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

by Susan Viets

  Anxious about the fact that I still had no long-term visa or accreditation papers and that the Foreign Ministry still held my passport, I made an appointment at the Foreign Ministry press office with Mr. I. to discuss my situation. He assured me that I would receive my passport and visa soon and that he hoped accreditation would follow in the New Year.

  “I applied for my visa months ago,” I half shouted and half pleaded. “I have to get my passport back now.” Mr. I. sympathized with my predicament.

  “It’s with the police solnyshko, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. He claimed not to know which police station held my passport, but I found out. When I showed up, the police officer in charge slammed the door in my face.

  Christmas approached. I remained trapped in Kiev. Yaroslav left for New York and would not return. Student protest leaders worried that they might be arrested. Yaroslav did too. He was more vulnerable than me. I understood why he went and was relieved he could leave, though jealous that I could not.

  By the time January 1991 arrived, I felt engulfed by gloom. Ira’s mother had moved to the dacha. Ira remained in Kiev. I appreciated her company, though I occasionally worried that she might be connected to the KGB. I had long ago reasoned that even if that were true, it didn’t matter because I had nothing to hide. Besides she did all the chatting. Language constraints meant that like a family pet, I listened but couldn’t really communicate what I thought. I mostly worried, though, that I was a burden. My short-term stay had now dragged on for six months. It could not be easy to have a house guest for so long. One evening mid-month we sat in the kitchen.

  “I’m meant to be getting accreditation soon,” I told Ira.

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  “I’ll be able to find a place of my own then,” I added. She was kind enough to tell me not to worry about this. We sat for a while longer in her kitchen and drank tea. Then I went to bed. Rukh, as determined as ever to push for Ukrainian independence, was holding a demonstration the next day. I looked forward to it. Activity helped brighten my mood.

  A cold wind blew as I made my way toward the demonstration in St. Sophia’s Square. I walked quickly and soon saw that people had already gathered there. I noticed a woman who whirled her way through the crowd. So many people knew her. When we passed, she stopped to say hello. Her exuberance won me over on the spot.

  “How nice to meet you! I’m Marta,” she said and stuck out her hand. Marta had just arrived from New York and would stay for several months. She would establish a bureau for her paper. I had a new friend.

  “I was at the Foreign Ministry press office and I think we’ll get accreditation soon,” she said. “This is important for Ukraine. It’s a way to show Moscow that Ukraine has some autonomy.”

  I did not know what to think. Politics had see-sawed so dramatically throughout the fall and early winter that I could not tell where the power lay – with hard-liners who opposed any move toward independence or with a more moderate faction that seemed to include the Foreign Ministry. I had waited so long for accreditation that I did not even dare to believe that Marta could be right, but a few days later the Foreign Ministry called. Marta and I met Mr. I. and Mr. C. at the press office. Mr. C. smiled when he announced the good news. He handed me my accreditation first.

  “Number one for you,” he said. Then he handed Marta hers, “Number two for you.”

  Being number one had never meant so much to me. All those months of anxiety disappeared into the past. I stared down at my laminated card and saw “press” in Cyrillic letters written down the side. I felt free, or as close to it as I could be in Ukraine. Mr. C. congratulated Marta and me. I sensed someone had fought battles behind the scenes to reach this day but doubted I would ever know the details. We chatted a while and then left the office. Marta rushed away to finish a feature. Now that I had official status, I ambled through the neighbourhood and eyed buildings where I would like to live.

  A week later I asked Marta, “What if we put apartment wanted ads up in all the buildings that we like?” She laughed and said, “They’ll think we’re crazy capitalists.”

  “So? The worst possible outcome is that we’ll be ignored.” Marta agreed. The next morning I went to her room in the Dnipro Hotel and we drafted ads. Then we drove up to our favourite neighbourhood and posted the ads in the lobbies of the buildings we liked.

