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Meet the Kids of Maidan Part II
by Doniphan Blair

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Rodion, a Russian-speaking costume designer from the Donbas, was very happy with Ukraine's recent progress and very angry with his Russian relatives. photo: D. Blair

Continued from 'Meet the Kids of Maidan Part I'

Ukraine’s digital success was also extolled by Rodion, a high-cheek-boned, dark-complected, oft-smiling man, who works as a film costume designer and looks like he just did a shoot himself, given the black leather duster and ornamental earrings he was rocking. I met Rodion, his old friend Catherine, a jeweler, and her teenage son, glued to his phone, near one of Kyiv’s many large, low-rent flea markets, where they were looking for vintage jewelry.

“Everything government related, from getting identity documents to filing taxes, is now online,” Rodion said, over a cappuccino. “It is easy to start a business. Both Catharine and I have our own.” They also detailed how well their socialized medicine works, suggesting Ukraine could become a model for social services as well as free markets and democracy, a socialist-capitalist hybrid achieved on the cheap, given it is still one of Europe’s poorest countries.

“Ukraine has been improving since Zelensky became president,” Catherine said. “I feel like the government cares about me now.”

Out of the blue, however, they began venting bitterly about Russians, even though both are from mostly Russian-speaking families, as were many of the creative people I met. “We speak Russian at home but not on the streets after February 24th,” Rodion explained. “We had to flee eastern Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2014—supposedly to save us,” he added, shaking his head and looking grim.

Rodion and Catharine blamed average Russians, not just Putin, an opinion shared by many Ukrainians and dating from 2014, when their Russian friends and relatives, which many Ukrainians have, gloated over social media about Crimea, feelings now compounded by massive war crimes. Adding insult to injury, many of those Russians claim the evidence for those crimes was faked.

“The Russian teachers’ union sent volunteers to brainwash Ukrainian children,” noted Catharine. “Unpaid volunteers?” I asked. “Of course not!” interjected Rodion, “Nothing in Russia is without pay these days!”

At the very moment Catharine, Rodion and I were chatting on September 16th, Putin was at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, meeting with the Chinese and Indian presidents, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. They told him—Modi to his face—they weren’t happy with his unnecessary war now threatening their economies and world food supplies, not to mention nuclear holocaust.

A week earlier, Kyiv had hosted its first conference since the war, an attempt to understand the war, in fact: the 17th annual Yalta European Strategy summit, named for the Crimean city where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill strategized the final defeat of Nazi Germany, in February 1945. A few months before, however, the Soviets had deported to Siberia all the Crimean Tatars, about a quarter million people, half of whom died, a small fraction of whom returned. Ukraine's democracy gave them full legal rights, but that ended with the Russian reconquest in 2014.

Some of those attending the Lviv Art Center's "Artists and War" conference, with Kerill (far left), Alem (3rd fr lft) and Dirk Grosser, who produced it (5th fr lft). photo: D. Blair

Dirk had organized two mini-conferences in Lviv, the second at the Lviv Art Center, which has classes, a small gallery and a nice café. Also about what artists should do during the war, it was attended by Kirill and nine others, including a Tatar-Ukrainian woman in her early 20s. Alem accentuates her wide-set eyes with aggressive makeup slashes, works for NGOs, and lives in Lviv, although she was raised in Washington DC and is also American. “People say it’s impossible,” Alem told us, “But my dream is to liberate Crimea.”

Y.E.S. is the brain child of Victor Pinchuk, an oligarch and philanthropist, who is sometimes called the Ukrainian George Soros, because he’s Jewish and supports culture, but rarely in the crazed conspiratorial sense. Indeed, the Pinchuk Art Center, a half a mile from the Maidan, is universally well regarded. Both Dirk and I found its contemporary collection impressive and its current show, “Russian War Crimes”, a tour de force of artists addressing war, Dirk’s subject. We lingered a long time in the substantial show, including the devastating video in the last room, a hurricane of quick-cut atrocity shots, sometimes using split screens, until we were interrupted by an attendant, who ushered us down to the street due to the air raid.

“Is there a bomb shelter we can go to,” I asked the guard in front. “No need, it was false alert," he said, laughing. "Insurance makes us evacuate everyone and wait for all clear.” “But what if there was an attack?” “The metro is right there and very, very deep.” Indeed, it was built for nuclear war.

In addition to organizing seminars and shooting a documentary in Ukraine, Dirk planned a performance piece. He enacted it on September 17th, in the middle of the Maidan, on the same spot graced by the dancers, which was dry, since it hadn’t rained for over a day. As I filmed, Dirk arranged on the ground 20 posters for the “Kunst Krieg” (“Art in War”) conference he arranged a month earlier in Berlin, each poster emblazoned with the word “cancelled,” since that’s what happened, for reasons he didn’t fully explain. Then he began calling German galleries to reschedule the conference.

The two-day Y.E.S conference was titled “Ukraine: Defending All Our Freedom” and featured banners with “I need ammunition, not a ride,” President Zelensky’s famous quip, which may have been written by his legendary media team. Hosted by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Y.E.S attracted to a hardened Kyiv basement some 400 international and Ukrainian notables, including Polish, British and American lawmakers, Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, who commended Ukraine’s digital prowess, and Professor Snyder, who emphasized the war was colonialist, which Europeans don't quite get, due to their own recent colonialism. Also in attendance was another one of our best and best-selling scholars of Ukraine and Russia, the journalist Anne Applebaum, along with General Wesley Clark, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and the Azov commander Serhii Tsisaruk.

