CARPATHIAN COWBOYS

Apart from Alik, my closest friend in Kiev was Alina, who’d known Alik for many years. Around 2000 Alina had won a green card lottery and moved to America, without speaking English.

“Who is this Natasha Rostova?” Alina asked him scornfully in Russian. She was comparing me to the sweet, starry-eyed young heroine of War and Peace. For most people, this would have been a compliment, but Alina was skeptical of youthful idealism and easy dazzlement. She was pleased, if also embarrassed, when I understood her jab and answered back. We became close friends, hanging out at her apartment in Brooklyn and watching Russian television. Alina moved back to Kiev not long before I arrived; she was helping to raise her brother’s small daughter, who looked exactly like her.

Alina introduced me to her old friend Igor, who was from Rakhiv, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains. Igor had an endless store of tall tales about western Ukraine. One night in a bar, he told me about a friend in Lviv who could summon rain or snow and had made himself immune to all drugs. This friend had also, Igor claimed, been honored by the pope, who was not at all opposed to Ukrainian witchcraft. But the most magical place of all was Rakhiv, where the mountains were so high that you could walk through the clouds, and where the Hutsuls, the “Carpathian cowboys,” as Igor called them, lived above the law, literally: Rakhiv is the highest city in Ukraine. Once it got warm, we headed west.

AS WE DROVE AWAY from Kiev, we seemed to retreat from modernity: the landscape became steeper and greener, and we saw more and more livestock on the side of the road. Igor’s Russian became more Ukrainian gradually, almost imperceptibly, so that by the time we reached Transcarpathia, he was speaking pure Ukrainian, without any Russian words mixed in. By then we were in Rakhiv, passing old men in carts drawn by horses with red-tasseled bridles. The rivers surged through the hills on rocky beds, past trees that had just come into blossom.

Rakhiv was half rustic and half modern, a village of concrete houses with tin roofs and Limp Bizkit graffiti. We wandered through an abandoned Soviet carton factory, built, according to the date on its facade, in 1950. The building had no roof and was surrounded by apple trees. In a field on a hill, we passed a metal skeleton—probably a train car—sitting in the grass, with white flowers growing from what had once been a floor. This was the way in Rakhiv, as in much of Ukraine: nature’s lushness embracing industrial decay. A rooster couldn’t stop crowing, though it was already midday, and his call mixed with techno blaring from passing cars. An old woman in a kerchief was shoveling a hole in the middle of a dirt road. Everyone we passed greeted us with the same words: “Christ is risen.” This, Alina explained, was the post-Easter greeting.

In 1887 Habsburg geographers declared a village near Rakhiv the “geographical center of Europe.” Although it was rarely considered a serious contender for the title anymore, the town was still proud of this distinction. Rakhiv was certainly a crossroads. Many of its inhabitants spoke three or more languages (Igor spoke five); its small population was Ukrainian, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Hutsul, Rusyn.

Igor struggled to explain who the Rusyn were, though he was himself half Rusyn. “Some people say they’re Ukrainian, some people don’t,” he shrugged. When the term Ukrainian came into wide use in western Ukraine in the early twentieth century, the Rusyns of Transcarpathia chose to stick to their earlier name.

Today we often think of ethno-national identity as something that has always existed, something close to race: a man is Ukrainian, as were his ancestors before him. In fact, for most of history, identity had to do with familial, tribal, imperial, or religious loyalties, and communities existed on a much smaller scale. What mattered was your village, your extended family, your local dialect, your faith. The ethno-national identities that we take for granted today were largely the product of nineteenth-century nationalist movements that created “imagined communities,” a sense of blood relation between people who had never met and who had dramatically different ways of life.

Language became a convenient mark of ethnicity, easier to classify than other components of ethnic identity, like folklore, customs, cuisine, or dress. The languages of church and empire—Latin, French, German, Church Slavonic, Russian—were used across huge territories, lingua francas for educated elites; but before the advent of politically motivated efforts to standardize and promote the languages of the common people, there was a spectrum of dialects across the land, much as Igor’s speech shaded from Russian into Ukrainian over the course of our car ride. People in eastern Ukraine spoke a version of Ukrainian that was closer to Russian than the dialect spoken in western Ukraine, which incorporated elements of Belarusian, Polish, Slovakian, or Hungarian, depending on the location. Even late into the twentieth century, people could disagree about which language they were speaking. The scholar Laada Bilaniuk writes about a Ukrainian linguist who, on a train in the early 1990s, praised a fellow passenger for her “beautiful, pure Ukrainian language”—to which this fellow traveler replied that she was speaking Belarusian. Transcarpathia, where Rakhiv is located, was the last region of today’s Ukraine to adopt a modern ethno-national consciousness, and some residents remain reluctant to join the national mainstream.

