I was looking for something else and found this Russian/Ukrainian Sign Alphabet cheat sheet in my notes.



If I'm not mistaken, I received it in 2001 from an openly gay, deaf-mute guy who was also a professional dancer here in Kyiv. We spent an evening writing notes to each other and then he asked if he could have my new Parker pen, a gift from the U.S. NGO I was about to quit then - and of course, I gave it to him, with great pleasure, mainly because my name had been engraved on that pen and I hated it, but also because I imagined this guy, in drag and totally gorgeous, using my name as stage name and signing autographs with my pen. I never saw him again, but this little find has reminded me of him and made me smile...

Dunya (Avdotya) Smirnova, a Russian screenwriter, journalist, TV host and, since 1998, one of my favorite people in general, sort of, thinks that Russian TV is covering Ukraine outrageously. The coverage is remindful of the Brezhnev times, she says in an interview with Bolshoi Gorod, a Russian-language Moscow weekly. Here's some more, on a slightly different topic, translated from Russian:

- You live between St. Pete and Moscow. Is there a difference between the views on the events here and there?

- The feeling of being neglected is stronger in St. Pete, which is typical of the relations between the provinces and the metropolis. The problems we've got here are somewhat different. We had our first snow ten days ago, and now electricity is being turned off periodically, neighborhood after neighborhood. I, for example, didn't have electricity part of today, and part of yesterday, and the day before yesterday. I was really curious about how the governor would deal with it. Last year, when the temperatures hit minus 30 Celcius, and electricity was shut off together with central heating, Yakovlev, [the former] governor, uttered an amazing sentence: "Oh, come on, of course we'll survive this winter - we've survived the Siege [of Leningrad during WWII], haven't we?"

- Then why, despite this, aren't there protests in St. Pete, and the turnout rates during the election are among the lowest in Russia?

- It's the so called "legal nihilism." The society became corrupted as the result of what had been done to it during the election. If they now succeed in squeezing Yanukovych into power in Ukraine, a monstrous thing would happen in a couple years, when at least half the country would not trust any elections. Just think of the [Russian] Duma elections of 1999 and 2003, and how the turnout rates have fallen.

[...]

- Putin openly supported Yanukovych. Do you think this would affect the West's attitude towards Russia?

- I'm afraid this will not lead to any real actions of the West. I admire the protesters in Ukraine: they've proved that they are a completely different people than we are. They do have a Soviet-minded segment, ready to spread itself for any kind of government, but half the country is now totally different. I'm very happy that their [the Russian government's] conviction that everything they've done here could be achieved anywhere turned out to be groundless. Now they'll fuck up in Abkhazia - and it'll definitely happen - and it'll be wonderful. To me, it feels like some totally Brezhnev times again, when you love the country but wish to see the state defeated completely.

(Please follow the links below to get a closer view of these pictures.)

This is what the wall of the post office building looks like now:




And this is Maidan Nezalezhnosti slightly over two weeks ago (my papa's old photo was taken from right across the square) - the renovated columns of the post office building that collapsed in 1989 are on the left from the white column, and the bell tower of the St. Sophia's Catherdral is on the right:




Finally, here's the huge building with the star that was still being built in 1954:

Another picture taken by my papa - 50 years ago, in 1954: the Bessarabka end of Khreshchatyk - and the building I've grown up in.

When my papa took this photo, he was 21.

I was born 20 years later...



The large poplar tree on the left-hand side is still there, much thinner and taller now. The famous Khreshchatyk chestnut trees are barely visible yet; 50 years later, they've grown so gorgeous that in the summers we feel like we live in the forest.

Funny, but just like 50 years ago, there's some construction going on right behind our building... Right now, it's a huge pit and lots of trucks driving back and forth. I wish I could walk inside this photo and see what was being built then? Was it the large building with the star on top of it, where the "Druzhba" ("Friendship") movie theater is? Yes, if you look carefully, you'll see roughly half of it already there, in the narrow gap between our building and the next one, underneath the construction crane. Scary...

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...

I'm glad we didn't receive this month's phone bill a week ago: it wasn't a good time to sober up then. Now that part of the revolution's over, the phone bill has nothing but the usual disheartening effect on me.

One night, at the very beginning of it all, my friend pointed at the clock tower at Maidan and exclaimed: "Look, isn't it sweet: you can order a taxi in the middle of a revolution! Just dial 0-54!"

In addition to the electronic clock, the tower at Maidan shows the date, temperature and an assortment of ads, which, that night and for a while afterwards, included cab service ads. That was weird indeed. Much weirder than getting some stupid phone bill.

