MAPPING THE KINGDOM OF PLASTIC BAGS: THE TOPOGRAPHY OF FAIRYTALE
CYNICISM IN CHELNOCHOVSK-NA-DNIESTRE, UKRAINE


Volume 21, Number 2 

MAPPING THE KINGDOM OF PLASTIC BAGS: THE TOPOGRAPHY OF FAIRYTALE 
CYNICISM IN CHELNOCHOVSK-NA-DNIESTRE, UKRAINE 

Diana R. Blank, University of California at Berkeley 
© 2003 Diana M. Blank All Rights Reserved 
The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East 
Europe Review is retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights other than those stated here. 
Please contact the managing editor for details on contacting these authors. Permission is granted for 
reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only the cost of reproduction is 
charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the authors. 

I am speaking with Dima about how life has 
changed since the end of the Soviet regime in the 
Southwestern Ukrainian town of Chelnochovsk-
na-Dniestre.1 Here’s how he punctuates our 
conversation: “You can say now that you don’t 
like the president.” In an afterthought that 
follows quickly on the heels of this thought, he 
adds: “You can’t say that you don’t like the 
mayor, but you can say that you don’t like the 
president.” Earlier in our conversation, Dima had 
referred to the mayor as “Marquis Karabas.” 
When I failed to understand the reference, he had 
said: “Don’t you remember, from the fairytale 
‘Puss in Boots’?” And he recited: “Whose forest 
is that? Marquis Karabas’. Whose fields are 
those? Marquis Karabas’. Whose house is that? 
Marquis Karabas’.”2 

Dima’s account of the state of things in 
Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre, Ukraine, one of 
many brilliant emic analyses I have been treated 
to on the topic, certainly seems to concur with 
that of those scholars of Eastern Europe 
(Burawoy 2001, Humphrey 1991, Verdery 1996) 
who would regard the postsocialist distribution 
of power in the region as dispersed among more 
or less independently functioning fiefdoms. In 
this case, the rapacious lord of the land fabulized 
by Dima is the mayor of the town, Mykola 
Mykolaivich Kruchko, whose political career in 
Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre does indeed seem to 
amount in large part to a consolidation of power 
carried out through a claiming and grasping up 
of places on the landscape, for as far as the eye 
can see. During his second re-election campaign 
in the spring of 2002, in a seeming caricature of 
Soviet iconography, and one that was taken to a 
degree that perhaps only Stalin enjoyed in his 
lifetime, a banner adorned by a much-larger-
than-life-sized hand-painted image of Kruchko’s 
face could be seen physically draping his power 
across the main road into the city. During the 
same campaign, an equally oversized image of 
the mayor’s head went up on the town’s House 

of Culture, and scaled-down versions of this 
poster could be seen mounted in shop windows 
and taxicabs throughout the town. The banner 
was removed after the elections, but the 
gargantuan poster has remained, along with 
many of its more diminutive counterparts. But 
Kruchko’s power, of course, extends far beyond 
the iconographic. 

Since his rise to power in the early 
1990s—and his influence in the town gained 
official stature in 1994, when Kruchko won his 
first of three bids for mayor—Kruchko has come 
to own numerous enterprises, including (but not 
nearly limited to) “Kru-tika,” a factory and firm 
producing a number of items, but most notably, 
tiles for paving sidewalks; at least one gas station 
located on the edge of town; Chelnochovsk’s 
principal hotel; and the most luxurious and 
popular restaurant in the town. The restaurant is 
officially registered under his (estranged) wife’s 
name, and the hotel is said to be registered under 
the name of his mistress, but Kruchko makes no 
bones about being the proprietor of these high-
profile and prestigious local landmarks. In 
choosing a name for his restaurant, for example, 
he did not mince words, entitling it—in a 
flourish that legitimizes his own entitlement and 
places him in the context of a long line of newly 
legitimated (or legitimated anew) monarchs—
“Nikolai Dvorets” (Nicholas Palace).  

