[URBAN NOTE] On the second city of Ukraine, Kharkiv

[rfmcdonald]

Transition Online posted an essay by a young Ukrainian, Viktoria Grivina, about what is now Ukraine's city, Kharkiv. Her description of a city still profound marked by the late Soviet era was evocative to me.

Showing where I live to foreigners was awkward. First, the name – Kharkiv, Kharkov, Xarjkov – is bizarre to pronounce and impossible to remember. Second, the webcam missed the 19th-century downtown and focused on the unfortunate Lenin, who hours earlier had literally been torn from the main square. Close to the plinth that had supported our former revolutionary leader stood four green portable toilets and a janitor. In a gray and orange coat, the janitor posed for the webcam with a look of melancholy. Nearby was the empty Freedom Square.

The two Europeans, Marco and Blas, were bemused by our unwillingness to build anything in this ridiculously huge area. “So this is the agora where people gather in Kharkiv?” Marco asked. I answered, "No." Marco required an explanation, “Where do they go to express their opinions then?” "”If they want to do that, they go home,” I said.

The surrounding streets were eerily empty. “Are you sure it’s not Chernobyl?” Blas asked. “I’m sure. See this is my school. No wait, it's not my school – it's on the other side of the city – but my school is an identical twin of this. We also have three basic types of apartment houses: five-, nine- and 16-stories. I live in a nine-story block. Any nine-story tower you see on the webcam you can consider my house,” I told them.

Marco wondered how the city planners came up with this cloning approach. As my history teacher once said, everything started in good faith and with good intentions. Besides, as the great Russian painter and thinker Kazimir Malevich wrote in his 1915 manifesto, the ideal form is rectangular: you can’t spoil a right rectangular prism, the most tasteful basis for architecture.

Blas looked again at the gray concrete nine-stories of the Saltovka neighborhood and asked whether people still thought that Malevich was right. I answered that it was something to dispute about. But not on the square; if you see someone protesting on Freedom Square, consider them aliens.