During the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev served at the Ukrainian front, but once the war ended, he took up his old job again—running the Communist Party in Kiev. In 1956, having assumed control of the Soviet Union, he denounced Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality in his now-famous “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress and began de-Stalinization and the reform policy known as the Thaw. Ukraine celebrated the resulting lessening of repression more than any other Soviet republic.
After Khrushchev’s removal from power and Brezhnev’s ascension, the former fell into disfavor in Moscow, but his name has largely enjoyed respect in Ukraine. Of course, some Ukrainians consider him, despite his revelation of Stalin’s crimes, no less a Soviet oppressor than any other Communist Party leader. But more often than not, people’s faces light up at his mention; they remember that, although he was ethnically Russian, at home he often said that “in his soul” he “wanted to be Ukrainian”; he respected Ukrainians for their work ethic and independent spirit. They recount glowingly how Khrushchev tried to improve life in their republic and at times even confronted Stalin about his neglect and abuse of Ukraine’s agricultural potential. With its relatively warm climate and fertile land, Ukraine had historically been known as the “bread basket” of the empire, Russian or Soviet, but Khrushchev argued it should not be the only one.
When in 1954 he transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, he hoped only to improve the peninsula’s governance. At the time, Ukrainians hardly noticed. (Even Khrushchev’s older daughter Rada, who traveled with her father surveying the area before the transfer, remembered, after the Crimea annexation in 2014, that “At the time they didn’t even want Crimea. Apart from historians, few Ukrainians cared about it as the possible original baptismal place of Kievan Rus or considered it to be theirs.”) Over decades, however, the peninsula did come to represent Ukraine’s competitive spirit with the Russians.
Although for the past fifteen years Kiev has been undergoing something of a Westernizing renovation with loans from the European Union to help, at least for the past few years, the sum effect is still less café cappuccino than café vareniki (Ukrainian dumplings). Andreyevsky Descent, where Bulgakov once lived, has slowly become a bustling market street on which one can buy locally sewn vyshivanki (in sizes promoted as large enough to fit Lenin statues), artisanal pottery, and traditional Ukrainian dresses and blouses superior in quality to if not always as fashionable as, say, Ivanka Trump’s made-in-China brand. A large banner stretched across the road proudly announced, in Ukrainian, that Andriivskii uzviz—tse Monmartr abo Grenich Villidzh Kiiva (Andreyevsky Descent neighborhood is the Montmartre or the Greenwich Village of Kiev).
Down in the city center, we would later walk around Kiev Passage, a pedestrian street off Khreshchatyk. There, high-end designer boutiques—Max Mara, Gucci, Louis Vuitton—give off an air of European chic.
Kiev may be the capital of a country aspiring to join the West, but much about it retains whiffs of the provincial Soviet midsize town. The pedestrian underpasses running beneath major thoroughfares in the center, like the labyrinthine tunnels leading to the subway entrances, recall scenes from the Moscow underground of the 1990s—kiosks of various shapes and sizes sell everything from milk to pastries, stockings and local Ukrainian handicrafts. Patriotically emblazoned in the yellow-and-blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, T-shirts and even kitchen towels also feature portraits of poet Taras Shevchenko, the nineteenth-century anti-Russian nationalist.
We chose to stay in the Hotel Dnipro, which once welcomed Communist Party apparatchiks from Moscow; a convivial and convenient temporary abode, it nevertheless remains unmistakably Soviet. The downstairs bar asks patrons to purchase cocktail nuts from a nearby store; the top floor breakfast room features a black grand piano on which, at seven o’clock in the morning, a musician played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C-Minor; the elegant waiters served food that surely came straight from tin cans. Outside, though, an almost Swiss-style orderliness prevailed and public transport ran on time.
The next day, in Budinok Kavi (House of Coffee), an upscale café tucked away on a placid pedestrian street off Independence Square, we met Bohdan Yaremenko, a Ukrainian diplomat in his mid-forties who had served as his country’s general consul in Edinburgh and as its ambassador in Istanbul. These days, he directs a foreign-policy think tank, the Maidan of Foreign Affairs. Bushy-haired, with a bon vivant’s corpulence and an easy smile, Yaremenko told us that he sees the vestiges of a bygone decade as evidence not of failed modernization, but as characteristics typical of a small country, one whose capital was not striving after the imperial grandeur of Moscow. The recent noise about whose Vladimir statue—that of Kiev or the Russian capital—is bigger and better stirs nationalist pride here.
“But Ukraine,” he went on to say, “should concentrate on genuine European integration, a desire for which was at the center of the Euromaidan revolution, rather than make remodeling Kiev the goal of reforms. The symbolism of Europe is attractive, but the country needs to do a lot before it gets there. Ukraine’s power system needs to change and function not so Kiev can look like Europe but because a bankrupt and corrupt society cannot form a part of Europe.”
In Yaremenko’s view, an inversion of goals has allowed Ukraine’s post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko to consolidate power in preparation for the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2019. Yaremenko worried that although Poroshenko, the wealthy owner of the Roshen candy company, is the opposite of Putin, a former KGB colonel, he has augmented the role of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Service. Some reforms—those concerning the judicial system, the pension fund, and the state bureaucracy—are slowly making their way through the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s often tumultuous parliament. Others, including those dealing with public health care and land reform, have stalled. Moreover, the government’s unwillingness to tackle corruption—the principal obstacle to the country’s westernization—has proved a major matter of contention between Kiev and the European Union.
“I am very unpopular in some quarters,” Yaremenko declared, “because I don’t cheer for the European Union granting us visa-free travel and approving the full implementation of the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.” (Yanukovych’s refusal to sign this accord sparked the Euromaidan revolt.) “The government here,” he added, “thinks that the West won’t abandon Ukraine, because of the wounds Russia has inflicted on us. But before elections it will be even slower in pushing through austerity measures to improve the economy and curb corruption.”
Yet Yaremenko saw reasons for cautious optimism.