These are the sites that everyone knows 
of, but a walk through the city streets is likely 
take one—beknownst or unbeknownst to the 
walker—past numerous others. Walking to the 
city bus station one day, for instance, I 
approached a veterinary kiosk and got close 
enough to notice the Kru-tika name on it. 
Kruchko’s appropriation of territory also takes 
more camouflaged, if not exactly subtle, forms. 
Those small entrepreneurs in the town with 
whom I had established a relationship of trust 
acknowledged to me—obliquely and yet 
unequivocally—that they regularly paid tithes to 

Jen
Typewritten Text
23



Volume 21, Number 2 

the mayor, and that they fully understood that 
should these tithes cease, their business would be 
brought to a halt, as well. These same 
entrepreneurs also made it clear that the mayor 
himself had reprimanded them for the eyesore 
that the sidewalks in front of their shops 
presented (sidewalks whose paving dated back to 
the last Soviet-era restoration), and commanded 
them to tile the area in front of their business. 
This demand has been made on those who rent 
their shops, as well as those who own them, and 
of course, the town’s only tile concession is Kru-
tika. In the spring of this year, the town’s taxi 
stops—theretofore simply designated non-
privatized stopping spots on the local 
landscape—were summarily auctioned off by 
“the City.” Nothing was built there, nothing 
produced. These particular points along the lay 
of the land in Chelnochovsk simply and 
suddenly became, in the spring of 2002, the 
private property of particular individuals. By the 
time the taxi drivers and the other residents of 
the town learned of the auction, the new owners 
had already laid claims to the deed. These new 
owners, Mykola Mykolaivich’s son (also named 
Mykola Mykolaivich), and three other men 
closely associated with the Kruchko family and 
commonly recognized as “banditi” (mafia) 
would heretofore collect dues from the local taxi 
drivers for granting them the privilege of 
stopping there. The Kruchko family, it is 
commonly recognized, profited (at least) twice 
off of this auction. 

But let us to turn to a place on the 
landscape incontrovertibly occupied by the 
“Marquis Karabas,” one that marks his power 
perhaps more conspicuously than any other: his 
restaurant Nikolai Dvorets. The scene, then, is a 
wedding, and the moments are captured on a 
video cassette that was sent to me recently by the 
bride and groom. The wedding took place in 
August of 2002 in the newly renovated 
restaurant owned by Mykola Mykolaivich 
Kruchko, on the momentous day that the 
restaurant reopened after renovations. In one 
scene from this tape, we find Kruchko risen from 
his place at the table in his own, eponymous 
palace, to toast the young couple. He stands in 
front of the shiny replica of the David he has 
installed in his newly renovated restaurant. 
(Amusingly, Kruchko’s head happens to be level 
with the David’s loins—a coincidence, no doubt, 
but a suggestive one, given that Kruchko is 
widely reputed to have lustily helped himself to 

more than pieces of land.) He hails the young 
couple as follows: 

Dear Lenochka, Vadim. Esteemed parents. 
Esteemed guests. Chelnochovchanye. 
Those who have traveled here, who grew 
up here and lived here. Those who live 
here. I’m very pleased that the city of 
Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre has…its place in 
the difficult hierarchy of government life. 
I’m doubly pleased to be able to work with 
such a wonderful person—our 
Lenochka…[He speaks of Lena’s beauty 
and intelligence, and wishes the couple a 
bright future together]….I want you to 
make your parents happy, and to be the 
pride of our Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre. 
After all, it is (this city) that raised you: our 
streets, our “Pizza”(café) our other 
establishments, our (nightclub) “Zero,” in 
short, our establishments, our City Hall, 
which has made of you such a serious 
woman. Let’s drink “gor’ko” to the young 
couple. 

Kruchko’s wishes to the couple are 
bracketed by his telling metaphorical mappings, 
which—among other things—collapse 
geography and power, beginning by locating 
Chelnochovsk’s place as within the hierarchy of 
government life and ending by appropriating the 
glory of—and even the credit for—this occasion 
through the trope of cityscape. His speech abides 
by wedding convention in overtly celebrating the 
couple of the day, but yields to political rhetoric 
that places a rather unconventional demand on 
the couple: be the pride of the city. And if the 
bride and groom are to be the pride of the city, 
he suggests, it is because they have wended their 
way to this momentous event via the streets of 
the town, whose landmarks culminate in the 
mayor’s office itself.  

