PERSPECTIVES: A local call in the global village (10/30/05)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

A local call in the global village

I was in a meeting in September when my cell phone rang. It was my friend Roman. "Can I call you back?" I asked. He readily agreed and gave me his number. An hour later, walking down St. Clair Avenue, I returned the call.

"Where are you?" I said.

"I'm on the Khreschatyk," Roman replied. Wow! The main boulevard in Kyiv, the same path city residents took more than a thousand years ago to the Dnipro to be baptized.

It was noon in Cleveland and 7 p.m. in Kyiv, and there we were, chatting at a distance of 5,000 miles, the signal clear as a bell. And it was a local call! Truly we live in a global village.

I remember a time when a letter from Ukraine, with colorful stamps marked "CCCP," was a big deal. Often, my parents pointed out how the envelope had been opened and then crudely resealed. "Tsenzura" (censorship), they'd explain before sitting down at the kitchen table to read the precious message from a brother or sister in the old country. Little was taken at face value. A person suffering from "the same illness" that had befallen someone else a while ago, meant the KGB was on his case. "Brisk winds blowing" was a political crackdown, and if "Stefko" was angry, that was really bad news.

Visits to Ukraine were also fraught with intrigue. Walk into an apartment and the host would put a finger to his lips and point knowingly to the ceiling. Relatives cautioned that the neighbor asking about life in America was really a KGB informant. Frumpy women sitting on every floor recorded the comings and goings of hotel guests.

It was a mechanical age, for the most part. To write, people took pen in hand or banged away at a manual typewriter. For copies, they used carbon paper. Kids these days barely know what that is, yet that's how Soviet dissidents in the 1960s and '70s challenged the system and ultimately brought it down. They'd type poetry, essays or stories in five or six copies, each more faint than the previous and distributed them to a small, trusted circle of friends, who then made copies of their own in the same painstaking, mechanical way. The KGB, desperate to stop the flow of self-published literature, conducted searches for forbidden manuscripts. They went so far as to analyze the typeface on documents, comparing it to a central registry of typewriters to try to identify and arrest the offending citizen.

Today, it all seems absurd, yet that was the grim reality - a nightmare society, cheerless, unimaginative, where creativity was stifled. Slowly, as radio increasingly penetrated the Iron Curtain, as copy machines replaced carbon paper, as growing numbers of artists, athletes and diplomats defected and tourists smuggled books, recordings and other contraband, the system was overwhelmed and ultimately collapsed. Brute-force politicians proved incapable of keeping pace with a more assertive citizenry who used more nimble technology.

Thirty-five years after my first trip to Kyiv, I was there again in August, when I joined the huge street festival marking Independence Day. It was overwhelmingly young and cheerfully vibrant. Tens of thousands shared the boulevard: break dancers, folk singers, Hari Krishnas, AIDS activists, jugglers, punks, unicyclists, veterans, boys dressed as Kozaks, girls in embroidered blouses. There were dogs, ponies and a monkey perched on a young man's shoulder. I saw a young Shevchenko-look-alike selling posters and an aging Lenin look-alike with a tin cup. Lots of people had cell phones pressed to their ears.

Believe it or not, there was even a long column of paganists parading on the Khreschatyk away from the river to honor the gods St. Vladimir deposed in 988. People took the Sun Worshipers in stride. After all, I thought, it's a free country; tourist that I am, I snapped pictures on my digital camera.

Walking the beautiful streets of Kyiv, I noticed how the Ukrainian language, once a rarity, is now ubiquitous on billboards, handbills, advertising, traffic signs, official notices, restaurant menus. Russian is also pervasive: for every Ukrainian conversation you overhear, four or five are in Russian. Indeed, when I spoke Ukrainian, the response was often in Russian. Politely, I'd explain that I'm an American who grew up with English and Ukrainian and barely comprehend Russian. Oh, no problem. Cab drivers, waitresses, sidewalk vendors, journalists, etc. would switch to the language of the customer - me - sensing, no doubt, that a deal or a tip was hanging in the balance.

For all the positives and negatives, Ukraine has truly changed for the better, and electronic communication has played a big role. It was critical for Ukraine's independence in 1991 and even more so during the Orange Revolution when people half a world away had up-to-the-minute information on what was going on.

In the Digital Age, people communicate freely - e-mailing, sending faxes, calling each other on cell phones, flying back and forth, often across political borders and many different time zones, pursuing their common interests, whether those are personal, cultural, commercial, religious, athletic, political or even criminal. The technology serves the cause of freedom, to be sure, but it's naive to think that just because no one's steaming open envelopes to read your mail, freedom is assured.

Dictators have always used a combination of guile and force to get their way. Nowhere was that more true than Ukraine. Today, the same technology that makes communication so easy also facilitates manipulation of public opinion, falsification of elections, the harassment and persecution of individuals. Indeed, it's now possible to track your every phone call, every purchase, every keystroke on your computer. That's why it was so inspiring to see Ukrainians whose ancestors had endured the tsarist Okhrana and the Soviet Cheka, NKVD and KGB rise up last December to defend what the nation had struggled for centuries to achieve.

In the process, Kyiv has become dynamic, stylish, bustling and free. Indeed, it's possible to call a friend in Kyiv, just like that - from Cleveland or a hundred thousand other places. Now, the challenge is to use Ukraine's hard-won freedom to achieve the kind of economy that brings rural Ukraine, with all its impoverished, dirt-road villages into the prosperous, connected global village.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is [email protected].

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