by Tim Judah
With its catastrophic drop in population from 52.18 million in 1992 to an estimated 45.49 million in 2013, Ukraine cannot afford to lose any more of its educated youth. The Maidan revolution had inspired many of them, but this motivating force is fast receding into the past. In Kiev, Evgenia Chernega, a thirty-two-year-old psychotherapist, told me how she had gone to live with a boyfriend in Canada, and when the revolution started they got married. On a visit to New York, she found herself crying as she read in the New York Times what was happening at home. “I felt I had to be there,” she said. She had to come back to finish her studies anyway, so four days after getting married, she flew to Kiev and offered her services as a volunteer psychotherapist to those on the Maidan who needed help. She never returned to the man she had married, who had taken Canadian citizenship and did not want to look back to Ukraine, which he had left when he was fourteen years old. Now, said Evgenia, for whom normal life had resumed, things “felt better,” but what scared her was that “they can keep us in this situation for ten years.” There would be constant stress for men, who could be called up at any time now and in the future. She had told her new boyfriend that perhaps he should think of looking for a job abroad. If people in the east really did not want to be part of Ukraine, then “why should our men die?”
The revolution and the war also changed the life of Ludmila Makarova, aged thirty. Before the war she had worked in publishing and for a travel company, then got a well-paid job with an international legal practice. As soon as Yanukovych decided not to sign the EU agreements, it was clear there was not going to be enough work, and she lost the job before she had even started it. She researched flights to India, confident of getting a job for a Ukrainian or Russian tour operator there, looking after their vacationers. She was not very interested in Ukrainian politics, though she had taken part in the Orange Revolution in 2004 and had—like so many others—become disillusioned with politics in its wake. When, a week into the 2013 protests, the Berkut riot police resorted to beatings to clear away the relatively few who were sleeping overnight on the Maidan, something changed. “I felt ashamed for my country. India could wait, but Ukraine needed me.” She volunteered at a tea and soup kitchen serving protesters on the square. Afterward, as the war began, she learned how to become an instructor to train soldiers and civilians in first-aid techniques tailored for frontline injuries. She said:
There is no point in complaining and saying that everything in Ukraine is corrupt, that the government is shitty, that the system doesn’t work and then just sit around moaning. You have to do something yourself. It is still worth trying, and there is no other country where I can be more useful.
Ukraine was not just in combat with Russia and the rebels it sponsored. It was in a race against time to save what could be saved and to set the country back on the right path. Almost a quarter of a century had been lost since independence. Before 2003, the first words of the national anthem, composed in 1863, were: “Ukraine has not yet died…” Since the state was now independent, this had been modified to “Ukraine’s glory has not yet died.” You can understand why the original still served to inspire though.
Women defending a rebel barricade. Sloviansk, April 2014.
Some notes of explanation: to an extraordinary extent Ukraine is a bilingual country. A large proportion of the population can either switch between Ukrainian and Russian or have a good understanding of the other language. Many also speak a mix of the two called Surzhyk. They don’t worry overly if Lugansk is written in the Russian way with a “g” or in the Ukrainian way, Luhansk, with an “h,” so I don’t feel compelled to either. I am spelling Kiev and Odessa in the way they have always been spelled in English and don’t feel the need to take what many regard as a political stance by switching to the Ukrainian Kyiv and Odesa. Likewise it really does not matter if Aleksandr becomes Alexander or Oleksandr, the Ukrainian version, and so on. In the traditional Russian spelling it is Donbass and in Ukrainian Donbas. I have used both.
I asked many people their age, not just because this is normal journalistic practice, but because it is helpful for the reader to have an idea of what generation they are. Sometimes I forgot to ask people how old they were and sometimes it was not appropriate. Sometimes I have not used people’s surnames because either they did not want to give them to me or they did not want me to use them.
An alternative name for the Maidan revolution is the Euromaidan revolution. Its focal point was Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev’s central Independence Square. The Ukrainian parliament is called the Verkhovna Rada. After the first mention, I decided not to spell that out each time it was written about.
I applied to the press service of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs with regards to a visa for visiting Crimea after the annexation of the territory. I never received an answer, and the press office of the Russian embassy in London told me that they could not help as it was “more polite” to wait for the ministry’s response. An enquiry at the Russian embassy in Kiev proved equally futile.
During the 1990s I covered the Balkan wars and I am the Balkans correspondent of the Economist. Because of this, I often notice parallels and, drawing on my experience, mention them when I think relevant.
On September 4, 2015, Olha Voloshyna, who appears in chapter 10, “Stalin’s Chicken,” sadly passed away. She was ninety years old. On the same day, in Donetsk, Andrei Purgin, one of the founders of the Donetsk People’s Republic, was purged from his official position. Some analysts believed that this was because Russia wanted to get the rebels to implement the Minsk peace agreements. In the same week, the cease-fire line went quiet and the world’s media began reporting that Russian troops were arriving in Syria. Viktoria Demidchenko, who appears in “Surviving Sloviansk,” got a job as a schoolteacher and did not pay a bribe to get it.
The last pro-Ukrainian rally in Donetsk. April 2014.
Donetsk, April 17, 2014. A pro-Ukrainian rally. The abbreviation PTN/PNH, which was to become common in Ukraine, translates loosely as “Putin—Go Fuck Yourself.”
All the contemporary interviews were done by me, with one exception. My colleague Harriet Salem interviewed and photographed Vladimir Antyufeyev, who appears in the Introduction, “Dying for Ukraine,” and gave me the transcript and pictures.
Andrey Kurkov’s novels paint a graphic and entertaining picture of Ukraine over the last two decades. He also chronicled the Maidan revolution in his Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev (Harvill Secker, 2014). In it he wonders where he and his wife will be after the summer. He says he would like to believe that they and their children will be at their summer house enjoying themselves and talking about the future, but then he says: “It is funny but the future never seems to come.” Ukraine’s problem has always been that while the future does of course come, it is never the good and prosperous one that it could and should be.
