Borderland Page 6
In 1883 the young Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz published his best-selling epic By Fire And Sword. A Hollywood-ian drama set during the Khmelnytsky rebellion, the book is not historically accurate. Never having visited Ukraine, Sienkiewicz based his descriptions of the Dnieper on his travels up the Mississippi, decorating its banks with mangrove swamps and ‘vast reptiles’. Nevertheless, it perfectly sums up the mixture of nostalgia, condescension and self-interest with which Poles view their erstwhile borderlands. The novel has two parallel story-lines: Khmelnytsky’s war with Wisniowiecki for Ukraine, and the battle between a savage Cossack otaman and a relentlessly virtuous Polish knight for the hand in marriage of a Ruthenian princess. The Pole ends up getting the girl, but the Polish army does not end up getting Ukraine. Instead the country descends into chaos: the book’s notorious final sentence reads, ‘And hatred swelled in people’s hearts and poisoned the blood of brothers.’ The moral of the story, not lost on the palpitating contemporary readership, was that history should not be allowed to repeat itself. To get rid of Russia, Poles and Ukrainians had to stop fighting, and stick together.
CHAPTER THREE
The Russian Sea: Donetsk and Odessa
Shall the Slav rivers merge into the Russian sea?
Or shall the sea itself run dry?
– Aleksandr Pushkin, 1831
‘WE CALL THESE things “Stalin’s hands”,’ said Alexey, pointing at a pair of hinged metal hooks at the bottom of a rusty conveyor-belt. Impervious to the freezing wind, he led me round snow-whipped slag-heaps and half-buried bits of rotting machinery, explaining just what each object was for. ‘These,’ he said, pointing to a stack of pine logs, ‘hold up the walls of the tunnels. The problem is that nowadays they’re very expensive and we don’t have enough of them.’ Earlier, an official at the local branch of the coal ministry had told me that 212 men had died in mining accidents in the Donetsk region the previous year, 32 of them in a single gas explosion. He hadn’t been at all embarrassed about the number: at four lives per million tonnes of coal produced it was well within normal ratios.
Alexey was in his early thirties, and had lived in Donetsk all his life. All his family were miners: during the war even his grandmother had worked down the shafts, losing the fingers of her left hand under the wheels of a runaway trolley-car. Though he had gone into a white-collar union job after college, he still thought of himself as a miner, a shakhtyor – in Russian the word still has a faint heroic ring – too. But beyond that Alexey wasn’t too sure what he was. Like most people in Donetsk he spoke only Russian, no Ukrainian. His family had come here from Russia, as far as he knew, late last century, when industrialisation was just getting under way. Did I know that Donetsk used to be called Yuzovka, after a Welshman, John Hughes, who opened the first foundry on the site? Did I know that Donetsk was twinned with Cardiff? Alexey had been there once on an exchange programme, and kept a little wooden shield painted with the Cardiff city arms in a glass-fronted cabinet in his office. ‘When we told them how we worked here they just couldn’t believe it. We looked at everything they had – the special baths, the clothes, the equipment – and we practically burst into tears.’
Inside the corrugated-iron shed at the top of the mine-shaft we watched the day-shift clocking off. Bent and ragged, with bloodshot eyes and gold teeth shining out of filthy faces, the men looked almost too miner-like to be true – blacked-up actors, perhaps, in some clichéd documentary on the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Most were in their forties or older. The younger ones, Alexey said, had found better jobs elsewhere, driving taxis or trading over the Russian border. He called a group over to meet the foreign journalist. They didn’t want to answer questions, jerking their heads when I asked them what they thought of their new Ukrainian government. As we shook hands, I noticed that many, like Alexey’s grandmother, had fingers missing.
In truth, Alexey said, the ‘Red Guard’ men didn’t much care who they were governed by. ‘Some of them demand that we go back to Russia, but this is just kitchen-talk. We know that Russia doesn’t need us – it already wants to close its own mines. Moscow, Kiev, it’s all the same.’ What they did want was better pay – any pay at all, in fact, since they hadn’t received a kopek for six weeks – and freedom to run their mine the way they wanted. ‘It takes six months to make any decision, because everything has to go through Kiev. The energy ministry takes our coal at three dollars a tonne, but we the producers aren’t allowed to sign our own contracts, though we could sell the same coal at $20 or even $60 a tonne.’ Dolefully Alexey shook his head, the flaps of his fur hat waggling like spaniel’s ears. Outside the snow swirled, the slag-heaps loomed, the tumbledown sheds and bits of broken machinery disappeared into the gathering dusk. It was time to go. As we said our goodbyes he pulled a bundle out of his pocket: two enamelled badges in the shape of his union’s initials, and a triangular banner in shiny red nylon. ‘For you – so you can remember Donetsk.’
