MEN’S DAY

Wyndi, an American consultant in her thirties, was brave and perverse, big-boned and outgoing, with well-toned arms and an exotic mixture of southern charm and radical feminism. An expert on pregnant women and drug use, she was my companion on my second trip to Ukraine, in February 2008.

Our flight was crowded with Hasidic Jews; Uman, in central Ukraine, is a pilgrimage destination, site of the burial place of Rabbi Nachman, founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement. (On their entry forms, pilgrims list the rabbi as their host.) Rabbi Nachman was rumored to be the Messiah. When he fell ill with tuberculosis, he was convinced that God was punishing him for writing a mystical book. He had the two manuscripts of the book burned, in an attempt to bargain for his life. No one knows what the book contained: the rabbi who copied it said, “There is no way of communicating the exaltedness of this book. If it had survived, everyone would have seen the greatness of the Rebbe.”

Aerosvit, the now-defunct Ukrainian airline, offered a good opportunity to readapt to the manners of Eastern Europe. The flight attendants denied us blankets, pillows, and even English; I was proud of myself for speaking to them in Russian. My language skills had improved since my last trip. Fantasizing about passing for a person who was not American, I sat alone, half-hypnotized by a sleeping pill, in the exit row, where it was so cold that I had to wear my coat and gloves. When we arrived at the Kiev airport, I wandered into the men’s bathroom, in a daze. I thought I saw a syringe in the toilet, then realized it was only a waterlogged cigarette.

WYNDI AND I VISITED a needle exchange point at an AIDS Center in a run-down neighborhood far from the city center. The tiny office consisted of a vestibule stacked with boxes of syringes and a room, perhaps four by eight feet, with space for only about five people at a time.

Wyndi and I sat on the couch and watched Nikita make us tea. He announced proudly that he’d stolen the mugs in which he served it.

Nikita was gregarious and flirty, and it was obvious that he liked women. Above his head was an oil painting: a naked woman in black garters was getting it from behind from one guy while a second man sucked on her nipple.

Nikita found it odd and rather funny that we were so interested in women drug users.

“The only thing I know about women,” he blustered, “is how to get them pregnant!”

Once he was done laughing at his own joke, he ran across the courtyard to summon his gynecologist friend, Irina. While we waited for her to arrive, Nikita told us that he helped women drug users get abortions if they didn’t want to have their babies.

“These children have no future,” he explained earnestly. He was probably sincere, but he sounded like a bad actor.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, U.S. policy makers hoped that Ukrainian independence would prevent Russia from regaining its imperial power. Ukraine became the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Israel and Egypt. The European Union, the United Nations, and private foundations like OSI also made grants in Ukraine. In a floundering economy, with a social welfare system that barely functioned, NGOs became an important career opportunity, and a means of survival. Educated, English-speaking Ukrainians vied for well-paid positions at international organizations with offices in Ukraine, while others opened their own NGOs. Running an NGO meant having a job (albeit a precarious one, since grants were almost always short term) and having the means to help others, too. In the 1980s, as I later learned, Nikita had worked as a fartsovshchik, trading souvenirs for jeans, records, tapes, and other foreign goods that he then sold. (Denim and vinyl inspired particular lust in Soviet people.

One of the purposes of our trip was to visit programs and decide whether to fund them. It was only natural that NGO employees put on the best performances they could, complete with props, extras, and set pieces. Many NGO staffers were willing to say whatever grant makers wanted to hear.

Nikita’s performance was rather perfunctory. He began our conversation by telling us that what we were about to see was a real, radical harm reduction project—he wouldn’t be staging any circuses for our benefit. In this we could not doubt him; we spent about two hours in the center and saw only one client, an older man who seemed to know Nikita well but who fled at the sight of us. Nikita explained that the fleeing man had recently approached him, said that he had stopped using, and asked for help starting HIV treatment. Unfortunately, Nikita explained in a tone of resigned regret, the man was lying. Since he was still using, he wouldn’t be able to get HIV treatment.

I was furious: we were supposed to be fighting for the right of drug users to receive HIV treatment. Apparently Nikita hadn’t gotten the memo.

Irina the gynecologist arrived. She was small and matter-of-fact, with cropped hair. She and Nikita were extremely chummy; she seemed ready to jump into his lap at any moment, right there under the oil painting.

Irina explained that all Ukrainian women received a cash payment of 8,000 hryvnia (then about $2,000, a large sum for a poor Ukrainian) for every child they bore, and that some drug users had babies so that they could use the money for drugs. We had often heard this story, and I was never sure whether it was true. In general, Irina said, many women, whether or not they were drug users, avoided gynecologists because of the intense stigma of premarital sex. Many women even avoided prenatal care unless there was an emergency.

