Thousands of them are in city-organized shelters in schools and sports arenas, some looking for long-term work and housing in the relatively safe region of Chernivtsi. Boole is now working with internal displaced persons-Ukrainians from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other regions more acutely affected. But the next time the government came, they were burning cars and setting fires, and the government says, ‘OK, we will negotiate!’”Įight years later, the smoldering war in the east exploded into a full-scale Russian invasion. The first people in Maidan, they were doing art actions, flash mobs-the government came and beat them up. “People learned that the government only respects force. But pacifist, Occupy-style activism was too weak to force change, he says.
I commented on the irony of a former Communist state looking to American communism-which had, after all, been even less successful in practical terms than the Soviet version-as a future for Ukraine. Like the American Communists, like Upton Sinclair-there is a history in America of organizing and popular uprising that we don’t have.” The people from the medical school coming out under fire to help the injured. was worth it not so much for the results but because it turned a tumbler in the minds of Ukrainians.” He mimed a key turning beside his temple. “I played in Kyiv, at the Maidan,” he says. Unusually, Sasha mixed the unionist/progressive leftism common to most folk-punk Woody Guthrie fetishists with a radical militancy. He had dark hair and light blue eyes, wore a sweater tied around his neck like a golf pro, and sang the kind of romanticized Americana that was increasingly popular in Eastern Europe: a bandolier of harmonicas, a stomp box, a version of “Down by the Riverside.” When Sasha arrived, I saw what they meant…He wore a handlebar moustache and a bowler hat and sported a tattoo of a skeleton playing a banjo. “We made up a myth that you were brothers, that you fell in love with a girl but she chose Sasha, and so you went to America.” “Everyone thinks he looks just like you,” the promoter told me.
We played a show together in the provincial town of Kalush. One was Sasha Boole, a rambunctious singer-songwriter from Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine near the Romanian and Moldovan border. When I wrote about my glimpses of the Ukrainian rock scene in the book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control, many of the musicians I spoke to had been newly radicalized by the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” (or Maidan Revolution), and the Russian annexation of Crimea that followed.
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