by Tim Judah
The Tatarbunary Uprising was not the only one egged on by the Soviets in Bessarabia in these interwar years, but many of their other plans fizzled out completely. Still this history does give pause for thought. In the West these events can seem like very obscure historical details. But, if you are in Moscow and thinking about how to destabilize Ukraine, all this is part of the textbook, the back catalogue. One account of the uprising in English was published in 1927 by Charles Upson Clark, an American academic who knew Romania and Bessarabia well. He wrote that the region was:
honey combed with revolutionary organizations financed and directed from Soviet Russia. These exploited the post-war economic and political difficulties of the country, the mistakes of the new regime, all forms of discontent, intensified by financial stagnation and the drought; and indiscreet or corrupt Roumanian officials played into their hands.
And so, in our times, the story repeats itself. Modern Ukraine is similarly “honeycombed” with organizations and individuals tied in one way or another to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, whose authorities have exploited the dire economic and political situation created by Ukraine’s venal and corrupt politicians, giving those who look to Moscow a source of succor and support.
Today cars and trucks speed through Tatarbunary, which lies on either side of the road between the Danube port of Izmail and Odessa. People stop here for a meal or drink at the modest hotel just out of town which, over the Christmas period, displays over the porch an illuminated model of reindeer whose heads slowly move this way and that. Horses and carts trot past the 1924 memorial. On the other side is an ordinary building on the corner of the street with a metal onion-style dome atop a mini-steeple. It is the church of Father Vasily. It is an unusual place because it was not built as a church. Vasily is Gagauz and was a priest in Izmail for fifteen years, and his wife was Ukrainian, from Tatarbunary. She wanted to come back and did so with their four children. “I decided that nobody would feed or dress them or give them an education, so I left my church and came here.” Then he found this building and said, “God, if you will it, let it be a church.”
Religion in Ukraine can be complicated. The mainstream Orthodox Church is divided between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kiev Patriarchate. There is also the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, founded in 1921, and the Greek Catholic Church, which is part of the wider Catholic community but draws on Orthodox rites and traditions. Most priests in this region belong to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Father Vasily. Tatarbunary, December 2014.
Wanting to open his new church, Vasily went to his bishop, whom he described as an “agent” of Moscow, and said: “If you don’t give me permission I will go to Kiev.” The bishop said, “Calm down, Gagauz—I know you people have hot blood.” Vasily replied that there was someone “with higher rank than him” and went to Kiev to seek a blessing. But he could not get it there either. A scandal ensued, as he proceeded to open his own church unaffiliated with either patriarchate but, miracle of miracles, people in town began to arrive with icons, crucifixes and other religious artefacts, many of which they had kept hidden during the Soviet period and some of which had been saved from churches that had been destroyed. “I did not buy anything,” he said enthusiastically. There was an old man who, when he was younger, had had the job of shoveling coal into the furnace of a heating system, he said, pointing at a fine large image of Christ with a radiating golden halo. One day stuff from a church was brought in and he was told to shove it all in the fire. He burned the first item but, realizing no one was looking, he hid three more under piles of straw. Sometime later, a few years after the end of the Soviet Union, when Vasily opened his own church, the old man rescued the items from their hiding place, put them on a cart and brought them to him.
For those who go to church, their priest can be an influential figure, even telling them whom to vote for. During the 2010 presidential election Vasily said “the other priest” told his flock to vote for Yanukovych because he would be “an Orthodox president.” The “other priest” was clearly more influential. In this area, over 80 percent voted for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Now, says Vasily, “we see that part of the population is for Russia and part for Ukraine, and that is the same for Gagauz too.”
Up the street and round the corner, you come to the office of local ecologist and political activist Iryna Vykhrystyuk, who is forty-six years old. It is easy to find because it has solar panels on the roof and flies a Ukrainian flag. Iryna, blue-eyed and determined-looking, has about as deep roots as you can get around here. One branch of her family descends from Cossacks who settled in Tatarbunary in the 1790s. Some of her relatives took part in the uprising of 1924. It failed, she remarks tartly, because the help they expected to come from Odessa never arrived.
It is December and in the office of her organization, Vidro-dzhennia, which means “Renaissance,” there are Christmas cards made by children, to be sent to soldiers on the front. They say things like “Stay away from evil,” “May God protect you” and “We are waiting for you with victory.” Iryna has three sons, one of whom is fighting. He is a volunteer with the army, not with one of the many militias that have sprung up. At first the army refused to take him because they had not mobilized him, but he and others who were in a similar situation protested and the army relented.
Now Iryna is doing what she can to support Ukraine’s soldiers, and before that she supported the Maidan protests against Yanukovych, but much of her activist life since 1996 has been devoted to reversing the ruinous legacies of Soviet policies on the local ecology. What is stunning though is that so long after the collapse of the USSR she and her colleagues have not succeeded. The reasons for this are vested interests and corruption, a classic tale which, replicated thousands of times in different ways across Ukraine, does much to explain how the country has been reduced to such dire straits.
