Borderland (4 page)

For Charles

NOTE ON PLACE-NAMES

Place-names are a touchy issue. For simplicity’s sake, I have used Ukrainian names for all towns and cities, including those in Russian-speaking areas, except where an established English-language version exists. Hence Kharkiv rather than Kharkov, Dnieper rather than Dnipro. For any surviving inconsistencies in transliteration, I beg the reader’s forgiveness.

CHRONOLOGY

Mid 800’s
     Scandinavians establish a trade-route along the Dnieper.

988
     Prince Volodymyr baptised in Chersonesus.

1037
     Santa Sofia Cathedral completed.

1240
     Mongol army under Batu Khan captures Kiev.

1362
     Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Algirdas captures Kiev.

1363
     Lithuanian victory over the Mongols at the Battle of Blue Waters.

1386
     Grand Duke Iogaila of Lithuania marries Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and is crowned Polish King.

Early 1400s
     First Cossack outposts established.

1553
     Zaporozhian Sich founded.

1569
     Union of Lublin creates the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

1596
     Union of Brest creates the Uniate church.

1648
     Khmelnystky Rebellion begins.

1654
     Treaty of Pereyaslav. Khmelnytsky accepts Russian protection.

1657–’86
     ‘The Ruin’. War between Russia, Poland, Turks and Cossacks for control of Ukraine.

1686
     ‘Eternal Peace’ between Russia and Poland hands Kiev and Cossack lands east of the Dnieper over to Russian rule.

1687
     Mazeppa appointed Hetman of Russian-ruled Ukraine.

1708
     Swedish army under Charles XII enters Ukraine. Mazeppa declares support for Charles.

1709
     Battle of Poltava. Swedes and Cossacks defeated by Peter the Great.

1773
     First partition of Poland. Galicia comes under Austrian rule.

1774
     Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji ends the Russo-Ottoman war.

1775
     Catherine the Great destroys the Zaporozhian Sich.

1781
     Catherine dissolves the Hetmanate.

1783
     Catherine annexes Crimea.

1795
     Third and final partition of Poland.

1830–’31
     Polish rising.

1840
     Shevchenko’s
Kobzar
published.

1847
     Shevchenko arrested and exiled.

1848
     ‘Springtime of Nations’. Polish risings in Cracow and Lviv. Ukrainians’ ‘Supreme Ruthenian Council’ declares loyalty to the Hapsburgs.

1861
     Elected assemblies created in Vienna and Lviv, with limited Ukrainian representation.

1863–’64
     Polish rising.

1876
     Edict of Ems bans all Ukrainian-language publishing and teaching in the Russian empire.

1881
     Alexander II assassinated by anarchists. Pogroms in Kiev, Odessa and Yelizavetgrad (Kirovohrad).

1890
     First Ukrainian political party formed in Lviv.

1905
     Nicholas II makes democratic concessions in face of strikes and mass demonstrations. Pogroms in Kiev, Odessa, Kherson and Nikolayev (Mykolayiv).

1908
     Ukrainian student assassinates the Polish governor of Galicia.

March 1917
     Nicholas II abdicates. Central Rada formed in Kiev.

November 1917
     (October, old-style Julian calendar) Bolshevik coup in Petrograd (St. Petersburg).

January 1918
     Red Army captures Kiev. Rada proclaims Ukrainian independence and flees.

March 1918
     Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. German army occupies Kiev.

November 1918
     West Ukrainian National Republic declared in Lviv. Ukrainian government flees to Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivsk) in face of simultaneous Polish rising.

December 1918–August 1921
     War between Red, White, Polish and Ukrainian armies, and ‘Cossack’ peasant bands, for control of Ukraine.

1923
     Allies formally recognise Polish sovereignty in Galicia.
Korenizatsiya
launched in Soviet Ukraine.

1929
     ‘Dekulakisation’ and collectivisation begin.

1929–’33
     Up to twelve million ‘kulaks’ deported.

1930
     Ukrainian purges begin. Polish ‘pacification’ campaign in Galicia.

1932–’33
     Up to five million peasants die of starvation in Soviet Ukraine.

1937–’39
     Second wave of purges sweeps the Soviet Union. Up to one million Soviets executed, and up to twelve million sent to camps.

1939
     Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact. Soviet Union occupies Galicia.

June 1941
     Germany invades the Soviet Union. Massacre and deportation of Ukrainian Jews begins.

1942
     Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) formed.

1943–’44
     Soviet army retakes Ukraine.

May 1944
     Crimean Tatars deported.

1947
     Last UPA units in Poland rounded up. Poland’s Ukrainians deported to newly-acquired ex-German lands, and to the Soviet Union.

1954
     Khrushchev hands Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR.

1965–’66
     Arrest and showtrial of Ukrainian ‘sixtiers’.

1972
     Shcherbytsky appointed First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Mass arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia.

1976
     Ukrainian Helsinki Group formed.

1986
     Chernobyl explodes.

1988
     First anti-communist demonstrations in Lviv and Kiev.

1989
     Shcherbytsky sacked. Rukh holds its founding congress. Uniate parishes legalised.

March 1990
     Semi-democratic elections to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet.

