Yanukovich's dacha and Putin's white table
Totally bonkers experience being the only person on a guided tour of Yanukovich's former secret dacha / sanatorium. Exploring Podil, Chernobyl Museum. The politics of language.
This morning I started my second day in Kyiv with a short walk to a cute little cafe called Honey. If you are ever in Kyiv and in need of eggs benedict over bacon with avocado or homemade macaroons, you will not be disappointed. I was even seated next to a bottle of Austrian wine, Heinrich from Burgenland!
I also experienced my first taste of what happens when you speak Russian in Ukraine with someone who doesn’t want to speak Russian to you. A young waiter greeted me in Ukrainian and I answered in Russian. That made him switch to English. It left me really surprised because in all my years of speaking accented Russian in Russia, no one ever switched to English. In this case, I think his personal preference was speak Ukrainian or English, at least with foreigners. But when Russian-speaking guests arrived, he had no trouble speaking Russian to them. He didn’t want to speak Russian with me. Fine. As soon as I switched to English, he lightened up and was super nice, but the whole experienced made me understand, you cannot assume anything here. You have to be open to all possible reactions, experiences, backgrounds, points of view. In that sense, it’s a lot like feeling around the corners of any ex-Yugolslavia encounter. You cannot assume anything, but people will tell you their positions soon enough.
The Podil neighbourhood is fascinating (lots of photos on my Instagram or here). It reminds me of the Jewish quarters in Budapest or Krakow, but without the mass tourism feeling. Perhaps in summer, in other years, there were more tourists here. Now it feels a little bit empty and definitely falling apart in places and then you turn a corner and something new has been inserted. It’s so strange because in Moscow there is no stone left unturned, and here there are still plenty of stones to turn, but that’s also the charm. Half the buildings you walk by, you think, well eventually they are going to crumble, but they haven’t yet, and in the meantime, people are living in them, little shops and cafes have opened up, life goes on. Sidewalks are sometimes repaired, sometimes not. The red trams are ancient. I’ve never seen trams so old and so dirty. But they are still running.
I took a Bolt out of Kyiv and we drove through some really depressing suburbs north of the city center, past Soviet-era housing blocks that haven’t seen any renovation, rows of those little tin can garages, kiosks, a few shops — suburbs of the kind you don’t see in Moscow anymore. Reminded me a bit of what I saw in other parts of Russia on my train journey a few years ago.
I was on my way to see former Ukrainian president and now resident of Rublevka Yanukovich’s insane former dacha which has now been turned into a park and a museum with guided tours, or so I was told. The whole drive I was thinking, unbelievable, Yanukovich would have driven by all of this crumbling infrastructure and borderline poverty in his motorcade and would have felt zero responsibility to do anything to make it a little bit better for ordinary people? That part always surprises me. It shouldn't, but it does.
The weather was awful, a drizzly cold rain. The taxi had already driven off by the time I started to wonder if anything would even be open. I bought a ticket to the park, and I was apparently the only visitor. The gardeners grunted at me to show my ticket, and the paths were so slippery I was sure I would fall and break my leg and that would be the end of my visit. I shuffled like an idiot to the main building, through park areas with a sport complex on one side and a tennis court on the other. The dacha itself is actually an enormous wooden palace (2600 square meters of living space, 3300 total if you count storage rooms and the like). There was one lone solider standing in front and a sign instructing to call a local number if you want a tour. So I dialled. Someone on the other end grunted hello, and again kept speaking Ukrainian to which I answered in Russian. 11.30 by the sport complex. Ok then.
I had 40 minutes to kill so I followed the signs to the zoo. Yanukovich had apparently been a fan of exotic animals, and now the poor things are stuck in a cold, snowy corner in little pens and huts. I have never seen such sadder ostriches, donkeys and a bison. I trudged back through the slush, thoroughly depressed, wondering what kind of an idiot goes to visit such a place now, in February, with the whole world thinking World War III is about to start and here I am checking out some obscene construction site of a corrupt former president now hiding in Russia.
Back at the sport complex, I waited out front. Everything was locked. In the window there was a strange baton of Soviet bread but covered in gold, and a puppet Yanukovich wearing a Russian-style fake fur hat and a t-shirt with a map of Ukraine on it. Mega spooky. I was about to give up when at 11.31 the door to the sports complex opened, and there was a middle-aged man of about my height dressed in traditional Ukrainian peasant slippers and a folk shirt, with a giant flag wrapped around his back and shoulders. It was red and black instead of Ukrainian blue and yellow, but with the same symbol on it (I later asked what the flag meant and was told it is the colors of the Ukrainian flag with blood spilled on them. I didn’t know what to reply to that!). I stepped inside the building and wondered what the fuck I had actually gotten myself into.
