Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  The organizers invited us to sit at tables draped with white cloths. Several bottles of red wine stood on each. I had not seen wine since an ill-fated video evening. A dozen of those hard-to-come-by bottles had lined my host’s hallway that night. We entered the living room. I saw my first video player since arriving in Ukraine and looked forward to a romantic comedy. Although there was scope for error with my patchy Russian, I am certain my host, whom I already suspected worked for the KGB, had not said that we would watch a Swedish porn star perform X-rated acts with a champagne bottle. When he lunged at two of us and held us in a grope and grip that could not be broken, I had visions of blackmail. Headlines flashed through my mind: Alcoholic, porn-addicted journalist evicted from Ukraine after ménage à trois. I fought off these memories and focused instead on the local mayor, who now gave a speech.

  He explained that his town had been slated for evacuation but that funds had run short, so he and all the residents still lived here. He did not appear to be concerned about radiation, though he ended his speech by telling us that he had chosen to serve red wine instead of vodka because it provided a good antidote to radiation. He urged us to drink as much as we could.

  I left before the end of the meal to take a short walk. One block from the building, I met a group of local women.

  “A foreigner,” one of them shouted.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Your shoes!” They wore plastic sandals. I had leather loafers. They clustered round me and seemed to speak all at once. I heard:

  “They promised to evacuate us. They lied.”

  “My son doesn’t understand radiation. I beg him not to climb trees. I say, ‘Ivan, you must never eat apples from those trees.’ He always promises but he’s mischievous. I find out from others that he and his friends have been in the orchards, eating their fill.”

  Another woman said, “My mother is the worst. She tells the children, ‘I lived through the Second World War. What is this radiation? Where is it? I don’t see any. It can’t kill you like a bullet or a bomb. Don’t listen to your mother, there’s no need to worry.’”

  I stood there and listened, upset by what I heard. I saw scientists board the bus. I waved goodbye to the women and ran to join the tour. The bus engine was already rumbling. The door slammed shut behind me. The driver took us to Slavutych, about fifty kilometres away from the Chernobyl plant. The town was newly built for Chernobyl evacuees.

  Thick forest surrounded Slavutych. The tidy wooden cottages along streets in one neighbourhood reminded me of an alpine resort. After the accident, all the Soviet republics contributed to construction in Slavutych. The Lithuanian government donated the cottages.

  I enjoyed being here. The air smelled fresh. Leaves in treetops rustled with the breeze. Dappled light patterned the roads. I thought of cottage country in Quebéc. This might be a nice place to visit for a holiday.

  We met the mayor at the town hall. Armed with statistics for Slavutych, he recited the population figure, the number of housing units, each republic’s contribution and the number of construction projects still unfinished. When we asked why so much remained to be done, the mayor said that Soviet authorities had accidentally built Slavutych on land contaminated by radioactive fallout. More than 80 percent of the construction workers fled when they learned the extent of the contamination.

  “They told us we were safe here, but now we find we’re trapped in a sack,” the mayor said. “The population is confined to the town. We can’t go out to the forest to gather mushrooms.”

  I felt the weight of this last statement. Ira had already informed me that mushroom picking, considered a sport in Ukraine, was an important part of weekend family outings. More than once I had been served up dishes of sautéed freshly picked mushrooms and listened to families reminisce about enjoyable days in the woods competing for the best mushroom find. I dreaded eating these mushrooms but always did so to be polite. My mother, a pediatrician, had been the director of a poison control centre in Ottawa. Several species of poisonous mushrooms grew in local woods. She had seen patients with mushroom poisoning from eating some of them. Two of these patients died. My mother had made me promise not to touch any mushrooms that grew wild.

  When the mayor finished his talk, we met workers from the Chernobyl plant. They described their daily routine. I was glad not to be alone as I did not know how to respond. What could one possibly say to men and women who dutifully reported to a special “sanitation chamber” near the railway station, where they changed into white cotton outfits before boarding the train bound for Chernobyl. They then transferred to a second train and changed clothes again once they entered the ultra-high-security final ten-kilometre zone surrounding the plant. When work was over, they came home to relax in a radioactive town. I wondered if we were speaking to a group of people who were unwittingly committing suicide.

