On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  From Rivne I carried on with such buoyancy that I was engrossed in thoughts other than about my father.

  As I passed through back-to-back villages, it occurred to me the land was shrinking in scale, and with it the concept of the world held by local people. If in Kazakhstan the average distance between settlements had been 100 km, then here in Ukraine it was rarely more than a tenth of that. Yet it was often the case that people did not know the names of villages beyond the next one or two. A satellite image of the earth at night that I had with me well demonstrated the nature of the land I was entering. From Mongolia to Russia the Eurasian steppe was visible as one vast black empty space, ringed by a few dim lights on its fringes in Siberia and Central Asia. In Ukraine, the lights of towns, cities, and villages faded in, growing in intensity toward western Europe, which was ablaze. The higher the density of living, it seemed, the shorter were the boundaries of the known world for the people who lived there.

  Another thing that began to strike me was that when I materialized in a village out of the forest, from across a field, or out of a gully, villagers were bewildered. Where had I come from? How? The penny dropped one day when I stopped to ask directions from a man on the edge of a village. I could see by the lay of the land, and from my map, that I could cut straight over a rise beyond the last houses, through a forest, and end up in the next little hamlet.

  “No, you can’t! I don’t know about your map, but it’s clearly wrong!” he said, a little angrily. “You need to go back the way you came and take the road over there.”

  I proceeded to follow my off-road route without issue. On the map I could see that the road he suggested would have taken me the long way round—almost twice as far.

  Unlike a nomad, who from the back of a horse learned to read the lay of the land using its natural features, this villager had mapped out his world almost exclusively according to roads. This had blinded him to the natural paths in the environment. It would be easy to assume that this road culture was a modern product of the motorcar, yet that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. After all, this man from whom I had asked directions had been at the helm of a horse and cart. When I asked him why he didn’t ride, he replied, “Horses are for work! Not for fun!”

  It was an apt illustration that Europeans from antiquity had been experts not at riding but in using carts, drays, sleds, and carriages. With a single animal, the settled farmer could transport hay, grain, and other produce, carry the whole family, and cultivate the land. For them this was a much more practical application of the horse than riding, although it did have one small drawback: they could travel only where their wheeled vehicle would go, and this limited their sensory experience of the landscape.

  Riding on, I began to imagine the life of a villager as it might have been in medieval times. Most peasants would have been illiterate and would have rarely traveled beyond the boundaries of their parish—the root of the term parochial—and for those who did travel a considerable distance, they did so almost exclusively by road.

  Meanwhile, for a nomad in the Mongol army in the thirteenth century, the world would have looked like a very different place. His concept of the world was an ever-expanding one as he traveled through diverse landscapes, experienced different cultures, heard a multitude of languages, and of course did so without being limited to roads. When the nomad horseman reached Europe, the knowledge and life experience he possessed would have been beyond comprehension of the insular European villagers. For them, just like for the man who rejected my map as being “incorrect,” it would have seemed that the invading nomads were breaking the rules. In fact, the nomad ways, land, culture, and origin had been a mystery to Europeans for thousands of years before the arrival of Mongols and, despite the eternal waves of invasion, would remain so, it seemed, for centuries to come.

  A week out of Rivne I woke tired and hungry in a weed-infested gully. Tigon yawned, pricked his ears, realized there was no food on offer, and then tucked his nose back under his tail.

  For five days straight we had been riding into bitterly cold wind and rain, and overnight fog had flooded the gully and snap-frozen my muddy boots and chaps. It might have been May, but winter was reluctant to let go.

  After a breakfast of residual oatmeal scraped from the bottom of a pack box, I willed the horses down to a river valley in search of food and a rest. In the village of Dumaniv I had only just dismounted when a car pulled up at a cluster of adjacent homes. I approached nervously but had barely begun when the driver cut me off: “Don’t even think about it! Sleep here! You will eat what we eat! Sleep where we sleep! We won’t offer more, we won’t offer less.”

