Thinking With the Blood. Owen Matthews
on Stumps.
The property at Mezhgoriye was listed as an administrative office of his Dubai-based company, Tantalit. In reality, Yanukovych commissioned the complex soon after coming to power in 2010 as a lavish private estate for the use of himself and his closest friends. The main residence was a three-storied wooden building built in Germany and transported in pieces to Kiev for assembly. Perhaps because of its oddly pre-fabricated appearance, the house earned the nickname Honka after the Finnish maker of budget ready-made log cabins.
The interiors were anything but cut-price. Even the inside of the lift was covered in mosaics and mirrors. The ground floor was paved in Florentine-style pietro duro cut stonework. The ground floor suite of rooms was decorated in neo-medieval style, including reproduction suits of armour, oak neo-gothic panelling and mosaics of chivalric scenes on the walls.
Various self-organised armed groups from the Maidan came to protect the palace. Guards were posted, dressed in makeshift body armour and carrying captured riot police shields and police armed with sniper riles to keep the army of gawkers who flocked from Kiev to wander through the grounds of their President’s private Xanadu in order. A few looters managed to attack the palace’s safes and cut some paintings out of their frames, though they left major works by romantic 19th century nature painter Ivan Shishkin and fashionable 21st century portrait artist Nikas Safronov in place. For the most part, though, the palace was preserved intact.
During those first, heady days, the two rather eccentric activists who today live in Yanukovych’s palace as self-appointed guardians first arrived at Mezhgoriye. One was Petya, a 34-year-old grocery salesman from Lvov and a passionate follower of Stepan Bandera. He is a wiry, intense man, who scuttles down the long echoing corridors of the corridor with a prim, clockwork gait. He wears a traditional embroidered Ukrainian peasant shirt and, for those who don’t immediately get his ideological affiliation, also goes around with the red and black flag of Stepan Bandera’s UPA draped over his shoulders. The other is Yulia Kapica, a slim, skittish thirty-something blonde who wears her hair in a traditional Ukrainian braid held up with a hairband of blue and yellow plastic flowers, Ukraine’s national colours. Petya lives in the main “Honka” wing; Yulia has been camped out in the health and sport wing of the palace since February.
“I joined in the Maidan protests from the beginning, and stayed all through December,” says Kapica. “I saw that our country was changing and I wanted to be part of it. No-one knew it would end in shooting of course. But people saw the Maidan protesters and began to be interested in what Ukraine is, who Stepan Bandera was, what is our national anthem. They began to learn Ukraininan language. For me the Maidan wasn’t about the EU agreement but about getting our people to discover their Ukrainian identity. Before the Maidan people were ashamed to be Ukrainians. After they were proud. They had stood up for themselves.”
Kapica came to Mezhugoriye on 23rd February — along with thousands of other Kiev citizens who came to goggle at the opulence of their deposed leader. “It wasn’t a shock for me to see this palace,” she says. “I knew who Yanukovych was and how he lived.” Kapica, a financial analyst from Berdyansk, spent the first days fishing Yanukovych documents from the lake and drying them out on the marble floors with hairdryers, then scanning them and sending the material to the Ministry of Finance and the police. In the evenings she and fellow activists barricaded themselves into the Health and Sport complex and mounted patrols to deter looters.
“We just blocked the corridors with things which made noise so that we could hear if anyone trying to break in during the night.” They lived on the food stocks kept in the palace barracks, formerly home to the Berkut garrison. “There was no-one in authority, no government, no control.”
Today, the palace is a major tourist attraction run by Petya, Yulia and a group of volunteers. No government department wanted to take responsibility for the palace which remains, technically, the private property of Tantalit. Yulia speaks of plans to turn the place into a “Museum of Corruption,” or perhaps a sanatorium.
Each weekend, crowds of Kievans drive out to wander in the park, admiring the white marble neo-classical statuary, the sweeping view onto the Dniepr River, the imported olive trees in pots and the elaborate cascade of fountains and stone staircases that leads from the palace to a lakeside dining room built in the shape of a stylised pirate ship. On the elaborate ironwork of a gazebo overlooking one of the duck-ponds, visitors have tied hundreds of blue and yellow ribbons, as though to mark the place as theirs.
Outside the palace gates, there is a bike hire stand, a Segway tour, a pie seller, and an ice cream van. Pairs of pretty girls walk with linked arms. Enterprising souvenir sellers have set up stalls selling lavatory paper with the face of Vladimir Putin on it, as well as fridge magnets depicting a Russian matrioshka nesting doll in camouflage, carrying a Kalashnikov. There are gold-painted miniature loaves of bread (a reference to a semi-mythical golden loaf supposedly found in the Palace) and model gold toilets. A man wearing royal robes and a giant latex head of Yanukovych topped with a crown poses for tourists.
The road back to town is jammed with visitors, so the taxi takes a detour round the wealthy suburb that has sprung up around the palace built by men who did well from the Yanukovych regime, like the French courtiers whose mansions huddled around Versailles. The harlequin mansions are an insight into the psyche, hopes and dreams of their builders. There are a lot of turrets, battlements and pointy roofs, apparently designed by an eight year old boy during double maths. A neoclassical portico peeks out here and there, and a few glass-and-steel monstrosities, some right next to gingerbread gables out of a fairytale, built of thick logs and decorated with fretwork. And of course every house is surrounded by a high wall, with steel gates and booths for security men, to keep it out of the sight and reach of commoners.
3
Will you lead me across the Maidan?
“What happened on Maidan changed us. It changed Ukraine… ”
Kiev doesn′t feel like the capital of a country at war. The cheap cafés in the streets around the Opera and behind the Golden Gate are full of chat and laughter. The noticeboards outside the University building on General Bibikov Boulevard (as I prefer to call it) are thick with posters for reggae concerts, dance performances, shamanic tea-drinking, free yoga classes, an out-of-town trance festival. True, the expensive shopping malls downtown are almost deserted as the Ukrainian gryvna has lost half its value since the outbreak of fighting. And a few weeks ago local authorities distributed leaflets informing residents of the location of their nearest bomb-shelters: Vladimir Putin reportedly boasted that his troops could be in Kiev win two weeks.
Nonetheless, after the burned tyres were cleared from the Maidan in March, and the last of the tent city which had grown up there over the winter had been packed up, the capital quickly returned to an almost eerie normality. The busy MacDonald’s at one end of Maidan re-opened (even as their brother MacDonald’s in Moscow were being closed down by sanitary inspectors, apparently as punishment for US support for sanctions). At the other end, on the steep street leading up to the Hotel Ukraine, a makeshift memorial has sprung up. The hundred-odd protesters killed during Berkut’s attempt to crush Euro-Maidan between 20‑22nd February 2014 were mostly shot by snipers firing from the hotel, which stands on a commanding hill overlooking the square. They are referred to as the Heavenly Hundred. Families and friends have brought photographs of the victims, and votive candles, and miners’ helmets and ribbons. One elaborate memorial even incorporates a steel riot shield and army helmet of one of the fallen into a carved granite headstone.
“What happened on Maidan changed us. It changed Ukraine. After many centuries of distrust — or rather, trusting only your family and not any other institution — Maidan emerged as the first instance where Ukrainians really experienced cooperation. And civil society.” Yulia Mostovaya is a formidably forthright, refrigerator-shaped lady who edits the Zerkalo Nedeli magazine. We sit on the terrace of a fashionable cafe as she fiercely sucks down Vogue Slims and double espressos. The waiters serve her as gingerly as if she was a washed-up sea-mine that might explode at any moment.
“The Maidan didn’t really disperse.