After welcoming them, Victor Pinchuk noted we were witnessing the final collapse of the Soviet Union—“Dinosaur can take a long, long time to die and, during this time, he will try to drag us back to his prehistoric past”—before introducing President Zelensky.

"Russia is doing everything to break the resistance of Ukraine, the resistance of Europe, and the world,” Zelensky said, wearing his standard khakis and military-green T-shirt. “The 90 days ahead will be more crucial than 30 years of Ukraine's independence. These 90 days will be more crucial than all the years of the existence of the European Union. [This] winter will determine our future.”

Ukrainian prayers for peace are joined by members of the Hare Krishna, seen here in Lviv's Old Town. photo: D. Blair

“No negotiations with the Russian Federation regarding the end of the war are possible," Zelensky explained, since “There is no confidence that they will keep their promises.” In fact, Russia's invasion of Crimea and the Donbas violated the U.N. Charter’s Article 2 on sovereignty and the 1994 Budapest Agreement, which was signed by the U.S. and Great Britain as well as Russia and guaranteed Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for giving up all of their nuclear weapons and much of their conventional ones. Less well known is the Battle of Ilovaisk in 2014 when the Ukrainians surrendered their weapons for safe passage but the Russians resumed shooting.

While fears of escalation are understandable, appeasement encourages rash action and agreement violation. A few weeks into the war, during negotiations hosted by Turkey, the Ukrainian delegates offered fresh security arrangements: Ukraine would stay non-aligned, Crimea negotiations would be postponed for 15 years, and the 2014 Donbas invasion would be addressed separately. In response, the Russian delegates called them Nazis and offered to withdraw from Kyiv, where they'd already been repulsed.

“We must fight," Zelensky continued at the Y.E.S. conference, articulating his ascent as Europe’s de facto wartime commander. “Endure the winter. Help those who are weaker. Protect those who need protection. Limit ourselves in what can be limited. And limit Russia in everything that should limit it. The unification of Europe is impossible without Ukraine." Most Ukrainians have wanted to join the E.U. for decades, and they even amended their constitution to that end in 2019. “It will be an honor for Europe to welcome our state," Zelensky concluded, "The state that wins!"

Dirk’s performance goes well. Standing in front of his colorful pile of “Kunst Krieg” posters, he calls the galleries, introduces himself politely and leaps into action—“You remember the Maidan Revolution, eight years ago? I am standing on Maidan Square right now!”—before asking if they can host a one-session conference on artists and the Russo-Ukrainian war. After chatting with a baritone gallery owner, Dirk grins at me, shouts something unintelligible, and starts cleaning up. It takes him three trips to haul away the paving stones he used to hold his posters down in the autumn breeze and, eight years ago, the kids of Maidan lobbed at police.

As I pack up the camera tripod, sliding its legs together, it dawns on me: “I take the train to Lviv tomorrow, so this is my last time on the Maidan.” I look around: Berehynia smiling down from her column, the multi-colored pigeons (black, white and mottled), the smattering of Kyivers going about their day, and the regulars, the yellow-blue wrist-band vendors and two tourist-photo hustlers, one wearing a cartoon horse outfit, the other covered with tattoos and carrying two large, white show pigeons, to whom I nod, since I got some photos earlier.

“What an incredible place, a cool architectural space, a symbolic place,” I muse, until I work myself up and start yelling to myself: “In the middle of a fucking genocidal war, the goddamn Ukrainians are so democratic, they don’t mind anyone coming to their central square and saying whatever the fuck they want—including the likes of Dirk, a half-crazed German performance artist!” During my five or six times on the Maidan, in fact, I don’t recall seeing a single soldier, police officer or even untoward stare.

Dirk Grosser doing a performance piece on Kyiv's Maidan Square, on September 17, 2022. photo: D. Blair

The next day, Dirk and I bade each other adieu with repressed emotions. Suddenly involved in each other’s lives—we also took meals together and roomed in a deluxe, rococo one-bedroom on Pushkin Street ($24 a night and four blocks from the Maidan!)—we were unable to understand what that might mean in the middle of our generation’s most destructive and divisive war, now slicing through countries, ideologies and friendships as well as mass murdering Ukrainians.

It was 1 a.m. by the time I hit Lviv. The cabbie raced the three miles of curfew-cleared streets from the train station to downtown, which is next to Old Town, where I had a spartan room in a 19th century building. In Ukraine, what that usually means is the building's entrance, stairs and hallways are falling apart—a comment on undemocratic collectivism, perhaps—but, once inside an apartment, they’re nice, large, luxurious even, having been renovated by the actual owner. At Kirill’s, for example, which he rents for the equivalent of 400 bucks, we walked up three flights of decrepit stairs, along a pealing balcony, and into a lovely, high-ceilinged duplex with a wrought-iron staircase, which leads to a big bedroom with a claw-foot tub and view of the city.

And spotless. Ukrainians are hygiene freaks who take their shoes off at home and in some businesses, like dental offices, and put on slippers or disposable shoe coverings.

Donning my slippers and stumbling down the dark hall, past five other rented rooms, I was happy to see my small room and tiny bed, which obliged my toes to stick out the slats at the bottom, as well as the chair, desk and large window, which looked out on Kryva Lypa, Lviv’s well-known courtyard crammed with cafes, now deserted during wartime at 2 a.m.

Kryva Lypa means “crooked linden tree,” which is still here, three stories tall, right beneath my window and surrounded by a circular, wrought-iron bench often occupied by women laughing, hipsters arguing, parents rocking kids or soldiers enjoying peace. Instead of the tourist trap I had assumed Kryva Lypa to be, when I moved in, it’s an old bohemian hang- and hide- out, protected by its two access tunnels, which can be easily blocked. Indeed, Kryva Lypa is where Lviv’s first movies were shown in 1903 and hippies and punks first congregated.

