Kiev in the spotlight

Master Juan Martínez was there, in Kiev. He was a flamenco dancer, from Burgos, he made a living with Sole, his wife, working in cabarets. He was very successful at times; Others had a pretty bad time. A part of his story was told by that enormous journalist who was Manuel Chaves Nogales. Huge journalist and enormous writer, a great chronicler of that Spain that emerged from the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, conquered the Republic and ended up mired in a tragic Civil War. He gave the floor to maestro Juan Martínez so that he could recall the episodes in which he had been involved since one fine day in 1914 he left the streets of Montmartre, where he had triumphed in places as famous as the Moulin Rouge, and went to Constantinople and from there to Russia, from where he would not leave until 1921. The Great War broke out immediately,and both he and his wife were pushed to a life of wandering, to jump from the bush, to survive as it was. They arrived in Kiev for the first time around October 1916, when the Tsar passed by and was cheered in the streets. Soon he would go down in history.

The peculiar literary artifact that Chaves Nogales conceived in

allows him to place that cabaret dancer at the appropriate moment in those places where something decisive was happening.

He was in St. Petersburg, for example, when the Winter Palace was taken: “I found myself in the middle of the street dressed in shorts, with a velvet jacket and toggles.

A purposeful suit for a revolution.”

The book thus collects a cataract of events told by a guy who lives on the margins, who plays the guitar and dances, who confesses that he has no political ideas and who is swept away by the tidal wave of a tumultuous time.

And Kiev, in those pages, is one of the places that suffers most intensely from the scourges of violence and war.

At this time, it is possible that many people in Kiev are worried about the threatening presence of Russian troops on the borders of Ukraine and with a thousand and one fears about the possibility of a war.

The one Juan Martínez tells is the one waged by the Reds against the Whites shortly after the revolution.

The relevant thing about his testimony is that it is what an ordinary man does, who knows little about geopolitical interests and who above all is interested in getting out of that horror alive.

One day he discovers that Kiev is the paradise of the bourgeoisie, and another he has the impression that its inhabitants have “disguised themselves as beggars as if obeying a slogan”.

There are times when he waves the tsarist imperial flag and other times when he waves the red flag.

It is not known what Putin will do, if he will dare to provoke a conflict in Ukraine or if he will try another type of strategy, less damaging to human lives.

The threat that is there, in any case, is that of war.

And it is convenient to remember what that Juan Martínez who was there said.

“One believes that dying is more complicated and difficult.

He imagines executions as something terrible and solemn.

There's no such thing".

Then he says that "the Bolsheviks killed, simply, because they believed that it was necessary to kill, without attaching any importance to it."

The whites and the greens and the blacks did the same.

When a war starts, life is worth nothing.

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