The New Yorker Radio Hour - Masha Gessen on the Quiet in Kyiv

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Masha Gessen is reporting for The New Yorker on the war in Ukraine, which is now in its fourth month. They checked in with David Remnick from Kyiv, which seems almost normal, with “hipsters in cafés” and people riding electric scooters. But the scooters, Gessen noted, are popular because prices have skyrocketed and gasoline is unaffordable. All the talk, meanwhile, is of war crimes—of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. (The Russian government has denied involvement in any war crimes.) And outside the city, in the suburbs, Gessen finds “unimaginable destruction,” comparable to what they saw in Grozny, Chechnya, “after the second war—after they’d had nearly ten years of carpet bombing.” The scale of atrocities, Gessen says, makes any diplomatic compromise over territory impossible for Ukrainians to accept. Plus, the head of the largest flight attendants’ union talks with the staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman about leading her members through turbulent times, with organized labor making a comeback, while unruly passenger behavior is reaching new heights. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Masha Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker who was born in Russia and has been covering that nation and its politics for us for years, up to and including the war in Ukraine. I reached Masha in Kiev last week. Masha, it's good to talk to you. It's good to talk to you, David. You've been visiting Kiev for years and years, and now you're there during wartime. And the streets of Kiev are said to be quiet as opposed to so much of the country in the east and in the south.

What is daily life in Kiev now? Daily life in Kiev, at first glance, is perfectly normal. Cafes are open, hipsters are in the streets, it's sunny, it's beautiful, three, four times a day you hear the air right siren, no one pays at any mind. You dig a little deeper. It's obviously not all so peaceful and so wonderful. There's small things that you notice at first, if you pay attention. There are very few kids. The women with children who were the bulk of the refugees, they haven't returned.

You notice, for example, that the lines of the gas stations are pretty long. The gas is incredibly expensive. And so that sheds a completely different light on all these young people shuttling around on electric scooters, which are, you know, Bolt is working here. People are renting scooters. But part of the reason they're renting scooters is because cabs have come few and far between and private cars are very difficult to use.

So it's this resumption of civilian life that is so much more difficult than life was just three months ago, even if Zerbitt first glance, it looks almost exactly the same. Now, you've also been getting out of town. How do things change? Well, just beyond Kiev, there's just unimaginable destruction. I mean, it's comparable to what I saw, for example, in Grosnia, the capital of Chichnia, after the second war, after they'd had 10 years of carpet bombing. I mean, it's just absolutely devastating. but you've seen all those pictures, right?

What you don't see unless you're here is how you pass from this totally pristine area where everything seems to be perfectly intact into an area that has been completely devastated. What are you hearing in terms of overheard conversations in cafes, restaurants, the streets? Yeah, so what you hear is talk about war. A lot of people, I'm assuming,

are getting together for the first time since they came back. So you hear a lot of people retelling the story of leaving the city, how they got out, when they got out. It's always some sort of dramatic story depending on what people's circumstances were, but it's always dramatic. And then they're not talking about that. They're talking about what missiles the U.S. ascending, where this battalion could have been posted,

should have been posted. The other night, there were these two absolutely beautiful women sitting at the table next to me, and they looked like supermodels. They were completely in total. full makeup the way that only Ukrainian women can be in just, you know, in utter perfection. And then I hear them say, Voucher, Irpeng, right? These places that have become synonymous with just horrific war crimes. People talk about war crimes all the time.

What are they describing? What are the particular acts? Well, people describe the random murder of civilians. People talk about rape. They talk about being robbed. They talk about being held hostage. They talk about torture. They talk about what's happened to them.

They talk about what's happened to their friends and relatives. I mean, the scale is just undigestable. It's not something that the national justice system can digest. It's not something that the international justice system can digest. And it's certainly not something that the human mind and heart can digest. When you talk to people in Kiev, what do they expect is ahead for them? In Kiev, a lot of people refer to the war in the past tense and then catch themselves and say, well, yeah, of course the war is still going on. It's entered that stage of war that Ukrainians are used to, which is war is elsewhere and you know where it is.

Like, you know how to end up at war. It's not, the war is not coming at you or at least not right at this moment. I'm told that it's very different. We're about to travel east and south a little bit, and I'm told that it's. very different in places that are closer to the front. People are afraid to talk to journalists. People are afraid to talk about what happened to them because they're quite convinced that it could happen again.

