I’m certainly the person who’s least worthy of joining the pantheon of former Kyiv Post staffers sharing their recollections here; I worked at the paper for a total of just seven weeks over the past 15 years.
On the other hand, they’ve included some pretty interesting weeks.
I got my first copy of the Post on a plane to Kyiv in the spring of 2000, where I was about to start a job at the newly formed Dragon Capital. I remember it vividly, because the cover story was about how publisher Jed Sunden had just been denied entry at Boryspil airport. And this was the country I was planning to make my home? Oops.
Fortunately, Jed made it back, and the Post carried on, keeping me informed and entertained during my attempt to reshape myself, once an aspiring journalist, into an investment bank analyst (and editor and spokesman and webmaster – Dragon was a much smaller place back then). Like every other expat, I took up the habit of reading the Post every week; I also got to meet Vitaly Sych and Viktor Luhovyk early on, when the bank and the paper set up the KP-Dragon Index.
After that, for the next two years my contribution to the Post was limited to a weekly nomination of Kupidon as Best of the Week in the reader poll, no matter what the category. This was back when Kupidon was a world-class dive bar, open 24 hours, with a crooked pool table and a mismatched chess set and a house band of two guys with one guitar between them. At one point I nominated their undercooked fish pelmeni for “best sushi.” The sad part is how plausible that was.
Actually, no, the sad part was my unrequited teenage crush on the Post – a reflection, I suppose, of an unrequited teenage crush on journalism in general. I wasn’t much of an analyst or spokesman or webmaster. I had a lot more fun discussing em-dashes and dangling modifiers than mREITs or share overhang, so most of my social life, such as it was, revolved around Post journalists. We spent way too much time doing autopsies of the latest issue, and slagging off their competitors’ strange fondness for unorthodox punctuation, while gathered around the tables in Baraban and other local watering holes, like, um…well, I guess just in Baraban.
Even in cities of 20 million, expat scenes are always small towns, and the Kyiv expat scene in 2000 and 2001 was smaller than most. And the Post was a quirky hybrid of a small-town paper for expats and a national paper of record. Love it or hate it, everybody read it, and none of the various competitors that popped up managed to replace it. So there I was, a 28-year-old journalism wannabe working at an investment bank, and I guess somehow being a Post groupie, and the staff’s graciousness in letting me tag along with them, made me feel like I had kind of a behind-the-scenes view of a local institution. If you think journalism is a calling, you could say I was missing mine; hanging around on the fringes of the Post was a poor substitute for actually doing journalism, but it was better than nothing. Greg Bloom actually offered me a job there in late 2000, but for a variety of reasons – which seemed good at the time but are too tedious to explain here– I turned him down.
I also remember hanging out with Post reporters outside Lukyanivska Prison, waiting for Yulia Tymoshenko to be let out of jail in early 2001. It was me, my Dragon colleague Mike Sito, Olga Kryzhanovska and the late photographer Viktor Suvorov from the Post, a few local journalists and a pack of Yulia’s adoring fans: babushkas bearing flowers. I offered to hold Suvorov’s backpack at one point, and I like to think I saved some of his equipment when the riot cops starts shoving the old ladies around for no apparent reason. Suvorov, of course, was right in the middle of the scrum. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s the reason they started shoving people around. Things like that tended to happen wherever Suvorov showed up.)
So the Post moved on, Dragon moved on, and I moved on from Kyiv in the middle of 2001.
I was in Warsaw in January 2002, freelancing, when I got an e-mail from Editor in Chief Diana Elliott: the Post needed an editor to stand in for a month during March to cover the parliamentary elections. Was I free? I jumped at the chance; soon afterward I was offered a job at Reuters in Warsaw, but I told them I couldn’t start until April since I was needed at the Post.
It was a great time: a dream job, with people I loved and respected, a final farewell to Kyiv before settling in to Warsaw and that Reuters gig. Though frankly, I don’t remember many specific events that happened during that month, other than one or two newsroom shouting matches and the free Vesuvio pizza in the evenings; I had never realized that even in Kyiv’s 2002 culinary wasteland it was possible to produce pizza so appalling that even journalists wouldn’t eat it when it was free.
Oh, and there was something about those parliamentary elections…who won again? Actually, I had to look it up just now to make sure I was remembering right. But Viktor Yushchenko’s victory that March was a harbinger of greater things – another moment in the slow awakening of Ukraine’s political consciousness. The start, I suppose, or at least the first part I saw, was the tent city in December 2000 to protest the Sept. 16, 2000, murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze. Let’s not forget him. Let’s not forget, either, that although Viktor Yushchenko later managed to screw things up so badly that he’s now making Leonid Kuchma look like an elder statesman (no, really, Kuchma?), in the 2002 elections his dignified persistence in the face of electoral fraud and violence was a force for good.
That, of course, led to the 2004 Orange Revolution; I couldn’t get Reuters to send me there to cover it, and taking time out to work for the Post wasn’t going to fly. But I managed to show up anyway, chanting “Razom Nas Bahato” and waving a California Republic flag on a shower-curtain rod I bought at TsUM.
The years rolled along; generations of Post staffers came and went, occasionally passing through Warsaw, and I made it back to Kyiv (and Baraban) every so often. I tracked the disillusionment and failure of the Orange Revolution, and the rise of the Yanukovych government, on the Post’s website and in the writings of Post alumni like Roman Olearchyk in the Financial Times. And I rolled along, too: from Reuters to Bloomberg, and from Warsaw to Beijing.