If Kruchko can be found staking his 
own claims to power through the idiom of 
landscape, he has others do his bidding for him 
as well, others who can sketch even more 
fictitious allegorical geographies. Here at Vadim 
and Lena’s wedding, for instance, he has the 
master of ceremonies (his employee at Nikolai 
Dvorets), who sets the scene for the occasion in a 
fairytale land. In a segment that appears earlier 
on this tape, the bride and groom—having 
descended the grand staircase in Nikolai 
Dvorets—stand before the assembled guests, and 
the master of ceremonies addresses the crowd: 

Jen
Typewritten Text
24



Volume 21, Number 2 

You know, when I first set eyes on this 
beautiful couple, on these guys, an old, old, 
fairytale immediately came to mind. And 
I’d like to take you all by the hand and lead 
you into this beautiful, magical land called 
love. In our kingdom, in our state, lived a 
beautiful queen. One day, she fell to 
daydreaming, and thought: how happy I 
would be if I had a little girl with lips 
scarlet as blood, a face white as freshly 
fallen snow, with hair black as ebony. 
That’s what the queen thought, and 
probably the good fairies heard her wish. 
Because her wish came true. And the 
parents…named her a beautiful name: 
Lena. The years went by. The girl grew up 
and turned into a beautiful woman. But her 
heart slept. And only the kiss of a 
handsome prince could wake her. And such 
a prince came along. He was not a foreigner 
to her. He lived, and was born, here in our 
city… 

The master of ceremonies’ 
transcendental metaphors transmogrify into 
concrete references, grounding the lofty qualities 
they represent in a local landscape that is at once 
physical and political. The formulaic geography 
of the standard Russian fairytale opening—“in 
some kingdom, in some government”—is subtly 
redrawn here as the transcendental myth gets 
located in “our” kingdom, “our” government. 
Lest that “gosudarstvo” be understood to signify 
“state,” the setting is quickly localized. The 
prince/groom is of local provenance, having 
spent his whole life in “our city.” This touch not 
only diverges from the traditional telling of the 
tale, in which the prince who wakes Sleeping 
Beauty comes from a foreign land, but elides 
certain details of the real-life situation: Lena was 
born and raised in the town of Potoki, on the 
other side of the Bridge of Friendship, and now 
has, therefore, Moldovan citizenship. (She is, in 
fact, employed in the mayor’s office illegally, 
registered under the name of a woman with 
Ukrainian citizenship). The official and 
unofficial hurdles that the couple had to clear in 
order to actually get married—as a result of the 
new gravity accorded to this place on the map 
where the Dniester separates Chelnochovsk from 
Potoki—made their lives a post-Soviet 
bureaucratic nightmare for months prior to this 
evening. And yet, nonetheless, Potoki is 
unanimously understood in Chelnochovsk as 
inevitably here, the inescapable other half to the 
inescapable Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre. Also left 
out of the story is the fact that the couple is 

counting the days until they are issued the 
documents that will allow them to leave 
Chelnochovsk for Germany. All of a sudden, in 
the space of this speech, the inbred nature of 
Chelnochovsk, the valley that has hermetically 
sealed in those who haven’t managed to escape 
it, becomes enchanted. 