Recently, Henry Kissinger said at Davos that Ukraine would have to reconcile itself to giving up territory in order to find a peace with Russia. I can only imagine what the reaction to this was in Kiev. Look, every Ukrainian understands that when you say territory, you're talking about the people who live there. And every Ukrainian understands in gory detail what happens to people in territories occupied by Russia. The very suggestion that you could consign millions or even hundreds of thousands or even one or two people willingly to the torture, the rape, the wanton killing, the the humiliation that they have suffered at the hands of the occupiers is, you know, that's just

unthinkable. Masha Gessen, thank you. Be well and be safe. Thank you, David. Masha Gessen in Kiev, and we spoke last week. You can read Masha's reporting at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Sarah Nelson started working as a flight attendant in 1996. She had a job with the United Airlines working out of Boston, where she roomed with other flight attendants. I got an apartment with seven other women because that was the only way we could survive and started my flying career. And about three weeks in, my fellow roommates got their first paycheck.

And I was so excited to get it. And called my bank account was down to $12, I remember, like $12.51 or something like that. So I went into the office and asked somebody, you got to help me. and get my paycheck. So the answer I started to get from the company personnel in the office there in Boston was, well, people get their paychecks at different times for different reasons. We're sure you'll get it next time. And I'm thinking, okay, I remember I'm supposed to watch it, not get upset, not cause a commotion while I'm on probation. I'll try to just a smile while I'm freaking out inside. So it was ramen and meals on the plane until the next pay period. But when that day came,

there was still no check. And so I went straight down into the office and asked, somebody's got to help me. I, again, didn't get my paycheck. And I started to get some of the same answer. You get your paycheck at different times. And I'm like, it's the same rhetoric, and they don't care. They don't see a person standing here in crisis. And the tears started to roll because I felt pretty desperate.

And all of a sudden, I had this tap on the shoulder. And I turned around, and there was someone standing there who I'd never seen before. She looked a lot like me. She was wearing the same uniform. And I do remember her union pins sort of shining on top of her wings. And she was asking me how to spell my name. She handed me a check for $800. And she said, number one, you go take care of yourself.

And number two, you call our union. And I did call our union. I have my paycheck the next day, but I always tell everyone that that was the moment. Sarah Nelson went on to become the president of that union. the Association of Flight Attendance. And the AFA represents some 50,000 workers and nearly 20 airlines. And right now, there's a push to unionize Delta's flight attendants.

Nelson is a frequent presence on Capitol Hill. And her name often comes up as a candidate to head the AFL-CIO. Staff writer Jennifer Gonerman recently profiled Sarah Nelson for the New Yorker. One of the first things that the public is usually very surprised to hear is that flight attendants are a highly unionized.

job. Our union has been in place since 1945 when we first organized at United Airlines and got our first contract in 1946. Looking back on your early days as a flight attendant as a young woman, what were the conditions like for you? Did you feel sexually harassed when you were working? Did you ever feel groped by a passenger? Was there much of the kind of passenger violence that we read about now going on, the so-called unruly passengers? What was it like for you as a young woman? It was, it was, passengers thought that there was hands on all the time. You'd be walking down the aisle, they'd get your attention by touching your rear end. And so some of it was sort of not, it didn't feel violent necessarily.

It certainly was not something that I experienced anywhere else. But there were also times when it was, you know, it did feel a little bit more violent and intrusive. and intentional, like the guy who walked up behind me and while I was setting up the galley before we took off. And he ran his hand along the outside of my hip and right down almost around my rear end and said, what? No girdle? How can you look this good in your uniform without a girdle? And, you know, it was just, it was everywhere. I mean, it was everywhere all day long.

And it wasn't that much earlier in the career of flight attendants that airlines were using us as a marketing tool. We were totally objectified, and that's the way that we were treated. Did you have any recourse in a situation like that? What were you to do? Never had anything like that happened to me before. No one had ever sort of warned me something like that might happen. But ultimately, you rest on, no, no one's going to care. No one's going to do anything about this. There's no way this guy's going to be taken off the flight. So you try to just protect yourself and then tell the rest of your crew, hey, watch out for Hansy and 5F, you know.

Hansy and 5F? Yeah. And later I found out that that continued to persist. And, you know, anyway, that was hard when the Me Too movement broke and all of a sudden I was the president overseeing a group of people who were continuing to live like nobody's going to do anything about this, and it's something we just have to live with. You mentioned the Me Too movement. Did you start hearing reports from your members about stories like this,

past and present, or what did it unleash within the world of flight attendants and the conversations that started happening? Well, when the Me Too movement broke, I realized, wow, well, first of all, they're talking about, like, women are sticking together, holding each other up, And all of a sudden, we really get to tell our stories. This is new. People care about this and they're going to listen to it and they're going to take it seriously. Wow.

We really have a chance to push forward. And so I actually called my communication staff in and I said, get ready. The phone's going to start ringing in there. Like, what do you mean? And I said, well, they're going to be looking for stories and workplaces. And the first thing they're going to do is say, who should we call about who has probably experienced sexism in the workplace? and they're going to think of flight attendants. And they were like, huh?

