Kyiv Quotes

Anna wrote to her father that she found her new land “a barbarous country where the houses are gloomy, the churches ugly, and the customs revolting.” Paris under Henry I was clearly not Constantinople, but more importantly, in Anna’s eyes, it did not rank even with Kyiv.

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves. "Ethnic Ukrainians" must be a group that acts in one way, and "ethnic Russians" in another. This is about as true as to say that "ethnic Americans" vote Republican. It is more a summary of a politics that defines people by ethnicity, proposing to them an eternity of grievance rather than a politics of the future.

Kyiv on May 31, the Russian president signed a treaty of friendship with his Ukrainian counterpart, pledging “mutual respect” for “territorial integrity” and the “inviolability of borders.”186

Olha thought that simply murdering her enemies would not be enough to satisfy herself and her people. A true daughter of her time, she was tireless in inventing inhumane tortures for her victims in an effort to see them tortured to death in front of her.

Every large-scale shooting action of the Holocaust (more than thirty-three thousand Jews murdered outside Kyiv, more than twenty-eight thousand outside Riga, and on and on) involved the regular German police. All in all, regular policemen murdered more Jews than the Einsatzgruppen.

   "The Kniaz is a handsome man," said one of her ladies-in-waiting.    "He is handsome and noble," added the Kniahynia, reflecting, "but his hands are awash with blood. The blood of my master, my husband - and a warrior demands revenge! I could love him, if I did not have to hate him with all my heart.

And the cruel woman ordered that the Derevlian Kniaz's arms and legs be severed. For the rest of his life he was to stay under her table and gather the breadcrumbs with his tongue.

Meanwhile, in the garden they dug large pits and in each pit they buried ten men alive. On both sides of the gate they constructed huge pyramids made up of the Derevlian commoners' severed heads.

The color revolutions did not change the post-Soviet world, but they left a lasting legacy and the hope that it would change one day. Ukrainians reappeared on the world’s television screens in November and December 2013, when they poured onto the streets of Kyiv once again, this time in support of closer ties with the European Union. At a time when enthusiasm for the European Union was at a low ebb among its member countries, the readiness of the Ukrainians to march and stay on the streets in subzero temperatures for days, weeks, and months surprised and inspired

After witnessing the pogrom, one of the best-known Jewish authors of the twentieth century, Sholem Aleichem, left the city and the country for faraway New York. Anticipation of a pogrom became a major theme in his last story about Tevye the Dairyman. The subject is also prominent in those of his stories on which the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof is based. In both the story and the musical, the city policeman is sympathetic to the Jews. That was true of some policemen, but many stood by during the pogroms, encouraging the violence. That seems to have been the case in Kyiv. By the time the police took action against the perpetrators of the pogrom, it had been going on for two days.

— А что, хлопцы, дело табак? — сказал дед. — Киев сдают. Мы возмутились: — Киев — второй Царицын. Ого, дед, еще знаешь, какой бой будет! — Какой там бой, — махнул дед рукой. — Вы посмотрите: куда им воевать? Уставшие, измордованные лошаденки тянули военные фуры, орудия, разваливающиеся телеги. Красноармейцы были оборванные, заросшие, израненные. Некоторые, видно, до крови разбив ноги, шли босиком, перекинув ботинки через плечо. А у других вовсе не было ни сапог, ни ботинок. Шли без всякого строя, как стадо, сгибаясь под тяжестью мешков, скаток, оружия и отнюдь не воинственно звякая мятыми котелками. — О несчастные расейские солдаты, — пробормотал дед, снимая шапку [101—2].

Club Kyiv’s “exclusive” clientele seemed to consist of young rich kids intermingled with overweight businessmen in suits and gold-digging prostitutes. Bishop couldn’t tell the difference between the working girls and the women there simply for a good time. To him they all looked the same, and he had never seen so many fake breasts, collagen-enhanced lips, hair extensions, and spray tans in one spot before. These girls wore the shortest skirts he had ever seen. How the hell do they stay warm showing that much skin, he wondered. They looked ridiculous in their winter coats with skinny bare legs protruding beneath them. Like ostriches, he realized with a smile.

