From Fall of Berlin Wall to Eyewitness Account of Ukraine’s 

Orange Revolution

Susan Viets. Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir. Delfryn Books, 2012, paperback, 276 pp.

Book Review by Andrij Makuch

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Susan Viets has a claim to fame as the first Western journalist to receive accreditation to work in Ukraine. She also has the distinction of being one of the few ex-pats to pen and then publish a memoir of her sojourn there. The result is a highly readable account.

Her story starts in the U.K., where she is struck by a lorry and receives a settlement package after a lengthy convalescence. She parlays this into an adventure as a stringer for The Guardian in 1989 Hungary, where she discovers that the Russian she had learned at school is a mixed blessing due to local hostility and that the face of the Eastern Bloc was changing swiftly. She falls in with a trio of East Germans, who further her street-level political education. In time she assists their crossing into the West at a picnic at the Austro-Hungarian border (hence the title) organized by an Imperial Habsburg descendant.

Viets moves on to Kyiv in June 1990. She had tested the waters about getting papers as a foreign journalist there in an earlier trip and was hopeful that these would come through. All the same, she set off without a clear idea of what faced her. What we get is a unique first-person account of Ukraine - and, along the way, other parts of the former Soviet Union - in a dynamic period. Her initial impression is fairly positive, as her train trip in to the Ukrainian capital provides her “first experience of Ukrainian hospitality” thanks to the good nature of her travelling companions – shots of vodka and requisite zakusky. The reality of life in Ukraine, however, is a startling challenge, starting with the dingy state of her apartment and moving on to the appropriation of her passport.

The rapidly changing face of Ukraine provides the central focus of the book. Viets was in Kyiv initially on a visa sponsored by Rukh (the Popular Movement of Ukraine) even though it was not a comfortable fit - initially she spoke only Russian, she was not a partisan supporter (as was tacitly expected), and she was intelligent enough to recognize shortcomings in the group’s political platform. She went to battle for journalistic accreditation, which eventually came through. Along the way, history happened, most notably the Moscow coup and the Ukrainian vote for independence, which is covered by the author with a wonderful personal perspective.

It is precisely the author’s ability to provide a human dimension to social circumstance and political change that is the major strength of the book. Viets notes that over time, she instinctively developed a hoarding instinct because of consumer shortages. She observes that President Leonid Kravchuk was “skilled in saying two different things at once.” And her hurried return to Kyiv from Zaporizhia following news of the Moscow coup takes place in a taxi whose stressed driver “channel[ed] all his anxiety through the accelerator pedal” as she and several colleagues “careened for several hours along a violently potholed ‘highway’” with no one caring to sit in the front seat “with its frighteningly panoramic view of all the things we might hit.”

Needless to say, the author has a cheerfully droll sense of humour that leavens the ride through book.

Ms. Viets’s memoir is highly entertaining and illuminating, but episodic. Events are not always framed with a date or data. For example, when dealing with student protests that brought about the resignation of the Prime Minister (pp. 67–69), we are not given a name. In fact, the entire work has the feeling of a collection of recollections rather than an organized reflection. All the same, it is ultimately satisfying, carried forward by the endearingly plucky attitude of the author.

Ukraine is not the sole focus of this memoir. We also depart to Hungary (as mentioned earlier), Chechnya, Moldova, and Central Asia, and read a harrowing account of Viets’s stay in London, when a colleague is linked to a political assassination. These are well worth reading, as is her entire recollection.

About the Author

Susan Viets reported for The Guardian, The Independent, and BBC World. She has also contributed to the CBC, Newsweek, USA Today, The Moscow Times and other publications. She lives with her husband in Toronto.

Picnic at the Iron Curtain is available on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca and other European Amazon sites; e-book available at the Kindle bookstore. It is also sold in bookstores: Toronto - Ben McNally Books (366 Bay St.), Book City (Bloor St. Annex and Yonge & St. Clair locations), and Koota Ooma (842 The Queensway); Ottawa - Books on Beechwood (35 Beechwood Av.); and Guelph - The Book Shelf (41 Quebec St.).

ISBN: 978-0-9879664-0-7

ISBN Kindle ebook:

978-0-9879664-2-1

Book Launch Event

On Friday, March 8, 2013, from 4-6 pm., Susan Viets will give a talk at a book presentation of Picnic at the Iron Curtain: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution at the University of Toronto in
Room 208, North Building, Munk School of Global Affairs (1 Devonshire Place). Please register at http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/event/13371/register/ This event is sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.