INSIDE AND OUT OF CHECHNYA VIA UKRAINE, Scott Alixander Sonders [e ink ebook reader .txt] 📗

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t’s 5AM but I can’t sleep. I’ve just returned from the southern border of Chechnya. I’m in Kyiv now. Before that I was in Odessa. After that I was in Stavropol. It’s been a long eight week foray into Russia and Ukraine.

Most of my ex-Soviet colleagues and acquaintances thought I was crazy mad
to visit the Stavropol region. Well, actually they used a more emphatic Russian idiom. But it’s too difficult for me to transliterate and it’s the kind of word that gets bleeped on television.

Now I am in my flat in the Shevchenkivskyi Raion (district). If I walk across Artema and go west, I’m only a half-kilometer to the American Embassy. If I stroll east, I’m five minutes to the Lukyanivskaya metro station. The trolleys are only 200 meters distant, and run every two minutes to the Center (downtown). Public transportation is outstanding – and any ride of any distance will cost a whopping ten cents.

The police officers hang out and socialize in front of the local precinct, which is directly across from my 8th floor two-room apartment. Unlike in America, here “two-rooms” indicates a bedroom, living room, kitchen and bath. It’s clean and comfortable by any standards.

The “rental agent” is Vitaly Smirnoff. No, he’s not the heir to a vodka cartel, just an enterprising and prematurely balding Russian in his late 30’s. He speaks a decent English and tells me that (he) “doesn’t notice the bad smell around the elevator.” He says, “I’ve had visitors from other big American cities and they say it reminds them of home.” I wonder in what kind of “home” those people live.

There is some charm to his maneuverability with language. But as many others here, he doesn’t understand the Western business value of “customer relations,” of creating product image, of investing today for tomorrow. He’d rather weasel another ten dollars from you today, and risk your disapproval, than gain a grateful customer for tomorrow and, perhaps, a good word-of-mouth recommendation.

“So, what about the title to this piece and what about Chechnya?” you’re asking.
I confess: it’s almost a ruse. This essay is a little about a lot. It’s a skewed view that sometimes drinks from both sides of the cup. Most of the political java we Americans dilute with cream and sugar gets splashed on pages printed with a great deal of hype about Victims and Perpetrators, the Evil Axis of Power, exaggerated claims about Russian prostitution rings, and the so-called bad life behind the ex-Iron Curtain. And maybe it’s because I’ve been sucking down cartloads of caffeine, but somehow I haven’t felt too much different about being in Odessa and Kyiv than I have in Paris, Helsinki, Berlin or Tel Aviv. These are all very much cosmopolitan and European cities by intent and action, feel and attitude, if not strictly geography. And they are all rather agreeable cities to be in, if not even live in for some time. All the amenities you’d need for comfort are easily found.

You could live a nice life here in this countries capital for about $1,000.00 a month, and maybe for less but even more comfortably in the warmer Black Sea resort city of Odessa. Yes, Odessa, a city of culture and antiquity, the city where the central promenade overflows in the evenings with smartly dressed handsome men and beautiful women who appear to have just walked from a page of Vogue Magazine. Yes, Odessa, the city where my maternal granny was born.

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So, if one must know, I had an alternate agenda for this visit. It feeds directly to and from my “roots.” Woody Allen once quipped that “Jews look like whoever was raping their grandmother.” But with less wry cynicism and more clarification about assimilation, one easily observes that my facial features in no way resemble a Persian Jew, or a Yemenite, or an Ethiopian. But they do look a lot similar to some Cossacks. I know of no such recent intermarriage in my family, so maybe Woody Allen has a point.

Three of my four grandparents are Russian. And a grandfather is of speculative derivation. He had many stories but no dokumenti. But we know he could speak equally comfortably with Russians, Romanians and Gypsies. The Odesskaya granny influenced me most. She had translucent blue eyes and a great sense of humor. She once joked to me that I “performed well in school because our family came from Russian Intelligentsia.”

I’ll come back to Kyiv in a moment. But first a sidebar about Odessa and how we take our cultures for granted. When I was fourteen, my family lived near a recreational area in Hollywood, California that is officially named “Plummer Park.” For whatever reason, Russian immigrants focused on that area, beginning in the 1970’s. Now the area is almost entirely Russian – or gay (what an admixture). And that park is now filled with babushkas and their grandchildren. English is no longer spoken there – and it has earned itself a nickname: “Little Odessa.” From Heaven, I think my granny must be smiling about this.

Yes, Heaven. Why? If nothing else, for her sense of humor. Until the moment of her passing – which was exactly the day of her 100th birthday? She had her hair, her hearing, and perfect eyesight. And even on that day she smiled to my then fiancée and said, “Oh Alixander is so handsome; if I were only 60 years (!) younger I would give you competition.”

