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The History of Ukraine: From the Golden City to the Orange Revolution | Sleep Story · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History.
0:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I am so glad you are here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to travel together, not across a great distance in space, but across a great distance in time.
0:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to Ukraine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a land of vast golden planes, of ancient golden domes, of rivers wide and slow and silver, of people who have, over the course of 100 years, built, and lost, and rebuilt, and lost again, and rebuilt once more.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The story we will tell tonight begins in the year 1900, when the city of Kiev was beginning to shimmer with a new electric light.
0:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It ends in the winter of 2004 when that same city filled with hundreds of thousands of people wrapped in orange scarves standing in the snow waiting for something that felt after so many long decades like a beginning between those two moments there is a great deal of history there is beauty in it there is also sorrow but our job tonight is not to rush through any of it
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Our job is to sit with it, the way you sit with a long piece of music, or a fire that is burning low and steady.
1:20
[SPEAKER_00]: We are in no hurry.
1:21
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've tuned in tonight to help your mind drift off, you're in the right place.
1:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the reason I create these.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: If you find this helpful, consider subscribing and leaving a comment about where you're listening from and what the time is.
1:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I love reading through the comments.
1:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something surreal about knowing someone is watching at midnight in San Francisco
1:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, the Golden City and the whirlwind.
1:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The year is 1900.
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It is early June and the air above cave smells of linden blossoms.
2:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The linden trees in cave are extraordinary things, tall and generous.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Lining the wide boulevards that curve along the edge of the bluffs above the Nipro River.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In June, they bloom and the entire upper city is suffused with a sweetness
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: that is difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced it.
2:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Soft, honeyed, a little, like something you once knew, a very long time ago.
2:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The Denipro itself is immense.
2:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not a modest river.
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: From the Bluffs above Podil, the lower merchant district of Kiev, you can look out across its breadth and feel for just a moment that you are standing at the edge
2:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The river moves slowly in summer, it's surface wide and flat and catching the late afternoon light in a way that makes it look not like water at all, but like Hammond Silver.
3:03
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1900, Kiev is a city of perhaps 240,000 people.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: That is not a very large number by the standards of the Great European capitals.
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: London has nearly 7 million.
3:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Paris has close to 3 million.
3:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But Kiev is growing.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It is growing with a particular kind of momentum.
3:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The way cities grow when they have found their reason for existing.
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: when they have discovered what they are for.
3:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And Kiev, at the turn of the 20th century, is for many things.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It is for religion, first of all.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The city is ancient, settled in the 5th century, a major center of the Eastern Slavic world since at least the 9th century, and it is thick with churches.
3:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The golden domes of the Kiev-Petras-Glavra, the monastery of the caves, catch the sun from every angle of the city.
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The monastery had been founded in the 11th century.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When Kiev was the capital of the Rus civilization, a vast medieval state whose name and memory would become centuries later, the subject of enormous political argument.
4:08
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1900, the Keeve Pachersk Lavra is still active, still filled with monks, still drawing pilgrims from across the Russian Empire and beyond.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: People come from thousands of kilometers away to pray in the cave churches carved into the hillside, where the relics of ancient saints rest in silver caskets in the cool underground dark.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They come by boat along the Deneepro, and on foot along the dusty roads from the step,
4:35
[SPEAKER_00]: and by the new Iron Railway that connects Kiev to Moscow and to Warsaw and to Odessa.
4:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The monastery gives Kiev one of its many names.
4:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Travelers called it the Jerusalem of the East, a city of gold and prayer, a city where the sacred and the everyday existed side by side.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: On a Sunday morning in June in 1900,
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[SPEAKER_00]: You could walk from a solemn litigee in a cave church.
5:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's air thick with incense and beeswax candles and emerge blinking into the sunlight to find a brass band playing in Merchants Garden the fashionable park on the upper bluff where ladies in pale summer dresses and gentlemen in boater hats were taking their morning walk.
5:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Both things were true.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Both things were key.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But Kiev was not only holy, it was also in 1900 becoming something else.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: A city of commerce, a city of industry, a city where the vast agricultural wealth of the surrounding step was being counted and traded and converted into the fortunes of a new merchant class.
5:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The wealth of this region was above all things, the wealth of sugar.
5:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian step, the broad, flat, endlessly fertile land that stretches south and east of Kiev, was one of the great agricultural zones of the world.
6:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Its black soil, the churnasem, is among the richest topsoil on the planet.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You could thrust your hand into it and feel its depth, feel how it had been building itself up for thousands of years, layer upon layer of decomposed grasses and roots and the organic matter of the step.
6:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This soil would grow almost anything.
6:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 19th century, the crop that transformed the region was sugar beet, the Russian Empire of which Ukraine was then a part.
6:33
[SPEAKER_00]: had discovered that the humble sugar beet could be refined into sugar, just as effectively as tropical sugarcane and at a fraction of the import cost.
6:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian step, with its deep soil and long growing seasons, turned out to be supremely well-suited to sugar beet cultivation.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1880s and 1890s, enormous refineries had sprung up across the region.
6:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In the city of Uman, in Paltava, in the towns of Padilia and Valhiniya, and the sugar they produced was being shipped by rail to Moscow and St. Petersburg and beyond.
7:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Kiev sat at the centre of this sugar empire.
7:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The great merchant families of the city, the broad skis, the Karnenko's, the Terechenko's, had built their fortunes partly or wholly on the sugar trade.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They lived in grand houses on Lipke Hill, the fashionable residential quarter above the Bessarabka market.
7:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They collected art, they funded hospitals and schools and theatres.
7:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They endowed museums.
7:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The extraordinary museum of Russian art.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Housed in a neoclassical mansion on Terechchenkivska street was the gift of one such family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These were not small fortunes.
7:53
[SPEAKER_00]: their refined sugar went to the tables of half of European Russia, and some of that money, inevitably, came back to Kiev and transformed the city.
8:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1890s, the first electric trams began running in Kiev.
8:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This was an extraordinary event.
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Kiev was actually one of the first cities in the Russian Empire, and one of the first in Europe.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: to introduce electric trams.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The first line ran from the Podil district, the old merchant quarter down by the river.
8:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Up the steep hillside to the upper city, carried by an extraordinary, few nuclear mechanism that allowed the trams to ascend grades that would have defeated any horse-drawn vehicle.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The trams were a source of enormous civic pride, by 1900, the tram network had expanded considerably.
8:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Lines ran along the Kreshetik, Kev's great central boulevard.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They ran through the St. Sophia Quarter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: passed the cathedral of the same name, whose mosaic Christ, the immense, or steer figure known as the unbreakable wall, had been gazing down from the apps since the 11th century.
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: They ran out to the new residential neighborhoods on the edges of the city.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: To ride the tram in Kiev in 1900 was to feel that one was living in a modern city, a European city, a city that was moving forward into the new century with confidence and energy.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The new century brought new architecture.
9:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Across Europe, a movement was transforming cities.
9:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It had many names in France,
9:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It was called Art Nouveau, in German-speaking countries, Eugenstil, in Kiev, and the Russian Empire, modern.
9:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it was called, it was recognizable.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Sinuous lines, instead of straight ones, organic forms drawn from nature, for sards that moved and curved and flowered.
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Doorways framed by cast iron in the shapes of water lilies and dragonflies.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Stained glass windows depicting peacocks in blues and greens.
10:02
[SPEAKER_00]: tiles in amber and cream, and forest green, arranged in flowing geometric patterns.
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Keeve took to this style within Thusiasum.
10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The decade between 1900 and 1910 saw dozens of remarkable buildings rise in the upper city and in the new neighborhoods to the west.
10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Walk along Velodermirsk street or through the lipkey district today and you can still find them for sards that seem to breathe that curve slightly at the corners.
10:33
[SPEAKER_00]: that surprised you with a carved stone face peering down from a third floor cornice or a wrought iron balcony shaped like unfurling ferns.
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the grandest of these buildings was the new key city council building completed in 1910.
10:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Another was the magnificent Horrodetsky house, also known as the House with Chimeras completed in 1902.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: This extraordinary building was the creation of an architect named Vladislav Horrodetsky, and it is difficult to convey in words just how strange and wonderful it is.
11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The facade is encrusted with sculptures of rhinocerosis, sea monsters, hunting trophies, elephants.
11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It rises at the edge of a bluff above the marinsky park.
11:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and from certain angles it appears almost to be leaning over the edge, as though it would like to step down into the park below and take a walk.
11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a completely unique building, and it belongs completely to Kiev, to a specific moment in that city's life when money was plentiful and creativity was given free reign.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The new department stores on the Crest Chatic were similarly extravagant, glass and iron.
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Wide windows filled with displays of French perfumes, German porcelain, Swiss watches.
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The cafes and restaurants of the upper city glittered with electric light in the evenings, when the fashionable population of Kiev would turn out for their evening promenade along the central boulevard.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There were also theatres, concert halls, cinemas.
12:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The first cinema in Kiev had opened in 1900.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1910, there were dozens, and the novel art form of the moving picture had already captured the imagination of the city's population.
12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: People lined up around the block to see the latest imports from France and America.
12:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, in many ways, a charmed time.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The long piece of the late 19th century, the packs Europa that had kept the major powers
12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: was still holding.
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The Russian Empire was troubled to be sure.
12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The revolution of 1905 had shaken the social order, and the Tsar had been compelled to grant a parliament the Duma in its wake.
12:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Kiev, in the warm June mornings, when the Lyndon trees were blooming, and the trams were running, and the smell of sugar laden barges drifted up from the river, it was possible to feel that the worst was
13:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we leave this golden era, we should pause to notice something important about Kiev in 1900 and 1910.
13:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, as the historians say he plucky has described it, a profoundly multi-lingual and multi-ethnic city.
13:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The language of the imperial administration of the courts of the upper classes was Russian.
13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: street signs were in Russian.
13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers aimed at the educated professional class were in Russian.
13:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The Tsar's portrait hung in every government office and his government conducted its business in Russian, but listened more carefully to the streets.
13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: In the markets of Podil, the Old Lower City, you would hear Ukrainian, the language of the surrounding villages and countryside, the language of the peasant farmers who brought their grain and sugarbeats and vegetables to sell.
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukrainian was the language of the deep countryside, the language of the folk songs that drifted from the windows of the poor Aquaters.
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The language of the epic poems called Doomi that wandering blind bars.
14:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The Cubsari, still sang in the market squares.
