The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  But Ukrainians seem to be accepting pragmatism. The 2004 Orange Revolution elected the charismatic, populist savior-candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who failed to implement reforms. In 2014 the people elected Poroshenko, basically their Mitt Romney, with all the enthusiasm Americans mustered for the original article: “He’s probably not a crook, and the alternatives are the laughable or the implausible.” Now the new civic sensibility—as every good politician knows, war has its drawbacks, but there’s nothing like it for uniting a country—stands in contrast to that of the cynical, stagnant Russians.

  Unlike the nouveau bourgeois Russian protests of 2011–12, the Maidan movement engaged people across class lines. Begun by the usual Occupy demographic of college students and young hipsters, it spread to include the unemployed working class, yet brought to power a billionaire president. As our friend Larissa in Kyiv said, “It’s like the war of independence that [Ukraine] never got to have. Because independence in 1991 came so easily, the country never had to make a positive decision, yes, we want to be independent. And now, people have to decide, do we really want to live in a different way?”

  To zoom in on one minuscule demographic tranche, it pointed toward a role for the college-age punks and DIY activists in creating the future of Ukraine as a society in reform. Punk is largely a bourgeois phenomenon (some base-level security is a prerequisite for rebellion based on ideals) mostly staffed by students or people with mid-level creative-industry jobs, with decent English and Internet access. And there tend to be three kinds of punk politics—the “no borders, no war” pacifists, the revolution-porn radicals, and the generic center-left liberals—none of whom, for the most part, will be personally involved in the fighting, and all of whom want or assume, like most middle-class kids, the privileges of Western liberal society. But those sorts of assumptions have a kind of power too, in that they breed a powerful resentment when unfulfilled. And punk and DIY on the American model constitute training wheels for the kind of self-organizing civil society pundits long for in developing countries, taking the unused semi-public space the former communist world is lousy with and commandeering it for the common good. Or if not good, at least enjoyment. Or if not enjoyment, at least the feeling of doing something in common, with the idea that it might push the ball an inch toward a better society.

  As an American and as a musician, I found something affirming in the opportunity to play for people for whom music and politics were meaningful in a concrete way, for whom the act of congregating and the investment of feeling in performing music were all serious business. It is a relief and an antidote to the prevailing sense in the West of the inherent valuelessness and disposability of both music and the people who make it. In her writing, Maria calls this “the privilege of political ambivalence”—in a context of economic stability and cultural freedom, people who make and consume art have the freedom to be apolitical. Before that zone of freedom is established, though, the mere act of gathering, independently, underground, in a condition of joy and fellow feeling, is inescapably a political act in itself.

  There was a small noon rally in front of the now-empty festival stage in central Kyiv from which, at the height of the protests, the anthem was sung hourly. A “commander” in a beret and aviators took the wireless microphone and sang, tunelessly, a patriotic song to a mismatched and motley line of three dozen “soldiers” (and a handful of patriotic tourists) standing at semi-attention in camouflage, Hawaiian shorts, striped tank tops. The donation boxes mostly stood empty. A bearded young man wandered over to the upright piano, which was painted the flag’s blue-and-yellow with an EU circle of stars, and picked out a tune. The cobblestones, ripped from the streets and sidewalks that winter for use as projectiles, were stacked neatly, and some workers had begun to replace them. Toward the center of the square, some cobblestones had been painted—yellow and blue, of course—and set out on the ground to spell out messages for some theoretical airborne viewer: “Patriotic Idea Maidan,” “Stop Propaganda: Here Is Not Fascism!” and, simply, “Ukraine.” Ten days after we left, the square was finally cleared by government forces.

  I walked up Institutka, past the moldering barricades, stacks of rusting homemade shields, and flower-draped memorials to protesters shot by government snipers. At the top of the hill, a black-on-yellow mock street sign sat propped against a wall of tires. “Changing the country,” it read. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

  We boarded a plane to Istanbul that night, and woke at dawn to the contrapuntal tangle of the call to prayer, the muezzins like a hundred hands knitting from the same yarn. It was five years since I’d decided to stake my supper on songs. I took on the troubadour life as a single man in a windowless urban closet the size of the loft bed I slept in. I wrote these words from the second floor of my house in a village, a married man with a car and a young daughter. I looked at my hands and at the instruments hanging on the wall. The thought of putting them on my back again struck no spark: the restless impulse had once again moved in me, now from the stage to the page. I had lived by the maxim that I could stay one step ahead of myself but found that the old itch would still be waiting for me when I finally arrived at a home. As Socrates said to the man who complained that travel had not improved him: “Not surprising. You took yourself with you.”

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