The “Treasures” of Mezhyhirya
Alisa Lozhkina

When Alexei Navalny's investigation of Putin's palace appeared in Russia in 2021, my old wounds started aching. I remembered how, in February 2014, I had been in a similar palace, the legendary Mezhyhirya of Viktor Yanukovych. It all happened almost by accident. On a day when Kyiv was celebrating the victory of the revolution and simultaneously mourning the dead on the Maidan, my friend artist Alexander Roytburd and I were sitting in the revolutionary stronghold of the intelligentsia, the Arbekina Cafe. A famous journalist called me and said that the self-defense of the Maidan1 found some countless treasures in the Mezhyhirya residence, from where our hapless president has just escaped. They said they urgently needed museum workers to find out what was going on there. I had with me a convincing credentials of the deputy director of Mystetskyi Arsenal. We hopped in the car with Andrii Fedoriv, who was also eager to look at the golden toilet, and enthusiastically drove to the dictator's palace, which only yesterday used to be the most guarded and inaccessible place in the country.

We arrived at dusk. Our self-defense guards met us at the gate, and handed us over to some other people. They put us in a van and took us for a roundabout route through a huge area of land to the garages where the "treasures" had been found. No one knew where they were, and the van wandered through a dark maze of alleys. Along the way we were constantly confused with someone and periodically were asked: "Are you divers? Here the Dnieper is already close, soon you can dive" (in Mezhyhirya they found some drowned documents,

which had to be raised urgently). "No, we are not divers, we are museum workers, take us where our help is needed!" "Fine, fine." In another five minutes and after five more laps around the park: "Who are you people? Are you here to feed the dogs? Shall we bring out the Alabai dogs?". In the end, we still got into Ali Baba's cave, which was a luxury garage with a huge collection of retro cars.

At the entrance, a completely insane and very selfless self-defender almost killed me with a sapper blade, not realizing that I was not a burglar, but the very representative of the museum community, with whom he was so eager to meet. There was a truck full of valuables and antiques in the garage. This stuff, apparently, didn't fit into the helicopter in which Yanukovych fled the country. A quick look around showed that there were ancient icons, manuscripts, and other important artifacts, piled on top of all sorts of gold-plated stuff, candelabras, crocodile skins, and some totally grotesque stuffed cats. In other parts of the compound, according to the self-defense groups, "valuable paintings" were discovered on the walls.

Credit must be given to the people who found this truckload of goods. They were worried about the threat of looting and from the first minute they said, "Get it all out of here right away!" I was taken aback, but I tried to explain to them that it was illegal and that I couldn't just take a truckload of icons from someone else's house. Even though the president had escaped and I had a museum credential. I told them they should wait a while and guard all the valuables until the new government came in. Yes, back then there was a naïve belief that the new government was about to come and sort things out. But the wait dragged on. Either the authorities couldn't care less or they all understood in their hearts that they all had the same palaces and same “treasures” in their anamnesis...

To make the long story short, we left the first day without seeing either a golden loaf or a golden toilet. I was politely offered to spend the night in a "tea house" where Putin himself allegedly stayed, but I didn't take the risk. To be honest, it seemed that this merry episode was the end of my participation in the rescue of the Tsar's treasures. A few days later, however, the same self-defense fighters called: "Have you forgotten about us? Mezhyhirya has already been nationalized by the Verkhovna Rada2, but there is still nobody from the authorities. We are sitting and waiting for the valuables to be taken away and given to a museum!" My conscience wouldn't let me send them away, so I went to Mezhyhirya again, and then I gathered my colleagues, under the aegis of the international organization Blue Shield and UNESCO, to professionally transfer the valuable artifacts to the museum. Thus for a few weeks I was a participant of absolutely incredible events.

Much has been written about the aesthetics of this strange estate, which combines the coziness of a hut, the tense atmosphere of a police residence and the luxury of rococo style. "Yokeloco" - as my colleagues and I then jokingly called this wild eclecticism. To declare an intention to evacuate valuables and to do so are two big differences. In a situation where a huge multi-billion-dollar palace was under the control of various self-defense groups and sometimes just random people, it was not an easy task. But we joined forces with several central museums and as a small group of women tried to do everything in our power so that the Ukrainian revolution would not be talked about as a triumph of looting. Yes, at that time these things seemed more important than threats and risks. But the authorities still did not appear in Mezhyhirya. Thus for a while we, a few ordinary museum employees, turned out to be the only representatives of order and state in this mini-universe, where the inhabitants of the main house were at enmity with those who guarded the SPA and the swimming pool, and even the garages on each floor had their own authorities. Everything of value that our special smog-organized emergency committee managed to discover, we centralized by inventory to the museum. And later Alexander Roytburd and I used this material to make an exhibition
The Codeх of Mezhyhirya at the National Museum of Art. https://artukraine.com.ua/eng/a/inventory-of-a-dictator/