On the outskirts of Vinnitsa, on our way 
back to Chelnochovsk, after running two red 
lights because Dima simply has failed to notice 
them from the angle at which they are hung, we 
come to a stop before a third one, waiting for the 
right of way. The traffic light consists of the 
usual red, yellow, and green lights descending 
vertically, but the green light at the bottom is 
flanked by two other green lights, forming a row 
of lights joined to the standard column in an 
upside-down T formation. This structure is hung 
high over the right side of the road, so that it is 
virtually invisible to the driver of any vehicle on 
the road. Borya, sitting in the passenger seat and 
craning his neck to make out the signal, wonders 
out loud about the logic of such a roadside 
installation. The question touches off a brief but 
telling lesson in political history. “What do you 
want?” is Dima’s response. “Our ancestors 
were…” Here he pauses for a long moment. 
“Who were those nomads who wandered on the 
land in the time long before Kievan Rus?” he 
asks. “Istorik!” he remarks, mocking himself, a 
history teacher turned auto-parts dealer searching 
the recesses of his memory for the proper name 
of his national forebears. Finally he finds it: 
“Skify,” the Scythians. “Do you know the story 
of the Scythians?” he asks, and embarks on his 
own telling of it:  

The Romans came. They wanted to conquer 
the territory, and so they had to fight the 
Scythians. So they set an appointment to 
meet at a field and do battle. The Scythians 
showed up, but while they were waiting for 
the battle to begin, they caught sight of a 
herd of wild boar. They wanted to eat them, 
so they forgot about the battle, and set off 
after the boar. The Romans understood 
whom they were dealing with, so they went 
off, and left the Scythians alone. They put 
up a few fortresses in the Crimean, and 
went back to Rome. 

We continue on the highway back, its 
two lanes merging into one at certain segments, 
before dividing again into two as it cuts through 
the empty beauty of the fields of the Podolia, 

Jen
Typewritten Text
25



Volume 21, Number 2 

many of which lie barren. (“Nothing grows 
here,” Dima remarks. Nobody cares.”) A few 
kilometers before we reach Chelnochovsk, a 
600-Series Mercedes passes us. “He’s come to 
congratulate Kolya (Mykola Mykolaivich 
Kruchko),” Dima says, and seeing our quizzical 
glances, he adds, “Well, where else could he be 
going, driving a 600-Series Mercedes with Kiev 
plates in this direction? To Vindichany, you 
think?” Not five minutes have passed before a 
Toyota Land Cruiser whizzes past us in the other 
direction. “There goes Burchuk,” Dima says, 
referring to a high-profile legislative candidate 
favored by Kruchko, and later disqualified by the 
regional election commission for filing an 
inaccurate financial report, “That’s his car.” 
“proyikhav po syolam,” he says, switching to a 
Russian satirically sprinkled with Ukrainian 
words, “He drove through the villages. Gave out 
newspaper to the grannies. The grannies had 
something to wrap their eggs in. They voted for 
him, our Skify did. Such is our country.”  

Dima’s political commentary begins at 
a traffic light on an urban periphery, and wends 
its circuitous route through the Scythian 
steppes—a detour of more than two thousand 
years—before it comes to a halt back in the 
present in a nearby village marked by popular 
manipulation and unquestioned poverty (both of 
material conditions and of political imagination 
to hold out for better than a newspaper bribe). In 
so doing, it collapses history, politics, and space 
into an amorality play, endowing local and 
contemporary hopelessness with farther-
reaching, national and primordial roots that are 
inseparable from the land itself. Dima’s social 
commentary is a deeply cynical origin myth in 
which power and powerlessness are scanned on 
and embedded in the landscape. 

Alexei Yurchak has argued that during 
the period of late socialism, cynicism was rooted 
in an understanding of official ideological 
representation as inconsistent with lived 
experience. The result was the cultivation of a 
“pretense misrecognition” that allowed the 
Soviet subject to navigate the incongruities of 
the system and of his own participation in it. 
This pretense misrecognition frequently yielded 
to joking interactions that released “repression 
anxiety” by channeling it into “winks of 
recognition” of this very incongruousness 
(Yurchak 1997). Notably, for Yurchak, this 
cynicism of the “normal” late socialist subject 
did not entail a complete refutation of Soviet 

ideals, but rather, a reflection on the considerable 
gap between those ideals and reality (Yurchak 
2003). According to Yurchak, the central role of 
this ridicule in addressing the “social 
incongruous” was supplanted in the late 1980s 
by the “analytic discourse of glasnost” (Yurchak 
1997). 