Урядові екскурсоводи слушно зауважують: їхати в Бабин Яр немає потреби, там нема на що дивитися. Али ви можете побачити його в центрі міста, на кожній площі і на кожній вулиці: одночасно все і нічого.

The linguistic root of “Ukraine” means “edge” or “border land.” The territory that became known as Ukraine is mostly an extended plain with few natural borders. Ukraine and Russia both assert a common origin in Kyivan Rus. This medieval kingdom was established by Viking warriors who intermixed with local Slavic tribes in what became known as the “Rus lands,” which were ruled from Kyiv (the capital of Ukraine today). Despite their shared lineage in Kyivan Rus, modern Ukraine and Russia clash bitterly over claims of common identity, as Russians portray it, versus separate identities, as Ukrainians assert. Kyivan Rus disappeared from history when the Golden Horde, the Mongols, sacked Kyiv in 1240.

The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were. The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013.

There are good men everywhere. Here. Odessa. Even Moscow. Do they count? Does anyone ever listen to them? Yes, of course they do. At the beginning, their voices matter. Without them nothing happens. But afterwards it's different. Afterwards, the only thing that matters is power.

The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea. Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation.

According to data provided by the respected Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, with Russians constituting 17 percent of the Ukrainian population, only 5 percent of those polled considered themselves exclusively Russian: the rest identified as both Russian and Ukrainian. Even those who considered themselves exclusively Russian often opposed Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs, refusing to associate themselves with Putin’s regime. “Ukraine is my Homeland. Russian is my native language. And I would like to be saved by Pushkin. And delivered from sorrow and unrest, also by Pushkin. Pushkin, not Putin,” wrote one of Kyiv’s ethnic Russians in her Facebook account. The ideology of the “Russian World,” which combines Russian nationalism with Russian Orthodoxy and which Moscow and Russian-backed insurgents have promoted as an alternative to the pro-European choice of the Maidan protesters, has helped strengthen the Ukrainian-Jewish pro-European alliance developing in Ukraine since 1991. “I have said for a long time that an alliance between Ukrainians and Jews is a pledge of our common future,” posted a pro-Maidan activist on his Facebook account.

Applying the Finnish model is based on the assumption that in return for neutrality—meaning not joining NATO—Russia will let Kyiv maintain its sovereignty and Ukraine will be able to develop into a stable, democratic, and prosperous state. However, the likelihood of such a scenario seems to be unlikely, given that the existence of a free and democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s corrupt and authoritarian Russia. In consequence, “the Kremlin will seek nothing less than the collapse of democracy in Ukraine.

The Kyiv embassy’s Kent had gone to the VP’s office in February 2015, when he first heard about Hunter’s connection to the “odious oligarch” Zlochevsky.

Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it—theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break.

On Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, Gorbachev read his resignation speech on national television. The red banner of the Soviet Union was run down the flagpole of the Kremlin’s senate building, to be replaced with the Russian tricolor—red, blue, and white. Kyiv’s colors were blue and yellow. There was no longer a symbolic link between Moscow and Kyiv. After four unsuccessful attempts, undertaken by different political forces under various circumstances, Ukraine was now not only united but also independent and free to go its own way. What had seemed impossible only a few months earlier had become a reality: the empire was gone, and a new country had been born. The old communist elites and the leaders of the young and ambitious national democrats had joined forces to make history, with Ukraine as the gravedigger of the last European empire. They now had to find a way to create the future.