And sometime last week, I noticed "Yushchenko - Tak! [Yes!]" and "Armiya z narodom!" ("The army's with the people!") slogans at Maidan tower, alongside with the date, time, temperature and the ads. That was weird, too, considering that the tower's been there since I remember myself, throughout the Soviet times, and I've never seen any dissident content on it, not ever.

(All of the links below are to sites in Russian or Ukrainian.)

I could've lived happily without it, just a few hundred meters away from the center of the Orange Revolution, but somehow I decided to see what Donetsk papers are saying about it all.

I haven't found Web editions of any print publications yet, but there's an online one, Novosti.dn.ua, "a Donbass Internet newspaper." The site's dominant color is orange, the type is dark-blue; there's a survey closer to the bottom of the page: Should we change the site's colors? - and of the 2,136 people who responded, 1,998 (93%) thought it should be left as it was.

Nevertheless, the site contains "recommendations on how to resist the orange ones" as well as a link to something called "New Ukraine, an online journal about the autonomy of Donetsk region."

I skimmed through the "recommendations" - sent in by the readers, some of whom are based as far from Donetsk as it gets, in Munich and Oxford - and found a link to two leaflets that everyone's welcome to print out and paste around their neighborhoods. Here's one of them (the caption reads, "'Our Ukraine' spreads its wings"):



The trident these people are turning into a Nazi symbol is actually Ukraine's official coat of arms...

One of the articles posted on this site Dec. 8 is about the silence of the Yanukovych's campaign headquarters: Kyiv supporters of Yanukovych "cannot even get the most elementary campaign attributes, scarves and ribbons, at [the former movie theater] Zoryaniy, so how can we speak about more serious work?"

And Yanukovych's campaign site hadn't been updated in a long time, since before Serhiy Tyhypko quit as head of the campaign, and the "voters of Ukraine" are still congratulating Yanukovych on his election as president of Ukraine...

Anyway, the more I look at it, the more convinced I become that it's all some kind of a joke - all these separatist sites accusing Yushchenko of being a fascist, and this Yanukovych persona, and the thing called Donbass Voters' Committee, one of whose surveys says 224 of the 528 respondents think Donbass should be part of the Russian Federation and 104 want Donbass to be an independent state...

It can't be true.

But it's not funny, either. It's sickeningly dumb. It's sickening.

I am again somewhat tired of politics, of all this "strategy that Yushchenko is likely to choose" talk, and of the "oh, there's so much to be done when we win" refrain - so much that no one really cares about the specifics.

But I'm sure we'll figure out eventually what exactly has to change here. We've just figured out the most important thing, after all: how to remind those we've elected of why they're there and what we want from them.

I've met a few people, though, who aren't enthusiastic about it all (my mother has met a few, too). "Do you really believe anything will change for the better if your Yushchenko gets elected?" - and they mean it as a rhetorical question, even though they are from Kyiv, and some live on Khreshchatyk, right next to the epicenter. It's amazing that they pretend not to notice how much has already changed.

A few days ago, Yushchenko spoke about issuing orange certificates to those who supported him at Maidan and elsewhere; tonight, he spoke about "a book with photos, titled: 'And I was there, too!'" - a book that everyone would have when the victory is ours.

It reminded me of the guy who was hired after I quit my job with a U.S. NGO in March 2001. A few months later, I stopped by at the office and asked him how he was surviving the madhouse. He replied: "Work is okay, but I'm upset in general because what am I going to answer when asked a few years on - And where were you when Kuchma was being removed, during the revolution? - Am I gonna say, Oh, I was travelling the country with some Americans at that time?"

I remember telling him he shouldn't be so upset, because while travelling with these Americans he was also encountering some of the best Ukrainian professionals out there, and he was helping some of them become even better by selecting them for participation in short-term internships in the States, and if at least one of these people returned to Ukraine with at least one new skill, it'd make Ukraine a slightly better country, and he would've played a role in it.

This guy later went to study in the States himself. I wonder if he'd been able to return in time for this year's revolution, which, unlike the one in 2001, has actually happened. I hope he's here now, enjoying it all.

Speaking about the Central Election Commission, Yushchenko said this (again, below is a close paraphrase, not a direct quote):

We are yet to see who and in what way was making it possible for the data from the polling stations to be first transferred [electronically] to either Medvedchuk and Kuchma's Administration or to the campaign headquarters of Yanukovych, and not directly to the Central Election Commission.

I do hope they'll find out who did it and how. I'd love to know myself.

