Borderland (18 page)

OUN’s response was an assassination campaign. In the early 1930s OUN killed dozens of Polish policemen and officials, as well as several prominent Ukrainian moderates. Its best-known victim was Bronislaw Pieracki, the interior minister responsible for the outrages in Galicia. Though OUN leaders were eventually rounded up and imprisoned, the organisation continued to expand right up to the Second World War, when it formed the basis of the Ukrainian partisan army.

OUN’s only direct descendant in contemporary Ukrainian politics is the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), a small neo-Nazi paramilitary group which sent volunteers to fight against the Russians in the Moldovan and Georgian civil wars. In December 1993, just after Vladimir Zhirinovsky shocked the world in Russia’s first free parliamentary elections, my editor told me to go and find out more about them. Was neo-fascism, he wanted to know, about to sweep Ukraine too?

UNA’s headquarters happened to be just around the corner from my flat, in a shabby basement at the end of a boarded-up cul-de-sac. In the mornings, its khaki-clad devotees could be spotted queueing, rather self-consciously, amongs the shuffling pensioners outside the local bread shop. My interview, with the second-in-command of UNA’S political wing, went like a dream. Dressed in black polo-neck, fatigues and army boots, he delivered the requisite tirade on Ukrainian cultural supremacy and Russian and American ‘diabolism’. Saracens came into it, so did Nostradamus. By trying to persuade Ukraine to give up its nuclear missiles, the West was ‘going in the direction of a third world war’. A Cossack mace sat in a corner, and a picture of the partisan leader Stepan Bandera hung, slightly askew, on the wall, next to a calendar from the Dniproflot riverboat company. I duly mustered my quotes and wrote my piece. That the Ukrainians should swing to the extreme right, I opined, was not only possible but ‘very likely’. Prices were doubling every month, factories were closing right and left, and fuel shortages had doused the eternal flames on the war memorials. All the Weimar ingredients, in short, were there.

My Ukrainian friends read the piece and got cross. I had got things completely out of proportion, they said. UNA was a tiny group, never likely to get anywhere, and they were fed up with people like me taking down its pathetic ravings and splashing them all over the Western press. Those excitable Russians might vote for a clown like Zhirinovsky, but Ukrainians were a sensible lot who knew how to keep their feet on the ground. They were right. In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of spring 1994, campaigning under the priceless slogan ‘Vote for us and you’ll never have to vote again’, UNA won three out of 450 seats, and quietly dropped out of the news. I had learned my lesson in one of Ukraine’s most enduring characteristics – pragmatism.

Western Ukraine produced four great writers between the wars: von Rezzori, Paul Celan, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schulz. Von Rezzori and Celan both grew up in Chernivtsi, Roth and Schulz in small towns in Polish-ruled Galicia. Von Rezzori was Austrian; Celan (born Paul Antschel), Roth and Schulz all Jews. Except for von Rezzori, still mixing with the literati in Italy, they all led tragic lives. Roth died a penniless alcoholic at a café table in Paris. Celan’s parents were both killed by the Nazis; haunted by survivors’ guilt, he threw himself into the Seine. Schulz, having just started being published when war broke out, was shot dead by an SS officer as he walked home with a loaf of bread.

Though all save Schulz lived most of their lives abroad, none stopped writing about the strange, indefinite borderlands in which they grew up. Their work is linked by a sense of limbo and disorientation – not the disorientation of exiles, but of people whose own homeland has no fixed identity. In his wonderful novel
The Radetzky March,
Roth turns Galicia into a literal and metaphorical swamp: ‘Any stranger coming into this region was doomed to gradual decay. No one was as strong as the swamp. No one could hold out against the borderland.’
²⁴
In Schulz’s surreal Drohobycz, pots and pans fly about the room, men turn into doorbells and cockroaches, and comets descend chimneys from green, millennial skies. His characters wander about in a timeless, somnambulant daze:

What has cut the town from its moorings is the passing of the Hapsburg empire, an empire which ‘squared the world like paper . . . held it within procedural bounds, and insured it against derailment into things unforeseen, adventurous, or simply unpredictable’.
²⁶
Even Celan, born two years after Austro-Hun-gary’s collapse, called himself a ‘posthumous Kakanier’, after the Hapsburgs’ omnipresent
K & K.
In von Rezzori’s Tcherno-pol, similarly lit by the ‘sunset glow of the sunken dual monarchy’, Hapsburg certainties have been replaced with cynicism, with a ruthless appreciation of the grotesque. His novel
The Hussar
has an impossibly correct Austrian, a left-over from the old regime, quixotically defending his nymphomaniac sister-in-law’s honour by fighting a series of duels. The incredulous city authorities duly commit him to an insane asylum:

