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You are here: Home Life in News Focus In Ukraine's west, cafe glorifies anti-Soviet fighters

24/06/2009In Ukraine's west, cafe glorifies anti-Soviet fighters

In the Kryivka cafe, you can order a ‘grilled KGB agent’ and shoot a rubber bullet at photograph of Stalin all under one roof.

"Are there Russians or Communists amongst you?" barked the grey bearded man at the entrance, clutching an old sub-machine gun.

A strange way to welcome visitors to a fashionable cafe perhaps. But then this is the popular Kryivka (secret place) cafe in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv that celebrates the deeds of a wartime anti-Soviet guerrilla group.

The man, dressed as a soldier, offers visitors a glass of honey vodka -- "poison for the Moskals," he cackles -- before leading them to the cafe that seeks to imitate a Ukrainian nationalist hideout.

The controversial Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) are still revered as heroes in western Ukraine for fighting Soviet forces up to the early 1950s in the hope of creating an independent Ukrainian state.

But their detractors accuse them of collaborating with the Nazis and taking part in deadly ethnic cleansing operations against local Polish citizens.

Almost everything in the cafe is a reference to the UPA: the waiters are dressed in khaki, the crockery is metal and wartime weapons and photos adorn the walls.

You can even fire a plastic bullet into the portrait of Soviet wartime leader Joseph Stalin, something Ukraine's First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko lost no time in doing when she visited.

"Before, we had a plaster head of Lenin to fire at,” said senior waitress Anna Garbar. “But it was completely destroyed in about two weeks of shooting and we still haven't purchased a new one."

 AFP PHOTO/ YURIY DYACHYSHYN
Ukraine, Lviv : A waiter holds a gun as he serves clients in the restaurant "Kryïvka" in Lviv on 23 March 2009

A changing place

The existence of such a restaurant would be unimaginable in the east of Ukraine, where daily life is conducted mostly in Russian rather than in Ukrainian and memories of the Soviet Union are fonder.

For centuries, Lviv was a part of the Polish kingdom and later, it became an important town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The beauty of Lviv's UNESCO-listed mediaeval centre sits in stark contrast to the urban landscapes of most ex-Soviet cities.

The city of Lviv and its region were only annexed into the Soviet Union during World War II and the city has grown into a Ukrainian nationalist stronghold since the country won independence.

After the hopes of the 2004 Orange Revolution that ousted a corrupt old regime from power, political unity remains elusive in Ukraine -- partly because of the country's linguistic and cultural division.

And the divisions show no sign of becoming smaller. In March, the Freedom movement of Oleh Tyahnybok, who is known for his populist Ukrainian nationalist rhetoric, won a shock victory in local elections in a region neighbouring Lviv.

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