Ukraine by Karl Schlögel

Author:Karl Schlögel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

From Yalta to Mallorca

The ‘Red Riviera’ is no longer. It is perhaps not a coincidence that a key episode in the USSR’s demise is associated with the Crimean coast: it was here, in the luxurious government dacha in Foros, that Mikhail Gorbachev was put under house arrest by the conspirators of the attempted coup d’état on 19 August 1991. Since then, the peninsula has rushed to catch up with a development that Western European holiday regions had decades to complete: a process lamented by the Russian intelligentsia that I would call Mallorcaization. Crimea has ceased to be a cultural signifier and become an advertising catchword. Today, the sanatoria are filled not with the working masses on reprieve from the toil of ‘immediate production’ but instead consumers who come with expectations. Animators have supplanted agitators; physical culture at daybreak has been replaced by gym classes. The patriotic songs have fallen silent, and everyone plays their own favourite music, usually at maximum volume. Formerly nationalized and union-operated facilities seek to lure individual tourists.

A new type has appeared on the promenade in Yalta. He has not been sent here – he has paid for himself and his statistically representative nuclear family. Russian, the old lingua franca, dominates in the street, but the anchor currency at the bureau de change is the U.S. dollar. The new type on the promenade is between 20 and 45; senior citizens are nowhere to be seen. He is fashionably attired and drinks juice rather than vodka. He knows he has earned this holiday. The younger children are still dressed up nicely, an echo of Soviet customs, but the teenagers tend to look like kids everywhere else. Where summer guests in Sochi display a lot of naked skin, in Yalta they undress just enough to let people know that they are in good shape. If you are one of them, you can afford to be here; that you are here is evidence that you are clued up, you can compare offers, you have travelled abroad for work and been to Antalya or Larnaca. There are many possible reasons why you chose Yalta. You have plans for yourself and the children. You are not one of the ‘new Russians’, nor a ‘new Ukrainian’, not a member of the jeunesse dorée that is in the papers all the time. You are a representative of a species about whom so little is known that some doubt whether it even exists. The sociologists who study the transition from the Soviet model of the mobilization society to a civil society in the Western mould have long expected its appearance. In their eyes, you embody the tendencies of an unstoppable modernity: privatization, individualization, differentiation. The species that has at long last begun to manifest itself on the promenade in Yalta, in Gurzuf, in Foros, Evpatoriya and Sevastopol, the species you exemplify, is the post-Soviet middle class. These homines novi had their fill of the ‘earthly paradise’ they were promised and enjoy the little piece of paradise they can afford by dint of their own hard work.

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