Julia R. Barton

  Radiolab, Feb. 12, 2014

Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s and the surprising origin story of what’s now known as a “Glomar Response.” With help from David Sharp and Walt Logan, we tell the story of a clandestine CIA operation to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and the dilemma they faced when the world found out about it.

  In the 40 years since that operation, the Glomar Response has become boilerplate language from an array of government agencies. With help from ProPublica editor Jeff Larson and NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, we explore the implications of this ultimate information dodge. ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer explains how it stymies oversight, and we learn that, even 40 years later, governmental secrecy can be emotionally painful.

  After listening to the story ... 

  After 40 years, many of the details of Project Azorian are only now coming to light. The US government’s default position has been to keep as much of it classified as possible. It took three years for retired CIA employee David Sharp to get permissionto publish his account of Project Azorian. And FOIA played an indirect role in that, as Cold War historians got the CIA to release, in redacted form, an internal history of the mission. After that and a threat of legal action, Sharp was finally able to publish his manuscript in 2012.

  We mentioned conspiracy theories that have swirled around Project Azorian filling the void where official silence has reigned. One of them is promulgated in the 2005 book “Red Star Rogue” by Kenneth Sewell and Clint Richmond. They posit that the K-129 was taken over by rogue Stalinist KGB agents in order to start a nuclear conflict. But the conflict was to be between the US and China, as, according to the authors, the sub had powers to disguise its sonic signature as a Chinese Navy vessel.

  This book is the basis of the 2013 drama “Phantom,” which features Ed Harris and David Duchovny as Soviet military officers who sip vodka in a very un-Russian way.

  Russian Naval historians, like Nikolai Cherkashin, are not only insulted by this take on the cause of the K-129’s demise, they say the true cause is much easier to pinpoint: They say an American vessel, possibly the USS Swordfish, collided with the Soviet submarine. 

  Despite the fact that the US government has turned over many documents about Project Azorian and what it found to the Russian government, many in the Russian Navy stand by their theory that it was far too easy for the US to locate the K-129 on the bottom of the Pacific, given the technology of the time. According to these theories, Project Azorian was nothing more than an elaborate cover-up disguised as... an elaborate cover-up. We can neither confirm nor deny that we exactly understand how that would have worked in practice or execution.

  But for our money, there’s probably no stranger and more telling document from this time than a video of the funeral at sea for Soviet sailors ostensibly recovered by the US during Project Azorian. Audio of the service starts at 1:25 in this post. Eulogies and rites are performed in both English and Russian (albeit with an American accent).

by Julia Barton

In 2002, the Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that it was unconstitutional to execute a criminal who was mentally retarded because it violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “excessive” punishment. But it fell to the states to decide what would constitute retardation under the law. In Texas, the job of defining who could and couldn’t be executed fell to the appeals court. Cathy Cochran was the judge who wrote the state’s opinion, and she cited one of her favorite novels, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, for guidance.

Of Mice and Men tells the story of Lennie Small, a big, strong, but mentally disabled ranchhand in California, and George, another ranch hand who takes him under his wing. Lennie is childlike — he loves little animals but often crushes them. He kills a woman without quite realizing what he has done, and in the end, George shoots Lennie out of mercy, ahead of the posse that is hunting him down.

“Most Texas citizens might agree,” Judge Cochran wrote in what is known as the Briseño decision, “that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt.”

In taking the severely retarded Lennie as a standard, though, disability advocates say that Texas has executed individuals who are less profoundly retarded, but deserve protection under the Supreme Court’s Atkins decision. Margaret Nygren, head of the American Association for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, points out that retarded people may be capable of telling a lie or planning a crime, but “they may not quite understand that the person interrogating them is being less than truthful. They may not be able to make eye contact. They may be so agreeable and wanting to please those around them that they are unable to successfully contribute to their own defense.”

John Steinbeck’s son Thomas also objects to the way Texas has used his father’s imaginative work. “To judge anything based on a piece of fiction, I think, is a stretch,” he said. “And I think it would’ve made my father extremely angry.”