  Valeri, as the man was known, led me home and doled out hay and grain. By nightfall I had scrubbed clean and sat reborn at the dinner table. Across from me sat Valeri, his father Volodomor, and his grandmother Ferona—three generations of a family, each of whom, I would learn over the course of the evening, was in some ways a unique product of their era.

  Valeri, who was in his thirties, had recently come back from four years working as a laborer in Spain. Like thousands of others who had reached adulthood in the chaos of the 1990s, he had gone to the European Union in search of work but was now barred from returning because he had overstayed his visa. He was relying on the savings he had brought back to set himself up for the future.

  In the formative years of Volodomor’s life, such a scenario had been unimaginable. Born in 1950, he was schooled in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and had served a long career in the army. In 1992 he had quit; in 1998 he “realized the big mistake” in his life and become Christian. Nowadays he was an evangelical preacher and had returned to the roots of his childhood in Dumaniv.

  Both Valeri and Volodomor had fascinating stories to tell, but the person who interested me most was Volodomor’s mother, Ferona. I’d been drawn to her ever since she greeted me at the doorway dressed in a black shawl that was as creased and wrinkled as the folds in her ancient face. She sat at the table practically jumping out of her skin. “I might be ninety-three, but I can still thread the eye of a needle, no sweat! And every day I go barefoot to the hills with my goats!”

  Her body was miniature and shrunken, but in her eyes was the sparkle of youth. She opened a Bible. “I only learned to read at the age of eighty-three! My son taught me so that I could read the Bible before I die.” With a giant magnifying glass trembling in her hand, she read aloud. I listened intently, astonished that before me sat a woman who had survived every violent convulsion of Ukraine’s past century. By the time she turned thirty, she had witnessed the Bolshevik revolution, Ukraine’s fleeting independence, Stalin’s purges, and the horrors of World War II, navigating her way through these cataclysmic events in spite of, or perhaps partly because of, her illiteracy.

  Like most survivors of her generation, she told me the event that had most affected her was the Holodomor, the famine of 1931 to 1933. Somehow most subjects of conversation with Ferona led back to her experience of this tragedy. Bearing parallels with the Great Zhut in Kazakhstan, the Holodomor had been triggered by the forced collectivization of Ukrainian farmers—a policy propagandized as a war on the kulaks, but which in reality was a means for the state to wrest control of agriculture, using the citizens as virtual slaves to produce grain that was then used to buy industrial equipment and patents from the West. Mass starvation began in the winter of 1931–32 after widespread crop failure. Stalin suspected sabotage and persecuted the farmers, who were now part of collectives.

  “To keep us alive my father hid a bag of wheat in between the stones in the wall of our house. One day the Komsomols found it, and Papa was sent away to a labor camp in Russia. We never heard from him again. I survived on grass and the old leaves of sugar beets,” Ferona told me.

  As tragic as that winter had been, it paled in comparison to what followed. The summer harvest of 1932 was successful, but few collectives met the unrealistic grain quotas. Failure to meet targets was treated as trea
son and led to an all-out attack on the rural population. Grain was locked up in storehouses or sent to Russia while essential supplies to Ukrainian villagers were cut off. “Bread procurement officers” roamed villages searching for food. Mortars were ordered destroyed. By the middle of the winter of 1932–33, people in Dumaniv—like in thousands of villages and towns across the breadbasket of Russia and Ukraine—were dropping dead in the fields, on the roads, in their homes. Even then, Ferona explained, the authorities “came to ask for taxes on everything—the trees in our yard, our animals, all our possessions.” When her family could pay no more they were evicted and locked in jail. The authorities stole everything remaining in their house, “even our sewing machine, bedding, and cooking items,” she said.

