John-Paul Himka

A Soviet-era postcard of the Lviv bus terminal.

I spent the first half of 1983 in Soviet Ukraine, in Lviv mainly but also in Kyiv. I had just married Chrystia Chomiak two months previously, and off we went to Ukraine on a research trip organized by the International Research and Exchanges Board. For the most part we lived in a cooperative associated with the Lviv Ivan Franko University. We shopped like ordinary Soviet citizens and maintained an active social life. It was an interesting time, before any of the Gorbachev reforms. In my blogs for Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, I have been writing vignettes on various historical periods, moving towards the present. I’ve decided to spend some time on this one year because it affords an opportunity to describe what Soviet Ukrainian life was like before everything began to change.

              Prior to our departure we assembled the gifts that were most sought after in those days. Essential gifts included clothing items, jeans being much coveted. There had been some supply of jeans coming into Ukraine, especially into Lviv, in the 1970s. Polish travelers were bringing in jeans, selling them on the black market, and using the profit to purchase gold, which was sold at a relatively low price in the USSR. But that particular exchange came to an end after the democratic trade union Solidarity emerged in Poland in 1980; thereafter visitors from Poland were banned for years, lest their ideas contaminate the population. The other clothing item people wanted was colorful scarves, babushkas, which served as an ersatz currency in the villages. My family in Michigan had been sending parcels with scarves to our family in Ukraine regularly since at least the late 1950s. All sorts of little things were also in demand, such as instant coffee, referred to as Neska in the vocabulary of the time; razors and razor blades served as perfect gifts for the menfolk.

              My wife and I went to Ukraine for scholarly work. I was researching my book on the penetration of the national movement into Galician villages,[1] though in explaining my project to the Soviet authorities, I had to frame the project rather differently, as a study of class conflict. Chrystia was working on a guide to Western Ukrainian vernacular architecture for the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village outside of Edmonton, Alberta.

I worked mainly in two venues. One was the Stefanyk Library, particularly the branch that had formerly been the library of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. At that time Yevhen Nakonechny worked in the library and helped me a great deal. He had been arrested in his youth as a member of the postwar Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and paid for it by a stay in the gulag. Later, in 2006, he was to publish a poignant, beautifully written, and conflicted memoir about the Holocaust in Lviv. He made sure I had a good seat in the professors’ reading room.

The other place I worked was in the Central State Historical Archives in Lviv. When I consulted materials there, the director of the archive was often seated at the front of the reading room. She was Nadiia Vradii, the mother of Vika, the 1990s Ukrainian rock star. My characterization of Director Vradii has always been the same: she was not a swine. Back then, I thought of that characterization as complimentary. Foreign scholars like me were not allowed to consult the card catalog (inventory) of the archive, yet we could only get access to items that we specifically requested. So it required considerable ingenuity to figure out what to order. It added a game dimension to research.

I also wanted to work in Kyiv and went there for a few weeks. I was denied access to any materials whatsoever, so my wife and I hung out at Hydropark, a beautiful beach along the Dnipro River. Chicken roasted over charcoal was our normal lunch there; I remember beer too. On my next research trip to Kyiv, in 1989, I actually had to work, because I was granted access to the Vernadsky Library. But that was okay, because it was no longer possible to enjoy Hydropark. It was closed then because of radioactive fallout from the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.

In future installments, I intend to cover food and drink culture, hygiene and health, some interesting persons I got to know, late-Soviet jokes, the language question, and politics.

[1] Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Edmonton, 1988). I have downloaded a digital copy on my academia.edu website.