A bill in the Texas Senate right now would do away with Judge Cochran’s "Lennie test," adopting a more scientific standard of retardation in deciding capital punishment cases. The bill is sponsored by two Democratic senators, but the conservative editorial page of the Dallas Morning News also endorsed the bill, writing “Texas is outlier enough on capital punishment without using literature as a guide for who lives and who dies. It’s time for a legislative fix that removes Lennie from Texas law.”

That would be a relief to John Steinbeck, who, according to Thomas, opposed the death penalty in every case. “I remember once my father saying “If you have to take another man’s blood to make your point, you haven’t thought out the question very thoroughly.”

https://soundcloud.com/roman-mars/99-invisible-88-the-broadcast

99% Invisible 

Sept. 3, 2013

There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally can’t get out of your car. Inside of a driveway moment, time becomes elastic–you could be staring straight at a clock for the entire duration of the story, but for that length of time, the clock has no power over you.

But ironically,  inside the machinery of public radio–the industry that creates driveway moments–the clock rules all.

At NPR’s studios in Washington, DC, there are clocks everywhere. Big red digital clocks, huge round analog clocks. There’s even special software and time calculators, where 60 + 60 = 2’00.

(All Things Considered director Monika Evstatieva during a live broadcast in NPR’s Studio 2A. Credit: Julia Barton)

Each show has a ‘clock’, a set template, from which the show almost never varies. Every show that broadcasts—or aspires to broadcast—in the public radio system has a clock. This is the All Things Considered broadcast clock, which NPR and stations across the country refer to on a daily basis:

It’s actually a pretty cool piece of visual design, but one which functions best when it is never seen. This template is used twice every weekday: ATC Hour 1, from 4:00:00pm through 4:59:59pm ET; and then for ATC Hour 2, from 5:00:00 through 5:59:59pm ET.

Here’s how it works: at the ‘top’ of the hour, there is a 59 second “billboard,” which announces what’s going up in the program. Then there’s five minutes for the newscast, which is itself divided into two segments (“Newscast I” and “Newscast II”). Then there are the “blocks”–A, B, C, and D–which is where the stories and interviews (or “two-ways”) live.

Segments can’t run long by even a second, because most of the local stations are automated to cut off the national program where the clock says they can. These times–the dividers between the sections on the clock–are called posts. You have to hit the post. Nothing can go wrong.

Though, of course, things go wrong every day.

(When Julia visited ATC, a live interview segment accidentally got wrapped up 35 seconds early. Then it was on Monika, the director, to figure out what to do. Credit: Julia Barton)

Taking care of the clock is so ingrained in the director’s psyche that a common side effect of the job is waking up in the middle of the night fearing that you’ve blown the post–these are called “director’s dreams.” To cope with the anxiety,ATC directors make their own cheat sheets to help them memorize every queue of every hour of broadcast.Visit any studio that does a regular live feed with a broadcast clock and you’ll likely find a cheat sheet one somewhere in the studio.

The director’s cheat sheets at ATC  have been used so much that they’re in tatters. They have since been laminated.

(Note the correction in the “Top Cast” in the upper right. It’s not “1:00″, it’s “:59″)

When NPR began in the early 1970s, show clocks were much less regimented–or they didn’t have clocks at all.

One of the early champions against the fixed clock was Bill Siemering, a founder of NPR who helped design the network’s overall sound. He came up with the name All Things

Considered (original title: A Daily Identifiable Product). Siemering wrote the mission statement of NPR, which is enshrined in the halls of NPR (note the text on the walls).

  (Credit: Interior Design)

Siemering liked a clock that was more free-form, because it allowed for spontaneity and unpredictability. But spontaneous and unpredictable does not always make for compelling radio. Done wrong, and you wind up with laughably bad “Schweddy Balls”-grade public radio.

When Siemering left NPR in the early 1970s, NPR chose to have more subdivided clocks. The constraints forced the shows to get tighter, which some say makes NPR stronger. One person is Neal Conan, former host of Talk of the Nation, who maintains that the earlier, freer days of NPR were not as halcyon as some may remember them.

