Ukraine

Five years after the Euro-Maidan revolution that overthrew their president and sent him fleeing to Russia, the Ukraine is now bustling with capitalist fervor and loving its new focus as the country that could potentially play an active role in toppling the U.S. president as well. Internal conflicts are always brewing here, such as in the Donbass, where some with a Soviet mentality are nostalgic for a lost past and willing to risk their lives to bring it back.

While young people urge their grandparents to “let go,” the last century was just too ominous and overbearing not to have had their spirits crushed out, with many of the older generation having served time in the Gulag. Blind beggars still sing in Lviv, potentially the most splendidly elegant city in all of Europe that no one has ever heard of. Advertisements feature cosmonauts, melting away the decades since the space race of the sixties. Possibly the world’s most advanced subway system hurls you through the Kyevian underground and jettisons you up escalators, as if trying to transport its passengers into the future. It’s all a weird mash-up of what was left behind and what the Ukraine wants to forget as quickly as possible but can’t, with Russia just itching to get back what it misses most.

Connect to the right daredevils, and they’ll take you to a heavily padlocked Soviet-style bunker that they’ve appropriated, replete with gas masks, a roomful of scientists’ code-filled notebooks, and rusted-out generators that roar to life. I faced all my claustrophobic fears and entered a manhole that revealed a catacomb of tunnels beneath Kyev’s surface, got chased off by a guard from a Soviet tank cemetery, burrowed into the structure of the South Bridge for a spectacular view at mid-pass, and explored the remains of an abandoned ship at dawn.

Here you’ll never tire of surreal monoliths to the sheer, bone-crushing and crudely-rendered power of the former USSR, as evidenced by the not-built-to-last Zhitniy market, Hotel Salyut, Institute of Information, and Baikove Crematorium. I’d like to say that I captured it all on camera, but there were mostly times when I lowered my lens in respect to my older subjects, the broken-down legacy of what Soviet realism once was and will never be again.

Here’s my photo essay on Ukraine.

As this was a challenging and somewhat intimidating venture until I fully immersed myself, I’d like to thank Bohdan, Max, Slava, Liuda, Vidor and Viacheslav, as well as everyone at Hotel Bursa.