from the series Icons of the Revolution by Sociopath (2014). The text is from Shevchenko’s poem “Hamaliya”: “Fire does not burn those tempered by flames.”

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“Ukraine has so many beautiful volunteering to fight, especially people things, doesn’t it?” the mother with children. NEW YEAR mused. “Like sarafans.” A sarafan is a BY SOPHIE traditional dress, a bit like a jumper. Any mention of the war made him IN KIEV PINKHAM “My ears ached on the plane, the snarl with anger and disgust. Alik was whole way,” the daughter said. a humanitarian; he had no interest in “Why didn’t you put drops in?” national ideas. Alik took me to visit his friend s the months of fighting Glory to Ukraine! Jacques, a French artist who’d been wore on, I got used to Glory to heroes! living in Kiev for a year. Long-haired thinking of Ukraine as a war and skinny, in white jeans and huge zone, a landscape strewn “Ukraine is a European country,” plush slippers bought at a market stall, A the mother said happily. By the time Jacques talked about every kind of with corpses, a place where people did terrible things to each other. But when we made it past customs, the singing event with the same sarcastic, self- I returned in December 2014, the Kiev patriots had dispersed. deprecating humor. He told us about airport’s arrivals hall was the same as On the way into the city, I passed the his love interest; the night before, usual. For a moment I thought that big soccer ball that had been placed he said, they’d had a whole bottle of maybe everything hadn’t gone to hell there in honor of the Eurocup. It was vodka, but she still wouldn’t sleep with after all. right next to the Kiev city limits sign, him. In the same tone of amusement Then I heard a group of men on the which had the words HERO-CITY and feigned outrage, Jacques spoke other side of the customs booth singing above it: this was the official Soviet about his experience of Maidan. He’d the Ukrainian national anthem. designation for the cities that had moved to Kiev just after the protests suffered most during the Second started, and he’d been living right off Souls and bodies we’ll lay down for our World War. Graffiti along the highway Khreshchatyk Street, on freedom shouted, THIS IS OUR GOD-GIVEN Square. When the barricades went COUNTRY! My driver turned up the up, he’d been almost trapped in his “Listen to how soulfully they sing!” volume on the radio every time the apartment. Soon he didn’t want to said a middle-aged woman standing news came on. I’d decided that my old leave anyway, because of all the fires behind me in line. She’d been speaking apartment on and explosions. Snipers were shooting Russian with her grown daughter, but had become uninhabitable, so I was from just above his building. “I mean, now she started drifting into a mix staying with Alik. It was already dark fuck, man,” he kept saying, as if he of Russian and Ukrainian. “Can you when I arrived at his apartment in were complaining about a traffic jam imagine them singing the Russian Podil. He heated up a carrot “cutlet” or being kept on hold while he called national anthem in Sheremetyevo?” for me—a vegetarian variation on the customer service. Sheremetyevo is an international Eastern European staple, the kotlet, Now Jacques was back to the expat airport in Moscow. a meat patty made of ground meat, good life, in a huge underpriced Her daughter murmured breadcrumbs, eggs, and onion. apartment with mirrored walls and in agreement. “Just like Tolstoy ate,” Alik told me. ceilings and northern and southern “He invented them.” views. The revolution had caused Glory to Ukraine! Like Tolstoy, Alik was a pacifist: he some stress, but the resulting collapse Glory to heroes! couldn’t understand why anyone was of the Ukrainian currency had made

Excerpted from Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine by Sophie Pinkham. © 2016 by Sophie Pinkham. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

