for all Ukraine, reflects the country as a whole, and may be a wake-up call in many respects about how to make the country better. I choose to tell this story also because it is very recent, and because Ukraine is talking about it, perhaps anxious to understand and learn.

Where to begin about Makar? Mykolaiv is a tough industrial city of about 500,000 known for shipbuilding and other heavy industry. It has not done well since the demise of the Soviet military machine that kept its factories busy and has offered its young citizens few prospects for a good life. Many of the most ambitious young people have left, either to go to Kyiv or other large Ukrainian cities, or just as often to seek work abroad. Others have fallen into poverty and some of the social problems such as alcohol and drug abuse that are often associated with economic hardship. The city's population has been declining in step with economic problems and outmigration. Oksana Makar was born into such a setting in 1993, two years after Ukraine's independence. She spent a lot of her childhood in an orphanage because her father was imprisoned for trafficking in narcotics and her mother for robbery.

A Diamond Monster

The word monster is used in both Ukrainian and Russian to refer to intrusive new buildings that are built without neighborhood welcome. They rise up from the earth and devour the city, something like the monster Godzilla emerging from Tokyo Bay to wreak havoc on Japan's capital. In Kyiv, the most aggressive monsters tend to be high-rises for rich people. They wreck history, historic cityscapes, and the natural environment, and impose themselves on existing infrastructure such as transportation or parking spaces, where they wreak havoc as well (Figure 7.1). They are built without reference to any overall city plan, in part because Kyiv does a very poor job of planning where to build, as well as without attention to zoning, in part because Kyiv zones so poorly. They simply appear wherever a developer has acquired access to a wanted site. Often, the construction is on public land: a park or playground, for instance, and proceeds simply because someone in the developer's pocket has issued papers, however dubious, that authorize construction. Thus, monsters and raiders are intimately intertwined. It's all very murky and secretive – a function of collapsed centralized decisionmaking and document issuance in the Soviet state followed by too long a period of free-for-all chaos in advance of any new order (Cybriwsky, 2012a).

A building called Diamond Hill is a case in point (Figure 7.2). It is a residential tower of 20 stories and 83 meters height that was developed by K.A.N. Development Ltd. on a prime site either on or immediately adjacent to parkland in the Pechersk District near Kyiv's center, and stands high on the same bluff as Pecherska Lavra and other prominent monuments. In our telephoto composition from across the Dnipro, Diamond Hill appears to loom over bathers at one of the city's popular beaches. The site had been parkland, but the builder had somehow managed to gain access nonetheless. There is a stone marker next to the building that reads in Ukrainian: “The Church of St. Michael stood here.

Life in Limbo

We begin with a tangled story about a wonderful museum that had the misfortune of becoming homeless. It is the Museum of the History of the City of Kyiv. I began to learn its story soon after I arrived in Kyiv for this project and ventured on a first outing. I had been there years earlier during a short visit to the city with my late father, and now I wanted to study the museum in detail as I began to immerse myself in any- and everything that I could learn about Kyiv. A handsome English-language guidebook that sells well in the city had reminded me where to go: 8 Orlyka Street in what was described as the “aristocratic Lypki” district, in a beautiful two-story baroque building from 1753-1755 that was once called the Klovskyi Palace, a residence for VIP guests to Pecherska Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, the ancient golden-domed Orthodox religious complex that is Kyiv's leading visitor attraction. For a time later, the building housed the first Kyiv Gymnasium (a school) and then the Women's Theological Seminary. It became the city's official history museum in 1981. The guidebook promised that the museum's “carefully assembled collection gives a detailed picture of the past and the present of the Ukrainian capital” and that “the museum has been recognized as a center of knowledge about Kiev.” I did not doubt these claims, but I remembered the museum as somewhat of a clutter of thousands of old objects in glass cases. As it turned out, I was going to learn a lot more about the present from the museum than about the past.

There was no museum at 8 Orlyka; the guidebook was outdated. Instead, I was confronted with the new location of the Supreme Court of Ukraine, a guarded gate, and a security guard who told me that the museum had moved, but that he did not know where. I found out the next day that Kyiv's history was even closer to home, at 2 Khreshchatyk, in “Ukrainian House,” a newer, Soviet-style building on a low hill overlooking European Square.

Place-name Gymnastics

The Soviet Union was adept at branding, and it changed the names of places under its control at will, most famously replacing certain czarist-period names with new names that honored the Bolshevik Revolution (Wanner, 1998, pp. 172-199). For example, in 1924 Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg and named at first after the name saint of Peter the Great and then after the Russian czar himself) became Leningrad after Vladimir Lenin, the revolution's main leader; in the same year Yekaterinburg, named after Catherine the Great, became Sverdlovsk to honor Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov; and in 1925 Tsaritsyn, meaning “the czar's city,” became Stalingrad, “the city of Stalin.” In the industrial district of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, a growing city founded in 1869 that was named Yuzovka (Yuzivka in Ukrainian) after John Hughes, a Welsh entrepreneur who opened coal mines and built a steel plant in the region, was renamed Trotsk after Leon Trotsky for a few months in 1923, and was then quickly renamed Staline and then Stalino. All of these cities were eventually renamed, some as early as the de-Stalinization of 1961: Stalino became Dontesk, Leningrad reverted to St. Petersburg, Sverdlovsk went back to Yekaterinburg, and Stalingrad became Volgograd. Furthermore, during the years of struggle for communist rule, young revolutionaries in their prime rebranded themselves personally: the man who was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili became Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, or simply Stalin (man of steel); while the man born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein in a small town near Kherson in the south of Ukraine eventually changed his name to Leon Trotsky. The new names, of course, are the names they took to their graves.