14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You would also hear extensively, Yiddish.
14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jewish community of Kiev was large and vibrant.
14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: By some estimates, Jews constituted roughly 12 to 14% of the city's population in this era, and though they faced legal restrictions that limited where they could live and what professions they could practice, they would deeply woven into the economic and cultural life of the city.
14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The great merchant families, the broad skis,
14:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jewish quarter of Podil was alive with commerce and learning, with synagogues and schools and printing houses, Keves Jewish community produced physicians, lawyers, writers, musicians.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There were also polls whose historical and cultural connection to this land went back centuries when Keves and its surroundings had been part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.
15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: There were Germans in the merchant districts, there were Armenians, and there were Ukrainians.
15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only the peasant speakers of the market, but an emerging Ukrainian intellectual class, teachers, writers, historians.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Journalists who were increasingly articulate about the idea that they constituted a distinct people with a distinct culture and history, not simply a branch of the Russian nation as a official imperial ideology maintained.
15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: This tension between the Russian imperial framework that governed the city and the Ukrainian cultural reality that breathed beneath it would become
16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1900, it was mostly a tension of conversations held in drawing rooms and the pages of literary journals.
16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1917, it would be played out in the streets.
16:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The summer of 1914 ended everything.
16:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungry on the 28th of June 1914 set in motion the chain of mobilizations and declarations that would within six weeks.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Engulf all the major European powers in the First World War.
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The Russian Empire entered the war against Germany and Austria-Hungry.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions of young men from across the empire, including hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, who served in the Russian army, were mobilized and sent to the fronts.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: For Kiev, the war years were years of upheaval and anxiety.
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The front lines moved back and forth through the western Ukrainian lands, what is now western Ukraine.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: then divided between the Russian Empire to the east and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the west and waves of refugees arrived in the city.
17:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The glittering cafes of the Crestjutik became military hospitals.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The hotels filled with offices.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: the sugar refineries turned partly to producing supplies for the war effort.
17:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The Russian army suffered catastrophic losses in the first two years of the war.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1916, the mood in the empire was bleak.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Food was scarce.
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The transportation system was straining under the demands of the war.
17:37
[SPEAKER_00]: the Tsar, Nicholas II, seemed incapable of responding adequately to the crisis.
17:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, in February of 1917, the calendar in Russia at that time still ran on the Julian system, 13 days behind the rest of Europe, the Revolution came.
17:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It began not in Kiev, but in Petrograd, the Imperial Capital.
18:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Factory workers went on strike, bread lines turned into protests, protests, turned into crowds, crowds turned into insurrections.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The troops sent to suppress the insurrections joined it instead.
18:15
[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of February, the Tsar had abdicated.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The 300-year Roman of dynasty was over.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A provisional government was established in Petrograd.
18:24
[SPEAKER_00]: and in key, almost immediately, something new appeared.
18:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1917, a group of Ukrainian intellectuals, political activists and public figures gathered in Kiev and formed the central rada.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The word rada means council or parliament.
18:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This was, in its own way, a revolutionary act.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The members of the Central Rada were asserting that the Ukrainian people, the people of this land, with their language and their history and their folk culture, had the right to speak for themselves to have a government of their own.
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The dream of the Ukrainian people's republic was being born.
19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: what followed was a period of bewildering complexity.
19:10
[SPEAKER_00]: One of those passages of history where events moved so fast and in so many directions that it is almost impossible to follow them without a chart.
19:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Between 1917 and 1920,
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: depending on how you count the various factions and foreign occupiers, something like 14 times.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Six distinct governments claimed authority over the city in roughly three years.
19:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us walk through them slowly.
19:38
[SPEAKER_00]: First, the Ukrainian Central Rada.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The Rada, based in Kiev, declared the Ukrainian People's Republic in January of 1918.
19:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an extraordinary moment, the first modern declaration of Ukrainian statehood.
19:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The Republic had a flag, two horizontal bands of colour, blue above and yellow below, representing the blue sky above the golden wheat fields of the step.
20:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a coat of arms.
20:08
[SPEAKER_00]: a golden trident, the trisope, an ancient symbol that had appeared on the coins of the roast princes a thousand years before.
20:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It had ambitions.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not have an army capable of defending itself.
20:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, the Germans, the Rada.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Unable to hold off the advancing forces of Bolshevik Russia made the fateful decision to sign a separate piece with Germany and the Central Powers, the Treaty of Brestletovsk, in February of 1918.
20:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Under this treaty, Germany recognized the Ukrainian People's Republic in exchange for grain deliveries to feed the German war machine.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered Ukrainian territory to secure those deliveries.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They arrived in Kiev in early March.
20:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The city had a new occupier.
20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The Germans were uncomfortable with the Rada's socialist politics and relatively chaotic administration.
21:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1918, they organized a coup and replaced the Rada with a new government under a Ukrainian nobleman and military officer named Pavlov Skoropadsky, who took the ancient title of Hettman.
21:18
[SPEAKER_00]: A title borrowed from the military leaders of the 17th century Cossack State.
21:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The headmanate of Pavlo Scoropadsky was the third government.
21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Scoropadsky's headmanate was conservative and oriented towards the large landowners.
21:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It lasted only until the German armistice in November of 1918, when the withdrawal of German forces left Skora Padski without his protectors.
21:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He fled to Germany.
21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian People's Republic was restored.
21:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, under a new executive council called The Directorate, led by the writer and playwright for Vladimir Vinichenko and the military commander, Simon Petliura.
21:57
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the fourth government.
21:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, from the north and east, the Red Army of Bolshevik Russia was advancing.
22:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The Bolsheviks considered Ukraine a part of the socialist revolutionary territory they intended to control, and they had their own plans for the region.
22:14
[SPEAKER_00]: In early 1919, the Red Army captured Kiev.
22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The fifth government, a Bolshevik-aligned Soviet government, briefly took control.
22:23
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Bolsheviks were not the only other force in the field.
22:27
[SPEAKER_00]: From the south, the white army,
22:29
[SPEAKER_00]: the counter-revolutionary Russian forces fighting against the Bolsheviks was advancing northward through the Ukrainian step.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: In August of 1919, white army forces under general Anton Denekin, captured Kiev, the sixth government, the whites held the city for only a few months.
22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: By December of 1919, the Red Army had retaken it, and by the middle of 1920,
22:56
[SPEAKER_00]: After a final military campaign, the war for Ukraine was effectively over.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian People's Republic had been defeated, the Bolsheviks controlled the territory.
23:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Soviet power was established.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The dream of the Ukrainian People's Republic, that bright and brief experiment in Ukrainian statehood, was extinguished, but it was not forgotten.
23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here in the ruins of that dream to understand what had been attempted and why it mattered.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The leaders of the Central Rada and the Ukrainian People's Republic were, in the main, not military men.
23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They were teachers, writers, historians, lawyers.
23:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The very first chairman of the Rada, Mikhailo Hraszewski, was one of the greatest historians of Ukrainian history.
23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: A scholar whose multi-volume history of Ukraine provided the intellectual foundation for the idea that the Ukrainian people had a coherent national story distinct from Russian history, stretching back through the centuries to the Kossak state,
24:04
[SPEAKER_00]: These were people who believed deeply and sincerely in the power of culture.
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed that language and literature and music and history were the true substance of national identity, and that once a people had fully claimed and articulated that identity, statehood would naturally follow.
24:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not wrong in their cultural analysis.
24:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They were simply overmatched militarily and diplomatically.
24:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In a moment of history, when military and diplomatic power was everything.
24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The flag they chose, the blue and yellow would survive.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The trident they chose as a coat of arms would survive.
24:43
[SPEAKER_00]: the name they gave their Republic, and the capital they chose, and the language they insisted on using for official government business for the first time in modern history, all of these things would survive, dormant.
24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Waiting.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: For now, let us rest here for a moment.
25:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In the winter of 1920, in a cave that is exhausted and uncertain, preparing to become part of a new Soviet state, the golden domes of the Lavra are still there, still catching the pale winter light.
25:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The Dniepros is still wide and silver.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The Linden trees on the boulevard are bare now.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Their branch is tracing dark lines against the
25:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2, The Bright and the Dark.
25:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The 1920s were, in certain limited but extraordinary ways, a golden decade for Ukrainian culture.
25:40
[SPEAKER_00]: This sounds paradoxical.
25:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine had just lost a war for independence.
25:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was now the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a nominally sovereign entity, but one firmly under the control of Moscow and the Communist Party.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The leading figures of the Ukrainian People's Republic were an exile in Prague,
26:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Vienna and Paris.
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The possibility of outright political independence had been decisively foreclosed.
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, in the early 1920s, the Soviet government pursued a policy called coronizatia, meaning indigenisation, or taking root.
26:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This policy encouraged the development of the languages and cultures of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union, on the theory that socialism could be built more effectively if it was communicated in the language of the local population.
26:32
[SPEAKER_00]: For Ukraine,
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This translated into a period of remarkable cultural flourishing known in Ukrainian as the Vidrogenia, the Renaissance, or, as history would grimly rename it, the Rosstrillian Vidrogenia, the executed Renaissance, the shot Renaissance.
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: For a decade, roughly from 1921 to 1932, an extraordinary generation of Ukrainian writers, poets, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals worked with intense energy to build a modern Ukrainian culture.
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not building something traditional or nostalgic.
27:13
[SPEAKER_00]: They were building something new.
27:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Something that engaged directly with the modernist movements of the era with futurism, with expressionism, with constructivism, with surrealism.
27:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The writer, Mikola Kvilevi, was at the center of this movement.
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a novelist and pamphleteer of brilliant, restless talent and he was not afraid to make provocative arguments.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1926, he published a series of pamphlets in which he urged Ukrainian writers to look not to Moscow, but to the West, to orient themselves toward the psychological Europe.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: by which he meant the tradition of servantas and Götter and Stendell and the Great Western literary canon.
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He coined the slogan, A Way from Moscow.
28:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a political statement, he insisted, but a cultural one.
28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Moscow did not see it that way.
28:08
[SPEAKER_00]: In the field of cinema, a young filmmaker from the Ukrainian step was making films that were unlike anything being produced anywhere else in the world.
28:18
[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Alexander Dovchenko and he came from the Cherna Hiv region, from a background of Ukrainian peasant culture.
28:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1928, he made a film called Svenigora, a dream-like meditation on Ukrainian history and legend.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1930, he made Earth, which many film historians consider one of the greatest films ever made, Earth is almost impossible to describe in words.
