As I walked through Kyiv’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), with Efrem Lukatsky, a friend from 20 years ago and one of Ukraine’s top photojournalists, his cell phone rang. Then mine rang. We finished our conversations, looked at each other, and both said the same thing:
“How did we work without cell phones? Or the Internet?”
When I landed in Kyiv in the spring of 1991, an Oxford Ph.D. student coming to Ukraine to do research, I quickly decided that the best vantage point to see history unfolding was to become a journalist. So I got myself a job with The Guardian of London.
Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union, its media system was state-owned and centrally controlled. Most Ukrainian journalists had never encountered non-Soviet media, or met someone from the West.
“How did we work without cell phones? Or the Internet?”
There were four other Westerners working as journalists in Kyiv when I began stringing for The Guardian that spring. The entire foreign press corps could fit into one car. Stories had to be dictated over the phone, and international calls had to go through an operator.
We were befriended by Ukrainian journalists who were revolutionizing the media, and Rukh [nationalists] who were revolutionizing the country. Information was shared in a way that rarely happens among journalists, who are always looking for the scoop, or politicians, who are always spinning the story.
When someone learned something, immediately others were told. Someone heard that [Soviet-era political prisoner] Stepan Khmara was going to be arrested, so we set up a rotation of journalists in his hotel room to witness and report on the story.
Lukatsky, the photographer, managed to slip past the OMON riot police and the dramatic photos of the violent arrest made it into the news the next morning.
By the summer, more foreigners began arriving in Ukraine. So when then-U.S. President George Bush Sr. visited in July 1991 and told Ukrainians that freedom is not the same as independence, this quote was widely reported and dubbed the “Chicken Kyiv” speech.
August is a slow news month, and many journalists went on vacation. I convinced those who remained to go to the Chervona Ruta music festival in Zaporizhya, Ukraine’s industrial heartland.
And that’s when the coup happened. Fortunately, Rukh leader Viacheslav Chornovil also liked music and was there, so we got an instant quote, but the media blackout made things difficult.
Susan Viets, of The Independent in London, had a short wave radio, so like Mikhail Gorbachev, we followed the BBC News bulletins and hired a taxi to take us back to the capital.
Within days we were in parliament when independence was declared. As soon as it was over, we had to rush home, order our phone lines through the operator and dictate our stories down the line.
Much has changed over 20 years. These days, phone camera videos of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko’s arrest get posted on the Internet and make it into the Ukrainian and global information space almost instantaneously.
In the early chaotic freedom of the [first Ukrainian President] Leonid Kravchuk years, restrictions were lifted. Yet there was no money and little expertise to build a healthy, democratic media system.
After his election in 1994, President Leonid Kuchma introduced a massive privatization drive that extended to the media sector. But privatization did not lead to free speech.
In less than a decade most of Ukraine’s media ended up in the hands of powerful businessmen, popularly known as oligarchs, who have close relations with political elites. These private media outlets worked hand-in-hand with the state, censoring the news during the late Kuchma era.
In the early chaotic freedom of the [first Ukrainian President] Leonid Kravchuk years, restrictions were lifted. Yet there was no money and little expertise to build a healthy, democratic media system.
The 2004 Orange Revolution [overturning a rigged presidential election that year] blew the lid off state censorship, and President Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency is remembered as a period of renewed free speech.
Yet media watchers pointed to the fact that economic pressures presented a new kind of threat to free speech.
In many ways, Ukraine’s media system has followed global patterns: concentration of media ownership, close links between political and economic elites, market factors dominating media content with infotainment being the norm, the Internet revolution and an explosion of new, social media.
Concerns over censorship continue, but the picture is not black and white.
For a while the Tymoshenko trial was broadcast on live television, but any journalist will tell you about subtle pressures. Audiences and readers have also noticed that certain subjects no longer appear in the public sphere as often as they used to.
When TV journalist Mykhailo Tkach asked Russian Orthodox Church leader Mytropolyt Pavlo about his expensive Mercedes, his private driver and plans to build a restaurant on the Monastery of the Caves’ grounds, he was insulted and threatened. The story did not run in full on the evening news but was posted online.
Some journalists continue to take the head-on approach, criticizing Yanukovych and his government. Others, like TV journalist Andriy Kulykov, accept invitations to view the president’s residence and use the occasion to pose questions about censorship. The weather added a comic note to the interview – part way through, the skies opened and all the participants got drenched.
Anyone who remembers what mass media was like in Soviet Ukraine cannot help but admit how much has changed. Now the country is run by post-Soviet elite who have to deal with Russia’s neo-imperialist behavior. Russian media products continue to have a heavy presence. Ukraine’s media system, like the rest of the country, is a work in progress.
Now, as in 1991, there are a handful of talented, hard-working journalists with integrity, who understand the ideal of independent journalism and free speech, and strive towards it as good journalists do. Yet these goals are elusive everywhere.
Some journalists continue to take the head-on approach, criticizing Yanukovych and his government.
I no longer work as a journalist, but come to Ukraine regularly and conduct interviews for my research. It’s hard to find much optimism in Kyiv these days leading up to the country’s 20th birthday. Even the weather does not seem to be cooperating – there has been as much rain as sunshine this summer.
It is perhaps a good reflection of Ukraine’s recent history: some bad, some good. Given that the US came to the brink of default this month, London was rocked with violent riots, many European economies are teetering, violence continues in the Middle East, and Russia long ago lost any semblance of democracy, things in Ukraine may start looking a bit less bleak.
For me, Ukraine remains continually interesting, but for those living and working here, it can’t be easy, despite the fact that everyone has a cell phone now.
Marta Dyczok, is an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Western Ontario, a fellow in the Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor at the National University of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She also participated in the Oral History of Independent Ukraine project: http://oralhistory.org.ua.