September–October 1990
     Mass demonstrations and student hunger strike in Kiev.

October 1990
     Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church legalised.

August 1991
     Attempted coup in Moscow. Ukrainian Supreme Soviet declares independence.

December 1991
     Kravchuk elected president of Ukraine.

January 1994
     Tripartite Agreement with Russia and America commits Ukraine to surrendering its nuclear weapons.

July 1994
     Kuchma elected president.

CHAPTER ONE

But the brightest light of all was the white cross held by the gigantic statue of St Vladimir atop Vladimir hill.

–
Mikhail Bulgakov, 1925

U
KRAINA
is literally translated as ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Being a borderland meant two things. First, Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. ‘Rebellion; Civil War; Pogroms; Famine; Purges; Holocaust’ a friend remarked, flipping through the box of file-cards I assembled while researching this book. ‘Where’s the section on Peace and Prosperity?’ Second, they were left with a tenuous, equivocal sense of national identity.

Though they rebelled at every opportunity, the few occasions on which they did achieve a measure of self-rule – during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1918–20, and towards the end of Nazi occupation – were nasty, brutish, and above all short. Moreover, until very recently Ukraine’s neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland. And many Ukrainians, Russified or Polonised by centuries of foreign domination, thought the same way. With inspiring moments in their schizophrenic history few and far between, and neighbours who refuse to acknowledge the existence of such a thing as ‘Ukrainian’ history in the first place, it is no wonder that Ukrainians are still puzzling out just who they are, and just what sort of place they want their country to be.

The story – Ukraine as borderland, Ukraine as battlefield, Ukraine as newborn state struggling to build itself a national identity – begins in Kiev. When I flew in, on a winter’s night in 1993, the airport baggage hall was ankle-deep in lumpy brown slush. Our suitcases appeared on the back of a Kamaz truck, which dumped them in one large heap, leaving passengers to dig and scramble for their possessions. The road into the city – Ukraine’s only four-lane highway, I found out later – was wrapped in Blitz-like blackness: no street lights, no crash barriers, no white lines. My companions smelt of wet clothes and old food, and carried large, oddly shaped bundles wrapped in string, with pieces of wood for handles. Deposited in a silent square in the middle of an invisible city, I went in search of a telephone box. What I found was a scratched bit of aluminium coping with an ancient Bakelite receiver attached – no instructions, no phone directory, no light. I didn’t have any Ukrainian money either, but miraculously, it turned out not to matter. Inflation had done away with coinage, and Ukraine no longer used the Soviet roubles the phones had been designed for anyway, so now all calls were free. Suddenly things felt a little friendlier, more penetrable – my Ukrainian journey had begun.

Visitors to Kiev usually hate the place, but those who live there nearly always grow to love it. The staircase to my one-room flat might have stunk of urine and rotten cabbage, but outside raggedy black crows swung about in the poplars, shaking gobbets of frozen snow on to the rattling trams below. I hked the cobbled streets with their elaborately stuccoed turn-of-the-century houses, so dilapidated that the city authorities strung netting under the balconies to prevent chunks of plaster falling onto pedestrians’ heads. I liked the hillside parks with their brick paths and rusty wrought-iron pavilions, where teenagers smooched in summer and children in rabbit-fur bonnets tobogganed in winter. I liked the old men playing chess on the benches round the pink-lit fountains on Independence Square, or shouldering home their tackle-boxes after a day’s ice-fishing on the Dnieper. I liked the way the dog-owners promenaded on Sunday mornings, gravely exchanging compliments on their exquisitely trimmed ‘Jacks’ and ‘Johnnys’. I liked the echoey, pigeon-filled covered market, full of peasant women who called you ‘little swallow’ or ‘little sunshine’, and dabbed honey and sour cream onto one’s fist to taste. I liked the couples dancing to an accordion – not for money, just for fun – in the dripping underpasses on Friday evenings. I liked buying posies of snowdrops, wrapped in ivy leaves and tied with green string, from the flower-sellers who appeared outside the metro stops early each spring. And in autumn I liked the bossy
babushki
who, passing on the street, told you to button up your coat and put on a hat, for the first snowfall had come. I even – sign of the true convert – grew to like
salo,
the raw pig-fat, eaten with black bread, salt and garlic, that is the national delicacy and star of a raft of jokes turning on the Ukrainian male’s alleged preference for
salo
over sex.

All the same, Kiev was a melancholy city. Its defining features were failures, absences. Some were obvious: only one supermarket (dollars only), few private cars (six at an intersection counted as a traffic jam), a joke of a postal service (to send a letter, one went to the railway station, and handed it to a friendly face going in the right direction). Others one only felt the force of after a time. With benefits and pensions virtually non-existent, the crudest health care (drugs had to be paid for; doctors wanted bribes), and no insurance (a few private firms had sprung up, but nobody trusted them with their money), Kievans were living lives of a precariousness unknown in the West, destitution never more than an illness or a family quarrel away. It showed in their wiry bodies and pinched, alert, Depression-era faces; the faces of people who get by on cheap vodka and stale cigarettes, and know they have to look after themselves, for nobody else will do it for them.

