Since January, people from around the globe have been able to search through and read more than 900,000 previously secret documents in the CIA’s Electronic Reading Room, covering such topics as the Cold War, Vietnam, the Berlin Tunnel project, the Korean War, and even the UFOs and various conspiracy theories.
After I discovered this, I started searching for any information the CIA had put online about Ukraine and Kyiv. I was intrigued to know how the American spies in the times of the Cold War saw my people and my city.
Their reports described Kyivans as educated, hardworking people, who knew how to entertain themselves, spoke mostly Ukrainian, and who were unhappy with the Soviet dictatorship – but afraid to express their discontent.
Apart from basic and strategically important information about infrastructure and the military bases in and around the city, the CIA agents focused on the everyday life of Kyiv and its people. So here are the most interesting facts about the life, prices, clothes, food, and urban transport of Kyiv in the 1950s-1980s that I found.
City life
A report dated July 1960 said there were two million people living in Kyiv. Since then the official population has grown to at least 2.9 million, while unofficially it is sometimes estimated to be twice bigger.
While some Kyivans today are unhappy with the renaming of the streets under the decommunization process and still use the Soviet names of certain of Kyiv’s streets, a similar thing was observed in the Soviet 1960s, although in reverse, with people then defiantly using the original Ukrainian names for certain streets.
“Although many of the streets were renamed after 1917, people still use the original Ukrainian names of the streets,” reads a report entitled “General information about Kyiv.” “Sverdlova Street is still referred to as Institutska Street.”
The old Ukrainian names were returned to these streets after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2014, part of Institutska Alley in central Kyiv was renamed Heavenly Hundred Street in honor of the EuroMaidan Revolution participants who were killed there by police.
I was surprised to read that in the 1960s Kyiv had 24-hour public transport – there was just a two-hour break, from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. (In 2016, public transport in Kyiv now starts at 6 a.m. and works only until midnight, although the city council has recently established night buses that would run three times during the routes.)
“There are special crossroads for pedestrians on Kyiv’s main streets, including Kreshchatyk, Vladimirskaya Ulitsa (now Volodymyrska Street) and Krasnoarmeyskaya Ulitsa (now Velyka Vasylkivska Street). Failure to use those crosswalks can result in a fine or even detention by a militiaman (policeman)” read a report entitled “Miscellaneous on Kiev,” from 1954.
Most stores in Kyiv opened at 8 a.m. while others started working even earlier, at 5 a.m.
Food, movies, prices
Today Kyiv has a reasonably good restaurant and bar culture: foodies can enjoy Vietnamese, Georgian, Chinese and Ukrainian cuisine, as well as grab a bite in numerous fast food restaurants and pubs.
CIA agents in the 1950s had fewer dining options.
A report dated 1954 reads that the top class restaurants in hotels were serving salmon, champagne, and butter. Breakfast cost 10 rubles, and dinner up to 20 rubles. The average salary was 300 to 700 rubles. The exchange rate at that time was fixed at 4 rubles to the U.S. dollar. A 1954 U.S. dollar would be worth $8.98 in 2017, so dinner in a top restaurant then cost the equivalent of today’s $44.90.
It was cheaper to dine at a cafeteria, where, the report said, a bowl of borscht went for just 1 ruble.
A movie ticket cost 3-6 rubles ($6.73, or $13.47).
Of course, the Soviet ruble wasn’t a currency in the true sense of the word, as it effectively functioned more like a trading stamp or coupon. But the comparison is interesting nonetheless.
I found a lot of evidence that Soviet Kyivans liked entertainments. A special, top-secret report on Kyiv beaches dated 1954 made me smile, as a CIA agent reported on the main beaches of the city by the Dnipro River, and how Kyivans would spend a lot of time on the beach alone, in couples, or with families. The report even mentioned that they wore a variety of types of swimsuits of different colors.
“People used to stay on the beach until 10 p.m. and then continue to relax in numerous restaurants, especially The Kukushka and The Zeleniy, the agent wrote.
The Kukushka restaurant on Parkova Road on the banks of the Dnipro River existed from the 1940s well into the first decades of Ukraine’s independence. It was closed as companies linked to former President Viktor Yanukovych redeveloped the area in 2010, and reopened as the Dali Park open-air nightclub in May 2013. The Zeleniy restaurant referred to in the report may have been connected to the nearby Zeleniy open-air theater, which by independence had fallen into ruin.
People and moods
The 1955 “Economic Situation in Kiev” report reads that despite strong Soviet propaganda about the return to heavy industry, there had been staff cuts in factories in Kyiv, and many workers had been sent to the kolkhoz (collective farms in rural areas).
There was considerable dissatisfaction among Kyivans about the lack of consumer goods, and there were shortages of even basic necessities. People lined to buy butter and sugar.
And while at the time of Ukrainian independence in 1991 and immediately after it Kyiv was a majorly Russian-speaking city, this was not the case in the first decades of the Cold War.
“Eighty percent of the population of Kiev used Ukrainian in their conversation, while the other 20 percent spoke Russian. Political subjects are never discussed with strangers on the train or elsewhere,” reads the 1955 report.
The newspapers wrote about the Communist Party, goods production and also, interestingly, featured literature pages with anti-Russian poems written by poets from the Donbas region – in Ukrainian.
In Ukraine today, people are divided between those who claim the Soviet regime brought nothing but grief and repression, and those who would like to see the return of the Soviet Union. People in the Soviet past had no such choice, but there was a simmering dissatisfaction with the status quo – just as today.
In the CIA texts, I saw Cold War Kyiv as a city that had plenty to offer – restaurants, movies, beaches – just as it does now. And I saw that Kyivans then, as now, were an open minded people, who, despite massive propaganda and pressure from a foreign regime, were struggling to retain their culture and their language.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
