CITY OF GARDENS, CITY OF RAVINES

Not long after the AIDS Conference, Alik moved back to Kiev. He started using drugs heavily again and indulging what he called, with his usual ironic self-awareness, his “Jesus complex”: he always had to feel he was saving or being saved.

I visited Kiev for the first time in May 2007, for a workshop I’d organized on health programs for women drug users. In New York, a graduate student had been giving me Russian lessons once a week, but I hadn’t made much progress. (Both Russian and Ukrainian are spoken in Kiev.) I made Alik promise to pick me up at the airport. I hardly slept on the plane, afraid he wouldn’t show up, that he’d get the day wrong or forget, which wouldn’t have been a surprise. But when I entered the arrival hall at Boryspil, Kiev’s dinky international airport, there he was in a cheap black suit, damp with sweat. He’d been swallowed up again by post-Soviet space; you could almost see his life expectancy declining. Still, I was happy to see him.

We drove along the smooth, narrow highway to the city, past walls of trees broken only by the occasional Ukrainian theme restaurant or hotel. There were a couple of lonely bus stops, and I wondered what sort of people waited at them: were they living in huts, in the forest? But soon we were passing cheap high-rises and shopping centers, and then we crossed the Dnieper River.

After Ukraine became independent, there was talk of pulling the Motherland statue down and melting her. Soviet ideology would be reduced to a neutral element, made into something better suited to the new world of Ukrainian freedom. But the statue was so enormous that its removal would have been prohibitively expensive. Besides, it stood for victory in the Second World War, still one of the most cherished memories of many Ukrainian citizens. The Motherland statue stayed, gazing toward Moscow: the Soviet past was too valuable and too vast to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, the resurrected symbols of the prerevolutionary Ukrainian nationalist past, of the short-lived rebellions against Russian imperial power, began to crowd forward. The new Ukraine adopted an old blue and yellow flag, a trident, and the anthem “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died.” These emblems were part of Ukraine’s new national identity, its idea of itself. Language, too, became a way of asserting Ukraine’s distinction, its difference from Russia. The Ukrainian language had been subordinated to Russian in imperial Russia and then in the Soviet Union, confined to villages and grandmothers, folklore and nationalist rebellion, and excluded, for the most part, from the spheres of government, education, or high literature. As a result, Ukraine had always been a bilingual country. Now Ukrainian became Ukraine’s national language, the linguistic boundary serving to reinforce the new national borders.

A sudden change of languages and symbols, with government institutions switching to Ukrainian almost overnight, was nothing new for Ukraine.

In 1919 Petliura was driven from Ukraine by the Bolsheviks. Shaken by the failure of the Ukrainian peasants to support the revolution, and despite Marxism’s opposition to nationalism, Lenin and Stalin developed a policy that allowed limited self-government for the various “nationalities” (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, Jewish, and so on) of the Soviet Union. The logic behind the policy was dialectical: by making room for nationalism, the Bolsheviks would hasten its extinction. Every Soviet citizen had to choose a nationality—not always easy in a multiethnic, multilingual empire—and a complicated system of local governance was organized. Soviet policy included the use of national languages in public life. In Ukraine, the 1920s saw a wave of Soviet-mandated “Ukrainization,” a sudden switch to the newly standardized Ukrainian language in government and schools, on street signs, and in newspapers, not unlike what Ukraine would experience again in the 1990s.

But Russian soon regained its old dominance, becoming the language of the centralized Soviet government. Ukrainian-speaking intellectuals and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s top political leaders were annihilated in Stalin’s purges, accused of “bourgeois nationalism.” Some were accused of “terminological wrecking,” the attempt to create a Ukrainian language that would isolate Ukraine from the rest of the Soviet Union and bring it closer to the hated Poland and other Western enemies. For Stalin, even word choice could be a form of political sabotage.

