When I
moved from Kyiv in 2008, I had accumulated a cupboard-full of yellow lined
notebooks: notes for the stories I wrote since starting at the local English
language newspaper when it was just a small flat on Klovsky Uzviz and two very stressed
editors hunched over computers.
Over the
course of those notebooks Ukraine changed from a country no one home in England
had heard of to a complicated, often difficult but incredibly rewarding nation.
And the Kiev Post changed to the Kyiv Post in a big new office with editors and
journalists on their way to the top of their profession in Ukraine, or moving
on to international media covering the region.
Journalism
is a license to ask questions, and my editors at the Kyiv Post encouraged me to
ask them, however sensitive, political, ‘unpatriotic’ or even strange and
obscure they were. In fact my first editors Igor Greenwald and Sean Lawler started
me writing about big topics like Ukraine’s geopolitical position, and Crimea, long
before I realised how truly big these subjects are.
It’s
surprising how many stories from way back turned out to be big. Like mail order
brides, which started as an ironic and sometimes touching life piece but which
led me to the huge, appalling industry of sex trafficking. Or the stories about
Ukrainian neo-pagans or ‘native believers’. The symbols and rituals of a very marginal
group are behind much of the ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ rhetoric about Ukraine now.
It’s thanks
to journalism that I discovered the Crimean Tatars. The Kyiv Post was
interested in them when most of Ukraine was not, and I covered their protests
about land rights as well as their remarkable history of exile and protest, and
their reviving culture in Crimea. I never guessed how significant their story
would turn out to be when I went on to write a novel about them, Dream Land, or how dark it would become since
March last year.
Some
stories I covered for the Kyiv Post and other publications came back again and
again: homeless children, healthcare scandals, dead journalists, HIV. Lots of
these stories never got much better, but HIV is one of the success stories. So
much progress has been made in challenging the stigma that used to be attached
to an HIV-positive diagnosis, and providing treatment for positive people and
services for drug users. It took the recent halt of substitution therapy in Russian-annexed
Crimea to remind me how bad it used to be.
I was lucky
enough to work with Ukrainian photographer Viktor Maruschenko when Stefan Roman
took over the KP culture pages and sent us to collect stories from forgotten
corners of Ukraine. We visited the exorcisms and holy fools of Kitaeve
monastery and the Jews of Vinnitsa; one of my favourite trips was to the
village where writer Joseph Conrad was born, to see the home-grown museum
containing his books translated into every language except Ukrainian or
Russian, alongside a giant sugar hammer and sickle plaque from the local sugar
beet processing factory.
With photographer
Viktor Suvorov – who died tragically in 2006 – we covered a different kind of
neglected Ukraine. We hung out with sex workers on the Mykolaiv highway to
cover their hard lives and harder choices, visited terrible, impoverished
orphanages in west Ukraine, and toured Roma encampments and holding centers in
Mukachevo to hear the stories of illegal migrants. There was always a lot of
pain and violence to write about in Ukraine. But shining through was the
incredible resilience, kindness and generosity of Ukrainians, in a beautiful country
I thought would always be basically at peace.
And there
were the quirky stories that still make me smile, like the one about home-made
pickles, and efforts by international development agencies to tackle Ukraine’s
iodine deficit by putting iodine in salt. In order to persuade housewives to
buy the salt the agencies very seriously organised pickle-tasting sessions, I
got to interview people describing their perfect gherkin, and an enterprising
local business decided it was a good idea to put iodine in ‘Doctor’ vodka
instead.
All this
from a country no one had really heard of; a country supposedly populated by prostitutes
and mutant Chernobyl cows; a country where, if we tried to interest international
media in a story, the response was always: ‘oh we have a correspondent in
Moscow for that.’ Despite that attitude,
Ukrainian journalism got under the skin of many of us. Katya Gorchinskaya,
Vitaly Sych, Euan MacDonald, Askold Krushelnycky, Tom Warner, Stefan Korshak, Roman
Olearchyk are just some of my colleagues who showed Ukraine to the world and
who are still conveying truth over stereotype about this wonderful, varied
country.
I thought I
had done with journalism over the last few years, if not with Ukraine. Even
Maidan wasn’t quite enough to bring me back – it was the annexation of Crimea a
year ago which did that. In a way I’m still covering the same old stories:
Ukraine’s geopolitical position, Crimean Tatars, even HIV and substitution
therapy. But something huge changed. I never in a million years thought I would
end up covering Crimea as de facto part of another country, or a war in east Ukraine.
I’m happy
the Kyiv Post is still going strong and still publishing my stories, and want
to thank all colleagues past and present – and those who are no longer with us
– for teaching me most of what I know about journalism. This last year has been
an endless one. I have pretty much one wish these days: to wake up to find
there is no news to cover from Ukraine. Not because the world has forgotten again
about this country, but because nothing bad happened, and we have to ferret around
for funny stories about pickles.
It’s kind
of a sad wish for a journalist. But I know KP colleagues will understand what I
mean.
Lily Hyde
has written two books about Ukraine, Dream Land and Riding Icarus, and
writes for international media.
