When me and my classmate Danylo were making plans regarding our future life, sometime around 1998, we were trying to predict lots of things. One thing that we did agree upon, looking at the barely working chimney shaft of local American-built tractor plant, is that provincialism of Kharkiv is dead certain for decades to come. I remember his words as they were said yesterday: "We'd better get away from this chimney as fast as possible, it's a monument to hopelessness”. Little did we know that in 2021 the probability of World War Three will largely depend on the mood of alcoholics from our depressive working-class district.
Nothing was pointing to the possibility of European, or as our professional Westernists love to say - Euro-Atlanticist, perspectives for Ukraine at the beginning of the century. Schengen visa was hard to get, especially for people from the Eastern part of the country. Galicians, Hungarians, and Romanians from the Western part always had some tricky ways to do it though, occupying all the strawberry gathering vacancies in Poland long before Easterners could catch up.
Among large cities, Kharkiv was always the least attractive destination in Ukraine for Western European and American tourists. Beating only Donetsk maybe. I for one met my first Americans when I went to Kyiv for the first time on a school trip. I got so excited that I asked for a mutual photo. The rest of the kids exploited my ability to speak decent English for a kid and queued up for their own version of this pic. “Wow, people from X-Files,” they said.
Ten years after the coming of a new millennium and the end of "X-Files”. European Union started to actively engage Yanukovych regime. This surprised everyone, as no criteria for ascension was met. Ukraine was a pure oligarchy, relying on aging Soviet heavy industry. Agriculture was not internationally competitive despite the fertile soil. Only local sunflower oil and honey were in demand in the EU back then. Contraband cigarettes too, but that's not exactly an entirely local product. I suspect Brussels bureaucrats expected an economic boom thanks to the then-emerging middle class, which indeed might have happened had Russia did not act the way it did.
As to why we ended up on this side of the fence… This theme will be explored separately. But for starts, there's a saying that Kharkiv is the most Jewish city in Ukraine and maybe the world. More Jewish than Odesa. Because while everyone knows that Odesa is Jewish, only Jews from Kharkiv know this about Kharkiv.
Taking this saying with a grain of salt, it's worth noting that only here Maidan and Anti-Maidan could coexist relatively peacefully for a time at the beginning of 2014. Locals want everything at once, preferably for free. This includes continued access to Schengen and Russian state TV. They're inquisitive and curious but slow to act. City's Jungian type is ENTP, an absent-minded engineer who will work for a pittance if the project is scientifically grandiose and who frequently forgets about hygienic necessities. That's why roads and infrastructure here are much worse than in Kyiv despite the bigger percentage of students and tech intelligentsia.
Up until the mid-2000s city featured an awful lot of gopniks, who tried to rob me and Danylo nearly every time we went to buy Sega Mega Drive cartridges. If you were a 90s boy, not a single month could pass without at least one incident of attempted extortion. While some famous locals like Eduard Limonov embraced and romanticized this culture, I always self-identified as anti-hooligan, a knight in shining armor and believer in fairness. Thankfully, such types largely disappeared simultaneously with cockroaches. In the end, I won and Limonov lost. Modern young men are much more cultured. Although modern young women are more depressive and confused.
If the active phase of war resumes, no doubt that this is where the front will be.
Which kinda puts me not in the bumblefuck I was growing up in with my friend Danylo… But in the heart of geopolitical divide between West and East.
A very rapid and unexpected change.