BULGAKOV DISLIKED the Ukrainian language, which he found silly and inconvenient, but he passionately loved his native city. As Alik and I drove into Kiev that first day, I understood why. Kiev was precipitous and green, a garden city, with a center full of brightly painted Art Deco–style buildings, buxom caryatids, squat gargoyles, and lavish churches. Its glamour was more than a thousand years old, the glow of a distant but powerful star. In the Middle Ages, Kiev was one of the biggest cities in Europe, capital of Kievan Rus, the first state to unite the Slavic tribes. It was traditionally known as “the mother of Russian cities,” “the Jerusalem of the Russian lands.” But it was sacked by the Mongol Horde in the thirteenth century, and the Slavic Jerusalem never quite regained its former glory. In his 1923 essay “The City of Kiev,” Bulgakov describes Kiev as a “quiet backwater,” lovable for its peaceful atmosphere, modest scale, and friendly, unpretentious inhabitants—who are compared, inevitably, with the pushier, sharper-toothed Muscovites, notorious for their grandiosity.

My favorite part of Kiev was Alik’s neighborhood, Podil, a low-lying area that skirted the northern end of the old hill city and was once the center of Jewish life in Kiev. In the first full bloom of spring, Kontraktova Square, the heart of Podil, was wide, leisurely, and green, full of young people chatting, eating ice cream, drinking beer, and playing guitars.

Bulgakov’s Podil looked very much like Alik’s Podil, which was, to a great extent, a reconstruction. The Bolsheviks blew up churches and cathedrals and replaced them with state buildings, or humiliated religious spaces by turning them into museums of atheism. This was more than just destruction. In tenth-century Kievan Rus, when a pagan temple was torn down, a Christian equivalent had to be built on the same site, squeezing out the pagan gods. After the end of the Soviet Union, Ukraine rebuilt the churches that had been destroyed. Their whitewashed or pale blue walls were made for shadows; their sites had housed many generations of gods. But reconstruction is easier than resurrection. No one could bring back Kiev’s Jews, who were massacred in 1941, during the German occupation, at Babi Yar ravine, a few miles west of Podil.

Above Podil, overlooking the Dnieper River, stood a statue of Prince Vladimir, the illegitimate son of Sviatoslav I and his housekeeper, Malusha, who was said to have visions of the future. Vladimir converted to Christianity in 987, supposedly because it allowed the consumption of alcohol and pork but more likely because he married an Orthodox Christian Byzantine princess. He baptized the people of Kiev en masse in 988 and had his wooden idol, Perun, the golden-mustached god of thunder and lightning, bound to a horse’s tail and dragged to the river, beaten with sticks, and drowned.

Vladimir figures prominently in White Guard; Bulgakov grew up close to the monument, on the steep, winding street named Andrew’s Slope for the Baroque Church of St. Andrew at its upper end. A few blocks past St. Andrew’s stand the majestic Byzantine-style Cathedral of St. Sophia and an equestrian statue of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossack hetman who signed a treaty with Muscovy in 1654.

In the climactic scene in White Guard, whirling masses crowd into the Cathedral of St. Sophia for a service. As the church bells peal in a terrible cacophony, a black sea of worshippers follows the church procession onto the frosty square. Blind Ukrainian minstrels sing about the end of the world; pickpockets steal, and beggars plead for change. There are rumors that Petliura, leader of the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian People’s Republic, has arrived. Petliura’s troops, including a Cossack company, march into the square, waving blue and yellow flags as the crowd cheers. Little boys climb up Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ankles and soldiers try to knock off his inscription, which celebrates a “united, indivisible Russia,” but bayonets are no match for granite. Petliura is nowhere to be found. After his defeat, he became a Soviet villain; when Ukraine became independent, he was a hero again, with a street in central Kiev named after him.

Prince Vladimir and Bohdan Khmelnytsky are among the only nineteenth-century statues that survive in Kiev. The Bolsheviks began their tenure by deposing the icons of the old world. For example, the 1911 assassination of Pyotr Stolypin, the tsar’s reformist minister of internal affairs, wasn’t enough; when the revolution came, the people built a gallows around his statue, hanging him in effigy and then smashing him to bits. This was revenge for all the revolutionary terrorists hanged from “Stolypin’s necktie.” Prince Vladimir was spared because Kievan Rus was the shared heritage of both Ukraine and Russia; Bohdan Khmelnytsky lasted because of his role as an anti-Polish revolutionary leader and agent of Russian-Ukrainian friendship. After 1991 surviving heroes had to be translated into Ukrainian. Vladimir became Volodymyr; Bogdan Khmelnitsky became Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