My guide (I never did learn his name) asked me to take a seat on the leather sofas next to the bowling alley (!) and put on the little blue plastic covers you have to use in every post-Soviet museum or hospital. As I fumbled with them, my guide frowned and asked me if I understood Ukrainian. At this point I knew the drill and said no, your choices are Russian or English. He took a deep breath but then started with Russian. I paid him the equivalent of €15 cash.
We began to walk through what was marketed as a sports club when Yanukovich was president. Technically, the entire complex was on land rented for 50 years from the Ukrainian state and operated by a private company which gave out “memberships”. To this day, the entire legal status is murky, something my guide complained about several times during the tour. If I understood him correctly, he and some other guys have been there for eight years trying to turn it into an actual museum, but they still have no legal status. They earn money from the tours and have the keys to the place, but it’s a really dodgy set-up.
He showed me, in order: a winter garden with real exotic birds still alive in cages and a stuffed lion (also was once real), indoor tennis court, massage rooms, salt room, boxing ring and gym. Did Yanukovich box, I asked? He was a raging alcoholic, I was told (so no). We then took a marble tunnel over 100m long underground between the sports complex and the main building. It was lit up with a strange blue light. Mega creepy vibes.
You enter the main building in the basement where there are empty rooms and elaborate wooden floors (elaborate wood is everywhere) and a bar area that looked like something out of an early 90s emerging market hotel. I thought about Putin’s supposed strip pole and hookah room (more fun). We then stepped into an Otis lift with real mosaic tiles on the floor, intricate wood panels, and gaudy rhinestones on the transparent doors. It took us to a main floor where we entered more empty rooms strangely decorated in medieval style with knights in shining armour standing along the walls. More mosaics on the walls. If there was any good French impressionism in his collection, it is long gone. Yanukovich apparently took truckloads of “personal possessions” with him before he fled the country.
Next was a giant table with a real stuffed black crocodile along the length of it. At the far end of the room, with a view to the river, was a smaller round table with a pit for grilling your own shashlik, indoors. Like Korean barbecue, I suppose. The plants are in giant pots which have real snake skin(s) and shells covering the outside. We moved on to the cinema room which was nothing more than a giant TV and ten ugly brown Lazy-Boys. It was awful. Just awful. Literally the ugliest room I have ever seen, anywhere.
We moved into the center of the building to the enormous crystal and gold chandelier. I’ve never seen anything like it. There is a gigantic curving round gala staircase and to the left of the main entrance, Yanukovich built his own little Orthodox chapel. The chapel walls are even lined with real amber decorations. My guide went on a little tirade about all Orthodox priests being KGB men, and I knew better than to take the bait. I nodded along.
The main rooms have ceilings of, I don’t know, 50 meters? It’s not a home but a terribly decorated museum. On each side of the main rooms are his and her bedrooms. His, because Yanukovich lived there alone. Only a staff of nine was allowed to work inside the house. His wife and sons never came there. His wife apparently lived in another city entirely and they did not get along. He didn’t let his grown sons come visit because he was paranoid. The her bedroom belonged to his lover, a waitress who came with a child she had from a previous relationship. In her bedroom there is a giant gold mosaic in the shape of her face. She is reportedly still in Russia with him; I guess it’s not the kind of relationship you can break up from. Gold bedrooms, gold bathrooms, ugly huge walk-in closets.
It was all so yucky and so wasteful and so lonely and so terrible I just wanted to cry and I kept thinking about Putin’s still unfinished palace. It’s the same thing, even down to the spa rooms and icky, tasteless interior design. Completely spooky and living like that would drive anyone mad. Would lead to paranoia. Delusions of grandeur. Thinking you can keep the world on its toes…and then you do.
My guide was a wealth of conspiracy theories (covid isn’t real the Chinese made it up), Ukrainian political history (far too complicated for me to have comprehended in full), and dubious financial calculations (no matter how opulent the place is, I cannot imagine any of it cost in the billions of dollars). He argued Ukraine is a playground for the U.S. to battle against Russia, that Europe likes to launder its money here. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about war. He argued if a little fighting starts it won’t last long…I didn’t find the arguments particularly convincing but I was somehow calmed by how relaxed he was despite spending over an hour telling me exactly how fucked up everything in Ukraine is. We have no hospitals, no schools, he said, but we have this. This is what they stole from us, the people. Fair point.
