It meant an escape from the past, an alternate reality in which Ukraine was never subjugated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union but instead became a ‘normal’ European country like Germany or France.” Pinkham, who first visited Kiev in 2007, a few years out of Yale, for “a workshop I’d organized on health problems for women drug users,” seems to have written two books: one, a memoir of her time in the “harm reduction” world, the other, a chronicle of the recent turmoil. “Europe meant freedom, fairness and transparency. . . After the occupation of Crimea came civil war, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the rise of the Donetsk People’s Republic - an unraveling that has led to a return to the vitriol of the Cold War.Īgainst this backdrop comes Sophie Pinkham’s “Black Square,” billed as a portrait of Ukraine “under the shadow of Putin.” If Kiev was at war, Pinkham writes, the battle was over “Europe,” which was a metaphor. Vladimir Putin, of course, cut the party short. Yet in the heady winter of 2014, a change seemed to arrive: People power swelled in Kiev and toppled a corrupt regime. The country has moved forward (and backward) not by design but in tumult. A vast borderland at the crossroads of Europe, it was hailed a nation reborn, only to reveal an inexorable weakness - fear of its Big Brother to the north and an inability to escape it. In the decades since the Soviet fall, Ukraine has vexed many - most of all, its own people. BLACK SQUARE Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine By Sophie Pinkham 288 pp.
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