Parts of Yushchenko's speech at Maidan tonight (most of the text is paraphrased to some extent, not quoted directly):

- In the past 17 days, a new nation has been born, a truly European nation, all thanks to you, the people, who protested the falsifications in a peaceful and civilized way - not a single drop of blood has been shed

- Thank you to the army and the police; thank you to the mayor of Kyiv, Oleksandr Omelchenko

- The conditions that we put forward, our demands that have been satisfied:

• The Supreme Court has cancelled the election results
• The Central Election Commission, some of whose members betrayed tens of millions of people, has been disbanded
  
• Election laws have been changed in order to avoid falsifications during the re-vote
• The government that inspired falsifications has resigned
• Prosecutor-general, Vasilyev, has resigned: he's paid a price for putting more value into phone conversations with Medvedchuk, Kuchma's administration chief, than the Ukrainian laws (Bilokon, minister of internal affairs, and others are to follow Vasilyev)

- A special thanks to the young people, the students - they initiated the most important events at Maidan. All of us here were students once - but what these young Ukrainian citizens have done is an incredible, exemplary deed

- Separatism, a nonsensical idea of autonomization - I'm addressing people of Luhansk, Donetsk and Kharkiv regions: do not trust those of your local leaders who were lying to you; there is nothing to divide us as a people. The spirit of unity has been ruling Maidan for 17 days already - and we have to take this spirit and carry it over to every corner of this country

- No one's rights are going to be violated - no matter who you voted for, or what temple you go to to pray to God

- One step remains to victory - we all have to be well-organized and well-prepared on Dec. 26; the headquarters are now working on a specific plan; the tent city will not be disbanded but re-organized because everyone has to go to their regions and work hard for victory; the campaign headquarters and the rescue committee will still be making announcements from the stage at Maidan

- You are all heroes - be proud of yourself!

I'm stuck at home with a sore throat.

On Channel 5, I see that Maidan is full, as always. People look happy, content - even though a few political experts, in addition to Tymoshenko, have been saying this has been Kuchma's victory, not Yushchenko's.

Yushchenko is beginning to speak now. Tymoshenko and Moroz are with him.

This is indeed very funny:

Born in 1960, in Dnepropetrovsk, a Russian-speaking village that was also the birthplace of Leonid Brezhnev, Tymoshenko trained as an economist before amassing a huge fortune through her dealings in the energy industry.

Dnipropetrovsk (Dnepropetrovsk is a transliteration from Russian) has population of over 1.1 million people - it is not a village.

Leonid Brezhnev was born in Dneprodzerzhinsk (formerly known as Kamenskoye), a town nearby, population over 250,000 people. (I've been to Dneprodzerzhinsk a couple times in the late 1980s, at tennis tournaments: we were there in winter and the town had no fresh air at all, and I can imagine how bad it smelled during the summers... Then, after the Soviet Union collapsed, many local metallurgic and chemical plants became too impoverished to continue functioning, and the air now is a lot cleaner.)

(Thanks to the two anonymous posters for pointing out Tymoshenko's profile in the Independent and the Dnipropetrovsk goof. Also, thank you, Don, for the link to Tymoshenko's family pictures - her daughter is so beautiful!)

PORA has announced that "it is TIME for classes" now!

Students accomplished a lot and they are ready to accomplish even more for the defense of Ukrainian democracy. And now we have period of exams, and that is why, after fulfillment of our civic duty, we say: ”It is TIME for classes”!

And we want everybody to be aware– Ukrainian students are prepared any moment to stand up for the defense of the justice and people’s rights!

Last week, I was told that Kyiv-Mohyla University students had been forced to return to classes part-time as early as last Wednesday, when their university's president decided they could support the pro-democracy movement in the afternoons and study in the mornings. Many didn't like this arrangement and signed a petition, asking university officials to make up their minds: it's either striking or studying, not both. I don't know how it ended.

On a different note, Kyiv-Mohyla University is starting the Museum of the Orange Revolution. Anyone can donate documents, posters, slogans, photos, etc. by taking them to the University's Korpus 3, Room 110. My student friend Tanya spent part of this past Sunday interviewing people from the Khreshchatyk tents, collecting folklore: the most memorable bits came from a guy reciting passionate poems about Kuchma's evil regime, and from a woman who had composed an anthem of the Tent City, somewhat too long but poignant and sincere nonetheless.

Taras Chornovil is biting Kuchma in his pathetic attempt to re-direct Yanukovych's campaign (link to this Kyiv Post piece via Scott W. Clark's foreign notes):

"All the falsifications in the election were sanctioned by Kuchma and he ... used administrative resources to discredit Yanukovych," Chornovil said.

Yanukovych did not know "anything about election falsifications," Chornovil told The Associated Press.

Chornovil also alleged that Kuchma's billionaire son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, was financing Yushchenko's election campaign.

He also insisted that Yanukovych would not resign as prime minister, but had taken a leave of absence so "that no one may accuse him of using administrative resources and pressuring voters."

Taking leave also appeared to be a safeguard against firing, because Ukrainian law bans the dismissal of presidential candidates from their jobs.