And sure enough, an hour later, the phone started ringing. In tonight's signature segment, NewsHour Weekends Megan Thompson reports on the troubling stories of harassment and abuse taking place at 30,000 feet, where there's often nowhere to turn. We pushed really hard in that moment and actually called on the industry to denounce the sexist past, to lift up our professions of safety professionals and demand. that there be zero tolerance at every airline for any kind of this behavior so that it would send a message to everyone, whether they were in management levels or in the flight deck, or to flight attendants themselves that they could report this and they would be safe and it would be taken

seriously by the airlines. And only three airlines stepped. I mean, I have to say three airlines did step up and do it. You could say it that way or only three airlines stepped up. And do you have any sense of how things have changed or not changed in the year since the Me Too? movement gains traction. I mean, since you did your survey and going around to various rooms, has anything gotten better? I think that what has gotten better is that more people believe that this will be taken seriously. We've been able to get the FAA to talk about it and take it seriously. We've had legislation passed that increased the fines for this kind of behavior. We got training for flight attempts to recognize and report human trafficking, which in a lot of ways

was sort of the same kind of lane about identifying that this is a unique crime and you have to not only recognize the crime. It's one thing if someone's punched in the face, you deal with the physical impact of that and you know how to take care of someone at that point. Sometimes you need some training in how to support the victim in a sexual harassment or assault case. And I think what has really changed is that in doing all of this and raising all of these issues, we've been able to actually change the way that the public sees us and talks about these issues. And we started creating a foundation where flight attendants and our union could be seen as powerful. A man is now banned from American airline planes after he allegedly attacked a flight attendant breaking her nose.

The flight from New York to John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana. Last year, 2021, there seemed to be an endless stream of stories about passengers, officially known as unruly passengers, but that obviously understates the problem. You know, violence on airplanes, passengers acting up, refusing to wear a mask, flight attendants sometimes even being injured. And oftentimes it seemed like alcohol was part of the story. Has that situation improved this year? It has not improved yet.

But we've done a lot of work, a lot of PSAs with the FAA communicating the consequences for acting like this. The FAA is strictly enforcing a zero-tolerance policy toward passengers who cause disturbances on flights or fail to obey flight crew instructions. They know from studying these reports that this is more than about masks. A lot of people were driving the idea that that would cut down on the conflict. We know, and the people on the inside looking at the reports, know that that's just not the case. We've got a lot more work to do to get things under control and make sure that people don't think that when you get on a plane, you get to punch the flight crew.

Back in early April, after the Amazon Labor Union prevailed in Staten Island, you said publicly that you thought the next big labor fight was going to be at Delta Airlines, where your union has been working with flight attendants to organize. How's that fight going? Can you give us an update on what's been happening? Off and on, Delta flight attendants have been trying to get a union for 20 years. The last time there was an election was 2010, and flight attendants narrowly lost. The idea that workers can't win was permeating not just at Delta, but across the labor movement, across all industries. So right now, as there's this resurgence in working people standing up and, feeling like the corporate elite have taken way more than their fair share. That's the general sentiment.

And now that there's all this excitement and we have all these, frankly, younger workers driving this who were not even here for the prior election, there's a lot of momentum. And I believe that the Delta flight attendants are going to file for an election this year. and it's going to be enormous. This is the biggest organizing campaign in one place going on anywhere. Certainly Chris Smalls is talking about organizing all of Amazon, so a half million workers. But this would be one election for almost 24,000 workers

at a company that's based in the South, and it's a big deal. Are they paying close attention to what's going on in Amazon, and how do you think that's affecting their approach? I mean, listen, union, is in the water. All these news outlets for years had stripped away their labor reporting and labor reporters. And so now you've got people who are tech reporters and health reporters, education reporters, and everything else doing labor reporting because it's the hot thing, right?

I mean, that used to be really, really difficult to talk about the union bust. And you almost trying not to do it. It was talked about in terms of inoculation. You got an in people against all the union busting that will happen. And what's happening now is that you see at Starbucks and Amazon is these young kids are saying right out front, like, give us our fair shot. We get free rein to decide here. And they're using the union busting to expose the companies. And they're actually using it as a part of the campaign to build momentum. I mean, you know, Chris Small's, the fact that Amazon went out and arrested him for giving food to other Amazon workers is, That all led to a win because people are seeing how far are these companies that have billions of dollars in profits will go to try to keep workers down and keep us from being able to get our fair share.

Sarah, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to speak with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I always enjoyed talking with you. That's Sarah Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendance. She spoke with Jennifer Gonerman, a staff writer at the New York. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Peter Bresnan, Ave Carreou, Breita Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele. with help from Alison McAdam,

David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Meng Fei-Cin. We had additional help this week from Michael May. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.