Black square : adventures in post-Soviet Ukraine /

IN THE DECADES since the Soviet fall, Ukraine has vexed many - most of all, its own people. 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. The country has moved forward (and backward) not by design but in tumult. Yet in the heady winter of 2014, a change seemed to arrive: People power swelled in Kiev and toppled a corrupt regime. Vladimir Putin, of course, cut the party short. 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. Against 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. "Europe meant freedom, fairness and transparency. . . . 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. Not until the midpoint of this volume do readers arrive at the Ukraine of the headlines, with the protests that began in Kiev's Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square - the Black Square of the title. Until then, readers may feel what they have in their hands is an affecting exposé of the nonprofit, do-gooder orbit. Pinkham, whose travels span seven years, offers backstage glimpses that bite: "I was just another girl in a cubicle, doing the usual two years before leaving for graduate school, the standard trajectory for administrative assistants at O.S.I." - George Soros's Open Society Institute. "I had the feeling that I was a mass-produced good. My row of cubicles was almost entirely female, dark-haired and petite. We all wore colorful pashmina shawls to protect us against the air-conditioning, and we got our periods at the same time." Pinkham has an eye for the elegiac, and captures the grim pall of the Ukrainian hinterlands: "There were balconies without railings, windows without glass, doorways without doors." "There were a couple of lonely bus stops, and I wondered what sort of people waited at them: Were they living in huts, in the forests?" Yet too often, the metaphors are left unpacked, and evocative questions unanswered. A glibness, too, can crop up. Pinkham dispenses with the natural-gas wars that have dominated Russo-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet era in a halfparagraph - and, within it, glosses the Holodomor, the murder of untold millions of Ukrainians during the collectivization of the 1930s. What's more, the prose occasionally suffers from an academic tilt ("folklore" is "employed . . . as a signifier of its post-Soviet identity") and betrays a reliance on facile physical descriptions (subjects are "cute," "pretty," "gorgeous," "beautiful," "very beautiful," "angelically beautiful"). The generalizations can also sweep wildly: "People in Belgorod seemed to devote most of their energy to interior decoration and child rearing." Oddly, the drama that Pinkham did not witness, the months of protest and the crackdown that followed, makes up the more vivid narrative. Writing from afar (by then, she is a graduate student in Slavic studies in New York), Pinkham captures the kinetic turmoil - the fear, violence, blood lust - made visceral by live feeds from helmet cameras and dashcam video. She does not shy from the questions that swirled in the wake of Maidan. "Who were the mysterious snipers on the rooftops?" she asks. Yet here as elsewhere, she settles for ambiguity: "Some evidence suggested that there had been antigovernment as well as government snipers." An annotated scholarly bibliography runs seven pages, but her best sources are Twitter, Facebook, Skype, blogs and emails, which offer a poignant immediacy to the revolution's actors. Her friend "Julia Y" writes of the Maidan: "After being there your clothes, hair and skin smell of fire, the smell you remember from childhood - just plain burning wood." Two years on, Laima, a "lesbian activist," says of the square, "It's like a corpse - the body is there, but the soul is gone." In the end, Pinkham's two narratives blend into one. "Many of the separatists I saw in pictures and videos looked familiar," she writes. "These were the same sullen, sunken-eyed young men I'd encountered at harm reduction centers. . . . But now they had guns; now they were heroes." In such moments, she conveys a hard-earned truth: Ukraine's victims of substance abuse and civil war inhabit common ground, perhaps too much of it. ANDREW MEIER, the author of "Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall" is working on a biography of Robert M. Morgenthau and four generations of his family.

Pinkham, whose writing on Russia and Ukraine has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Times, here presents adventures indeed, depicting her travels and work throughout the region. Pinkham volunteered with health groups and studied Russian, which led her to work for the Red Cross in Siberia, searching for something she could not yet name. Her involvement with the Open Society Institute brought her in close contact with people who had grown up in the struggling post-Soviet countries, and here Pinkham tells their stories. She has a keen eye and a winsome ability to weave colorful visions from the smallest fragments origami tulips, the beauty of fur-coated Siberian women, stones on the beach. As her public-health work led her from Siberia to Moscow, and Kiev, her musing on Kazimir Malevich's painting of a black square on a white background, signifying the end of time, the culmination of history, corresponds to the increasing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, the 2013-14 Maidan protests, and Crimea, a contested, cherished place. This engaging, clear-eyed portrait of an intensely troubled region could not be more timely.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2016 Booklist

Pinkham, who has written on Ukraine for the New Yorker, has a reporter's incisive eye and gives a rich and fascinating view of post-Soviet Ukrainian life. She studied Russian and volunteered with health groups in college, and, after graduating in the early 2000s, was in search of purpose. She took a job with the Open Society Institute, working on an education and treatment program for drug users to combat the AIDS epidemic. Pinkham eventually moves to Ukraine-a country whose "horse-drawn carts and babushkas survived" alongside newfound wealth and a growing totalitarian state-and falls in love with it. She's astute in her observations as she takes a close look at Ukraine's complex history and often hostile relationship with Russia. Pinkham is increasingly aware of the ever-present corruption and growing instability in Ukraine, and she examines the Maidan revolution and Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the continuing war in eastern Ukraine. Pinkham's look at Ukraine is accessible and comprehensive. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.