  Resembling the debate that goes on in Kazakhstan about the causes of the Great Zhut, there is broad disagreement—primarily between Russians and Ukrainians—about whether the Holodomor was a genocide or just a tragedy resulting from collectivization. For Ferona there was little doubt that the state did everything it could to thwart the survival of the rural Ukrainian population. At the height of the crisis, when the only way for many villagers to survive was to send their children to cities, a passport and registration system was introduced to keep collective farmers out of urban areas. The border with Russia was closed, and food imports were not allowed in.1 Miron Dolot, in Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust, an eyewitness account from a survivor of the Holodomor, points out that when villagers resorted to eating cats and dogs, quotas for dog and cat skins were suddenly invented. Authorities went around shooting the animals, and the carcasses were guarded and left to rot. When people resorted to wild birds, rodents, and fish, Stalin proclaimed that all living things were owned by the state. In some cases, being alive was considered counterrevolutionary because it demonstrated that the collective farmers and their families were getting food from somewhere. By the summer of 1933, an estimated seven million Ukrainians had starved to death. Unbelievably, it was a tragedy unacknowledged by the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.2

  In the morning Ferona took me down to the velvety grass by the riverbank with her four goats. She had promised to sing for me, and after tethering her little crew she put her hands together in prayer and wet her lips.

  I was born in Ukraine

  I lived here a long, long time

  Now they are sending me away

  What is happening to me?

  They will send me out of Ukraine

  They will send me away

  Oh, oi oi oi

  I am leaving small children behind

  And adults go away with me

  My small children are not ill

  Other people will feed them

  And I will be in Siberia

  Remembering my children.

  From her crumpled, shrunken body came a deep, gravelly voice. It wavered a little at first but soon strengthened.

  And who’s going to feed him

  When he’ll be on his deathbed?

  And who’s going to feed him?

  How is he going to live?

  She brought her hands to her face, and, as though an unhealed wound were breaking open, her eyes cracked and tears came, running over her fragile eyelids and down the worn, eroded gullies of her cheeks. She edged close, clutched my hands, and searched my eyes for a fragment of consolation. But then her grip loosened and she surrendered to an empty gaze. Although millions had suffered with her, most had died long ago, lucky to survive just one of the tragic waves of madness that had swept Ukraine in the twentieth century.

  The surroundings fell away. Avoiding villages, I camped in hidden valleys and cut through fields and forests. At night I sat by the campfire feeling the cool air fall on my back and the glow of coals on my face. I listened to the horses grazing and watched the moon rise into clear, starry skies.

  I tread a knife-edge of wonderment and gloom. While Ferona would probably pass away as peacefully as a fallen autumn leaf, Dad, who had lived in one of the safest countries on earth, had met a violent end. Was it destiny? Luck? Karma? Or was life’s path random? How was it that Ferona embodied the optimism of the children from the school in Rivne even though she had seen the very worst of humankind?

  It wasn’t until one stormy afternoon several days west of Dumaniv that I was pulled out of my introspection again. I had reached the river Zbruch, a shallow flurry of water that had once been the border between the Russian and Polish empires. For many during the 1930s it had been a cruel demarcation line between life and death.

  On the eastern bank, where I pulled up, Stalin’s terror had reigned. On the far bank the churches had remained intact, the people had continued their farming traditions, and there had been little hint of a famine. Until World War II, in fact, the land west of the Zbruch had passed between the Austro-Hungarian and Polish empires but had never been part of Russia. It was only when the Red Army routed the Nazis that Ukrainian land as far as the plains of Hungary was absorbed by the Soviet Union. Nowadays the Zbruch is the border between Khmel’nyts’kyi Oblast and Ternopil Oblast and is one of the fault lines of the east-west cultural divide in modern Ukraine.

  As I crossed the river and carried on through a village, rain bucketed down and dark brooding clouds swallowed the sun. Even in the dimness, through the frame of my tightly pulled hood, the atmosphere in the village at once felt different. There were tall two-story homes, a flaking old church that looked to be Catholic rather than Orthodox, and shopfronts built onto ornate buildings of an unfamiliar style. I rode through the main street, then up a muddy track between twisted wooden homes that took me out over a crop of winter-sown wheat. I hurried on another few hours toward the town of Bilche Zolote (the name means “white gold”). Ismet Zaatov from Crimea had contacted some friends along my route, and earlier I had received a message that the mayor of Bilche Zolote was awaiting my arrival.

