This is very near the center of town in Kharkov, Ukraine. They use these old trams that are absolutely on the edge of breaking down with every creak and groan.

Here is a block of apartments in Kharkov, Ukraine.

This is the lower floor of the office building in Kharkov, Ukraine. The building holds many companies and Program Ace is on the top floors. Once you are actually into the offices themselves, they are perfectly nice and they have sweet broadband… but the entrance area down below could use a coat of paint or two…

This is a place I passed every day when walking from my apartment to Mike’s apartment while in Ukraine. BTW, they now seem to get pretty agitated when you call it "The Ukraine"… just stick with "Ukraine", and it will avoid you some dirty looks, which are not the good kind of looks to get from Ukrainians.

This is a super cool restaurant in Kharkov. I wish I could have gotten a lot more shots, but when a Russian owner glares at you, it’s generally a good idea to put away your camera.

This is what I see every morning on my daunting egress from our apartment in Kharkov.

This is the little public area near the train station.

The train station was across from my apartment in Kharkov.  I passed it every morning and every night on the way into the office.  It has a class old-Soviet feel and always looked great in the sunset.

When I was in Kharkov, Ukraine, my host drove me up to the Russian border where we visited these mass graves. It was very eerie. This is the site of the Katyn Massacre, where the Red Army executed over 20,000 Polish prisoners, many of whom were senior officers in the military that were captured in 1939.

Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors (including Stefan Kaczmarz); 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. In all, the NKVD executed almost half the Polish officer corps.[1] Altogether, during the massacre the NKVD murdered 14 Polish generals. I got this information (and you can get more) at from the Wikipedia page on the Katyn Massacre.

For some reason, the picture of this gal I put up a few days ago got 4x the hits the my usual pictures in the first 24 hours. I don’t understand why people like looking at this stuff instead of landscapes and strange buildings. So anyway, let them eat cake I say…. here is another.

(just kidding…. of course…. glad you like this series)

I told my brother that I was going to the Ukraine. He warned me that the women there were not pretty - short, fat, and hairy were the three admonitions he passed along. I think Kyle learned everything he knows about East European women from the German swimming team in the 1976 Olympics.

I am in the Ukraine (it’s hard to tell from this picture) for work with a software partner there that has about 160 programmers, artists, animators, and other game-development disciplines. It just so happens that Oleg, CEO of this other company, is a famous photographer in the Ukraine. He has more photography equipment than Hefner and Flynt combined. He also has his own photography studio with enough lights to melt Chernobyl (strange segue to my story about Chernobyl).

Oleg and I talk a lot about photography. I’m more into landscapes and unique finds. He’s more into male/female models and having them do things with props and scenes and shaving cream. He invited me to his studio and Saturday and said, “We get models, zerefore we take some pictures.” I had never worked in a studio like his before, so I gave him a big thumbs up.

We showed up at his studio early and spent an eternity as he showed me every light, every strobe, every remote control, and another eternity looking at aperture and lighting and then having a 250-pound Ukrainian man sit in a chair to get the lighting right… Instead of posting a picture of the 250-pound Ukrainian man, I decided to put up this one of the model.

I only speak a few words of Russian, so I let Oleg do all the talking. We snapped away for a while and I got some interesting shots. I have a bunch more that I will post in coming weeks/months.

I’ve now spent a long time in the Ukraine because we are building some significant software there for our upcoming and super-secret gaming destination, and I’ve made a number of observations.

Since one of my hobbies is economics, it has been very interesting for me to be immersed in a country that is emerging from communism into a form of capitalism with a pinch of kleptocracy/oligarchy chewing away at the fringes during the transition.

I took the first three pictures below from the common areas behind my apartment that I stay in while in Kharkov, Ukraine. The inside of my apartment is very nice, as is the inside of many places throughout Ukraine. The offices up at Program Ace are spotless, pristine, and very HAL-2000-like.

However, every single “common” area in the Ukraine is completely run-down and looks bombed out, forgotten, radiated, and dangerous. In my judgment, this is a vestige from the communist era, when everything was commonly owned and there was no personal property. When things are commonly owned, they almost always fall into disrepair since “altruistic cleaning and maintenance” is a concept that only is heard from the ivory towers of college professors that are inside the theoretical and elitist bubble.

The same thing happened in New York’s Central Park in the late 70’s. It was very much treated in a communist way, where a faceless bureaucracy expected their disconnected staff and an altruistic public too keep Central Park nice, clean, and well maintained. It turned into one of the dirtiest and most unsafe areas in the US. After that, Colombia University did a study and the system changed to one of privatization where people had a sense of ownership and pride in different parts of the park. Today it is one of the best public parks in the world.

Even though apartment buildings are privately owned in Kharkov, the landlords still have the oligarch mentality that there is no real need to maintain and beautify the common areas since competition is not yet in full force. Almost every elevator I entered was very old, with exposed and rusted gears, creaking chains, and a layer of dust collecting since the days of Sputnik. Every stairwell looked like the Germans had used it for target practice in 1943. Every face I saw in those stairwells was morose and untrusting. My walks home in the middle of the night after a long day of work have very little light as I pass from one cloister to another, walking from one group of dark-dressed smoking men quietly grunting to the next.
The final picture is from another stairwell, just outside the old KGB building.

This was shot in the heart of Kharkov. I took it from about 7 angles and I think I like this one the best. I’m just not sure any more… this place looks really cool from every angle.

Kharkov has a Russian old world feeling about it, and nothing shows that better than the Blagovishensky Cathedral in the central part of the city. It’s huge - enormously huge in an imposing Soviet state sanctioned religion kinda way. I did not get a chance to go inside of it, but next trip I will.

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This is the Ministry of Ministries where bureaucrats formed a bureaucracy from where they could administer to other administrations on how to organize organizations, since those were the sort of things that were done in the former Soviet Union.

The Ukraine was certainly an interesting place. Here is a link another set of pictures that I have uploaded so far from there.

This is the front door of the place I stayed in Kharkov. The apartment, up on the fourth floor, was quite nice, but the stairs were in *somewhat* of a state of disrepair. This was located in an older building just a few steps from the old KGB headquarters.