In the center of Rakhiv, a handsome metal Hutsul, a “Carpathian cowboy,” burst out of a boulder, in his fedora and embroidered blouse and vest, a sack slung over his shoulder, an ax in his hand. The inscription on the brand-new monument announced, “We know who we are.” Following the custom of the region, by which people referred to their dialect as “our language” rather than giving it a name, the monument didn’t need to specify the man’s tribe. We know who we are, said the Hutsuls. We don’t need you to tell us. Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, and Ukrainians passed through, but the Hutsuls (who, like the Rusyn, are sometimes, but not always, considered a subethnicity of Ukrainians) were there to stay. The Hutsul houses in Rakhiv were decorated with mirrors on the outside walls, to ward off misfortune.

We went to meet Igor’s friend Vanya at a cafe, where we had Ukrainian beer, Parliament Lights, and dried fish. Vanya had an elfin quality, with a crooked nose and a maniacal grin. Like everyone else in Rakhiv, regardless of age or sex, he was wearing a tracksuit—a sportivnyi kostyum, as it’s called in Russian. Young women paired their tracksuits with high heels; old men wore them with fedoras. Only babushkas were immune, wearing a more traditional costume of flowered head scarves, galoshes, and men’s blazers.

As we walked along the ridge of a mist-covered mountain, passing flocks of black and white sheep, Igor told us that Vanya had robbed a Prague bank and a Warsaw jewelry store. Both times he’d done it on impulse, and both times he’d been caught, but the Warsaw jail had gotten fed up with his misbehavior and sent him back to Ukraine. It occurred to me that this unlikely tale was less fact than metaphor: the people of Rakhiv were such shape-shifting cosmopolitans that they could slip across any European border and plunder capitals on a whim. When you lived in the geographical center of Europe, high above national boundaries, able to speak any language you pleased, you could do things that were unimaginable for those subject to the ordinary constraints of ethnicity and nationality.

Still, Rakhiv hadn’t been impervious to Soviet authority. The local Hutsul chief, Igor said admiringly, had served in the Soviet Army, where he’d killed six Uzbek soldiers who were trying to beat him up. He served twenty-five years in prison, then came back to Rakhiv to be a cowboy.

The mountain people weren’t immune to nostalgia for socialism, either.

“Life is too uncertain now that the Union is gone,” Igor’s father complained over shots of vodka and a Hutsul corn dish called banush. “Now you choose a path, but you don’t know where it will end.”

He reminisced about the day Rakhiv’s men had gathered to watch porn in 1990, when they’d first gotten international television service.

“It was about Catherine the Great!” he chuckled. “Or maybe Rasputin.”

WE DROVE TO IGOR’S grandmother’s house near the Hungarian, Slovakian, and Romanian borders. Her village made Rakhiv, a small mountain town where no building was more than five stories high, look like an ultramodern metropolis. She and her daughter drew water from a well and used an outhouse.

“She doesn’t speak our language?” she inquired in her Rusyn dialect, pointing a trembling, bony finger at me. I did not. Even Alina had trouble understanding her.

We went to the family cemetery to pay our respects. “Did they say anything?” Igor’s grandmother asked when we got back. Alina and I spent the night in a huge, sagging bed that dated from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The region was full of ghosts, but not the frightening kind.

Being in the geographical center of Europe—and more importantly, on the EU’s poorly policed eastern border—meant that smuggling and counterfeiting thrived in Ukraine’s western regions. The Romanian border was lined with people selling fruits and vegetables, live chickens and ducks, cheap clothing, and all kinds of other goods, often from shipping containers that had been made into roadside shops. People in this area were rumored to make and sell fake French wine, fake Scotch, fake Marlboros, and fake Ecstasy, smuggling goods, both real and fake, into the EU, where they were sold on the black market.

In green fields of yellow flowers, we saw brand-new half-built brick and concrete castles, many of them with turrets and other Gothic ornamentation. There were balconies without railings, windows without glass, doorways without doors, and few signs of ongoing construction. Igor joked that the local smuggler princes built their castles mostly to compete with their neighbors; they’d dig an expensive swimming pool in a bean field and replace it with a tennis court the next year. They built them for their daughters, he laughed: the better the daughter, the bigger the castle. Finishing the mansions was beside the point.

LVIV, THE UNOFFICIAL CAPITAL of western Ukraine, has been reinvented many times. Lviv was part of Poland from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it was called Lemberg. (The city retains a threadbare Habsburg glamour, with graying Gothic crypts and wood-paneled Austrian coffeehouses.) In the nineteenth century Lemberg was mostly Polish, German, and Jewish, though the surrounding countryside was full of peasants who called themselves Ruthenians, and who were learning to call themselves Ukrainians. Because the Austro-Hungarian Empire was less hostile than the Russian Empire was to the use of the Ukrainian language and promotion of Ukrainian ethno-national identity, Lemberg became a base for Ukrainian-language publishing and for Ukrainian educational and cultural organizations. After World War I Lemberg became Lwow, a Polish city in which only one-sixth of the inhabitants were Ukrainian.