HARRIMAN | 5 ­­ Director Alexander Cooley and Sophie Pinkham in the director’s office before the Harriman book launch (November 14, 2016)

the expat good life even better. install a strong military leader, perhaps “I have no news,” Zakhar answered, Jacques said that he liked Ukraine a dictator. They didn’t think it would in his usual bantering, slightly because it was a really free country, be very hard. “What are the police deranged tone. “I haven’t done not like France or England or the going to do?” asked one Azov fighter. anything for an entire year—that’s . In Western Europe, he “They couldn’t do anything against the a record for me. I’ve just been said, there were too many rules, and peaceful protesters on Maidan; they’ll monitoring. During Maidan I lived everyone was always asking questions. hardly withstand armed fighting units.” in the gallery so I could monitor the Here you could do as you pleased, Azov used a modified version of the revolution more closely.” (His gallery especially if you were an expat. He said Nazi-era Wolf’s Hook as their insignia; was a short walk from Maidan.) he was working on a nude portrait of like the ultranationalists of the 1990s, “Sometimes I didn’t leave the garage Trotsky’s great-granddaughter. they said it represented the words for three days at a time. Alla was the “Idea of the Nation.” Azov was funded only one who knew I was there—she’d THE OPERA was decorated with a huge by Ukraine’s most prominent Jewish come and make me go outside. You banner that said WE WELCOME THE oligarch, Igor Kolomoysky. Nothing was could eat well on Maidan! We used to HEROES OF ATO. (Everyone referred surprising in Ukraine anymore. line up for , didn’t we, Alla?” to the antiterrorist operation by its Alla rolled her eyes. initials.) Despite this warm reception, MY OLD FRIEND ZAKHAR, the Zakhar and his friend, an unpleasant many would-be heroes were still proprietor of the underground art man with a pointed nose, beady eyes, wearing their masks. At the Christmas gallery-garage, invited me over to and long, greasy hair, started talking fair on St. Sophia Square, Santas posed his house. I took a taxi; at the new about the war. Everything came down for cash while men in camouflage and exchange rate, I was suddenly very rich. to money, they said. People joined the balaclavas collected money for the Azov When I arrived, Zakhar and a friend Azov Battalion for the money—and no Battalion, the volunteer battalion with were watching an American romantic wonder, now that there were no jobs. the strongest neo-Nazi tendencies. The comedy dubbed into Russian. We were Zakhar and his friend discussed a rumor previous summer Azov members had soon joined by Zakhar’s long-suffering they’d heard about how you could told the Guardian that once the war girlfriend, Alla. make big money by buying weapons in in the east was over, they’d “bring the “What’s new?” I asked, though I the ATO zone and selling them for twice fight to Kiev,” and that they wanted to knew this was a fraught question. as much in Kiev. The problem with this

