by Tim Judah
In the future, and even if we leave aside the desire to attract money-spending tourists, Lviv will most likely better reflect its past. But unless Poles and Jews had asked for this, nothing would have happened. It is an irony, for example, that some visitors to the city might stay in the luxury Citadel Inn hotel. It is inside a large, imposing, round redbrick fortification that was part of a major Austrian military development built in the 1850s. The area overlooks the historic city center with its church spires and domes. You can read all about this in the history section of the hotel’s website. What you can’t read is anything about the fact that between 1941 and 1944 this was the center of the Nazi POW camp Stalag 328. Roughly 280,000 prisoners, the vast majority of them from the Red Army, passed through here and (numbers vary) up to 148,000 are said to have died. Most were starved to death by the Nazis, but others were shot or died of typhus. According to some accounts, the Nazis even brought from elsewhere prisoners already infected with typhus, so that they would infect and kill more. As prisoners arrived they were filtered, and Jews and those known to be communists were quickly earmarked for death. Some French and Belgian POWs were brought here as were Italians, who were fighting alongside the Nazis until the country capitulated in 1943. No one, it seems, really worries much about remembering what happened here. The Nazis, keen to have the Ukrainians as allies, let out many Soviet Ukrainian soldiers. As for Russia, since the overwhelming majority of the prisoners were Russians, it is not, it seems, interested either. In the Soviet period, says Ruslan Zabilyi, the director of the nearby Lonskoho prison museum, the fact that there were so many POWs was something shameful and had to be hidden. Soviet soldiers who had been encircled by the Germans were “not supposed to have surrendered and such information would destroy the myth of the invincible Soviet army.” During Stalin’s lifetime they were even officially called traitors. It is not surprising that some—how many is unknown—then joined the army of Soviet general Andrey Vlasov, who, once captured, switched sides. Because Russia sees itself as the main, if not sole, heir to the story of what in the former Soviet Union is called the Great Fatherland War, a story of Russians fighting alongside Nazis, and not against them, is certainly not a subject to be remembered.
Meanwhile, on the website of the Citadel Inn we can read that it incarnates “a revival of royal hospitality” and the “majestic traditions” of Austro-Hungarian “authentic imperial luxury.” In the last few years, whenever there has been building work around here, or trenches have been dug for pipes and cables, the workmen have found human remains. During the war, what is now the hotel was known as the “Tower of Death.”
Ticket to transit across Moldova to get to Bessarabia. Mayaki, December 2014.
You need a ticket to go to Ukrainian Bessarabia. You leave Odessa, cross the bridge over the Dniester River, and ten minutes’ drive down the road arrive at a Ukrainian border post. There they give you a slip of paper with some stamps on it. The border guard writes down on the slip how many people are in your car and the time, and tells you to drive on and not to stop. For the next 7.7 kilometers you are in Moldova, or sort of. You don’t pass a Moldovan border post unless you turn off at a junction, and a few minutes later you arrive at another Ukrainian one.
“Why did you stop?” demanded the policeman.
“To buy apples.”
“You are not allowed to do that.”
“How did you know we had stopped?”
“Because I can see how long it took you to get here.”
This is the way the Soviets drew the border. Now the road is under Ukrainian jurisdiction but the woman who sells apples from bright red buckets on the side of the road is in Moldova. If you stepped off the road to buy them, you entered Moldova illegally.
Even most Ukrainians don’t know much about Bessarabia. It is not a part of their country that looms large in their history or imagination. Politically, geographically and ethnically it is something of an anomaly. It is a kind of footnote, albeit home to more than half a million people. Sometimes they refer to it as an “appendix.” And they mean that in a literal sense. Many don’t even seem to know why it is really part of Ukraine. It hangs off the bottom of its body politic and, as Ukraine went to war, some of its people, and those in Moscow planning the destruction of Ukraine, wondered if a quick surgical operation would suffice to extract it from the country.
