Experimental Blog # 211

Notes and quotations from "Black Square - Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine" by Sophie Pinkham

"...2013-14, when Ukraine had another revolution < > more spontaneous than the Orange Revolution a decade earlier, it became known simply as Maidan, for Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev's Independence Square, the site of mass protests that lasted for three months < > More than a hundred people were killed during the protests; some ten thousand died in the war that followed."

"His{Yushchenko's} prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was a Russian-speaking oligarch from Dnipropetrovsk, in south-central Ukraine. She was canny enough to polish up her Ukrainian and do her hair in phony wheat-gold braids, modeling her image on the Berehynia, a dangerous female water spirit rebranded as a mother goddess."!!
"Ukraine's bilingualism made it an easier place to learn Russian than Russia itself."

"In 1887 Habsburg geographers declared a village near Rakhiv the "geographical center of Europe."" Rakhiv is a town in the Carpathian Mountains in far southwestern Ukraine near the border with Romania. "The ethno-national identities that we take for granted today were largely the product of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that created "imagined communities," a sense of blood relation between people who had never met and who had dramatically different ways of life."
"Lviv was part of Poland from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it was called Lemburg. < > In the nineteenth century Lemburg was mostly Polish, German, and Jewish, though the surrounding countryside was full of peasants who called themselves Ruthenians, and who were learning to call themselves Ukrainians. < > After World War I Lemburg became Lwo'w, a Polish city in which only one-sixth of the inhabitants were Ukrainians.
    "During the Second World War the city went to the Soviets and then the Germans, becoming part of the Soviet Union after the war ended. It was renamed Lvov < > Lvov's Jews had been killed in concentration camps, mass shootings, or pogroms, and its Poles and Germans had been driven out, deported, or killed."

"When I saw the documentary All Things Ablaze, < > I realized that there were many versions of Maidan. < > As in reality, it isn't clear who started the violence, or who is fighting for what, exactly. It often seems that people may be fighting just for the sake of it."

"On May 11, 2014, the Donbas separatists held referenda < > Only Russia recognized them{the landslide votes in favor of independence} as legitimate. But as in Crimea, many people in Donetsk and Luhansk truly did want to distance themselves from Kiev's new government and to put themselves under Russian protection."

"Ukraine was trying hard to distance itself from the Soviet past. It declared May 8 "Victory in Europe" Day and replaced the Soviet term "Great Patriotic War" with "Second World War" in keeping with European practice."
    "Shortly after Victory Day, Poroshenko signed new laws that attached criminal penalties to the display of Soviet and Nazi symbols in almost any context, and prohibited any denial of the "criminal character of the communist totalitarian regime of 1917-91 in Ukraine.""
"The new laws were an act of symbolic violence against the civilization in which many Ukrainians grew up, and for which millions of Ukrainians lost their lives while fighting the Nazis. < > Thousands of signs had to be changed and monuments removed, replaced with the heroes of the moment."