Back in the USSR

Kiev, Ukraine

It was the beginning of June. Back home in Pennsylvania, my Masters thesis was coming along great. I was reading, holing up in coffee shops, conducting interviews, and all around being generally productive. What I needed was a distraction. What I needed was Pip.

My Irish friends Pip and John had organized a trip to the World Student Christian Federation Conference in Kiev, Ukraine. There was some funding available for us to travel there. After the last conference in Berlin (which had been nothing short of life-changing) there was no way I could miss it. Even if that meant flying all the way back to Europe and spending my last pennies on budget flights and student hostels. We planned a three-week trip, with a week in Kiev, and then nine days in Armenia (!) to visit friends. I guess if you're going to do it, do it right.

It was a reunion in Dublin to see all my friends again. We spent a day and a night catching up, filling every hour with pubs, Irish food, an arts festival in Dun Laoghaire, football, and a late-night walk through Dublin, while reminiscing about our past year. I love all those guys, and I am going to miss every one of them. (Come to Pittsburgh!)

Kiev is the capital of Ukraine and one of the most important cultural centers in Eastern Europe. It was once the third largest city in the Soviet Union. Situated in the north-central heartland of Ukraine, it lies in the middle of the bread-basket of Europe. As we flew over the country and its endless miles of farms stretching to the horizon, it was as if we were flying over Iowa.

We got off the plane and stepped out into the intense heatwave that had devastated Ukraine that summer. It was well over 100 degrees. As we crowded through the sweltering airport, and stood neck and neck in security for over two hours, Pip and John melted, their cold-blooded Irish sensibilities nearly doing them in. We changed our money at the airport, and tried to interpret the directions we had printed out to get to the conference compound. Cyrillic letters confounded us; strange words transliterated into English were little better. We tried to stay positive as we made our way blindly onto public transport with absolutely no hint of Ukrainian or Russian between us. The bus took us another hour into the center of Kiev, as we stared mile after mile at gray, concrete apartment complexes.

We spotted two young-looking people a few seats up, also staring perplexedly at what looked like a printout from the WSCF. We hoped they spoke English and tapped them on the shoulder. (They spoke it brilliantly.) They turned out to be Andrei and Andreea from Romania, and they would become our fellow nomads that night.

We took the rickety, old Soviet-era metro underground from station to station, until we finally found the train to take us to a bus stop above ground, on the edge of the city. From there we waited. And waited. We expected the right bus to come, but it didn't. The minutes became hours as we laid out on the hot sidewalk, strange people brushing past, the evening turning to night. There was no sense asking for directions: no one spoke English, and we didn't even have the proper address to ask for. With no working cell phones, we camped out, waiting for the bus that never came.

That's when Nadia arrived. She was lost too, but she could manage a little bit of Ukrainian. Nadia is from Bulgaria and is studying in the US, and even though she had never formally learned Russian or Ukrainian, she was able to basically mold together her own Slavic language based on words common to them all. In a few minutes we had two taxis come pick us up.

Of course our taxi drivers got lost. In the thick forest outside Kiev, they made countless u-turns and asked for directions from neighbors. There was much yelling as we drove deeper into more remote and empty streets. But finally... we made it. We walked into the gates of the concrete Soviet-era compound, in the middle of a forest. It was the former site of an orphanage -- gray, utilitarian, imposing. Where were we?? As we walked through the courtyard, we greeted students who were scattered around the courtyard, sitting in small groups, playing guitar, drinking Ukrainian beers, singing songs.

The World Student Christian Federation is so meaningful to me because it brings together people from both Western and Eastern Europe -- from Northern Irish Protestants to Georgian Eastern Orthodox -- to learn and worship together. The WSCF doesn't favor any particular version of Christianity; instead, it maintains that the study of ecumenism is central to helping students learn how different traditions come to God, on a historical and personal level.

The students are brilliant. Probably about fifty languages were represented. At this conference there were thirty of us or so, from Ireland, Scotland, England, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Armenia, Georgia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, and the Netherlands. We spent the days listening to lectures, sharing stories, talking theology. When the concrete hallways would get too stuffy, we would sit outside in the shade of the trees on the broken concrete -- you could sometimes smell Ukrainian food drifting from the neighborhoods nearby.

We talked about how the Eucharist was understood in each of our traditions. The Orthodox students often took their Church's conservative standpoint, often unbending and uncompromising, whereas the Western students sometimes sacrificed doctrinal certainty for a sense of inclusiveness. No matter who was contributing, however, the level of personal devotion was staggering; these traditions were ancient, but they were so so important to them all. As the days went on, it was as if centuries of European history were unfolding in our conversations, in an insanely complicated mix of nationality, ethnicity and religion. I learned so much.