Instability of place-names has marked spaces within cities, too, with politically important changes being made at critical times to the toponymy of streets, urban districts, parks, squares, schools, factories, subway stations, and many other elements of the urban landscape. There are directories published for individual cities, including Kyiv, that help residents keep track of both newly approved names that they should learn and the banished names they should avoid, as well many traces in the cityscape itself of place-name transition.

“No More Heroines”

No More Heroines? (note the question mark) is the title of a very interesting book about changing conditions for women in post-Soviet Russia (Bridger, Kay, and Pinnick, 1996; also see Engel, 2004). Even though it is about Russia and not Ukraine and is now more than a decade old, it applies to a very large extent to the experience of women in Ukraine as well, and still speaks to us today. The book makes a pithy comparison between the heroic image of women in the Soviet period and the unfortunate images that have emerged since the Soviet Union ended. The discussion accords with my own observations and opens a topic here about sex and sexism in contemporary Ukraine, and in Kyiv specifically.

In the propaganda of Soviet times, women were portrayed as being strong, confident, central to the economy, and during the war against the Nazis, heroic defenders of the homeland. Whether she was Olympics gymnast Olga Korbut (actually an ethnic Belarusian) or a female cosmonaut such as Valentina Tereshova or Svetlana Savitskaya, to mention the three names that are listed as examples in No More Heroines?, the popular image was “overwhelmingly one of achievement … In production, in sport or at home with the family, the Soviet woman … was strong, progressive and capable of anything” (p. 1). We see this in Soviet propaganda posters, for example, in which she joyously called her community to join the collective farm; she was seen as a determined factory worker in a black landscape of belching smokestacks; or as in a 1931 poster by G. Shegal, she broke free of the drudgery of kitchen work and stepped into the bright light of modern Soviet urban life (“Down with kitchen slavery! Let there be new household life!”). In World War II, she sternly (and now famously via a popular poster) sushed her countrymen against gossiping (Ne boltai!), unwaveringly sent her only son to war with the charge to be a hero (But heroem!), and supported the troops by laboring in field and factory. A 1942 poster by Viktor Ivanov shows the Soviet woman driving a tractor and the inscription “A tractor in the field is worth a tank in battle.” After the war, we see her calling fellow citizens to rebuild: “We defended Leningrad.

The Residential Ring

I am not the first urbanist to write a book about a city and focus disproportionately on a small area in the historic center at the expense of a vast outer ring of urban development. The center always draws those who love cities, has more history, more variety, and more action per unit area, and disproportionately distinguishes the city from other cities. But the zones beyond the center are important, too, and we now turn to a profile of Kyiv's “residential ring” and its changes in post-Soviet time (Kravets and Sovsun, 2012; Skubytska, 2012; Tyshchenko, 2012b). I write “suburbia” in quotations because not all of the places that we will discuss here are actually beyond Kyiv's municipal limits. A great many of Kyiv's bedroom zones (spalni raiony) are well within the city.

We can think of Kyiv as essentially two residential zones: (1) a central core in which the majority of dwellings are older apartment structures such as those from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but within which many new tall, modern residential structures are being built; and (2) an expansive outer zone of newer apartment buildings, most generally taller than the older ones in the core, that is the ring of “bedroom suburbs” around the city. Another fair generalization is to say that much of the development of the outer zone began after World War II as a response to the housing shortages that were caused by wartime damage in the city and postwar rural-tourban migration. Construction was stepped up in the 1970s and 1980s in connection with the Soviet government's efforts to ease the housing crisis that was exacerbated with extra-rapid population growth and industrialization, and to improve the quality of urban housing. The majority of these buildings are in planned mikroraion developments that characterize Soviet city planning. These neighborhood units were all pretty much the same, not just across Kyiv but also within Soviet urban space more generally, as were the individual apartment structures and the individual apartments.

The most fundamental change in the housing landscape is the shift from state ownership of most housing to the private sector, and the concomitant emergence of a society that is increasingly one of home and apartment owners as opposed to tenants.