Ukraine’s Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire’s belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine’s 5 2 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.
To stay independent, Ukraine has to keep its Russian-speaking east sweet. Densely populated and heavily industrialised, it already has a big say in the country. In the first post-independence presidential elections it was the weight of eastern votes that handed victory to Leonid Kravchuk, an ex-Party boss, over Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former dissident and leader of the independence movement. And in 1994 it was eastern votes that threw out Kravchuk, by then the darling of the nationalists, in favour of Leonid Kuchma, ex-director of a missile factory in the Russian-speaking city of Dnipropetrovsk. The previous year, ironically, Kuchma had been forced to resign as prime minister when thousands of Donbass miners arrived in Kiev demanding pay rises. Ukrainian politicians’ worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.
Ukraine’s Russians, though, are neither the oldest nor the most problematic legacy of Ukraine’s 300 years inside the Russian empire. Far more invidious was the effect of Russian rule on the Ukrainians themselves, beginning with the decline and fall of the Cossack hetmanate. Khmelnytsky’s Pereyaslav Treaty had not, in the Cossacks’ eyes at least, made Ukraine east of the Dnieper part of Russia, but simply given it Russian protection. Though subject to increasing Russian interference, the Cossacks still chose their own hetmans (subject to the tsar’s approval), ran their own army, and collected their own taxes. Loyalty to Russia was conditional, a matter of mutual rights and promises. The arrangement fell to pieces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the disastrous hetmanate of that most un-Cossack of Cossacks – Ivan Mazeppa.
Suave and subtle, famous for his love affairs and his deft hand at political intrigue, Mazeppa was an even unlikelier rebel than Khmelnytsky. Born into a noble Orthodox family in Polish-ruled ‘right-bank’ Ukraine, he was schooled at a Jesuit college in Warsaw before entering the court of King Jan Kazimierz as a gentleman-in-waiting. Keen to create a cadre of Ruthenian nobles loyal to the crown, Kazimierz sent him to study in Holland before putting him to work on diplomatic errands to the left-bank hetmanate. In 1663 the promising young favourite suddenly left Cracow and joined the Polish-ruled Cossacks on the western bank of the Dnieper. Legend – as embroidered by everyone from Byron to Tchaikovsky – has it that he had been discovered in bed with the wife of a neighbour, who stripped him naked and sent him galloping off into the steppe on the back of a wild horse. Whatever the truth, Mazeppa spent the next few years travelling back and forth to the Crimean khanate as the Polish Cossacks’ envoy. In 1674, journeying home from one of these missions, he was captured by the Zaporozhians and t
urned over to the rival left-bank hetmanate as a spy.