  Weeks went by with no response. Then a man left a message on my answering machine. Marta and I had already found apartments through her contacts, but I arranged to meet the man anyway. He showed me a large apartment in the centre, diagonally across from where I would live. I thought I would introduce the man to Bill, a British journalist who had visited in the fall and had recently driven back from London to work here. He was staying in a flat owned by Yaroslav’s uncle. I walked over and knocked on the door. Bill opened it and peered intently through his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “How was the trip back?” I asked. Bill held a thick book in one hand and a bar of deodorant in the other.

  “I stocked up on petrol in Poland,” he explained. “I filled tins in the back but didn’t shut the lid properly on one. Petrol sloshed all over a box of books.” I watched as he rubbed deodorant over a page of his book and then flipped it and rubbed more on the next one.

  “Best thing to counteract the smell,” Bill said. I saw boxes full of tinned food in the hallway. Bill invited me nearly every night afterwards for dinner and always let me choose a tin to open. When the food ran out, we ate porridge and persimmons, the only fruit available in the Bessarabskyi Market. Occasionally we found an Azeri pomegranate.

  I began to dream about food. I called an American friend in Moscow. I had visited hard-currency grocery stores there and remembered rows of fresh produce.

  “I’m dying for an orange,” I told him. “I’ve actually started to dream about salmon and snow peas. I wonder if that means I’m malnourished. All you can get here is pickled garlic, shredded pickled carrots and pickled tomatoes.”

  I asked my friend whether he would shop for a small group in Kiev and send the food down by train. He agreed and wise to Russian ways, bribed the female wagon attendant in one car. She kept the groceries in her cabin. Everything was there when I collected the shipment.

  I finally felt settled in Kiev. Even work went well. In Hungary I had chased news. Here, at least until now, little competition meant that I only had to sit still and news arrived. It came through visits from strangers, phone calls, envelopes stuffed full of documents surreptitiously shoved under a door, or from some opposition members during a walk in the park, where they escaped bugs (the electronic kind). Even the chairman of Parliament, Leonid Kravchuk, left his office door open. Ukrainian journalists wandered in, so I did as well, though that door soon closed. With a formal foreign press corps, the rules changed.

  Now we sat together in a press gallery that overlooked the chamber of Parliament. A white Lenin statue stood in a nook behind the high table where Mr. Kravchuk and his associates sat. That winter Marta, Bill and I followed manoeuvring between Moscow and Kiev over a referendum planned for March. The referendum, if passed, would confirm the continued existence of the Soviet Union but would decentralize some powers to the republics like Ukraine.

  By the time the vote occurred in March, western Ukraine and the Chernobyl region had added a question on Ukrainian independence to the ballot. Both those regions voted in favour of independence. The result did not constitute an immediate challenge as the majority voted in favour of the union, but it was something to note.

  Another foreign journalist arrived. She came from Oxford to do research for her PhD but set that aside to temporarily report for a British paper. This second Marta in our press corps was from Toronto. Now we had Bill, New York Marta, Toronto Marta and me. We nearly occupied a full row in the parliamentary press gallery.

  I watched, fascinated by this game of cat and mouse, as the Ukrainian Parliament pushed for more control over areas previously under Moscow’s authori
ty. Parliament in Kiev created a new position of president of the Republic and explored ways it might be able to control deployment of Ukrainian troops in the Soviet army. I wondered, along with so many others, how Moscow would respond.

  Negotiations were under way for a new Union Treaty between Moscow and the republics. It seemed that some of Ukraine’s initiatives might be endorsed. Leonid Kravchuk spoke of sovereignty for Ukraine in nearly every speech but still embraced the Union. I could never tell where his emphasis lay. He was skilled in saying two different things at once, which sometimes left me understanding nothing at all. Then, in early August 1991, President Bush arrived in Kiev.

  Summer holidays meant that few journalists remained in Kiev. New York Marta had gone home. Her replacement, Lesyia, had arrived.

  “What a disappointment!” Toronto Marta said as we sat together in the press gallery after Bush spoke. Journalists quickly dubbed this Bush’s Chicken Kiev speech. Phrases that I jotted down included “suicidal nationalism” and “the suicidal course of isolation.” Bush wanted Ukraine to stop asserting sovereignty so that Washington could maintain the status quo in relations with Moscow.