  The nature of my meeting with the mayor in Bilche Zolote proved characteristic of the man I came to know in coming days. Long after darkness had descended I was clopping along the main street wondering how I might find the mayor, when there came someone running into my path wearing a suit and tie. He had a chubby face, a stomach to match, and the stocky, square frame of a bulldog.

  “Off you get! We’re just about to start dinner!” he instructed in a raspy voice. Introductions had to wait as he seized me by the collar, asked someone to watch my horses, and ushered me inside a bar for a celebratory pint.

  Come morning I was left with no doubt as to who was in charge. I had barely pried my eyes open when Yaroslav burst into the room in a frilly apron holding out a tray of steaming hot eggs, sausages, salad, bread, and tea. He dragged his nose over the feast in appreciation, then put it on my lap.

  “Here you are, traveler! Courtesy of Bilche Zolote’s first-class hotel!”

  This was just the beginning of my time under the wing of the eccentric and at times overzealous mayor, who viewed my arrival as the chance to put his town on the map. Every moment was a photo opportunity, and in coming days he would treat me to aromatic baths, royal tours of the town’s historical sights, feasts with local dignitaries, and even a school concert put on at his insistence. Although he possessed an overinflated sense of self-importance that tended to rub locals the wrong way, his enthusiasm and raw energy were infectious. I was more than happy for my journey to fall into his hands while I enjoyed the opportunity to recuperate physically and gather my first insights into western Ukraine.

  My days in Bilche Zolote were centered on Yaroslav’s office, where on my first visit he sat behind a large desk, directed me to a seat, and proclaimed that he was the “owner of this region” and that he didn’t have to “answer to anyone.” He was scheming to set up a national press conference based on my arrival and generally spent his time reaching for the phone and fax. His press release was titled “Great World-Famous Australian Traveler Arrives in Bilche Zolote.” During the work session that first day, I trawled my eyes around his walls and shelves
, which were plastered with flags, photos, books, and emblems, all in one way or another representative of the spectrum of Ukraine’s divided politics and indicative of the crisis currently engulfing the country. Two small flags in a vase on his desk symbolized the main opposing forces at work: the flag of the pro-Western and NATO-aspiring Orange Revolution Party, and the flag of the Russian-leaning Party of the Regions.

  Although the president of Ukraine at that time, Viktor Yushchenko, had been swept to power during the 2004–5 Orange Revolution, the Party of the Regions had since won a majority in parliamentary elections and installed Yushchenko’s archenemy, Viktor Yanukovych, as prime minister. In the beginning of April 2007, only days before I flew back to Ukraine, Yushchenko had dismissed the government and called for fresh elections. Yanukovych was now contesting the decree in the constitutional court, and Kiev was once more flooded with thousands of demonstrators. In some Russian media there was talk of civil war and the potential for the country to split into separate states. The political deadlock reflected deep cultural divisions in Ukraine. In the west of the country, people were staunchly nationalist and identified themselves as European. In the Russian-colonized east and south, the population was predominantly Russian-speaking and-leaning.

  As a western Ukrainian himself, Yaroslav’s bipartisan display of flags was out of official decorum only—his true sentiment was embodied by a large black and red flag on the shelf. It was the historical banner of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Next to the UPA flag was a large portrait of the late Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Lauded as a hero in the west but a villain in the east, Bandera was a divisive figure who had led a faction of the Ukrainian Nationalists Organization (OUN) whose ultimate aim in the 1930s and 1940s was to create an independent state in today’s western Ukrainian provinces. The UPA was the military wing of the organization and had fought a guerrilla-style campaign first against the Poles and then against the Soviets until it disbanded in 1949. Bandera, who was eventually assassinated by KGB agents in Munich, had emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a symbol of Ukrainian independence and anti-Russian sentiment.3