Resistance pulses through Kyiv. For years, a far-reaching network of fearless young Ukrainians in the city’s interlocking art, activism and club-culture scenes have been battling for a more equal society. As a full-scale Russian invasion threatens everything they’ve built, the movement is fighting back to prevent Putin destroying their future.
Text: Alex King – Photography: Nicola Zolin
IT’S A BONE-CHILLING NIGHT IN KYIV, towards the end of October 2021. We’re huddled around an electric heater under a small marquee in the courtyard of an old Soviet beer factory, waiting for a Telegram chatbot to tell us if our Covid tests are negative and that we can go inside. “The first time I came here, I was amazed by how everybody looks, dresses and thinks so differently,” explains Yevhen Trachuk, an artist and co-organiser at Kyiv Pride, while we wait to kill time. “You can be whoever you want to be, there’s no need to be ashamed.”
A club and creative hub, K41 is at the vanguard of Kyiv’s queer-friendly nightlife scene and rumoured to have been founded by those responsible for Berlin’s Berghain – which, like most clubs around the world, will remain closed for another four months. Tonight, K41 feels like the centre of the club-culture universe. The techno is as hard and unrelenting as can be. However, the overall atmosphere is warm, almost zen. K41 is a state-of-art club experience, where none of the grit of the cavernous industrial space has been lost, but using the cloakroom or toilets feels like a five-star hotel. Wearing ornate creations, fetish gear or nothing at all, beautiful people of all nationalities, gender presentations and sexual orientations sway together amid the strobe lighting, smoke machines and palpable sense of liberation.
Three decades after the peaceful Revolution on Granite helped lead to independence for Ukraine in 1991, young Ukrainians are still fighting fearlessly for dignity and tolerance – a hopeful, democratic future for one of Europe’s youngest states. Beginning in 2013, Kyiv caught the world’s imagination as protestors occupied Maidan Square for months. Known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity, the movement succeeded in ousting the corrupt, Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, following a series of clashes that saw over 100 killed.
Almost 10 years later, passionate young Ukrainians remain fuelled by a hunger for change. A post-revolutionary energy is still burning brightly: it can be felt in the freedom and self-expression in Kyiv’s interlocking techno, art and activism scenes, whose promise has lured people from across Eur