  I saw Lesyia enter the press gallery. She waved and joined us, discussed the speech, then got up to leave.

  “Are you going to Chervona Ruta?” Marta asked Lesyia.

  “When is it again?”

  “In two weeks,” Marta said. “You guys should come. All the best bands are playing.” I had not heard of Chervona Ruta, so I asked for the details.

  “It’s an alternative music festival that started two years ago in western Ukraine. This year the festival will be in Zaporozhye in southern Ukraine, a Russified region. The festival is partly cultural and partly political. The bands are great and very Ukrainian. The idea is to expose people in a Russified region to Ukrainian culture and music and to make them aware of Ukrainian identity. A lot of the musicians sing in Ukrainian, not Russian,” she explained.

  “Is this Ukraine’s Woodstock?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” said Marta. “Chervona Ruta is the name of a love song written by Volodymyr Ivasiuk in the late 1960s. His song became a hit, but he was hassled by the KGB because the song was very Ukrainian at a time when all things Ukrainian were repressed. In the early 1970s Ivasiuk died. The authorities said he committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree. Everyone thought the KGB killed him.”

  “How awful,” I said, sickened by the image. “It’s nice that organizers named the festival in his honour. I’d love to go, if you don’t mind company.”

  “Great,” Marta said.

  “I might also bring a guest. I’m not sure when he’ll arrive, but it should be some time soon.”

  “Do tell!” Marta said.

  “There’s not much to say. I only know that he’s another British journalist named Stephen. A friend of mine is meant to host him. Since I have a spare room, he asked if Stephen could stay with me until Stephen finds his own place.”

  “The more the merrier,” Marta said. Lesyia said she’d go as well.

  Marta and I shared a room in the Zaporozhye hotel. We compared notes on bands we had heard. I loved the ones that wove folk into rock. They created such a unique sound.

  “I met Andriy Sereda,” I told Marta. I said how surprised I was to bump into this famous musician, standing barefoot, in a stadium corridor. “He described this festival as the musical rebirth of Ukraine.”

  “He’s right,” Marta said.

  “He thinks that even if people don’t understand politics that they’ll intuitively realize the Union Treaty is harmful for Ukraine,” I told her.

  The treaty was due to be signed soon, but we didn’t really feel like talking about politics. It was just fun to be here listening to music. I sat on my bed. Marta brushed her long, thick hair. A crystal pendant hung from her neck. Pretty and slender, Marta was on her way out.

  “Don’t wait up for me!” she said. She laced up her Doc Martens.

  “I know, I’m a bedtime wimp,” I told her. Marta, a night owl, would party for hours more. Our body clocks did not match.

  A few minutes after she left, I went to join Stephen and Lesyia for a drink downstairs.

  As I walked down the corridor, I saw the lady who monitored our hallway (many Soviet hotels had them) planted in a chair behind her desk. Her body spilled over the frame.

  “Girl, leave your key with me,” she commanded. I pointed out that I would still be in the hotel, just downstairs, but handed the key over to appease her.

  I took the elevator down to the bar. Lesyia and Stephen sat at a table. A tinny version of a popular song played on the sound system. I slid into a spare seat at the table.

  Stephen, still reeling from culture shock, peered through his glasses across the bar, observant of details that I no longer noticed.

  “Is that a lady of the night?” he asked. Lesyia and I shifted in our seats and saw a tall, slim young woman with the type of blonde hair that came from a bottle and a skirt so short that it might be confused with underwear.

  “Could be,” Lesyia said.

  “Bill knows someone who wanted to be a hard-currency prostitute,” I told them. “Apparently lots of her friends at university did too.”

  “Oh come on,” Lesyia said.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Do you want us to leave you alone so you can find out?” Lesyia asked Stephen. We heard a ripple of laughter from Stephen, “Not particularly,” he said. We chatted a while longer. Midnight struck. August 18th slipped into August 19th. I felt ready for bed.