When I explored Kiev for the first time, the city’s streets were punctuated by monuments to the great men of Ukraine’s past: round-edged metal figures holding cities, books, and swords. Not all of the statues were new. A Soviet-era statue of Taras Shevchenko, the nineteenth-century poet-prophet of the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian language, stood in Shevchenko Park, across the street from Shevchenko University, which resembled a giant red velvet cake. A statue of Lenin stood at the end of nearby Shevchenko Boulevard. Lenin and Shevchenko made a strange pair. Shevchenko was born a serf, and spent most of his life railing against the Russian slave masters and lamenting Ukraine’s lost glory. (He was sent to prison and into exile for pro-Ukrainian agitation.) He wept over the burial mounds of Cossacks, the fierce horsemen of the steppe and the embodiments, for him, of Ukrainian independence.

Shevchenko was, and remains, a savior figure for Ukrainian patriots. He would have hated the Soviet Union. In one of his most famous poems, he asked to be buried above the Dnieper, expressing the hope that someday the roaring river would carry the blood of his enemies (among them, the Russians) out of Ukraine, into the Black Sea. But Soviet policy demanded the canonization of literary heroes of each Soviet “nation,” and Shevchenko was Ukraine’s designated bard. It helped that he had spent most of his life in poverty: Soviet critics dubbed him a “Red Christ,” “apostle of day laborers and hired hands.” In 1939, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, a spate of publications celebrated Shevchenko as a revolutionary opponent of social injustice and a devoted student of Russian revolutionary thinkers.

MAIDAN NEZALEZHNOSTI, Independence Square, has been Kiev’s center since the nineteenth century, when it became home to Ukraine’s parliament. In those days it was called Parliament Square. In 1919 it was renamed Soviet Square, and in 1977 it became the Square of the October Revolution. A large Lenin was erected, only to be pulled down again in 1991. Lenins were tolerated in post-Soviet Ukraine, but they had to know their place.

Maidan was the site of a 1990 pro-reform student hunger strike that spread through the country. In 2001 it saw protests against then-president Leonid Kuchma, who was implicated in the murder of Georgiy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who had been decapitated and dumped in the woods. In 2004 Maidan was the site of the Orange Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of orange-clad citizens protested the blatant voter fraud—including state-sanctioned bullying, coercion, and violence—used to elect Viktor Yanukovych as president.

Yanukovych was poorly educated and terrible at public speaking; as a young man he had been convicted for theft and assault. He wasn’t promising presidential material. But he was a highly placed member of the Donetsk business “clan,” in eastern Ukraine, and Kuchma’s camp put him forward to compete with the cosmopolitan Viktor Yushchenko, a liberal, Western-leaning politician who was married to a former U.S. State Department employee. Before the election Yushchenko was poisoned, apparently during a meeting with the head of Kuchma’s security services. Though he recovered, his face was disfigured by the lesions caused by dioxin—an ingredient in Agent Orange.

The Orange Revolution protests, which combined a surge of public outrage with political and financial support from Western governments and renegade Ukrainian oligarchs, resulted in the fair election of Yushchenko. While previous Ukrainian presidents had played the West and Russia against each other, trying to extract the maximum benefit from each, Yushchenko chose to side with the West from the start. He declared his hope that Ukraine could help spread democracy throughout the post-Soviet world. Putin was displeased; under Kuchma, Ukraine had drifted back into Russia’s orbit, and Yanukovych would have been easier for Russia to manipulate. The West was thrilled, feeling that this was another step toward the peaceful democratization of the entire world, the expansion of Western influence, and the dwindling of Russian power. Western aid poured in, and Ukrainian NGOs flourished; this was how I ended up working with Ukrainian AIDS organizations.

Yushchenko proved a better international figurehead than leader. His prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was a Russian-speaking oligarch from Dnipropetrovsk, in south-central Ukraine. She was canny enough to polish up her Ukrainian and do her hair in phony wheat-gold braids, modeling her image on the Berehynia, a dangerous female water spirit rebranded as a mother goddess. Tymoshenko’s economic reforms met with mixed results, and she became involved in a bitter feud with fellow oligarch-turned-politician Petro Poroshenko, who was known as the Chocolate King because he’d made his fortune in the candy business. Just a year after the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko dismissed Yulia Tymoshenko, who became his political opponent.

