In the middle of the last Saturday of January, hundreds of people congregated on the frozen Dnipro River for a rave. Under the high noon sun, the world was white: the tall apartment blocks lining the riverbank, the unplowed boardwalk and the flat, snow-covered expanse of ice.
With a citywide curfew in effect, parties in Kyiv have long moved to daytime hours, and with much of the city lacking light and heat, it makes sense to gather outdoors. So adults of different ages, dressed in puffy coats of every color, baggy designer sweatpants and chunky Uggs, had gathered, though there wasn’t much dancing, perhaps because the battery-powered speakers weren’t quite strong enough to blast music through the open air. There was, however, much mingling, some barbecuing, a lot of mulled wine and at least one book burning, of a Russian-language young-adult novel. Kids in snow pants slid down the steep, iced-over bank of the river; when they skidded across the ice, they knocked over a few adults.