And just like that he turned the last of his chain of 50 keys and led me out the main entrance. I thanked him and slugged myself across the icy path to find out how the hell I was going to get back to Kyiv. I asked the ticket lady (not a happy bunny but can you blame her) where the nearest marshrutka was. She yelled at me and pointed to a white Mercedes van that was so old I think it might have been produced before I was born. I knocked on the window and the driver let me in. I paid the equivalent of 1€ and took a seat. We slowly began to bump our way down the potholed roads, past brick homes for the wealthy, into a nearby town which was home to the most run-down post-Soviet housing I’d seen this side of Krasnoyarsk. It was really sad. And then a Raiffeisen bank pops up in a building that looks like it is on the verge of collapse and you just shake your head.
Another fifteen minutes or so and we were at the end of the Kyiv metro line. It was equally depressing. I walked in the mini-mall and bought some hand decorated gingerbread cookies from some nice ladies because I figured that was better to bring home than crap from China for my girls. There are lots of stores in Kyiv selling crap from China. Some of it is very cute. Prices are low because people don’t have money but they are uncomfortably low if that makes any sense. I do not feel good about paying €0.30 for a subway ride, but that’s what it costs.
Back in the city center, I grabbed a Lviv croissant and coffee, and headed to the Chernobyl museum. It was organised rather chaotically, but it was really interesting to see all the original documents, and the photos of the characters we all now know if you watched the HBO series.
If you read Russian, check out this letter by the science editor of Pravda to the Central Committee of the USSR in mid-May 1986, imploring them in a very frank and surprisingly open manner to understand what was happening on the ground. No PPE for soldiers or drivers who assisted in the evacuation efforts, panic in Kiev, a lack of information from the government was making everyone nervous…amazing how history just keeps repeating itself.
Kind of exhausted, both physically but mostly mentally, I went in search of a bookstore, and was pretty disappointed that it seems hard here to find a good selection of Russian language books. I bought a few anyway, and had an excellent modern Chinese dinner. My waiter was super happy to speak Russian to me. The young women at the bookstore spoke English as soon as they realised I couldn’t answer them in Ukrainian.
Over dinner, I saw the photos of Putin and Macron sitting at the now infamous white table, and I wanted to bang my head against something in frustration over how one person is keeping the whole world on its toes. It shouldn’t be like this, and yet…
The good news is both Schallenberg and Baerbock were in Kyiv today. That kind of diplomacy needs to keep on coming. I cannot stress enough how much it does not feel like people are freaking out here about a potential Russian invasion. Maybe they are worried, I don’t know, but I don’t get that sense. Everything feels very, strangely normal, like the world is talking about Ukraine but in Ukraine people are just going about their lives, going to work, school, getting on with things.
I have a zillion photos of the palace but I’m not sure you want to be flooded with them. After a while all the crystal chandeliers and gold bathrooms and hideous furniture start to blend into one. A selection of photos are on my Instagram. For me the fascinating thing was the dacha-palace was built not that long ago. Yanukovich only fled the country in 2014. My guide says he is still alive and Putin’s hostage as a message to Lukashenko along the lines of: look, this is what will happen to you if you mess up and loose control. My guide talked a lot about Lukashenko as a puppet, a useful idiot. He also said Russian soldiers would put down their guns and turn around and attack Moscow once they hear from Ukrainians what they are fighting for, what kind of freedoms they are defending. That to me sounded absolutely bonkers, just like my guide’s covid theories.
One thing is clear: when you grow up in a system that does nothing for ordinary people, fails to provide a lot of basic services taxpayers should be entitled to, and instead you see gross displays of corruption and insane amounts of stolen and unfairly gained wealth floating around, no investment in a future economy, it would drive anyone mad. You would start to question everything and come up with crazy explanations for why everything is so messed up. From a Balkan perspective, the cynicism is endemic now. You don’t get rid of it anymore.
Gosh this is long and rambling, I’m sorry. I hope this is somewhat interesting. Tomorrow is a new adventure. Fingers crossed. My airplane friend Valentina reached out, and wants to give me a little tour later this week on her day off. I happily accepted her invitation.
Thanks for reading!