May 31, 2007
Khmelnetsky
I was invited to speak at the Khmelnetsky National University by Angela Rozova, a Fulbright alum herself (she taught in Iowa a few years ago). On the day we traveled to Khmelnetsky we had time between trains to meet briefly with Ella Reznikova, husband Bill and wonderful friend Temo in Kiev – right in the main square from where television news cameras broadcast pictures of bored flag- drooping “protestors” who smile as they try to look angry. They are paid; it is hot.
The day we were in Kiev we did not see any protestors. It was the day that police (controlled by Yanukovich and the Rada) entered the Prosecutor General’s office to protect him from the president, Yushchenko, who had fired him (are you still with me?) because he refused to investigate three constitutional court judges for misconduct/fraud, and because he never resigned his seat in the Rada when he was appointed Prosecutor General.
There was no sign of any trouble at all in Kiev. People ate ice cream, the market boomed, children carried balloons, young men and women supped on warmish beer, heat melted the asphalt, we dashed for shade, sweating buckets. After querying everyone we know, we can comfortably assert that Ukrainians are more worried about this unseasonable three weeks of unrelenting heat (95 degrees in the shade, but who’s counting?) than they are about the constitutional “crisis”. Troops were mobilized as “partisans” for both sides in this gritty standoff. On Saturday, President Yushchenko ordered 3,500 of his most loyal new police toward Kiev. They were stopped outside of Kiev by their colleagues, who remained loyal to Yanukovich (their boss’s boss just 48 hours earlier) – the traffic police.
I’m not a lawyer, but since no lawyers or judges are willing to come to firm decisions on these events, I’ll hazard that mobilizing troops and police for political purposes, as well as the President’s takeover of the Interior Ministry last week (which gave him the police and KGB/CIA-types, not all of whom were willing to switch their loyalty to him) are illegal acts. They are the most recent in a long pattern of questionable maneuvers that threaten to bore the Ukrainian voters into a stupor, if the heat doesn’t get them first.
The general opinion here is that these machinations have nothing – and I do mean nothing – to do with the people of Ukraine. The politicians are enriching themselves, making closed door deals, coddled by a complacent press and being childish. With Shakespeare, most here are of the opinion, “A pox on both their houses”.
We did see a fire in the outdoor market at the railroad station – the heat, perhaps aided by a careless smoker, ignited the insulation around a large pipe (propane?) – two firemen with tiny house-sized fire extinguishers managed to extinguish the 10- foot high flames as vendors quaffed Kbac (pronounced “k-vass”, a sweet non-alcoholic yeast drink) and fanned themselves in the heat barely 20 feet away. The flames probably created a welcome breeze.
Our own adventure was not yet over. We took an evening fast train to Khmelnetsky in western Ukraine, in the Podillya region – an area that is losing population as Ukraine’s emigration (particularly of young people) increases. Angela met us and took us to a lovely apartment in a dormitory. We even had a refrigerator, dishes, large windows and a porch! The next day was full – with meetings with faculty, I then taught two classes (one on creative writing, and one on the Constitution) as events swirled in Kiev – though none of us knew it yet. I gave the faculty and students a copy of the Ukrainian constitution, which none had read yet. This is common; it is not a well known or understood document.
After lunch in the faculty room of the school’s snack bar, we toured Khmelnetsky with six students. They practiced their English, showed us beautiful new glass malls, enormous yellow regional administration center in this capital city of about 140,000, fountains (with happy wet young men who agreed to let us take their photos) and quaint cobblestoned café- lined pedestrian walkways. We saw war memorials and an eternal flame, children’s playground and a bride. I almost bought a blouse. But the most surprising visit was to two small art galleries which feature regional painters. We bought two small oil paintings, one of a village (by E. Miller, a Ukrainian art professor in L’viv) and one of a cottage in autumn (by a Ukrainian artist named Demko). We both love both of these (which is good, since I did the final choice sans David).
The girls were charming, and were eager to meet us on Saturday morning for another tour. Alla and Marina had lunch with us and strolled through the parks – David’s solo tour the previous evening had netted a fine pub and a public band concert. The city sits on a lovely river (Buh) which Angela took us to later in the afternoon for a cool drink and a long talk. We so enjoyed all the people we met, and I hope to revisit the university if possible.
While on e-mail Friday night, David learned from a friend in America that there was trouble in Kiev. “Should I be worried?” David wrote? “Well the president has called in the troops”. Linda was already watching television footage when David returned. We watched TV for four hours, learning much Ukrainian as we attempted to understand the repeating images and decipher the reporters’ interpretations. However, the fact that the “breaking news” did not change for four hours led us to believe that events had stalled for the evening. They had: key figures met all night and all the following night to agree not to agree on a date for the next elections, then announced they had agreed. The press was happy, most people were mollified, and still, there is no official, clear, set in law and unchangeable DATE for an election. Life goes on in Ukraine as usual, and the politicians proceed apace.
This trip demonstrated once again how truly productive David and I can both be in difficult circumstances. We continued to work and write and network on trains and in cafes. I taught in 100 degree rooms where to turn on a light would be a huge mistake because of the heat it would generate. David jumped from pillar to post to grab e-mail connections, as he worked on several proposals for Stone Environmental, and I began the long awaited reading of the memoirs of Catherine the Great. We each wrote abstracts for a conference in L’viv (the conference begins on June 11, David’s first full day of being “shhhh-sixty”) and I planned my last class with my best students in Dnipropetrovsk.
We have taken three young students under our wings. They will spend the summer on a “work-travel” program at a shirt store in Provincetown – they fly on June 5. So we communicated with them from afar, planning yet another meeting to go over logistics (just how does one get from JFK to Provincetown with no money and little English?) before they leave. Our friend Olga is also planning a summer work sojourn – stay tuned for details.
We continue to swelter here. The entire day must be planned around survival in the heat. I’m about to find one of those polluted rivers and jump right in.
LBG
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