This is a photo of the still empty Maidan that my papa took in July 1951. In the right-hand corner, you can see part of a roofless skeleton of a building - one of the last reminders of what Khreshchatyk looked like after WWII.



It's amazing to think of all the changes that have occurred at this spot in the past half-century...

It used to be October Revolution Square before they renamed it into Independence Square; it keeps being reconstructed; there used to be a huge Lenin-with-the-workers statue (called Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves by the people) and now there's a shopping mall there and a huge, tacky column with a woman on top of it; part of the post office building collapsed sometime in August 1989 (I may be wrong about the date, but I did hear the horrible sound of the crash from my window), killing over a dozen people, and now the renovated wall looks like Reichstag, with the names of the people who came to Maidan to defend their freedom written all over it; the humongous, ugly and lousy Hotel Ukraine used to be called Hotel Moskva (Moscow) until very recently...

There's so much more - and I wish I had the patience and the knowledge of an historian to recount at least some of it here...