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It is ostensibly about the collectivization of agriculture in a Ukrainian village, the arrival of a tractor, the conflict between the old peasant landowners and the new Soviet collective farm, but the film is not primarily about politics.
29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It is about the relationship between human beings and the soil, between life and death, between the body and the land.
29:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It moves with the slowness of seasons.
29:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It lingers on faces, on the earth, on the movement of crops in the wind.
29:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Gaudar once said that Dovjenko's earth was one of the 12 most beautiful films ever made.
29:26
[SPEAKER_00]: In the theatre, the director Les Curbus was transforming the stage, his boresal theatre, based in Karkiv, which was then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, became one of the most innovative theatrical companies in the Soviet Union.
29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Kerbus was interested in the physical and psychological dimensions of performance.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way an actor's body could communicate meaning beyond language.
29:50
[SPEAKER_00]: He staged productions of Ukrainian classical literature, alongside productions of Bertolt Brecht and Geold Kaiser and other European modernists.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: In poetry, a group of young writers called the Neo-classicists, including Michael Azerov, Pavlofile Povich and Maxim Rilsky, were writing intricate,
30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: formerly rigorous first that engaged with the traditions of ancient Greek and Latin poetry while being unmistakably modern and Ukrainian.
30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And in painting and graphic art and architecture, the influence of constructivism, the Soviet avant-garde movement,
30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: that sought to put art in the service of the new socialist society through bold geometric forms and industrial materials was being felt across Ukraine.
30:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Carcive, the industrial city in eastern Ukraine, that served as the Soviet Ukrainian capital from 1919 to 1934, was particularly active as a centre of this new culture.
30:53
[SPEAKER_00]: completed in 1928 was a bold statement of constructivist architecture, a massive complex of interlocking towers connected by elevated walkways, built of reinforced concrete and glass, overlooking freedom square, one of the largest public squares in Europe.
31:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a building that announced that the Soviet Ukrainian state was modern, serious, and forward-looking.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this, the films, the plays, the poems, the buildings, was a genuine, cultural flowering.
31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It was real, the talent involved was real, the ambition was real, and then Stalin crushed it.
31:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The late 1920s saw a dramatic shift in Soviet cultural policy.
31:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The era of relative tolerance for national cultures was ending.
31:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Stalin, having consolidated his personal power after Lenin's death in 1924, was now pursuing rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization with brutal determination.
31:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed discipline, not creativity.
32:00
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed conformity, not experimentation.
32:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian cultural renaissance was identified as a problem.
32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Its leaders were accused with varying degrees of specificity of bourgeois nationalism, meaning that they were paying too much attention to Ukrainian cultural destinctiveness and not enough to the unity of the Soviet state.
32:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The charge of nationalism was, in the Soviet context, a serious one.
32:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It could mean a rest, it could mean exile, it could mean death.
32:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1933, the writer, Michaelux Velovi, the man who had called for Ukrainian culture to look to the west, shot himself.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He did it in Karkiv on May 13, 1933, and he left a note, protesting the Stalinist persecution of Ukrainian culture.
32:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The theatre director Les Cobas was arrested in 1933.
32:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He was sent to a labor camp.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He was executed in 1937.
32:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The poet, Michael Erzerov, was arrested in 1935.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He was executed in 1937.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The filmmaker, Alexander Dovchenko, survived, barely, and not without enormous personal cost.
33:16
[SPEAKER_00]: he was subjected to intense political pressure, forced to make politically acceptable films, rather than the works of personal vision that had made him great.
33:26
[SPEAKER_00]: He spent much of his later career in a kind of creative exile, making films in Moscow rather than in Ukraine.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He died in 1956.
33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The list of those arrested, executed, or driven to suicide in the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the Stalin years is very long.
33:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It has been estimated that of the roughly 225 leading figures of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the 1920s.
33:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The vast majority, somewhere between 80 and 90% were dead or in labor camps by 1940.
34:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why history calls this generation the Rosstrilliane, Vydrogenia, the executed Renaissance.
34:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But to understand the full weight of what happened in Ukraine in the 1930s, we need to leave the cities for a moment.
34:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to go to the step.
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us go to a village.
34:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us say it is in the Poltava region, southeast of Kiev, in the black soil heartland of Ukraine.
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the kind of village that had existed in essentially the same form for centuries.
34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A cluster of white-washed, thatched roof cottages, along a dirt road, surrounded by fields that stretched to the horizon.
34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The fields were well-tended.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The village had chickens and pigs and cows,
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: the women grew kitchen gardens of sunflowers and beet and cabbage and dill.
34:57
[SPEAKER_00]: In summer, the village smelled of warm earth and cut hay.
35:01
[SPEAKER_00]: In winter, smoke rose from the chimneys of every house.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The people of this village were Ukrainian peasants.
35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: They were farmers.
35:09
[SPEAKER_00]: As their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been, they spoke Ukrainian.
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They sang Ukrainian
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They marked the year with the old agricultural festivals, Ivana Kupala in mid-Summer, the harvest festivals of early autumn, the long quiet fasting weeks of winter.
35:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They went to the Orthodox Church on Sundays, where the old priest spoke in Church Slavonic.
35:35
[SPEAKER_00]: These were the people Stalin's collectivization policy targeted.
35:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in 1929, and accelerating through 1930 and 31,
35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet government launched a campaign to eliminate private farming and consolidate all agricultural land into collective farms, Colk Hozy, under state management.
35:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The peasants were to give up their land, their animals, their tools.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They were to work collectively under the direction of the state.
36:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In theory, they would all benefit from the efficiency and modernity of collective agriculture.
36:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In practice,
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The campaign was a catastrophe of human suffering.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In Ukraine, it was worse than a catastrophe.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It became a famine.
36:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The details of what happened between 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine are documented and horrifying.
36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet government facing peasant resistance to collectivization imposed grain quotas on Ukrainian villages that were impossible to meet.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: When the quotas were not met,
36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The authorities came and took everything, not just grain, but all food, beans, potatoes.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Every vegetable from the kitchen gardens, the livestock.
36:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, even the seeds set aside for the next planting, people starved.
36:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They starved in the villages, and they starved on the roads when they tried to flee the starvation.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And they starved in the cities when the authorities imposed internal passport restrictions that prevented Ukrainian peasants from moving to urban areas where food might be available.
37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The famine of 1932 and 33.
37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: which Ukrainians call the Holodomore from the Ukrainian words for hunger and killing, a death by hunger killed millions of people.
37:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact number remains contested because the Soviet government suppressed information about the famine, falsified census data.
37:33
[SPEAKER_00]: and prevented international observers from reporting on it.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates range from 3.5 million to 7 million deaths, with most serious scholarly estimates falling in the range of 3.5 million.
37:46
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a number that is easy to hold in one's mind.
37:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us simply say, the villages of the black soil step, which had been alive with children and song and the smell of baking bread, fell quiet.
38:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And many of them did not come fully alive again for a very long time.
38:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the holiday more was genocide, whether the Soviet government deliberately targeted Ukrainians as a national group for destruction, is a question that historians and governments continue to debate.
38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: What is not in question is that it happened, that it was catastrophically severe in Ukraine specifically, and that the Soviet government did nothing to prevent it and much to worsen it, including actively hiding its existence from the outside world.
38:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian Parliament and many national governments around the world have now formally recognised the holiday more as a genocide.
38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The debate continues in international bodies and academic circles.
38:47
[SPEAKER_00]: What does not continue because it cannot because it was ended is the world of those villages.
38:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The world of the white washed cottages and the sunflower gardens and the
39:00
[SPEAKER_00]: that world was damaged in ways that took generations even to begin to understand.
39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us sit for a moment in the silence.
39:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside, if we imagine ourselves in that village in the Poltava region, it is winter.
39:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The fields are covered in a thin layer of snow, and the birch trees at the edge of the village are bare and white against a pale gray sky.
39:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The church bell
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: if it is still ringing, marks the hour in tones that carry far across the flat landscape.
39:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The step is extraordinarily quiet in winter.
39:33
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a quality to the silence of a very flat, very open landscape in cold weather that is unlike any other silence.
39:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Sound travels far, and then it disappears into the distances without an echo.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: a crow calling from the top of a bare oak tree.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The creek of a wooden cart wheel somewhere on the road, and then silence.
39:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, this is the Ukraine of the 1930s marked by loss by an almost incomprehensible grief, but also still present, still here, still breathing.
40:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The Nipro is still flowing, the black soil is still beneath the snow, still impossibly
40:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who survived carried their language, their songs, their memories.
40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They carried them quietly, carefully, knowing that to display them to openly was dangerous.
40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They carried them forward.
40:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 3 The Iron Heart
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 22nd of June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, as the Germans called it, was the largest military invasion in history.
40:47
[SPEAKER_00]: More than 3 million German and Axis troops crossed the Soviet border along a front stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
40:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Their initial objectives included prominently Ukraine.
41:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's industry, it's agriculture, it's mineral wealth, it's strategic position.
41:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The German advance was initially rapid and devastating.
41:12
[SPEAKER_00]: By September of 1941, German forces had surrounded Kiev in one of the largest encirclements in military history.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The Battle of Kiev cost the Red Army something in the range of 600,000 men, killed, wounded or captured.
41:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The city fell to German occupation in September of 41.
41:35
[SPEAKER_00]: For three years, Ukraine was under German occupation.
41:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The occupation was brutal.
41:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The German authorities treated the Ukrainian population.
41:45
[SPEAKER_00]: whom their racial ideology classified as subhuman slaves, with contempt and violence.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions of Ukrainians were killed, some in deliberate massacres, some in reprisals against partisan activity, some in the systematic murder of the Jewish population.
42:03
[SPEAKER_00]: that was one of the central crimes of the Nazi regime.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The massacre at Baben-Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, took place on the 29th and 30th of September, 1941, just days after the German capture of the city.
42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In two days, German Insatzgruppen killed approximately 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children.
42:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
42:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The victims were marched to a ravine on the edge of the city and shot over the following months and years.
42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: More massacres took place at Babinya, Roma people, Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric patients.
42:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The total number killed there is estimated at more than 100,000.
42:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The war cost Ukraine somewhere between five and eight million lives.
43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The exact number will never be known with certainty.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Entire cities were reduced to rubble.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The industrial infrastructure of the Donbass, the coal and steel heartland of Eastern Ukraine, was destroyed.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The agricultural countryside was ravaged.