An eight-foot, punk-era turntable sculpture still hangs in the brew pub Bratyska (“bratyar” means brothers), which features 30 beers on tap, including a tomato one I didn’t try, and a famous borscht I did, every day for a week, in fact, after catching a cold. Prepared daily by Pani Lida (“pani” means missus), the no-nonsense, middle-aged woman I saw taking smoke breaks on the front porch, the borscht was both tasty and had great sides: cloves of garlic and slices of onion and pig fat, in addition to the standard sour cream and dark bread. No wonder Bratyska is so popular with college students, especially from the National Academy of Art, two miles away.

“I’m taking the interior design curriculum but hate, hate it,” said Pauline, whom I met on Bratyska's porch and is tall and stunning, despite the acne she doesn’t hide with makeup. “It was the only department I could get into with my small portfolio. I only draw or paint sometimes. My passion is performance art.” “Oh, that’s cool,” I effused, trying to seem so myself, “A friend of mine just did a performance on the Maid—” but Pauline interrupted me. Her friends from the Academy, easily recognizable by their distinct dress and greetings, had arrived.

Girl posing with a sculpture of their beloved 'babuskas' (grandmothers), Kyiv. photo: D. Blair

Next to the Bratyska was a well-appointed nightclub and jazz venue, which just reopened as a comedy club. “Lviv’s fourth,” I was told by the ticket taker, a twenty-something Ukrainian-American woman raised in Sacramento, which is near where I live in California, who moved back after the war started. “What can I say? Ukrainians love comedy,” she explained. “People under threat of death need humor?” I offered, " Perhaps the gallows humor thing," and, “Or they’re honoring Zelensky,” which finally got a laugh.

In fact, Zelensky did do standup around Kyiv, Ukraine and Russia, where he also acted in a number of films, including playing Napoleon in the Russian comedy feature “Rzhevsky Versus Napoleon” (2012). Although poorly reviewed and a box office flop, the film’s kooky plot or mere existence suggests that conquering Ukraine was not foremost on most Russians' minds at that time. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s experience in Russia, from being a comic on the road to a more respected actor or his one meeting with Putin, provided him invaluable insight.

“We know for sure that we don’t need the war,” Zelensky pleaded with Russian listeners, during his February 23rd, eve-of-destruction broadcast. “Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if we’ll be attacked… if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves."

"You are demanding security guarantees from NATO, but we also demand security guarantees. Security for Ukraine from you, from Russia and other guarantees of the Budapest Memorandum. [If there is war] nobody will have guarantees of security anymore. Who will suffer the most from it? The people. Who doesn’t want it the most? The people! Who can stop it? The people. But are there those people among you? I am sure.”

Across from Microbrew Bratyska, in one of Kryva Lypa’s access tunnels, is one of its lesser lights: Dizzy Coffee, a tiny shop with two tables and a small upstairs loft but a powerful interior design using Piet Mondrian's colored squares. After my late-night return from Kyiv, I dropped by Dizzy for a quick cappuccino but got into an in-depth discussion with the barista, Andrii.

Thin, dark haired and 23 years old, with a sweet face beneath a light beard, Andrii has a degree in economics and a penchant for machine-gun-fire speech and wild gesticulation. As I learned over the next few days, Andrii is the elder in a crew of voracious-reading, pop-culture-consuming and debate-loving kids, who also listened to their grandparents. It was Andrii, in fact, who informed me of the Holodomor’s three rounds—1932-3, ’45 and ’46-7—hands flying around the espresso machine for emphasis but not spilling a drop.

“My grandmother worked in bakery,” Andrii said, during our first chat, which went high speed between coffee customers for over an hour. “Soldiers came every day and took 90 percent of bread. It’s a problematic. It goes for few years after war.” The Soviets also murdered almost 300 Ukrainian writers in the 1930s—"They are called 'executed renaissance,'” he told me—and kept killing intellectuals into the ‘70s.

Andrii, economist, historian and barista, at his post in Kryva Lypa's Dizzy Coffee, where he headed up a crew of young Lviv intellectuals. photo: D. Blair

“She was Jew, Holocaust survivor from Warsaw,” Andrii added about his mother’s mother. “Her name was Mandelbaum, popular Jewish name,” although his family didn’t find that out until perusing her papers after she died. As it happened, her husband was a member of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, who had been arrested and did time in Siberia before they met.

“Did they know each other’s stories?” I asked. “They must have,” Andrii said, “They lived together for many years.” “Did they love each other?” “They must have, they had four children.” “Is your mother loving?” “Yes.”

Somewhere around then, into Dizzy’s cramped confines strode Andrii’s best friend, Vasyl, 22, all boots, skinny jeans and unkempt, curly black hair. A programmer for a German company, who does comparatively well, I learned when he told me about his life two weeks later, Vasyl grew up poor in one of the Soviet-style apartment blocks that speckle the suburbs of eastern bloc cities. When he was sixteen, he worked in a factory for eight months, learned not to romanticize proletariat life, and bought his first computer. He also plays classical piano, loves heavy metal and punk, often reads or listens to books on tape, and writes poetry. Andrii writes prose. Vasyl also told me about his grandparents, speaking almost as fast as Andrii but with less gesticulation.

“He was very, very against war,” Vasyl said about his grandfather, Mykhailo (Michael in Ukrainian). “He was born few years before the Great War and saw many terrible, terrible things as a kid: dead people, dead animals, bombed buildings, bombed streets, bombed whole cities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera”—Vasyl’s trademark expression in English. Andrii’s is “problematic,” used as a noun.

