Travel Ukraine Quotes

Live your dreams, not your fears! A.Hume

I repeat the names of the cardinal points in Russian: sever, north, desolate asperity of the Gulag; yug, south, a funnel that sucks you down toward the bottom; vostok, east, like the launch of a catapult; and zapad, west, the sound of falling head over heels.

The bear, he says, is many animals in one. Like a lion, he downs mammals much bigger than he; like any ruminant, he pillages crops; he steals grapes and fruit like a monkey; nibbles on berries like a blackbird; plunders anthills and beehives like a woodpecker; digs up tubers and larvae like a pig; and catches fish with the dexterity of an otter. And he eats honey like a man.

By the end of 1986, the Liquidators had decontaminated more than 600 villages and towns. Army troops travelling in armoured vehicles washed Kiev’s buildings continually throughout May and June, and it became a crime to own a personal dosimeter in the city for more than two years after the accident. The government placed strict controls on the sale of fresh food; open-air stalls were banned. These restrictions lead the Head of the Central Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of the Ukraine to remark that, “thousands of ice cream, cake and soft drink stalls have vanished from the streets of Kiev.228

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

After contacting the Zionist Organization, he was granted first priority to board a small boat of illegal immigrants of their way to Palestine, from the Romanian port Constantza. The ill-fated boat Mefkure, on which he was travelling, was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean Sea and none of the passengers survived. A few weeks later, when Yuda reached Bucharest, the fate of the boat was already known. Thus the three young people about whom I wrote initially - Selma, Leiser, Abrasha - were all gone by 1944. A the age of twenty-one, Abrasha was lost in the frozen wastes of Siberia; Selma, at eighteen, perished in the steppes of the Ukraine and Leiser, at twenty, in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. All three young Zionists, idealists, never saw the land that they were yearning for, never lived to reach Palestine. Abrasha's father remarked in great sorrow that his son, like Moses tried to lead his people to the Promised Land, however, he did not live to see it.

But the glimmer of hope in Russia was not entirely extinguished by the atavism of the Putin years. The Japanese reinvented themselves in the 19th century and again after 1945, the Germans, the Spaniards and the Italians experimented with dictatorship and abandoned it. French, Spanish, German and Swedish armies terrorised Europe for centuries, then decided they preferred peace after all. The other Europeans gave up their empires and turned instead to liberal democracy. Only the most obstinate historical determinist would insist that Russians were uniquely incapable of shaking themselves free of the burden of history. By the 3rd decade of the 21st century Russian was already different from what it had been in Soviet times, it's huge size diminished by jet aircraft, modern communications and the internet. Its people by previous standards urban, educated, comparatively prosperous, free to travel, surprisingly well-informed, determined optimists might even hope that the shock of the Ukraine war would change the way Russians look at their past and perhaps make them more open to a different and more constructive future. One thing only was sure, Russia's future would be shaped by the Russian people themselves, regardless of the hopes, fears and wishful thinking of foreigners.

Noi siamo sul bordo sud del Mare del Nord, tu sul bordo nord del Mare del Sud

On August 29, I flew from Kiev to Moldova and Belarus, continuing my travels in the former republics of the USSR. I wanted to show Russia we had a sustained focus on its periphery and were not content simply to leave these struggling states to contend with Moscow alone. Had I stayed in the White House longer, I had more substantive plans for US relations with the former Soviet states, but that was not to be. Particularly in Minsk, despite Alexander Lukashenko’s less-than-stellar human-rights record, I wanted to prove the US would not simply watch Belarus be reabsorbed by Russia, which Putin seemed to be seriously considering. One aspect of my strategy was a meeting the Poles arranged in Warsaw on Saturday, August 31, among the national security advisors of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and the United States. Let the Kremlin think about that one for a while. I obviously had much more in mind than just having additional meetings, but this was one that would signal other former Soviet republics that neither we nor they had to be passive when faced with Russian belligerence or threats to their internal governance. There was plenty we could all do diplomatically as well as militarily. After I resigned, the Administration and others seemed to be moving in a similar direction.18

It involved traveling to Moscow, something Dan didn’t relish, especially with the current regime and the war in Ukraine. The President had become more dictatorial since the war had started, and not gone so well.

Perché sono venuto qui? Me lo chiedo a ogni partenza, come se fosse stato l'ordine supremo di uno zar, e non la mia personale volontà, a spingermi lontano.

E adesso, vecchio barbagianni, questa fottuta frontiera ti mancherà," (…). Diavolo, pensai, non c’è nessuna ragione per rimpiangere la frontiera. In breve tempo capii. Mi mancava il sogno, la linea d'ombra da valicare, il senso del proibito. La mia prima spinta al viaggio non era nata proprio dall'esistenza della Frontiera?

Passare dal norvegese al russo è cambiare mondo (...); trionfano le i, frequenti e variegate come le betulle.

Sulla parete, un'icona di San Nicola convive senza problemi con le tette di una bionda da calendario per camionisti.

Come in," she tells her, and she invites her in to see her treasures, all affectionately addressed by diminutive nicknames: taters, carotelles, strawbabies, peasies, and so on. "Explain to your readers that it's a sin not to cultivate the earth," she says to Monika, and her elementary truth startles me. Why don't our priests thunder from the pulpit against this first of all sins?

I've learned in my travels not to ask too many questions. It's better to talk about yourself. Offer something of yourself and your own story so that the dialogue turns into a bartering of firsts.

The arrangement fell to pieces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the disastrous hetmanate of that most un-Cossack of Cossacks – Ivan Mazeppa. Suave and subtle, famous for his love affairs and his deft hand at political intrigue, Mazeppa was an even unlikelier rebel than Khmelnytsky. Born into a noble Orthodox family in Polish-ruled ‘right-bank’ Ukraine, he was schooled at a Jesuit college in Warsaw before entering the court of King Jan Kazimierz as a gentleman-in-waiting. Keen to create a cadre of Ruthenian nobles loyal to the crown, Kazimierz sent him to study in Holland before putting him to work on diplomatic errands to the left-bank hetmanate. In 1663 the promising young favourite suddenly left Cracow and joined the Polish-ruled Cossacks on the western bank of the Dnieper. Legend – as embroidered by everyone from Byron to Tchaikovsky – has it that he had been discovered in bed with the wife of a neighbour, who stripped him naked and sent him galloping off into the steppe on the back of a wild horse. Whatever the truth, Mazeppa spent the next few years travelling back and forth to the Crimean khanate as the Polish Cossacks’ envoy. In 1674, journeying home from one of these missions, he was captured by the Zaporozhians and turned over to the rival left-bank hetmanate as a spy. At this