6 | HARRIMAN otherwise appealing plan was that it Battalion, which was on the front lines Ukraine promised to required going to the ATO zone. from the beginning. When he joined Ukraine had reintroduced up, it wasn’t even a proper battalion, send reinforcements, conscription the previous May, and a just a band of patriots without a name. government troops, but new wave of troop mobilization had Misha had told me we were going these never arrived: a just been announced for February. to a party for the released prisoners, “Don’t you understand that we and I’d imagined a big event, a noisy terrible betrayal. The pro- could be drafted at any time?” Zakhar’s hall full of men in fatigues. But it was Ukrainian fighters in the friend said, his voice shrill with anxiety. only a few close-mouthed couples at Il “I don’t want to be cannon fodder!” Patio, a faux-Italian chain restaurant city were surrounded. “You think they want me in the on Bessarabska Square. Aleksei had army?” Zakhar said ironically. the high, stripped cheekbones that Alla and I laughed at the idea of you often see among people who drafting an emotionally unstable, take HIV medications, which change alcoholic bohemian with a penchant the distribution of body fat. With his separatists but also Russian troops. for public nudity. “They could take glassy, beatific green eyes, he was Before Ilovaisk, it had seemed that you,” his friend insisted. “They can beautiful in a way peculiar to some Ukraine was about to win the war. take anyone, whenever they want.” drug users and people with HIV or As prisoners, Aleksei and his fellow TB, people who seem to have one foot fighters had been beaten, made to ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE SPOKE in the next world. He and Sveta were confess, and paraded for Russian loudly about their support for the already on intimate terms with Misha; news cameras. Eastern Ukrainians war, far fewer intended to go and they’d even let him photograph them like Aleksei usually tried to hide their fight. Friends shared strategies to in bed on the first night after their origins, so that the separatists could avoid being drafted; to many, the draft reunion, as they lay in the dark, staring think them natural enemies from the seemed like a form of human sacrifice. at their phones and frowning. I had west rather than traitors, who might An estimated fifteen hundred the impression that they were relieved be treated even more cruelly. But servicemen had been killed during to have an intermediary. the separatists weren’t always strict. nine months of fighting, but evidence In August, Aleksei had been People in Ilovaisk had written letters suggested that the real death toll was captured in the battle of Ilovaisk, a asking the Donetsk People’s Republic higher, that the government was strategically important town between for POW labor, and the people’s trying to conceal the scale of its losses. Donetsk and Luhansk. Pro-Ukrainian republic had complied. Aleksei and Misha Friedman, a Russian- volunteer battalions managed to some other POWs were assigned to American photographer, invited me raise their flag in Ilovaisk without do repairs in a woman’s house. The to meet Sveta, a longtime AIDS activist any casualties and were said to be woman felt sorry for Aleksei, and let from Donetsk, and her husband, clearing the city of terrorists. But him Skype with Sveta. Aleksei, a fighter who’d just been then the separatists appeared. There The families of the exchanged released in a pre–New Year’s prisoner were battles in the streets, with many prisoners hadn’t been informed exchange. Both Sveta and Aleksei casualties. Ukraine promised to send in advance about where the men were HIV-positive former drug users. reinforcements, government troops, would arrive; President Poroshenko When Sveta had started her AIDS but these never arrived: a terrible kept all the joy for himself, having NGO, Aleksei had been on the board betrayal. The pro-Ukrainian fighters in the prisoners deposited on an of directors, but he’d soon grown the city were surrounded. After several airstrip at night. He was the only one tired of the paperwork and become days, the separatists agreed to allow photographed greeting them. The a mechanic. For him the war was them to retreat via a “humanitarian wives were furious. personal: he’d lost his apartment in corridor,” but the retreating battalions Now Sveta looked anxious and Donetsk, his work, his hometown. were ambushed, killed, and captured. happy, her eyes open as fresh wounds. He volunteered early for the Donbas Survivors reported seeing not only Aleksei was drinking a half-liter glass of