  A Chernobyl host took me to the accident site. I shivered as we stood in front of the destroyed reactor encased in a cement and metal cover, a sarcophagus. I saw no traditional memorial to those who died – no crosses, commemorative plaques, statues or flowers – but this bleak sarcophagus looked like a huge tomb. Cranes and electricity pylons poked up from the landscape. A long patch of desiccated grass ran in front of the reactor. Otherwise I saw only cement, metal, wires and steel. Other reactors nearby still worked. Ghostlike figures dressed all in white scuttled between buildings at the complex. I thought of the men and women that I had met in Slavutych. We did not linger long at Chernobyl.

  Our next stop was Pripyat, a modern Soviet city built to house Chernobyl workers, a few kilometres farther down the road. We were going with a Ukrainian MP, Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi, who had worked at the plant and wanted to visit his old apartment. Although he was middle-aged, he still had the unruly hair of a rebellious student and a long moustache that curved down and made him look sad.

  “Come this way,” our Chernobyl host said, as he led us into a changing room. “You’ll need protective clothing.”

  “You don’t need to change to wear these,” he said, pointing to green army fatigues hanging on clothes pegs. The other option was white suits with matching puffy hats that looked like chef’s outfits. I chose army fatigues that I could slide over my own clothes and special rubber boots for my feet. Then we boarded a zone mini bus to travel the short distance to Pripyat. “When the bus is too contaminated it will be buried in a graveyard,” our Chernobyl host said.

  I knew what he meant. A friend who worked in TV had already shown me footage from the time of the accident. Rows and rows of heavily contaminated helicopters, ambulances, buses, cars and trucks, no longer safe to use, filled fields near Chernobyl. Some vehicles were buried but many still lay out in the open. In Kiev, it was difficult to find spare car parts, so they had to be bought on the black market. My mechanic warned me to always go through trusted contacts to avoid contaminated car parts cannibalized from vehicles in the zone.

  It only took minutes to reach the checkpoint at Pripyat. The last person that we saw was the guard who waved us in. We drove along a grid of straight streets lined with tall apartment blocks. This city should have been bustling with life, but all we heard was silence. The only noise came from birds that had reclaimed Pripyat. Not a soul came in or out of the deserted apartment blocks. We stared down empty streets. I thought I saw someone standing on a diving board at the local pool. I probably just conjured up a person to try to make this urban ghost town a more normal place. I felt like one of the last survivors on Earth after an apocalypse.

  We visited the local fairground. Grass grew as high as the bottom seats of the Ferris wheel. Our Chernobyl host warned us not to step off paved surfaces.

  “We wash these down regularly to keep them radiation free,” he said. After a brief tour of public sites, Shovkoshytnyi felt ready to face his apartment and all the memories this might trigger. He remembered Pripyat as a lively city. I considered it one huge graveyard and a warning of what might happen in the event o
f nuclear war.

  We walked to Shovkoshytnyi’s apartment. We saw dolls propped in windows in many places that we passed.

  “They told us we were only being evacuated for a few days,” Shovkoshytnyi said. “It happened so fast, we grabbed just a few things. Children left those dolls to welcome us back.” When we reached Shovkoshytnyi’s building the front door stood ajar.

  “Looters have been here,” he said. He did not want to touch the door because of radiation contamination. He kicked it with his foot so that it swung open wide. Debris littered the stairwell. Glass crunched underfoot. We climbed slowly, stepping over slippers, badminton rackets, empty picture frames and a home distilling kit.

  Shovkoshytnyi’s apartment had been spared by the looters. He took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door. We stepped into a time capsule.