“He wrote it all in his memoir, which I read, which was hard to read, because it is written by hand and had many strong statements. Some too strong for publication,” although that could be cleaned up by his daughter, Vasyl’s mother, a book editor. “He died last week,” Vasyl added, to which I offered condolences. “He had good life. He was 85. We will have cemetery thing on Sunday.”

Vasyl’s parents are religious, which is how many older Ukrainians addressed the terrible trauma of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism and genocide, although his mother is Jehovah’s Witness. “It was her way of rebelling against grandfather, who was Orthodox,” Vasyl explained. Somewhere in there, he noted that, “She and I are the only ones in our family to graduate from university,” although Mykhailo was a renown building crane operator.

Vasyl (rt), another one of Lviv's young intellectuals, having a beer with Andrii at the popular Bratyska brew pub. photo: D. Blair

“When the war started, Grandfather thought we should surrender, surrender right now, surrender as soon as possible,” Vasyl said, getting excited. “‘We are going to lose anyway,’ he kept saying, ‘And that will stop killing.’ But after a week, Grandfather changed his mind. ‘We have to fight,’ he said, ‘To stop killing in the future.’”

Andrii tried to enlist in the Ukrainian Army but was rejected and did extensive volunteer work near Kyiv. Vasyl didn’t bother, since he’s been plagued with health problems since childhood and figures he can contribute more in other ways. What he calls his “homemade NGO” recently bought a car, 70 pairs of socks and some shoulder bags for rocket-propelled grenades, which a friend drove across Ukraine to “their unit.”

For the next three weeks almost daily, Andrii, Vasyl and I embarked on a broken-field run across Western civilization, from “The Bible” and Plato to Poe and Crowley, the filmmakers Lynch and Tarantino, or the philosophers beloved by twenty-somethings worldwide: the Slovenian leftist Slavoj Žižek and the innovative evolutionary psychologist but also rightwinger from Canada, Jordan Peterson, both of whom Andrii and Vasyl find interesting but too extreme. One of them, I can’t remember which, read and enjoyed “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller, the other Gregor Von Rezzori’s “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite”, two of my favorite books.

We lingered over Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”, which I hadn’t read, I was ashamed to admit, but knew of as the great farce of Russian literature. Bulgakov was from Kyiv, it turned out, and fought in the Russian Civil War, first for the czar, then the nationalists. His satire is so dry, according to Andrii and Vasyl, critics are still arguing whether Bulgakov was sending up or supporting Stalin.

“Satire doesn’t work with conspiracy theorists, because they take it literally,” I pointed out. "Are you familiar with ‘The Illuminati! Trilogy’ by Robert Anton Wilson?” “No,” said Vasyl. “It’s about a secret group called the Ill—” “We know about Illuminati!” “OK, great, and how ‘bout QAnon?” “Of course!” “Anyway, Wilson, he was only joking about the Illuminati, which is why he put an exclamation point in his title, but readers believed him anyway. Actually, he was trying to put people off believing in conspiracy theories, like McCarthyism... the communist scare in the '50s?" "Yes, yes, we know about McCarthyism!"

“We don’t worry about such bullshit!” interjected Andrii, “We have too many conspiracy problematics from Russia.”

At any moment, of course, we would switch to breaking news or reports from the front, which I was now getting from an American with a literary bent and checkered past who was fighting with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion near Kherson. Paid the same as Ukrainians, foreigners can reject orders or quit fighting. Over hours-long phone calls—one of which Vasyl listened in on—or text dialogues, Terry, 53, from upstate New York, regaled me with pithy stories about firefights or his international comrades: the short, gorgeous Norwegian of tribal Sana heritage, who was tough as nails and drove a Porsche, the Jewish woman medic from Texas, who hauled a wounded man almost twice her size to safety, or his close friend Paul Kim, 1997-2022, whose death devastated him. A Korean-American from Oklahoma, Kim was a dedicated democrat, an up-for-anything warrior, and perhaps the first ex-US military officer to die in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The Lviv youth debate team: (rt-lft) The 16-year-old Evelina, Andrii, Vasyl, Marion and Yaroslav. photo: D. Blair

Or we’d analyze Putin’s psychology, that of the leftists supporting him or the rightwingers opposing him. After beers at Bratyska one night, we retired to my meagre quarters, and Vasyl delivered a dissertation on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi punks: how they emerged from the punks of Russia, a society defined by its anti-Nazism, which makes those symbols an easy way to rebel; how a popular Russian punk musician moved to Kyiv and developed a following; how they want to destroy the state, like anarchists, not strengthen it, like actual National Socialists; and how it was better to keep talking to them rather than letting them stew in alienation.

Stepping into Dizzy once, I found it empty except for Andrii and Vasyl arguing loud and fast and gesturing wildly. “What are you debating?” I finally interrupted. “Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome,” Vasyl said. “Which side are you on?” “Equality of opportunity.” “So Andrii is still a leftist?” “Sort of.” “Does Dizzy’s owner ever worry you’re driving away customers?” “No. He sits right there,” said Andrii, pointing to where I had seen a quiet, amiable fellow, by the name of Volodya, Vasyl told me. “I buy a coffee or two a day,” he added, “As do all our friends, which keeps Volodya in business.”

