Black Square: Adventures in the Post-Soviet World by Sophie Pinkham

Black Square: Adventures in the Post-Soviet World by Sophie Pinkham

Author:Sophie Pinkham [Pinkham, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Autobiography, Europe, Geopolitics, History, Non-Fiction, Political Science, Revolutionary, Russia, Social History, Travel
ISBN: 9781473518339
Google: jFUyCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-08-24T23:00:00+00:00


10

DREAMING OF EUROPE

I left Ukraine as soon as I got back from Meganom; my time was up, and I returned to New York to go to graduate school at last. (I also started writing for magazines, usually about Ukraine and Russia.) But in the summer of 2012 I got a short-term job coordinating harm reduction activities during the European Championship soccer tournament, the Eurocup, which was being held jointly in Poland and Ukraine. The guy who’d hired me—an American—disappeared into the casino-brothels of Cambodia just as our project was getting started. (A lot of people who work in harm reduction are current or former users, and these things happen from time to time.) Since my plane ticket was nonrefundable, I decided to go anyway.

In 2009 Viktor Yanukovych, the man who’d tried to steal Ukraine’s presidency in 2004, had been elected president. This time he won in a fair vote. His victory testified to Ukraine’s disillusionment with the leaders of the Orange Revolution and to the country’s regional divides. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions had always maintained substantial support in eastern Ukraine, their economic and political base, as well as in southern Ukraine and Crimea. Yanukovych’s ascent was depressing, but not surprising.

Yanukovych, who was nothing if not classy, invited foreign investors to Ukraine to see the chestnut trees in bloom and watch “how women begin to take their clothes off when it gets warm.” As the championship approached, there was much anxiety about the moment when thousands of drunk, virile, Euro-spending soccer fans would descend on a country already notorious for its sex trade and HIV epidemic. Femen, Ukraine’s “topless feminist” group, soon joined the fray, claiming that the tournament would increase sex tourism and prostitution. As an act of protest, two gorgeous Femen members stripped off their shirts and snatched the Eurocup trophy that was on display in Dnipropetrovsk. Happy tourists took their picture. Here were the beautiful naked ladies they’d been promised!



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