Ukretnoexp. Part IX. Bonus track

October 26–31, 2009

Fall arrived. The summer ethnographic expedition around the perimeter of Ukraine (see eight stories, starting with Part I) needed a logical conclusion in the form of a trip through the country’s heartland.

Kremenchug

A drab city that takes excellent care of its property.

The mosaics aren’t plastered over with advertising.

The lampposts have fences to protect them from cars trying to park.

The post boxes have little awnings to shield them from rain and snow.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Soviets were still running the place.

An incredibly beautiful detail: a trolleybus stop sign.

An interesting local custom: if a building number contains a slash, the two parts of the number are shifted relative to each other on the building’s wall.

Dniprodzerzhinsk

This city next to Dnipropetrovsk is notable only for being the world capital of highway prostitution. There are young women standing every twenty meters along the road, and if you pull over, one of them approaches and asks, «Hey sweetie, looking for a good time?»

The city looks accordingly.

Dnipropetrovsk

There’s a scrolling advertisement at the red light (almost like in Montevideo).

Dnipropetrovsk glasses.

The city has its own signature parking meters (different from the Odessa model).

Over-the-street banners consist of individually carved letters. Apparently the local ad agencies have a lot of free time and not a lot of clients.

Dnipropetrovsk thinks it’s already in Europe.

But it’s not actually quite there yet.

Zaporozhie

I already passed through here in the summer and didn’t find anything interesting. But there were three sights I hadn’t managed to see: Khortytsia Island, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station and the grandiose Stalinist buildings.

Khortytsia turned out to be boring and overrated. The yellow mesh recycling containers for bottles and cans are the only potentially interesting thing here, but these containers are now being installed all over Ukraine (they had already appeared in Kiev by the time I got there—see further down in this story).

From Khortytsia Island, you can see the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, which visually unites different historical periods.

The power plant remains frozen in the Soviet era.

By the way, most of the equipment here has never been replaced since the station’s post-war opening. And Soviet equipment didn’t exist yet back then, so they installed General Motors equipment. It’s still purring along smoothly to this day.

They did, however, replace the wonderful oak windows in the gatehouse with horrible white double glazing. But the modernizers haven’t gotten inside the plant so far.

They’ve only updated the central console a bit.

The old console (which is almost as beautiful as the one at the Ivankovo Hydro Power Plant in Dubna) hasn’t been thrown out, thankfully. It’s been left sitting behind the new one.

The granite walkway in the machine room has a specific practical purpose: it attracts all the dust. All the cleaning lady has to do is pass her mop once over its half-kilometer length—and presto.

The place is filled with relics of the past.

And with quiet.

The granite stairway has an inventory number. You can’t trust the people—never know what they might get up to.

In the city itself, the ornate classic Stalinist buildings are particularly noteworthy. The residential buildings of the Zaporizhstal steel plant:

And the building complex «For the Workers of the Coke and Chemical Plant» across the street:

In fact, the entire main street could have been a living monument to urban planning and that particular era, if only every window hadn’t made a significant contribution to defacing the city. Some people did their part with insulated window units, some with an AC, some with signs.

Krivoy Rog

The lampposts here are cousins of the ones in Pripyat.

The most interesting part of the city is the metro, where you can still see not only the old turnstiles, but also the old change machines (which exchanged Soviet 10-, 15- and 20-kopek coins for 5-kopek ones that could be used in the turnstiles).

But the platforms here are low, and the system is serviced by trams (Volgograd has the same thing).

The trams look ordinary from the outside, but inside, the seats run along the sides of the car, rather than across in rows like on a normal tram.

Riding a tram underground is an unusual feeling.

Cherkassy

Cherkasy has found a clever solution: instead of an eternal flame (which needs to be fueled by expensive Russian gas), they’ve put a circular screen into the monumental woman’s hand. Now mighty pixels burn eternally for all of ingenious mankind.

Kiev

By the end of October, everyone in Ukraine had officially gone mad: every second person was wearing a face mask to protect themselves from swine flu. I’ve never seen such widespread insanity in our part of the world. On the bright side, there’s no other country (except Cambodia) where a post office employee will stick the stamp onto your postcard for you, simply because she considers this an essential service.

Yellow mesh dumpsters for aluminum cans and glass and plastic bottles have been set up around the city. After previously visiting a dump in Novosibirsk, I began to appreciate the value of separate waste collection a bit more.

The Kiev planetarium is hosting a fruit and vegetable expo against the backdrop of the solar system.

* * *

Over the summer, I managed to really fall in love with Ukraine—with its religious families in the West and total chaos in the East; with its women, the most beautiful in the world, and its resorts, the most hideous in the world; with its rotten government and its unbelievably gentle soul.