I lived in a rough neighborhood, so you had to know all of the troublemakers to stay free of trouble. But these new kids came out literally from nowhere after national independence. They made all of us uneasy.
Most peculiar was that, despite their thuggish looks, they didn’t care about your money or the typical “where-do-you-live, and who-do-you-know?” routine. Having met these guys, you had to pass a Ukrainian language exam, or risk being beaten up. If you got off lightly, you still ended up getting into a heated up conversation about who does and does not belong in Ukraine.
Their questions – and usually they asked you to translate from Russian a few words – started with easy ones. The real challenge came later, as the “examiners” would start asking tricky questions, demanding that we answer in western Ukrainian dialect, and not in the Ukrainian we learned at schools. The trickiest thing was to translate into Ukrainian skovoroda (the frying pan), which all of us were taught sounded the same in Russian and Ukrainian. Yet, saying this aloud meant to get in trouble. The correct answer was patel’nia.
The news about the gang quickly spread and all of us kids frantically began to learn the tricky words that we thought might interest the language-oriented gangsters.
Funny, it’s from that time that I’ve remembered many of the fancy Ukrainian words back then you would never hear in a heavily russified Kyiv – faino for good, hornyatko for mug, batyar for a cool rough guy. We all knew these strange-sounding words by heart, as nobody wanted to be caught unprepared during the encounter that we all knew would one day happen.
It did. One day I was reading a movie theater poster in Russian when a couple of grim-looking guys came up and asked me to read the poster like it should sound, meaning in Ukrainian. Thankfully the movie titles were really simple, and it didn’t really take any of those fancy words that I had diligently learned. The language gangsters nodded in approval and dissolved into the crowd as suddenly as they came up. My first real language test was an easy one.
Gladly for us kids, the movement towards national identity also had a much brighter, in our opinion, side. When in the late 1980s-early 1990s the Rukh, the first non-communist political movement, came around, we didn’t really know it was a party. For us, it was a group of people selling the coolest badges on earth near Olympic Stadium. In bright blue and yellow they were almost too colorful to look at, as we used to wear whatever clothes were available. And there wasn’t much, and what we had was usually in dull grey and brown.
Wearing Rukh badges with the Ukrainian trident was the surest way to look cool. They didn’t sell cheap – approximately for the price of 20 ice creams or 10 beers – so getting one of those was really tough.
The day I finally saved enough money and came to the square that in two decades would be the venue for the Euro 2012 soccer championship, I saw that the trident badges were the most expensive. I couldn’t afford to wear the symbol which soon would become the national coat of arms.
Instead, I got the one with Taras Shevchenko’s stanza “break your chains and fraternize,” and was happy beyond belief. I now think that if the Rukh, or whoever was making the badges, could find a way to mass produce t-shirts, Ukraine’s independence would come much faster and, perhaps, some of the neighboring Soviet republics, equally hungry for trendy clothes, would ask to join.
It was in the summer of 1991 that by a pure coincidence some of my friends made a discovery: If you buy some of the dry silver paint powder from a nearby convenience store, wrap it up and put it on fire, there would be a loud blast. Not devastating, unless you put it in a glass jar that creates a lot of dangerous debris – but just an awesome explosion.
So we went on polishing the art of making the silver paint bombs to the point of perfection. It was at about the same time that I got to see a war movie set, and my verdict was unequivocal – those film studio pyrotechnics were pathetic compared to us!
So, we kept practicing all the way until Aug. 19, when the military coup in Moscow happened. That day was extremely dark and cloudy with the Chaikovski Swan Lake ballet broadcast on TV and radio over and over throughout the entire day.
Then, it stopped, and we learned that the military and KGB top officials grabbed the power in Moscow.
Later on, Leonid Kravchuk, the parliament’s speaker who in December would become the first president of Ukraine, went on the air saying that Ukraine does not abide by the orders from Moscow, and everyone should remain calm.
Soon, the rumors of the tanks approaching Kyiv began to spread. My neighborhood, located far from downtown and all the boiling political activity, got very quiet, as it seemed that people wouldn’t dare to come outside.
And so we took all the silver powder that we had and made it into bombs. No glass jars – we wrapped them into paper as nobody meant any harm. All we wanted is to shake ourselves and our neighbors up. So we put our paper bombs all over the yard and blew them all, screaming “the tanks are coming.” I will never forget the picture of a nine-story residential building with scores of faces peering out of the windows for the “tanks.”
Days later, the military plotters in Moscow got arrested. Ukraine declared independence – the event which I completely missed. Only some time later I would watch news footage with the famous scene of the giant blue and yellow flag brought into the parliament session hall – still with the Lenin statue inside – and then I realized the greatness of what had happened in my country’s history.
But back in late August 1991, all I cared about was that the summer holidays were over, and the school was about to begin.
I didn’t worry too much about this, though. I had hell of a story to tell to the classmates.
After all, that summer I passed the street exam in Ukrainian, got a Rukh badge and the tanks never made it into my neighborhood – thanks to the bombs I made with my friends.
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected]
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