HARRIMAN | 7 ­­ out front; empty beer bottles were fun people—they know how to keep scattered on the ground. themselves occupied. One fighter once said to me, ‘Oh! You’re a journalist! NOT ALL THE VOLUNTEER Want to throw a fly?’” Mukha, or “fly,” FIGHTERS were motivated by political is the nickname for a Russian rocket ideals or national ideas. For a certain launcher developed in the early 1970s. type of man, the war offered an When Techinskiy declined, the fighter opportunity to recapture a sense of shot the rocket launcher himself, just potency and significance, whatever to keep busy. the cost. In a society in which so many men were adrift, war had appeal, OLENA, an acquaintance from my especially if it paid. public health days, told me straight off Oleksandr Techinskiy, who made the that the last year had almost killed her. Pinkham holding a copy of her Maidan documentary All Things Ablaze During Maidan she had coordinated Black Square and went on to work with a number of medical aid to the wounded, sending foreign journalists covering the war in people to clinics and buying medicine, eastern Ukraine, put it more cynically, equipment, and prosthetic limbs. In saying that many of the guys who August her husband, father of her were fighting were just “looking for an nine-year-old daughter, had been beer; he had been sober for ten years excuse to get away from their wives, drafted. Olena hadn’t wanted him before the war, but he’d gotten smashed stop showering or changing their to join up. She knew that there were on his first night as a free man. underwear, and get drunk.” plenty of ways to get out of the draft; During his four months in captivity, Once the country had taken up after all, this was Ukraine, still one Aleksei had shared a bed with a friend, arms, it was hard to put them down. of the most corrupt countries in the who was also at the table with us. The “People have gone over to war now,” world. Even military personnel, she’d friend was only twenty-four, and his Techinskiy told me. “They’ve gotten heard, were managing to escape fur hat with its earflaps askew made used to it, they’re comfortable there, mobilization. But Olena’s husband said him look like a little rabbit. He and and they don’t want to leave. he wanted to defend his country. He Aleksei and the other men muttered “At one point I was in Piski, near had no real military training, only some in their guttural Donetsk accents, Donetsk, with Right Sector. A Right theoretical knowledge of artillery. showing each other war videos on Sector guy asked a Right Sector girl if The impoverished Ukrainian army their phones and discussing military she had ten towels. ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but provided almost no equipment to its equipment. Aleksei’s eyes lit up at the what will you give me in return?’ He conscripts, so Olena and her husband talk of weapons. traded her a hand grenade—an F1, a scrambled to purchase several “I don’t think he’ll be a mechanic kind of grenade that was invented in thousand dollars’ worth of gear and again,” Sveta said. “Look—he already the Second World War.” medical supplies with assistance from misses his gun.” I made some anodyne Weapons became playthings, friends and colleagues. Through comment about the need to organize sometimes literally: two Luhansk personal connections, Olena was able help for the fighters who returned separatists and a couple of bystanders to obtain prescription painkillers, with PTSD; Sveta snorted. No one was were injured after the separatists another thing the government didn’t going to help these men. tried to bowl with grenades. Weapons provide. (The government was Il Patio closed, and the party offered relief first from the boredom shocked to discover that because of was over. I arrived at the Maidan of everyday life, and then from the its own labyrinthine requirements metro station just before the train boredom of war. for opioid prescription, it was unable stopped running for the night. “You spend hours just sitting to procure painkillers for its own Men in camouflage and balaclavas around waiting, with nothing to do,” soldiers.) After just three weeks of were wrapping up a drunken fight Techinskiy told me. “Fighters are training, Olena’s husband was sent to

8 | HARRIMAN HARRIMAN AT 70

Donbas. When Olena and I met, he Spinner’s outfit seemed more than “ Many people are had been on duty for three months outdated. without any break or hope of rotation. Spinner stood in Alik’s living room, killed because of He was already used to killing people, looking in the mirror, admiring pure stupidity,” and to people trying to kill him. himself, practicing his dance moves. Olena told me. “My Olena said that Maidan had “I’d like a car and an apartment on “crystallized” civil society, proving Bessarabska Square and a pistol,” he husband and many that self-organization was far more said dreamily. others are hostages efficient than anything orchestrated “Why do you want a pistol?” I asked. by the corrupt, useless, badly managed “I like pistols,” he said. “There are of this situation— state. But the story was no longer an weapons everywhere now.” “The they cannot escape.” inspiring one. Olena and her husband nineties are coming back,” Alik said. had been lucky to have the money “We have to be ready!” Spinner and connections to get the necessary laughed. equipment and supplies, but they couldn’t do anything about the AT A TRENDY NEW CAFÉ off broader problems: lack of equipment, Khreshchatyk Street, I interviewed training, and experience, and Nikita, the eccentric harm reductionist incompetent officers who exposed I’d first encountered several years soldiers to unnecessary risks. earlier. Huge, broad-shouldered, and “Many people are killed because bald, in a red-and-white-checked of pure stupidity,” Olena told me. cowboy shirt, Nikita was out of “My husband and many others are place, out of proportion, out of time. hostages of this situation—they cannot American Christmas music was playing escape. Or if they do, they’ll be in the background: Bing Crosby’s criminals.” Her husband was one of “Jingle Bells,” “Last Christmas” by the many people who predicted that Wham!, and “All I Want for Christmas the soldiers would come back very Is You.” Nikita looked around with angry at the government, with their impatience, declined a coffee, and told own military equipment and fighting me about the . experience, and that Ukraine would “We had a very tough country. You become even more dangerous than it had to wait online for two hours to buy had been in the 1990s. underwear. There was food to eat in the capitals—in Kiev, Moscow, Tallinn. ALIK’S FRIEND SPINNER But not in other places. Every Saturday (pronounced “Spee-nehr”) came over and Sunday people rode on the train to visit. Spinner was an extremely to buy sausage. On Sundays in Kiev, good-looking raver. you’d have to wait in line for four He was thirty but seemed younger, hours. People stood and read, wrote with a boyish face, yellow-tinted whole dissertations, while they waited glasses, baggy camouflage pants, and to buy sausage.” He laughed. “So brightly colored high tops. His outfit anyone who robbed the government was perfectly normal for a raver, and I was a saint. Now it’s the same way.” wouldn’t have looked at it twice in New He told me about working as a black York in the 1990s. But in Kiev in 2014, marketeer in the 1980s. “I’d go up when every underpass held a cluster to a foreigner who’s visiting. ‘How’s of shady, unshaven men in fatigues, life, kid? Give me a T-shirt or some