One last magnificently Rezzori-esque figure from the pre-war borderlands deserves mention – Jan Ludvik Hoch. Hoch was born in 1923 in Slatinske Doly (now Velyky Bychkiv), a muddy little town wedged between the Carpathians and the river Tisza in what was once Czechoslovakia and is now Transcarpathian Ukraine. It had a main street, two wooden synagogues, a few shops, one bar and five cars. It didn’t need a cemetery, jokers said, because everyone either emigrated or ended up on the gallows.

On birth, Jan had been called Abraham, but when the birth was registered at the town hall an official insisted that the baby take a Czech name. His father was a woodcutter and cattle-dealer, and probably, like the rest of the town, a part-time smuggler, ferrying shoes and clothing across the Tisza to Romania in exchange for food and alcohol. The family lived in a two-room cottage with its own wooden verandah and well but no oven; instead dough was sent to the communal bakery. The seven children shared beds and shoes, and every year gypsies cleared out the pit below the outdoor privy and spread its contents on the vegetable patch in the yard. Jan wore a skullcap and long Hasidic curls, and learned to read and write in Hebrew at the local
yeshiva.
When war broke out he reinvented himself. He cut off his hair, took the train to Budapest, and joined – it is unclear quite when or where – the Czech Legion. The Legion took him from Palestine to Marseilles to Liverpool, and he ended the war a much-decorated captain in the British army. When he took British nationality, it was under a name chosen by his brigadier – Robert Maxwell.

One blazing Sunday afternoon forty-five years later I interviewed Maxwell on the roof of the London headquarters of his publishing empire. A helicopter gleamed on the Astroturf, and a butler in striped trousers brought up tea things on a tray. Dressed in a scarlet silk shirt that bulged like a spinnaker-sail, he was the fattest and most bombastic man I had ever seen. The lies he told about his business (the subject of the interview was the launch of the
European
) were transparent, superb, regal in their scope and shamelessness. Eighteen months later, as his companies crumbled around him, he vanished over the side of his motor-yacht into the Mediterranean. Enigmatic to the last, he was another true son of the somewhere in the middle of nowhere that was pre-war borderland Ukraine.

CHAPTER SIX

The decree required that the peasants of the
Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to
death by starvation, put to death along with
their little children.

–
Vasiliy Grossman, 1955

M
ARIA
P
AVLIVNA
K
URYNO
, crabbed and shrunken as a Pompeii mummy, has lived in Matussiv all her life. Her cottage has two rooms and a clay floor and smells of horse. On the wall, papered with mismatched offcuts stuck on with drawing-pins, hangs a photograph of her husband, black-bordered and framed in tin foil. He disappeared fifty years ago, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Now Maria spends her days on the warm ledge above the clay stove, dozing or watching the television that stands beneath the icons in the corner. Her daughter and granddaughter are there too – a stout middle-aged woman in a
muzhik
’s padded jacket, and a wide-eyed little girl who chews the end of her blonde pony-tail and ducks her head when we try to take a photograph. It takes a while to make ourselves understood.

‘Babka, there’s someone to see you, a foreigner, from
Angliya.
’

‘Is she really an English girl – really, really foreign? You mustn’t photograph me – look at me, I look like a monkey! I read somewhere that Ukraine borders England . . .’

‘And this one’s from
Kanada.
’

‘From
Amerika
!’

Roma shrugs her shoulders.

‘Yes, from
Amerika
!’

Maria wears a scarf over her yellow-white hair and a nylon dress held together with safety-pins. As she talks she crosses herself again and again. She was twelve years old when ‘Nicholas’s war’ began and fifteen at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. She can remember reaping corn with her sisters in her family’s one-and-a-half-acre field, while the daughters of the local big house rode round on horseback. ‘You’d cut five sheaves, keep one, and the other four would go to the Lopukhins,’ she says. ‘But it wasn’t so bad – at least they paid.’ Neighbours worked in the local beet refinery, owned by the Brodskys, the Jewish sugar magnates who endowed, among many other good works, the Bessarabka covered market in Kiev. The village had twice as many inhabitants then, and real shops where you could actually buy things: ‘Jewish
magazinchiki.
You could say – bring a bag of flour, and they would bring white or brown, right to your house, whatever you wanted.’