At this point, one might have thought Mazeppa’s career was over. Not a bit of it. Deploying his already legendary charm, Mazeppa sweet-talked his way out of captivity and into a job as assistant to Ivan Samoylovych, the left-bank hetman. Thirteen years later, having ingratiated himself with Moscow and manufactured a conspiracy framing Samoylovych for treason, he was hetman himself. A nonpareil at sizing up the endless intrigues of the Russian court, he managed to stay in favour when Peter the Great overthrew his sister Sophia in 1689, and quickly became one of the young tsar’s closest confidants. Mazeppa sent Peter wines from Crimea; Peter replied with gifts of fish from the Baltic, as well as the new Order of St Andrew and vast Ukrainian estates. ‘The tsar would sooner disbelieve an angel,’ rivals muttered, ‘than Mazeppa.’1 The French diplomat Jean Baluse, on a visit to the Cossack capital of Baturin in 1704, described him at the height of his power:
Conversation with this Prince is extremely pleasant. He has unusual experience in politics, and, contrary to the Muscovites, follows developments in other countries . . . On several occasions I tried very assiduously to direct our conversation toward the present political situation, but I must confess I could find out nothing definite from this Prince. He belongs to that category of people who either prefer to keep completely silent or to talk and say nothing. But I hardly think that he likes the Muscovite Tsar, because he did not say a word against my complaints about Muscovite life. But in the case of the Polish crown, Monsieur Mazepa did not hesitate to declare that it is heading, as did ancient Rome, toward decline. He spoke about the Swedish King with respect, but deems him too young . . .2
As Baluse guessed, Mazeppa’s loyalty was wavering. Apostasy came four years later, precipitated by Peter’s long Northern War with the austere young Charles XII of Sweden. In September 1708 the conflict reached a crisis-point. Charles had already swept over Poland, putting a Swedish puppet on the Polish throne, and now his armies threatened Moscow and St Petersburg. But at the village of Lesnaya, in present-day eastern Belarus, the Swedes suffered their first serious setback, when Russian troops cut off and burned the wagon-train carrying the army’s supplies of powder, food and winter clothing. Unable to push on east, and with winter drawing near, Charles turned southwards to what he had been told was a ‘country flowing with milk and honey’ – to Ukraine.
Here Mazeppa’s genius for picking winners failed him for the first time in his life. Faced with a choice between hostile occupation by Charles’s brutal army, or supporting the Swedes and risking Russian fury later on, Mazeppa stalled, excusing himself from joining Peter by pretending to be mortally ill, then declared for Charles, taking 2,000 of his Cossacks with him. Peter was amazed and furious. It was with great wonderment,’ he wrote, ‘that I learned of the deed of the new Judas, Mazeppa, who after twenty-one years of loyalty to me and with one foot already in the grave, has turned traitor and betrayer of his own people,’3 Peter immediately ordered that Baturin’s 7,000 inhabitants be put to the sword, and the following month, at a solemn ceremony in Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral, Mazeppa’s name was pronounced anathema, a ritual that was to be repeated annually in all Russian churches for the next 200 years.
Exactly what Mazeppa hoped to get out of his U-turn is a mystery. He may have dreamed of putting himself on the throne of a genuinely independent hetmanate with Swedish backing. He may simply have been infuriated by Russia’s failure to honour the Pereyaslav Treaty by helping defend Ukraine against threatened invasion by the Poles. (Peter’s reply to earlier pleas had been ‘I cannot even spare ten men; defend yourself as best you can.’)4 He was certainly jealous of Peter’s favourite, Aleksandr Menshikov. But whatever his motives, he had picked the wrong man. The following summer, just outside Poltava, a small town east of Kiev, Charles’s and Peter’s armies finally came face to face. Wounded in the foot, Charles could only watch the battle from a litter, leaving command split between bickering generals. Demoralised and badly led, the Swedes suffered one of the most decisive defeats of European history. Sweden’s dreams of the Kremlin were over; Russia, with its first major victory against a modern army, was on its way to becoming one of Europe’s great powers. After the battle Charles and Mazeppa fled west across the steppe to Bender in Ottoman-ruled Moldova, leaving most of their army stranded on the wrong side of the Dnieper. Mazeppa died three months later, his head propped on saddle-bags full of looted diamonds. Charles was killed by a stray bullet in 1718, while besieging a town in Norway. Descendants of the soldiers they abandoned can be found outside the Swedish embassy in Kiev, forlornly applying for citizenship of a country their ancestors left three centuries ago.
In Poltava I stayed with a family of Baptists, introduced by my temporary interpreter Taras, a spotty youth who spent his spare time reading Pilgrim’s Progress (‘What, please, is a Slough of Despond? Who is Mr Valiant-for-Truth?’) and distributing American-produced leaflets showing believers climbing ladders to heaven, and unbelievers burning in hell-fire. (Religious tolerance, in Taras’s book, was ‘a typical decadent Western idea’.) Grandparents, two sets of parents and eight children all shared a newly built, immaculately tidy house on the outskirts of town. Lined up in height order like the Family von Trapp, the children gave their names – Irina, Kristina, Slavik, Yulya . . . – and sang an evangelical hymn: ‘My Father is waiting for me in heaven/ Where He has made a crown for mee-eee.’ Afterwards they went back to watching Stop Or My Mom’ll Shoot! on video. Though all the characters were dubbed by the same bored voice, they didn’t seem to mind, laughing uproariously at every joke. The machine, little creamy-cheeked Irina explained, was a present from South Carolinan missionary dentists, who had given them all fillings while spreading the Word. So too was the shiny new poster on the wall, with coloured time-lines showing mankind’s progress from Adam to Last Judgement, via the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. But what had really impressed her was the dentists’ remarkable bulk. ‘There was one’ – a conspiratorial whisper – ‘called Phil. When he sat down his legs went like that!’ And she spread her hands in the manner of a fisherman describing a monster missed catch.