Look at modern histories and accounts of Ukraine, and Bessarabia barely rates a mention. Maybe this is because historically there were not so many Ukrainians or Russians here, but I suspect that it is because it doesn’t fit into the big narratives people want to create or believe about the country. Unlike many elsewhere, especially in the west of Ukraine, most of its people did not yearn for generations to be part of a united and independent Ukrainian state but, as conflict engulfed parts of the east in 2014, they realized they did not want to die to be part of Russia either.
Bessarabia is isolated and often forgotten, but in many crucial ways its stories and those of its people are just the same as those in the rest of the country. After nearly a quarter of a century of independence almost everyone in Ukraine, unless they are very rich or a politician, or quite often both, feels angry and resentful at someone. This is the story of modern Ukraine, only in Bessarabia it is often more so. In that sense, understanding Bessarabia means understanding why you need a ticket to get here, and understanding that means understanding something about Ukraine.
To understand what “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” mean, we need to understand how names are used in different ways in different contexts. Here the issue is: what is Bessarabia? Today the appendix curls out west of Odessa. From the rest of the country there are only two roads in. One crosses a rickety bridge over the Dniester, which also serves as a railway bridge. To the north of this is a vast liman or lagoon-cum-estuary where the river flows out to the Black Sea. At the top of the liman is the second road. Here you cross the bridge over the Dniester at the town of Mayaki and you get to the border point where they give you the ticket. To the west, Bessarabia is bounded by the Danube and to the north by Moldova.
Bessarabia has nothing to do with Arabs, as its name might lead one to conclude. Its name derives from that of the Basarabs, the medieval Moldovan princes who once held sway here. Historically, the region that is now Ukrainian, most of which also has the alternative name of Budjak, was the core of Bessarabia. Once the Russians took it from the Ottomans and consolidated their control with the Treaty of Bucharest in 1812, it became a part of what they called New Russia or Novorossiya. The Russians then used the name Bessarabia to describe both this southern part, what is now Moldova, and some lands to its north, which are also now in Ukraine. Today, says Anton Kisse, an ethnic Bulgarian politician and local big shot, it is hardly surprising that people are worried. After all, war and change come here every generation or two.
Ottoman mosque, now a museum, surrounded by weaponry from the Second World War. Izmail, December 2014.
In my notebook I started to write down the dates of who had ruled this land during the last two hundred years during an interview with Alexander Prigarin, an ethnographer and specialist on the region at Odessa University. After a few lines he became exasperated and took my book to write himself.
1812–1856 Russia
1856–1878 Moldova
1878–1918 Russia
1918–1940 Romania
1940–1941 USSR
1941–1944 Romania
1944– USSR
It seems odd that he ended his list like this and not like this:
1944–1991 USSR
1991– Ukraine
And perhaps not to complicate things, he left out:
1917–1918 Moldovan Democratic Republic
…which only lasted a few weeks.
And this is the simplified version! In detail it is an even more tangled web, as some districts remained Russian after 1856 and Moldova united with Wallachia in 1859 to form Romania. But the result of this history is the ticket. In 193
9 Stalin and Hitler drew their infamous line from the Baltic to the Black Sea in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Soviet Union had never recognized Romanian control over all of the old Russian province of Bessarabia after the First World War. So now, in the new circumstances, they explained in the wake of the pact that they were just reasserting control over what was rightfully theirs, a forerunner of what would happen in Crimea in 2014, although there Russia had previously recognized Ukraine’s territorial integrity. After the Soviets took control of this southern part, with its higher proportion of Slavs, it was amputated from the rest of the region and given to Ukraine and a sliver of territory to the east of the Dniester River given to the new Moldovan Soviet republic. But, as it was all in the Soviet Union, it did not really matter if the road from Odessa passed through Moldova and that Moldova itself, already stripped of the Bessarabian Black Sea coast, had no access to the sea even via the Danube. In 1999 the Moldovans and Ukrainians made a deal though. Ukraine got to control the road which runs through the village of Palanca, where women sell apples by the side of the road, and in exchange Ukraine gave Moldova a 430-meter strip of territory which adjusted the map and allowed the Moldovans to build themselves a port on the Danube at Giurgiulesti, which otherwise was cut off from the river by a virtual stone’s throw. From afar, all this seems like obscure detail—but to those who live with the vicissitudes of Soviet cartography, coping with the results is everyday life. These are small places, but Ukraine is now faced with a war based on maps and history. Why did much of the Russian-speaking east, south and Crimea end up Ukrainian, ask those who reject its sovereignty—not Russian?