I was having trouble concentrating. In addition to the oil painting, the room held a small library, with translations of Jane Austen, and several framed pictures of Nikita posing against blue backgrounds, alone or with women. I didn’t see a single condom, educational poster, or pamphlet.

Wyndi asked for the bathroom, and Nikita led her there by the hand. When they came back, he said that they’d found someone jerking off; he found this very funny. And what did Nikita do in his office, I wondered, with his oil painting and Jane Austen?

When Nikita showed us his unopened boxes of needles and unassembled sharps containers, I noticed the lone piece of HIV information in the room: a sticker on the closet that said EXTREME SEX and showed two nearly identical scenes. On the left, a stick figure woman was bent over a table that was covered with empty cocktail glasses. Two men with erect penises as long as their arms were lined up behind her.

NO! said the sticker.

On the right was the same picture. This time the men were wearing condoms.

YES! said the sticker.

From the AIDS Center, we went to visit a syringe exchange point located near a pharmacy that sold drugs illegally. Two energetic outreachers worked there: a man and a woman, both former users. Two clients were there when we arrived, but they ran off at the sight of us. Here was the eternal problem of “site visits”: you scared the natives. This was another reason that NGOs often had to plan their performances in advance. They had to show the grant makers they were working, but it was impossible to work with the grant makers hanging around.

The outreach workers told us that the pharmacy allowed them to stand outside on the condition that they didn’t go into the pharmacy or bother anyone. They hung their box of syringes on a tree so that only the male outreach worker, who was exceptionally tall, could get at them; otherwise, they said, people stole them.

It was too cold to stay out for long, and soon we left to meet up with Alik at Kontraktova Square. Sober for a few months, Alik was more thoughtful than the last time I’d seen him, slower moving, more vulnerable and less grandiose. His skin was clearer and smoother, his hair was neat, and he was wearing a beautiful pinstripe suit in gray flannel.

Alik and Nikita had known each other for a long time. Nikita seemed to occupy a secondary position in the pride; as soon as he saw Alik, he became subdued, almost deferential.

We went to a Georgian restaurant and had delicious khachapuri, sizzling cheese-filled bread.

“Unlike some people,” Nikita told us as we ate, “I don’t want to leave Ukraine just because things aren’t going so well. But I don’t want to live in shit either, so I decided to start shoveling it out.”

Horribly behind schedule, we took a taxi to another organization of potential grantees, a program for poor, HIV-positive mothers. (Not all of them were drug users; some had been infected by sex partners, often by boyfriends or husbands who used drugs.) There we discovered, to our horror, that Anna, the unbelievably diligent manager of the project, had kept a group of clients waiting for hours to meet with us. We were being treated like monarchs on a tour of our realm.

The two young clients, one fashionably dressed and one with only half a mouthful of teeth, spoke passionately about how the program had transformed their lives. If they were acting—and I didn’t think they were—they had a special talent. A third woman was a former client who now worked at the program; she was serene, thoughtful, and well spoken. They talked about the unbearably long waits at government clinics, where those who couldn’t pay were always last in line. Sometimes, they said, they had to leave to feed their children before they had seen a doctor. Corruption was endemic among health care providers, and because of the $2,000 baby payments, doctors were especially impatient with new mothers who didn’t offer bribes; they were rich, after all, if only temporarily.

OUR NEXT STOP was Odessa, the port city founded by Catherine the Great and developed by the Duc de Richelieu, a refugee of the French Revolution. Odessa became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Russian Empire, and this diversity is still reflected in the city’s street names: French Boulevard, Albanian Street, Jewish Street. Odessa was a center of Jewish culture, but the great majority of its Jews were killed during the Second World War. Most of those who survived eventually emigrated, often to New York. Now Odessa, which remains a predominantly Russian-speaking city, feels hollow, trading on the ghosts of the past. Because it’s a port, Odessa developed an exceptionally severe drug problem in the 1990s and a corresponding HIV epidemic. The city became notorious for its street children, who lived in the sewers and started injecting drugs before they’d hit puberty.

While we were waiting for our flight, a short, rotund man with white hair and snaggleteeth came up to us, all smiles, and said in a southern accent, “I thought I heard Americans!”

I pretended not to hear him, New York style, but Wyndi gave in to her southern instincts and chatted with him. He told us proudly that he was from suburban Maryland and worked for Lockheed Martin.

“Are you ladies here for business or pleasure?” he asked.

Wyndi told him that we were there for work. “Are you in Ukraine for business?” she asked politely.

“Personal business,” he chirped. “I’m here to meet a young lady.”

A fat little boy, about eight or nine, ran up to him.

“Daddy! Daddy!” he cried. Snaggleteeth excused himself.

On the plane, I listened to him talking to his female companion, a middle-aged Ukrainian woman who spoke excellent English.

“I think I’ll tell her you’re my translator, just so she doesn’t get confused,” he was saying.

