Recollecting Perestroika: Notes from the Playgrounds of Ukraine (1986–1993)

Abstract

Political crisis currently unfolding in Ukraine’s urban centers churns with an iconography carved against itself, the scars of a turbulent history unevenly distributed across space and time. But not only region and language are pitted against each other in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and elsewhere, but generations, separated from each other by the relative movement of historical forces. Perestroika, Gorbachev’s ambitious attempt to restructure the Soviet political economy, stands out as a point of such generational contradiction in Ukraine. Many adults experienced perestroika as an opportunity to push for national independence (and a long awaited political victory). For the children of the 1980s, however, the insecurity and tumult of this period, intensified by the catastrophe at Chernobyl, are reflected in recollections of a more intimate independence, the boundaries of which are demarcated not by political ideology but by the gazes of strangers and the absence of parents. Through these years, many children witnessed events inexplicable even to the adults around them: rising unemployment, fear of radiation fallout, shortages of food and other basic supplies, friends lost to emigration, heroin or disease. Yet for children entering the social world for the first time, what is inexplicable tends to be pushed to the edges of experience, which remains driven by the pursuit of friendship, excitement and belonging.