I visited Ukraine in July 1991, during the last hot summer of the USSR. Traveling to the Soviet Union at that time meant stepping right into the eye of the hurricane to witness changes that would go down in history. In the street atmosphere of Moscow, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and Kiev breathed airs of glásnost (transparency) and reform. Although we didn’t know it yet, the days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika were numbered.
In Kiev, radioactive isotopes from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which had exploded two years earlier just 180 kilometers from the Ukrainian capital, were still floating in the air, although we did not see them, and a sticky humidity rose from the immense Dnieper River that reaches from Russia to the Black Sea. Finding a cold beer in the city was mission impossible, and the stern, wiry faces of the Orthodox monks contrasted with the formidable cast-iron sculptures that guard the entrance to the Alley of the Heroic Cities of the War Museum, a set of brutalist-style buildings that tell the epic resistance that the inhabitants of Kiev put up in 1941 against the German invaders, on a hill crowned by the Monument to the Motherland, a 62-meter-high, 530-ton stainless steel sculpture by Yevgeny Vuchetich (1908-1974). Pure socialist realism.
Splendor and decadence
Almost a decade after my first trip to the Soviet Union, in the frigid December 1983, when Europe was in the midst of the Pershing-2 missile crisis —one of the most tense chapters of the Cold War that put the world on the brink of a nuclear war, although few knew about it— and the intense cold of the Baltic had frozen the waters of the Neva River, the abandonment was still evident in the majestic buildings and squares of Saint Petersburg : the Winter Palace (where the Hermitage Museum is located), the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Admiralty and its unmistakable golden spire or the Decembrists’ Square, in front of the majestic Saint Isaac’s Cathedral . The hotel receptions were still as soulless as he remembered them, as were the shops, nightclubs or restaurants on Nevski Avenue.
Through the streets of Moscow preached Hare Krishna groups, and although a McDonalds had just opened, the famous GUM stores on Red Square had not yet reached the brands of fashion and you could still buy a sturdy Zenith SLR camera for less than 500 pesetas (about 3 euros) or book a table at a luxury restaurant like the Prague on Arbat Street, closed today, for a dinner that included beluga caviar and smoked sturgeon , for 10 or 15 euros per p person. Underground, the dream of the triumph of the proletariat materializes in the metro stations of the Russian capital. All of them were designed during the heyday of Stalinist architecture as people’s palaces, and are among the most sumptuous in the world. Komsomolskaya Station (of Komsomol, the youth organization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) is emblematic, with its chandeliers, marble, mosaics and baroque stucco. My favourites, the most refined and avant-garde, are the five designed by the architect Alexey Dushkin between 1935 and 1952: Kropotkínskaya (dedicated to the Russian geographer, naturalist and ideologue Piotr Alekséyevich Kropotkin); Ploshchad Revolyutsii (Revolution Square); Avtozavódskaya (car factory, in Russian); Novoslobódskaya (new suburban), and Mayakóvskaya, in honor of the famous Russian composer Vladímir Mayakovsky. Ukraine’s declaration of independence after the failed coup of August 1991 was the coup de grâce for the USSR, when a dipsomaniac named Boris Yeltsin took charge of the Kremlin culminating the move that Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa and a former film actor turned US president named Ronald Reagan had put into march several years earlier, ending with the end of the Cold War and the disintegration and economic collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. From the ruins of the socialist superpower would emerge a newly minted country of rich people, gangsters, nostalgic for the old regime and spies converted into politicians like Vladímir Putin (Leningrad, 1952), Yeltsin’s successor, who would turn the tables on the West more than two decades later by placing, through disinformation tactics and social networks that allowed him to win the elections, a eccentric millionaire in front of the White House. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Current crisis between Ukraine and Russia coincides with the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union. Putin, who is now in his seventies, is a politician with the soul of a soldier who has marked himself as a legacy revive Russia’s role as a world power. In 1998, he was appointed the first deputy head of the Yeltsin Administration. Two months later, he would go on to occupy the position of director of the Federal Security Service (SFS), heir to the Soviet KGB, where Putin had begun his professional career as a secret agent in Germany. On March 26, 2000, he won the elections with 53% of the votes. It does not take a fine analyst to realize that the leader of the The Kremlin, which has since been amassing power and eliminating political adversaries, will never let Ukraine fly. And not just for strategic reasons. Behind the threat of a new invasion is not only Putin’s intention to prevent the expansion of NATO, but the thesis that Russia and Ukraine are a single people whose origin dates back to the voyages of the rus or Varegos , as the vikings from the region of Gotland, in Sweden, who in the 9th century opened the trade routes of Eastern Europe.
The Fallen Giant
One turn of the screw
The Vikings of Kiev
The name of Varegians is Byzantine, although it derives from Norse væringjar. Sailing down the Volga and Dnieper to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, the Rus traded with the distant Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate. Impressed by the Vikings’ prowess with weapons, the Byzantine emperors recruited Norsemen to create an elite unit that would be their personal bodyguard for two centuries: the Varangian guard. Together with various Slavic, Finnish and Baltic tribes, those warriors from the North formed the Kievan Rus, the seed of what is now Russia, a confederation of principalities that lasted four centuries. After the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, Ukraine became depopulated, and Kievan Rus disintegrated into many small feudal states, the most powerful of which was the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, which later became the Principality of Moscow.
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