This video took Ukraine by storm today. If you haven’t seen it already, you really need to watch it. The occasion: President Medvedev of Russia had just arrived in Kyiv. He and President Yanukovych of Ukraine were laying wreaths at a World War II memorial. Unfortunately, there was a rainstorm in Kyiv yesterday ….

Dan and I went down to Kiev’s main boulevard, Khreshchatik, to watch the Victory Day parade, which marked the 65th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.  There were marching bands, tanks, war veterans carrying bouquets of flowers, and lots of Ukrainian army conscripts dressed up in World War II style uniforms.

This woman told us she was born in Kiev one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, June 21, 1941.

We decided this picture needed a caption.  Just WHAT is that other guy thinking?

PHOTO CAPTIONS
“*They* won the Cold War?”
Or…
“No, Durak, the strap goes over the *right* shoulder!”  Rob Gurwitt

“He looks too happy; we must have him deported.”  Lori Ashford

“How is that man listening to the voices in his head, without headphones?  Tim Fretz

“The Red Army synchronized swim team sizes up its new Mennonite coach” Matt Frumin

“Jew?!” David Rubenson

“Where are the KGB when we need them?” Monica McCarthy

“Big fancy American. He don’t even have no stinkin’ medals!” Peter Breslow

“Hey, what’s he doing out of the Gulag?”  Scott Simon

“My belt’s too tight and it’s making me grumpy.”  Cheryl Weber

“The hairdresser said if we wear these ‘permulators’ on our head for 4 hours, we can have hair just like this guy.” Tim Fretz

“Grrr…I bet he’s going to post this picture on facebook, too!”  Sonya Charles

“Bearded barbarian.  No medals or stylish cap either. Yet, he seems happy!” Tim Charles

“Weirdo go home!!!”  Sarah Swartzendruber

“There goes the neighborhood!”
“Bloody pacifists!”
“If only we still had the Gulag!”   Cal Eigsti

“I vant heem, vit catsup…maybe vit onions. Make dat catsup AND onions.”  Firoozeh Dumas

“I didn’t know Lenny Cosmos has a beard!”  David Bucher

“He’d look better in one of my hats”  Susan Stamberg

“NPR reporter interviews Ukrainian cosmonauts before attempted launch on flying saucer”   Chris Joyce

“I can’t believe we lost the Cold War to these smiling, medal-less fools…”John Borrazzo

WE ALSO RECEIVED THESE COMMENTS:

Gotta love those light-hearted Ukrainians!  What’s Dan smiling about?  Margie McCarthy Hall

Were you asking too many questions?  Rhoda Charles

I’m glad you guys are getting out of there soon. . .Jane Stewart

Nice to see he’s making friends over there. Dianne Torreson

It’s touching how welcome Dan’s presence is– and it’s hard to tell him apart from the natives.  Lizzy McCarthy

Why does it look like the guy is going to kill Dan??  Cathleen McCarthy

What did you do to deserve a look like that? How can those guys hear anything?  Sharyn Tieszen

I noticed the soldier is holding holding/restraining his hands, which is reassuring. Maureen McCarthy

Maybe the Red Army guy is wondering where Dan’s bathing cap and earplugs are?  Sheila (McCarthy) O’Brien

Brigid finally found a way to do a radio story about Ukraine’s mind-boggling footwear! She realized that we were watching a kind of Winter Olympic sport right here on the streets of Kyiv.

So: Here’s a link to the piece that ran on The World.

Now, I spent a lot of time and effort gathering visual material that The World couldn’t use. So here’s a slide show version, too! Hope you enjoy it.

How’s this for a fine group of young aspiring journalists?

These students are in the master’s level journalism program at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. They took a class on radio production that I co-taught last term. (My co-teacher, the fabulous Tanya Lockot, is on the far right in the green sweater.) If you understand Ukrainian, you can listen to their final projects here. I was quite pleased with the variety of their reports. Some looked back at history, others examined current social problems or cultural developments, and one climbed to the top of an abandoned building in downtown Kyiv.

I’ve also given a couple of lectures at other places, including the journalism departments at Zaporizhzhia National University and Kyiv’s National Aviation University, where this picture (below) was taken. The gentleman with me is Volodymyr Vladymyrov, who invited me to talk to his students. Vlad, as I call him, spent a year at the University of Missouri as a Fulbright scholar in 2003-2004.

Lecturing generally has gone pretty well. I’ve been very impressed by how well the students here understand English. They do their writing in Ukrainian, though, and my language limitations prevent me from doing much of the kind of teaching that I think is most valuable: Acting as an editor, and giving specific feedback to students on their own projects. I hope what I’m doing is still worthwhile!

Lenin

When we first arrived last summer, we came across a curious sight. Just around the corner from our apartment stood a large statue swathed in layers of green gauze. We soon learned that underneath all those bandages was none other than Vladimir Illych Lenin. He was recovering from an injury. Last June, some Ukrainian nationalists had smashed the Bolshevik leader’s face and arm with a hammer. (They want to get rid of statues and symbols that glorify Ukraine’s communist past).

We never actually saw anyone repairing the statue, although some ardent Communist Party members erected a tent next to the statue and kept a round the clock vigil. (Usually they were just milling around, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes).

So we were surprised when a few weeks ago, the gauze came off and Lenin was all better! There was a little celebration, with speeches, a band, and people laying flowers at his feet. The festivities were only marred by some malcontents who hurled red paint at the Bolshevik leader. They were quickly arrested, and the red paint scrubbed off.

