Independence Day in Kyiv
- Aaron Schorr
- Aug 28, 2021
- 16 min read
Updated: Aug 31, 2021
We all had a rough night and decided to take it easy the next day. We woke up and headed to Pochaina, site of Kyiv’s weekly flea market. Every good post-Soviet city has a large flea market, and they usually offer amazing Soviet memntoes and assorted knick-knacks. This was no exception, offering random knives, sewing machines, toy soldiers, electrical apparati, and coins with the occasional Nazi relic mixed in. There were also a surprising number of American-branded shirts and hats, alongside books of Soviet pins. So many pins. Bilal had a real thing for Soviet pins, and was attempting to collect the entire old guard of the CPSU, meaning he pored over every single book in an attempt to find elusive pins from the early years of the USSR. Unsurprisingly, finding Trotsky was proving rather challenging. The flea market had basically the only old men in Kyiv, and two of them pulled us into their shop, which was a wonderland of Soviet memorabilia, with maps, prints, and posters as well as endless albums full of pins. I got a fantastic resource map of North America and some interesting pins and walked away a happy camper.
We returned downtown for lunch at a Georgian restaurant that had been recommended to me. We ordered a proper feast to compensate for the previous day’s debacle, including the largest khinkali (boiled dumplings filled with meat) I had ever seen, easily as large as my fist. It was an absolutely delicious meal, but we weren’t the only ones having a good time - it may have only been 2 pm on a Sunday, but the local Piana Vyshnia (the same bar serving cherry liquor as in Chisinau) was full of people, including plenty of families with children.
Germans, New and Old
We took the metro to Arsenalna, which at 105.5 meters below ground is the deepest metro station in the world. The Soviets had a real penchant for deep metro stations (which could also serve as nuclear bunkers), but they also built really fast escalators which would probably not meet Western safety standards, so the trip to the surface was merely 4:05 minutes, much less than the Jerusalem train station which is 25 meters closer to the surface.
The Arsenal district above has a series of beautiful parks with memorials scattered throughout. First was a memorial to the Kyiv Arsenal Uprising, in which workers at the Arsenal revolted in support of the approaching Bolsheviks in January 1918. The memorial does not appear on any maps - perhaps due to the loaded prospect of indigenous Ukrainian support for the October Revolution - and we happened to stumble upon it by accident.
Next was a memorial to General Nikolay Vatutin, commander of the Voronezh Front which fought the Germans at Kursk in March 1943 and retook Kyiv in November of that year. Despite being murdered by Ukrainian nationalists in 1944, the liberator of the city received a place of honor in the center of the park.
We wanted to continue north to Marinsky Palace, but found the entire area cordoned off by massive police forces. We walked along the perimeter which had a policeman every 8 feet or so until a motorcade emerged from the palace and sped off, the German flags showing that it was Angela Merkel visiting on one of her last state visits as German chancellor. A group of protestors surrounded by riot police sounded their trumpets as the vehicles sped by, voicing their disapproval at Germany signing an agreement with Russia to provide natural gas through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The combination of Vatutin and Merkel was a good metaphor for Ukraine’s geopolitical reality - locked between Germany and Russia, each of which assumed the role of villain at different points in history.
We skirted the palace through the park as massive booms suddenly rocked the city. It sounded like the Germans were back (and in a way, they were), and we got a glance of an artillery battery set up on the opposite bank of the Dnieper as they continued to fire. Smoke covered the river and the explosions were almost deafening, but nobody seemed to mind. We reached the Arch of Friendship Between Nations, where a large group of teenagers was dancing to k-pop as the guns rested. The arch is meant to commemorate the ties of friendship between Russia and Ukraine, portrayed by the awfully homoerotic statue at its base, and became predictably controversial after the 2014 revolution and subsequent Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Instead of tearing it down as some suggested, the city decided to paint a large crack in it, which in my opinion does not do enough to depict the deep rupture in the relations between the two nations.
We walked down the hill towards our hostel as convoys of troops left the city after Merkel. With military planes flying overhead in their final rehearsals for Independence Day, it felt like something terrible was about to happen, but the ever-growing crowd of bargoers didn’t seem to notice.
