Stolen Moments, Kyiv
I flew into Kyiv’s Borispol International Airport late on a late November afternoon. “Air Field” struck me as a better description; militaristic concrete walls circumscribing scrubby marsh grass. Stepping off the plane, I felt the crisp, cold, thin air; the crisp, cold thin light.
At Immigration, I handed my passport to one of the slim, blonde girls in military green and large shiny brass buttons, high boots and improbably short skirts – a 1960’s Bond movie come to life.
On the way in to the city, along the typically long, straight trophy road, I passed impossibly massive small trucks loaded with cabbages, billboards promoting those aspirational images of the west: Winston, Marlboro and Chesterfield. The outskirts of the city were pock-marked with Soviet era tenements.
Centrally located, the Radisson SAS is a smart and modern international hotel, fitted into a beautiful old shell. The staff are efficient and friendly and the facilities are similar to Radisson’s across Europe; a perfect, familiar base for doing business. Checked in, I wandered out for some air, taking in the neglected seventeenth century buildings, absorbing the pre-Soviet European-ness of the city. I could have been in a forgotten corner of Paris or Vienna.
The next day, I took a taxi across town with my Ukrainian colleague to visit one of the city’s universities. Valeriy, all six broad feet of Slavic moustache, and I wedged ourselves into the tiny orange Lada and surrendered to the anarchy of East European traffic where assertiveness is all and totalitarian conventions like sticking to one side of the road and wasting good pavements on pedestrians are seldom acknowledged.
Eventually, on the outskirts of the city, we crested a hill and turned off the road. The boxy little car pitched into a wide trench and, with a roaring whine, crawled out the other side – an aspiring T80 battle tank. Powering through the open gates, we entered a large car-park seemingly abandoned to entropic weeds. Slowly, we approached the concrete university building , massive in a way that only Soviet engineering could achieve; like a missile silo perhaps, or a nuclear bunker. The taxi crawled, a small orange beetle, around the perimeter until a tiny black door opened, and a tiny black-clad figure emerged.
Yuri, Dean of the faculty of Cybernetics, a dapper academic proudly recounted the history of the faculty as he guided us through darkened corridors to his office. Reaching back over 50 years, his faculty was at the dawn of cybernetics, one of the homes of modern computing. He showed us around classrooms, diligently turning off lights as he went. He explained how, during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, his faculty's web-servers were the only facility able to maintain the flow of information across the internet, the famed Orange Channel.
The heart of any computing operation is its Server Lab. Typically these are glass-panelled, high security areas with spotless, dust and static free floors and refrigerator like air-conditioning where rack upon rack of sleek, shiny technology serves up information networks around the globe. Yuri's server room was certainly locked. Inside, precarious panels like B&Q shower cabinets shielded a Jenga game of technology through the ages. Battered boxes of grey and putty from across the last 30 years hummed and wheezed as Yuri explained how they nursed the machines to maximum longevity only abandoning them when finally they failed beyond repair. I was impressed and touched and somehow humbled that in the new free-market world which the East is embracing, so much proud history could be scrabbling for funds.
But fortunes are changing all across Eastern Europe and the hunger for success is palpable. We drove back downtown and left our taxi on a busy main street. From there, Valeriy guided me along a back street to an abandoned looking tenement. Inside, the bare staircases and anonymous doors reminded me of a scene from a cold-war spy film – a conjured image of bleak, Soviet monochrome existence. Three storeys up, and in the gloom we reached a heavy-duty armoured door. Valeriy knocked loudly and heaved it open. The contrast was blinding. Light exploded out from a modern open-plan office suite where a score of hip, young tee-shirted techies plied their trade on the latest technology. Typical of businesses which have erupted in the years following Ukraine’s independence, Mikhail’s firm has capitalised on the Soviet legacy of strong engineering and science education and mounted that on a chassis of free-market energy. Eastern Europe is not so much playing catch-up with the West as it is Leap-Frog. Where Mikhail’s firm is enabling new business with advanced infrastructure, other firms are combining these advantages with an inherently lower cost base to capture a sizeable piece of the technology out-sourcing market.
After our visit Valeriy took me for dinner at one of Kyiv's finest restaurants, the past preserve of the Soviet elite. We ate and drank the finest Ukrainian food and wine, spoke of his childhood and our families. He told me of a recent visit to a relative in Moscow – where his sister-in-law feared to even discuss the political situation within the privacy of their own home; where asking a policeman for directions resulted in a demand for papers, an interrogation and still no help - and of how much it had made him appreciate the freedom which he and his family now enjoyed in Ukraine.
Back at the Radisson, and filled with finest Ukrainian caffeine, I found I couldn't sleep and padded down to the bar. Over a beer, I watched another example of contrasting fortunes as a faded English businessman haggled with a beautiful young prostitute; red wine and arrogance diluting his discretion.
The next day, I squeezed a few precious hours to go exploring. Not far from the hotel stands the reconstructed Golden Gate, originally built in the eleventh century and an impressive reminder of the importance of the city in its first age, when it was reputedly the largest city in the world. Elsewhere, the city is a mix of architectures. There are magnificent baroque churches like that of St Andrew’s which light the skyline in gold and green onion-domes. There are the World Heritage sites of St. Sophia Cathedral and Kiev Pechersk Lavra (the Monastery of the Caves) which are among the holiest pilgrimage sites of the Orthodox Christian church. And, in sequence from the glories of the baroque and the reviving elegance of the seventeenth century, there is the inescapable, brute architecture of the Soviet era; like the Hotel Ukraina where egalitarian sensibilities dictated that all rooms were exactly the same size or the colossal Mother Motherland statue honouring Heroes of the Soviet Union. And, somewhat at odds with everything, there is also the “House with Chimaeras”; a bizarre confection built in the Art Nouveau style and sited across from the offices of the President. 
The house is festooned with animal statues both real and fantastic, all modelled from cement: a monochrome menagerie of rhinoceros, elephants, porpoises and sea monsters; salamanders, enormous frogs and stags. Originally designed as an apartment building, its architect, Gorodetsky, was an avid hunter and director of a cement company.
I left Kyiv- Kiev as we used to say – with a sense of a vibrant city emerging from a dark twentieth century and hurrying to reclaim its position as a major European city. The current political situation there is often cast as something of an East/West split: should the country look to Russia or Europe for its future? I wonder if, in many ways it is really a generational dichotomy. All across Eastern Europe, the shock of free-market realities generated vast opportunity but tore away past certainties. A whole generation, a whole sector of society and a whole perspective lost its frame of reference, lost its place and its future. That is a challenge that every one of those countries is mastering in its own way. It would be a tragedy if Ukraine slipped along its way and deprived Europe from embracing a long-lost relation.