During the Second World War the city went to the Soviets and then the Germans, becoming part of the Soviet Union after the war ended. It was renamed Lvov, the Russian version of Lwow. Lvov’s Jews had been killed in concentration camps, mass shootings, or pogroms, and its Poles and Germans had been driven out, deported, or killed. Ukrainians from the countryside helped fill the empty spaces in the city. It was only as part of the Soviet Union that Lviv became the quintessentially Ukrainian city, the bastion of Ukrainian identity, that it is today. When Ukraine became independent, Russian Lvov officially became Ukrainian Lviv. The city had never been Russified, and it remains the only major Ukrainian city where the public sphere is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking.

On our first night in Lviv, we visited a discotheque behind a McDonald’s. It was classic post-Soviet entertainment: flashing neon and black lights, dancers flapping listlessly to anonymous Euro-techno. Though the music was too loud for conversation, we did our best to chat with a six-foot-tall woman in fringed white knee boots, and with her pudgy companion, a man in a white Andy Warhol wig and matching sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar and wore a huge onyx ring on his middle finger.

The next day, Lviv’s “City Day,” men in chain mail, armor, and red velvet cloaks rode horses through the street, waving banners. Hutsuls in colorful folk costumes played violins and danced. Mimes did tricks on unicycles, women in princess dresses walked on stilts, and huge Cossack puppets strode down the cobbled street. People in camouflage rode by on a tank, waving a flag: Ukrainian nationalists.

Lviv had a somewhat unwarranted association with the interwar and World War II–era Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which were based in the forests and villages of western Ukraine and fought for decades against the Soviets and Germans, killing many thousands of Poles and Jews as well. OUN and UPA pursued a violent, authoritarian, ultranationalist ideology based on the dream of a Ukrainian state cleansed of outsiders, and they briefly allied themselves with the Nazis against the Soviets, before the Nazis turned on them. The Soviets worked hard to purge their lands of OUN and UPA, killing more than 150,000 western Ukrainians, deporting 200,000, and incarcerating some 110,000—far more than had actually fought with the nationalist guerrillas. After 1991, OUN and UPA became tragic heroes of the new Ukrainian history. Orange Revolution president Yushchenko awarded two of their most famous leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, the posthumous title “Hero of Ukraine” in 2007.

In Lviv, entrepreneurs with a sense of humor decided to capitalize on their city’s reputation as a hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism. They opened Kryivka, a Ukrainian nationalist theme bar in the cellar of a Habsburg building that was once the Venetian embassy.

The restaurant’s entrance was through an unmarked archway off the main square. Halfway down a flight of stone stairs, we gave the “password” to a man in a soldier’s uniform.

“Glory to Ukraine!” he said. He was holding a vintage machine gun.

“Glory to heroes,” we replied. He poured us shots of honey liqueur from a metal flask. The slogans “Glory to Ukraine,” “Glory to heroes,” and “Death to enemies” had been popular with Ukrainian nationalists in the first half of the twentieth century.

We passed through a tunnel into the bar, which was meant to look like a Ukrainian hideout during the Second World War. The walls were decorated with vintage weapons and old photos of Ukrainian guerrillas. Kryivka was part of a chain that included a restaurant honoring Lviv native Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, where sexy waitresses promised discount cards for anyone who’d consent to a lashing, and a “Jewish” restaurant that had no prices on the menu because patrons were expected to bargain. But Kryivka was by far the most popular, visited by almost every tourist to the city.

Somewhat ironically, many of Kryivka’s visitors were Russian tourists looking for a thrill. For people raised on the Soviet vilification of Ukrainian guerrillas, Kryivka was like a haunted house. Its chief function was to confirm that you were safe; Russia had killed off the real Ukrainian guerrillas long ago. Ukrainian nationalism was reduced to kitsch, playacting by the “Little Russians,” as Ukrainians were called in the Russian Empire.

When a Russian lifestyle TV show filmed a segment on Kryivka, the program’s cheerful host explained that the restaurant was run by “Ukrainian nationalists who don’t like Russians.” Armed men were shown dragging a man in a Red Army hat—the kind ubiquitous in post-Soviet tourist markets—through the restaurant, then throwing him into the “dungeon.”

“Of course, this is all just a tourist attraction!” the host reassured his viewers.

After receiving the “password,” the obliging doorman told the television personality, in a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, that the liqueur he had poured was poison for moskali—the derisive Ukrainian term for Russians. When the moskal ordered his meal in Russian, a jovial old soldier strode in, shooting his pistol offhandedly and saying, in Ukrainian, “We’ve received information that there’s a moskal in our midst. Does anyone know where he is?”

The moskal, who was dressed in a hipster’s red plaid shirt, said gamely, in Russian, “I don’t know!”

The soldier tested him on his Ukrainian pronunciation, to laughter from the other guests.

“If you sing a Ukrainian song, you’ll live,” the soldier said as he threw the host into the dungeon. “If not—we’ll shoot you!” The moskal produced a few lines of a Ukrainian folk song, and returned to the dinner table.