And yet, in post-Soviet Chelnochovsk-
na-Dniestre—where an ideological vacuum 
remains in the space where official Soviet 
representations once stood, a space that has been 
filled by the logic of truisms identifying power 
with might—ridicule flourishes. The arbitrary 
and self-serving nature of the distribution of 
power in the town is so thinly whitewashed that 
the violence underlying it shows plainly through. 
In fact, the cloaking of the self-interested 
workings of power in Chelnochovsk, with 
Mykola Mykolaivich Kruchko at the helm, is so 
patently fictive that one often finds it articulated 
in a genre that no functioning adult is expected to 
take at face value—that of fairytale. 
Chelnochovchanye tend to respond in an idiom 
that bears much of the humor found in its Soviet 
counterpart, but little of the equivocality: a 
cynicism of mythic dimensions. This discursive 
genre—a kind of anti-fairytale of a disenchanted 
land—is mythic in both senses of the word: It 
assumes the form of a metaphysical legend and 
the narrative it imparts is unverifiable. In her 
conversations with perestroika-era Muscovites, 
Nancy Ries identified a “conventional inventory 
of generic forms, images, themes, and figurative 
devices” through which people converted their 
acts of persistence in the face of the “complete 
disintegration” of ordinary life into magically 
heroic narratives that she terms “fairytales” (Ries 
1997). In post-Soviet Chelnochovsk, one finds a 
slightly different story—one in which the trope 
of the fairytale mocks the very possibility of the 
heroic or the magical. This idiom expresses a 
sense of powerlessness perceived as so inherent 
to contemporary life in the town that it is 
mapped onto the landscape. 

With Dima at the wheel, we have 
almost completed our journey back from 
Vinnitsa. We have already passed the sign 
demarcating the city limits, and are making our 
way down into the valley of Chelnochovsk-na-
Dniestre. Out here, on the elevated outskirts of 
the town, Dima shifts his chin toward a hill at 
our left. He says he’s proposed to Anya, his wife, 
that they buy that piece of land up there and 
build a house to live in. “Anya would be queen 

Jen
Typewritten Text
26



Volume 21, Number 2 

of the mountain,” he says. “Like the princess on 
the pea (na goroshine), only she’d be princess on 
the mountain (na gore). There, she’d be the most 
authoritative (samaya krutaya) in the town. 
There’s nothing cooler (kruchshe) than that in 
Chelnochovsk. (He’s playing on words here, of 
course, with “krutoi” simultaneously signifying 
both steep and authoritative. Borya joins in: “But 
she wants to be in the center (of the town). She 
wants to be in the Kirov (factory) 
neighborhood.” Dima counters: “She wants to be 
“na Birzhe,” on the ‘Exchange’. We’ll have to 
pitch a tent there.” He is referring to the political, 
social, and symbolic center of the town, 
triangulated by the City Hall on one corner, the 
billiard hall on another, and the “Pizza,” (the 
most popular café, where much of the high and 
low drama of the town gets played out) across 
the street. The Birzha is formed by the nexus of 
those landmarks, and at one particular spot on 
the sidewalk, one can see—at any hour—a 
congregation of “krutiye,” the authoritative men 
in the town associated—marginally or more than 
marginally—with the shady activities 
inseparable from power. We continue our 
descent into the city. As we pull into the center 
of town, Dima is moved again to poetry: 
“Kingdom of plastic bags!” he declares 
Chelnochovsk, with ironic emotion. “We have 
‘American Beauty’ here everyday. The dance of 
the plastic bags! Then, as he parks the car in 
front of the auto-parts store he co-owns with two 
other men from the town he cries out, “Hello, my 
motherland!” 

Dima’s inverted fairytales are perhaps 
extraordinarily eloquent, but they are, 
nevertheless, couched in a genre to which many 
Chelnochovchanye repeatedly turn, to express a 
sense of place that perhaps cannot be expressed 
without great subtlety of humor. The absurdity of 
official fairytales is time and again parodied as 
obscenity, in ingenious spontaneous riffs on the 
genre that invert the attribution of enchantment 
to the valley of Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre. If the 
master of ceremonies’ speech went through the 
motions of endowing the mayor with a power of 
mythic dimensions—a power that cannot be 
uprooted from the very land itself—other 
Chelnochovchanye can be found to endow 
cynicism itself with mythic dimensions, 
sketching an iconography of the absurd that 
begins to account for how it feels to live in 
Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre, Ukraine.  