Yushchenko’s anti-Russian liberal rhetoric and promotion of Ukrainian linguistic and national identity were unpopular in Ukraine’s east and south and in Crimea, regions with closer ties to Russia and less affinity with Ukrainian nationalism. People in these regions hadn’t appreciated the resurrection of prerevolutionary Ukrainian nationalist symbols, either; Ukraine’s new national idea seemed designed to exclude them. In 2006 Yanukovych, who’d tried to steal the presidential election just two years earlier, became Yushchenko’s prime minister. Ukraine’s political, legal, medical, and educational systems were still miserably corrupt, and optimism was starting to ebb. But when I visited in 2007, Ukraine still felt like a relatively free country, a place where something good might happen.

AFTER MY WORKSHOP was done, Alik took me to drink tall, slim half-liter glasses of beer at Olzhin Dvir, a bar at the upper edge of a cliff-side park that plunged several hundred feet down, with a rickety flight of wooden steps that seemed to lead into a forest. Alik told me there was a neighborhood at the bottom of the steps, a corrupt real estate developer’s fantasia, a cluster of retro pastel buildings where no one could afford to live. When he took me to see it, we were the only people on the empty streets, which were littered with bits of rebar and haunted by stray dogs.

From Kiev, I was flying to Warsaw for a harm reduction conference. Alik wasn’t going, but his new girlfriend Valya was. She lived not far from the airport, and he proposed that we all sleep at her place the night before our early-morning flight.

Valya’s tidy little apartment was in a khrushchevka, one of the big, anonymous apartment buildings that Khrushchev built in the 1960s to alleviate the Soviet housing crisis. Alik and I arrived and took off our shoes, as is the custom in Ukrainian and Russian homes. Valya invited us into the kitchen, putting out some Armenian cognac and a box of cheap, too-sweet Ukrainian chocolates that would serve as zakuski, the snacks that follow a shot. As we drank and ate, Alik and Valya spoke Russian, and I did my best to follow. Then Alik and I switched to English. Valya didn’t seem to care what we were saying; she exuded the single-minded purpose common among people who are addicted to drugs.

Valya and Alik were in a serene mood, because they had some heroin. They decided it was time to get high. Valya had trouble with her veins, which were scarred by years of injecting, so Alik—who was a doctor, after all—injected her, then injected himself. The process was surprisingly innocuous, almost clinical, completed in a calm, businesslike way. I thought about the research papers I had been reading in my cubicle in New York, about how being injected with drugs by someone else increases HIV risk, statistically speaking, and about how women who inject drugs are more likely to have a sexual partner who injects drugs. I knew that this scene illustrated the scientific findings that I read about in my research and used in public health work. And yet this was a story about two characters, not a population, and it couldn’t be expressed in statistics. Alik and Valya were two people trying to help other Ukrainians and also themselves, bound together in a relationship of mutual self-destruction. They were like the underworld equivalent of President Yushchenko and his ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko: reformers gone astray, disfigured and overtheatrical. And I was the confused, well-meaning American observer.

Valya was nodding off on the couch, looking in my general direction. Suddenly she sat up, her eyes widening.

“Why aren’t you wearing any slippers?” she asked. She had noticed that I was barefoot. In Ukraine, as in Russia, walking on cold floors is believed to lead directly, almost inevitably, to illness.

Valya pulled herself up and tottered over to the entryway, where she found a pair of fluffy pink slippers embroidered with cartoon cats. She handed them to me, watched me put them on, and then sat back down and resumed her nod. Alik found a blanket and put me to bed on the couch, tucking me in. Alik never nodded out.

KIEV’S LILACS BLOSSOM in May, which is generally considered the city’s most beautiful month. As Bulgakov wrote in White Guard, in spring “the snow melts, the green Ukrainian grass appears, running in braids across the land.... There is no longer even a trace of blood.” After the Bolshevik revolution, during the May Day celebrations, “agittrams” and “agitcars” rolled around the city with mobile moving picture shows. In the military parade, there were “living paintings” of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the February and October Revolutions. History creaked through the streets, and winter’s bare branches and gray skies were distant memories.

On my last afternoon in Kiev, I passed a woman in plastic leopard-print high heels, holding a sprig of lilac in one hand and a liter of Amstel Light in the other. She stuck in my mind long after I left; she seemed to embody Kiev as I had encountered it, a blossoming city scarred with the ravines of a violent past, facing an uncertain future, chemical reassurance always close at hand.