43:18
[SPEAKER_00]: When the Red Army finally liberated Ukraine from German occupation, beginning in 43 and completing in 44, they found a landscape of devastation.
43:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The reconstruction that followed was one of the great projects of the post-war Soviet Union.
43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us talk about the Denis Pro Dam, because it is one of the remarkable engineering stories of the 20th century, and it is deeply woven into the history of Ukraine.
43:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The story of the dam actually begins before the war, in the 1920s and 30s.
43:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet government, under Lenin and then Stalin, had embarked on a program of rapid industrialization.
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the central planks of that program was the electrification of the Soviet Union.
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Lenin famously said that communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.
44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The Denis Pro River, with its rapid flow and its enormous volume, was identified as a perfect site for a major hydroelectric dam.
44:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The stretch of the river below the city of Zaparizia where ancient granite rapids called the Denis Pro Cataracts.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: had for centuries been an obstacle to river navigation, was chosen as the location, the rapids, which had been the historic homeland of the Kossak siege, the famous fortified camp of the Zaparogian Kossaks, would be submerged.
44:43
[SPEAKER_00]: In their place would rise a wall of concrete and steel, holding back the river and generating electricity.
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Construction began in 1927.
44:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The project was partly designed by a firm from Cleveland, Ohio, along with the most advanced construction equipment available.
45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Tens of thousands of Soviet workers built the dam, many of them working in dangerous conditions, many of them dying in construction accidents, or from disease and exposure.
45:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The D-niproges, as the dam was known, short for D-niproveska Hydroelectric Stampsia.
45:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The D-nipro Hydroelectric Station was completed in 1932.
45:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, at the time of its completion, one of the largest Hydroelectric dams in the world.
45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It backed up the river for 150 kilometres, creating a vast reservoir that drowned the ancient rapids and the islands where the cosacsech had once stood.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It generated over 500,000 kilowatts of electricity, which powered the new steel mills and aluminum plants and chemical factories that the Soviet government was building along the river.
45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The dam was a symbol of Soviet modernity.
46:01
[SPEAKER_00]: of the power of industrial civilization to transform nature in the service of human progress.
46:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It was featured in films and posters and propaganda.
46:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the subject of poetry and song.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the Germans blew it up.
46:15
[SPEAKER_00]: In August of 1941, retreating Soviet forces deliberately destroyed the dam to slow the German advance.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The resulting flood killed an unknown number of people.
46:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates range from several thousand to tens of thousands, both German soldiers and Soviet citizens who had not been warned of the demolition.
46:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The dam lay in ruins for three years.
46:40
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war, the Soviet government rebuilt it.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The reconstruction of the Dnieproges was completed in 1950, just five years after the end of the war.
46:52
[SPEAKER_00]: This, too, was a symbol of the extraordinary capacity of the Soviet state to mobilize labor and resources on a massive scale.
47:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The rebuilt dam was larger than the original, generating even more electricity.
47:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The reconstruction of the dam was part of a broader story of post-war rebuilding that transformed the landscape of Soviet Ukraine.
47:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now let us go to Harkiv, Karkiv.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: is the second largest city of Ukraine, located in the northeastern part of the country near the Russian border.
47:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It was founded in the 17th century as a cosac settlement and fortress, and it grew slowly until the late 19th century.
47:37
[SPEAKER_00]: When the development of the Donbass coal and steel industry turned it into a major industrial centre and transportation hub.
47:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1919, when the Bolsheviks established Soviet power in Ukraine, they made Karkiv the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, partly because it was safer than Kiev, which had been the centre of the resistance, and partly because it was more thoroughly industrial and proletarian in character, better suited to the ideological identity of a worker's state.
48:14
[SPEAKER_00]: when Stalin moved the capital back to Kiev.
48:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But Karkiv's role as a centre of science and technology grew after the move.
48:22
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1950s and 60s, the Soviet government invested heavily in Harkiv's scientific and research institutions, making it one of the leading science cities of the Soviet Union.
48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: A science city in the Soviet context was an urban centre deliberately developed to concentrate scientific research and advanced industry.
48:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Harkiv was not a planned city in the way that some Soviet science cities were.
48:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was already large and established, but the deliberate concentration of scientific talent and resources there was unmistakable.
48:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The Karkiv physics and technology institute
49:00
[SPEAKER_00]: founded in 1928, became one of the leading physics research centers in the Soviet Union.
49:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1932, Soviet scientists working at the Institute achieved the first nuclear reaction in the Soviet Union, splitting the atomic nucleus using accelerator technology, developed in collaboration with colleagues in Cambridge and Berlin.
49:22
[SPEAKER_00]: it was a scientific milestone.
49:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In the post-war years, the Institute was deeply involved in the Soviet nuclear program.
49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The Institute of low-temperature physics and engineering founded in 1960 was another archive institution of world importance.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Research conducted there on the properties of materials at extremely low temperatures led to discoveries that contributed to the development of superconducting
49:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Harkiv also had a major aerospace industry.
49:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The Harkiv Aviation Factory produced military and civilian aircraft.
49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The city's engineering universities train generations of Soviet aerospace engineers.
50:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the Karkov tractor factory.
50:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Founded in 1930.
50:10
[SPEAKER_00]: one of the largest tractor manufacturing plants in the Soviet Union producing the agricultural machinery that the collective farms needed to cultivate the vast fields of the step, the factory, which employed tens of thousands of workers, was a city within the city, with its own hospitals, schools, housing blocks, and cultural facilities.
50:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the iron heart of Soviet Ukraine.
50:36
[SPEAKER_00]: the combination of heavy industry, military production and scientific research that made the Ukrainian Soviet Republic one of the most economically and technically significant components of the Soviet Union by some estimates.
50:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine accounted for roughly 15 to 20 percent of Soviet industrial output, despite representing roughly 18 percent of the population, and less than 3 percent of the territory.
51:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The minds of the Donbass, the coal basin, straddling the border between what is now eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia, produced a very large proportion of the Soviet Union's coal.
51:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The steel mills of dynipropetrovsk and zapparisia and mariupol produced enormous quantities of steel.
51:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The chemical plants and machine factories and defence industries of the Harkiv dynipropetrovsk zapparisia industrial corridor produced weapons, aircraft, missiles, tanks and the industrial goods that the Soviet economy required.
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine was the engine of the Soviet machine.
51:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us step back for a moment from the scale of all this industry and look at what daily life was like in Soviet Ukraine in the 1950s and 60s.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In the cities, life was organized around the large state enterprises, the factories, the mines, the scientific institutes.
52:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers lived in apartment blocks built by the state, the famous Krushchevki, the five story prefabricated concrete buildings named with gentle irony after Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev, who had initiated their mass production in the late 1950s as a way to address the severe housing shortage.
52:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The Krushchevki were not architecturally distinguished.
52:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They were boxes of grey concrete with small windows and minimal ornamentation.
52:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But they gave millions of Soviet families their own apartment for the first time, with running water and central heating and a private kitchen.
52:40
[SPEAKER_00]: For people who had previously lived in communal apartments, shared with three or four other families, this was a genuine improvement in living conditions.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In the evenings, families gathered around the television.
52:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Television sets had become widely available in the Soviet Union by the early 1960s to watch the state broadcasts.
53:01
[SPEAKER_00]: On weekends, people went to the parks, to the cinema, to the theatre, the Keeve Opera House, rebuilt after the war, offered high quality productions of Ukrainian and Russian Opera and ballet.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The Philharmonic orchestras of Kiev, Harkiv, Leviv and Odessa performed the standard European classical repertoire as well as Soviet compositions.
53:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The libraries were well-stocked, the schools were free and functional.
53:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There was, of course, a great deal that was not permitted.
53:34
[SPEAKER_00]: political descent was suppressed with varying degrees of severity, depending on the era.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The relative relaxation of the Kruchchev era, the Thor that followed Stalin's death in 1953, allowed for a brief flowering of cultural experimentation in the Soviet Union as a whole, including in Ukraine.
53:55
[SPEAKER_00]: A new generation of Ukrainian writers and artists emerged in the early 1960s, known as the Shist Desiatniki,
54:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They wrote with more personal and national feeling than had been permitted in the high-style in era and some of them, poets like Vasyl Simonenko and Ivan Drak, artist and filmmaker Ivan Zuber became quietly influential figures in the preservation of Ukrainian cultural consciousness.
54:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But the cruise chef thought was followed in the mid-1960s by a new period of repression under Leonid Brezhnev.
54:33
[SPEAKER_00]: who had pushed the boundaries too far were arrested.
54:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were sentenced to labor camps.
54:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The poet Vassil Stuce, one of the most significant Ukrainian literary voices of the 20th century, was arrested twice.
54:47
[SPEAKER_00]: First, in 1972, then again in 1980, and died in a Soviet labor camp in 1985.
54:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He is remembered today as one of the martyrs of Ukrainian culture.
55:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The tension between the Ukrainian cultural identity, persistent, resilient, finding its expression in literature and music and folk art and the simple act of speaking the language and the Soviet Russian dominated state was never resolved in this period.
55:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It was managed and suppressed when it became too visible and it continued to exist beneath the surface.
55:26
[SPEAKER_00]: the architecture of the step.
55:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It is 1965.
55:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You are travelling by rail through the Ukrainian steppe, southeast from Kiev towards Zaporizia.
55:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The train moves at a steady pace.
55:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And through the window, you watch the landscape unfold.
55:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It is late summer.
55:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The harvest is in.
55:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The fields, stripped of their grain, are a pale gold brown.
55:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And the distance is so great in every direction that the horizon seems to curve with the earth itself.
56:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Occasionally you pass through a village, the older houses, those built before the revolution, a low and white-washed, with bright blue or green window frames and fetched roofs.
56:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The newer buildings are the ubiquitous Soviet concrete of the collective farm era.
56:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There are silos, there are water towers, there are the corrugated metal roofs of tractor sheds.
56:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But between the villages, the step is itself.
56:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There is something very old in this landscape.
56:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The burial mounds of ancient peoples, the Sithians, the Sarmations, rise from the flat ground at intervals, low-green domes that have stood for two and three thousand years.
56:44
[SPEAKER_00]: the Sithians buried their chieftains under these mounds, with their horses and their weapons and their gold.
56:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of the gold has been found and is now in museums.
56:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Extraordinary work, animal figures in gold have a quality to astonish any jeweler.
57:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of the mounds are still intact, still holding their ancient occupants in the quiet earth.
57:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The step grasses between the agricultural fields are coarse and dry in late summer.
57:14
[SPEAKER_00]: When the wind blows, and it almost always blows on the step, a steady, endless wind from the east.
57:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They move in long waves, like something breathing, the sky above is enormous.
57:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union was not exaggerating when it called Ukraine the breadbasket of the Union.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This land, this impossible depth of black soil under this enormous sky, is one of the most productive agricultural environments on earth.
57:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Watching it through the train window in the long golden light of late afternoon, you feel something.
57:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It is difficult to name.
57:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It is something like the feeling you get in the presence of any very old and very large thing.
57:55
[SPEAKER_00]: An ocean, a mountain range, an ancient forest, a feeling of your own smallness and of something else, something that is not smallness, something that is continuity, the sense of being part of a process much larger and much longer than yourself, the train moves on.
58:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The sun sets in layers of orange and purple.
58:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The first stars appear over the flat Eastern horizon, and the step, which has seen Sithians and Sarmations and Kosaks, and Napoleon's retreating armies, and the armored columns of two world wars, continues its slow vegetable conversation with the sky.
58:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, The Pulse and the Collapse.
58:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the spring of 1986.
58:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In Kiev, it is April.
58:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The chestnut trees that line the boulevardes of the upper city are in bloom.
58:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Their creamy, white and pink flower candles rising against the blue spring sky.
58:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The city has a population of about 2.5 million people.
59:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a Soviet city, thoroughly Soviet.
59:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Its major boulevardes named for Lenin and October Revolution and Communist Heroes.
59:08
[SPEAKER_00]: its public spaces dominated by the granite monumentalism of socialist realist architecture.
59:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Its bookshop selling the approved literature of the state, but it is also key, unmistakably key.
59:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The golden domes of the Lavra and of Saint Sophia Cathedral still catch the morning light.
59:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The Crestchetic Rebuild after the war in Grand Soviet Imperial style with its wide sidewalks
59:37
[SPEAKER_00]: is still the heart of the city's social life.
59:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In the evenings, people walk along it in the warm spring air.
59:45
[SPEAKER_00]: They eat ice cream from the little kiosks that appear at the first hint of warm weather.
59:51
[SPEAKER_00]: About 140 km to the north of Kiev near the town of Pripyat is the Chornobyl nuclear power station.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The name Chornobyl, sometimes rendered Chernobyl in Russian, comes from the Ukrainian word for a local type of wormwood plant.
1:00:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Artemisia Volgaris.
1:00:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a common plant of the step and the river floodplain with grey green leaves and a faintly bitter smell.
1:00:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It is, by all accounts, thoroughly unremarkable.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The nuclear power station at Chernobyl had been under construction since the 1970s.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the largest nuclear power plants in the Soviet Union, intended eventually to operate four reactors,
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_00]: with two more planned.
1:00:40
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1986, the first three reactors were operational and the fourth was undergoing a safety test.
1:00:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It is important to understand that the Chernobyl plant in the spring of 1986 was considered a successful and unremarkable Soviet industrial facility.
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It had operated
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The workers who lived in the model city of Pripyat, a purpose-built city of 50,000 people, one of the Soviet Union's proudest new urban projects, with its gleaming apartment blocks and its amusement park, and its well-stocked shops, considered themselves privileged to live and work there.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The city was modern, the pay was good, the schools were excellent.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_00]: On the night of April, the 26th, 1986, at 1-23 in the morning, react to number 4 exploded.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The explosion at Chernobyl was not a nuclear bomb explosion.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a steam explosion.
1:01:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The result of a catastrophic failure during the safety test, which had caused an uncontrolled chain reaction in the reactor core.
1:01:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The explosion destroyed the reactor building, blew the thousand-ton reactor lid into the air, and exposed the burning reactor core to the open sky.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_00]: In the immediate aftermath, the workers and firefighters who responded to the disaster did not fully understand what had happened.
1:02:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew there had been an explosion.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew there was a fire.
1:02:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not know in the first hours that the reactor core was open and burning and releasing enormous quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The firefighters who first responded to the blaze on the roof of the reactor building received massive doses of radiation.
1:02:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them died in the following days and weeks.
1:02:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They are remembered as heroes, as men who walked into something they did not fully understand in order to try to control it and who paid with their lives.
1:02:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In the city of Pripyat, which was close enough to the plant that residents could see the fire burning from their apartment windows.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The night of April, the 26th, passed in a strange state of incomplete knowledge.
1:02:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet authorities had not yet announced that anything serious had happened.
1:03:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Children went to school the next morning.
1:03:06
[SPEAKER_00]: People went about their ordinary Saturday activities.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The evacuation of Pripyat did not begin until the afternoon of April 27th, more than 36 hours after the explosion.
1:03:17
[SPEAKER_00]: at approximately two in the afternoon buses arrived in the city.
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Residents were told they would be evacuated for three days while the situation at the plant was addressed.
1:03:28
[SPEAKER_00]: They were told to take only what they needed for three days.
1:03:32
[SPEAKER_00]: They locked their apartments and left, expecting to return.
1:03:37
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not return.
1:03:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The evacuation was orderly and relatively rapid.
1:03:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The Kindergarten's were still set up for the morning routine, with small chairs and small cups and small boots lined up by the door.
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The apartments still had their furniture, their photographs on the walls, their houseplants.
1:04:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ferris wheel in the amusement park, which had been scheduled to open for the Mayday holiday just a few days away, had never been ridden.
1:04:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The zone of mandatory evacuation around the plant was eventually expanded to a 30 kilometer radius, affecting more than 115,000 people who were relocated from their homes.
1:04:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The exclusion zone around Chornobyl still exists today.
1:04:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine walking into Pripyat today.
1:04:28
[SPEAKER_00]: People do, there is now a regulated tourism industry that brings visitors into the exclusion zone and photographers and journalists have documented the abandoned city extensively.
1:04:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The streets are overgrown, 40 years of unintended vegetation have worked their way through the asphalt, cracked the sidewalks, begun to dismantle the buildings from the outside in.
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Birch and Aspen trees have grown up in what were once open plazas and playgrounds.
1:04:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The apartment blocks stand empty and staring.
1:04:58
[SPEAKER_00]: In some of them, the windows have broken and the interiors have been exposed to decades of weather.
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In others, the apartments are remarkably intact.
1:05:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Furniture still in place, wallpaper still on the walls.
1:05:11
[SPEAKER_00]: though faded and peeling now.
1:05:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The swimming pool is still there.
1:05:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's empty basin collecting leaves.
1:05:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The theatre, with its velvet seats, slowly decaying.
1:05:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The school, its black boards, still chalked with the lessons of April 25, 1986.
1:05:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a quality to this kind of abandonment that is unlike any other.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not the abandonment of a place that was never loved.
1:05:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the abandonment of a place that was deeply inhabited, deeply lived in, and then suddenly, completely inexplicably left.
1:05:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The ordinary objects of life, the boots, the teacups, the children's drawings on classroom walls.
1:05:54
[SPEAKER_00]: carry with them the absence of the people who used them, and that absence is very loud.
1:06:00
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the eerie silence of Chernobyl, not the silence of emptiness, but the silence of presence that became absence, a silence that still somehow speaks.
1:06:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But the historical significance of Chornobyl extends far beyond the immediate human tragedy.
1:06:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Great as that was.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Chornobyl became over the following years, a slow motion catalyst for the independence movement that would ultimately dissolve the Soviet Union.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is why.
1:06:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet government's response to Chernobyl was characterized at least in the first days and weeks by the bureaucratic reflex that had governed Soviet public life for decades.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Suppress information, manage the narrative, present the state in the best possible light.
1:06:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The explosion was not announced on Soviet television for almost two full days.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When it was finally acknowledged, the language was carefully minimized.
1:07:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The term accident was used.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The severity of the radiation release was not disclosed.
1:07:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But the truth has a way of leaking out, especially when it takes the form of radiation detectable by instruments in other countries.
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Swedish nuclear plants detected unusual radioactivity in early May and traced it to the Soviet Union, prompting international inquiries that Moscow could not deflect.
1:07:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet government under the new leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev,
1:07:32
[SPEAKER_00]: who had come to power in March of 1985, with a stated commitment to greater openness, glass lost, was in a difficult position.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It had committed itself, at least rhetorically, to transparency.
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Chornable was the first major test of that commitment.
1:07:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Gorbachev's government did eventually acknowledge the scale of the disaster, more fully than any previous Soviet government would have done.
1:07:55
[SPEAKER_00]: but the damage to public trust had been done.
1:07:58
[SPEAKER_00]: People in Ukraine and across the Soviet Union had experienced in real time what the government's instinct had been to hide, to minimise, to manage.
1:08:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And they had experienced the consequences of that instinct.
1:08:13
[SPEAKER_00]: People who might have been protected had not been told to take precautions.
1:08:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Children had continued to play outdoors in the contaminated air.
1:08:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In Ukraine, specifically, the emotional and political weight of Chernobyl was particularly intense.
1:08:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The disaster had happened in Ukrainian territory.
1:08:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The radioactive fallout had affected Ukrainian land and Ukrainian people.
1:08:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only in the 30-kilometer exclusion zone, but across a much wider area, including parts of Kiev, the initial inadequacy of the response, the delays in informing the public.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The way in which decisions about the Ukrainian population had been made by authorities in Moscow, who treated Ukrainian concerns as secondary, all of this fed into a growing sense, among Ukrainians, that they were not fully in control of their own fate under Soviet governance.
1:09:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Riders and intellectuals who had already been quietly skeptical of Soviet rule became more vocal.
1:09:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Environmentalist groups
1:09:20
[SPEAKER_00]: which the glass-nosteera had permitted to organize, focused their energy on Chorn Oble, and on the broader question of nuclear safety.
1:09:28
[SPEAKER_00]: These groups became organizing structures for a broader political movement.
1:09:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1989, a mass movement called Rook, the Ukrainian word for movement, was founded.
1:09:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It was initially described as a democratic cultural and environmental movement.
1:09:47
[SPEAKER_00]: not a political independence organisation.
1:09:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But its membership grew rapidly and its demands became more explicitly political.
1:09:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1990, Rook was calling for Ukrainian sovereignty.
1:10:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The disaster had cracked open a space that could not be closed.
