In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  Poster about the “Communist Inquisition” of the USSR. Bulgarian cultural center. Bolgrad, December 2014.

  After a little coaxing Galina said that the people I needed to talk to about the Bessarabian People’s Republic were the men of a small group called the Bulgarian Friendship Society. Phone calls were made and contacts established. Pushed a bit, she let slip that this small group of men have for years fantasized about some form of special status or republic for Bessarabia, and then blurted out: “Old idiots!”

  One of them is Stepan Stojanov, who is sixty-one and works in the market. During our discussion in the little Bulgarian library in Galina’s building he seemed rather level-headed. The group has been around for some thirty years, he said, so it existed in the last years of the Soviet Union and its purpose was to raise questions about Bulgarian language and culture and to establish links with Bulgaria. Now the group was no longer active. It was split by the Maidan revolution and the war, and that reflected the split in town. Because he worked in the market he said he could pick up exactly what people were saying and thinking. “I would say that at the moment 60 or 70 percent have anti-Ukrainian outlooks.” Then he corrected himself. “About 20 percent are pro-Ukrainian and 30 percent anti-Ukrainian and all the others don’t care. The rest are saying they will support whoever gives them a better life.” When the conflict began in spring 2014 there was a pro-Russian wave. “People said, ‘When the Russians come, they will give us gas, double our pensions and make our life better.’ Now we have war in Donbass though, and this pro-Russian outlook has decreased.” Stepan said he had always wanted autonomy for Bessarabia, or at least for Bulgarians, but “me and many others think that this is not the time” because its supporters would be used by Russian intelligence and special services against Ukraine. “They want to create chaos here and many understood that.” In conversation with him and another member of the group who had joined us, a name began to pop up repeatedly. It was that of Igor Babych, a Russian general who served his career here, retired here and is well known about town. If there was to be a separatist movement, then maybe he could lead it? My attempt to find Babych proved unsuccessful, but Anton Kisse had a few things to say about him when we met.

  “I can tell you,” Kisse said, that “we are talking” to the general “and he is not a threat.” He has not been arrested. He is close to the Odessa police chief, who has been to Bolgrad to “drink tea with him.” Babych, he explained, had been happily swilling beer and grilling shashlik on his barbecue in his retirement when his name was talked about as a possible leader of a pro-Russian movement, “and maybe the Russian special services came to him for that,” and he loved it simply for the attention and status it gave him.

  According to Anton Yarotsky, a young aide to Kisse and a person who likes to use the expression “political technologies,” the whole Bessarabian People’s Republic story was used by pro-Ukrainian politicians to blacken enemies like Kisse whom they accused falsely of supporting it. But because Kisse was a shrewd political operator, he was able to use the story to his own benefit. By keeping silent on the issue, pro-Russians believed the story of the pro-Ukrainians that he supported it and thus they supported him, when in fact he did not. Actually, he said, Kisse and his friends are investing €5 million in a ferry across the Danube to Romania, and so they certainly didn’t want any instability here to disrupt their plans. Yes, Kisse confirmed, when I asked him about the ferry plan. “What am I not involved in in Bessarabia?” he asked with a smile on his face. The ferry is a small piece of a project, including upgrading roads, which has been talked about for fifteen years. The real problem, he said, had been in getting the go-ahead for a new customs and immigration terminal. Permission had now been granted. As far as he was concerned, Bessarabia “was stable, is stable and will continue to be stable.” When I asked him if he was not frightened that conflict could spread here, he just said: “Who is not frightened?”

  Before leaving Bolgrad I ran into a man in his twenties called Eduard. He told me he was the head of the municipal water department and approached me with a tone of menace. Salaries had remained the same, he said, but the price of everything had gone up. His arguments were rambling and confused. Ukraine had gas (some, but in fact nowhere enough), so why should people pay the same price as in countries where they don’t? “We would like to be part of Ukraine, but not part of Europe. Europe does not accept us. They don’t accept our products and what can we talk about if we are only doing business with Russia? Why is Poland on strike and 25,000 people have left the Czech Republic because of homosexuality in one week?” The Russian and pro-Russian media have been assiduous in their bigoted propaganda against the European Union and over gay marriage and in their attempts—clearly resonating with some—to contrast Putin, who rides horses bare-chested, and manly Russia, with Gay Europe symbolized by the person of Conchita Wurst, the bearded Austrian drag queen and 2014 Eurovision Song Contest winner.

  Izmail is one of the biggest towns of Bessarabia. On the Danube it was always an important port. You can stand on the riverbank and look across the river to Romania. First I went to see Kira, an Albanian from Zhovtnevoe, a pensioner who lives in a tower block of a Soviet-era housing project. Her daughter lives in London and married an Albanian from Albania, so she and her husband had been to visit. She liked it but disapproved of what she regarded as its hidebound traditions. Turning the conversation to Izmail I asked her what the atmosphere was like. Many Russians had come here in the Soviet period, she said, and although they had lived here almost all of their lives, they “are always criticizing the government. It is very unpleasant.” She thought the town was divided fifty-fifty between pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainians, but maybe that was changing in the wake of what had happened in the east. Many were now “afraid of Russia” and “especially its bandits and mercenaries.” Since there is no bridge or ferry to Romania, since Izmail hangs on the very edge of Ukraine and is hard to get to and since Ukrainian citizens need visas to travel to the EU, I asked her what it felt like living here. She replied: “Everyone says we are living in a deep hole here.”