A Walk through Ukraine’s Troubled Century
We were joined the next morning by Oleksii, a friend of mine from Yale who was a native of western Ukraine, who took us back to Arsenalna to complete the national monument trail. I was very happy to have a Ukrainian join us, even if he wasn’t quite a local, to lower the language barrier which had been steadily rising since leaving Turkey. Moldova, with its combination of Russian and Romanian, was manageable. Transnistria was more difficult, but I had traveled in Russian-speaking areas before and knew enough to get by. Odessa may have been Ukrainian, but Russian was still lingua franca, but in Kyiv Ukrainian was king. I had no problem with the Cyrillic, but over half the words shared no root with Russian, and getting around was not easy.
Oleksii had taken the night train from home, and we met over breakfast at the same Soviet canteen near our hostel, where we had a classic Ukrainian breakfast of sirniki (cheese-stuffed pancakes) and vareniki (potato dumplings, a cross between Russian pelmeni and Polish pierogi). We walked through the Park of Eternal Glory to the Holodomor Memorial, commemorating the Ukrainian famine of 1931-2 in which 3.5 people died as a result of deliberate Stalinist policy. I wanted to learn more about the event, but the museum was unfortunately under renovations, so I had to content myself with a look at the dramatic monument which perhaps ironically looked like something out of the Hunger Games.
Next was the Rodina (Motherland) complex, which would be the pinnacle of Ukrainian patriotism. We first came across a collection of military vehicles scattered in a parking lot. Many of them had seen actual combat in Donbass (the eastern region invaded by Russia), and bore signs designating them as "real evidence of Russia's military aggression against Ukraine”. We walked a little further to find another, much larger collection of WWII- and Soviet-era weaponry, including a Li-2, which was an exact Soviet copy of a DC-3, the largest tanks I have ever seen, and a SS-25 Sickle, a terrifying road-mobile ballistic missile which could wipe out a European country without being detected by American satellites.
We walked down a boulevard dedicated to городам героям слава (“the glory of hero cities”), lined with the names of the so-called Soviet “hero cities” which were commended for their bravery during the war - Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kyiv, Odessa, and Sevastopol, among others. Above us towered a statue of the Rodina (Motherland) herself, a 102-meter tall steel woman brandishing a sword as she looked out over the Dnieper towards Moscow. The Soviet designers did a great job, as the gravity of the place was impossible to ignore. Behind this was a small museum commemorating Ukraine’s very tumultous years following WWI, a historical episode I knew almost nothing about which Oleksii defined as “Ukrainians fighting against everybody - Poles, Germans, Russians, Communists, nationalists, and more.”
The main museum was supposed to be about Ukraine during WWII, but the first floor was entirely dedicated to the fighting in eastern Ukraine. The exhibit told the story of the invasion and the Ukrainian resistance, which cost the lives of 13,000 people from 2014-2018. It was strange to read about such recent history in a museum, but this one did a good job of telling the story, with lots of tattered Ukrainian flags to drive its points home.
The rest of the museum actually dealt with WWII, and specifically with the battle for Kyiv, during which the Germans managed to take some 600,000 Soviet soldiers prisoner. There was hardly any English, but many of the displays really didn’t need translation. We progressed through the duration of the war to the room commemorating the victory, which housed the famous eagle on the side of the Reichstag in Berlin toppled by the Soviet invaders. Even broken and on a pile of rubble in a museum, the statue seemed to pulse with power and command the room around it. It wasn’t all glory, though - the next room was a hall lined with photos of fallen soldiers, which despite its impressive length was merely a drop in the bucket of the roughly 20 million people the Soviet Union lost in the war.
