After a summer weekend in Warsaw, my friend Marta came back to Kyiv raving about the positive changes in Poland. 'They're so far ahead of Ukraine,' she told me. Stores and restaurants and cafes line the streets of Warsaw. 'It's so nice, and cheap,' she enthused.
I decided to see what she meant. Martial-law Warsaw gave me my first glimpse of Communism's dreary public face back in 1984 and the bleak monotony of the landscape, the dirty stores and smelly cafes with ubiquitous signs reading 'piva niema' – no beer – was anything but 'nice'. Even the colors – on the buildings, the signs proclaiming socialist fraternity, people's clothing – were merely hues of gray.
They were the same colors I saw from the train as it chugged through northern Ukraine on the way to Warsaw. Except for the vividly azure private cottages and the lush swamps of the Polissia region, the apartment and municipal buildings that flitted past the train's dirty window were decrepit and dingy.
Though I've grown accustomed to such eyesores after eight years, even Poland didn't fully prepare me for the relentless ugliness of Soviet Communism when I first visited the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1989.
Weaned on the poetry of 19th century Ukrainian romantics, I came in 1989 expecting to see the national version of a beautiful captive in chains. What I found was a toothless hag in a trailer park. Nothing looked right. Indeed, there didn't seem to be any right angles anywhere. Nearly everything built in Soviet times was painful to look at and it usually smelled like a combination of old fish, stale tobacco and urine.
I am not familiar with what, if anything, Lenin had to say on the subject of a esthetics. Nor do I know Stalin's views on beauty except that he decreed socialist-realism as an art form.
Looking at the results, however, I imagine that proletarian function won over bourgeois form, though in the end, the forms of filling Five-Year-Plans – with so many thousands of square meters of new housing, for example – eventually became more important than whether that housing was functionally habitable.
In the end, it was all both ugly and shoddy, likely a whole country of slums and junkyards. And no one cared because it belonged to everyone and, therefore, no one.
Even the exceptions, like the parliament or the Central Committee building (now housing President Leonid Kuchma's administration) or the titanium Mother Victory looming over the Dnipro were impressive and monumental, but they were not pleasing to the eye. Perhaps the best example was the Cabinet of Ministers, a Stalinist monstrosity of gray granite whose effect, probably intended, was to oppress whoever saw it.
The new white, Ukrainian facade is a vast improvement. As are the renovated, pre-revolutionary buildings appearing with increasing frequency – like the strip of pastel-painted offices and embassies on Ivan Franko street that shows what central Kyiv could look like given the money, the will and a healthy balance between private property rights and historical preservation.
My friend Marta has seen those changes in Kyiv, too, so when she told me how nice Warsaw was, how far ahead it was of the Ukrainian capital, I was eager to see how much more successful it has been in rooting out that gray, Communist ugliness.
When I emerged from Warsaw's central train station the following morning, I saw the shiny, new glass and steel office towers topped with neon signs and billboards. Then, on a road I remembered for its bleak monotony, new gas stations with mini-marts which displayed everything down to barbecue grills.
And an old friend's new apartment on the outskirts of the city was in a spanking white stucco building roofed in red tile. Much of what I saw were tacky strip malls, but even they were bright and new and colorful and, yes, 'nice' – and there was a lot more of it than anywhere in Ukraine.
But once my eyes adjusted, I began to notice all the dreariness that still remains. The shoddy old apartment complexes, large piles of those mysterious scraps of rusted metal you see everywhere in the back lots of Ukraine. And though they now house privately-owned cafes and shops, the buildings lining Warsaw's streets are overwhelmingly Communist-era.
Warsaw's new, capitalist a esthetic was still a patch of color on a still-dreary communist canvas, like the trident tacked on to the ex-Komosmol headquarters that now houses the Ukrainian Ministry of foreign affairs.
And when my adjusted view returned to Kyiv, I realized that Warsaw's patch of color is bigger, but the background is still essentially the same.