In much of Ukraine, small villages tend to straggle and run into one another. Here things are a bit different. Like almost all of the rest of the country the land is flat but, oddly since it is bounded by rivers, water has always been a problem here. With the imposition of Russian rule from 1812, the Russians expelled most of the local Muslim Tatars who roamed the steppe here with their characteristic Karakul sheep, which can thrive in areas with little water since they can store fat in their tails. (If Karakul means nothing to you, think Astrakhan hat or coat.) Now the Russians had to repopulate the place: Bulgarians came, as did Cossacks from the east, Christian Albanians, Gagauz (who are Christian but speak a variation of Turkish), Russian and Ukrainian peasants, Russian Old Believers and thousands of Germans who trekked from Prussia, what is now Poland and elsewhere. For their loyalty they were given land and were free peasants, unlike serfs in the rest of the empire. For this, they and their descendants were eternally grateful. Today two communities who leavened the Balkan-like makeup of this region are gone: the Jews, who mostly died in the Holocaust when Romania briefly retook the region, and the Bessarabian Germans.
The end of the Bessarabian German story constitutes a fascinating detail ignored by all mainstream history books of the region, not least because of the bad light it casts on the Soviets in those years which helped create Ukraine within the borders it has today. When Stalin’s troops occupied Bessarabia in 1940, part of the deal with Hitler was that its Germans would be sent “home to the Reich.” Notices were pinned up in German areas informing people of this. Some 400 German members of a “commission”—SS men, according to Edmund Stevens, an American journalist who witnessed the Bessarabian Germans arriving across the new Romanian border—were then sent in to persuade people to leave and itemize their property. They would be given exactly the same when they arrived at their destination, they were told, which for many was to be the property taken from Poles in occupied Poland. Once they crossed the border the SS separated able-bodied men from their families because they were to be inducted into the German army, which would soon attack the Soviet Union. Stevens wrote that these men were particularly valuable to the Nazis because “they knew every inch of the frontier zone, and most of them spoke Russian in addition to German and Romanian.” He witnessed them cross into Romania in covered wagons like those their ancestors would have taken to get here and wrote that they shouted “Heil Hitler!” as they left the USSR. Those who sooner or later obtained land and farms taken from Poles would lose everything at the end of the war as they fled before the advancing Red Army. Meanwhile, at the same time as the Germans were leaving the region, Jews were fleeing from anti-Semitism in Romania into Bessarabia, the Soviets were shooting and deporting political undesirables and the more prosperous peasants and many Romanians (or Moldovans) were crossing out of the USSR into Romania.
Today, determining exactly who lives in Bessarabia is a problem, because there has been no census in Ukraine since 2001 and anyway, in such a mixed area identities are even more fluid than in some other parts of the country. If someone has an Albanian, a Moldovan, a Bulgarian and a Gagauz for grandparents but speaks Russian, which is the lingua franca here, then being Ukrainian is not so obvious. Also, as in other regions of Ukraine there was immigration from other parts of the country and the rest of the USSR during Soviet times, and since the collapse of the country, a general decline in the population. The young are leaving to work elsewhere and the population is becoming older. In 1930, according to ethnographer Prigarin, there were 900,000 people here. In 2012 there were estimated to be 577,574.