We emerged from the dark and heavy room and walked up a flight of stairs into a bright white marble pavilion, the sun streaming in through the large windows and seemingly beckoning us to enter. The walls were lined with the names of all the soldiers who received the designation of Hero of the Soviet Union, and the ceiling had a beautiful mosaic with a Soviet star bearing the word победа (victory) at its center. We were physically located at the base of the Motherland statue with a view of Kyiv around us, and I was speechless at the incredibly powerful design of the place, which was highly evocative of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Mummies in Candlelight
After a coffee break, we made the short walk to Lavra, the main Orthodox church in Kyiv and one of the largest church complexes in the world, in use as a monastery since 1051. The tremendous compound partially belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (which is a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church), and thereby serves as something of a Russian bastion in the center of Kyiv. The woman at the gate spent a very long time scrutinizing our Yale IDs, but eventually agreed to let us pay the student rate with hardly a glance at Yotam’s Technion ID. The main church was plastered with icons on the exterior, which was something I had never seen before, and was beyond beautiful on the interior. Built in the 18th century and receiving handsome funding from Moscow, it looked like a newer and nicer version of St Sophia, with much more vivid Biblical frescoes on its walls and an absolute masterpiece of a golden altar at its center. A platoon of women was hard at work polishing every surface until it gleamed, with the result that the entire structure looked like an army base just before the visit of a senior officer. We entered a side church full of odd pillars bearing Jewish stars, and I was struck by how different Orthodox churches were from Western ones - they were stubby, with altars at their centers, room to stand at their wings, and never any place to sit.
No visit to a European city would be complete without a climb up a cathedral’s bell tower, but Kyiv offers a rather unique view. Most interesting is the view to the east, towards the Dnieper and across it. The river is bright green these days because of algae which flourish in its ever-warming waters, and so is the area around it which functions as a tremendous green lung in the heart of the city. The eastern bank is home to ugly new housing developments which Olexii, who had spent much of the summer interning for the deputy mayor of Kyiv, was all too happy to rant about, and I dubbed them “Transdnipria” in a homage to the breakaway republic on Ukraine’s southwestern frontier.
Lavra is particularly famous for its cave system, used by its monks as a burial site for hundreds of years. We walked to the edge of the complex and into the caves, which were pitch black and full of pilgrims. Everyone beside us had candles, but Olexii and I got ourselves two from a candelabra at a small shrine, which made for much safer walking. We had been in lots of tunnels over the past week, but these were probably the oddest. Small openings along the tunnels housed gilded sarcophagi in which various monks were buried, with the more notable ones getting dedicated shrines and altars. They were all wrapped in elaborate cloths, but some of them had mummified body parts peeking out, and mummified monk hands lit by candlelight in a dark cave are unquestionably one of the most horrifying things my eyes have ever seen.
We took the subway onto the river and got off on an island in its center. The water was definitely a biohazard, but the numerous beaches were full of people who didn’t seem to mind it. Our destination was a fitness installation almost hidden between the beaches and the water park, where the equipment was made entirely out of repurposed Soviet machinery. The machines themselves were made of axles and I-beams, and the weights were train wheels, clamps, and other pieces of industrial scrap metal. It could have been an art installation, but the place was crawling with very jacked shirtless men, some of whom looked like they had been in a fair amount of trouble in their lives. Yotam joined them, and we gave kvass another shot at redemption, which it almost managed to achieve.
Oleksii wanted us to go to a traditional Ukrainian restaurant and brought us to the imposing government district around Maidan. The decor was similar to the place we had eaten at in Odessa, but this place was so traditional that it had portraits of pin-up girls in sexualized versions of traditional Ukrainian dresses over its urinals. Ukrainian food gets a bad rap for being grey and flavorless, but this meal was as delicious as any of the world’s leading cuisines could hope to compete with. We started off with an incredibly flavorful borshch (the Ukrainian version of borscht), and continued with derunyy (fried potato pancakes), holuptsii (stuffed cabbage), and cherry vareniki, all topped with sour cream, with honey cake and Napoleon for dessert.
We could hardly move after the feast, but we had tickets for a concert at the nearby Ukrainian National Philharmonic. We were the youngest people in the crowd by around 30 years, which was only a partial excuse for being as late and underdressed as we were since we hadn’t had time to change clothes. That wasn’t the only faux pas that we committed, either - an old man came up to us and berated Yotam in Russian for daring to drink water out of a bottle in a place of большая культура (high culture). The concert was a special performance of Ukrainian composers in honor of Ukraine’s 30th anniversary of its independece - Barvinsky, Stankovich, Ptushkin, and Shevchenko. None of us knew any of the music, but it was still a great experience.