Great Leap
Sitting in the Chinese capital in late 2014, in a newsroom under attack by a corporatist dictatorship, trapped behind the Great Firewall and surrounded by a billion people who have been beaten down by a generation of famine and terror, then co-opted by a generation of relative mass prosperity (relative to starvation, that is), the news from Kyiv was like a vision of water in the desert. Could this be it? Were the Ukrainians finally standing up? Would they do it right this time?
I gave up hope several times, but thanks to President Viktor Yanukovych’s thug instincts that wouldn’t allow him to just let things fizzle out, the protests kept building. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and I were bringing our torrid eight-year relationship to a close; I ended up in Prague in late January with no job, and with plans to go skiing for a week. But I was hearing, faintly at first and then louder, the siren song of Kyiv. And the Post.
What was the point of hanging around in Prague? I was now a freelance journalist, who knew my way around Kyiv; this was no time to be skiing. I got in touch with Brian Bonner and made my pitch: get me a press pass, so I’ll be able to get into places, then I’ll write a couple pieces a week for you guys and freelance for other people, and you pay me if you happen to get any cash. Brian said yes, and my photographer buddy Nelson Ching, a fellow Bloomberg refugee, said he’d come join me, and we were off.
I showed up in the newsroom on Feb. 3. I didn’t recognize a soul. Katya Gorchinskaya and Mark Rachkevych showed up a bit later, so that made two souls. But that was it. Yet somehow the atmosphere was the same – the same as it is in any newsroom (veterans and newbies, not enough space, messy desks, a paranoid siege mentality, bad coffee), and the same as in the earlier Post newsrooms (Westerners and Ukrainians, diaspora and “real” expats, a well-justified paranoid siege mentality, bad coffee).
There followed two weeks of…well, of nothing much at all. Not even growing tension, just boredom and frustration and a faint tinge of menace. Protesters camped out on Maidan; cops stood around; politicians made speeches from the stage; smoke drifted up from the chimneys of the tents; those two old guys with the kettledrum down by the post office held their perpetual hairy-back contest.
An air of futility and depression started to creep in. Was it all just going to end in a stalemate (like the hairy-back contest)? Spring would come, the barricades would melt away, and the crowds with them. It wasn’t safe to go out at night: titushki roamed the streets like the packs of feral dogs from a decade earlier; the siege mentality drifted over all of Kyiv, normally one of the safest cities I’ve ever been to. The strangeness of not being able to walk at night outside the barricades, and the desperate camaraderie inside them, which smelled like campfire smoke: That’s what I remember most from that time. I wrote a couple stories for the Post. Aside from a nibble from one U.S. glossy magazine that inspired Nelson and me to follow Vitaly Klitschko around for a couple days, the freelancing went nowhere. My story pitches fell on deaf ears; editors in the West finally had a break from writing about that obscure place and a chance to focus on Venezuela.
And then: Tuesday, Feb. 18. Police fired on protesters near the Rada. I made my way to the Party of Regions headquarters, which somebody had set on fire, and called in the details to the newsroom. There followed a few hours where police chased protesters along the streets around the Verkhovna Rada, past Arsenalna Metro; I ran back and forth with the crowd, calling in updates, catching a whiff of teargas (actually just a drop in one eye, but that was enough for me), and ending up at the makeshift clinic in the Officers’ House, trying to get casualty figures.
Then the walk home through darkening streets after the Metro was shut down; not knowing where the titushki or the cops would show up next. Then watching the battle on a live webcam feed in the apartment Nelson and I rented: cops storming the barricades, Profspilok in flames. Then leaning out our window overlooking Khreshchatyk, across from TsuM: all night a slow parade of ordinary Kyivans, rolling tires up the street to contribute to the barricades.
There was a tense calm in the city on Wednesday, Feb. 19; I tried to make it home before dark (I was now staying with friends out near Ploshchad Pobedy) and told Brian I’d be back on Maidan in the morning.
On Thursday morning, Feb. 20, I made it to the square around 9:30, and things looked grim. There was a line of protesters in front of the stage, armed with nothing much; the police lines were about 100 meters away, just up the hill on Instytutska Street, and on Khreshchatyk Street next to Profspilok – behind smoke screens from burning tires. It felt like one last push from the cops would end the whole illusion. I started messaging in updates and photos. Mobile data didn’t work down by the stage, so I ran back and forth to the McDonald’s at the end of the square: they had shut down, but they thoughtfully left their wi-fi server on, so I could get a signal from out in front and send in my material.
At one point I was back in front of the stage when they announced: Don’t throw or shoot anything into the smoke screen – our guys are back there. I knew that was news. I ran back to the McDonald’s to report in. Then I looked up the hill and saw the smoke clearing, and small knots of protesters waving flags on the grassy hill below October Palace, which had flames coming out of some of its windows, and I realized they had won – or at least gained a temporary respite.
A year later, what exactly they had won still remains to be seen, and it’s still possible that the decisive answer will come in Moscow, or Berlin, or Washington. But I’ll never forget that moment. If you were holding your breath to find out whether the Post ever found any money to pay me, well, they didn’t. But I can’t think of many things I’d rather have than the chance to bring news from Maidan to the world, through a respected news outlet like the Post, and to be a part of their talented team for those three weeks.
The words “literally” and “unforgettable” have both been cheapened by years of misuse, but I owe a debt of gratitude to the Post for that moment in my life. It was literally unforgettable.
Nathaniel Espino lives in Warsaw, Poland.
