From 2010: Keith Gessen reports on the period after an earlier Ukrainian drive for independence.
In 2007, Yushchenko announced the creation of a “National Book of Memory.” Thousands of volunteers—schoolteachers, activists, local historians—would cover the country and interview people about what had happened in the early nineteen-thirties, and gather names of the victims. “It could have been a great project,” Kasianov said. “But instead it was done in a totally Soviet way.
Yushchenko’s support of the ultranationalists was polarizing. As the argument heated up, Yushchenko’s father, a Red Army P.O.W. who had been interned at several of the German labor camps, including Auschwitz, got dragged into it. He was accused by people in Moscow and their fellow-travellers in eastern Ukraine of being a camp guard at Auschwitz, rather than a prisoner.
But Lviv was so pretty that I forgot the Bandera monument as soon as I passed it, on the way into town. Lviv is a magically preserved example of Austro-Hungarian Baroque, a smaller Prague. It’s astonishing that such a city should have ended up in the Soviet Union, and, as you walk around it on a quiet Sunday morning while many of its residents are still in church, you can forgive them most anything.“Yes,” he agreed. “But unfortunately there is no Ukrainian architecture here.
So it was all just a show, like Tymoshenko’s braid: performative ethnicity, as the scholars call it. But there were a lot more people in the bunker than had been in the Golden Rose, and after a while a large group of young men started singing old Ukrainian nationalist songs. Two young men at the table next to mine left their dates so they could join in. They knew all the words.
The next day, three days after his hopes for reëlection were dashed, Yushchenko finally appeared and delivered a short but remarkable speech. It contained all the hope, pathos, and delusion that had marked his Presidency. He stressed that the elections had been exceptionally fair and equal and democratic, that they “set an example for the entire post-Soviet space.” The Orange Revolution had triumphed, he said, by giving people the right to choose their President.
In a televised interview, Yanukovych referred to Anton Chekhov, who spent many productive years in the Crimean city of Yalta, as a Ukrainian and Russian poet. The Ukrainian press started laughing and couldn’t stop. For days, they competed in digging up the most sophistic Yanukovych supporters to claim that Chekhov was indeed Ukrainian, and a poet. “His stories are poetry in prose,” one said.
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