Celebrating Independence the Old-School Way
The next day was the big day - Ukraine’s 30th independence day, to be commemorated with the largest military parade in the country’s history. We had just so happened to schedule our visit to Kyiv to coincide with the parade, and I was ecstatic. We woke up early and had breakfast at the nearest branch of “Lviv Croissants”, a chain of croissant cafés which Oleksii had promised were “better than France” (they were not). We walked up the hill to Maidan amid a large crowd, some wrapped in Ukrainian flags and others bearing various patriotic banners. Among the civilians taking their places were military veterans and members of various paramilitary organizations, dressed in different uniforms and bearing their respective flags.
We found front-row spots a couple hundred meters down the road from the main grandstand as the ceremony commenced. First to arrive were the heads of various Eastern European states and the patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, each of which were smartly greeted by soldiers in dress uniforms. The Ukrainian president was late, and the announcer attempted to fill the time by promising a display of a “modernized Ukrainian force, thoroughly transformed since 2014” when the Ukrainian state essentially depended on for-right paramilitary organizations to retain its sovereignty. The president finally arrived and the parade could begin. The Ukrainian flag was raised to the sound of a gun battery saluting in the river and the president gave a long speech in support of liberal democracy, ending with the usual chant of “glory to Ukraine!” Awards were handed out to soldiers, artists, teachers, and scientists with outstanding achievements, and the loudest applause by far was garnered by Andriy Pyatov, captain of the national soccer team.
The road was cleared and a band struck up a marching tune as several dozen uniformed service members carried a 100-foot Ukrainian flag past the grandstand. As a huge fan of military parades, I have watched many Moscow Victory Day parades online, so I knew what was coming, but it was still incredible to watch. One formation after another passed by us, all marching in perfect lockstep with their boots hitting the ground every half-second. They all looked right as they passed the president, then returned to eyes-front and finally snapped their heads right again at our location, bearing regimental banners with old Slavic writing that looked almost like runes. Soldiers in a dozen different uniforms, cadets, marines, soldiers, aviators, female officers, border guards, National Guardsmen, policemen, even firefighters - the number of formations was dizzying and the rhythmic precision inspiring. Perhaps surprisingly, every single formation had a contingent of female members in its rear rows. As they passed us, each formation rendered a patriotic chant at the top of their lungs: Слава Україні! Героям слава! Слава нації! Смерть ворогам! Україна понад усе! (Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes! Glory to the nation! Death to enemies! Ukraine above all!).
Next came the foreign representation - smaller detachments of forces from the UK, Baltic and Scandinavian states, Georgia, US, and others. We made a big deal of cheering for every NATO member except Romania (wearing obscene Napoleon-era uniforms) and extra-loud for the US, even though none of the Western militaries could march anywhere near on par with the Warsaw Pact militaries. When these had passed, it was time for the vehicles - groups of brand-new SUVs, trucks, armored personnel carriers, tanks, howitzers, rocket launchers, radars, and engineering equipment driving three across in clouds of diesel fumes that got thicker with the larger vehicles. As they passed us, they would speed up and form a single line as they departed the square in a massive racket as the ecstatic crowd cheered them on. I had seen Israeli combat vehicles in action, but the level of noise and smoke here was on an entirely different level which made everything that much more dramatic, and it seemed like every single type of vehicle in use by the Ukrainian military was on display. Perhaps the highlight of the entire event was a battery of S-300 strategic surface-to-air missile launchers, a similar version of which had been delivered to the Syrian military amid much fanfare in mid-2018 during my military service. I could hardly believe that I was standing not 10 feet away from a live unit flooring it through the streets of Kyiv.
Finally, there was the flyover. Formation by formation, every single type of aircraft operated by the Ukrainian Air Force or National Guard (plus a handful of foreign aircraft) flew over the square. The parade ended with a British formation of Eurofighters releasing blue and yellow smoke followed by the Antonov 124 Mriya, the world’s largest transport aircraft, which really caused the rather sanguine crowd to lose it. The parade was definitely one of the highlights of the entire trip and perhaps one of the most unforgettable experiences of all my travels, even if seemed a rather Soviet way to celebrate independence from the Soviet Union.
The Valley of Death
The entire area around the square became utter chaos after the parade was over, but Oleksii found us a place to have lunch until the crowds died down. One of Kyiv’s most unique culinary experiences is a visit to one of the city’s Tatar restaurants, specializing in the cuisine of the Turkic minorities native to Crimea. The Turkic roots were plainly evident in the many now-familiar terms on the menu, alongside very unfamiliar dishes of a cuisine I had never heard about. I ordered manty and dada hyzartmasy, which were boiled mutton dumplings and a pan-fried vegetable and lamb dish, respectively. The food was fantastic, and we finished with strong Turkish coffee and Crimean baklava, which is rather similar to Moroccan briouat.