HARRIMAN | 9 ­­ Because drug underwear. Or dollars.’ For dollars you Crimea or the east were more cunning, got eight years. more dishonest than Kiev natives. treatment with “Russia wants to bring us back to “People from Donetsk come and methadone or Soviet times. But Putin has given us a think we owe them something. So buprenorphine was nation. I used to be closer to Donetsk you’re a drug addict, so you’re HIV in spirit. But now I’m not close to positive—go ask Russia for help. Why illegal in Russia, all Donetsk at all. I would never invite are you coming here? Maybe you Crimean programs Putin to come to Ukraine. I’d get a gun shouldn’t have been waving those flags and shoot him instead.” He said this in and begging Putin to come.” had stopped; the UN a very casual way. had recently I asked him about anti-Semitism ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, Alina and announced that of the in Right Sector and Svoboda. (Nikita I went to visit Alina’s colleague, was half Jewish, which was part of the Yury, and his wife, Yulia. (Alik had eight hundred reason I’d wanted to interview him.) disappeared.) Yury and Yulia were Crimean drug users “Svoboda works for the KGB,” he good-looking, charming, successful who’d been said. “What makes you think so?” I people in their thirties, with a asked. “I don’t think so. I know.” beautiful blond son about five years receiving substitution “You know?” old. They lived just off St. Sophia treatment before “I’m an old Jew, what do you want? I Square, in a high-ceilinged, Euro- know everything,” he said, and laughed. renovated apartment furnished with the Russian Because drug treatment with white IKEA furniture. annexation, an methadone or buprenorphine We drank champagne and ate ham estimated was illegal in Russia, all Crimean that Yury’s mother had baked. programs had stopped; the UN had “Why don’t you show us your one hundred or more recently announced that of the present?” Yury asked his shy son, were now dead, eight hundred Crimean drug users who was playing quietly in the who’d been receiving substitution corner. The boy’s eyes widened, and mostly of overdoses treatment before the Russian he ran into his bedroom. When he or suicides. annexation, an estimated one came back, he was holding a huge hundred or more were now dead, black air rifle, as big as his body. mostly of overdoses or suicides. “He was begging for it for six Others had moved to parts of months!” Yury said, laughing. “It’s Ukraine where treatment was still real—it works. But there are no available. There were drug users bullets in it, of course.” and HIV-positive people among the Kiev residents traditionally refugees from the east as well. Nikita celebrated New Year’s Eve on had new harm reduction clients, but Maidan, but now there were too he didn’t like them much. many painful memories; the “The good ones from the east or festivities had been moved to St. Crimea are somewhere else, doing Sophia Square. When it was almost something else,” he said. “They’re not midnight, we went downstairs. the ones who came here. The ones Bundled in our parkas, scarves, I see want to take with both hands— hoods, hats, and gloves, watching they have Russia in their heads.” In our breath in the night air, several his opinion, although all drug users hundred of us greeted a new year. were tricky, the HIV patients and drug Everyone was eager to chase away users who had moved to Kiev from the old one.

