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Interview with Veronica Khokhlova
Duration:
8 minutes and 16 seconds
Country:
Ukraine
Language:
English
License:
CC - Attribution Non-commercial
Genre:
Video Blog
Producer:
David Sasaki
Director:
David Sasaki
Views:
112
(11
embedded)
Posted by:
oso on Oct 25, 2009
Central and Eastern European Editor for Global Voices
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Video Transcription
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- ♫♫♫♫♫♫
- I'm Veronica Khokhlova
- I'm regional editor for Central and Eastern Europe
- I spent three years total in the states
- and I really miss my friends there I really miss the libraries
- I miss many things, but mainly my friends and the libraries.
- We also lived in St. Petersburg for two years.
- Moscow, St. Petersburg: I have a love-hate relationship with these places.
- Just like with any other big city I've lived in.
- I have a love-hate relationship with my native Kyiv.
- With Istanbul it is only love at this point
- because I'm only going there as a tourist. I've never lived there for longer than a month.
- So I still feel like a welcomed guest there.
- So it is a 100% love relationship.
- Cities where I've lived - Moscow, Kiev, St. Petersburg - it's love-hate.
- But big cities, it is impossible to have any other feeling.
- I first started blogging sometime in 2003
- but then I stopped and then I resumed blogging in 2004
- when the Beslan hostage crisis happened.
- And I just had to write so I started blogging again
- and I kept blogging and no one was reading me
- and then I came to Kyiv for the election to vote
- I lived in St. Petersburg back then.
- I came to Kyiv to vote. I came for two weeks
- and stayed for two months and was blogging what is now known as the Orange Revolution.
- David: Can you give us a brief, 30-second description of what the Orange Revolution was?
- It was the presidential election that was falsified
- and people gathered in Kyiv to protest the violations and to do a re-vote
- and eventually President Yushchenko became the Ukrainian president.
- I like to call it not the Orange Revolution but Maidan
- because I'm sort of allergic to the word 'revolution'
- so I call it Maidan because
- Maidan is Independence Square where the protests took place
- It is called Maidan Nezalezhnosti - "Independence Square"
- When Maidan just started
- I received a message from the New York Times person asking me
- to write an op-ed about what is going on. Like a view from the ground, sort of
- And I wrote an article for them
- which was cool
- David: What did it say?
- It was about the young generation of Ukrainians
- who had much less fear
- and a much better understanding of what they wanted
- and how to achieve that than the previous generations
- The article was not exactly about our politicians
- the politicians that we were electing then
- and who are in power today and who
- did many things that were not very good
- and who have not done many things that they were expected to do
- But I was writing about, you know, my friend
- who was 20-years-old then
- and people like her
- They're still around. They're still around doing great things.
- As opposed to our politicians
- David: How did you first start writing for Global Voices?
- In 2006
- February, 2006. When my daughter was not yet three months old
- That is when I started.
- And it was tough to juggle a new born baby and ...
- but I was still writing anyway, and I was
- reading all those blogs anyway at that time.
- I've always been interested in
- what people are writing about our part of the world, the former Soviet Union.
- So it kind of came very naturally.
- And it is still very interesting.
- David: What are some of your favorite posts or most memorable posts that you have published on Global Voices?
- The first one for some reason that comes to mind
- is not from LiveJournal; it's a translation of
- a woman who lived in Chechnya during the first war
- It is a 2006 translation
- that is the first one that came to mind for some reason.
- It was a very painful thing to translate.
- And very powerful. I don't remember her name.
- But it was about Chechnya. It was a first person account
- of what happened in Chechnya.
- And it was published originally in some forum.
- Not on LiveJournal.
- There is so much stuff. It is really hard to choose.
- David: Are there any stories that started in the blogosphere, or something that you translated, that then got into the mainstream media
- and then became a larger story?
- Well, Georgia ... the Russian-Georgian War
- last year.
- There were several people I translated
- who got into the mainstream media.
- The woman whose nickname is "pepsicola" or something
- I was translating her and then she was doing interviews and everything
- She lived in Porti, the town that got bombed.
- David: Tell me about your Flickr set on parking pictures in Kiev.
- [Laughter] I started it when my daughter was born.
- Where we live
- there are plenty of cars there and everyone at somepoint started parking on the sidewalks.
- And driving on sidewalks. It was impossible to go for walks with her.
- You always had to try to pass a car.
- You had to go out into the road which is dangerous.
- So I started that photoset sort of as a protest
- but also to vent and it didn't change anything
- it only got worse as you may have seen.
- I'm a sporadic blogger now
- Sometimes I write about Ukrainian politics
- sometimes I write about Russian politics
- sometimes I write about my daughter. Travel ... to Istanbul mainly
- because that is the only place where we go now.
- I'm sporadic and I like it.
- David: What do you see as the future of Global Voices five years from now?
- I really hope that we expand.
- I really hope that we continue to do what we're doing
- all of us, all the wonderful people who are working for Global Voices
- and I have only met one of them in person.
- I hope to meet everyone.
- David: Are you going to finally go to a Global Voices Summit?
- Hopefully! Inshallah.
- David: Alright, thank you.
- ♫♫♫♫♫
- You can read Veronica's posts on Global Voices at http://globalvoicesonline.org/author/neeka
- Her personal blog is http://vkokhl.blogspot.com
- Music by Arsenal. Please remix, reuse, distribute, and translate this video.
- ♫♫♫♫♫


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