It is noon and Kristina Shevchenko heard three bullets flying today. “Within half an hour,” she says on the phone. The front in eastern Ukraine is six kilometers away. But the young woman will soon be living in New York, so she doesn’t even have to move. If that sounds strange so close to the line of conflict, she fought for it. She’ll hear the war from New York.
Kristina Shevchenko is 27, a teacher of Ukrainian and literature in the industrial city of Novgorodska, 11,000 inhabitants. Together with her youth organization, she campaigned for her Ukrainian hometown to be called New York soon. She was recently in Kiev, where she campaigned and convinced a parliamentary committee. The committee has approved the renaming. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitrij Kuleb has already indulged in a joke and said that the next UN meeting could then take place in New York, Ukraine. A little industrial town that wants to present itself as a metropolis that it will never be? No, says Kristina Shevchenko. “It’s about historical justice.” And also about confidence, about departure, about the will to change something in the very dreary everyday life.
Shevchenko says that German immigrants, Mennonites, founded the settlement in the 19th century and named it New York. Two versions are circulating why. One: the powerful owner of a mill had previously been to America and raved about it. The second: Another entrepreneur had an American woman who was very homesick. In any case, in 1951 the Soviets renamed New York Novgorodska. “They were against the name New York because they were against America,” says Shevchenko.
As a child, her grandmother once told her that she used to live in New York. Little Kristina asked why she, her grandmother, had come back to Ukraine from America. Since then, the New York fantasies have been swirling in her head. Since the war in eastern Ukraine, Shevchenko pushed the desire, convinced friends, citizens, politicians in Kiev. If Parliament approves, and there is little doubt of that, she will live in New York. In Ukrainian. It’s her dream in the shadow of war.
Kristina Shevchenko hopes that it will then be easier to develop the industrial city and attract investors. So far there is not much: a phenol plant that the city depends on, two cafes. The hospital? “A disaster,” she says. “It has not been renewed since the Soviet era.” The roads also need to be repaired. Otherwise, the teacher lends a hand to make life more colorful. She organizes parties, dance courses, and clean-up actions at the cemetery.
Shevchenko says that the renaming is about the city’s history, not a comparison with the big Big Apple and its splendor, from which something is supposed to fall off into the gloom at the front. And yet there is longing. “I associate all of this with this name: perspective, freedom, possibilities,” she says. Kristina Shevchenko uploaded a photo of Sinatra New York at night to her Facebook profile. “It would be great if we could become brother cities,” she says. Has she ever been to New York City on the Hudson? No, she says, but she would like to visit it. Not easy with her earnings as a teacher: the equivalent of 250 euros a month.
After all, she sees the first gentle change at home: nothing that would shine yet. But there is now a gas station with the words “New York” emblazoned above it. A “Bakery New York”. And a youth who is confident and proud of the future city name. However, Kristina Shevchenko cannot influence her greatest wish. That the war is disappearing from her life in New York.
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