  “Everything is just as we left it,” he said. A frying pan stood on the stove and a flour pot on the counter. Shovkoshytnyi’s gym equipment lay on the living room floor. We did not stay long. I could not imagine visiting my past like this. I hoped the trip brought Shovkoshytnyi closure. He sat quietly on the bus during our journey back.

  When we arrived at the plant, we took off our protective clothing and boots. Chernobyl workers measured us for radiation. “You’re clean,” one worker said after he swept me with a Geiger counter. “Take a shower when you get back and make sure you wash your hair.” We boarded our own bus. A guard dressed in khaki and open-toed sandals with socks measured radiation levels on the bus tires before waving us on. We drove onto the road and out of the zone.

  5

  UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE

  On a chilly early autumn evening in 1990 I sat on a sofa in the office that Yaroslav and I shared – a studio apartment that Yaroslav “rented” from a friend through some complicated arrangement that let two Ukrainians reach an agreement no foreigner here could. It had been an extraordinary few months. Ukrainians had elected pro-independence Rukh politicians to Parliament. Then the Communists, who dominated Parliament, supported Rukh’s declaration of Ukrainian sovereignty. I never thought this would happen so quickly. I felt excited by these political developments but discouraged about my personal circumstances. I wondered who would become independent first – Ukraine or me. I still could not rent an apartment, leave Kiev or do so many things I took for granted in my old life. Working from this office was my one taste of freedom.

  It was situated down the hill from Ira’s, in the Podil port district. Yaroslav stood in the galley kitchen, stirring a pot of vegetables (clean ones, he insisted) on the stove. He had been away on road trips, reporting from other republics. I envied him this ease of travel. I had been given permission for one visit to Budapest to pick up my car. Otherwise, however, I remained stuck in Kiev, still unable to reclaim my passport. I wished we had a Canadian or British consulate here or someone else who could help. Once in a while I thought of Ute and understood a little better now how she must have felt.

  “Want some?” Yaroslav asked as he took the pot off the stove. I nodded yes. He put plates full of ratatouille topped with stringy melted cheese on the table. Then the phone rang. Yaroslav spoke Ukrainian to the caller. When he finished, he turned to me and said “There’s going to be a student hunger strike. The students want the Communists out of power. Their demands include the dissolution of Parliament and new elections by spring. We should meet in the square tomorrow morning. They’ll set tents up then.”

  “Wow! This is amazing on top of everything else that’s happened. So the students are trying to oust the Communists. Maybe Ukraine will be the new Hungary,” I said.

  “It’s not Hungary here,” Yaroslav insisted.

  The phone rang again. Yaroslav picked up the receiver and handed it to me. My regular evening call to the foreign desk had come through on time. I pitched the student hunger strike story. Just after my call ended, another one came through. The operator connected Yaroslav to his foreign desk. He worked for a British daily now. He offered the same story as me.

  “We’re meant to be competitors, not collaborators,” I joked after he hung up.

  “The rules change when the entire foreign press corps fits in the front seats of a Lada,” Yaroslav replied. We finished eating, scrubbed melted cheese from the bottom of the ratatouille pot, washed the rest of the dishes, turned out the light and locked the office for the night. Yaroslav lived with his granny. I drove him home and then went back to Ira’s, the wide boulevards free from traffic.

  The next morning, I reached October Revolution Square early. I hovered as students equipped with hammers drove tent spikes into the paving stones. I worried that riot police would sweep in and cart the students away on charges of vandalism. The only person who actually appeared was Yaroslav, bleary-eyed, with a knapsack hanging off his shoulder. He wore a black sweatshirt as protection against the morning chill.

  “Do you think the police will intervene?” I asked Yaroslav.

  “These are students. It wouldn’t look good to beat them up,” he said. An hour passed. No police officers arrived. A few canvas tents similar to those I had seen in pictures from 1930s camping trips now stood on the square. Students placed plastic sheeting over the tops of the tents to protect them from dew, frost and rain. They camped near a huge red granite Lenin statue, which dominated the square.

  “Hi guys,” I looked up the steps that led to Lenin and saw our friend Mary, an American Ukrainian lawyer. She volunteered for Rukh.

