In Wartime
Page 22
In these turbulent times Andrey has made no secret of which side of the barricades he is on. At the entrance to the TIS port is a giant Transformers-style robot sculpture holding a Ukrainian flag. For its mouth it has a red digital ticker-tape screen along which run the words Slava Ukraini! “Glory to Ukraine!” More than a year after the beginning of the war in the east, Andrey was fairly confident that the critical point of risk had passed and that Odessa was not about to fall into separatist or Russian hands. Anyone watching television can see what is happening in Donetsk and Lugansk, he said, and so can make their own realistic assumption about what would happen here if conflict were to spread. When there had been anti-Ukrainian demonstrations in the city in 2014, he had mingled with protesters to hear what they were saying and was shocked that middle-class people were among them. “There were doctors and teachers and government officials, and their salaries are way bigger in Russia. They were just fed up with low salaries and low pensions.” At the time many thought that Odessa might fall into Russian hands like Crimea, but one key difference is that perhaps most people in Crimea wanted to become part of Russia when the opportunity arose, while the same could not be said about Odessa.
Robot at the entrance to the TIS terminal. Vizirka, April 2015.
Andrey said it was hard to know what his workers thought, not least because he had decreed that politics must be left at the port gate. He estimated, “We had people in favor of Russia, perhaps thirty percent and maybe they still are, and then seventy percent for Ukraine.” The difference would be if 10 percent of the pro-Russians were actively propagating their views. When the war began and a port train driver stuck a Donetsk People’s Republic flag on his locomotive, Andrey says he was fired within two hours. More sinister was the day his security men found a man dressed like a homeless person snooping about. When they searched him they found he had a Russian military officer’s identity document on him. He was handed over to the Ukrainian security services. He must have been a low-level operative and a dimwit at that for carrying ID, but it was clear what he was doing. “This is where military ships could berth.” If Russia was going to land men and military equipment in a bid to take Odessa, the TIS port would be the ideal place to do it.
Especially at the most critical times, Andrey was active in the local media. He wanted people to see that he was taking a pro-Ukrainian position at a time when many were uncertain and no one knew if, in the wake of the loss of Crimea and the beginning of the war, the rest of Ukraine might simply implode. He wanted everyone to know that “we would be in big trouble if Russia came.” Then those close to him and colleagues in Odessa suggested he pipe down, even though they shared his views. They feared that if Ukraine lost Odessa, anyone who had been prominent in support of it would lose their business and believed that whatever happened, they had a responsibility to their workers and families and perhaps it was not worth risking all if it meant that the business would be destroyed. Andrey did not pipe down.
Now that the threat from Russia had receded he had another concern. The government needed to get a move on and reform the country fast. When they carry out reforms they don’t explain why, he said. A year ago no one would have thought of saving water, gas or electricity because, as they were heavily subsidized, they were cheap. Now the subsidies were going and prices were rising, but no one was explaining to people why this was happening and so they got angry. The revolution had also led to new people being put in charge of a system, of ministries and administrations full of people who “need to be fired.” They were destructive elements left over from the past, he said, and sabotaged attempts to change things. New people at the top spent 80 percent of their time fighting those who were supposed to work for them and only 15 or 20 percent of their time on reforms. One serious problem was that Ukraine simply did not have enough individuals with the right skills to replace those he thought should be sacked. Andrey said he spent time at the Ministry of Infrastructure and it was full of people “who are against any changes,” while the new intake “don’t know anything about ports.” For this reason, and “because it is easy to criticize and I am trying to help,” TIS employees were being dispatched to Kiev to give master classes on how ports operated. In the railway sector, energy and mining, he saw the same problems.
Maidan, he lamented, had been a “revolution of merchant bankers,” by which he meant that many of the top posts in government had gone to people who worked in finance and were rich enough to take time off to take them on. Ukraine had plenty of good people with financial and banking experience, but not enough who had other types of business experience. The problem with this was that the finance types
don’t like to come into conflict with anyone. By their very nature they have to be friendly and tolerant but, given the way the country is, they must be decisive and tough and it is just not in their nature, so when it comes to fighting corruption and putting people in jail they just can’t do it. Some good examples: none of the former politicians are in jail. No corrupt prosecutors or judges have been arrested. How can you do reforms like this? In Odessa they changed the head of the prosecutor’s office, but everyone else is the same.
Judges were bribed to put people in jail, and the person who paid the most wins when a commercial dispute comes to court. It is not surprising that there has been far less foreign investment in Ukraine than its size and potential suggest it should have. Many corporate agreements are done under British law, Andrey said, but whatever a British court might decide, it is of little use if its decision cannot be enforced in Ukraine. There are no multinationals in the Ukrainian port business “because they are afraid. They say, ‘Why come to Ukraine when we can go to Slovenia or the Baltics?’ ” Above all else, Ukraine’s corrupt legal system needs fixing, “and that has not even been touched by the reforms yet.”
Before leaving and turning out from the port back onto cratered roads, I asked Andrey if he was an optimist. “An optimist is not the first to shout ‘hurray,’ ” he quipped, “but the last to shout “we’re finished,” and there is still time to shout that.” A banker who knows Andrey said that the shame was that there were far too few businessmen like him in Ukraine.