But granny was tired from watching another friend die every week. She wanted to leave. She waited until after the birthday party I gave her. She smiled and ate cake. And she even waited until the shift changed at 8PM, so her favorite nurse would go home. She left us at 8:35PM. If she hadn’t been a Russian Jew, maybe a Hindu instead, they would believe she “took a conscious exit from her body.”

Another sidebar: I now live in the foothills of Encino. My house is on a quiet street; the back garden has a multitude of flowers. But every possible ethnic restaurant is a short walk away. And for whatever the reason, it seems that when most of the Russian immigrants get a good job, they vacate Hollywood and move (where else?) to Encino! And Encino also has a nickname, “home of the Russian mafia.” I’m not so sure about any criminal underbelly. My streets are among the cleanest and safest anywhere. But for certain, the medical offices nearby have many doctors and clientele who now have names which end with
“-evich” and “-skaya.” I think my granny is smiling about this, too.

Last sidebar: Before my eventual many visits to ex-CIS countries, I could only speak the few endearing Russian words that my granny taught me. Well, those and also how to command my dog (сидите. Лежите…). Of course these commands later became convenient, if not silly, when applied to meetings with the female gender, while matriculating a year of my kandidat nauk in Moscow. But because of my granny, I also indeed assumed that the “official” word, in English, for cereal was “kashi.” Babushka molodyet!

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Okay, back to my story: Strongly in its favor, Kyiv has one of the finest public transportation systems anywhere. Yes, I am repeating myself – but it’s within the context of literary hyperbole and because I’m from the non-commutable and mostly grid-locked city of Los Angeles. But transportation in Kyiv rivals Frankfurt, Montreal and Moscow, if not in beauty but efficiency. You can get anywhere fast. And cheap. A single “anywhere” fare on any conveyance is 50 Kopeks (about nine cents). And like the very wintry city of Montreal, you can virtually live underground here, if you so chose, all winter.
All major intersections have pedestrian undercrossings (Los Angeles, are you listening?) which are connected to underground department stores, groceries, cinemas, cafes and pretty much whatever you need. And the city feels safe. Few might believe this, but I have less hesitation to walk around more places here in Kyiv (and throughout Ukraine) than I would in LA.

And I’m even surprised about the climate. At least in Odessa, the winters are mild if compared to cities in the Northeast and Midwestern United States. That’s important to me. I suffered through a “visiting professorship” in Tallinn, Estonia where a cold and bitter wind would whip the rain horizontally. It was like Sankt Petersburg. In absolute temperature, Moscow is colder but Petersburg and Tallinn are much less hospitable. I was wet and cold all winter. I developed permanent bronchitis for three winter months. After all, I grew up in Southern California where my warmest article of clothing was a leather sport jacket.

Certainly, if you choose to do business Ukraine or Russia, you won’t become profitable without learning to deal with some degree of open corruption. Taxes are avoided. Favors are bought. It’s really the same in the United States; it’s just not in the “open.” But more importantly, many of the Russian “working class” are refreshingly honest. Every city has its thieves. One learns to avoid them. But throughout Ukraine, I’ve many times bought something and simply let the clerk pick the correct change from my hand. And not once have they miscounted in their own favor.

I don’t want to be naïve or misleading. There is a dominant problem for Westerner in Ukraine: they too often are viewed as potential “gold mines.” The media has convinced most Ukrainians that Americans have inexhaustible sources of cash – and that this should be unreasonably shared with those who suffered from years of Communist oppression.

And there are the Russian girls who have married American men, often to find lives of bitter disappointment. They watched every episode of “Melrose Place” and believed it was a factual documentary! They expected that anyone who earned thirty thousand dollars a year must surely be able to afford “the good life.” And certainly “anyone who worked hard could earn ninety thousand a year!” Reality is often a bitter pill. Some of those women were experienced physicians in Russia and came to America, only to discover that their credentials were considered almost worthless. Some of them now work as medical assistants for $11 an hour. And there is no place in Los Angeles where one can survive on $11/hour. Our television told them and sold them that all Americans live like actors on soap operas. For the non-Americans reading this, trust me, we don’t.

Of course there is elitism everywhere in the world. One of my colleagues, Irina Ivanova, from Shevchenko University in Kyiv, says I’m “responded to in this way because (I’m) lodging in a workers neighborhood.” She says this with a slight but unhesitant air of disdain. I understand she implies that the intelligentsia are not only more aware and honest, but also better in class and quality. She lives here; I only visit. Only a fool would argue.

The University assigned me an assistant from day one. Sure I once had to translate a page from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” for my professors before they’d sign off on my Ph.D. in “useless Liberal Arts” (as my astrophysicist friend Marina calls it). But it’s easy to “explain” what I’ve read in Russian on “page 151” when I