  On the riverbank an old man was fishing. A big barge went past, traveling upriver. Just downriver we could see the port cranes and behind us was an old mosque, now a museum. In Soviet times, he said, the river was much busier. I asked if he would like the Russians to come back. Yes, he certainly would. Another old man listening to the conversation said that if Putin was in charge here that did not mean, as many thought, that pensions would suddenly shoot up and the glory days of the Soviet Union would be restored to Izmail. The response of the fisherman was spluttering invective. The other old man was a “fucking fascist, Nazi Banderovsti”—a reference to the western Ukrainian leader from the Second World War. The second man retreated. Listening in were two girls who waited for their chance to speak. They were students and had just come from the nearby church. One wanted to get her shy friend to practice her English. Wasn’t it frustrating, I asked, to be able to see the EU “just over there” but not be able to go there? They looked a bit baffled and said that if they wanted to have fun they could go to Odessa or go on holiday somewhere else in Ukraine.

  Fisherman on the Danube. To the left are the docks of Izmail and, on the right, the other bank is Romania. Izmail, December 2014.

  The mosque was surrounded by Second World War–era artillery. On the inside you can see a vast panoramic painting of the capture of Izmail from the Turks in 1790 by Russia’s General Alexander Suvorov, and hear a recorded narration of the event. If you listen in Russian you get sound effects of cannons too. When Suvorov took the town, most of the population were Tatars and Turks. One of the officers in Suvorov’s army was a young Baltic German called Balthasar von Campenhausen. He wrote later that the town was “extremely beautiful.” There were seventeen mosques, “the most magnificent of which was built by the merchants who trade to the interior of Asia,” and he added that “the palace of the Pacha, and the khan or inn, which the Asiatic merchants freq
uent, were extensive buildings.” He described the fortress built by a German architect and noted that the Armenians and Greeks “have a church and monastery here.” Then, rather laconically: “The useless obstinacy of the Pacha, who attempted to defend the fortress, even after all his ammunition was consumed, forced us in the year 1789, under Suwarrov, to take it by storm, and on occasion this beautiful city was reduced to ashes.” It was not just the city which was reduced. Thousands of people, including women and children, were massacred as the Russians sacked Izmail—not just soldiers.

  After the First World War, when Izmail was under Romanian rule, the town had a population of 37,000, of whom 11,000 were Jews, 8,000 Romanian (in Soviet times they became Moldovans), 6,000 Germans and the rest a sprinkling of Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians and so on. The effects of the Second World War coupled with postwar urbanization, which brought ethnic Russians and others from across the Soviet Union here, plus Ukrainians, Bessarabian Bulgarians and Albanians, who had hitherto lived as peasants in the countryside, utterly changed the city. In 2001 Russians comprised 42.7 percent of the population, Ukrainians 38 percent and Bulgarians 10 percent. That explains the divisions in Izmail just as the same legacy explains why people in different places in Ukraine think and react as they do today, though conclusions derived from ethnic data alone cannot be drawn simply, as they can in other conflicts.

  The road from Izmail to Vilkovo is pockmarked with craters. There has been no war here but the word “potholes” simply does not do them justice. Later I learned two things. A politician in Odessa, which is the capital of the whole oblast or region of which Bessarabia is a large part, told me two things about the road. When I asked him why it was so bad his first reaction was that it did not actually matter because, as it was not a big main road, “only locals use it.” Then he told me that it had in fact been repaired a couple of years ago. The problem was, of course, corruption. Roads are notorious the world over for providing an easy opportunity to skim off extra profit. You are contracted to lay asphalt with a certain thickness, which you say you do, but you do not, pocketing the cash for the materials not bought or sharing it with whoever secured you the contract. The problem for those who use the road is that the surface quickly deteriorates, as it is not thick enough—just as it has here. Then a maintenance crew can go out to resurface it once again and more money can be shared between those in on the deal.

  Vilkovo is known as a town of Old Believers, descendants of people who refused to accept the reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century and who scattered to the farthest, most isolated corners of the empire and beyond to avoid persecution. Today they make up some 70 percent of Vilkovo’s population. They settled here along with Don Cossacks also in flight, in the marshy delta of the Danube, and in this region and in Romania they are called Lipovans. The town, founded in 1746, is crisscrossed with canals and some have dubbed it optimistically the Ukrainian Venice. Along some of the canals people teeter on narrow boardwalks and tiny rickety wooden bridges as they go about their business. Houses have little jetties in front, to which their owners’ boats are tied. In the center of town is a Soviet-era fisherman monument and the main, turquoise-painted Old Believer church. From Vilkovo this branch of the Danube, known as the Kilia branch, forks out into several smaller ones, which then flow out into the sea. This is how Vilkovo got its name—it derives from the word for “fork.”