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Street graffiti in Kiev. Photo by Sophie Pinkham

In the morning, Kiev’s snowdrifts were blue and gold Svoboda flags; held a Ukrainian flag and a portrait were strewn with empty bottles the others were red and black, for of Taras Shevchenko. An Orthodox of cheap champagne. (“Soviet Right Sector and other nationalist priest made a speech, and then Champagne” was one of the most groups. Passing clusters of men in everyone sang a song. As the rally’s popular brands.) While nursing fatigues, some of them in balaclavas, speakers stepped down from their my hangover, I saw on Twitter I stopped behind a family. little stage, they clustered around that Evgeny Feldman, a Russian “It’s not too scary for you?” the Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of photographer, was at the annual father asked his children, laughing. Svoboda, asking him to pose for torch march in honor of the The children seemed unconcerned. photos with them. Robust and nationalist hero ’s Their father was showing them a photogenic, he towered over birthday, January 1. Feldman’s historical curiosity, a zoo exhibit. the crowd. He looked like a real pictures were ominous; a mass of A group of pensioners were politician, but if this was his torches burning in the night, the wearing traditional Ukrainian constituency, he was in trouble. The marchers almost invisible. I headed clothing; one babushka wore crowd was full of people who were to Maidan. a woven headband covered in one-eyed, disabled, elderly, visibly A man was leading a pony through pompoms and little pins with marginal. It was hard to take them the Maidan underpass, and drunk portraits of Bandera. Small children seriously as a neofascist menace. men in Winnie-the-Pooh costumes slid across the icy cobblestones. An Feldman, the journalist, said the were propositioning laughing attractive blond woman had Right march was smaller than it had been women who shoved them away. The Sector’s black and red flag painted in previous years; maybe this was menacing, torch-wielding hordes of on her cheek. because the young and able-bodied Feldman’s photos, which had already “Glory to Ukraine!” the group had gone to fight in the east. been retweeted again and again by shouted. Only a couple of people On the steps leading up to those who were concerned, or who yelled “Death to enemies,” and they the square, some young men in wished to seem concerned, about didn’t sound convinced. camouflage were clowning around, Ukraine’s far right, had dispersed. On a small stage, a pretty woman waving flags and singing some kind All that remained was a small group stood and smiled radiantly, holding of nationalist limerick. Suddenly a of flag wavers. About half the flags a portrait of Bandera. An old man few of them began to shout “Glory

HARRIMAN | 11 ­­ “All this will pass. to Ukraine! Glory to heroes! Death to 302-bis Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, the enemies!” the guttural chant tearing Moscow communal apartment where Suffering, sorrow, out of their throats. This time it Bulgakov lived with his first wife. He blood, hunger, and sounded genuinely frightening. hated the apartment and made it mass death. The sword the site of the dance of the unclean AT THE BULGAKOV MUSEUM, spirits in The Master and Margarita. will vanish and the housed in the novelist’s childhood We walked through the wardrobe stars will remain . . .” home, a sign on the door announced, into Bulgakov’s room in Moscow, then “The entrance into our museum of into a final sitting room, back in Kiev. — Mikhail Bulgakov, White Guard individuals who support the military The guide lined us up in two rows, occupation of Ukraine is not desired.” shortest to tallest, in front of a mirror. Inside, one of my fellow tourists was “This room can never be peaceful,” wearing a Right Sector scarf. she said, “because it is full of doors. I could tell that the tour guide, a There is another room where peace well-kept woman in her fifties or can be attained, but we cannot reach sixties, was the kind of person for it; I can only show it to you.” whom literature is a religion and a She turned off the lights and favorite writer is a messiah. Though pressed a switch. The mirror became she spoke quickly, her voice had a window, and instead of our own the modulation of a professional reflection, we saw a ghostly white actress’s, and she looked very bed, a bookshelf, and a cluttered dignified in her black cardigan writing desk that seemed to be sweater with its grid of thin white suspended in the air, trembling. We lines. It was clear that current events gasped. Then she flipped another had inspired her with new fervor, switch, and we saw nothing but stars. new grief. “Why do we look at the night sky Speaking Russian, she told us so seldom?” she asked. She was grimly that by 1918 this house had referring to the famous last lines of become a communal apartment; White Guard: Bulgakov couldn’t go home again. The world of his childhood had All this will pass. Suffering, sorrow, vanished. He lived in Moscow for blood, hunger, and mass death. a while but soon returned to Kiev, The sword will vanish and the stars because it was freer there. will remain, long after the shadows “That was a hundred years ago,” of our bodies and our affairs are she said meaningfully. gone from the earth. There isn’t She led us through the living any man who doesn’t know this. So room, where there were two why are we so reluctant to turn our pianos and a Christmas tree— gaze to the stars? which would not, she pointed out, have been allowed during Soviet “Thank you for coming to our times—and then into a painstaking beautiful city,” our guide concluded, reconstruction of Bulgakov’s sisters’ “where, as you can see, there are no bedroom. With great ceremony, she fascists or Banderites.” opened the wardrobe to reveal an apartment door with a tablet that read “50.” This was apartment 50 on

