I came back to Kyiv, the city of my birth, after a 16-year absence in 1995 to become a famous foreign correspondent, distract myself from the failure of a marriage and reconnect with a place where I spent a happy childhood despite the occasional vitriol of strangers offended by my Jewish face.
And while I was writing freelance pieces for the Christian Science Monitor about how impossible it was to operate a legitimate business in Ukraine with all the red tape and the racketeering, a Brooklyn kid a few years younger than me was starting one all the same, with money raised in part from friends and family.
Jed Sunden’s brainchild, the Kiev Post, was meant to emulate the success of the Prague Post, which he had witnessed firsthand. It didn’t look like the future recipient of any journalism prizes at first, the product of a shoestring operation.
But it was local! The Christian Science Monitor was mostly read in corners of America where Ukraine was little more than an exotic curiosity, just another distant land with problems. Writing columns for the Post meant that my jeremiads against government corruption and the cynicism of U.S. aid programs might be read by people to whom they might mean something.
Sometime in the spring of 1996 I struck a barter deal to edit a couple of issues as a fill-in, in exchange for round-trip airfare Stateside.
When I turned up for my cameo in the little flat on Klovsky Uzviz then serving as the editorial office, I found that I’d been provided with an assistant. He was a 23-year-old who’d just arrived in Ukraine 48 hours earlier from Moscow, following a girlfriend who’d been transferred to work in Kyiv.
Sean Lawler went on to a brilliant career as a literary editor, chef and journalist. I would end up attending his wedding and his funeral. But back then, he was a kid a year removed from college who had already landed two gigs after a weekend in town. Helping me put out a newspaper neither of us had ever edited before was one. Tending bar while some “Chechens” took the owner of the Cowboy Bar for a ride in the woods was another.
By the time Sunden hired me as the Post’s editor-in-chief in December 1996, I knew Lawler had the talent to serve as an effective managing editor. Jed let me spend what I needed to hire a staff and I went on a recruiting spree, aggressively poaching young talent.
At the time, it felt like we could never find enough people with the right skills. In retrospect, we were blessed with an embarrassment of riches. We stole Euan McDonald from Eastern Economist to serve as the Post’s business editor, having no inkling he might eventually become the EuroMaidan Revolution’s John Reed.
When I lured (current deputy chief editor) Katya Gorchinskaya to cover politics, I could not have dreamt she’d become such a huge part of the Post’s success.
Before Lily Hyde became an award-winning author and covered the region for just about every reputable Western publication, she reported for us on the problems of Kyiv’s homeless children.
Viktor Luhovyk went on to write for Associated Press.
Stefan Korshak, who miraculously for us turned up in Odesa, would go on to Deutsche Press-Agentur.
Every time I catch a glimpse of Ukrainian weekly magazine New Times or see how many people follow its chief editor Vitaly Sych I beam with pride because I know where he got his start.
Volodya Bilanovsky, hired at 19 to keep us well supplied with notebooks and see that reporters had their expenses covered promptly, is a logistics executive in Australia.
And as much as we prized and promoted youth in those days, it was some of the “adults in the room,” like designers Yuri Merkulov and Sveta Shevtsova and distribution manager Kostya Kulinich, who kept their cool and led by example in moments of greatest stress.
With so much talent on board, the newspaper couldn’t help but improve and did, rapidly.
The editorial page came alive with Oleh Smal’s cartoons, and I had a blast working with Tolya Kazansky on “Smirky the Lovable Expat,” a Doonesbury wannabe type stumbling over the hypocrisies of the expat and Ukrainian experiences.
Sunden was the best possible publisher to work for, unfailingly providing everything I sought, from a travel budget to a rigorous defense of editorial independence. We only argued about two topics that I can recall.
I flat out told him that I wouldn’t edit a sister Russian-language publication, simply because I wasn’t brave enough. Publishing in English kept us relatively inconsequential and therefore unmolested. Back then, even before Georgiy Gongadze’s murder on Sept. 16, 2000, it was clear what happened to sufficiently serious threats to the status quo. I have all the respect and admiration in the world for the people willing to pay any price to tell the truth. I came from a place where it costs almost nothing.
The other disagreement involved Sunden’s decision to change Kiev to Kyiv in the newspaper’s title. I argued that the Russian spelling was a lot more widely used and every bit as legitimate. He insisted on Kyiv out of perfectly valid political and commercial considerations. My sense is that Ukrainian patriotism has moved on from spelling controversies after the events of the past year. Today I’m immensely proud of the fact that Kiev/Kyiv is the largest city in the world where Russian speakers can speak freely.
Though I’ve gone on to an eventful career in financial journalism, editing the Kiev Post in 1997-98 was a professional pinnacle I’ll always treasure. I’ll never forget editing the great piece Luhovyk wrote about the feudal politics of his native village, or breaking news that foreign beauty pageant contestants had been sexually harassed en masse.
We covered murders and business deals and social problems, reviewed concerts and restaurants — did everything a local paper should do — but also reported from Odesa and Donetsk and foreign embassies and the Rada.
The couple of old issues I’ve just pulled out of a desk drawer are not subtle in their foreshadowing of the recent horrors. Here’s a piece I did about boundlessly cynical, hopelessly corrupt electioneering near Donetsk. There’s the “Divided States of Ukraine” graphic we led with based on the ballot results a month later.
But there’s lighter fare in these time capsules too, like a tarmac marriage proposal to a mail-order bride. For all its cheesiness, it’s infinitely preferable to [separatist leader Alexander] Zakharchenko’s goblin glower as he humiliates Ukrainian POWs.
The fact that the Post is going strong after 20 years and is a trusted source of Ukraine news worldwide is, of course, largely to the credit of Brian Bonner, Gorchinskaya and the many talented, courageous journalists who’ve worked with them.
But the K in the Kyiv and the P in the Post still look exactly like they did when I chose the font 18 years ago. And given all the newspaper has accomplished since and all the memories and friendships it has given me, that makes me inordinately happy.
Igor Greenwald served as Kyiv Post chief editor from 1997-1998 and as an associate editor in 1996.