Then, in 2014, I realized almost immediately that these events at Mezhyhirya had to be documented. I had the ambition of an aspiring cinematographer, so I invited camerawoman Katya Gutsol. One more woman joined our spontaneous feminist regiment and we started shooting a film. Or the film began to shoot us. Initially I had planned that it would be a film about our heroic adventures of saving valuable paintings, but gradually the focus shifted. I realized that I wasn't as interested in the treasures and all the grotesque luxury. The most important thing in the whole experience for me personally was the absurd situation itself, where it was as if we were playing the omens of the capture of the Winter Palace, and also the people who called us to help. Svitlana and Askold were the most beautiful revolutionary couple, people who fell in love with each other on the Maidan and fought selflessly to muse valuables from Yanukovych's collection. Absolutely cinematic owner of all the keys to the palace, a man and an embodiment of a revolutionary spirit nicknamed Petro the Ghost. The good villain Ivan. I will never forget them. And the billion-dollar Mezhyhirya, which with every day turned into a terrible temptation for all the revolutionaries who found themselves there.

I did not make a beautiful patriotic film. The people I filmed are wandering around a huge, empty palace, almost compulsively discussing possible theft. They don't quite fit the idea of classic heroes. But they are young, naive, beautiful, and not at all to blame for the fact that they are far from being in a fairy tale, but in some strange, scary parable about how an enchanted house tries to change every person who happens to be in it.

Mezhyhirya, in a sense, is a symbol of our entire country on the eve of the revolution, when corruption and lawlessness became so deep and pervasive that it simply entered the fabric of reality and one big invisible Yanukovich spilled into the air we breathed. But Mezhigorie is also a warning for the future. An enchanted house can change and enchant the bravest hero. Even the best people in the meat grinder of our government risk turning into scum and thieves.
"Once here, I began to understand why he held on to it all so much," says a young student in the film. She guarded the manor's main building, the luxurious Honka Hut, in the early days after its capture. Charming girl, pure angel. And was the owner of this house such a super- horrible person when he was at home with his loved ones? I don't know, I didn't see any chilling signs of domestic crime. The strangest objects that caught my eye were a tambourine in the bedroom (yes, it awakens the imagination) and a catalog of the revolutionary artist Serhii Poyarkov with a nice donation inscription. Yes, and also very scary big pictures of dogs in cages in an animal shelter, hung right next to each other all around the room of the main princess of this house - the minor daughter of Yanukovych's civilian wife. But on the whole, a normal house, one can live in it.

The characters in my film talk a lot about unsightly things. They speak about their temptations and the struggle against them. They are not all angels, yes. Why was all this to be filmed? It seemed to me at the time to be the most important thing. Maybe I, too, was possessed by the demons of that cursed house. And does this mean that the revolution was a mistake? For me the answer is obvious - it was inevitable. And it will happen again, and again, if we do not drive the curse of irresponsibility and kleptocracy out of us. In every square millimeter of the Mezhyhirya there was corruption. This crazy eclecticism, these mountains of gold-plated nonsense, Potemkin village. It concealed the savagery and backwardness of a man who was a product of the Ukrainian 1990s and 2000s, with all the oligarchs, glamour and the seemingly bottomless resources of the country, which they so impudently plundered. Even in the absence of a master, this house, like Leviathan, was almost instantly consuming and spitting out the naive souls that were there desecrated.

One day a miracle happened in Ukraine, a small but bright anomaly, when a huge number of people suddenly wanted to be better. Unfortunately, in Mezhyhirya these dreams of a different Ukraine almost immediately faced a reality check. I did not manage to make my dream movie about it. A large part of the footage was stolen along with my computer that same spring. With Artem Stretovich's help, I used what was left to edit a rough cut almost immediately at the end of the summer of 2014. I tried to show it to someone, but in the wave of post-revolutionary euphoria these reflections on the existential nature of Ukrainian kleptocracy were clearly out of place. And then the war began. Many of the movie's characters had gone to the frontline, and jokes were no longer welcome. I became afraid that I could offend someone by dispelling the illusion of a sugary world with no undertones. I was afraid that this film, which I was making for a Ukrainian audience and therefore allowed myself to be critical and ruthless, might become a "useful idiot" for Russian propaganda.

Many years have passed since then. Many wounds still hurt, and new ones have been added to them. Talking about this subject still makes me uncomfortable, but I think it is necessary. As I rewatched the film, I thought that if I was editing it today I would make it much shorter and probably would change many things. But this film, in this version of the montage, remains in its time and speaks to what was acutely disturbing to both me and my characters at the time.
I very much hope that Belarusian and Russian revolutionaries and filmmakers, when they carry their dictators out of their palaces on pitchforks, will make better, more sublime movies about it. And of course, I wish all future revolutionaries to avoid such temptations as Mezhyhirya. In the meantime, I decided, purely as a memento or in case anyone is interested, to share a link to a film that has been sitting on a shelf for many years. It is already, you could say, an archival vintage. I haven't touched the material since September 2014. The film itself, of course, is a bit long, as is this text, and not perfect. But it is a living and honest glimpse of reality. Or rather, that corner of it which was revealed to me at that time in Mezhyhirya. At that time I also made up a brief annotation of the documentary:

If it's Yanukovych you're searching for, don't look at Mezhyhirya. Look inside yourself.