After the Revolution, Maria’s memory gets muddled.
Bandyty
came and took people away – to the North ‘where they built a canal, poor people’, or to the woods, where they were shot and buried in pits. When was this? Who was doing the shooting? ‘Ah, they were just bandits – such bandits.’

Matussiv’s undoing, like that of thousands of other villages in central and eastern Ukraine, was not war or revolution but collectivisation, and the massive famine – the ‘Great Hunger’ – which followed it. Finding Ukrainians who are willing and able to talk about the famine is surprisingly hard. The younger generations have been told little about it by their parents and grandparents, for fear that such talk might compromise their careers, even their lives. ‘It just wasn’t something we talked about in our family’ was a typical comment from Kiev friends. The old, who remember the famine at first-hand, are dying off fast, and do not like confiding in strangers.

My problem was solved by my interpreter, Sergey Maksimov. A gentle, bearded man in his early forties, he was grotesquely overqualified for his job. He had written a thesis on ‘The Use of Dactyl Markers in British Legal Language’ at Birmingham University, could read manuscripts in ancient Goth, and knew the whereabouts of every Scythian gravemound and ruined monastery in the country. But his teaching post at the Foreign Languages Institute only paid twenty dollars a month, so he was happy to spend hours with me in parliament translating dull debates. His lifeline – the place where he went to croon John Lennon and contemplate life – was his dacha at Lukovytsya, a village a couple of hours down the Dnieper by hydrofoil. His neighbour Hanna Hrytsay was a proper villager, not a
dachnik,
and would be happy to talk.

A spry, scrubbed old woman with pink cheeks and silver hair done up in a bun, Hanna looked as though she had stepped straight out of a fairy-tale. The whitewashed walls of her cottage were festooned with scythes, wicker baskets, enamel pots, old cartwheels and useful bits of rope and leather. Every inch of the half-acre plot behind was covered with immaculate rows of onions, sweetcorn, potato-plants and tomatoes. One small barn, walled with hurdles, stored the last of the previous year’s hay; another, roofed with tarred cloth held in place by bricks hanging on wires from the roof tree, housed a brown-and-white cow with curly horns. Hanna said she would have preferred asbestos for the roof, but at a million coupons a sheet it was too expensive, and she and her husband were going to have to carry on making do with tar-paper. All Lukovytsya’s running water came from a single standpipe; like Matussiv, it had dirt roads, no shops, no public transport and, in winter, no postal service.

Hanna was seven years old when collectivisation began in 1929:

The local church – ‘it was a beautiful one, with bells’ – was demolished and its icons looted. ‘People protested but it didn’t help. There was a man called Myron who lived right here – people used to go to his place to read the Bible and sing hymns. Then he disappeared too.’

Hanna’s family sold ‘everything – icons, clothes, pillows’ to buy rye. But by the winter of 1932 they were living off anything they could find. ‘People were eating straw and lime-tree leaves, making
kasha
out of bark, nettles. I went to see my uncle, and they served a dinner. There was a stew – I saw something strange – tails sticking out of it! It was made from mice!’ Compared to most villages, the Lukovytsyers were lucky, because they could trawl – illegally, using blankets – for fish and molluscs in the Dnieper. Even so, two families died. On the other side of the river things were much worse: ‘People were killing their children and eating them.’

The famine, though, was a long time ago. What Hanna really wanted to talk about were the iniquities of the present. A few years ago she and her husband had sold five cows and put the proceeds – 2,000 roubles, ‘half the price of a Volyn jeep in those days’ – into the bank. Hyperinflation had since reduced their value – the savings of a lifetime’s work – to absolutely nil: ‘not even enough to buy a box of matches’. They had been keeping the money for their funerals. Now they wished they had bought a refrigerator instead.

Exactly how many people died in the Great Hunger of 1932–3 is unclear. As Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs, ‘No one was keeping count’. Contemporaries spoke of 4 or 5 million. The historian Robert Conquest uses Soviet census data to arrive at a figure of 7 million: 5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Another 6.5 million, he reckons, died in ‘dekulakisation’ immediately beforehand. If Conquest is right, the whole operation killed over twice as many people as the Holocaust – thirty-four lives not for every word, but for every
letter
in this book. These may well be underestimates, since Soviet census data are unreliable. When the post-purge census of 1937 turned up an embarrassing population deficit, Stalin promptly had the officials in charge arrested and shot. Subsequent counts, one can assume, erred on the side of optimism.