 These days, podcasting allows for shows such as this one to be free of a post, and go on for as long or short as is fitting for any given story.

Reporter-producer-editor (triple threat!) Julia Barton visited NPR’s old headquarters at Washington, DC, where she spoke with ATC directors Monika Evstatieva and Greg Dixon, and former Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan. Julia also spoke with public radio’s patron saint, Bill Siemering.

Many thanks to All Things Considered Executive Producer Chris Turpin and the other powers-that-be at NPR who gave us unfettered access to the shop during Julia’s visit.

(Note: Julia visited NPR while they were still at 635 Massachusetts Ave, NW. They have since moved to 1111 N. Capitol St.)

What happens when we build big?

Julia Barton remembers going to the top floor of Dallas’s then-new city hall when she was teenager. The building, designed by I.M. Pei, is a huge trapezoid jutting out over a wide plaza. Julia found the view from the top pretty fantastic, especially when munching on a Caramello bar from the City Hall vending machines.

But once she went to a protest in the plaza below. And those same windows, now hulking over her, made her feel small, and the whole event insignificant. Texans have a fondness for big structures—big arenas, big houses, big freeways. Julia wasn’t sure if their hidden message wasn’t simply this: I’m important, you’re nobody.

For people who distrust the big project, Edward Tenner’s 2001 essay “The Xanadu Effect” is some comfort. Tenner, a visiting scholar at Princeton University, ponders the ways in which obsession with bigness can presage hard times for a business or even a nation. Tenner named his essay not for Olivia Newton-John’s anthem or even the Coleridge poem, but for the palace Xanadu built in the movie “Citizen Kane.” That Xanadu, of course, was based on a real-life palace that newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst built in his waning days of empire:

On its 24,000 acres were a 354,000-gallon swimming pool, a private zoo and four main buildings with a total of 165 rooms. Along with other such extravagances, the estate helped send Hearst into trusteeship late in life. The cavernous halls of Welles’ gloomy cinematic Xanadu seemed to filmgoers — as the real, happier building must have appeared to many Hearst Corp. public investors — the very image of the pride that goes before a fall.

The downside of the Xanadu Effect has seen itself play out in other places—the Empire State Building, for example, was conceived in the 1920s but completed during the Great Depression, when it was known as “the Empty State Building.” Tenner’s not arguing that big things shouldn’t be built; he’s saying bigness is a gamble. It pays off when it it uplifts people, gives them a sense of grandeur and purpose. It fails when it crushes them or just makes life a pain, as in the big-built city of Moscow, where pedestrians have to scurry under the wide avenues in tunnels:

(Above: A pedestrian tunnel in Moscow. Credit: Veronica Khokhlova)

On a recent reporting trip to Russia for PRI’s “The World,” Julia travelled to Sochi, Russia’s southern-most city and upcoming host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Sochi is Europe’s biggest construction site right now, with Xanadu-like ice-palaces going up right on the Black Sea.

(Above: Big Ice Palace. Credit: Julia Barton)

All the construction—including billions of dollars of infrastructure—is good news for the Russian state and shoring up its presence in the Caucasus. It’s not necessarily good news for the locals. Julia interviewed a Sochi resident, Alexei Kravets, who’s been in a stand-off with authorities about the fate of the home he built by the Black Sea.

(Above: Alexei Kravets. Credit: Julia Barton)

Kravets’s court case to save his home has been standing in the way of a new railway complex. Construction workers have been throwing rocks through his windows, scraping his walls with backhoes, and hauling away his storage units. Kravets has been confronting them on film:

It’s a dramatic example of big vs. small, but this type of conflict often happens in the face of massive development. Edward Tenner says beyond just governments or private developers, we all need to think more carefully about the costs and benefits of building big.

“Bigness is a strategy that just about always fails, unless it succeeds. Or you could say it always succeeds except when it fails. And there really is no one way that you can regard it. You have to see it as a very powerful, easy-to-misuse, but also tempting way to go about things in life,” he says.

Notes:

Julia Barton produced another great story from 99% Invisible about the Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. An all-time fav.