Again struggling to walk, we made our way to the nearby metro station. Yotam asked Oleksii to get him some Tums at a pharmacy, but he misunderstood the request and told the pharmacist he needed to help Yotam because his “heart was burning”. Significant confusion ensued, and he walked away with a stack of pills for completely irrelevant conditions while the pharmacist shook her head at the stupid tourists.
We emerged from a subway station in a residential area at the western edge of the city. The station was called Dorohozychi, but forest nearby was known by a very different name: Babi Yar (or Babyn Yar in Ukrainian). After the Germans took control of Kyiv, the Red Army carried out a series of successful sabotage operations against the occupiers in September 1941. The Germans blamed the city’s Jewish population, and decided to exterminate it. The entire Jewish population of Kyiv was instructed to arrive at Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) on the morning of September 29th with their belongings for purposes of resettlement to an unknown destination. When they arrived, German soldiers and Ukrainian police officers confiscated their belongings, led them in groups into large trenches dug by Soviet POWs, undressed them, and shot them where they stood. In the evening, explosives were detonated on the walls of the trenches, making them collapse and cover the piled bodies, which numbered 33,000 by the following afternoon - men, women, and children. It was the largest massacre perpetrated by the Germans up to that point and a significant escalation of their efforts to exterminate Jews, which had previously not been as systematic. In the two years that followed until the Soviet liberation of Kyiv, another 100,000 or so people were killed at Babi Yar - Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and communists, and Soviet POWs.
We first visited the western side of the forest, which had an immense moment at least 15 meters tall to the Soviet soldiers and civilians killed at Babi Yar. The monument consisted of a group of powerful naked men attempting to reach a female character representing the motherland but plunging into an abyss, and honestly looked like a gay art installation. This monument was built in 1976 by the Soviet authorities and made no mention of the Jewish victims of Babi Yar, despite the protests of the local Jewish community.
We crossed over to the eastern side and walked down the “Alley of Martyrs”, a beautiful tree-lined path built upon one of the mass graves found at the site. Around us were various memorials to the Jewish victims, all of which were erected by the Ukrainian government in the 1990s. The sky was a heavy gray and it started to rain, but even the glum weather didn’t quite make the place feel evil in the way other Holocaust monuments I’ve visited did. With the city around us and the vivid green setting, it was difficult to imagine that tens of thousands of innocent people had simply been lined up and shot here eighty years ago. At the end of the Alley was the Tree of Life, a modern art installation consisting of a reflective disk with tall stalks growing out of it riddled with bullet holes. The entire installation vibrated at frequencies corresponding to the numeric values of victims’ names as Bilal and Oleksii debated whether Hitler was a worse genocidal dictator than Stalin.
Fan Zone Three
We took a subway to the Golden Gate and walked down Khreshchatyk, the main boulevard flanking Independence Square. Groups of soldiers were milling about, many very visibly drunk, and the streets were thronged with people. There was a major concert scheduled for the evening, and Oleksii had somehow managed to score us tickets to the sold-out venue, bearing the incredible title “Country Birthday - Solemn Concert Dedicated to the Independence Day of Ukraine”. The venue was Kyiv’s Olympic stadium, the 70,000-seat home field of FC Dynamo Kyiv. Our tickets were for the “fan zone” - codeword for the field - and we had to walk around the entire stadium to find our gate among the ever-growing crowd. The place was packed with tens of thousands of spectators, and walking onto the field as fireworks erupted and lit the entire stadium was a surreal experience that felt like an American football movie.
We returned to Podil and reunited with Oleksii, who had missed the concert due to some very shady meetings he had to take at the city government. The bars were all packed with people braving the rain, and there was a mosh pit of shirtless gopniks in the middle of the street. Oleksii had a real thing for shisha bars, but he picked a really good one to take us to. Ukrainians took their shisha really seriously, and one could customize both the intensity and the flavor of the smoke - the waitress recommended the absurdly specific “orange energy drink with ice”.
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