The term ‘famine’, with its implication of natural disaster, is the wrong word for what happened. Unlike the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, the deaths of 1932–3 were a deliberate, man-made event. Crop failure was not to blame, since the harvest of 1932 was only slightly smaller than average, and actually better than that of the previous year. Nor can it, by any stretch of the imagination, be put down to bureaucratic oversight. By the early autumn of 1932 Stalin and his ministers undoubtedly knew, because local communists repeatedly told them so, that the countryside was starving, but ordered that food requisitions continue none the less. Right through the famine, storehouses full of ‘emergency supplies’ were kept locked and guarded, while people died in thousands in the villages round about. During the less serious famine of 1921–2 (also the result of grain requisitions), the Soviet government had allowed Western relief agencies to provide food aid; in the far worse conditions of 1932–3, it denied that famine existed at all.

The official explanation – seconded, until quite recently, by standard Western textbooks – was that collectivisation was a painful but necessary step towards modernising the rural economy, the famine something obdurate peasants brought upon themselves. ‘You can’t make an omelette,’ Stalin is said to have declared, ‘without breaking eggs.’ But even from this point of view, collectivisation was counter-productive: deporting all the country’s most successful farmers and starving the rest to death was hardly the way to go about boosting agricultural output, and Soviet farming has not really recovered from the blow even now. Like Stalin’s purges, which killed hundreds of thousands of stalwart Party supporters and most of the Red Army officer corps, the collectivisation famine of 1932–3 is so incredible, so seemingly self-defeating, that it is unsurprising that many historians have interpreted it as some sort of self-perpetuating blunder, a freak act of God.

The most convincing explanation for the famine is that it was a deliberate, genocidal attack on rural Ukraine. The groups the Bolsheviks most hated and feared, and had had most difficulty subduing during the Civil War, were the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities. The Ukrainian countryside – home to the Soviet Union’s largest and most turbulent ethnic minority and to its richest and most self-reliant peasantry – embodied these twin demons in one. For centuries visitors had contrasted Ukraine’s ‘smiling’ farmhouses, so clean that ‘a traveller might fancy himself transported to Holland’,
¹
with Russia’s rural hovels. Their prosperity was not only the result of a richer soil and milder climate, but of the fact that most Ukrainian farmland was individually owned by independent smallholders, whereas Russian land was held communally, and periodically redistributed by councils of village elders. Communism – which to the peasant meant collectivisation – was thus even less popular in Ukrainian villages than in Russian ones. By 1928 there was one Party member per hundred and twenty-five peasant households in the Soviet Union as a whole, compared to only one per thousand in Ukraine.
²
When Stalin ordered collectivisation, Ukraine was where it encountered most resistance and where it was enforced most harshly. Though there was also widespread famine in the Russian Kuban (where many Ukrainians also lived), and among the Kazakhs, Don Cossacks and Volga Germans, proportionately higher grain quotas in Ukraine ensured that it bore the bulk of deaths. ‘Truly, truly,’ wrote Vasiliy Grossman in his autobiographical novel
Forever Flowing,
‘the whole business was much worse in the Ukraine than it was with us.’
³

The attack on Ukraine was a reversal of policy for the regime. In the mid-1920s the official line towards ethnic minorities was
korenizatsiya
or ‘taking root’.
Korenizatsiya
meant encouraging non-Russian languages and cultures (though not political organisations), with the aim of broadening communism’s appeal. Ukrainian-language books and newspapers were printed in large numbers, and hundreds of new Ukrainian-language schools opened, under the aegis of Mykola Skrypnyk, a close friend of Lenin’s and one of the few Ukrainians with a senior post in the Ukrainian Communist Party at the time. It was at one of these that Petro Hryhorenko, a Soviet army general who turned dissident in the 1960s, ‘first saw and heard played the Ukrainian national musical instrument, the
bandore.
From them I learned of
Kobzar,
written by the great Ukrainian poet Taras Grigorye-vich Shevchenko. And from them I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko, that I was Ukrainian.’
⁴
Even Party officials were made to take courses in the language and use it in government business. Viktor Krav-chenko, an aeronautics student at the Kharkiv Technological Institute, described how
korenizatsiya
shook up the education system: