In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  Anatoly is a skeptic when it comes to Petro Poroshenko, who was elected president in May 2014. “He worked for Yanukovych for too long and now change is happening too slowly.” But he is still a believer. “I was on the Maidan as were two of my sons. One was beaten. He had his head smashed. For my part, it was my rights I was protecting.” Rusev said, “With Yanukovych we had no chance. At least now we have a chance.”

  Rusev was born in 1959 in a village near Sasyk. He is an ethnic Bulgarian and his family came to Bessarabia in 1821. Back in the village no one shared his views. “Many of my relatives are waiting for Putin. It is very sad. Bulgarians remember how Russia supported Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars. They believe that with a Russian system it will be better. Most people voted for Yanukovych in my village. It is hard to explain why. They just want to work on their land but they were worked upon,” he said, using an expression popular in the post-Soviet world, “by different political technologies. They believe Putin will solve all their problems and they don’t believe the Ukrainian authorities.”

  A few months later, in May 2015, something unexpectedly did change in the Odessa region. Poroshenko appointed Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia, to be its governor. A clear enemy of Russia and a man who did much to transform his own country—it remained to be seen if he could change his new domain.

  There are more than a hundred villages and districts in Ukraine unimaginatively named Zhovtnevoe. It means “October” and was one of a selection of names celebrating the October Revolution and other Soviet themes doled out to places across the Soviet Union. Zhovtnevoe in Bessarabia looks pretty much the same as any village-cum-small-town in Ukraine, but it has one peculiarity. It is the Albanian village of Ukraine. In the 2001 census 3,308 people in Ukraine described themselves as Albanian and today about half of the country’s Albanians live here. Many of the rest of the villagers are Bulgarian. The village was founded in 1811, and the ancestors of many of these Albanians came some 200 years ago from Bulgaria, where their ancestors may have already lived since the sixteenth century. The Albanians are all Orthodox. (Most but not all Albanians are Muslim.) When this part of Bessarabia fell under Romanian rule in 1856, some families moved to three more villages close to the Sea of Azov, which flows into the Black Sea, where their descendants remain. Albanians also lived in Odessa, but Zhovtnevoe, whose original name was Karakurt, which means “black wolf” and is still in wide use today, remained a sort of Ukrainian Albanian capital village.

  Elena Zhecheva, who had been mayor since 2006, was in the little town hall. She is forty-six years old and has two daughters in their twenties. She sat in the dark, because for two hours a day the electricity was off, as it was across the region since there was not enough coal for power stations because much of it came from the now war-afflicted east. In her office cabinet she has small Albanian and Ukrainian flags and various souvenirs people have brought back from Albania, Kosovo, or Macedonia, including a ceramic tile portrait of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, herself an Albanian born in Skopje. There are some 2,500 villagers according to Elena, of whom 60 percent would say they are Albanian, even if they don’t all speak the language. With every passing year and with intermarriage, she said, it was increasingly hard to tell who is what.

  In my family I am Albanian from my mother’s side and Bulgarian from my father. My grandfather spoke Bulgarian to my sister and Albanian to me. My husband knows Russian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Gagauz and Ukrainian, but he is Albanian. However, when we argue we argue in Russian. In school the children are taught in Russian and study Ukrainian, but it is not in daily use. That is not because of some attitude to Ukraine but it is simply not used.

  Albanians here are desperate for contact with Albania and Kosovo. The Albanian government says it will help, but for years nothing has happened. Because they speak an old-fashioned Albanian, the modern language is hard, though not impossible, to understand. Behind Elena is the crest of the village with three colored stripes. Red is for the village’s Albanians, green for Bulgarians and blue for Gagauz.

  As the gloom gathered the talk moved on to the life of the village in general, and while it may on the one hand be something of an ethnographic peculiarity, on the other it is little different from Ukraine’s hundred or so other Zhovtnevoes. Because of the power cut, it was getting cold and Elena pulled her coat close over her. What she said was stark: “I have bitterness in my soul.” She campaigned to be mayor with the goal of changing things for the better, but with every passing year it became harder and harder. “I don’t want to just exist in this position if I cannot do anything.” Corruption is the problem, she said, here and everywhere in Ukraine. It blocked her and others from being able to do anything to make life better for the village. “I look at my village and the hardworking people here. Ukraine is not such a poor country and we could do well.” The main road is in bad condition and smaller roads are in an even worse state. To the west Bessarabia is bounded by the Danube, but there is no bridge or ferry over it to Romania. The only way out is to cross through Moldova. If the road was good, if Ukraine’s European integration strategy bears fruit, making exports easier, if trucks did not have to waste time at customs to cross a tiny strip of Moldova to access the European Union’s markets, little Zhovtnevoe might have a chance to flourish. Now it has few jobs but lots of farmland and 24,000 pigs and, said Elena, “no one will invest here.” This is a depressed region with no industry. “Maybe some see future prosperity, but I don’t.” Would it not be better if there was a good road out directly to Romania, in which case it would take maybe ninety minutes to get there? She just laughed. She wanted a good road to Odessa first.

  In Soviet times the kolkhoz employed 1,000 people. Now only a few hundred work in agriculture. Young people leave. There are eleven shops and one café. Others work in the town hall, the school, the kindergarten and so on. The village is full of pensioners and some stay-at-home mothers, said Elena. “Others go to Odessa and rent an apartment and try to find a life there.” That the village ages and that kids, especially those who get an education, want to leave is nothing specific to Zhovtnevoe or to Ukraine. In these dangerous times people wonder whom to believe and whom to follow if forced to make a choice. But whom to believe? “My opinion is that people just can’t understand what is going on,” she said. They watch Ukrainian and Russian television and try to figure out who is telling the truth. “Many people don’t express their view openly. What they really want is work and to earn money for essential things and to at least live their simple lives. It sounds mercantile. Money is evil, but we cannot live without it.” Now what was happening in Ukraine was a fight for power by two big groups, and many here thought it was “not our fight.”

  That night I was sent to stay in the house of Granny Stefanida Stamat. Just opposite her house was a little shop where I stocked up on supplies and the woman behind the counter totted up the bill with an abacus. Stefanida’s house, with its compound and field at the back, is big. She has plenty of rooms, though most of them are unused because she is alone now. She has more land elsewhere, which she got when the kolkhoz was broken up. She is seventy and too old to farm it, as indeed are most of her neighbors, so like millions of others in Ukraine she has rented it to a company, which farms it together with the land of her neighbors and then, depending on what she wants, gives her a small amount for the produce it sells and a proportion of what is grown. Last year she took half of the produce to see her and her chickens through the year and 3,600 hryvnias, which in December 2014 was less than €200. Her monthly pension was 1,100 hryvnias or some €60 and much of that went on gas to keep her warm in winter. (A few months later the fall of the hryvnia slashed a third off the value of these figures.) She has two grown-up children who have moved away, thirty-two chickens, fifteen geese (“but I killed them”) and twenty-five ducks. In summer she has plenty of fruit that she grows. Like every single pensioner in Ukraine she is angry about her tiny pension, but those who live in the city don’t have the e
xtra resources she has, which makes them far, far angrier. “I want cheese and sausage,” she said firmly. She needs cash to buy these, as she does to pay for gas. Indignantly she declared: “I was working for forty-four years!”

  Some people, she told me, mentioning in particular Bulgarians in Bolgrad, the nearby town, thought that if Russia ruled here again life would be better, but Stefanida did not believe it. “I have lived for twenty-three years in Ukraine and Ukraine pays our pensions and all the produce we buy is Ukrainian.” A neighbor had commented on the small Ukrainian flag in her kitchen. “I said ‘yes—Slava Ukraini!’ ” Glory to Ukraine! Stefanida is unsentimental. When I left the next day I asked her if any of her neighbors were sent to the Gulag when Soviet forces returned in 1944. “Yes,” she said, “there was a man over there who was sent away.” He was apparently richer than most in the village. He never came back and his wife never remarried. I made some remark about life being tough in Soviet times and especially while Stalin was still alive. “There was a woman who stole one and a half kilos of grain from the kolkhoz,” she said, recalling that she was sent to jail. I misunderstood her gist. I thought she was citing this as an example of an unjust system and tough times. No. The point was that then you got jailed for any tiny infraction of the law, but now people “steal millions and nothing happens to them.”