12 | HARRIMAN Graffiti at the Bulgakov Museum (Tothkaroj / CC-BY-SA-2.0)

IN HER BOOK, Black Square: of working for a nongovernmental Sophie Pinkham, a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia’s Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, agency, including facing the negative Department of Slavic Languages, is writing her Sophie Pinkham uses the lens of attitude toward international dissertation, tentatively titled, “Sanctuaries, Strolls, and Slander: The Pushkin Myth after the public health, specifically HIV donors and their prescriptive Thaw.” She is a 2012 graduate of the Harriman prevention and advocacy, to policies, propels Pinkham’s narrative Institute’s MARS-REERS program, for which she organize the story of her decade and keeps it from being mere wrote the thesis “Blatnaia pesnia, the Odessa in Siberia and Ukraine. After travelogue or memoir. Instead, Myth, and Alternatives to Utopia in Soviet Song.” graduating from Yale in 2004, Black Square perfectly captures the Pinkham’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, n+1, the London Pinkham traveled to Siberia as a decade in all its manifest absurdity, Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs. Red Cross volunteer to work in HIV/ poignancy, and tragedy. AIDS education and prevention. “New Year in Kiev,” from the The Harriman Institute hosted a book launch for She continued her work in the HIV book’s final section entitled “War Black Square on November 14, 2016, as part of the field in Russia as a representative and Peace,” recounts Pinkham’s Harriman at 70 lecture series. of George Soros’s Open Society return to the capital city, but Institute, moving to Ukraine in now conversations with friends 2008 to study Russian and collect frequently touch on war, volunteer oral histories about women’s rights fighters, prisoners of war, weapons, and AIDS activism in Ukraine. In and even toy rifles. The chapter her work with activists, many of ends appropriately enough with an whom are former injection drug eerie visit to the Mikhail Bulgakov users, Pinkham comes into contact Museum in Kiev, during which with young men and women only the guide quotes lines from the slightly older than herself, members civil war-era novel, White Guard. of the first generation to come of Bulgakov’s words, written in the age in post-Soviet society. And not 1920s at the beginning of the writer’s only activists and doctors, but also career, remain as effective and musicians, artists, and teachers, moving almost a century later. thus bringing into focus a youth One final note: The transliteration Black Square: Adventures in culture flourishing amidst collapse, of proper names in “New Year Post-Soviet Ukraine ruin, and war. The tension between in Kiev” follows that of the book Sophie Pinkham keen observation of post-Soviet life publication; for example, Kiev and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2016) and culture and the practicalities not . ISBN 978-0-393-24797-8

HARRIMAN | 13 ­­