A zebra stands by another which has been kicked to death overnight. Askania-Nova, April 2015.
“Yes, kids! We’re coming!” shouted Viktor Gavrilenko happily out of the window of his green Lada Niva as we hurtled over the steppe. They stood, looking sullen and stared at him. A little bit away from the main group, one was standing beside another one lying on the ground. “Oh my God! He’s dead!” said Viktor. We jumped out to have a look. His eyes had been pecked out by crows who had streaked his body with their white excrement. If this had been an African wildlife reserve the overnight death of a zebra would have been a mundane affair. Here at Askania-Nova, less than an hour’s drive from the border with Crimea, where they have lived on and off for well over a century, the murderous overnight assault in which an alpha male had kicked a younger male to death was, said Gavrilenko, “very rare.”
Phone calls were made and a team summoned to take away the victim for a postmortem. After this he would be fed to the guard dogs. We moved off to see the bison nursing their young, wild donkeys from Tajikistan and rare Przewalski horses from Mongolia. Then we came to the herds of saiga antelope, with their characteristic snuffling muzzle that looks like a tiny elephant’s trunk. A quarter of a century ago, a million ranged across the Eurasian steppe all the way to China, but the post-Soviet world has not been kind to them. There are perhaps only 50,000 left. They have been hunted for their meat and above all for the distinctive horns of the males which are used in Chinese medicine. Now there are none left in China. Suddenly Viktor and Viktoria Smagol, his thirty-nine-year-old saiga specialist, leapt out of the car and within minutes Viktor was cradling a two-day-old foal which Viktoria put in a cardboard box that happened to be labeled “From Ukraine.” The Chinese want them for breeding and pay $3,000 a head. Half an hour later he was in a pen with eight others
. When they are four months old they will be flying to China.
There is something surreal about the zebras of the Ukrainian steppe, the camel which had just given birth in Askania-Nova’s zoo, with its ostriches, immaculately kept gardens and arboretum. It is a jarring contrast to what you would expect in the crumbly and dilapidated little towns of this part of the south. But the strange thing is how, despite all the odds, this place has survived the whirlwinds of history.
Viktor is a turbocharged fifty-nine-year-old. Since 1990 he has headed up the steppe biosphere reserve and steered it through the difficult post-Soviet years. Now bad times are here again, but Askania-Nova has seen far worse. Walking around the arboretum at dusk he began to tell the tale. In 1828 this tract of land, designated as parcel “71,” was bought by the Duke of Anhalt-Kothen, a small duchy in the center of Germany. The plan was to turn the steppe here into sheep country. His retainers had experience with sheep, and the port of Odessa, just a few days’ trek away, was open for business to export wool. On the designated day a long column set off from the small town of Rosslau on the river Elbe toward the planned settlement. It was to take its name from one of the duke’s 800-year-old titles. In the column were fifteen men, four women, six children, two bulls, six cows, eight horses and 2,866 sheep. They traveled, according to one account, with three covered wagons which “had been loaded with all the equipment: clothes, linen, tools, seeds—everything that had to go.” But the steppe was dry, the project badly managed and the venture was not a success. In 1856 it was sold to Friedrich Fein. He was the prosperous descendant of a man who, according to one version of his story, for accounts differ slightly, had fled to imperial Russia from his native Germany in 1763.
Fein managed to turn Askania-Nova into a successful sheep farm, and eventually there would be several hundred thousand sheep here. After his death the estate passed to his only child, a daughter, and her husband, a man called Johann Falz. By permission of Tsar Alexander II, they were allowed to create the name Falz-Fein to preserve the Fein name. It was their grandson Friedrich Falz-Fein who, in 1884, began to create a zoo, an arboretum and a reserve here and fenced off a large area of virgin steppe to preserve it. By this time the family also had a fish-canning plant and a small Black Sea port nearby from which they could export their wool. When Tsar Nicholas II came to visit in April 1914, Friedrich had fifty-eight types of animals and 402 types of birds. The tsar is reported to have exclaimed: “My goodness, what harmony there is here, what peace…What a paradise!” As he set off back to his brand-new Livadia palace in Crimea, he said he hoped to visit again in autumn, “if we haven’t got a war on our hands by then!”
The end of the war, the civil war and the revolution saw the Falz-Feins flee to Germany, sailing away from Crimea. Friedrich’s mother refused to go and was shot by bandits or Red Army soldiers at her huge stately home in nearby Preobrazhenka. Fighting raged around Askania-Nova as it changed hands between Whites, backed by German troops, and Reds. With the final imposition of Soviet rule most of the animals had been killed, eaten or had escaped, but perhaps a quarter survived. In 1919 the property was nationalized and in 1921 it became a state steppe reserve. An institute of animal husbandry was developed, based on the scientific work of Friedrich Falz-Fein. Just as Askania-Nova was getting back on its feet, Stalin’s purges began. Between 1933 and 1937 the number of scientists and other workers here who were executed came to eighteen, with more sent to the Gulag. Oddly, as thousands of other places were given new, proper, revolutionary-sounding names, Askania-Nova kept its name with all of its aristocratic connotations. In 1941 war came again and, while officially the reserve and institute continued to be run by a German, by 1943 with the return of the Red Army only 20 percent of the animals were left. Reconstruction began again.