More audio from the Russian protest Julia attended on her own podcast, DTFD.

Sochi 2014: Building Boom for Winter Olympics Leaves Some Behind

By Julia Barton ⋅ March 26, 2012

Katya Davidenko sits with a group of students who study English at a college in the Russian resort city of Sochi. She said she’s excited for the day when thousands of athletes and spectators from around the world will descend on her hometown for the 2014 Winter Games.

“Before Olympic Games were announced, I felt like I will leave this city and go and live somewhere else,” Davidenko said. “But now, when I see what is happening here, I obviously will stay here.”

But not all the students share Davidenko’s enthusiasm. Diana Kozlova, who recently got married, said rents are going up quickly and she can’t afford to start a family.

“The local people can’t live here because life in Sochi has become very expensive,” she said.

Whether Sochi is getting better or worse as a result of the coming Olympics, one thing is certain — this once sleepy resort town will never be the same.

Almost every corner of Sochi now bears the marks of massive construction. New hotels and condos sprout from the hillsides. The Russian government is building new highways and some 30 miles of light rail. The construction requires multiple tunnels through solid rock.

Sochi’s facelift has officially cost the Russian government at least $10 billion, and state-controlled companies like Gazprom have spent billions more constructing hotels and resorts in the area.

Russia has pledged that Sochi 2014 will be the greenest Olympics yet, but the environmental groups Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund have already pulled out of an agreement to monitor the construction. They say the government largely ignored their recommendations.

They’re especially concerned about unofficial dumps springing up in Sochi.

Tatiana Skyba lives in the hills above the new Olympic ice skating and hockey arenas. She says one night last April, she and her neighbors were awoken by a terrible noise. Their houses shook as if in an earthquake. It was a landslide.

Skyba said her house was knocked off its foundations. The city gave her and her neighbors some money to build new homes. But those houses have started sinking at strange angles. The ground is still moving, and residents now blame a large dump up the hill. They say trucks bring loads of concrete rubble there every day.

City officials say there’s no connection between the dump and the sinking of nearby homes. Still, Sochi has seen an increase in landslides since Olympic construction began.

Meanwhile, Skyba and her neighbors are stuck in their tilted houses above the gleaming Olympic park.

“We have this joke among us on the street,” Skyba said. “By the time the Olympics start, we won’t have to buy tickets. We’ll have already slid down there.”

At least Skyba still lives in her old neighborhood. About a thousand Sochi families have had to move because of the Olympics. That number of evictions is small compared with other places that have hosted recent “mega sports events.” The UN Human Rights Council found that the 2008 Beijing Olympics prompted at least 6,000 evictions.

In a statement, the International Olympic Committee said that it takes the issue of relocation very seriously.

“A certain number of relocations have been necessary for the construction of Olympic venues, and Sochi 2014 and the government has assured us that people are being fairly compensated in line with Russian law,” the IOC said.

While the IOC said it has met with some of the displaced families in Sochi, it hasn’t spoken with one man there who’s been in a standoff with Russian authorities.

Alexei Kravets stands in front of his home on the Black Sea in Adler. (Photo: Julia Barton)

Alexei Kravets has been living in one room of his house on the Black Sea coast. He’s been without water, gas or electricity for five months, since the city demolished the rest of his neighborhood to make way for a new rail yard. His cinderblock house is surrounded by mud and rubble, and he’s painted slogans like “IOC help!” and “SOS!” in red on all the windows.

“In the evening, a backhoe comes up to the house and starts to scrape the concrete just to pressure me psychologically,” Kravets said. “If I left the place for, like, 15 minutes, they’d tear it down right away.”

Kravets said the backhoes have damaged the walls and he’s afraid the house could collapse on him. He’s refused the government’s offer of an apartment three miles from the coast. He’s a lawyer, and he’s appealed to Russian and European courts for help, but has gotten no ruling.

“We never asked anything from the state,” Kravets said. “We built the house all by ourselves, and now the state is taking it away from us.”

