Thinking of the great cultural centers of Ukraine, the name Zhmerynka is not the first that comes to mind.
The city of 35,000 people in Vinnytsia Oblast, 304 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, until recently was a cultural dead zone. In common with many small towns and villages in the country it lacks libraries, art galleries, cinemas, or for that matter any other major cultural attractions.
So for local public activist Yaroslav Minkin, Zhmerynka was the perfect spot to conduct a cultural experiment.
‘Almost nothing happens’
“Nowadays half of Ukraine is excluded from cultural life. Twenty-two million Ukrainians live in towns where almost nothing happens,” Minkin told the Kyiv Post.
Minkin and other local activists, with the support German cultural organization the Goethe-Institut and Zhmerynka city administration, formulated “Plan Z” (short for Plan Zhmerynka) to transform this sleepy town into a cultural hotspot.
“Zhmerynka was chosen as a town with almost no cultural background, a kind of special cultural point zero,” said Minkin.
That might be a little unfair on Zhmerynka, which, like many other small Ukrainian towns, is rich in items of historical cultural interest. The city is known for its 19th century train station building, which is one of the most beautiful in Ukraine, combining modern and Renaissance architecture.
“We found many peculiar things that make this city special,” says Minkin. “(Russian composer Pyotr) Tchaikovsky lived in the nearby village of Brayiliv from 1878 to 1880.”
Nevertheless, most of Zhmerynka’s residents are not aware of its interesting history. So part of the aim of the Plan Z activists was to attract locals’ attention to the things that make their home town special from a cultural point of view.
The initiative was launched in August and aims to make Zhmerynka more attractive to locals, tourists and investors.
Outdoor cinema
Last summer Zhmerynka’s first-ever outdoor cinema event, organized by Plan Z activists, was a huge hit with the locals – they’d literally never seen anything like it. Up until last year, the cultural life of the town had been limited to its museum, the children’s library, and music concerts held every Aug. 4 – Zhmerynka’s city day. To visit nightclubs or a cinema, the town’s young people had to travel the 34 kilometers to the nearby bigger oblast center Vinnytsia, says Viktoriya Tsabak, a native of Zhmerynka, who now studies at a university in Kyiv.
The cultural events organized as part of Plan Z are always overcrowded, organizers say. The city’s inhabitants now enjoy regular contemporary art exhibitions, music concerts and even masterclasses from Ukrainian film directors.
With the success of Plan Z, culture activists are now thinking up ways to bring their initiatives to other culture-starved parts of Ukraine. But that will require “cultural decentralization,” they say.
According to Frederike Mosechel, the secretary for cultural and educational cooperation programs at the Goethe-Institut in Kyiv, the budgets for cultural development in Ukraine’s provinces run dry because the big cultural centers in the country – large cities like Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Kharkiv – suck up the centrally distributed culture budget before funds can trickle down to smaller towns. If more remote locations had cultural autonomy or cultural decentralization, they would have more opportunities to attract private investments into the cultural and infrastructural development of their regions, experts like Mosechel believe.
‘Cultural decentralization’
To encourage this “cultural decentralization,” the Goethe-Institut, along with German and Ukrainian experts, has conducted a series of training seminars for local activists, teaching them how to plan interesting cultural projects, raise money for them, and fire locals’ enthusiasm for such projects.
Mosechel came to Ukraine in the summer of 2014 and is now well aware of the difficulties that activists come across when trying to organize cultural events in Ukraine’s remoter districts. All the same, she is still optimistic about the cultural prospects of the Ukrainian provinces. “Ukraine just has to find the right balance between the center and outlying districts,” she told the Kyiv Post.
But activist Minkin is concerned about the lack of initiative among residents of small towns. “Cultural activists are simply afraid of taking any responsibilities,” he said.
Meanwhile, Plan Z activists are working hard to make sure Zhmerynka’s residents start to take a more active role in the cultural and social life of their hometown.
“All of the initiatives have to be grassroots, not top-down,” says Minkin. “It would be easy to invite the rock band Scorpions to Zhmerynka to make the town famous. It’s much harder to wake up local activists and inspire them to develop their own ideas.”