1:10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union did not end slowly, after decades of apparent permanence, it ended quickly, in a series of events in the summer and autumn of 1991, that still have the quality of something almost dreamlike.
1:10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: something too large and too sudden to fully absorb on the 19th of August 1991.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: A group of hard-line communist party officials launched a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
1:10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They announced that Gorbachev was ill and unable to govern.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They declared a state of emergency.
1:10:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They deployed tanks in Moscow.
1:10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The coup failed, within three days, it had collapsed in the face of popular resistance.
1:10:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The extraordinary images of ordinary Russian citizens standing in front of tanks in central Moscow and the refusal of key military and security units to carry out the farm.
1:11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Coos orders.
1:11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Gorbachev returned to Moscow.
1:11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The coup leaders were arrested, but the coup in its failure had fatally weakened the Soviet centre.
1:11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The Communist Party was suspended, the authority of Moscow over the republics dissolved almost instantly.
1:11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And the republics, one by one, in the days and weeks that followed,
1:11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: began to declare independence.
1:11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine had actually already declared sovereignty, a somewhat weaker concept than full independence in July of 1990.
1:11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 24th of August 1991, the day after the coup's failure became clear.
1:11:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian Parliament, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic voted to declare full independence.
1:11:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The declaration passed with 265 votes in favour, and only 4 are posed.
1:12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Deputies from all political factions, including the Communist Party, voted for it.
1:12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: In the extraordinary circumstances of those August days, with the Soviet Union visibly disintegrating around them, independence seemed to almost all of them, like the only rational course.
1:12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian people themselves would have to confirm the decision.
1:12:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5.
1:12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The new country.
1:12:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The referendum was scheduled for the 1st of December 1991.
1:12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In the weeks between the declaration and the referendum, Ukraine existed in a strange state of suspended possibility.
1:12:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It had declared independence, but that declaration had not yet been confirmed by the people or recognized by the outside world.
1:12:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union technically still existed, though it was visibly unraveling.
1:13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Mikhail Gorbachev was still the president of a country whose constituent parts were departing one by one.
1:13:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The campaign for the referendum was relatively low-key by the standards of modern democratic elections.
1:13:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no significant opposition campaign urging Ukrainians to vote against independence.
1:13:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The political climate made such a position almost impossible to sustain publicly.
1:13:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The question on the ballot was simple and unambiguous.
1:13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you support the act of declaration of independence of Ukraine?
1:13:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In the cities, and in the villages, in the industrial east, and the agricultural center, and the nationalist west, Ukrainians went to the polling stations.
1:13:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a Sunday.
1:13:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In Kiev, the weather was cold and clear.
1:13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: December in Ukraine is typically grey and damp.
1:13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But the first of December 1991 was, according to those who remember it, a day of sharp winter sunshine.
1:14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The polling stations set up in schools and community centers and cultural halls, opened at seven in the morning and remained open until ten at night.
1:14:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The lines formed early.
1:14:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine standing in one of those lines.
1:14:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You are perhaps in your 40s, old enough to remember the Kruechev era, to have lived through Brezhnev and the political trials, to have watched Gorbachev's reforms begin and then seen the coup and felt the ground shift beneath your feet.
1:14:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You are standing in a line of your neighbours, people you have known for years.
1:14:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody is speaking very much.
1:14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is cold.
1:14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The breath rises in small clouds.
1:14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone has a shopping bag.
1:14:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else is holding a child's hand.
1:14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The child is bored and hopping from foot to foot.
1:14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You go inside when your turn comes.
1:14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The room is warm and fluorescent lit.
1:14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: A table, a folded ballot, a curtain booth.
1:15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You take the ballot and go to the booth and you market.
1:15:03
[SPEAKER_00]: You fold it carefully.
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You put it in the box and then you walk back out into the cold winter sunlight and something has changed.
1:15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though nothing visible has changed, even though the street is the same street and the apartment blocks are the same apartment blocks.
1:15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and the statue of Lenin that stands in the square at the end of the road is still standing there.
1:15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Something has shifted.
1:15:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The results announced the following day were extraordinary in their clarity.
1:15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: 90.32% of Ukrainians who voted had voted yes.
1:15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The turnout was 84.18%.
1:15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The yes vote was not only dominant in Western Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalism had always been strongest.
1:15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It was dominant everywhere, in the Russo-Fone East, in the Crimean Peninsula, in the Industrial Dombas.
1:15:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Even in Crimea.
1:15:55
[SPEAKER_00]: where roughly 2-3rds of the population identified as Russian, 54% voted for independence.
1:16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The verdict of the Ukrainian people was not ambiguous.
1:16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: On the same day as the referendum, presidential elections were held.
1:16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Leonid Kravchuk, the former head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, who had supported independence, was elected Ukraine's first president.
1:16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, the Presidents of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus met in a hunting lodge in the Belarusian forest in Belarus and signed a declaration dissolving the Soviet Union.
1:16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a much looser arrangement.
1:16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 25th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union and the Soviet flag over the Kremlin in Moscow was lowered for the last time.
1:16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In Kiev, the Soviet flag had already been replaced.
1:16:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The blue and yellow flag, the colours of the Ukrainian People's Republic that had briefly flickered in 1917 and 1918 flew over the government buildings.
1:17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The flag that Mikhailo Hushewski and his colleagues had chosen, the flag of Skye and Wheatfield was back.
1:17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In dependence, when it arrived in full, arrived with a problem, the problem was money.
1:17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union had operated on the basis of the Soviet Rubel, a currency that had been shared across all 15 republics of the Union.
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Within dependence, Ukraine needed its own currency, but creating a national currency from scratch, establishing a central bank, printing notes, building the financial infrastructure, takes time.
1:17:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the immediate chaos of the Soviet collapse, time was scarce, and the situation was urgent.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: was the carbo vanets, or more precisely the coupon carbo vanets, the coupon carbo vanets.
1:18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: These were temporary paper banknotes printed quickly and introduced in January of 1992, intended to circulate alongside the rubble until a proper permanent currency could be established.
1:18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The coupons, as they were universally known, were distinctive objects.
1:18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They were printed in relatively simple designs, compared to the elaborating graving of established currencies.
1:18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They came into nominations that soon became almost comically large, because Ukraine, in the early 1990s, was experiencing hyperinflation of a spectacular and devastating kind.
1:18:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The hyperinflation of the early 1990s in Ukraine was one of the worst in modern history.
1:18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1992, prices rose by roughly 1,700 percent.
1:18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1993, they rose by another 10,400 percent.
1:18:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us try to make that concrete for a moment.
1:19:01
[SPEAKER_00]: If a loaf of bread cost one carbovannets in January of 1993,
1:19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: it would cost approximately 105 carbavansi by December of the same year.
1:19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The coupons that had been introduced in denominations of 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, and 50 carbavansi were rapidly made worthless.
1:19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: New denominations had to be printed.
1:19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1993, 100,000 carbavansi banknotes were in circulation.
1:19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine your wallet filled with these colourful, rapidly devaluing pieces of paper.
1:19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine going to the market with a bag full of paper money and buying a week's worth of groceries.
1:19:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine watching prices change, not week to week, but day to day, sometimes hour to hour.
1:19:54
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the lived experience of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1990s.
1:19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The coupons were strange colourful things.
1:20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlike the official Soviet currency, which had been dominated by portraits of Lenin and images of Soviet heroism, the carbo van its coupons began to incorporate Ukrainian national imagery, the trident appeared.
1:20:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Images of Ukrainian historical monuments appeared.
1:20:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a kind of skits of freenier to this moment.
1:20:22
[SPEAKER_00]: These pieces of paper that proclaimed Ukrainian national identity, while simultaneously losing
1:20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The physical sensation of handling them was remarkable to those who remember it.
1:20:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The paper was not the heavy cotton-rich paper of established currencies.
1:20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was lighter, more like ordinary paper, and it felt some remember this almost fragile.
1:20:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You were holding in your hand.
1:20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The tenuous precarious financial reality of a new country trying to find its footing.
1:21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The replacement of the Carbovenets with a permanent national currency was one of the most carefully planned and secretive operations of early Ukrainian independence.
1:21:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The decision to create a permanent currency to be called the Hrivnia after the ancient monetary unit of Kiev Rus.
1:21:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The Hrivnia of Silver that had been used in medieval Ukraine had been made in principle from the beginning.
1:21:27
[SPEAKER_00]: but the timing had to be right.
1:21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The hyperinflation had to be brought under control first.
1:21:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The institutional framework of a functioning central bank had to be in place, and the physical notes themselves had to be printed.
1:21:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The printing was the logistical challenge.
1:21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine did not have in the early 1990s.
1:21:48
[SPEAKER_00]: the capacity to print the security features, the special papers, the watermarks, the metallic threads, the microscopic engravings that prevent counterfitting in modern banknotes, the country needed to contract with an outside supplier.
1:22:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The contract went to the Canadian bank note company, based in Ottawa, Ontario.
1:22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: This was kept very quiet.
1:22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The reasons for the secrecy was several.
1:22:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Economically, if word spread that Ukraine was about to introduce a new currency.
1:22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It could trigger capital flight and further destabilise the already fragile carbon venex.
1:22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Politically, the introduction of a new currency was a major national event and would attract significant attention.
1:22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And logistically,
1:22:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The shipment of billions of new banknotes from Canada to Ukraine was a physically vulnerable operation.
1:22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So the printing was done under conditions of strict secrecy, and the shipment was codenamed Operation Sheel.
1:22:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In August and September of 1996, the newly printed Rivnea notes were shipped from Ottawa to Ukraine in a series of carefully arranged and guarded flights.
1:22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The notes, which bore the images of Ukrainian historical figures and landmarks, and which were printed in the green, blue, and purple tones that would become familiar to Ukrainians over the following decades, arrived in Kiev and were stored in secure locations.
1:23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The conversion was announced publicly on the 25th of August, 1996, Ukraine's 5th Independence Day.
1:23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The announcement came as a surprise to most of the population, who were given two weeks from September the 2nd to September the 16th, to exchange their carbovancy for souvenirs at a fixed rate of 100,000 carbovancy to one souvenir.
1:23:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The conversion preceded smoothly, Ukrainians lined up at banks and exchange points around the country.
1:23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They handed over their increasingly baroque collections of hide-and-omination coupon notes, and received in return the crisp, new Harivniya bills, with their images of Bodyn Kamell Nitsky, and Yaroslav The Wise.
