The New Wild West of Eastern Europe and Its New Capital of Kiev

I was in a basement disco in Kiev a few nights ago at three o'clock in the morning.

I was in a basement disco in Kiev a few nights ago at three o'clock in the morning.

Anyone who knows me will tell you this is not my natural habitat. I hated dancing and strobe lights in the late 1960s and early 1970s when people not only dressed in primary-coloured clothes and juddered in bright flashing lights, but also wore flared trousers.

I remember going to a very jolly Saturday night party in someone's house in London around 1981. The colours, the lights, the loud pulsing music. It was very well done but, that morning I had been in a studio in Birmingham for the live three-hour mayhem that was the Tiswas children's TV show - and I think it was towards the end of that season's 39-week run.

For people at the party, bright exciting colours, lights and noise were a good thing. I just wanted to stare at a beige wall for three hours. Sensory overload was not excitingly stimulating; it was more of what I had already had all morning, minus the smell of shaving-foam-filled 'custard pies' and whatever the sweet-smelling ingredient of the occasional explosive puffs was.

Which brings me to the basement disco in Kiev at three o'clock in the morning.

Unmarried twenty somethings with disposable incomes way beyond the wild imaginings of their parents at the same age were dancing and drinking their Thursday night away to 0730 on Friday morning

Kiev's streets are busy with Range Rovers and other 4-wheel drive vehicles and occasional nightclubs and 24/7 restaurants.

"It's a cross between the decadent remnants of a Communist state and the Wild West with mobile phones," I told a friend back in the UK via Skype and the free WiFi in my very good room at the trendy Impressa Hotel. "It's young people with money for the first time," I added, knowing what I meant but not knowing if that phrase actually communicated what I meant.

In The West in the mid-to-late 1950s, 'teenagers' first appeared. Before then, people in their late teens had been schoolchildren or students or a living-with-their parents underclass with no money. But then they suddenly had disposable incomes and could afford to build their own lifestyles.

Then, starting in the Swinging Sixties though the Seventies, sexual liberation added a whole testosterone-fuelled extra dimension and (a phrase I hate) the Working Class British kids found they could be as decadent as the upper classes had always been because, suddenly, their parents were going on holiday to Spain not Blackpool and 'Working Class Yoof' was 'in'.

From the early 1990s, post-Soviet Union kids had a theoretical new freedom, though without the money to fuel any real new lifestyles. I worked in Prague in the mid-1990s and saw this after it started but before it fully happened - there, the change I saw seemed to be heavily-fuelled by foreigners and tourists finding an open-minded country with relatively cheap living costs.

A Brit who has been coming to Kiev since around 1992 told me: "You could really see the changes happen from about 1999 onwards."

The old Soviet Union is the new Wild West. Not an original thought, but true nonetheless. I vividly remember being behind a young couple in 1996 who were walking hand-in-hand down Wenceslas Square in Prague. He was wearing a dark jacket which clearly marked him as working for some private security company. Out of the bottom corner of my eye, I saw something bouncing on his right hip as he walked with his left arm round his girlfriend and it was then I saw it was a handgun in a hip holster.

It really was the Wild eastern West.

There was much talk in Prague at that time of the various mafias - German, Italian, Russian - who controlled parts of the city's and country's economy - one mafia ran most of the taxis. There is talk today in Kiev of the mafias and a surprising number of people - taxi drivers, shop assistants et al - without prompting, show extreme verbal dislike of the current President, openly calling him a 'criminal'.

Where all this goes, only time will tell.

I do not know if the testosterone-fuelled mating rituals in that Kiev basement disco are a sign of a new awakening or the last belated gasp of a decadent Europe before the inexorable rise of China.

When I was in Prague in the mid-1990s, it was becoming (with Dublin for Brits) the weekend party capital of Europe. In a recent edition, the Kyiv Post was touting Kiev as the "new stag party capital of world".

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