Since its historic Orange Revolution in December 2004, the eyes of the world were fixed on Ukraine. Under a democratic president, an uncertain economy and a meddling Russia, Ukraine appears to be the crossroads -- its present state and future outlooks are up in the air.
What is certain is that the Ukraine of the past is moving away from the present at a pace never seen before.
This Spring Break, junior Yana Belyaev traveled to Odessa, Ukraine to record a piece of this past before it slips away completely.
As part of a group sponsored by the Hillel of Greater Baltimore, Belyaev traveled with eight other students from Towson, Goucher and UMBC. Together with students from the Hillel of Odessa, the two groups interviewed and recorded Odessa's history as told by some of its oldest residents.
The students left Baltimore on March 19 -- two flights and 13 hours later, they arrived at Odessa, Ukraine.
"It looked so communist and run down, everything was concrete, a lot of cars and trucks were from the communist era, c9 but once you hit the center of the city there's a lot of people with a lot of money," Belyaev said. "Some parts of the center are really gray and concrete, but right next to them would be a really nice building."
Odessa, a historic warm-water port on the Black Sea, has had a rich and, at times, tragic past. Over the past 60 years, Odessa witnessed Nazi occupation, Soviet rule, the fall of communism. Most recently, and with a great deal of mixed feelings, Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Today, it is a city of a little over a millio and is home to a blend of Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian communities.
Odessa's Jewish community has traditionally been one of Europe's largest, at points reaching 40 percent of the city population. However, it has also been the subject of severe persecution by Odessa's authorities, suffering repeated pogroms in the Czarist years and massacres during the Axis occupation.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, much of Odessa's Jewish community emigrated to Israel and Western Europe, and Odessa's residents are witnesses to these changes.
Over Spring Break, Belyaev's group conducted extensive interviews with 12 resisdents and shorter ones with many more.
In these interviews, Odessa residents gave a human face to the events.
"Some of them were really optimistic and happy," Belyaev said. "We interviewed one couple that had been together for 60 years. They had both turned 83 recently, they're really happy to be alive. But there were other people you could tell were much more miserable, who could really barely make ends meet.
"A lot of them have very little pension since after the Soviet Union was gone. Most of them talked about the war, a lot of them were in labor camps," Belyaev contined. "The elderly people all wanted to go back to the Soviet times. A lot of people in their families have left," Belyaev said,
But working aside Ukrainian students, Belyaev also noted a different take on the post-communist transition.
"None of the younger people wanted to go back to the Soviet system. When we talked about it they were all like, `Hell no,'" Belyaev remarked.
Like college students all over the world, the twenty-some Ukrainian students shared a lot of the same fashions and interests as their American counterparts. After their day spent interviewing residents and touring Odessa, students from Baltimore would spend their free time with the Ukrainian students.
"The best part was hanging out with the Ukrainian university students, that was the most shocking. They the way they live is not quite western. Their style is very similar, but their take on things is very different," Belyaev said.
"They're much more politically aware -- there was an election on the day we left, and they knew all the candidates and their platforms."
But students from Odessa, located in the southern and more heavily Russian part of Ukraine, present a different picture of political activism than the outspoken Orange revolutionaries that were publicized in the Western press.
"They were actually very private about who they want to vote for. Some people really hated Yuschenko," Belyaev said, referring to Ukraine's current president who was elected on a reform platform.
In the end, the project produced a DVD of the recorded interviews, which was sent to interested researchers and circulated in the Jewish communities around Baltimore, who had initially provided the funds for the trip.
For Belyaev, the trip left her with fond and lasting memories. She enjoys going through her photographs now, recapturing old faces. She recalls visiting and interviewing Vera, a blind woman, who shared her own photographs with the group. Then there was the eighty year old man who offered his vodka and, like so many during the trip, shared his memories with a glowing smile on his face.