  The next day I was taken to see the school. Elena, the mayor, had asked the cheerful Galina Petrova, aged fifty-one, who works with her in the town hall, to take me over. There are 244 children in it. When Galina studied here in the 1970s there were 400. She introduced me to Natalya Kircheva, who is the deputy head and aged forty-four. When she studied here in the 1980s there were 300. We looked at pictures on the walls of students in years past, on school trips and having fun, and Galina and Natalya pointed out photos of themselves as happy teenagers.

  The school has a small museum of village history and folk costumes. Today was the last day of school before the Christmas holidays, and small children were swirling around in the corridors in fancy dress with their parents. The history teacher is Igor Pushkov, who came to talk to me. Originally, he said, the village was one of Nogai Tatars, who are related to Crimean Tatars and were expelled from the region when Russian imperial rule was imposed. Then the Bulgarians came to settle and only later, in the 1830s, did the Albanians arrive. When he went out of the room Natalya took me aside and said that Albanians believe they came here in 1811, and because Igor “is Bulgarian he is saying the Bulgarians arrived first.” Natalya is Albanian and would love to go to Albania for language tuition because, unlike the Bulgarians who have a trained Bulgarian teacher in school, the Albanians do not. The tour of the school over, I thought that it was time to leave, but I was mistaken. A side room had been set aside with sandwiches and chocolates. Everywhere in Ukraine ordinary people want to tell you what they think, in large part probably because they believe their own leaders don’t listen or care about them. “No one comes here. No one is interested,” said Natalya.

  Fancy dress on the last day of school before the Christmas holidays. Zhovtnevoe, December 2014.

  Talk quickly turned to the war. Natalya was very vocal. “It is politicians fighting it out, not a people’s war. I would support a government which would support peace on our land, even if it was not Ukrainian. We need stability.” She has two sons. One is a student and would fight if he was called up, the other is hiding because he does not want to be mobilized. “We are divided.” She described herself as “a patriot of this land, not of Ukraine, but of my bit of land, of Bessarabia. If my son died in this war and afterward Ukraine was powerful, why would I need it? It is not a price I am willing to pay. If we can’t reach a solution peacefully, then leave everything as it is.” People here, and not just here, feel isolated and forgotten. Ukraine has done little or nothing for them, they think, while some have become rich and Ukraine is a rich country with enough for everyone. Here, where locals are not even ethnic Ukrainians, there was much less willingness to pay the ultimate sacrifice for the country. Natalya’s son was at university in Odessa and like everything else in Ukraine it is permeated with corruption and she had to find the cash to help him get through. So now she thinks, “Why defend this country? We are not waiting for Russia, we are waiting for changes for the better,” and this post-Maidan government “won’t bring them. I understand that I need to think globally, but now I am thinking like a mother.” Galina chipped in: “A mother who has lost her child has lost the most precious thing and life is not worth living then.”

  Galina’s own son is a seaman. In Soviet times many young men from this region, from Odessa and the coast, went to work for the Soviet merchant fleet. When the USSR collapsed, that vanished. Ships were purloined in one way or another, and a few people made a lot of money selling them. Now men work for foreign companies and the pay is good. He works all over the world but says he is ashamed of Ukraine “because people laugh at us and say that we are manipulated by people who have power.” Natalya added, “so that Russia and the U.S. can resolve their political issues on our territory.”

  Galina said that people here were waiting for change but they had not seen it, and because of their experiences in the past there was no trust that government was willing or able to introduce reforms to benefit the population. In Soviet times there was a big military airbase nearby and a paratroop division. If war had broken out between NATO and the USSR, their job would have been to secure free access to the Black Sea. Troops from here went to Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in the 1980s. With the base and the soldiers came a military hospital. “We had great doctors, but they have all been removed from here. So, what was that reform? It left us fewer doctors and beds and no specialists.” And free health care, which is what Ukrainians are supposed to benefit from, is mostly free on paper only.