Each day, we left our remote neighborhood on the outskirts of Kiev. Dirt roads crisscrossed old trolley lines, and there were the remains of buildings that had been overcome by the forest. Beautiful little Ukrainian Orthodox churches seemed set in the strangest places (we went inside one of them for liturgy). The neighborhood shop had candy and dried fish behind a glass counter, and the entire back room was filled with warm beer and Ukrainian vodka (the best vodka in the world, they say).

As my Polish friend put it, our accommodation wasn't post-Soviet, it was Soviet. We stayed in concrete dorm rooms. Our toilet didn't flush the entire time we were there, and the shower was nothing more than a hose with a drain in middle of the floor. At night we slept with the windows open to stay cool, and we could hear stray dogs howling outside. I loved it.

We went on a few excursions to the center of Kiev, via the old trolley line. Kiev is giant, and mostly beautiful. The problem is, most of what you see has been reconstructed. All of the churches in Kiev were destroyed by Stalin under the guise of state-sponsored atheism, and most of everything else was wiped out in the War. Regardless, the beauty of these churches was phenomenal. Our tour of Kiev moved from the historic district on the western bank, past government buildings, inside churches, and up an old funicular to a mountaintop lookout over the river.




















Everywhere you step in Kiev, you can feel the chill of communism. There are still statues dedicated to Stalin, or Soviet-inspired soulless architecture, or common exercise areas, or monuments to Russian heroes. Russian as a language, in fact, is everywhere, along with the ever-present stigma that comes with speaking Russian in Ukraine. Interestingly Russian was the second language of the conference: when groups of Orthodox students were by themselves, they switched to Russian. But my Belarusian friend asked someone on the street for directions in Belarusian (which is only vaguely comprehensible to a Ukrainian) rather than in Russian (which every Ukrainian knows), just so they wouldn't flat-out ignore him.

The animosity stretches back a long long time. My knowledge of Soviet history was so bad. I had no idea about the forced starvation of Ukraine, a campaign by the Soviets that killed 11.4 million Ukrainians during peacetime. For several years, Ukrainian farmers were forced on threat of death to send all their harvest to Russia. We went to a museum dedicated to the Holodomor, as they call it, and it was chilling.

And of course there was Chernobyl, which happened not more than 100 kilometers north of Kiev. A Ukrainian ecology student happened to be at the conference, and he and I stayed up late one night talking about Chernobyl. He said, in the first hours, the Soviets held firefighters at gunpoint and forced them to run into the burning reactor, unprotected, in order to put out the flames. They could only stay inside for a matter of seconds because the pain was so intense. But it was necessary to put out the fire so that a lead encasement could be constructed to contain the radiation (since lead melts at a low temperature). Many many firefighters died or simply disappeared. By the way, people in Kiev didn't even hear about the catastrophe until three days later, when relatives in the US were able to contact them. The horrors of radiation poisoning can still be seen in parts of the country.

Enough of that...

By the end of the conference, we had really gotten to know each other, and it was so hard to say goodbye. That last night, we sat in the hallway and played guitar (Stephan from Belarus knew the entire Scorpions catalog, and Guns N' Roses, but the song that got everyone in the room singing loudest was "Hotel California"). But then somehow, people started quietly singing folk songs from their countries: Polish songs, Bulgarian songs. The Belarusians sang a beautiful, sad song in three-part harmony; Viktoria is a classically-trained opera singer (opera is very popular in the former USSR). Their songs echoed through the concrete hallways... it was magical.

After the conference was over, Pip and I were getting ready to fly to Armenia the following day. We had a day to kill, so our friend Natalie showed us all around the parts of Kiev we still hadn't seen. She was a student there, and she knew the ins and outs.

Best of all was an ancient monastery in the heart of Kiev called The Monastery of the Caves. There's only one small gate through which you can enter, but inside the walls of the complex, you're surrounded by beautiful churches, stone streets, age-old buildings, and views overlooking the entire city. We went into the caves, through long, snaking passageways alongside dead monks from centuries past who have been left on display in glass coffins. Your only light is the candle in your hand.

We stayed in a hostel, and the next day we said goodbye to Natalie. Before long we were on a tiny plane headed to Yerevan, Armenia! What a story that is to tell! Just wait!