A Taste of History

Kyiv has two hearts, maybe three. The undisputed historical center of the city is the site of the old walled city of Prince Volodymyr the Great (r. 980-1015), and the site of the enlarged walled city that was put together during the long reign (1019-1054) of his son Yaroslav the Wise. This zone was the capital of ancient Rus and stood high on promontories above the Dnipro River. The main hill is today called Volodymyr's Hill (Volodymyrska Hora) and the main thoroughfare is Volodymyr's Street. There are some remains of an old gate to Yaroslav's city called Zoloti Vorota (Golden Gate) enclosed within a museum-like structure, but the main treasure from early history is the St. Sophia Cathedral complex, a UNESCO world heritage site with origins that go as far back as the first half of the 11th century. There are many newer additions to St. Sophia as well, and also centuries-old reconstructions and expansions of earlier construction, so not nearly all of this complex is the product of the princely period. It is, however, one of the two main historic sites in Kyiv and is intimately identified with the glory of Rus and historic Christianity, and with the city's early reputation as a “New Jerusalem.” The other most important historic site is the Monastery of the Caves Complex (Pecherska Lavra), also a UNESCO world heritage site. It is on slopes that rise from the river south of the first center and dates to 1051. It is the centerpiece of Kyiv's so-called third heart, the Klov Hill (Klovska Hora) and the Pechersk district. That area grew up around the nearby monastery, and then in the 19th century became known for a large fortification and munitions manufactory for the Imperial Russian army.

The second heart of Kyiv is Podil (Russian: Podol), a district of trade and commerce at the elevation of the river. It was a port and the distribution point for food that was brought into the city, and it came to be known in later centuries for its various trade fairs and for the sale of grain and grain futures, horses, and other livestock.

Looking after Lenin

During Soviet times, there was a likeness of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870- 1924), Russian revolutionary and founder of the Russian Communist Party and the USSR, in the center of virtually every city and town from the border with Poland and other East Europe satellite states in the west to the Pacific reaches of Siberia in the east. Many communities had multiple Lenins, as statues of him were also erected in front of schools, libraries, and other public buildings, and at factories, rail stations, and virtually everywhere else where there were Soviet citizens to pay homage. Vladimir Ilyich was a ubiquitous icon as well on Soviet political posters and banners, lapel medals and other awards to Soviet heroes, and on postage stamps and currency of various denominations. For a time, the leader's presence was rivaled by that of Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), but de-Stalinization after the dictator's death returned Lenin to sole position at the top of Soviet iconography until the Soviet Union itself crashed in 1991. That ushered in a time of choice for citizens of the vast territory, with the result that a great many statues of Lenin were opportunistically toppled or dismantled, often to great cheers from crowds in anticipation of better days. The first such event in Ukraine apparently took place in L’viv on September 14, 1990. After that, Lenin removals spread or were repeated almost instantly in many other areas of Ukraine and in other collapsing Soviet republics, and they have continued sporadically ever since in the post-USSR era, sometimes via dead-of-night vandalism (Wanner, 1998, pp. 172-199).

In Kyiv, we have a story of Lenins removed, Lenins that never were, and one prominent Lenin who still stands. Its history with the statues is, therefore, probably somewhat typical of the former USSR, although as a bigger urban place and strategically important because of military research and industrial production, there were probably more Lenin statues in the city than in most other Soviet cities. With respect to removal of Lenins after the end of the Soviet Union, Kyiv is probably somewhat in the middle for Ukraine. In the west of the country, Lenin statues were taken down with glee as soon as it was possible to do so, starting with the toppling of the statue in front of the Opera Theater in L’viv.

Hero City

The title of this chapter and “Hero City” are terms that are not to be taken lightly, because in history the city has faced the worst of demons and many heroes have sacrificed their lives to defend it. The time of World War II is indelibly etched most strongly in the narrative of Kyiv, as the suffering at the hands of Nazi aggressors was unprecedented, and the defenders who fought against them in the “Great Patriotic War,” as the struggle is known in the Soviet/post-Soviet sphere, are remembered forever with reverence and thanks (recall Figure 5.2). These heroes encircled the city with rings of defenses and held strong for seven weeks before the Nazis eventually took over Kyiv, were deliberately starved during German occupation, and then fought valiantly to retake the city on November 6, 1943. Hundreds of thousands of citizens gave their lives in the fight for just this one city, earning Kyiv the Soviet designation as “Hero City.” There are great monuments in Kyiv to these heroes that are much beloved, most especially the Museum of the Great Patriotic War that is capped by the dramatic 62-meter-tall stainless steel statue of Batkivshchyna Maty (Mother of the Fatherland) (Chapter 5). Other memorials are Park Slavy (Park of Glory) with its obelisk honoring the heroes of the Second World War and eternal flame to the Unknown Soldier; another tall obelisk on Prospekt Peremohy (Victory Avenue) that honors Kyiv as a Hero City; and various Soviet tanks on pedestals throughout the city and statues of generals, soldiers, and sharpshooters. Still more remembrance is via street names (e.g., Prospekt Peremohy; Prospekt Heroiv Stalingrada [Heroes of Stalingrad Avenue] in Obolon), names of subway stations (e.g., Heoriv Dnipra [Heroes of the Dnipro]), and annual holidays, parades on Khreshchatyk, and staged events in Independence Square (e.g., November 6 is the day for honoring the 1943 liberation of Kyiv). We see aging heroes on the street sometimes, men and some women, proudly wearing their medals. Their honorable service may have been in the defense of Kyiv or it may have been elsewhere in the war; regardless, other citizens offer smiles and sometimes nod or a bow of appreciation.