Indeed, Dizzy was often half full of their friends, working on laptops, chatting quietly, debating loudly or getting caffeinated. They were mostly young women like Maria, a sweet, smart and hardworking translator, to whom Vasyl would call out mid-sentence for help with a word in English, Anya, the elegantly-dressed, redheaded photographer, who did their photo shoots, or Zosia, an artist, graphic designer and adventurous spirit as well as Dizzy’s weekend barista, who once told me, “Lviv is all hippies."

Some of them were helping Andrii and Vasyl on their new magazine, Фрайдей найт. Pronounced “fraydey nayt” and meaning Friday night, it references an older magazine, Четвер (“chetver” meaning Thursday), edited by a popular modernist writer from the Carpathians, Yuriy Izdryk. Friday Night's logo—a slab of meat taped to a Ukrainian embroidery, a la Maurizio Cattelan’s "Banana" (Art Basel Miami, 2019)—was designed by Andrii’s girlfriend, Stasia (short for Anastasia), who is talented, bright-eyed, beautiful and, it so happens, blonde, and may be all of 20.

“Andrii will do more editing and content creation,” Vasyl said, “And I will do tech and funding. We will focus more on ideas, poetry and philosophy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, since war is already discussed everywhere.” The first issue will probably be printed in February, they told me, and be accompanied by a social media presence.

Some of Dizzy’s denizens were only 16, I was surprised to learn, and still in high school, where they’d read but didn’t quite get Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, one admitted to me. A few joined the debate club Andrii and Vasyl attended and toured with around Ukraine. They invited me to the club once, which met weekly at a youth center across Old Town, and debated in English, so I could participate. Watching Evelina, a tall, innocence-exuding, almost albino-blonde 16 year old defend the proposition “Is nostalgia beneficial?” in high-speed English—on top of hanging around Andrii, both her parents are lawyers—I thought, “My god, the kids of Maidan are getting younger, fiercer and more articulate!” No wonder Putin is petrified.

The ruins of the 16th century Golden Rose Synagogue is one of Lviv's only Jewish memorials and a popular teen hangout. photo: D. Blair

The next day, September 26th, was Rosh Hashana, the beginning of Judaism’s high holy days, which I usually honor by going to a synagogue for a few hours, even though I'm agnostic. Although Lviv has one synagogue left, the Beis Aharon V'Israel, near the train station, which has been run for the last three decades by a lovely New York Hasidic rabbi and his wife, I decided to tour the city’s synagogue ruins, of which there are many. After searching online and extensively on the ground, I found the weathered plaque marking the largest, the Great Synagogue, now an empty lot with a small playground but a majestic colonnade of trees. I also found the Tempel Synagogue, no sign but again an empty lot, which suggests some respect for the half millennium when Lviv was almost one third Jewish.

Then I headed to my favorite, the Golden Rose Synagogue in Old Town, a wonder of medieval architecture from 1582 until August 1942, when the Nazis destroyed it, except for the floor and back wall. Aside from the memorial for the Jewish ghetto, which has a nice park on a main avenue with a menorah and large sculpture, the Golden Rose is Lviv's only Jewish memorial. It features extensive explanatory signage, in Ukrainian and English, and a modest row of waist-high black stones engraved with photos and quotes. One stone has a famous 17th century rabbi, Joel Sirkis, declaring, "[Lviv is] a grand and glorious city, full of scholars, writers and teachers... the source of wisdom and foundation of prudence."

In addition, for the last 30 years at least, the Golden Rose has been a hangout for teenagers, perhaps because there’s no one to chase them away. In all kinds of weather or times of day, up to a hundred kids of Lviv are at the Golden Rose, playing music, goofing around, flirting and drinking, sometimes to excess, sometimes relieving themselves in the destroyed sanctuary, since no toilet is readily available.

They breathe life into old stones, I find, which is why I had already visited the Golden Rose three or four times. And why I spent a few hours there the afternoon of Rosh Hashana, gazing into its grassy remains, reading about the Jews of Lviv and their annihilation, and thinking about my own mistakes and trespasses during the last year, which is the spiritual assignment of the last day of the ten-day holiday, Yom Kippur. "Were there any major errors I was missing?" I wondered.

The kids didn’t pay me much mind, despite my being over three times their age, until I felt a presence behind me: a short, stocky young man. Speaking decent English, Valter, 23, a soldier on leave from fighting near Kharkiv, invited me to drink with his buddies. I begged off, explaining I’d rather not since it was a Jewish holiday, but he kept repeating his invitation and, somewhere in there, noted his grandfather was a Nazi.

“A Nazi from Germany?” I asked, incredulous. “Yes,” Valter said. “Was he an OK person?” “Yes.” “Did he give you candy as a kid?” “Yes.” “Did he treat your mother well?” “Yes,” he said and added, tentatively, “It is weird. My grandfather fought the Russians. Now I am fighting the Russians.”

I looked into Valter's unassuming gaze. Facing physical death or the moral dilemma of dehumanizing the enemy is not a walk in the park at any age. Indeed, my Foreign Legion contact, Terry, tough as he claimed to be and over twice Valter's age, mentioned both of those difficulties. Finally, I said, “It’s good you are talking about it,” and gave him a hug, which he accepted. “Keep talking about it, I would say, just keep talking about it.”

Valter’s friends were Oras, six-foot-seven, about 20 and with an excellent command of English; Adriana-Maria, younger and blonde, who poured me a paper cup with some hard alcohol and an energy drink, which I held but didn’t sip, and two 14 year olds, Ruslan and Nazar, who attended high school nearby. The nattily-dressed and dark, shoulder-length haired Ruslan didn’t speak a word of English, but the skinny, scruffy and nerdy Nazar did, expressively if haltingly. Ruslan and Nazar seemed to be enjoying Lviv’s dreamy, vibrant youth scene, even in the middle of a deadly, disastrous war, which Valter must have had told them about, and to which they may have to eventually go.

