While visiting a flea market in Kharkiv, I overheard an old woman yelling: “I believed, I believed so much listening to the Voice of America..., I believed...but I was lied to.” As often happens during my visits to Ukraine, I was then thrust into my own Soviet past all over again. This seemingly out of context bit of exchange caught me off guard and illuminated a space of public discourse on fundamental issues of failed utopias and contested historic narratives right in the middle of a small, but lively baraholka.
Baraholkas, or local flea markets, are places often populated by fascinating bric-a-brac items and no less fascinating characters who sell them. As a subject of anthropological fieldwork, a flea market is not just a trading place, it is its own social organism. People who sell and buy there often engage in topics of conversation as varied as the current price of bread, or a political course of an entire nation. Opinions, memories, personal experiences are traded along with old crystal goblets, chummy figurines, spare car tires, clocks, and radios. This priceless human material is included at no extra cost, and is simply part and parcel of social life at a flea market.
Flea markets across Ukraine represent an intensely rich fieldwork, cutting across class, economic status, political affiliation, and even nationality. Born out of necessity to make a living after the difficult post-Soviet transition of the 1990’s, these markets allowed the most vulnerable parts of population to survive food and currency shortages. These days, flea markets continue to exist as a main source of livelihood for older or unemployable citizens, and those who need to supplement their income. Baraholkas are enclaves of both past and present, negotiating public forums for a still ongoing transition form being an old ‘Soviet’ to a new ‘Ukrainian’ citizen.
On the other end of the spectrum of this identity transition, is a mega market like 7km market in Odessa. This place has undergone an intense transformation from a 1990’s make-shift bazaar on the outskirts of the city, to an enormous enterprise, much like a state within a state, funneling over 150,000 visitors and rumored 20 million dollars in daily profit. 7km market, or Sedmoi, is open for retail and wholesale at different times, and represents a whirlwind of commerce. Considered the largest market of its kind, it attracts buyers and sellers from Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Central Asia and Africa among others.
The sheer scale of Sedmoi’s 170 acres illustrates both the enormity of market forces unleashed on the post-Soviet landscape, and its cultural externality to a country that is still untangling from its Soviet past. In contrast to more intimate, neighborly transactions of baraholka, 7km market is vast in the amount of transactions, and oriented towards speculation, profit, and business building. This type of market represents survival of the fittest, not just bare survival.
The differences between operative dynamics of baraholkas and a mega market expose the changing relationships to the objects themselves. A flea market populated with personal belongings, representing specific history, is a place where one can exoticize the past, trade in unwanted memories, or fulfill an old desire for ownership of something. By this very nature baraholka offers a sense of community, a sphere in which a simple old toy or a tarnished bric-a-brac can attain a mythic glow of a relic from a shared past.
The relatively novel mega market offers an entirely different understanding of its objects as stand-ins for the monetary transactions. Almost without exception new, and thus free of character or history, these wholesale objects point away from themselves towards the opportunities for wealth distribution, expansion, and accumulation. A wholesale object represents a desire to replace possession and belonging with material freedom, and the possibilities such freedom offers. Because of these qualities, mega market objects are transient, almost momentary in their nature, appearing and disappearing according to the demands of their marketplace. With their gleaming, shiny surfaces wholesale objects broadcast a vision of a future full of promise, and yet uncertain and out of reach.