  Leaving the school I asked them in the corridor if they had heard of a plan to establish a Bessarabian People’s Republic, rumors of which had been circulating on the Internet. A stern-looking teacher overheard me and admonished me. “You should not even speak of such things! Even to talk about things like that risks smashing Ukraine, which is like a glass, into pieces and I don’t want anyone to talk about it.” Her name was Yevdokiya Gelmintli, she was gray-haired, grandmotherly and seventy years old. Ukraine is like a family with a broom, she said. “The broom is strong, but if everyone has one twig each, then anyone can break you. Even rumors of such things would help those who want to smash Ukraine apart. The south of Ukraine is rich in resources and ‘black earth’ and we want a better life, but not to separate from Ukraine.”

  Sign for the pig farm. Zhovtnevoe, December 2014.

  As I left Zhovtnevoe something strange by the side of the road caught my eye. On a brick base, which might once have held a sign indicating that this was the collective farm, was a large pink cartoon pig sporting a yellow hat with a flower in it. It was the entrance to the pig farm.

  Bolgrad on a dark December afternoon is a gloomy place. Maybe in summer it is nice. The first thing I saw when I arrived was a funeral progressing slowly through the streets. The coffin lay on the back of a truck and behind it came a brass band followed by the mourners. In front walked a man carrying two oranges on spikes, a local funeral tradition.

  Bolgrad lies about four hours’ drive from Odessa and is close to the Moldovan border. President Petro Poroshenko was born here in 1965, but the town is best known as the Bulgarian capital of Bessarabia, and 60.8 percent of the people who live in the town and the wider region are Bulgarians, according to the 2001 census. In the center of town is a large memorial commemorating the Bessarabian Bulgarians who died fighting for the liberation of Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. Far from being a historic monument, it was in fact unveiled only in October 2012 by none other than Bessarabia’s great political survivor Anton Kisse. This is his home turf.

  I wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious story of the Bessarabian People’s Republic. The Internet
rumors suggested that it might play the same proxy role as the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics if Russia decided that it wanted to take the conflict further and snap Bessarabia off from the rest of Ukraine. If this project were ever to materialize, the rumors went, Russians and former Soviet Afghan war veterans could be used to proclaim the republic and mobilize pro-Russian Bulgarians. Maps of the Russian nationalist Novorossiya project show all of the south, including Bessarabia, being stripped from Ukraine. One reason why the region could be vulnerable is that there are many Russians here, especially former military men, who were originally not from Bessarabia but stayed behind after the fall of the Soviet Union and the closure of the huge military facilities that used to be here.

  In this region there had been some credible stories of drones flying overhead. They might come from Transnistria, the breakaway slither of Moldova, which serves as a smuggling hub and is under Russian control and where there is a contingent of Russian troops. The drones might be trying to see what the Ukrainians are up to in the old Soviet airbase, where some limited military activity has resumed. Elsewhere in Bessarabia, closer to the coast, it was assumed that the drones were flying off ships from the Russian Black Sea fleet based in Sebastopol, in Russian-annexed Crimea. On paper, the idea of a Bessarabian People’s Republic makes sense in that with determination and a small number of well-trained men it would be technically easy to isolate the region from the rest of the country, as there are only two bridges in across the Dniester, which could be blown up. In reality, such events might well simply splinter Bessarabia into several rival centers of regional and ethnic power.

  To find out more, I met up with Galina Ivanova, the head of the Bulgarian cultural center. She definitely did not want to talk politics. She showed me their small museum, containing exhibits of Bulgarian ethnographic interest, embroidery and so on and pictures and panels on various themes. One commemorates locals who fought in the Red Army during the Second World War, and includes a Soviet flag. On the other side are panels and information on the “Communist Inquisition,” the Gulag and the Holodomor. Those who glorify and honor the Soviet past in Ukraine usually ignore or deny the dark pages of Soviet history; likewise, those on the other side of the historical barricades in Ukraine glorify those who fought the Soviets and often collaborated with the Nazis. This exhibition is a little unusual then, but actually reflects what many ordinary and unideological people think: it is possible to honor those who fought the Nazis and fascism without denying the evils wrought by communism in Ukraine.