  Misha Zhmud, aged fifty-seven, is a local councillor, scientist and entrepreneur. He has built a small village of vacation houses on the river, called Pelican City, from where you can set out to explore the Danube, its birds and the Ukrainian portion of the delta, the greater part of which is in Romania. As dusk fell we sat in his little office and I scribbled by candlelight because the power was off again. Twenty years ago, he said, some 14,000 lived in Vilkovo and there was work for 7,500. Now there are only 2,000 jobs and 7,500 people. “The population is disappearing,” said Misha. In terms of work Vilkovo had gone back sixty years, and “if we don’t create three hundred or four hundred jobs here then Vilkovo will turn into a village very quickly.” A lot of local men, who have a tradition of seafaring here, have gotten good jobs as sailors on foreign ships and send money home. They can earn €5,000 to €7,000 a month when they are abroad, which is huge for Ukraine, but even this influx of cash for some lucky families is not enough to stem the exodus of those who remain.

  There were some big employers here in Soviet times. One was a fish-canning factory employing 1,300, which has gone, and the others were in fishing, the port and a shipyard. From here ships could sail up and down the Danube, but corruption and neglect led to the collapse of the industry. The coups de grâce were the Yugoslav wars. First, sanctions on Serbia led to a drop in business and finally, during the 1999 Kosovo war when NATO bombed Serbia, bridges were downed into the river, halting traffic. By the time it was cleared there was no more business, at least for Ukraine.

  Today, far more traffic flows up and down the main Romanian Sulina branch of the Danube, which, says Misha pointedly, “is in the EU,” while here, once navigable parts have silted up. Tourism has created some 300 jobs but many of these are seasonal and, as it is so hard to get to Vilkovo, it has not flourished as it should. The war is hundreds of kilometers away but foreigners see that Vilkovo is in Ukraine and numbers have fallen off dramatically. Meanwhile, as the hryvnia’s value has slumped, costs have soared. Misha also produces and exports honey and reed used for thatch. The problem is that the Chinese are among his greatest competitors in both fields and the Chinese have launched dirty disinformation campaigns to discredit Ukrainian honey. He is happy that after the Maidan revolution Ukraine finally signed a trade deal with the EU, but complained that its honey quota was far too small. One consequence of that he lamented would be the continuation of a problem they already had before the deal, i.e., honey smuggling. This meant that Ukrainian honey ended up packaged and sold as German honey. “And it is the same with reeds.” On a positive note, that day he had a meeting with partners from EU countries about using reed as a biomass energy source.

  The result of the drama of the last twenty-three years and the sheer difficulty of surviving here have left at least some of the older generations in Vilkovo “sympathetic” to Russia, “as they want a strong government,” Misha said. Ever since independence Ukrainian governments had been simply incapable and none had done anything for Vilkovo. But of those who look to Russia, while they know their own difficult situation, the problem is that there are “two Russias.” They see St. Petersburg and Moscow, which are one, but do not see the other, the rest of the country where “their standard of living is even worse than here.” Sympathy for Russia seems a vague and not very passionate force, however. In Misha’s view most people here are apolitical; if called up to serve in the Ukrainian army they would do so, but equally “they would serve the other side the same.”

  Misha always supported pro-European parties, but now, although he and his friends were the local partisans of the Maidan revolution, he cannot understand what President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk are doing. They can’t even open legal cases for corruption against Yanukovych and his cronies. “This sleepy regime needs to be woken up!”

  The next day Misha’s son Alexei, who is thirty-two, took me on a speedboat down to the sea. It was cold, clear and bright. He thought that politically people here were divided along generational lines. “Now we have children who are pro-Ukrainian and parents who are pro-Russian.” But the younger generation are disappearing because of the lack of work. Of his school class of thirty students only five remained in Vilkovo.

  We saw reedbeds, stacks of cut and bundled reed ready to go and the odd fisherman. We passed a derelict Soviet communications-cum-watchtower. As we went by an island Alexei said seventy families used to live there but now there were only ten. There is no electricity and people scrape along by fishing, growing their own vegetables and selling food to vacationers. I asked Alexei if, since this pl
ace is so isolated, there was much smuggling here, but he said there was not, because on the Romanian side of the river there were hardly any people, as “it is even worse than here.” Some of the old houses on the riverbank and islands have been bought by people from Odessa as vacation homes, and some new ones have been built, but, said Alexei, they don’t do them up nicely because they don’t want to draw attention to them. This is either because of thieves or because the law is such a mess of contradictions that most of them exist in a legal limbo and, until the rules have been reformed and clarified, people cannot legalize their properties here.

  As we came closer to the coast, birds skimmed and whirled. The coastline is always changing here. Sediment and sand constantly form new low islands and sandbanks. Finally, we came to where this branch of the river flows out to the sea. A monument has been erected on the beach and become slightly lopsided. It is black, made of steel and says “Okm.” It means “kilometer zero.” It is supposed to refer to the end of the river, but might as well refer to the end, or the beginning, of Ukraine.