Tatarbunary, which means “Tatar Wells,” sits at the top of the 210-square-kilometer Sasyk liman, the lagoon-cum-estuary that runs out to the sea. At the mouth of Sasyk, as with neighboring limans, there is a broad sandbar, up to 500 meters wide in places. But the sandbar did not seal Sasyk off from the sea, so while small rivers ran into it, it was a saltwater lagoon and traditionally a source of fish to eat and sea salt to sell. On land the villagers grazed goats and sheep and Iryna’s ancestors began to plow up the steppe and plant vineyards. In the 1960s an ambitious project was approved by the Soviet authorities. The idea was to dam Sasyk by building a massive 14-kilometer-long dike along the sandbar, digging a 13.5-kilometer-long canal from the Danube and filling it with freshwater and thus make it the center of a huge irrigation project. (Switch to satellite mode and you can see all this easily with Google Maps.) The aim was to eventually link the Danube with the Dnieper in order to irrigate 8.7 milllion hectares of land.
Work began and Sasyk was closed off from the sea in 1978; irrigation began in 1981. Giant pumps extracted the salty water, which was being replaced with fresh Danube water. According to Iryna, the majority of people around Sasyk were enthusiastic. “There was not enough freshwater here.” People got their water from wells and small steppe rivers but now demand was escalating, especially due to the consumption of local kolkhozes or collective farms. They had, she says, good Ukrainian chernozem, the fertile “black earth” that Ukraine is famous for, but not enough water. “In Soviet times we always wanted to be ahead of America in terms of producing grain, wheat, corn, sunflowers and grain for cattle.” Before the advent of kolkhozes people knew how to look after their land and especially when to leave it fallow, which is particularly important when land is dry. “Then this system was destroyed.” The kolkhozes used all of the land all of the time and so it lost its potential and the soil degraded. Then came the Sasyk irrigation plan. Among some of the scientists who worked on the project there had been some skeptics but, according to Ivan Rusev, a well-known local ecologist and activist whom I also met, these were Soviet times and so they kept their heads down and did not want to figh
t against the prevailing trends. The project was disastrous. Instead of turning Sasyk into a freshwater lake, the result was that the earth in the newly irrigated land turned salty due to the fact that saltwater continued to enter Sasyk through springs and underground caverns.
In 1994 irrigation from the liman was restricted but not before almost 30,000 hectares of soil had been destroyed or their productivity badly damaged. Wells started to fill with salty water and some 3,000 people had to leave the irrigated area. The water also began to destroy the local ecosystem. There were floods, and birds died. Now the liman, said Rusev, who trained as a biologist, is “a soup of pathogens.” Historically Odessa was afflicted by cholera, which Rusev said “is like plague. It just sleeps. The microbes are just waiting and cholera could come from Sasyk again.”
The next morning Iryna took me down the bumpy road on the western shore of Sasyk. We passed a defunct old Soviet brick factory, the earth pockmarked with craters where the clay was dug up. Iryna said that on paper the factory still exists as a going concern, despite the fact that money was provided to close and move it even before the end of the Soviet Union. Now she thought the director used the premises to do something for his own benefit. On the other side of the road there is a monument indicating that this was the beginning of Trajan’s Wall, an earthwork system or defensive line supposedly built by the Roman emperor. It is hard to see anything here, and whether Trajan or the Romans really had anything to do with the earthwork line is hotly disputed by academics. Next we came to Borisovska, a neat village lining a road leading to a decrepit collection of old buildings, some in a state of virtual collapse, by the shore of the liman. This used to be one of a group of sanatoria around Sasyk and one of the best-known in the Soviet Union. Part of the building is a bakery now. We walked down the muddy track to look at the scruffy rubbish-strewn shore and returned to buy freshly baked bread.
People used to come here, said Iryna, for the healing effects of the water and mud baths. After Sasyk was closed off, the once therapeutic mud was lost as it filled with polluting heavy metals coming from the Danube. “There was a TB sanatorium and ones for children and adults. They treated bones, heart disease and abdominal diseases and then the system was destroyed.” Now, said Iryna, locals suffer from these diseases which used to be cured here and which they were less prone to before by virtue of living close to the lake. Since the closure of Sasyk respiratory diseases and cancers have shot up around the liman.
A few kilometers away is the village of Glubokoye. At the edge of the village, down a muddy path, is a cemetery. It is a bleak and windswept place. The gravediggers were digging and most of the modern graves are, like everywhere else in Ukraine, wreathed with bright and colorful plastic flowers. The first Cossack settlers began to bury their dead here when they arrived in the eighteenth century. Then, as now, the cemetery overlooked Sasyk, but every generation since has buried its dead further from the water and closer to the village. When Sasyk was closed, however, the water level changed. Before the closure it was 20 centimeters lower than the sea. When it was closed and the water remained too salty, the engineers raised the level to 60 centimeters above sea level, causing floods and land erosion. Now land on which the cemetery is situated ends abruptly as an earthy cliff above the water, and this has gradually been falling away.