A group of true believers now keeps a 24 hour watch over their man. With his chin thrust forward, Lenin strides resolutely into the bright socialist future.

Ever since we got here, we’ve intended to write something about the wild dogs who live on our street (and most other streets and parks of this city.) For outsiders like us, they are a startling and fascinating phenomenon: Dogs that live right in the middle of a city, side by side with humans, but which clearly are not pets. We learned very quickly to leave them alone. Soon after we arrived here, we were walking down our street and Nora saw a couple of them lying sleepily on the sidewalk. She instinctively moved toward the animals — they seemed so lovable! — and in an instant they were on their feet, barking and looking like they were ready to rip out our throats. We felt lucky to get away.

I’m finally posting this because last week, the Financial Times published a really interesting story about the wild dogs who live in Moscow. It sounds very similar to Kyiv, although I haven’t seen any dogs riding on the Metro here.

The FT story doesn’t dwell on the darker side of this canine community. The dogs, especially those that live in parks, can terrorize runners and bicyclists, and menace children at playgrounds. We’ve heard that there’s increasing interest in doing something to get ride of those dogs — but no action so far.

We speak very little Russian. When we go to restaurants it is hard to read the menu, on the street we can not read the signs, at the store we can not understand the food labels, but mostly we can not talk to Ukrainians very easily. There is a huge language barrier for us, and the Ukrainians. And when we can break through it, it is thrilling. I went with my mom (and a translator) to Kyiv’s main square and interviewed people there about what they thought about the candidates for president. It was a great language break through. I love coming along to those types of interviews. You get to hear what the normal people that you see on the street everyday in Kyiv think. It is really interesting and fun.

It is sometimes fun to try to use my Russian to communicate with people who do not speak English. I bet I sound silly but as long as I am understood, it is fine. My once a week violin lessons for instance. My violin teacher knows just as much English as I know Russian, so it is pretty even. He loves to learn new words in English and I like to learn new Russian words. I’m always learning. He pronounces many things wrong, but I can still understand, and I bet I do that too.

Once our family was in a restaurant and we were looking at things on the menu and trying to figure out what they meant, (we forgot the dictionary) when a couple came over and tried to help us. We could not understand what they meant when they said “Chicken head.” Finally we figured out they meant eggs. That sort of thing comes up a lot and it is amusing. We like living here because it is so interesting. Even though it is frustrating trying to communicate when you do not know the language, it can also be very entertaining.

A few months ago, I fell under the spell of Mikhail Bulgakov’s book White Guard. The book is set in Kiev and describes events that Bulgakov witnessed during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

Bulgakov was a native of Kiev, and his descriptions of “the City” are wonderfully evocative. A central image in the book, to which he returns again and again, is a statue of St. Vladimir that stands on a hill overlooking the river. When I read the book, I wasn’t sure exactly where this statue was, or if it still existed. So I was delighted to stumble onto it during a walk the other day.

Here, along with a few pictures, are two passages from White Guard.

In winter, as in no other city in the world, a calm fell over the streets and lanes and the upper City, over the hills and the lower City, sprawled out at a bend in the frozen Dnieper, and all the mechanical noise retreated into the stone buildings, which softened and muffled its growl. ….

But the electric white cross in the hands of the gigantic St. Vladimir on St. Vladimir’s Hill shimmered best of all ….. In the winter the cross shone in the thick black heavens and reigned coldly and calmly over the dark sloping distances of the Moscow shore, where two huge bridges crossed.

The books ends with this passage:
The last night blossomed. In its second half its heavy blue, God’s curtain, which enrobes the world, was blanketed with stars. In the infinite height beyond this blue curtain, at the holy gates, they seemed to be serving vespers. Lights were lit at the alter, and they appeared on the curtain as crosses, in clusters and squares. Above the Dnieper, Vladimir’s midnight cross rose from the sinful, bloodied, snowy earth to the black and gloomy heights. From a distance its crossbar seemed to disappear and merge with its vertical, transforming the cross into a sharp, menacing sword.

But this isn’t frightening. All this will pass. The sufferings, agonies, blood, hunger, and wholesale death. The sword will go away, but these stars will remain when even the shadows of our bodies and our affairs are gone from this earth. There is not a man who does not know this. So why are we reluctant to turn our gaze to them? Why?

If you look for them, this country is full of ghosts — masses of people who once lived here, but were driven away or killed in war, political oppression, pogroms, or genocide. One unanswered question in today’s Ukraine is how these vanished communities will be remembered. Are the Jewish shtetls, for instance, part of Ukraine’s national story? Or some separate history?

Brigid did a radio story for The World last week about one of these vanished people, the brilliant author Sholem Aleichem, and the community that he described in his stories about Tevye’s daughters. Those stories, of course, became the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” You can listen to the story by clicking on this link.

We only realized a few weeks ago that there’s a Ukrainian stage adaptation of “Tevye’s Daughters” playing here in Kyiv, Sholem Aleichem’s home town. Grigori Gorin, a Russian author and playwright, created it several decades ago, and it’s been playing here regularly for the past twenty years. Ukraine’s most famous living actor, Bogdan Stupka, plays the lead role. We went to see it, and even though we couldn’t understand the dialogue, it was an amazing experience. There’s no singing in this version, but a lot more laughing along with the crying. It seemed closer to the spirit of the original stories. But it was also a moving and slightly disturbing experience to experience these stories in the place where they were written, where the life they describe was so horribly snuffed out.