Kravets pulled out a small laptop and showed a video he made. Recently he put some of his belongings into a metal storage unit behind his house to save them from demolition. Construction workers immediately showed up with a crane to take the unit away.

“Where do you work?” Kravets demanded of the supervisor in the video. “Where are your orders to remove my things?”

“We are building Olympic facilities,” the man said. Kravets again asked for court papers, but the man brushed him off.

By Julia Barton

 February 13, 2012  

PRI's The World

  Audio: Play | Download

When it comes to going to church, Ukraine is mostly Orthodox Christian, but Protestant churches are gaining a foot-hold there.

One of the biggest now is the evangelical Embassy of God, based in the capital Kiev.

The church’s founder, Sunday Adelaja, originally hails from Nigeria and he represents an unusual success for Africans in the former Soviet world.

Adelaja, who grew up in a poor Nigerian village, said couldn’t afford to go to college. Then in 1986, he got a rare offer.

“Of course, thinking about it now looks kind of funny, because I got a scholarship from the Communist party of the Soviet Union,” Adelaja said. “The whole idea was to give scholarships to Africans — young, dynamic Africans who are brilliant — so that they may go back to Africa and do Communist and socialist revolution.”

Adelaja laughs at this because he kept a secret from the Soviet Communists. Before moving to the officially atheist Soviet Union, he became an evangelical Christian. He kept his faith under wraps until the USSR fell apart in 1991.

“I just knew that God was pressing me, pressing upon my heart, to step up from the boat, and step into the water, and try to just offer the word of life, the gospel, to the nation of Ukraine,” Adelaja said.

It wasn’t easy at first. Adelaja said that’s because he’s black.

Africans still face frequent harassment in Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union, and you can still find racist depictions of blacks in the media.

Still, Adelaja managed to get his own Sunday morning television show in the mid 1990s. And his church, Embassy of God, began to grow.

(Worshippers sing a hymn in Russian at an Embassy of God church in suburban Kiev. This branch of the church meets in a Soviet-era auditorium. Photo: Julia Barton)

It now claims to have 100,000 members, though that number is hard to verify. Adelaja preaches the so-called “prosperity gospel,” that God intends the faithful to have financial wealth and happiness. It’s in contrast to the Orthodox Church emphasis on reward in the afterlife.

Adelaja no longer has a TV show, but his church is sprouting branches around Ukraine and beyond.

In suburban Kiev, about 100 Embassy of God members meet in a wood-paneled, Soviet-era auditorium. It’s extremely cold out, and the worshippers keep their coats and hats on as they sway to the music in the sanctuary.

Their pastor, Ruslan Mahmedov, pulls up the day’s Bible verses, in Russian, on his iPad and projects them on a screen behind him.

Many here say Embassy of God helped them when no one else would. Yuri Shostak says that four years ago, when he got out of prison, he was living in the storm sewers. Then he got into a drug rehab program run by the church, and now works there helping other addicts.

“For me, it’s a miracle that I’m here now,” Shostak said. “I have everything. I have clothes, I have shoes. I have people that I love. I’m so grateful that Pastor Adelaja took us in, that he came here to Ukraine.”

But not everyone is glad Sunday Adelaja is in Ukraine. Authorities in the Orthodox Church have condemned him. They say Embassy of God is nothing more than a cult with a charismatic leader. According to Ivan Bodnaruk, a Kiev attorney, it’s worse — the church is a financial scam.

“What is Sunday Adelaja doing in Ukraine? I’ve asked myself that question,” Bodnaruk said. “I think he came here to make money and maybe build a political career.”

Bodnaruk represents hundreds of Ukrainians in a civil case against Adelaja and members of Embassy of God.

It all goes back to an investment fund that church members started here in 2006. The Kings Capital fund promised high dividends. But it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that bankrupted many investors — people like Elena Urbanskaya. She mortgaged her apartment to invest in King’s Capital. She said Embassy of God members coached her through the whole process. Then the fund collapsed and she lost everything.

“It was a terrible shock for people, because within the church, people trusted each other,” Urbanskaya said.