Valter (cntr), a 23 year-old soldier, shows a drawing of him at the front by a 9-year girl, who gave it to him, and (lft-rt) Oras, Adriana-Maria and Ruslan, the Golden Rose Synagogue memorial, Lviv. photo: D. Blair

Indeed, beyond the Golden Rose Synagogue, a brutal geopolitics was unraveling with alarming alacrity:

• Six days earlier, on September 20th, President Zelensky addressed the U.N. Assembly by video. “What is not in our formula? Neutrality,” he said. Later, he asked, “Why [is] the Russian military so obsessed with castration? What was done to them so that they want to do this to others?” but ended on a hopeful note. “We decided to provide humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and Somalia… additional amounts of our wheat.”

• The next day, Putin ordered the immediate mobilization of 300,000 soldiers and repeated his big lie: Russia will “liberate [the Donbas] from the neo-Nazi regime, which seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as the result of an armed state coup.” Russia will also defend itself, including territory incorporated after the upcoming “referendum,” by any means necessary, he said, voicing yet another nuclear threat, which started on February 28th, when Russia’s nuclear forces went on high alert.

• Within hours, there were arrests, riots and shootings at Russian draft centers, including authorities by draftees. Mostly non-Russian, they were well aware they will become part of the standard Russian strategy of throwing large numbers of troops against better -trained and -equipped opponents. Within days, up to a quarter million military-age men had fled Russia, choking airports and border crossings from Finland to Kazakhstan.

• On September 24th, the so-called referendum "asked" Ukrainians in Russia-controlled territory whether they wanted to become Russian, with soldiers going house to house coercing votes, even from 13 year olds. The same day, Zelensky announced that surrendering Russian soldiers “will be treated in a civilized manner, in accordance with all conventions,” while a United Nations panel reported that Russians had tortured civilians and raped children.

• Four days later, the referendum passed by a supposed 97% and, the following day, a video went viral of a Russian soldier surrendering after finding himself at the front without proper equipment, three days after being drafted off a street in Moscow.

• On September 30th, the Kremlin celebrated “Ukrainians rejoining the motherland” in Moscow’s Red Square with pop music performances, a military spectacle and speeches. “Western elites deny national sovereignty and international law," Putin said, using the common conspiracist trick of accusing enemies of one’s own crimes. "Their hegemony has a pronounced character of totalitarianism,” he claimed before calling on Kyiv “to end the war that they unleashed back in 2014.”

• That same day, Zelensky stood on a Kyiv street empty except for a small desk on which he signed Ukraine’s official application to NATO.

That same night, the last one of September and a Friday, coincidentally (considering Andrii and Vasyl's magazine), the rain pisses down, as it has almost constantly for three weeks. I think of the soldiers. It must be brutal soaked to the bone, trying to move through swollen streams and muddy fields, especially when on the attack, as many Ukrainian fighters have been since a few days before the deluge started on September 10th.

My room is cold, and I have a bad cold, although it’s not Covid, I know, since I just took a test. Ukraine did not miraculously escape the pandemic, as it sometimes seems, it's just that Covid's mortal threat is far overshadowed by that of war. Hence, no one mentions it, unless someone actually gets sick, and only one in a thousand on the street masks.

The Bratyska's famous borscht, replete with its fabulous side dishes. photo: D. Blair

The sirens start around midnight and howl for a half an hour straight, longer than the four or five other air raid signals I've heard in Ukraine. “Does that mean a real attack?” I text Andrii on Instagram, their preferred communication platform. “It’s bullshit,” he responds. “Should I go down to the basement?” “No. You will get sicker.”

The sirens wail intermittently until 4 a.m., long enough for me to entertain dark-night-of-the-soul scenarios: What if the Russians bomb Kryva Lypa to punish Ukrainian free thinking at one of its sources? “Kryva Lypa is old. Its buildings have big walls,” Andrii said earlier that day, tapping a wall, “Only direct hit breaks this.”

It strikes me as tragic but also absurd and then disgusting and grotesque that my new friends and I, the community of Kryva Lypa, the people of Lviv, the people of Ukraine, a burgeoning, nation-building democracy, are now ensnared in a modern, mass-murderous war.

“It is already World War Three,” according to some Russia analysts, like the preeminent English-American Fiona Hill, who was Trump’s Russia expert but provided damning testimony at his first impeachment, which was all about Ukraine, oddly enough. Indeed, it concerned Trump’s attempt to blackmail President Zelensky, whom Trump considered corruptible, but then Trump's exposure as corrupt by a Ukrainian-American, ironically, the U.S. Army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman, who listened in on Trump’s “perfect phone call.” Trump's scam—to withhold essential weaponry until Zelensky enacted or merely announced a phony investigation into President Joe Biden's son, Hunter, who was paid $11 million from 2013 through 2018 by the Ukrainian company Burisma—was probably suggested by his so-called Ukraine expert, Paul Manafort. Trump and company also repeated Kremlin conspiracy theories like Ukraine is not a real country, it is the most corrupt country in world, and it, not Russia, hacked the Democratic National Committee's emails in 2016.

Putin has worked with conspiracy theories his entire professional life, first as a K.G.B. agent, then as president. Shortly after his appointment, in fact, he blamed Chechens for the highly suspicious Moscow apartment bombings of September 1999 in order to start the Second Chechen War. Wars work well with the conspiracist formula that reality is an illusion, enemies are out to get us, and only I can save you.

