Until then, readers may feel what they have in their hands is an affecting exposé of the nonprofit, do-gooder orbit. Not until the midpoint of this volume do readers arrive at the Ukraine of the headlines, with the protests that began in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square - the Black Square of the title. It meant an escape from the past, an alternate reality in which Ukraine was never subjugated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union but instead became a ‘normal’ European country like Germany or France.” Pinkham, who first visited Kiev in 2007, a few years out of Yale, for “a workshop I’d organized on health problems for women drug users,” seems to have written two books: one, a memoir of her time in the “harm reduction” world, the other, a chronicle of the recent turmoil. “Europe meant freedom, fairness and transparency. . . After the occupation of Crimea came civil war, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the rise of the Donetsk People’s Republic - an unraveling that has led to a return to the vitriol of the Cold War.Īgainst this backdrop comes Sophie Pinkham’s “Black Square,” billed as a portrait of Ukraine “under the shadow of Putin.” If Kiev was at war, Pinkham writes, the battle was over “Europe,” which was a metaphor.

Vladimir Putin, of course, cut the party short. Yet in the heady winter of 2014, a change seemed to arrive: People power swelled in Kiev and toppled a corrupt regime.

The country has moved forward (and backward) not by design but in tumult.

A vast borderland at the crossroads of Europe, it was hailed a nation reborn, only to reveal an inexorable weakness - fear of its Big Brother to the north and an inability to escape it. In the decades since the Soviet fall, Ukraine has vexed many - most of all, its own people. BLACK SQUARE Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine By Sophie Pinkham 288 pp.

Black Square by Sophie Pinkham