1:24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: and the facade of the Kiev Pesharsk Lavra.
1:24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The Hrivnia was a statement of intent.
1:24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not merely a practical financial instrument.
1:24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a cultural declaration.
1:24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Its imagery was deliberately Ukrainian, in a way that the Soviet rubble had never been.
1:24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The Medieval rulers who appeared on its notes were part of the same narrative of Ukrainian historical continuity that Mikhailo Hushevsky had articulated at the beginning of the century.
1:24:28
[SPEAKER_00]: This currency said, we are a distinct people with a long history, and we have a country.
1:24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The Harivnia has remained Ukraine's currency from 1996 to the present day.
1:24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: In that respect at least, Operation Shield was a complete
1:24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the most consequential and most quietly extraordinary decisions of early Ukrainian independence was the decision to give up nuclear weapons.
1:24:57
[SPEAKER_00]: When the Soviet Union dissolved in December of 1991, the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet military was distributed across four of the successor states, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
1:25:11
[SPEAKER_00]: of the roughly 27,000 nuclear warheads in the Soviet arsenal, approximately 4,700 were deployed on Ukrainian territory, tactical and strategic weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles in silos scattered across the Ukrainian countryside and long-range bombers.
1:25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: By sheer weight of numbers,
1:25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: larger than China's, larger than France's, larger than Britain's.
1:25:46
[SPEAKER_00]: What to do with it?
1:25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The argument for retaining the arsenal had a certain cold strategic logic to it.
1:25:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine was a new and vulnerable state.
1:25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It had borders with Russia, with which relations were complicated and uncertain.
1:26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Historical experience, particularly the experience of the 1930s,
1:26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: when Soviet power had killed millions of Ukrainians, gave some reason for caution about trusting in Russian goodwill.
1:26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent.
1:26:16
[SPEAKER_00]: A country with several thousand nuclear warheads is a country that cannot easily be coerced.
1:26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The argument for giving them up was also powerful.
1:26:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine did not actually have operational control of the weapons, the launch codes, and command authority remained with Russia.
1:26:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Maintaining the weapons would require enormous technical and financial resources that Ukraine did not have.
1:26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And the United States?
1:26:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The other nuclear superpower was strongly pressuring Ukraine to disarm, offering significant economic assistance in return.
1:26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The diplomatic process that led to the decision unfolded across several years of negotiation with the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, as Ukraine's main interlocutors.
1:27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The key figures on the American side included President Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, and then his successor Leonid Kuchma led the Ukrainian side.
1:27:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The final agreement was reached and signed in Budapest Hungary on the 5th
1:27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances committed Ukraine to transferring all its nuclear weapons to Russia for dismantlement, a seeding to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and eliminating the nuclear infrastructure on its territory.
1:27:39
[SPEAKER_00]: In exchange, the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia, provided assurances, note assurances,
1:27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: sovereignty and existing borders that they would not threaten or use force against Ukraine, and that they would seek UN Security Council action if Ukraine were threatened with nuclear aggression.
1:28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The dismantlement process was slow and methodical.
1:28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The nuclear warheads were gradually transferred to Russia for decommissioning.
1:28:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The intercontinental ballistic missiles in their silos in the Ukrainian steppe were destroyed, some of them in elaborate ceremonies attended by American and Russian officials.
1:28:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The last nuclear warheads left Ukrainian territory in 1996.
1:28:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine was now a non-nuclear state.
1:28:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The story of what happened subsequently to the security assurances of the Budapest memorandum.
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and what it meant when those assurances proved insufficient, belongs to a later chapter of Ukrainian history than the one we are, telling tonight.
1:28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: For now, let us simply note that the decision was made and that it was one of the most consequential acts of early Ukrainian sovereignty and that it was made by people who were trying
1:29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: that they had to make such a choice at all, that they found themselves in the mid-1990s, holding decisions of literally world historical consequence, is itself a measure of how extraordinary this period of Ukrainian history was.
1:29:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Independence brought with it a quieter but deeply significant process.
1:29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The physical transformation of public space, for seven decades, the visual landscape of Ukrainian cities had been shaped by Soviet iconography.
1:29:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The image of Lenin was everywhere, on statues, on plaques, on bass relief panels, on the facades of buildings, the streets bore the names of Soviet heroes and events.
1:29:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The October Revolution Square in Kiev, Karl Marx Street, Commissar Malska Street, after the Communist Youth League.
1:30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: These names were on every map in every address book on every street sign.
1:30:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The process of removing and replacing this iconography was gradual, contentious in some parts of the country, and ultimately profound in its accumulative effect.
1:30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The statues came down first and mostly quietly.
1:30:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The Lenin statue that had stood in the central square of almost every Ukrainian city, Kiev, Harkiv, Liviv, Odessa, Poltava, Chernihiv, was removed in the early to mid-1990s.
1:30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In most cases, the removal was handled administratively without great ceremony.
1:30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers arrived with cranes.
1:30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The statue was unbolted from its pedestal.
1:30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was taken away.
1:30:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In some cities, the reaction was mixed.
1:30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In Kiev, the removal of the central Lenin statue in 1992 was observed by crowds of onlookers.
1:30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: some supportive, some ambivalent.
1:31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The pedestal sat empty for years before a new monument to independence was eventually placed in independent square.
1:31:09
[SPEAKER_00]: In western Ukraine, in cities like La Ville, the removals were faster and more enthusiastic.
1:31:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ukrainian nationalist tradition was stronger in the west.
1:31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and the association of Soviet monuments with occupation and repression was more direct and personal.
1:31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people in Western Ukraine had living memories of the Soviet deportations of the late 1940s when tens of thousands of people suspected of nationalist sympathies had been sent to Siberian labor camps.
1:31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: For them, the removal of Lenin statues was not merely symbolic but deeply personal.
1:31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: In Eastern Ukraine,
1:31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Particularly in the heavily ruseophone cities of the Donbass, the reaction was more complicated.
1:31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Many residents that had genuinely positive associations with Soviet era symbols, which represented for them not oppression, but stability, employment, and social provision.
1:32:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The removal of Soviet monuments felt to some, like an erasure of their own history and identity.
1:32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This regional difference between a Western Ukraine that experienced Soviet symbols as markers of occupation and an Eastern Ukraine where Soviet symbols had more positive or at least ambivalent associations was not merely about aesthetics.
1:32:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It reflected deeper differences in historical experience, cultural identity and political orientation that would continue to shape Ukrainian politics for years to come,
1:32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Streets were renamed.
1:32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: October Revolution Square in Kiev became my dan Nezależności, independent square.
1:32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Carl Mark Street became Horrodetsky Street after the architect of the house with Chimeras.
1:32:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Komsomolska Street became Mikhail Ska Street after the Archangel Michael, the patron of Kiev.
1:33:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside the removal of Soviet symbols came a different kind of visual transformation, the restoration of religious and historical monuments.
1:33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The most dramatic of these restorations was the rebuilding of St. Michael's golden-domed cathedral in Kiev.
1:33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: St. Michael's had been one of the great medieval churches of Kiev, founded in the 12th century.
1:33:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It had stood at the edge of the upper city, overlooking the Deneepro.
1:33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's seven golden domes visible from miles away.
1:33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1936, Stalin's government had demolished it.
1:33:42
[SPEAKER_00]: A deliberate act of cultural destruction aimed at eliminating one of the most visible symbols of Ukrainian historical and religious identity.
1:33:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The site was cleared and used for Soviet era government buildings.
1:33:56
[SPEAKER_00]: After independence, the question of rebuilding St. Michael's arose almost immediately.
1:34:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Archaeologists had documented the original structure extensively before its demolition, and its footprint was known precisely.
1:34:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The argument for reconstruction was both cultural and symbolic.
1:34:15
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not merely a religious building, but a monument to the medieval civilisation of key routes, to Ukraine's deepest historical routes.
1:34:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Reconstruction began in 1997 and was completed in 1999.
1:34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The rebuilt cathedral is identical in its external form to the medieval original.
1:34:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It's seven domes recovered in gold leaf.
1:34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: that catches the morning light in exactly the way the medieval domes must have done.
1:34:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The frescoes and mosaics of the interior, which had been partly preserved in museums after the demolition, were restored to their original positions.
1:34:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The reopening of St. Michael's was a moment of considerable, emotional significance.
1:34:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The cathedral occupied a particular place in Kiev skyline, visible from the My Dan, from the Crest Chatic, from the hillside above the Podil district.
1:35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Its domes were a reminder of a cave that had existed before the Soviet Union, before the Revolution, before the Empire, a cave that had been the centre of a major medieval civilization.
1:35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Similar restorations were undertaken elsewhere.
1:35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The Church of the Tides, the oldest church in Kiev, was archaeologically studied and commemorated, though it has not been physically rebuilt.
1:35:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The Churches of the Petschersk Lavra, which had survived the Soviet era, partly because of their status as a museum, were returned to active use by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
1:35:44
[SPEAKER_00]: This religious and architectural restoration was, in a sense, the inverse of the Statue removals.
1:35:51
[SPEAKER_00]: The removals were taking away the visual markers of one history.
1:35:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The restorations were putting back the visual markers of another.
1:35:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Taken together, they amounted to a sustained and thoughtful reshaping of the visual and symbolic landscape of Ukraine.
1:36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: A country still knew and still uncertain, trying to decide what story it wanted to tell about itself.
1:36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: We should not leave the 1990s without acknowledging that the decade was in political terms, turbulent and often discouraging.
1:36:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The economy of independent Ukraine was in crisis for most of the decade.
1:36:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The collapse of the Soviet economic system had been devastating.
1:36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The large state enterprises.
1:36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The mines, the steel mills, the machine factories were suddenly operating without the captive market of the Soviet command economy.
1:36:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them were not economically viable in a market system.
1:36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Unemployment rose, living standards fell sharply.
1:36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The hyperinflation of the early years wiped out the savings of older Ukrainians who had been counting on their accumulated rubles and carbavancy for retirement.
1:37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Into this economic vacuum moved a new class of operators who would come to be known across the former Soviet Union as oligarchs.
1:37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: These were individuals, often with connections to the old Soviet nomenclature, or with the physical boldness and legal flexibility that the chaos of the transition period rewarded.
1:37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: who managed to acquire control of major enterprises at knockdown prices through a privatization process that was frequently corrupt and opaque.
