Our acquaintance with Sasha, a tall and barefoot man whose age was hard to tell with his shoulder-length silver hair and beard scratching his chest, started in September.
Showing up on Prorizna Street, right next to the Kyiv Post’s old office, he would look us straight in the eyes with a deep sense of dignity and pride. This man, despite his rough clothing and bare feet, isn’t an ordinary homeless person. He emanates joy and knowledge. His gaze is hard to escape.
It took a couple of weeks before we warmed up to each other. At first, some of us tried to avoid him, but the old office’s entrance was in a courtyard, so there was no way to hide. Then, after realizing that he poses no danger, many mornings would start with conversations with him.
He would come faithfully almost every morning before 9, apologizing when he was late. He would brush his hair, looking at his reflection in the shop’s glass pane and then he would light up with joy if some of us smiled back in recognition and said “good morning.”
Somehow he learned that we were all journalists and volunteered to distribute the Kyiv Post. He was very clever about it: One day he would hang the newspapers on a clothes hanger and another he would lay out copies on a construction table he had found somewhere.
He never flogged it; he was a considerate salesman. Some people offered him money and he would take it, but then bring it to us in the evening, because he “didn’t need any.”
Alexander distributing Kyiv Post at Prorizna street near the previous office of Kyiv Post (Ganna Bernyk)
“I distribute the Kyiv Post so that people have post,” he once said alluding to the notion of Lent, which in Russian sounds as “post.” He asked what it meant in English, satisfied that it was something like a postal message.
Sasha, or Oleksandr Krynychny as we later learned, carried his important documents wherever he went in a well-worn clear plastic bag that was part of his traveling bag of possessions. Fittingly, he became the subject of many discussions in the office.
Some worried that his campaigns might hurt our reputation. Others thought that his peaceful demeanor and admiration for the newspaper would only help our profile as a community paper. Despite the difference in opinions on what to do with Sasha, we all wanted to help him, and buying shoes for him seemed like a good thing to begin with.
He refused all offers of shoes and money from us. “No, no,” he’d say, almost offended. What did he want? A job and help getting to America.
From passing exchanges we had with him, it became clear that he wanted friends and listeners. He had many stories to tell, mostly about police corruption, God, his traumas, the United States and Warsaw. An emotional teller, he pieced all these subjects together and tried to pass them on all at once when he had a pair of giving ears.
Sasha was born in Luhanska Oblast in 1957 to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father. He said his dad was a miner and a great influence on him. “We were poor and he was never at home, but I loved him so much,” Sasha would tell us emotionally.
When Sasha grew up, he went to Russia to study agriculture, “a profession from God as my father used to tell me.” In 1977, he apparently received a letter that his father died in a car accident.
From this point on, Sasha’s biography gets blurry. He thinks that the KGB killed his father because “he was speaking the truth like I do today.” He would then go into lengthy descriptions of how he is being tortured every night by the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] – even showing marks around his neck where he claims to have been choked.
“I don’t belong to anyone, only to God,” Alexander liked to say with great dignity in his eyes. (Ganna Bernyk)
“My dad told me once that I need to go to the U.S. or work for them,” he used to repeat. The advice stuck. He said he was in Poland and camped under the American Embassy there with an SOS sign, hoping he would get a visa.
Most people would probably classify Sasha’s situation as mental disorder. He is certainly less possessed by worldly pleasures than most of us. “I don’t belong to anyone, only to God,” he liked to say with great dignity in his eyes. “You have to worry about government, politicians and businessmen dictating their will to you and I don’t.”
One day our neighbors at Prorizna called police to report Sasha’s bare feet. We talked to the officers, saying he does no harm and that he distributes the newspaper for free. His bare feet seem to bother many people, but he connects to the earth that way. He is also proud of his athleticism, occasionally hitting the pavement and doing repeated push-ups to show his strength.
Every day he said he was swimming in the Dnipro River before coming to greet us at 9 a.m. “The sun is your mother and the moon is your father. You have to eat the sun and it will make you shine from the inside,” he once said.
As we changed offices, moving far from the center, Sasha didn’t come along. He would probably not find the new business center in the industrial area to his liking. It certainly has more security that would separate him from us.
Maybe he’s still there on Prorizna Street, soaking in the sun and spreading sunshine around. Give him a smile from us if you see him one day.
Kyiv Post lifestyle editor Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected]. Rina Soloveitchik interned at the Kyiv Post.