I would conclude with just one more 
such vivid representation, and let it have the last 
word. The scene is the following: I am at a 
devishnik, an all-female party at Dima and 
Anya’s house to celebrate the their daughter’s 
seventh birthday. The guest of honor has long 
ago gone to bed, and the women still sit at the 
table, drinking, telling stories and jokes, toasting. 
One of the women pronounces a toast. It’s a toast 
about the end of the world, and it goes something 
like this:  

The end of the world is coming to 
Chelnochovsk. A black cloud hangs over 
the city. It moves toward The Big Tent 
(restaurant). Bak! The Big Tent is no more. 
It moves toward Nikolai Dvorets. Bak! 
Nikolai Dvorets is no more. It moves 
toward our window. It peers in, and we are 
sitting here cozily at the table, drinking. So 
I’d like to drink to this: that no matter what 
happens, even the end of the world, we 
don’t give a fuck. 

References  

Bilaniuk, Laada. 2002 . Gender, Language 
Attitudes, and Language Status in 
Ukraine. Language in Society 32(1). 

Burawoy, Michael. 2001. Transition without 
Transformation: Russia’s Involutionary 
Road to Capitalism. East European 
Politics and Societies 15( 2):269-290. 

Golbert, Rebecca. 2001. Language, Nation, and 
State-building in Ukraine: The Jewish 
Response. In: Language, Ethnicity, and 
the State. Vol. 2 (Minority Languages 
in Eastern Europe post-1989). C. C. 
O'Reilly, ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave 
Macmillan. 

Humphrey, Caroline. 1991. Icebergs, Barter, and 
the Mafia in Provincial Russia. 
Anthropology Today 7:8-13. 

Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Conversation 
and Culture during Perestroika. Ithaca: 
Cornell University Press. 

Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism, 
and What Comes Next? Princeton: 
Princeton University Press. 

Yurchak, Alexei. 1997. The Cynical Reason of 
Late Capitalism: Power, Pretense, and 
the Anekdot. Public Culture 9(2):161-
188. 

Jen
Typewritten Text
27



Volume 21, Number 2 

Yurchak, Alexei. 2003. Soviet Hegemony of 
Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It 
Was No More. Comparative Studies in 
Society and History 45(3). 

 Endnotes  

1. Out of concern for those living in the town, 
I have changed the names of many of the 
people and places mentioned here, including 
the name of the paper’s main character—the 
town itself. By any name, however, 
“Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre,” remains a very 
real place in the world, and its place in the 
world is of profound importance for those 
whose lives are located there. I could not, 
therefore, seek to disguise the terrain on 
which “Chelnochovsk” is lived. Rather, since 
this paper is about mappings in and of the 
city of Chelnochovsk-na-Dniestre, I will 
begin by placing the town on the map in a 
rather conventional (if approximate) fashion. 
Chelnochovsk is located in the Southwest of 
Ukraine, at the intersection of a geographical 
and political border where the Dniester River 
divides Ukraine from Moldova. The Bridge 
of Friendship, which has long connected 
Chelnochovsk to its other half, the Moldovan 
town of Potoki, and which was so 
nonchalantly permeable and during the 
Soviet period, is now choked with the social 
and economic charge of international 
crossings. This paper moves on to present 
other maps—visual and verbal—that would 
appear less conventional; it aims, however, to 
explore some of the conventions located in 
those maps. 

2. The verbal exchanges on which this paper 
is based were carried out either in standard 
Russian, or in a highly Russified Ukrainian 
(or, more accurately in this case, a slightly 
Ukrainianized Russian) often called surzhyk. 
For more extended discussions of 
contemporary linguistic negotiations in 
Ukraine, see Bilaniuk 2002 and Golbert 2001 

Jen
Typewritten Text
28