Ukraine's Heart of Darkness
Michel Faber examines the brutal legacy of the previous regime
"Who is prosperous in this country? Only thieves and bandits!" What we see in the next few hours could fill a book more tragic than most readers could bear.
Odessa, so the tourist brochures say, is the pearl of the Black Sea. It’s romantic and vibrant and intoxicating. The city’s women are famously beautiful. Visit the many websites offering mail-order Ukrainian “brides” and you can view a selection of “hot sexy” ones frolicking on Odessa’s unspoilt beaches. Arranged meetings with 17 to 23 year olds cost 89 American dollars, 24 to 30 year olds are $79, while women over 41 are a bargain at $59. All females are “guaranteed available”; any that might cause disappointment are instantly deleted.
Once upon a time, Ukraine was a communist state in which enterprises like this were inconceivable, but in which thousands of people got “deleted” for real. The country has tragic history of Stalinist purges and oppression. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, it has striven to become a European democracy. As in other post-Soviet states, the results have been a mixture of inspirational achievements and dispiriting betrayals. There are elections, with the usual controversies about vote-rigging and shady candidates. There is an emergent middle class, free at last to travel, free to think and do all sorts of things that were previously forbidden. Prada and McDonalds have set up shop amidst the shabby tenements and derelict palaces. Every day, more billboards are erected and more imports become available. But one of the biggest imports since the mid-nineties has been HIV/AIDS. An estimated 400,000 people are infected. It’s a bigger timebomb than Chernobyl.
I’m in Odessa with Médecins Sans Frontières, the aid organisation better known for its interventions in African war zones and famine camps. We’re in a restaurant, eating a nice breakfast of cherry pancakes. Outside in Deribasovskaya Street, a revolving advertisement for a bride agency winks at us through the window. Natalia Rudaya, MSF’s PR officer, is explaining that getting interviews and pictures for the article will be difficult. The epidemic is, well, kind of a secret. Over the last four years, MSF’s attempts to help the local health care system come to grips with it have been hampered by denial, ignorance and fear. There is a terrible stigma around HIV. Sufferers who are well enough to live at home anxiously conceal their status from neighbours, flatmates, even family. The terminally ill are kept in conditions the Ministry of Health would rather not advertise. Also, we have the obstacle of official accreditations and permissions, stamps and signatures. Natalia sighs in frustration.
One person who proves unusually willing to talk is Ludmila, a 62-year-old woman we meet at the outpatients department of an infectious diseases clinic. She has travelled a long way with her ten-month old grandson Ilya; the clinic is in the middle of nowhere, behind a Jewish cemetery, flanked by decaying factories. But Ludmila is motivated because her grandson has AIDS and MSF has just started him on the anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs that may keep him alive.
Ludmila used to be a technologist in a baby food factory. Now, in a cruel irony, she relies on handouts of infant formula. She also gratefully accepts a jumbo pack of disposable nappies; they’re the wrong size for little Ilyousha, but the clinic hasn’t any smaller ones. I ask Ludmila when her life started to go wrong, and she erupts into a passionate tirade against her useless son, his junkie girlfriend, and the social catastrophe that has engulfed Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like many disaffected pensioners, Ludmila appears to have forgotten some of the horrors of Stalinism, remembering instead the way the old regime took responsibility for its citizens’ welfare. She yells and weeps and shakes her fists, incensed that she’s been reduced to hawking cigarettes in the street, unable even to afford a cot for her grandchild. “He’s all I’ve got in my life now,” she says. “This baby.”
As for the possibility of me and Tom, the photographer, accompanying her to her home and taking pictures, she’s all for it. “You’re very welcome. I’m not afraid of anything. I don’t give a shit where this article will be published. People should speak out.” Mention of the imminent election triggers another diatribe against corrupt politicians. “Who is prosperous in this country?” she cries. “Only thieves and bandits!”
On the long, long bus journey from the AIDS clinic to her home, Ludmila begins to get nervous. Her righteous fury is spent, giving way to jitters about the possible consequences of this encounter with foreigners. By the time we get to her flat, she demands a signed document promising that The Sunday Times will not be published in Ukraine. I sit on the bed next to the sick baby, scribbling two contracts on official-looking letterhead from an Italian B&B – one for her, one for us. Even so, she insists we can only take photographs in her bedroom. The rest of her home – a dark, grimy lounge dominated by a broken pram, and a balcony on which the baby’s wretched father stands smoking – is off limits. The interview is cut short when Ilya – an enchantingly good-natured, trusting child – needs his afternoon enema.
Fighting for the lives of those already infected is an important part of what MSF does, but prevention is naturally the more desirable aim. A wondrous variety of aid organisations and charities, both international and home-grown, are at work in Ukraine to keep vulnerable people from contracting the disease. They include Faith Hope Love, which focuses its attention on addicts and sex workers, and Life Plus, which offers counselling, education, and other support for homosexuals. Needle exchanges and outreach programmes have ensured that infection rates among these groups have slowed encouragingly – although they’re still rising in the population as a whole.
What many of these non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have in common is their recognition of the essential role of Peer Counsellors – people who’ve been through HIV and are willing to share their experience with those for whom it’s a terrifying unknown. Ukraine’s health care service is full of specialists but has no equivalent of our family GP, so bewildered newcomers are desperate for compassionate advice. Peer counsellors offer this, combating the syndrome of fear and shame that makes infected people reluctant to seek help until it’s too late.