1:37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1990s, a small number of extremely wealthy individuals controlled enormous portions of the Ukrainian economy, the steel industry, the energy sector.
1:37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: the media.
1:37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Their economic power translated directly into political power and the relationship between business and government in Ukraine during this period was deeply entangled in ways that democratic theory would not endorse.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The first president, Leonid Krafchuk, served until 1994 when he lost a presidential election to Leonid Kuchma, a former Soviet manager from the Nipropatrovsk missile industry.
1:38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: until 2004.
1:38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: His presidency was characterized by authoritarian tendencies, a close relationship with the oligarchic class.
1:38:27
[SPEAKER_00]: and a foreign policy that attempted to balance between Russia and the West without fully committing to either, a position sometimes called multi-vector policy.
1:38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Kuchma was also associated with several serious scandals.
1:38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The most damaging involved the alleged complicity of his government in the murder of Georgie Gongadze, a Ukrainian investigative journalist who had been critical of the Kuchma administration.
1:38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and who disappeared in September of 2000.
1:38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: His headless body found in a forest outside Kiev in November of that year.
1:39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Tape recordings, allegedly made in Kuchmas' own office, appeared to implicate him in ordering surveillance and possibly more of Gong-Gadze.
1:39:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The scandal did enormous damage to his legitimacy, both domestically and internationally.
1:39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But through all of this political turbulence, Ukraine continued to exist.
1:39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It continued to be a country, the institutions, imperfect, corrupted in many cases, but present, continued to function, elections were held.
1:39:36
[SPEAKER_00]: newspapers continued to publish even under considerable pressure, the judicial system operated, even when it was manipulated.
1:39:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Civil society organisations, which had begun to form in the late Soviet era, and had grown through the 1990s, continued to advocate for rule of law, transparency, and democratic accountability.
1:39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine was struggling, genuinely struggling,
1:40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: to become the kind of country it had declared itself to be in 1991.
1:40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The struggle was not clean or easy or quick, but it was real.
1:40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: and then came the autumn and winter of 2004.
1:40:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The presidential election of 2004 brought to a head all of the tensions that had been building in Ukrainian politics and society.
1:40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The tension between East and West, between Russian orientation and European orientation, between the oligarchic networks of the Kuchma era,
1:40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: and the demand of a growing civil society for democratic accountability.
1:40:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The election was between Victor Janakovic, the prime minister and candidate, supported by Kuchma and the established power structures, and Victor Yushchenko, a former central bank governor and prime minister who had positioned himself as a reformer and pro-European candidate.
1:41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yanakovic had the support of the major oligarchic groups of the Russian government, which made no secret of its preference for him, and of the largely russophone eastern regions.
1:41:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Ushchenko had the support of civil society organisations of Western Ukraine and of the growing middle class in Kiev and other major cities.
1:41:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The campaign was vicious.
1:41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In September of 2004, Victor Ushchenko became seriously ill after attending a dinner with Ukrainian security service officials.
1:41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He was taken to a hospital in Vienna, Austria, where doctors eventually diagnosed him with dioxin poisoning, a rare and specific form of poisoning that pointed unmistakably to a deliberate assassination attempt.
1:41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He survived, but the dioxin left his face disfigured with Clarachni, the lesions that appear as a result of dioxin exposure.
1:41:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He returned to Ukraine to continue his campaign.
1:42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The first round of the election held in October produced no outright winner.
1:42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The run-off held on the 21st of November was declared a victory for Yanakovic by the Central Election Commission.
1:42:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But the declaration came against the background of massive, documented evidence of fraud, ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, irregularities in the count.
1:42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: International observers from the organisation for security and cooperation in Europe declared that the election had not met international standards.
1:42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The reaction of Ukrainian civil society was immediate and extraordinary on the night of the election results.
1:42:40
[SPEAKER_00]: People began gathering in the central square of Kiev, the Maidan Nezolegnosti, independent square.
1:42:47
[SPEAKER_00]: They came with tents and sleeping bags and orange scarves and orange flags.
1:42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Orange was the color of Ushenko's campaign, and they stayed.
1:42:56
[SPEAKER_00]: In the days that followed, the protests spread, other cities joined.
1:43:01
[SPEAKER_00]: At the peak of the protests in late November, estimates suggested that up to 500,000 people were on the My Dan in Kiev alone.
1:43:11
[SPEAKER_00]: More were demonstrating in cities across the country.
1:43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The My Dan in late November and December of 2004 was covered in snow.
1:43:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The temperatures were below freezing, and the square was filled with people.
1:43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of thousands of them wrapped in orange, carrying orange candles, singing, talking, waiting.
1:43:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The square is enormous by European standards.
1:43:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Designed in the Soviet era for military parades and capable of holding very large crowds.
1:43:42
[SPEAKER_00]: At its centre is the Independence Monument, the granite column topped by a gold-clad female figure representing Ukraine, which had been unveiled in 2001 to mark 10 years of independence.
1:43:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Around the square, are the Soviet era government buildings and the post-Soviet hotels and the beginning of the
1:44:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The stage erected by the protesters had enormous screens on which speeches and concerts were broadcast.
1:44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The space between the central monument and the stage was packed shoulder to shoulder with people in orange.
1:44:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The air smelled of bonfire smoke.
1:44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of small fires had been set to keep people warm and of the hot soup and tea that was being distributed continuously by volunteers.
1:44:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The sound was the sound of hundreds of thousands of voices, sometimes speaking, sometimes singing, sometimes simply breathing together in the cold.
1:44:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It was called the Orange Revolution, the Supreme Court of Ukraine, in a decision of historic significance.
1:44:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Invalidated the results of the November 21st runoff and ordered a new vote.
1:45:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The new vote was held on the 26th of December.
1:45:04
[SPEAKER_00]: This time, with much more rigorous international monitoring, Victor Yushenko won.
1:45:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He was inaugurated as President of Ukraine on the 23rd of January 2005.
1:45:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The people on the My Dan had won.
1:45:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be too simple to say that the orange revolution resolved all of Ukraine's difficulties.
1:45:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not.
1:45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The Ushchenko years were marked by infighting within the reformist camp by ongoing economic challenges and by the continued influence of oligarchic interests.
1:45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The political revolution on the My Dan did not immediately translate into a thorough transformation of Ukrainian institutions.
1:45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Progress was slower, more complicated, more halting than many who had stood in the snow had hoped, but the orange revolution mattered and it mattered in ways that would only become clearer with time.
1:45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It established
1:45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: that the Ukrainian people were capable of taking political power away from those who had stolen it.
1:46:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It established that civil society in Ukraine, the organisations, the journalists, the ordinary citizens who had come to the Maidan, was real, robust and capable of decisive collective action.
1:46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It established that Ukraine was not simply a passive object of geopolitics to be disposed of by the decisions of its powerful neighbours, but a country with its own political will, its own demands, its own capacity for self-determination.
1:46:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It also marked symbolically and practically, the transition from the first post-Soviet decade to something different.
1:46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The 15 years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Orange Revolution had been years of building chaotic, often corrupt, frequently painful building, but building nonetheless.
1:46:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By 2004, Ukraine had institutions.
1:47:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a civil society.
1:47:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a free press, however embattled.
1:47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a generation of young people who had grown up after the Soviet Union and for whom independence was not a distant aspiration, but the simple, given fact of their lives.
1:47:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Something to be protected and extended rather than achieved.
1:47:20
[SPEAKER_00]: These young people had come to the May Dan in their orange scarves, they had stood in the snow, they had been cold and they had been persistent and they had been right.
1:47:31
[SPEAKER_00]: We have traveled a long way tonight.
1:47:34
[SPEAKER_00]: We began in 1900.
1:47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: on a warm, June morning in Kiev when the linden trees were blooming and the electric trams were running and the new century was full of possibility.
1:47:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We followed the city and the country through a whirlwind of revolutions and occupations through an extraordinary cultural flowering and its brutal suppression through the devastations of war and famine and political repression.
1:47:59
[SPEAKER_00]: through the strange engineering dreams of the Soviet decades, through the slow moral earthquake of chornable, through the quiet, monumental moment of independence, through the coupons and the currency and the diplomatic negotiations, and the statues coming down, and the domes coming back up, and we ended in the snow of the Maidan, in the orange winter of 2004.
1:48:23
[SPEAKER_00]: 104 years of history.
1:48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a great deal of history to hold in one's mind at once, and perhaps for now, you do not need to hold it all at once.
1:48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it is enough to hold a few of the images.
1:48:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The golden domes catching the morning light, the white-thatched cottages of the step village.
1:48:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The engineer's standing in the concrete shadow of the new dam.
1:48:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The first Rivnea notes passed across a bank counter, the orange candles in the snow.
1:48:54
[SPEAKER_00]: These images are not the whole story.
1:48:57
[SPEAKER_00]: No story ever is.
1:48:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine's history is long and contested, and full of things we did not have time to mention tonight.
1:49:06
[SPEAKER_00]: the Cossack traditions, the Greek Catholic Church of Western Ukraine, the many cities and regions and peoples who stories are not exactly the story we told.
1:49:16
[SPEAKER_00]: History is always bigger than any telling of it, but these are true images and they belong to a place and a people who have across a hundred years.
1:49:27
[SPEAKER_00]: and despite extraordinary pressure and suffering, remain themselves, Ukrainian, distinct, recognizable, persistent.
1:49:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The last image I want to leave you with is this.
1:49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a January morning in 2005.
1:49:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Victor Yushenko has just been inaugurated.
1:49:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The Miden, which was crowded for two months with protestors and their tents and their fires and their orange banners, is being slowly cleaned up.
1:49:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers move through the square, collecting what has been left behind.
1:50:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The orange banners are filled.
1:50:02
[SPEAKER_00]: the stage is being dismantled.
1:50:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But the square itself remains, made Anne Nezolegnosti, independent square.
1:50:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And at its centre, the independence monument, the woman in gold, rising on her granite column above the square, above the city, above the bluffs and the river, and the vast step to the south and east catches the winter light.
1:50:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The sky above her is the particular pale blue of a cold, January morning in Kiev.
1:50:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Below, the old city breaths and moves, the trams are running, the chestnut trees are bare but alive, already carrying the invisible intelligence of next spring's leaves.
1:50:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The Denis Pro, far below, moves its silver mass south toward the sea.
1:50:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Ukraine continues.
1:50:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for being here tonight.
1:50:54
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.