  I woke early in the morning. Marta was still asleep. I dressed quietly and left the room. I went down to the restaurant for breakfast. I saw no one that I knew, so I ate quickly, alone. Sombre classical music played on the sound system in the restaurant. It seemed an odd choice for a hotel filled with rock festival guests. I gobbled down two undercooked eggs on untoasted bread, sipped black tea and then returned to the room. I opened the door quietly as Marta usually did not rise until shortly before noon. I tiptoed in, rounded the corner and, to my surprise, found her wide awake and fully dressed.

  “There’s been a coup in Moscow,” she said. She seemed to be in shock, as was I.

  We rushed out of the room to find friends and more information. No one knew much. A brief recording periodically interrupted classical music. It still streamed dirge-like from all radios. The announcement said that a committee of hardline Communist leaders (the GKChP) now ruled in Moscow. I knew that these hard-liners had opposed the Union Treaty, afraid the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, would give too much power away to the republics. Gorbachev, who was on holiday in his dacha in Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula just a little farther south than us, was under house arrest. I felt shocked to imagine him there, in a place that should be a relaxing sea-side retreat, but was now a jail.

  We spoke briefly with the head of Rukh, Viacheslav Chornovil. This brave man had been imprisoned in labour camps until the mid-1980s for speaking out against Communism. He joked now that coup leaders might send him back to the Gulag. I worried that joke might come true.

  Marta and I found Lesyia and Stephen. We looked for fast Kiev-bound transport. We found a taxi driver who would make the day-long trip. We started out calmly enough. I held my shortwave radio out the window to capture the best possible reception for BBC news bulletins. The taxi driver wanted updates, so we translated the news for him, which was probably not a good idea. One journalist reported that tanks and troops were headed toward Kiev. The taxi driver seemed to channel all his anxiety through the accelerator pedal. We careened for several hours along a violently potholed “highway” from Zaporozhye back toward Kiev. No one wanted to sit in the front seat with its frighteningly panoramic view of all the things we might hit.

  We saw one tank camouflaged on the outskirts of Kiev as we drove in. However, by the time we reached the centre, the city looked completely normal. The scent of freshly baked bread wafted through o
ur taxi as we passed a local bakery. Customers lined up at a busy café nearby.

  We had been in touch with Mary, who had stayed in Kiev. We found her and asked how Kravchuk had responded to events in Moscow. She gave us a concise lawyerly update: “Kravchuk hasn’t come out for or against the coup. He’s sitting on the fence. I’ve seen the coup leaders on TV. They look drunk. I think they’re scared.”

  All the drama occurred in Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, denounced the coup. Tanks appeared in the streets. One battalion switched sides and backed Yeltsin. He climbed on a tank to rally his supporters, who braced for an attack from the hard-liners. Nothing like this happened in Kiev. I drifted through the halls of the Writer’s Union, around the corner from Parliament, where Rukh held some of its press conferences. I searched for news but found none. Everyone here waited, just like me.

  I left the building and walked down the hill to my apartment on Karl Marx Street. I opened the door to stillness and accumulated dust. A light on the answering machine by the phone flashed. When I played the messages, I heard one from the Canadian embassy that recommended evacuation from Kiev. I erased it.

  We still waited for someone to take a decision, for Kravchuk to rebel or for coup leaders to introduce marshal law in Ukraine, but nothing happened. When it was clear that the coup had failed, Kravchuk called a press conference for foreign journalists. He described a visit from the commander of Soviet Ground Forces, General Valentin Varennikov and a group of other Soviet generals who had marched into his office. The general told him to remove a portrait of Gorbachev from the wall, and ordered Kravchuk to support the coup.

  “I did everything that I could to prevent tanks from crushing people,” Kravchuk said. He smouldered. I sensed a change in Kravchuk, a new anger at this personal violation by Moscow military men who threatened him. But Rukh leaders appeared furious with Kravchuk because he took so long to denounce the coup. Some reform-minded Communists and military leaders in Ukraine had spoken out against it before Kravchuk. I talked with friends. We heard rumours of a new push for independence, dissected tensions between Rukh and the Communists and wondered what would happen at an emergency session of Parliament that would be held soon.