ndence, but it might as well have been decades. I was 16, and I didn’t really know much about Ukraine, beyond that it was a country of almost 50 million stuck between Asia and Europe. I certainly didn’t know it was just shy of becoming an independent country, and a fledgling democracy.

I was a guest at the Artek Young Pioneer camp in Crimea. I spent three weeks working at a gymnastics exposition that included athletes from the Soviet Union and a small team of Americans. My memories are of sand, sun, water and children with red scarves tied around their necks.

My second trip to Ukraine began this summer with a midnight flight into Boryspil. The worst way to come into a country is by night. My introduction to Kyiv was marred by darkness and shadows. But the dawn brought more than sunlight to my eyes.

I came back to Ukraine nearly 13 years to the day of my first visit, and the circumstances are very different. I’m 30 years old, and as someone who’s spent his life living in various places around the globe, I have no culture to identify with as home; another way to put it is that I have an insatiable thirst to know my own story. Part of that story is Ukrainian, as my grandparents were born here. But if I’m technically a member of the Ukrainian Diaspora, I don’t presume to know what it means to be Ukrainian.

I haven’t exactly started to learn on the streets of Kyiv. I didn’t really expect to. What I found, in fact, was not so different from other places I’ve been. I saw a cult of fashion when I walked down Khreshchatyk. Women and men were dressed as if today were the most important day of their lives, the defining moment. I saw women so beautiful that clothing was merely a distraction. I also saw other people, particularly men, standing on corners and drinking warm beer. They looked like they were listening to whispers that said, “tomorrow.”

I saw advertisements for a consumer lifestyle that is still a dream. I sat in a cafe in a mall and watched people windowshop. But nobody bought anything. They just looked, perhaps waiting to be swept up by a standard of living that hasn’t come yet.

Kyiv feels like it beats with a quickened pulse. The excitement of free enterprise and democracy is like adrenaline flowing through the streets of the city. Consumerism is in the wind. Like the smell of ozone before a rainstorm, I could sense the coming of western values, for better or worse.

So what if no one wants to talk about the upcoming presidential election? Ukrainians are not post-communist so as much as they are post-modern. They want what everybody else wants. The whole process of getting it, it seems, is taking too long for their tastes. Politicians are concerned about holding onto power, but they lost a lot of that power on August 24, 1991 anyway. The new power is wielded not by politicians, but by advertisers and public relations firms. It’s about goods and services, Levis, L’Oreal and Samsung.

People already have the hunger; they just need the cash to satisfy it. Salaries are still low enough that people windowshop, planning their wants not far beyond their everyday needs.

Ukraine is not so different from any other burgeoning democracy, but the middle class needs to multiply like rabbits to offset the colossal power amassed by the power elite. Thirteen years after the fall of the USSR, an elite still has access to everything, while most people don’t. So maybe the country is not that different after all from the country I visited 13 years ago.

Independence by itself will not create wealth or a strong civil society. Only active democratization will bring around those benefits.

Ukrainians must grab hold of their own destiny; this is not the time to let passivity spread. The goal they want to achieve is elusive enough that an aura of mystery surrounds it; it is attended by the unknown, which can be frightening. But it doesn’t matter: Ukrainians, like any other freedom-loving people, must take any action that they can, and create movements guided by the will of the people to fashion their dreams into democratic realities.

I’ve often heard the analogy of Ukraine as the children of Israel, wandering in the desert for 40 years. And like Israel, Ukraine does not have the option of going back to Egypt. The seeds of the benefits of democracy have already been sown in Ukraine. Like Moses viewing the Promised Land from a mountain after all his hard work, this generation of Ukrainians might only see those benefits in the distance, but the view will be good.

T.A. Akimoff is a Kyiv Post intern and a student at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism.