Diary of a Shopkeeper, 27th February
Twelve hundred years ago, as the Norse expanded west into Orkney and Shetland, they also headed south-east, across the Baltic and through what is now Lithuania and Belarus. (The name ‘rus’ originated in Sweden, deriving from ‘people who row.’)
When they came to the banks of a mighty river at the heart of a fertile plain, some settled, and transformed a peasant village into an important city: Kyiv. A massive statue of these legendary Viking founders, standing proud in a longship, is one of its must-see sights – or was, till Russia invaded last week.
Until 2013, another imposing statue stood near the Besarabsky food market: an 11-foot-high portrayal of Lenin in red granite. In December that year it was toppled and smashed as part of the Euromaidan protests against the corruption and human rights abuses of the Moscow-aligned government. The following spring the protests evolved into the Revolution of Dignity, which initiated a new era of closer integration with Europe. Or did, till last week.
In 1993 I spent three weeks in Kyiv with a journalist friend, James Meek, who was reporting on the collapse of the Soviet Union for The Scotsman. What struck me about Kyiv was its familiarity. It looked and felt much like any other great European city. Paris, say, with its broad river, its opera houses, its cathedrals, and its boulevards lined with stately nineteenth century apartment blocks.
True, there were some concrete monstrosities from the age of Stalin, but every city has its brutalist carbuncles, thrown up in a spasm of urban renewal, or.to repair war damage. And Kyiv had been repeatedly wrecked by war throughout the 20th century.
What wasn’t like Paris or Lisbon or Edinburgh was the number of people everywhere doing jobs in old-fashioned, labour-intensive ways. Bundled-up old women swept the streets in teams with what looked like birch brooms. At the top and bottom of each escalator in the cavernous underground system – now serving as a series of bomb shelters – three staff loitered, just keeping an eye on things.
Everyone I met was excited to have escaped the tyranny of the Soviet system a year and a half earlier. Even the ones with jobs like watching an escalator all day – who, I felt sure, would not keep such employment under the rigours of the capitalism that Ukraine was understandably keen to embrace.
Everything was in transition. There was no new national currency, and instead a system of ‘coupons’ operated. I’d taken £300 spending money for my visit, and as one pound bought over 300 coupons, for the first and only time in my life I was briefly a millionaire.
This meant that food was, for us westerners, embarrassingly cheap. I bought a loaf of bread in a bakery for three coupons, or about 1p. It was the size of a bicycle wheel. On the other hand, many food shops were empty, and when the word got out that they’d been restocked with some essential item like butter or vodka, queues materialised within minutes.
James took me to the huge Besarabsky market. There were ten tables filled with radishes, ten filled with bunches of dill, and ten empty except for one scrawny chicken carcase, guarded fiercely by another one of those bundled-up old women.
I wonder what she’s guarding now.
When we emerged, I posed to get a photo taken leaning against the statue of Lenin, like any naïve tourist would. A soldier in a long grey coat appeared, rifle slung across his shoulder. He spoke quietly but firmly, and gestured: show some respect you idiot, and get going. I got going.
I have fond memories of my visit to Kyiv and the warm welcome given by a people who’d only just started to receive western visitors after decades of isolation. I had no inkling then that what appeared to be ‘the early days of a better nation,’ to use Alasdair Gray’s famous phrase, was only a brief period of calm before revolution and counter revolution would sweep across the country. And now invasion.
The Orcadian and McAdie & Reeve have organised a crowd-funder, Gaan the Distance, to deliver essential supplies to Ukraine. Anyone who wants to can donate here.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd March. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.