Poltava, it turned out, hadn’t yet decided whether to treat its famous battle as a glorious Russian victory or as a tragic Ukrainian defeat. In the meantime, successive ideologies were being allowed to accumulate, like strata in a sort of historiographical ocean bed. In the middle of town, in a square full of cigarette kiosks and shuffling trolley-bus queues, stood a tsarist monument, all cannons, eagle and laurel wreaths, celebrating the battle’s first centenary. Next came the inevitable Lenin, one hand outstretched, the other deep in his pocket (‘Looking for money for the budget,’ said my driver). Opposite Lenin a big hand-painted billboard had gone up: ‘The Flower Poltava in the Wreath of Independent Ukraine!’ The newest monument of all was a giant stone cross, inscribed ‘To the Cossack Dead’ in folksy Ukrainian lettering. The central post office, a white pillared building that had housed the local Nobles’ Club, chipped in with a mercifully apolitical message of its own: ‘CITIZENS! USE THE SIX-DIGIT POSTAL INDEX!’
In the little museum on the battlefield site – a snowbound muddle of factory buildings and straggling woodland – the traditional Russian version of events held undisputed sway. Socialist-realist oils showed Peter at his more sympathetic pursuits: rolling up his sleeves in a cannon foundry; dividers in hand in the Volga shipyards; spotlit through storm clouds aboard a rearing charger. The grand finale was a diorama of the battle itself – real wagon wheels and cannon balls in front of a painted scene of galloping horses, flying banners and puffs of smoke, all ‘created by artists of the Grekov studio of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’. But why hadn’t the museum got anything about Mazeppa? The attendant, a pretty blonde in anorak and padded boots, rifled through her desk, produced keys, and led me along a corridor to a distant room. Here, she said, was their new exhibition. It had pictures of Mazeppa in beaten copper, bits and pieces of weaponry and Ukrainian folk cost
ume, and a wobbly fibreglass Cossack gravestone. It was behind locked doors, she said, because ‘we don’t have a man to look after it. If anyone asks, we just let them in.’ Hadn’t the museum come under any pressure to ditch its old, pro-Russian displays? A sigh. ‘At first, yes, but now it has faded away. Nobody’s interested in history any more.’
Following the disastrous Mazeppa adventure, the hetmanate went into rapid decline. The Cossack capital was moved from Baturin to Hlukhiv, closer to the Russian border, and Russians were given command of the Cossack regiments. Government was overseen by a ‘collegium’ of Russian officials, and hetmans who stood on their rights were imprisoned or replaced. Royal favourites were granted vast Ukrainian estates, and began building themselves the neoclassical mansions, designed by Scots and Italians, whose dilapidated hulks still brood over the villages east of Kiev today.
The last of the hetmans was Kyrylo Rozumovsky, younger brother of Oleksiy, an affable but illiterate Ruthenian who caught Empress Elizabeth’s eye while singing in the imperial choir, and subsequently became her lover, maybe even her husband. He was removed by Catherine II in 1764, following his petition for a return to full autonomy and for the hetmancy to be made hereditary in the Rozumovsky family. Now that the hetmans were gone from ‘Little Russia’, Catherine declared, ‘every effort should be made to eradicate them and their age from memory.’5 In 1781 she did away with the hetmanate altogether, splitting its territory into three provinces organised on the same lines as the rest of the Russian empire. The Sich had been razed by Russian troops six years earlier, and its lands given over to Russian grandees and German and Serbian colonists. The surviving Zaporozhians were deported to the Kuban, north-west of the Caucasus, leaving Ukrainians to sing ballads in their memory – and scour the Dnieper reed-beds for their hidden treasure – for ever after.