Borderland

  BORDERLAND

  BORDERLAND

  A JOURNEY THROUGH THE HISTORY OF UKRAINE

  ANNA REID

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Copyright © 1997 Anna Reid

  Published in 1999 and 2000 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1997

  Published in 2000 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877.

  Find us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN-10: 0-8133-3792-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-8133-3792-0 eBook ISBN: 9780786722822

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library materials Z39.48-1984.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people contributed to this book. Especial thanks to Sergey Maksimov, Svetlana Rusnak, and Sasha and Tanya Sparinsky for their help and friendship in Kiev; to Yulya Horoshilova, Roma Ihnatowycz, Vlada Tkach and Roman Waschuk for encouragement and ideas; to Professor Timothy Colton, Dr Peter Duncan, Prince Jezzar Giray, Dr Lubomyr Hajda, Simon Hemans, Professor Geoffrey Hosking, Dr Daniel Kaufmann, Professor John LeDonne, Professor Richard Pipes, Professor Roman Szporluk, Professor Adam Ulam and Dr Andrew Wilson for illuminating interviews; to Jonathan Ford, for his ruthless and invaluable critique of the manuscript; to Chiara Clothier, Julian Ellison, Jean de Sola Pool and Chris and Annabel Wrenn for putting me up; and to the patient staffs of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies library, the London Library and the British Library. Thanks too to Peter Robinson of Curtis Brown and Rebecca Wilson of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, without whose enthusiastic support this book would not have been written, and lastly to my mother and stepfather, Sara and Sandy Milne, and husband Charles, who bore my obsession with Ukraine with fortitude.

  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 inde
pendence.

  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

  The New Jerusalem: Kiev

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

  – Mikhail Bulgakov, 1925

  UKRAINA 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 civ
ilisation, 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:

  There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe. Discord thus ensued among them, and they began to war one against another. They said to themselves, ‘Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the Law.’ They accordingly went overseas to the Varangian Russes . . . The Chuds, the Slavs, the Krivichians and the Ves then said to the people of Rus: ‘Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’1

  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.