“In my opinion, the reason [Putin is] at war in Ukraine is not a fear of NATO enlargement or because he’s trying to build a bigger Russian empire for his legacy,” remarked William Browder, who is from a famous leftist American family but became the biggest hedge fund manager in Moscow until he crossed Putin, on Ukrainian television (10/22/2022). Instead of following the zeitgeist shift to post-modern kleptocracy, Browder blew the whistle on corruption. After he was almost extradited to Russia from Spain, on a phony Interpol warrant, Browder developed the Magnitsky Act, which was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 2012 and then by Canada and the European Union. It facilitates the sanctioning of foreign officials who violate human rights, and the freezing of their assets, and is named for Browder's lawyer, the Ukrainian-born Sergei Magnitsky. In 2009, the F.S.B., the successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., arrested, tortured and killed Magnitsky.

"I think he’s at war because he’s a dictator who has stolen so much money over the last 22 years from his people that he’s afraid the whole thing will explode,” Browder concluded. “I believe he started this war in Ukraine, very simply, to distract his people away from him towards essentially a fictitious enemy, the Ukrainian people.”

“After Crimea, his popularity was at 90 [percent] and so life was good for Putin,” noted the Russian economist Sergey Guriyev, now living in France (Global Economy Meeting, 1/12/23). “Then it started to come down—because of raising retirement age, because of pretty successful anti-corruption campaign, and social media campaign by the opposition, so his popularity came to 60 again—and so he thought it was time to do something like 2014, something like Crimea.”

Yet another 'art during war' piece depicting the Russian president, at Kyiv's Military Museum. photo: D. Blair

Donald Trump has long allied with Vladimir Putin and other conspiracy theorists and promoted false narratives, from birtherism to election denial, but some of his followers have tired of the deceit, as indicated by Republican losses in the midterm elections. Putin, however, has state media and police and military power at his disposal, plus 70 years of classical Soviet indoctrination and 20 years of the modern Russian version. As it happens, the former's noble fantasies, propaganda and double speak was easier to deprogram than today's cyber-powered cynicism, grievance-baiting, what-about-isms and conspiracy theories, which complement the ubiquitous graft. The Kremlin elite believe they have crafted a powerful enough narrative and gravy train and conned enough people, in Russia and abroad, with the big lies of "Ukraine is Nazi" and "America overthrew Ukraine and is using it to destroy Russia," to legitimize yet another one of the region's prolonged bloodbaths, either in a years-long war or nuclear attacks.

As dawn breaks over Kryva Lypa, I finally realize what's been bugging me since Rosh Hashana.

When I was 12 years old, I did a school presentation about and solicited donations for Biafra, where two million people eventually starved to death in Nigeria’s civil war (1967-70). In 1983, I started reading the history and literature of the Holocaust and attending conferences, in an attempt to heal myself, my family and my community. To a limited degree, I spoke out about the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, as I wish more people had for European Jewry. My first published piece, “Interview with Bruno Lowenberg”, was about a Berlin bookman and survivor of Dachau and won a North-West Journalism Award (1983). I co-created “Our Holocaust Vacation” (2007), a documentary about my family’s return to Poland with my mother, Tonia Rotkopf Blair, an Auschwitz survivor, which showed on PBS, and I edited her book, “Love at the End of the World: Stories of War, Romance and Redemption” (2021, Austin Macauley, available through all major outlets).

But I neglected Ukraine.

As the first of October brightens into a gray, rainy day, I realize: Not only did Obama and Merkel drop the ball on Ukraine, I had. When Russia voided the Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea and the Donbas, there should have been more governmental sanctions—if not military intervention or at least arm shipments by the Memorandum's signees—but also people protests. That I didn’t recognize Ukraine's Woodstock-nation moment in 2014, nor its harsh repression by a colonialist overseer, or that I can't even convince some of my hard-left friends that is what has happened—even after telling them about my two-month encounter with Ukraine (my loud exchange with Lyudmila, an 80-year-old physics professor and Russian-Jewish-American, at a Hanukkah party in the Oakland hills, was embarrassing)—is a personal failure of grotesque proportions, given one of my life projects is to oppose genocide.

I only started reading Snyder and Applebaum after February 24th—ordering their books that very day, in fact—although I had read about and endorsed Snyder’s thesis, detailed in his “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010), that both Germany and the Soviet Union sought to colonize and depopulate Ukraine. I raced through his “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018), even while taking 25 pages of notes, so gob smacked was I to learn that the American conspiracist movement, which I had been researching and opposing since 9/12, and writing and publishing on since June 2020 (see "Why Trump and QAnon Are So Hard to Stop: Conspiracy Theories and LARPs"), borrowed many of its methods and claims as well as hacked emails from Russia.

All authorities lie constantly is the radical, new Russian worldview, according to Snyder, who observes that, “[Russian] politicians first spread fake news themselves, then claim that all news is fake, and finally that only their spectacles are real,” on page 11 of “The Road to Unfreedom”. That they are both more honest about the spectacle and better at it is how they sell it simultaneously to a naive public as well as conspiracy professionals. In their post-truth world, as well as perpetrate endless conspiracy theories, they can erase bothersome facts, assuage enormous suffering through denial, and endorse evermore outrageous fantasies, including their hybrid of postmodernism, socialism, fascism and Russian traditionalism, which will save the world, they claim, from western imperialism, decadence and gender dysphoria.

I also gobbled up Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy” (2020), a precise, personal and comprehensive view of liberal democracy's decline in Europe. Poland's lurch to the right surprised me since it seemed to be doing a great job of integrating with Europe, when I visited in 2005, and it had made immense progress since 1997, when I was there filming "Our Holocaust Vacation". Applebaum had a ringside seat, since her husband, Radek Sikorski, was Poland's Minister of Defense from 2005 to 2007 (he also led the E.U.’s admirable attempt to mediate between the Maidanites and Yanukovych). She details how the Poles were overcome by “the politics of resentment,” polarization, anti-democratic practices and what has become a worldwide religion, conspiracy theories. “’[T]here was no such thing as an accident [to him],’” a friend of Applebaum told her about Lech Kaczyński, Poland’s president from 2005 to 2010, “’If something happened it was the machination of an outsider. Conspiracy is his favorite word.’”

Along with Snyder, Applebaum has long reported on related problems in Russia—notably in her books "Gulag: A History" (2004, Pulitzer Prize winner) and "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" (2017)—and foreshadowed or predicted the current catastrophe.

The goddess Berehynia on her column surveying the Maidan, including a field of Ukrainian flags honoring fallen Ukrainian and foreign fighters. photo: D. Blair

The all-clear siren sounds around 7 a.m., and I hear doors opening and chairs scraping as Kryva Lypa’s waiters and baristas start another business day during wartime. That's when my thoughts turn to the Maidan.

“If the Russians go nuclear,” it suddenly hits me, “The Maidan will surely be ground zero! If the Russians are already attacking libraries, memorials and other cultural institutions, they will obviously want to destroy the central symbol of Ukraine's independence movement.”

I feel like crying, but the tears don't come.

As horrific, unimaginable and destructive as nuking the Maidan will be for Russia, Europe and the world, as well as of course for Kyiv and the people of Ukraine, those are the Kremlin's stakes, which it has been raising since a few days after the war started. Given Russia's systemic corruption, poor weapons, untrained soldiers and tradition of extreme violence, there will eventually be nowhere else for them to go for a path to victory. Nuking the Maidan will be counterproductive, politically, strategically and militarily, most analysts agree, but more militant and angry Russians, like members of the white supremacist mercenaries, the Wagner Group, now central to Russia’s war effort, get a perverse pleasure from being world-class killers.

"Never Again" seemed like a reasonable goal when I was coming up, but history suggests there will always be more genocides, that all weapons eventually get used, and some sort of nuclear attack is just a matter of time. Contemplating those conclusions can be psychologically devastating but we have to embrace the possibilities.

Nevertheless, the horror can't go on forever, history also indicates. Someday it will end, and Ukrainians will rebuild, restore and heal, as they did after the Holodomor, the Great Terror and the Nazis. Indeed, the kids of Maidan grew up hearing how their grandparents did exactly that, they just enjoyed three decades of democracy, which they refuse to renounce, and they love each other dearly.

It may take a decade or two to vanquish the Russian Federation, to give them enough death to inspire treaty adherence, to scrub Kyiv of radioactivity and reconstruct the Maidan in all its glory—to put Berehynia back on her golden pedestal—but Ukraine will survive, of that I suddenly feel certain, having gotten to know the kids of Maidan.

I lull myself to sleep in my tiny bed, which finally warmed up, imagining how the Maidan will look during its first Victory Day celebration, which I am determined to attend. I see happy faces, despite the horrific death toll and suffering, because surmounting that soul-crushing sorrow is an obligation of Ukraine's geographical-historical destiny. I hope my decades of Holocaust and mystical studies are enough to offset my own sadness and help them with theirs, especially when I see some of my Ukrainian friends and, if the road to peace is long and they survive, their kids. I also hope to meet an incredible crew of freedom fighters and lovers from around the world, including, I hope, anti-fascist Russians.

Drifting into dreamland, I fantasize about the speakers and performers on the Maidan’s proscenium for Victory Day. There will be some fantastic dancers, I assume, as well as performances and art shows around the square and across Kyiv and Ukraine. There will surely be seminars and conferences addressing how to restore a devastated economy, infrastructure and environment, augment psychological services or develop dialogues in polarized societies, which Americans would do well to attend. I also hope there will be presentations on the Roma crisis, LGBTQ rights and Jewish history tailored to Ukrainians.

I left Ukraine on October 9th, the sky still dark with impending storms. Eighteen hours later, the air raids in Lviv and Kyiv were real, as Russia began its strategic bombing campaign against power and water facilities. In Lviv, the missiles did not kill anyone directly but the electrical blackouts did. None of my friends were seriously affected—they claimed it was nothing new, or they posted photos of candle-lit dinners—but I felt I had deserted them.

Things will get bad as temperatures drop, surgeons operate by flashlight, the elderly and young freeze, and World-War-One-style trench and artillery battles rage across the 500-mile eastern front. Meanwhile, the Kremlin keeps upping its ante: more infrastructure bombings, more relentless attacks, more soldiers mobilizing, more torturing of civilians, and more threats of their nihilist nightmare, nuclear holocaust.

Imagine what a populous, prosperous and peaceful country Russia would be today if they hadn’t killed so many of their own people as well as others. Despite their world-class literature, their leaders appear unfamiliar with a central fact of human history: If bullies were so successful down through the ages, we'd still be living in caves.

It will be tragic, it will be brutal, it will be genocide, even without the detonation of nuclear devices. Unfortunately, the efficacy of our ideas—and how they trickle down to civic society, culture, technology and discipline—are periodically tested by those who fantasize that extreme amorality and brutality can bring victory. Sadly, the only way to prove them wrong is by force of arms. During this difficult moment of historical transition to a digital, diverse and civil-rights-supportive world, the kids of Maidan may end up saving not only Ukraine but the spirit of democracy.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Dec 22, 2022 - 01:33 PM