The Russian invasion of Georgia this month should have smacked a complacent Ukrainian political class into some semblance of clarity. Should have – but did it?
It must have been fun belonging to the ‘democratic, Western-leaning’ ‘orange’ portion of the Ukrainian political class these last several years. Let’s say, for example, that you were President Yushchenko, that ‘reformist’ hero still popular in the West, if not at home. All you had to do was mumble out the occasional vague speech and jet off once in a while to mug for the cameras with Nicolas Sarkozy or Bill Clinton. People pinned medals on your chest in Boston and Philadelphia and for some reason Gerard Depardieu thought you were cool. Meanwhile, back home your cronies were looting everything that wasn’t riveted down and shoveling the resultant cash into Cyprus bank accounts, or using it to buy bunker-looking dachas or Bentleys with which to tool up to the entrances of vulgar restaurants. Your approval rating was down in the single digits, but who cared?

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With cigarettes costing somewhere around 5hrv, added to the fact that you can smoke virtually anywhere, trying to cut out the deadly habit isn’t easy in Ukraine. With the country suffering from serious demographic problems, which are likely only to get worse in coming years, it may well be time for the Ukrainian government to follow the example of many other countries, and introduce a blanket ban. As a smoker who would dearly love to quit, I would welcome any moves in this direction.

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Since the euphoria Orange Revolution in November 2004 when the people took control and won out over a corrupt system, Ukraine’s political situation has, sad to say, been less than stable. The big question now is, will this latest round of elections lead to a long running stable government, or will the country’s politicians continue to bicker like school children over their slice of the pie?
Who’s going to come out on top in the elections on Sunday? According to all the polls the Party of Regions will get the biggest percentage of the vote followed by Yulia Tymonshenko with Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defense coming in third and the Communists following up the rear. And then there is the new kids on the Kuchma Bloc who many pollsters have put out in front in the most recent polls.

There was a time when you could guess whether someone was foreign or Ukrainian by looking at their shoes. The great fashion divide was so deep that in the absence of ethnic characteristics you could still tell from a distance where someone was from. That is emphatically no longer the case, both because of the ever increasing availability of Western fashions at affordable prices and the exposure to and adoption of Western clothing as part of a more integrated European lifestyle. One of the most striking areas of fashion fusion has been among young ladies, with the miniskirts and high heels which were worn with an almost religious intensity at the turn of the millennium now joined by punkier styles, trainers and baggy sportswear. There is a huge amount of colour and originality on the streets of Kyiv these days compared to the blacks and grays of the 1990s, when leather jackets were standard issue and many girls dressed in vulgar, revealing outfits and cheap animal prints.

Back in the day there were only about twenty places in Kyiv where anyone with money would consider going out, and on any given evening you could pretty much guess where the VIP scene would be. It was a lot of fun, but it was yawningly predictable. These days there are so many options that even being editor of a listings mag like What’s On does not guarantee that you’re aware of them all. There was a time when I could confidently say I’d been in every single decent Kyiv restaurant and nightclub, but that would probably be impossible to achieve now given the sheer scale of the capital’s leisure industry expansion. The past six years have seen the emergence of a whole strata of society with considerable disposable income comparable with the wealthier middle classes of Western Europe, and I think that people still don’t realise quite how comparatively wealthy Kyivites have become.

As I look at the banks of photographers scrumming down to snap away at the lines of gushing celebrities and wannabes at any given party these days it seems almost inconceivable to think that there was a time not so long ago when it was difficult getting Kyiv people to pose for the camera. I always thought this camera coyness was some sort of KGB hangover, and part of the whole insecurity thing that also made people cautious about disclosing personal details to strangers. We’d often get people coming over and demanding our photographers handed over their film (this was before the advent of digital technology, obviously). They would generally be rude and sometimes aggressive, although as far as I know we always got away with promising not to publish the offending image. A common situation was for a man to be angry after being photographed with his female ompanion, who it soon transpired was not actually his wife! The fact that people are now so comfortable being photographed is an indication of a new openness that has come from the top down and is all part of a willingness to engage and a lessening of the desire to control every facet of human existence which I think drove society here for a long time.

This week’s summer issue of What’s On will be the last ever from Chief Editor Peter Dickinson, who has been running the English-language weekly city guide for six years and is now moving on to become Chief Editor at Business Ukraine magazine. As he bows out Peter reflects on the changes he has seen over the years while covering developments in Ukraine’s capital city.

I remember once being referred to as someone who smiled a lot, and thinking to myself that it was a pretty poor show if a society was so miserable that people actually thought it noteworthy that someone was prone to smiling. Public displays of emotion were frowned upon in the Soviet UNI0N, of course, and there was not a hell of a lot to be smiling at in the early 1990s, but even so it was hard in 2001 to get away from the stereotype of Ukrainians as a dour, miserable lot. Today’s Kyiv is a much more welcoming place where you can find so many street level smiles that it no longer seems to be much of an issue, and the old widespread cynicism
about American-style ‘Have a Nice Day’ consumer culture has been replaced by a realisation that you really do feel better if you smile.

The only people who talked about politics in 2001 were the expat know it all types along with a few committed but isolated Ukrainian activists and social scientists. The criminality of the regime was considered a closed book and accepted with a huge slice of fatalism by the vast majority of the population. On the few occasions when I asked Ukrainians about their politics I was amazed by their utter lack of interest and equal absence of knowledge. I remember once memorably asking over ten otherwise educated people in a bar if they could name the country’s current prime minister. None could. Contrast that with the situation circa 2007, when everyone has opinions about a vast array of political issues, political talk shows dominate the TV schedules, and elections are widely seen as valid and representative.