(The main sanctuary of Embassy of God in Kiev is still a temporary structure. The church has been raising funds to build a modern mega-church, but Pastor Sunday Adelaja blames bad publicity from a legal case for hampering their capital campaign. Photo: Julia Barton)

Ukrainian prosecutors maintain that Adelaja ran Kings Capital from behind the scenes. They’re pursuing charges that could put him in prison for up to 12 years. Adelaja denies any involvement.

“Just prove what I have done! I don’t even know what I have done. I’ve never visited the company. I don’t even know where it is,” he said.

Adelaja added that his goal was never to make money and amass power, but to save souls. Now, he said, he can’t walk the streets without someone shouting insults at him, or worse.

“Believe you me. For every day I stay in the Ukraine, I die a thousand deaths,” Adelaja said.

Perhaps it was the below-zero temperatures, but on a recent Sunday morning, the main chapel of Embassy of God was only a third full.

It’s an inflatable structure, like those that house tennis courts. It’s supposed to be temporary.

Embassy of God hopes to build a new mega-church. But that’s on hold for now. Membership and donations are way down. Adelaja blames that on bad publicity from the legal case.

By Julia Barton ⋅ February 3, 2012

PRI's The World

Thousands of protesters plan to gather in Russia on Saturday to call for political reform. But Moscow will also host competing rallies, some in support of Russia’s current prime minister and top presidential candidate, Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s supporters and detractors both have pop songs to sing about him. But oddly, Russia’s best-known pro-Putin and anti-Putin songs were written by the very same songwriter.

Alexander Yellin sits in an expensive café in downtown Moscow. The 53-year-old lyricist is partly bald – what’s left of his graying hair is tied back in a pony-tail.

Yellin writes songs that others sing. Ten years ago, he bet a friend $200 that he could create a hit song in Russia on the cheap.

Yellin won the bet. His pop song “A Man Like Putin” became so huge that it’s been translated into English.

When “A Man Like Putin” came out, Putin had been president for two years. Yellin said his song reflected the country’s admiration for the man.

“At that moment, there was such euphoria that there was this new, young leader who’d move the country forward,” Yellin said. “The song was a bit ironic. It wasn’t opposed to Putin—it was written in a way to depict Putin as the ideal man, even the ideal husband for women.”

Yellin may have written “A Man Like Putin” as light satire, but it wasn’t taken that way. Vladimir Putin made it his anthem and even played it at rallies. Yellin, who’d been a dissident rocker in Soviet days, seemed a bit uncomfortable with the embrace.

But even just a few years ago, he told foreign journalists there was no point writing anti-Putin songs—no one would listen to them.

All that changed last September, when now-Prime Minister Putin announced he was running for president — again. A political opposition leader asked Alexander Yellin if he’d write a different kind of song now, one that reflected the country’s disgruntled mood.

Yellin came up with “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin”, which is from the viewpoint of a patient in a psychiatric ward. “Why is there a hole in my head, and in the budget?” he asks his doctor. “Why instead of tomorrow today is yesterday?

“It’s all so complicated!” the patient concludes. “It’s just too messed up. Our madhouse will vote for Putin, and with Putin we’ll be happy.”

Alexander Yellin said mental illness provides an obvious metaphor for the way Russians view their leaders.

“Schizophrenia seems to me inherent in Russians,” he said. “On the one hand, Russians don’t love those in power, but on the other, they just go along with everything that’s done in the political arena.”

Yellin and his group Rabfak—a Soviet acronym for “Workers’ College”—released the song in October and the video went viral.

Rabfak performed at protest rallies here in Moscow last December. A group of Russian linguists named “Our Madhouse Votes for Putin” the Russian phrase of the year. The last time Yellin won that honor was in 2002—for the phrase “A Man Like Putin.”

All told, Yellin said he made about $8,000 off “A Man Like Putin,” plus the $200 bet. He doesn’t regret writing the song; he even hopes it might get recorded again.

In November of that year, on Kiev’s Independence Square, Olena felt her life change for good. She was among thousands who crowded into the square to protest results of the presidential election.

