REFLECTIONS: Adventures in Orangeland (09/10/06)

REFLECTIONS

Adventures in Orangeland

by Andrea Chalupa

When my time has come and the priest is reading me my last rights, I hope I have few regrets in life. Currently, I am still living with one, and that's not having been in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution.

If you were there, you can probably still remember the "electric atmosphere," the excitement, how there was "just this something" in the air. That's how I've heard the Orange Revolution described before by people who experienced it first-hand. Meanwhile, during those cold winter months of 2004, I was probably on a warm couch somewhere, living off Thanksgiving leftovers and watching the historic events unfold on television, wishing I was in Ukraine. One year later, I was.

I first went to Ukraine in August of 2005 to find someone to translate my grandfather's memoirs from Ukrainian into English. My grandfather, Olexji Keis, comes from my mother's side of my family and is from the Donetsk Oblast.

I grew up in a small California town and learned Ukrainian from my grandfather. But after he passed away 15 years ago, I gradually stopped speaking the language. At home, we rarely spoke Ukrainian. My parents, my older sister, Alexandra, and I spoke Ukrainian only during heated family arguments or to discuss how much to tip the waiter when he's standing right there.

So post-college graduation, when it came time for me to see the world, I chose to go to Ukraine to re-learn my family's language and to find someone who would translate my grandfather's memoirs. I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland chasing the White Rabbit and meeting all sorts of characters along the way.

The first thing that struck me about Ukraine was the youthful energy in the cities. Some of the friends I made while living in Lviv and Kyiv were national radio DJs, journalists, filmmakers, rock stars, VJs, on MTV-like shows, and aspiring politicians and diplomats who speak several languages - and they are all under the age of 25.

One of my closest friends in Lviv, Andriy Maksymovych, ran across Ukraine Forest Gump-style to raise money for charity. He is an example of the post-Soviet generation in Ukraine that has come to rely more on itself than the state.

By late November 2005, during the first anniversary of the Orange Revolution, I was in Kyiv reading the translation of my grandfather's memoirs for the first time. In the opening chapter my grandfather describes witnessing, as a little boy, the tsar's White army battle the Bolsheviks on his family farm. In one passage he describes how his father asked the retreating colonel of the White Guard why the tsar's soldiers, with their fancy uniforms and big horses, were running from the tattered and barefoot Bolsheviks. The colonel answered him:

"When the snow melts in the spring and the water runs from the hills, countless streams will form, which will turn into an immense flood that cannot be stopped. As is so today, the people have risen all throughout the land and we do not have the least chance of stopping them. This is why we are running."

The people could not be stopped two years ago with the peaceful victory of democracy in the Orange Revolution. But now, after the dramatic events of the summer, the tide has turned. Viktor Yanukovych is prime minister and President Viktor Yushchenko, many former supporters are grumbling, should have died from the dioxin that scarred his face rather than make a deal with this former foe.

I went back to Kyiv this summer to visit the good friends I made while living in the capital for five months during my first trip to Ukraine. It felt strange to see the city gripped by the anxious excitement of the political crisis. The maidan and Mariinskyi Park were covered by the protest camps of Pora, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Yanukovych supporters, and the Socialists and Communists.

My first weekend back, I approached a Pora camp on the maidan and was immediately ushered in and offered a plate of boiled potatoes and sausages in a make-shift kitchen.

"We want new elections. We cannot have Yanukovych as our prime minister," explained Dima Bashuzoff, Coordinator of Ukrainian Diaspora in Moldova and Romania for Pora. They were there, Mr. Bashuzoff explained, to fight for democracy and to stand up against Soviet-era corruption. "We will be here as long as it takes to protect the ideals of the Orange Revolution."

At night I stayed with the Pora protesters, but during the day I ventured into the Yanukovych camps that were concentrated in front of the Verkhovna Rada. One sunny afternoon, after a week of rain, I sat with some miners from Donetsk who wore blue capes and hats, and carried flags for Yanukovych as they watched young men from Pora play a game of soccer in Mariinskyi Park. They told me they supported Mr. Yanukovych because they miss the stability and might of the Soviet Empire. They believe Mr. Yanukovych will unite Ukraine with Belarus and Russia to create a Soviet-style bloc of countries.

"What about joining NATO and the European Union?" I asked.

"Why?" said one miner, his eyes bulging. "Soviet soldiers saved France from speaking German!"

He continued by telling me that Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, paid off Mikhail Gorbachev to "destroy" the Soviet Union and, pounding his fist on his palm, said "Kill Dick Cheney!"

Back in the Pora camp on the maidan for the night, I stared up at the Ukrainian flag waving over the mesh sunroof of my tent. Outside my tent, a group of protesters sang the national hymn.

This is not my grandfather's Ukraine. He would have been shot for singing those songs. According to his memoirs, he was arrested and tortured by the KGB for much less. That was 70 years ago and today, despite people's grumblings that the Disney-like euphoria of the Orange Revolution is over, Ukraine is experiencing the back and forth of progress. Sometimes it's as smooth as someone learning to drive stick shift for the first time.

The Orange Revolution may be over, and I missed it - we all now miss it - but maybe there is more to come. I was just in Kyiv, and there's still "just this something" in the air.

Andrea Chalupa is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. She hails from Davis, Calif., where she graduated from the University of California, majoring in history, in 2004. Her thesis on "The Role of Religion in Political Independence Movements in Ukraine" earned her high honors. Ms. Chalupa has written a social satirical novel set during the Orange Revolution, and her screenplay on Western journalists corrupted by Stalin's Moscow is a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

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