According to the 2001 census 40 percent declared themselves Ukrainian, 21 percent Bulgarian, 20 percent Russian, 13 percent Moldovan, with the rest split between other small groups. According to the politician Kisse, this is wrong. Only 7 percent are really Ukrainian, he says, because many people declare themselves as such even though they may not be. When it comes to what people regard themselves as, and what language they speak, statistics in Bessarabia do not lend themselves to the same sort of interpretation as they might elsewhere. Speaking Russian as your mother tongue does not indicate here, as it does not elsewhere in Ukraine, that you regard yourself as Russian. This is something many in Russia either don’t understand, or don’t want to understand.
Kisse is a controversial man. When I met him in his office in Odessa, the fifty-seven-year-old had a Ukrainian flag behind him and was dressed in a Ukrainian Olympic team tracksuit. His detractors say he is an opportunist and survivor and indeed he has come far. One of his first jobs was as a tractor driver. Now they say, if it had looked as though Odessa and the south were not going to stay part of Ukraine, like Crimea, he would have adjusted to suit the time. That is what he has done, being one of Bessarabia’s deputies in the Verkhovna Rada. Before the Maidan revolution he was a member of Viktor Yanukovych’s then ruling Party of Regions. Now he is creating a local party of his own called Our Land, which is suitably ambiguous as it could mean Ukraine, or Bessarabia, or just a village.
Like him or loathe him, what he says about many of his constituents, whom he concedes are often “pro-Russian,” is true not just for Bessarabia but for much of Ukraine as well. “The best period was in Soviet times.” In the 1960s and ’70s especially, he explained, sports centers were built, palaces of culture, which act as local community centers, went up, roads were built, people got gas and piped water for the first time and irrigation channels were dug. Money was channeled into culture and local, national folk troupes. “Bulgarians performed all over the Soviet Union,” he said. “Through culture the Soviets reached the hearts of the people.” But there was a catch. Education was in Russian, which came with its own culture and the gradual political effect of Russification. So, many of those whose ancestors came in the nineteenth century retained vague, positive images of Russia, because it was thanks to Russia that their ancestors had come to put down roots here; positive memories of the USSR outlasted negative ones and language helped make a link between Russia and the Soviet Union. “This is what remains in people’s memory.”
And now, Kisse told me, since Ukraine had been independent “we can’t talk about the development of Bessarabia.” Privatization and the dividing up of former collective farms and declining social security provisions had made people more and more worse off he said. You can argue that this is not in fact true and that most people ar
e better off in many ways than they were before, but as always in politics, it is perception that counts, not reality. Many people are still pro-Russian, said Kisse, but now they are far more inclined to keep quiet about this than they would have been before. Now “the vast majority are for Ukrainian unity.” Surely that was a contradiction, I asked. Yes, he agreed, it was. On May 2, 2014, some forty-two anti-Maidan, pro-Russian activists died in a fire in Odessa after running street battles with pro-Ukrainians in which some five others died. Then the declaration of rebel republics in the east did not result in the regions being snapped off cleanly like Crimea and people becoming instantly better off, but in war. In those circumstances, the wind began to change.
In the center of Tatarbunary, a couple of hours’ drive south-west of Odessa, there is a classic Soviet-era memorial. One man holds a flag aloft, one crouches with a rifle and one brandishes a pitchfork. It commemorates the Tatarbunary Uprising of September 1924, when a group of locals, with covert Soviet help, organization and arms, rose up against Romanian rule. The leader went under the nom de guerre of Nenin. Once he and his men had seized the town, he summoned the locals and, standing on a table taken from the town hall, proclaimed the founding of a Moldovan People’s Republic. Red flags were raised. Tatarbunary was a good place to start the revolt because much of the population was Ukrainian or Russian and resented the government’s policies of Romanianization. The region had been under martial law since its annexation in 1918. So, when Nenin told people that the Soviet cavalry was on the brink of entering Bessarabia, many rallied to the call. Within a few days it was all over. At first the police summoned help from a posse of some forty Bessarabian Germans from the nearby town of Sarata and then Romanian troops arrived to finish off the revolt. Some 500 were arrested, 279 put on trial and the following year 85 were convicted.