Ukraine’s political engagement with the West began in earnest in January 1994 with the signing of a deal brokered by the United States, according to which Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR—potentially the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In the Budapest Memorandum signed in December of that year, the United States, Russia, and Great Britain provided security assurances to Ukraine, which joined the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a nonnuclear state. While many in Kyiv questioned the prudence of giving up nuclear weapons (the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of the Budapest Memorandum guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, would strengthen their case in 2014), there were significant benefits to be gained at the time. Ukraine ended its de facto international isolation as a country previously refusing to join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and became the third-largest recipient of US foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt.

As often happens with former colonial administrators, a strong inferiority complex afflicted the Kyiv elites vis-à-vis their Russian counterparts, and they initially followed models developed in Russia to deal with their own political, social, and cultural challenges. It took them a while to realize that the Russian models did not work in Ukraine. Ukraine was different. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Ukrainian religious scene. By 1992, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which accounted for 60 percent of all Orthodox communities in the former Soviet Union, had split four ways: there were Greek Catholics who had emerged from the underground, Orthodox who remained under Moscow’s jurisdiction, adherents of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Kyiv Patriarchate, and, finally, the Autocephalous (self-ruling) Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had its roots in the 1920s and also did not recognize the authority of Moscow.

Yaroslav died on February 28, 1054, and was buried in the Cathedral of St. Sophia, which he had built. His earthly remains were placed in a white marble sarcophagus decorated with carvings of the Christian cross and Mediterranean plants, including palms, which were by no means native to Kyivan Rus’. According to one theory, the sarcophagus—a stone embodiment of Byzantine cultural imperialism—had once been the final resting place of a Byzantine notable but was brought to Kyiv either by marauding Vikings or by enterprising Greeks. The sarcophagus is still preserved in the cathedral, but the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1943, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn. What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

Throughout 1941 and early 1942, the Einsatzgruppen fanned out over the Baltic states and then the Soviet Union, carrying out massacres in what has lately been labeled “the Holocaust by bullets.” At Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine, they gunned down over

Vilnius University, which rivaled the University of Oxford in enrollment for some time, was closed in 1832. The government had no more patience with a school it considered a hotbed of Polish nationalism. Other Polish-run educational institutions in the region also shut their doors, among them a lyceum in the town of Kremianets in Volhynia. The government transferred the lyceum’s rich library, collection of sculptures, and trees and shrubs from the botanical garden to Kyiv, where it created a new imperial center of learning to replace Vilnius University in 1834. The Polish language was banned there; Russian was the only language of instruction. The new university was named after Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great—the first Orthodox autocrat and a Russian to boot, as far as official historiography was concerned.

April 2020, the Kyiv District Court ordered that Shokin be formally recorded as the victim of an alleged crime by the former US vice president. Joe’s identity originally was redacted, but the court ruled that he be formally named.

Looking to the future doesn’t mean you have to forget the past.

Things will get worse before they get better, but you are strong. Just make it through today and hope that tomorrow will be better.

Everyone who had reason to work with him agreed that he’d changed. A lot of his confidence seemed to have gone. He was less sure of himself, less prepared to take a risk or two, somehow smaller. Maybe it was something that would pass, said some. Maybe not.

Life is dangerous, she thought. No one survives it.

Her past clutched in her hands and her future laid out in front of her, painted against each other in stark relief, but how could she bridge this divide? Life had set her down a path she’d never imagined traveling, and now she was stuck with one foot in each world—the before and after.

Looking to the future doesn’t mean you have to forget the past. You can have both.

Execution by Hunger.

The largest cities in Ukraine are Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa.

I will die in Moscow, not seeing Ukraina. Before death, I will ask Stalin to extract my heart, just before I am burnt in the crematory, from my chest and bury it in my native land, in Kyiv, somewhere above the Dnipro on the mountain-hill. Fate, send happiness to people on this ruined and bloodstained land! Disappear, hatred! Evanesce, poverty!

