Booking into Bukovina

In my second year of university I purchased a copy of the Time-Life Library of Nations: the Soviet Union from a thrift store in Vancouver and I’ve never looked back.  I loved this book and read it often, marveling at the pictures of people operating large machines that consisting of knobs and buttons with presumably no function.  There was also a picture of two old ladies cleaning the boulevards of a major Soviet thoroughfare or highway.  It gave some sort of statistic about the number of roads in the SU being 1:10 as compared with the US despite having twice the land area and the same population.  

Well, all that is sort of immaterial when the majority of land in the SU is actually barren and unpopulated.  What isn’t barren and unpopulated, however, is the Ukraine and consequently I was expecting the best of Soviet infrastructure to greet me as I crossed into my first former Soviet republic.  The road existed, certainly, but was not particularly wide nor was it smooth.  This of course didn’t stop the driver from racing as fast as possible to make up for the lost time due to my passport at the border, being certain to hit every pothole he could while sporadically eyeing me in the rear-view mirror and giving me a big, wide steel-toothed smile and an enthusiastic thumbs up.

Perhaps you saw my brother act this
scene out in Russian class for a
school play in the early 90s.

Perhaps I’ve never expressed just how terrified I am of Ukrainian border control.  They wear full body camo suits that I feel are appropriate for Arctic missions on, combat boots, large fur hats, and a look of disdain and unwieldiness.  I am also terrified about lying on anything that is even remotely official, so when I had to tell the Ukrainians where I would be staying I naturally panicked.  The driver told me that I should list the “Hotel Bukovina” as my place of accommodation.  The border guard looked impressed, which terrified me more.  Why would an illustrious patron of the Hotel Bukovina be travelling by common coach?  Nevertheless, we were off.  

At the Chernivtsi avtovoksal, a crowd of two greeted me with a sign of my name in Cyrillic, as expected.   We then proceeded to our hotel—Hotel Bukovina.  I heaved an enormous sigh of relief that I would not be tracked down and thrown in a Ukrainian prison, or worse.  In retrospect, I had no idea why I would expect anything but the absolute best.  Here we were in Chernivtsi, one of the farthest outposts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the colonising and civilizing influences of the Viennese.*   This was still “Europe”—or something like it—and there was no reason not totake advantage of the exchange rate.

And what an exchange rate!  At the time the gryvnia to dollar ratio was 7.5:1 and while it usually means that things end up costing a similar price despite an exchange rate, this was not the case in the Ukraine.  Everything seemed to cost 1/7.5^th the price of its equivalent in Canada.  Taxi rides, hotels, perogies, coffee, and it was all very high quality.  As it was St. Patrick’s Day, we went to a local pub for some beer and potato-based products.  Perogies of every filling filled our table: potato, cheese, mushroom, cabbage—the bounty of the harvest all rolled into neat little pockets and drenched in sour cream.  

After much merrymaking we got down to business to decide our plan of attack for the region.  We hired a taxi to take us to the town of Potochyshche (Поточище), where my great-grandmother was born.  Like most young girls at the time, she dreamed of city life and not marrying a local boy from the village.  I assume.  Actually, I have no idea what would make someone leave, but somewhere along the line the idea of leaving family and the only world you have known is outweighed by the possibility of immeasurable future returns.  This pioneering spirit, of course, might be responsible for the same attitude many North Americans share today vis-à-vis Europeans that when a child turns 18, they are out.  So, like many at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century, she saw a sign advertising free land in Canada and decided that she, a single, 22-year-old Ruthenian debutante, was ready to take on the world.

  

While I have been praised far and wide for my Russian skills, one variable oft forgotten is that until March 18, 2010, I had never actually seen a real Russian person, much less a Ukrainian.  So when we entered the town hall of Potochyshche and demanded that they haul out every record they possessed in hopes of finding out where the remaining 16 or so brothers and sisters of my great-baba were today, I was hopelessly inadequate.  Of course, the documents they had were hopelessly inadequate as well.  They had no record of any of our family in the city—despite the town clerk having the same last name, but flat out refusing to entertain the possibility of being related to us—and in a panic they called the oldest man in the village to verify.  In about 5 minutes he stormed in and began a rant the gist of which my many years of studying Russian definitely paid off for: the Soviets came.  Essentially, the Soviets came in and took the records, the people, and did whatever altering of the landscape was necessary in their vision of a glorious socialist future.

Of course, to be fair to the Soviets, they weren’t the only cause of upheaval in eastern Galicia and Bukovina.  Between 1918 and 1991 the region fell under roughly six flags—Austro-Hungarian, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, German, Soviet, and Ukrainian again—not to mention the many short lived republics that popped up in the chaos surrounding the end of WWI and the vacuum left by the collapse of the old imperial system.  Not that the majority of the villagers in the area particularly cared about these geopolitical manoeuvrings, rather just expressed annoyance at the constant stream of armies across their incredibly flat and arable land.  Nevertheless, after an hour or so, we could claim that we “did” Potochyshche and were on our way back. 

*Chernivtsi and Lviv were Austro-Hungarian bastions of culture and Ukrainianness on the Galician-Bukowinian steppes.  In fact the national awakenings of the 19^th century occurred in these cities and, as in Prague, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Kosice and Krakow, all on the back of the firmly established and uniform Austrian education system and communication network.  My own grandmother presumably made it all the way to central Canada via Hamburg using the German she would have learned in school.  "And what have the Romans done for us?" indeed.