Talking Location With Graham Hurley – author of Kyiv

5th March 2022

TalkingLocationWith… Graham Hurley – author of ‘Kyiv’ the WW2 thriller (seventh in his ‘Spoils of War WW2 thriller series ) and just published by Head of Zeus in paperback at £8.99

I went to the Ukraine with my wife in October, 2018, one of many stops on a one month train expedition to Baku, in Azerbaijan.  We stayed for nearly a week in Kyiv, freshly arrived on the night sleeper from Warsaw, having shared a compartment with a delightful Ukrainian accountant called Yuri, who neither drank nor played cards.  We managed to corrupt him on the latter count, and shared the large print of each other’s lives as he progressively cleaned us out.  Next morning, Yuri solved the many challenges of acquiring a Ukrainian sim card and threaded us through the Metro to get us to where we were to live.

Central Station Kyiv

Our top floor apartment was a time warp, a throwback scored for red velvet drapes, huge pieces of brown furniture, Art Nouveau flowered lights, and an out of tune piano.  In the evenings, especially, it felt like the long-ago owner, doubtless a widow with impeccable manners and an impressive bust, had only just left.  The main door to the landing, incidentally, was reinforced with steel plates and had three bolts, two locks, and one of those scary inspection ‘spyholes’ that distort the waiting face outside.

The apartment was at the back of Kreshchatyk, one of the main boulevards, an easy stroll to Maidan Square.  We roamed the city on foot for a couple of days, concentrating on the old quarters.  That distinctive noise of tyres on cobbles – part rattle, part bump-bump – accompanied us everywhere, and it was easy to duck the crowds of tourists and get lost in the city’s nether regions.  My Ukrainian isn’t all it might be but the students, especially, speak good English and making contact wasn’t a problem.  Our overwhelming impression was of an old city with a young face.  There were also areas of darkness, more a mood than a reality, and when locals told us to take care and keep our eyes open we did just that.

By the time we set foot in Kyiv, the country had been at war with the Russians for four years after their siezure of the Crimea and parts of the Donbas, and a day at the State Museum of the Great Patriotic War, beneath the shadow of the gigantic Motherland statue, told us an enormous amount about the national psyche.  On the train heading east, I’d read Anne Applebaum’s terrifying account of the Thirties famine (‘holomodor’ in Ukrainian), and drifting through the museum it was impossible to ignore the determination of Ukrainians not to give the Russians a second chance to bring the nation to its knees.  These, we concluded, were fiercely proud people, as most of the free world will now acknowledge.

Children’s Playground, Chernobyl

It was at the museum, incidentally, that my lovely wife unearthed the story that was to become Kyiv, the sixth book in the Spoils of War series.  The Germans took Kyiv in September, 1941, just three months after invading the Soviet Union.  The retreating Soviets spent their weeks under siege booby-trapping  a number of key buildings in the city they deemed likely to be seized by the occupying forces.  A small group of engineers retreated to a thickly wooded island in the middle of the Dnieper river, waited several days for the Germans to settle in, and then began to blow them up by radio signal, building by building.

Perschk Monastery

This was a story I’d never heard before, the smallest footnote to the atrocities that were to follow, including, within weeks, the massacre of 33,000 of the city’s Jews in the ravine at Babiyar.  These historical events form the background to my novel and doing the research back home after our return from Baku, it was impossible not to revisit those streets as I tried to plot the movements of my characters as parts of the city mysteriously exploded.

Motherland Statue

One footnote.  During our stay in Kyiv, we made the three hour journey north to the huge limited-entry zone that surrounds the now-contained wreckage of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.  Visiting the plant itself was a salutary experience but what stays in the memory are the overgrown remains of the nearby town built to house the plant’s workforce.

Aside from the rampant vegetation, everything was still in working order.  All it lacked, was people. While Ukrainians had obviously welcomed the cheap electricity that came from the plant, Moscow’s attempts to keep a lid on the disaster, and thus hazard millions of Ukrainians in Kyiv, has left another lasting scar.  What incompetence and nuclear fission so nearly achieved, the Russians are now delivering on an entirely different scale.

Graham Hurley

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