The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

The arrival of the Mongols ended the illusion of the political unity of the Kyivan realm and put an end to the very real ecclesiastical unity of the Rus’ lands. The Mongols recognized two main centers of princely rule in Rus’: the principalities of Vladimir-Suzdal in today’s Russia and Galicia-Volhynia in central and western Ukraine. Constantinople followed suit, dividing the Rus’ metropolitanate into two parts. The political and ecclesiastical unity of the Kyiv-centered Rus’ Land had disintegrated. The Galician and Vladimirian princes were now busy building Rus’ lands of their own in their home territories. Although they claimed the same name, “Rus’,” the two principalities followed very different geopolitical trajectories. Both had inherited their dynasties from Kyiv, which was also their source of Rus’ law, literary language, and religious and cultural traditions. Both found themselves under alien Mongol rule. But

As the Mongols approached Kyiv in November 1240, their huge army made a dreadful impression on the defenders. “And nothing could be heard above the squeaking of his carts, the bawling of his [Batu’s] innumerable camels, and the neighing of his herds of horses, and the Land of Rus’ was full of enemies,” wrote the chronicler. When the Kyivans refused to surrender, Batu brought in catapults to destroy the city walls, built of stones and logs in the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The citizens rushed to the Dormition Cathedral, the first stone church built by Volodymyr to celebrate his baptism. But the weight of the people and their belongings proved too heavy for the walls, which collapsed, burying the refugees. St. Sophia Cathedral survived but, like other city churches, was robbed of its precious icons and vessels. The victors pillaged the city; the few survivors remained in terror in the ruins of the once magnificent capital whose rulers had aspired to rival Constantinople. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, an ambassador of Pope Innocent IV who passed through Kyiv in February 1246 on his way to the Mongol khan, left the following description of the consequences of the Mongol attack on the Kyiv Land: “When we were journeying through that land, we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground.

Kyiv suffered a deadly blow from the Mongol assault and would not recover its former importance and prosperity for centuries.

What could account for the transfer of Prince Yaroslav’s remains all the way to the Western Hemisphere? The answer has nothing to do with American cultural imperialism but is closely associated with the Ukrainian claim to the legacy of Kyivan Rus’. Ukrainian clergymen leaving their homeland removed the relics so as to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army. Concern that if returned to Kyiv, they might end up in Russia explains enough the continuing refusal of the custodians of the Brooklyn church to discuss the issue of Yaroslav’s remains with representatives of the Ukrainian government. Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era.

he was doing the very thing the state officials hoped to prevent—uniting them.

The origins of this realm were in the conversion of Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of Kyiv, who began the Christianization of Russia in the tenth century. In this semi-mystical vision, Moscow and Kyiv are the temporal and spiritual centres of a single state.

How did I not know about this?

This is not about getting us to produce more food,” he said, as the impossibility of survival suddenly became so painfully clear to both of them. “They want us all dead.

Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kyiv’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

She wasn’t sure what she believed anymore, but if someone had the chance to escape this hell, dead or alive, she certainly didn’t want to invite them back.

another Varangian ruler, Oleg, captured Kyiv in modern-day Ukraine.

the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1944, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn.

According to legend, three brothers—Kiy, Shchek, and Khoryv, from the Slavic Polian tribe—founded the settlement of Kyiv in the sixth century CE.

The prosperity of Kyivan Rus attracted invaders from the southern steppes. The city of Kyiv and the power of Kyivan Rus were destroyed by the Mongol Baty Khan’s conquest in 1240.

In 1156 Prince Yuri ‘Long-Arm’ Dolgoruky, whose mother was Gytha of Wessex, daughter of King Harold, built a stronghold on a hill overlooking the Moskva River. At times he was grand prince of Kyiv, then of Vladimir-Suzdal. It was the Mongol invasions that ultimately made this fortress, Moscow, the pre-eminent principality of the Rurikovichi and future fulcrum of Russian empire.

Most damaging in the recordingd in which [Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European intgration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

Most damaging in the recordings in which [President Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European integration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).