Valeriy, a man in his sixties, out for a walk, pointed down to one place where the earth was crumbling into the water and where there used to be a beach. In his childhood, he said, it was always packed and it was hard to find a place to put down your towel. Villagers made lots of money renting rooms to vacationers. Years ago, he continued, the cemetery stretched another 150 meters out toward Sasyk. Today the last graves before the cliff are from the 1880s. A century or so of graves, including all the old Cossack ones with their characteristic Cossack cross stone tombstones, have gone, lost to the village and to history.
Gingerly we followed a slippery mud path down to the shore. Behind us there was a crashing sound as a little slice of land literally slipped away. Under the cemetery they have tried to stop the erosion by trucking in rocks, but the earth is still falling away because of the wind. It is a bizarre sight. At the top of the cliff, bones and coffin planks protrude from the earth where they were buried. The wind wears away the soil and eventually the remains fall onto the shoreline below. Bits of tombstone lie in the mud along with the odd bones and pieces of skull.
It is logical to conclude that, as this great Soviet engineering experiment has failed, the simple answer is that it should be reversed. The sluices should be opened, the sea should be let back into Sasyk and nature should be allowed to reverse the effects of human interference. This is what Iryna, Ivan Rusev and others have campaigned about for years. Appeals have gone to the government, commissions have been created to examine the problem and politicians, said Iryna, “pretend to do something.” It is a story that could be repeated ten thousand times across Ukraine. Politicians promise they will resolve a problem and “people start believing ‘finally this guy will do what he has to do’ and after that he forgets.” In the end real decisions are not taken here in little Tatarbunary, but still, in and around town, there are too many who “are literally parasites on this ecosystem.” They have all been fighting hard and have hitherto had the connections to prevent change. There is no more irrigation from Sasyk, but there are defunct pumping stations and they employ people. In total about a hundred work for the Ministry of Ecology, looking after the dike, the pumps and the pipes. They are, she said, “pumping out budget money” in the form of pay, but more than that, over the years, they have been stealing and selling off pipes and machinery, some of which are still in good condition. Still, if Sasyk was opened again they would no longer have their “phantom jobs.” And worse: “The other criminal thing,” pointed out Iryna dryly, is that the local authorities benefit from this system because they collect tax from these salaries and thus they are “fed for doing nothing.”
The next reason Sasyk is not reopened is fishing. Before the closure Sasyk was a spawning ground for Black Sea fish, but there were also freshwater fish, which now are the only ones to survive, albeit in tough conditions. The water is brackish and afflicted by suffocating algal blooms. It is also contaminated with the heavy metals washed down the Danube from industry upstream and then trapped in here. The water is thus toxic and does not meet sanitary norms, so, said Iryna, neither she nor others who know how bad the situation is would eat Sasyk fish. Still, people are poor and some can make a little money by fishing. But they cannot just cast off or take their boat to the middle of the liman as their grandfathers would have done. Now a businessman owns the fishing rights here, secured thanks to his political connections. Locals must buy expensive permits, adding to their costs such as equipment and fuel. And woe betide anyone who dares to fish without a permit. “He has guards and they will punish you.” Or worse, she said matter-of-factly, you could risk getting killed. If the lake was opened again then people could fish freely once more, so obviously the well-connected businessman has lobbied hard to keep his fishing preserve.
What has happened at Sasyk over the years has happened in different ways everywhere in Ukraine. Imagine a big ship. If you make a very small hole in the hull, it will leak but not sink. But if you make enough holes, the ship will keel over and begin to slip below the waves. Sasyk is one hole.
Ivan Rusev, ecologist and activist, on the bridge over the Dniester to Bessarabia. Mayaki, December 2015.
There is another small hole at the little town of Mayaki. I stood with Ivan Rusev on the bridge over the Dniester and he pointed to a complex of luxury houses being built illegally in the national park just on the Bessarabian side of the river. Since the Maidan revolution, he said, illegal building had soared. The reason was that the new government had stopped building inspections in order to save money, and on the basis of its conclusion that the system was so rotten and corrupt there was no point in sending out inspectors just so they could be bribed some more. They wer
e indeed corrupt, said Rusev, but now, with no inspections whatsoever, those building illegally “are more active than ever.”
His burly colleague Anatoly Zhukov, who is from Mayaki, has been compiling files on what has been happening and sending the information to the president and the prosecutor’s office, but to no avail. “Many people in this region are very corrupt,” he said, and “they have just changed flag and changed party.” In other words, former Yanukovych loyalists have simply jumped ship and now support the new people in power. In Mayaki people were particularly angry because since the town was founded in 1521 its inhabitants had had free access to the riverbank and now those areas had been acquired by a company to build houses for “rich and corrupt” people. Sitting in a dingy café Anatoly began to name local bigwigs, explained their connections to Yanukovych and how they profited from that relationship and how now, being connected to top people in Kiev, they had survived the transition wrought by the Maidan revolution. He singled out a top local official. “He is totally corrupt. He was a Yanukovych man and now he has been promoted. Nothing has happened.”