The flight was full of American men. These were the bride-buyers, hoping to find a good old-fashioned wife in the rubble of Communism. The kind of woman who still knew how to be a woman, as the bride-buyers liked to say; the kind who hadn’t been ruined by feminism, who still knew that the customer came first. Some of the Odessa beauties the businessmen met online were genuinely desperate to get out of Ukraine; others were con artists.

WE WERE GREETED at the Odessa airport by a local harm reduction NGO worker named Natalia, and by a large number of stray dogs. We drove to Hotel Valentina, where Natalia and her NGO had helped us organize a training session on harm reduction for women, for potential grantees from Ukraine and Russia.

Natalia bragged that Deep Purple, one of the bands most beloved in the former Soviet Union, had stayed at Hotel Valentina. A short walk from the discotheques and theme restaurants of Odessa’s famous Arcadia beach, the hotel was a summer resort. The windows were duct-taped, but that wasn’t enough to keep out the icy air.

Wyndi said that the hotel reminded her of a summer camp, then revised her opinion: it was more like the hotel in The Shining. We ate in the giant dining room alone, confronted by an array of Slavic “salads,” processed meat and mayonnaise with a sprinkling of vegetables.

The dogs of Odessa sang their wild song all night, and the wind blew a loose piece of metal against the side of the hotel. Every time it hit, it sounded like a gunshot. I hardly slept.

When our training started, the Russian participants complained loudly and frequently that Ukrainians didn’t know how to heat a building properly; the Ukrainians grimaced. The Russians seemed to be unaware that as far as gas was concerned, Ukraine was at Russia’s mercy. The post-Soviet Ukrainian economy remained dependent on huge subsidies on Russian gas (though Russia also needed Ukrainian cooperation, since its gas flowed through Ukraine to Europe), and Russia used this to manipulate Ukrainian politics. When things got really bad between the two countries, Russia threatened to cut off the gas to Ukraine entirely. This would mean economic disaster and perhaps death by freezing, depending on the season. It wouldn’t have been the first time Moscow had cut off Ukraine’s means of survival: in the 1930s, during the collectivization of agriculture, millions of Ukrainians starved to death, although they lived on the most fertile land in Europe.

The tactless Russian participants also made jokes about the Ukrainian language, which they found deeply comical, almost comprehensible but not quite, like ludicrously bad Russian. The polite Ukrainians smiled irritably; they had long ago grown tired of being cast as lovable hillbillies. I too was implicated in Russia’s linguistic imperialism. With only enough money for one training, we had decided to hold it in Russian, since (we assumed) all the Ukrainians spoke Russian, while the Russians didn’t speak Ukrainian. We had simultaneous translation for the English-speaking organizers, and another level of translation would have turned the training into a Tower of Babel. But our choice of language replicated the old Russian-Ukrainian power imbalance. Some of the participants from western Ukraine, where Russian never fully took hold, weren’t comfortable speaking Russian, although they understood it. They were reduced to the position of silent observers.

IN THE VAN to the airport on our way back to Kiev, Olga, one of our future grantees, told us that today was a very important holiday—Men’s Day, the corollary of Women’s Day, March 8, a very big deal in the former Soviet Union. “Men’s Day” was a war holiday when women congratulated men, and men went to the sauna or the bar and congratulated each other. Technically it was Defenders of the Fatherland Day, previously known as Red Army Day, commemorating the establishment of the Red Army. (There were a number of women in the Red Army, so it wasn’t really fair that the holiday should have morphed into an occasion when women give men even more care and attention than usual.) Men’s Day remained a national holiday in post-Soviet Russia, but not in independent Ukraine. Still, Ukrainians kept celebrating: it was a great excuse to get drunk.

Alik invited me to come out to a club with him and watch a boxing match. I imagined two burly Ukrainians in a disco, beating each other to death without gloves.

The club, Khlib, was supposedly the coolest underground spot in Kiev: a grimy, strobe-lit basement with Turkish toilets. We were let in for free by Vasya, Alik’s childhood friend from around the way. Vasya was even taller than Alik, with an enormous paunch acquired, Alik said, after he had stopped being addicted to speed. Vasya seized my wrist and stamped it with glow-in-the-dark ink, then steered me through the club by my shoulders. He and Alik were drinking methamphetamine dissolved in Coke. How ironic, I thought, and how perfectly post-Soviet.

I was waiting for the boxing match to start, but it never did—there were just a lot of greasy teenage ravers, leaning against the walls and staring at each other. I was a little ashamed for Alik and Vasya. Unable to part with their youth in the deranged 1990s, they were the only grown men in a club for disaffected teens.

We went to a pub to watch the match, which was being broadcast at four a.m. from Madison Square Garden. A Russian was fighting a Ukrainian.