Now the institute started to expand and had large farms at its disposal, and these required manpower. People began to arrive, or be sent to work and settle here, and the village of Askania-Nova grew into a town. At first there were just modest houses, but in the Khrushchev era typical five-story blocks were built. There were shops, a cinema, a bakery, a dairy and a meat plant. And then, said Vera Kravchenko, aged seventy-six, who milked antelopes in Askania-Nova for twenty years, “After perestroika everything began to go wrong.”
Money for the institute was drying up, but Viktor managed to secure the formal separation of the reserve, zoo and arboretum from it. The institute wasted away, but the reserve survived all the tribulations of the post-Soviet era. It was a popular place to visit on holidays and, according to Vera, Viktor ran, and runs, a tight ship. If you work there and get caught drunk you are out. Today Viktor is an angry man though. Budget cuts mean that the state is paying salaries and fuel bills, but for everything else the reserve and the zoo need to find the money themselves. One source of income is breeding and selling animals, such as saiga and bison; the other is ticket sales. Before the war Askania-Nova had been receiving an average of 100,000 paying visitors a year. In 2013 it had 86,216, but the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war saw the number collapse to 34,096 in 2014. So, said Viktor, “I have a big bill for Putin!” He wrote to his colleagues in Moscow to protest against the takeover of Crimea and what was happening in the east, saying that scientists should not stay quiet as they had when Hitler had taken over Austria and the Sudetenland. One of the most senior men he wrote to, an old friend, did not reply but his deputy did. The response was: “We are not free in communications.”
I was staying the night at Vera’s house. She and her husband had rooms for guests, and the conflict had seen their numbers tumble in line with park visitor numbers. She and her husband came, as did so many, after the Second World War. Around the house they have pictures of kittens, saints, parrots and Stalin. They have family in Crimea, and Nikolai Kravchenko, who is eighty, told me they say things are great there now since the Russians have taken over. When I asked if he thought they should come here too, he answered: “Of course! They should have done it years ago.” Of Stalin he said ruefully: “He was the leader of our lives.” The rest of the family was more circumspect. His daughter Oksana and Anatoly Ivanov, her husband, aged sixty-three, went to live in Russia in the 1990s. In the end they decided to come back when there was a crackdown on illegal immigrants. They could not get their paperwork in order without paying a $5,000 bribe, which they could not afford, even though Anatoly was making good money working for the police as a vehicle electrician. Of the family in Crimea, he said, after a period of going on about how great it was with higher pay and pensions, they had gone very quiet because prices had risen so much too. He did not want the Russians to come to Askania-Nova. In Crimea, people were no longer free to say what they wanted, but “I can say whatever I like.”
Life in Askania-Nova still revolves around the reserve and the institute, which together employ about 450 people. In Soviet times they employed 1,100. The collapse of employment has led to an exodus. From a peak of 10,000 inhabitants in the mid-1980s there are now only 3,500 living here, and most of them are elderly. The absence of people gives the town an eerie feeling. Nikolai said that he called his street, lined with pleasant houses with vegetable gardens, “the street of death” because so many of his neighbors have left or died. Walk down the street and it is immediately clear how many houses are empty and beginning to fall down. On the main street a new house of culture, which would have been a sort of village hall, was built at the end of the Soviet period but then sold to someone in what locals assume to be some money-laundering scheme. Now it is closed, a dilapidated eyesore just like the old cinema on the other side.
Some of those who left in the late 1980s and early ’90s were Germans, or people claiming German descent who could thus go to Germany. I wondered if some of them were the descendants of the colonists who had come as part of the original settlement or with the Falz-Feins. People looked blank when I asked them about this. I went to the cemetery just outside town and met a woman and her husband. I had seen gravestones with German na
mes and asked her about this. She told me that her father, whose grave she had come to visit, had been an ethnic German. But, she explained, he had been a Crimean German, a descendant of settlers who had arrived at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1941 all of the Crimean Germans, like the Crimean Tatars, were deported by Stalin before the arrival of the Nazis, and so she had been born in Kazakhstan. After the war, again like the Crimean Tatars, the Germans were prevented from returning home but they could come here, and many did to one nearby village in particular, which was about as close to Crimea as they could get.
A few hundred meters away we could see a large Ukrainian mobile radar. It was there to help keep watch on the Russians and to give early warning in case their forces move out from Crimea and begin an invasion of the mainland.
A couple of times I thought Natalie Jaresko was going to cry. But she did not. It was twilight and we sat on the terrace of her house just outside Kiev. As we talked, all the emotion of trying to save Ukraine from economic oblivion bubbled to the surface. Each time, though, the Minister of Finance regained her composure. Her two daughters, aged seventeen and eleven, drifted in and out asking homework questions. The next morning her older daughter was taking an economics exam. “I just feel incredible pressure,” said her mother. Ukraine’s very “existence as a country” was under threat, and “we have no choice but to succeed.”