This is the final installment of the Ukraine project. Thanks for reading!
Elections in Odessa, Ukraine, July 1994. These workers are sprucing up a building where voting would take place the next day. During the preceding weeks, candidates appealed to the new sense of Ukrainian independence by promising an improved, Communist-free life. There were expensive television campaign commercials--only flyers.
I'm told that the Ukraine is different now, sixteen years later. Some people wondered who ordered Communism removed, who thought it was so bad that they had to do away with it completely. And that's understandable. It's like your parents kicking you out and leaving you to figure out how to pay your bills, find a job and an apartment, and where to find food, let alone cook it. That's what it felt like to me, anyway. An entire country in limbo, everyone shrugging and asking, "What do we do now?"
Yet some were hopeful, like the person quoted in the last paragraph above. "It will get better," the positive thinkers said. And reportedly it is better. I hear there's more food in the stores and money in the banks. And the line between Eastern and Western fashion is more blurry now, as women wear Gucci and smell of expensive perfume as they shop in modern stores. As for the babooshki, I'm sure there are plenty of die-hard scarf-heads left. At least I hope so.
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