  “I hope they’ve practised how to handle riot police,” she said. Yaroslav, Mary and I milled around as the protesters pitched more tents. By the time we left, a dozen tents stretched down the square. Over the course of the following days, the tent city swelled and support for it grew.

  I don’t know who was more surprised by the size of the protest when students marched, Mary and me, the police or Communist politicians. That morning I put on Doc Martens, anticipating standing for hours on the streets. I dressed in jeans, a sweater and a large maroon duffle coat. I had my favourite Kiev breakfast, dry cottage cheese–like tvorog, topped with smetana, a cross between crème fraîche and sour cream. I ate this snow-white mountain from a bowl. Fuelled by black tea, I strolled to the square through streets lined with elegant buildings, enjoying the walk as I always did. I remained in awe of the architecture in central Kiev. No one had described the beauty of this city to me before I arrived. It still amazed me.

  As I reached the crest of the hill leading down to Khreshchatyk, I heard a voice amplified through a megaphone. Once I topped the crest and headed down, I had a clear view of the square. It already teemed with students and more were still pouring in along adjacent streets. I joined the throng and watched as organizers took charge.

  I spoke to a group of students who said that organizers had barricaded the doors of the library where they studied. The students had gone to the library and had found that the doors were locked. There was a notice about the march on them. They went to the square. Some seemed irritated at the disruption, but most were curious enough to join. A teacher in her late twenties led the last contingent that arrived, a spirited class of twelve-year-olds. The teacher looked as if she was the oldest person in the square.

  The organizers shouted instructions through megaphones. Everyone obeyed. First the protesters formed small squads. Then they assembled in orderly lines. Student guards linked arms around the perimeter of the crowd. They walked quickly, to the beat of a drum, toward Parliament. I wondered how MPs would feel when they saw city children on the march.

  Mary stood on an embankment near Parliament, a tall, striking figure draped in a heavy, long coat. I climbed the embankment to join her.

  “I never thought this many people would turn out,” I said.

  “It’s quite a show,” Mary replied. We tried to estimate the size of the crowd (we noticed adults in it now) by counting rows as people marched by. We gave up at 80,000. Still more marchers passed.

  The protest worked. The authorities allowed the student l
eaders a lengthy appearance on TV. The prime minister resigned. The students returned to class, assured concessions on their other demands would follow. They did not. I felt tricked and was sure that the student leaders did too. Momentum dissipated. The atmosphere soon changed in Kiev. Communist leaders organized a large military parade to mark the November 7th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They banned all protests for that day.

  Yaroslav and I both had parliamentary passes that let us cross between city zones established for the parade. We arranged to meet by the Rukh building on the morning of the 7th. We would come from opposite sides of the city.

  As I neared the Rukh office, I saw a long military cordon. My pass meant nothing as my path was blocked. I wondered if Yaroslav was faced with a similar situation over on his side. I stared at huge green army trucks. They stood so close together that their wheels nearly touched. Their engines still hummed. The tailpipes spewed diesel fumes. It seemed the trucks might charge forward at any moment.

  I stood still, paralyzed by the noise and the size of the trucks. I thought of my accident in London and worried that a truck might move and crush me. I could either inch my way through the crevice to reach the other side so that I could interview trapped Rukh protestors, or I could stay put. I knew that the blockade would not deter Yaroslav. I breathed slowly to calm myself. I smelled diesel, felt vibrations from the engines and fought panic. I rubbed against two walls of black tires as I squeezed through. I reached the other side clammy. My heart raced. I knew that hard-liners had seized charge. All that optimism I had felt for Ukraine just a month ago faded away.

  Not long afterwards, the KGB harassed Yaroslav’s friend, our office landlady. They interrogated her because she rented the office to Yaroslav and me. She collapsed and ended up in hospital. I felt terrible and was not even allowed to visit her in case my presence made matters worse. In the end we managed to retain the office, but everything seemed so precarious now.