Stepping off the night train, full of memories of his life there three decades ago, the writer finds a changed city fighting for survival
My first flat in Kyiv was a couple of metro stops outside the city centre, just opposite Volodymyrskyy market, in a nondescript mid-20th century block. The lease was arranged by post. It took me five days to drive there from Edinburgh in an old Polo in November 1991. Finding my way to Kyiv was easy – one road from Calais takes you straight there – but once I got to the outskirts, I must have used a paper map to navigate through the city. I spoke no Ukrainian, and enough Russian to ask basic directions, but not enough to understand the answer. I could read the street signs. I found a parking space round the back and began to unload my stuff.
Recently, I went back. I crossed the road from the square by the metro and went through the market. It’s a neater, quieter place than I remember from the early 1990s, not so much because of the war as from the gradual changes over the intervening years, when peasant farmers around Kyiv became fewer and post-communist supermarkets and commercial food distribution systems replaced the old state shops. In the weeks before and after the 1991 referendum, when Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union, precipitating its quick disintegration, I went to the state shops to queue for cheap, rationed, often scarce items such as bread and hard cheese; the market was a place of plenty and, for locals, high prices. Row upon row of countrywomen in aprons sold huge jars of sour cream, chalk-white towers of cottage cheese wrapped in muslin and pots of horseradish in beetroot juice, alongside vendors from the Caucasus offering persimmons, pomegranates and fresh coriander, and pickle merchants with buckets of Korean carrot salad and wild garlic stalks. All this is still abundant in Kyiv, still locally made, but packaged and stacked on supermarket shelves by big firms. Nobody’s selling homemade sour cream now – perhaps they’ll be back in spring? – there’s only one pickle seller, and the meat counter is no longer quite the shrine to pork fat it once was.