“At one moment everybody understood that it’s the moment you can decide, and you have to take part,” Olena recalls. “And it was a very new feeling for me, for example, and I think for many people.”

That night, Olena and her husband Denis Samygin made up flyers and drove to the outer reaches of Kiev to paste them on bus shelters.

“Don’t go to work, just go to Maidan, because tomorrow, it’s our last chance,” Olena wrote on the flyers.

Olena and the other protesters believed the vote had been rigged in favor of a candidate from the industrialized Eastern part of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych. The campaign had been incredibly bitter, and opposition candidate Victor Yuschenko had even been poisoned.

After two weeks of protests, the Ukrainian government allowed new elections to take place and that time, Yuschenko won.

Olena was thrilled—and for about a year, she says, the country seemed transformed. But slowly, she watched the energy of the Orange Revolution fade. Three years ago, when new elections came around, Ukrainians elected the candidate who’d been defeated in the Orange Revolution, Victor Yanukovych.

The new government has put some Orange Revolution leaders in jail. That’s upset the European Union, and upset the middle class Ukrainians, who want more links with Western Europe. At this point, Olena is both frustrated and defiant.

“I don’t think that we lost. Because you never lost your experience, you never lose your experience. If you lived the experience, you have that, and this is yours,” she says.

But meanwhile, Olena has a lot to think about in her own life. She has two children. And a few years ago, she and Denis got a mortgage to buy in an apartment in a 100-year-old building in central Kiev. They renovated it to take out all of the Soviet-era touches. The closet-sized bathroom became…a closet. And the old kitchen is now the bathroom.

“It’s very great to have bath-ROOM,” Olena laughs. “Because ‘bathroom’—you have to have to have a room. To have a bathroom with a window, and so big, it’s like extraordinary.”

Olena says she and her circle of friends define “middle class” as having enough money to own an apartment and a car, and to travel abroad. She and her family live comfortably, but for Denis, this sense of comfort pretty much ends at their front door.

“What’s lacking for the middle class is any kind of social protection, as far as health care is concerned, or the legal system,” Denis says. What’s more, he says government bureaucracy makes it hard to run a business. He should know—he’s co-owner of a public relations firm. He says things are getting more corrupt again under the Yanukovych regime.

“More people are talking about how it’s pointless to live here,” Denis says, “and it would be better to leave.” But he and Olena have no plans to go. They care too deeply about Ukraine. After their children were born, Denis even switched from his native Russian to speaking Ukrainian all the time. Denis says this means his wife will usually get the upper hand when they argue, since she’s a native Ukrainian speaker.

Olena grew up in a provincial city southeast of Kiev. Her mother was a pediatrician, and her father an engineer. They were solidly middle class. Except this was the Soviet Union, so the middle class didn’t really exist. Olena remembers going to Soviet military parades with her family.

“From somewhere my father brought these balloons and I [thought] it was a miracle, these balloons. I liked it very much,” Olena recalls.

Balloons felt like a miracle because her parents didn’t have much. In 1991, when Ukraine became a new country, they suddenly had even less.

“My parents were not paid on their work. It was very difficult. There was no money, like there’s no money at all,” she says.

Still, Olena’s parents insisted that she to go to a good school in Kiev. Olena paid her rent in the city by bringing food from the countryside on a two-hour train ride. It eventually paid off: Olena got into university in Kiev and started working as a journalist. Within ten years, she went from hauling plucked chickens on the train to being a national TV editor.

Olena needed determination and energy to succeed in the face of historic change. But now things have started to slow down—and Olena’s not sure she likes that. She describes her current state, half-humorously, as a kind of stagnation, an “existential crisis.”

“Because everything has happened already,” Olena says.

Exciting as her life has been, Olena doesn’t want her children to feel the same pressures she did. Her daughter Sonja, who’s six, has a mobile phone, and 3-year-old Marco knows how to navigate a laptop computer. After Sonja asked for a dog for three years, Olena got her one.

“She has to experience that dreams—if you want something, dreams come true. Just to experience this in her life,” Olena says.