The absences were physical too. Though better preserved than many ex-Soviet cities, ghosts haunted every corner. Here, an empty synagogue; there, the derelict shell of the once-grand Leipzig Hotel, left to rot by a corrupt city government. The pavement bookstalls sold a heartbreaking little brochure entitled
Lost Architectural Monuments of Kiev,
listing all the churches and monasteries demolished under Stalin – St Michael’s of the Golden Domes, St Basil’s, SS Boris and Gleb’s, St Olga’s, and on and on. With so many gaps, with so much missing, searching out the past required a sort of perverse enthusiasm, an archaeologist’s eye for small clues and empty spaces.

The easiest of Kiev’s pasts to re-create in the imagination is the raucous commercial city of the pre-revolutionary sugar boom. The novelist Aleksandr Kuprin, writing in the 1910s, described a town full of stevedores and pilgrims, Jewish hawkers, German madams, down-at-heel Russian officers, students, card-players, cigar smoke and cheap champagne. Most of Kiev’s surviving historic centre – ponderous opera house, cobbled boulevards and the extraordinary Chimera House, barnacled with frogs, deer and rhinoceroses, that advertised the city’s first cement factory – dates from then, and on summer evenings the streets still smell, as in Kuprin’s day, of ‘dust, lilac and warm stone’; riverboats whistle on the Dnieper and men drink
kvass
out of jam jars at little booths under the chestnut trees. A museum on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the helter-skelter lane that plunges down from Catherine II’s rococo St Andrew’s Church to Contract Square, once the site of a great annual fair, houses an atmospheric ragbag of period ephemera: sepia photographs of uniformed cadets lounging against a studio balustrade, a pair of white suede gloves, a painted umbrella, ivory elephants, a stereoscope, a curlicued shop-till, a velvet opera cloak trimmed with ostrich feathers.

But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.

Kievan Rus’s founders were neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but the same Scandinavians – variously known as Vikings, Varangians, Normans or Norsemen – who conquered Iceland and parts of England, Ireland and France in the ninth and tenth centuries. Their arrival in Slav lands, according to the earliest Rus history, the
Chronicle of Bygone Years,
was by invitation of the quarrelsome tribes scattered along the forest-bound rivers south of the Gulf of Finland:

The
Chronicle
may be overstating the Scandinavians’ importance. Some historians think there were never enough of them to have had much influence; others believe that one of the local tribes, the Polianians, built the foundations of Rus before their arrival. Either way, they came not as rulers but as merchants, along a trade route connecting the Baltic and Black seas via the river Dnieper. Sometime in the eighth century, they built their first outpost on Lake Ladoga, near present-day St Petersburg, and in 830, according to the
Chronicle,
they sailed their dragon-headed longboats downriver to the little wooden settlement atop sandstone bluffs that became the trading centre of Kiev. Byzantium’s Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, writing a memorandum on imperial administration in the tenth century, described boatfuls of slaves, fur, wax and honey floating down the Dnieper tributaries when the ice broke each spring. In Kiev they refitted with sails and oars, and in June they set off in armed convoy for the Black Sea and Constantinople. Hoards of the silver coins the Scandinavians got in return still turn up all the way from Ukraine back to Sweden. It was a dangerous journey, especially so 250 miles South, where a series of rapids meant the boats had to be unloaded and dragged overland, leaving them vulnerable to attack by fierce nomadic Pechenegs. Thus what started out as a commercial venture turned – like the Hudson’s Bay and East India companies in centuries to come – into a political one. Trading posts turned into forts, forts into tribute-collecting points, and tribute-collecting points, by the end of the tenth century, into the largest kingdom in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians. In the process the Scandinavians’ ruling dynasty, the Riuriks, adopted native customs and language, intermarrying with the local clans and Slavicising their names. Helgi became Oleh; Ingwarr, Ihor; Waldemar, Volodymyr.

The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev’s Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium. Etiolated saints, draped in ochre and pink, march in shadowy fresco round the walls; above them a massive Virgin hangs in vivid glass mosaic, alone on a deep gold ground. Her robe, as described by the travel-writer Robert Byron in the 1930s, is of a ‘tint whose radiant singularity no one that has seen it can ever forget . . . a porcelain blue, the blue of harebells or of a Siamese cat’s eyes’.
²
On her feet she wears the crimson slippers of the Byzantine empresses, and she is framed by an inscription taken from Constantinople’s Hagia Sofia: ‘God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be moved; God helps her from morning to morning.’ On the twin staircases leading to an upper gallery, imported Greek craftsmen painted holiday scenes from home – almost the only pictures we have of secular Byzantine life. Four-horse chariots (or the bits of them that survived nineteenth-century overpainting) race up the walls, cheered on from windows and balconies, while outside the hippodrome gates a clown dances and musicians play pipes, cymbals, flute and a bellows-organ.