Introduction. Dying for Ukraine
GDP figures are from the World Bank as are many of the other economic references. The World Bank’s reports can be found via its Ukraine site: worldbank.org/en/country/ukraine. Researching the book I also used the Economist Intelligence Unit’s regular Ukraine reports. References to the Balkan wars come from my own experiences, reporting and writing.
1. Weaponizing History
The full text of Putin’s Duma speech on March 18, 2014, can be found on the English pages of the Kremlin website, en.kremlin.ru.
2. Thumbelina in Donetsk
Timothy Snyder’s figure of 3.3 million dead from the Holodomor can be found on p. 53 of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage, 2011). The book is superb and above all readable, and I freely admit to drawing from it. For more on the Holodomor, see the chapter “The Soviet Famines” in his book.
3. “Our history is different!”
With reference to the Carpathians, I don’t quote from it, but a wonderful book is Under the Carpathians: Home of Forgotten People by J. B. Heisler and J. E. Mellon (The Travel Book Club, 1949).
It was first published in 1946 but was based on research done just before the war. So, by the time it came out, the Carpathians as described in it no longer existed. It is full of beautiful pictures. In the same section I touch on the Orange Revolution and its legacy. Excellent basic books on the modern history of Ukraine include The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation by Andrew Wilson (3rd ed., Yale University Press, 2009) and Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation by Serhy Yekelchyk (Oxford University Press, 2007). Wilson is also the author of Ukraine Crisis: What it Means for the West (Yale University Press, 2014), which chronicles the Maidan revolution. Not referenced, and focusing on events at the turn of the millennium, J. V. Koshiw’s Abuse of Power: Corruption in the Office of the President (Artemia Press, 2013) is an excellent primer on corruption at the heart of government.
4. “How can this be?”
This section draws on and from Vassily Grossman’s Everything Flows (Vintage, 2011); the quotes come from pp. 127–49.
6. Chernobyl: End and Beginning
The article I refer to by Mikhail Gorbachev can be found on the Project Syndicate website. It is called “Turning Point at Chernobyl” and was published on April 14, 2006. There is a lot of information about the work being done there now on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s website under the section called “Chernobyl Shelter Fund.”
7. Lemberg to Lviv
The Snyder quotes come from Bloodlands, as do the statistics. Another invaluable resource drawn on here is his The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569–1999 (Yale University Press, 2003).
8. Ruthenes and Little Russians
The 1911 Baedeker’s guide to Austria-Hungary mentioned at the beginning of the chapter has been digitized and is readily available online.
9. Nikita at the Opera
Liberation, the 1940 film by Alexander Dovzhenko, can be found on YouTube. For anyone who wants to read more about Ukrainian nationalism, the OUN and UPA, see Myroslav Shkandrij’s Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology, and Literature, 1929–1956 (Yale University Press, 2015).
10. Stalin’s Chicken
The Sefer Grayding can be found at jewishgen.org. It was originally published in 1981 by the Society of Grayding Emigrants in Tel Aviv. The testimony of Pitciha Hochberg is the last entry in the list of contents.
11. The History Prison
I draw on and quote from The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler, Lwow, Poland 1942–1944, edited by his daughter Renata Kessler (Academic Studies Press, 2010). The quotes come from pp. 34–39. The Introduction, by Antony Polonsky, one of the world’s leading authorities on Polish-Jewish history, gives a concise history of the period, including lots of statistics on Lviv’s population and its changing ethnic breakdown over time. The quotation from Tarik Cyril Amar comes from his article “Different but the Same or the Same but Different? Public Memory of the Second World War in Post-Soviet Lviv.” He has posted it on academia.edu (with many other fascinating articles). It was originally published in the Journal of Modern European History in January 2011. The April 2015 open letter to President Poroshenko can be found by searching for “Open Letter from Scholars and Experts on Ukraine Re. the So-Called ‘Anti-Communist Law.’ ” It is on krytyka.com/en.
12. The Shtreimel of Lviv
Rabbi David Kahane recorded his experiences in wartime Lviv and how he was saved by Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky in his book Lvov Ghetto Diary (University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), which is a translation of the original Hebrew version by Jerzy Michalowicz. The quote from historian Frank Golczewski comes from his essay “Shades of Grey: Reflections on Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Galicia.” This is published in a wonderful collection called The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010). The quote can be found on p. 146. Another book covering this subject is Smoke in the Sand: The Jews of Lvov in the War Years 1939–1944, by Eliyahu Yones (Gefen, 2004).
13. The Scottish Book of Maths and All That
The quote from Radek Sikorski was published on October 19, 2014, by politico.com in an article called “Putin’s Coup.” It was written by Ben Judah, my son. I may be biased, of course, but Ben’s book Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (Yale University Press, 2013) is the best one on the subject of Putin’s Russia.
16. Winds of Change
The description of the end of the German Bessarabian story citing Edmund Stevens, including the quotes, comes from Cheryl Heckler’s An Accidental Journalist: The Adventures of Edmund Stevens 1934–1945 (University of Missouri Press, 2007). On pp. 107–8, Heckler reprints the account, citing his unpublished memoirs, pp. 82–86.
17. Bones of Contention
Some of the description of the Tatarbunary Uprising comes from Charles Upson Clark, who is also quoted here. See his book Bessarabia: Russia and Roumania on the Black Sea (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1927), specifically chapter 28, “The Tatar-Bunar Episode.” The book has been digitized and is easy to find online. A major piece of scholarship in English used for this section is Tanya Richardson’s “The Politics of Multiplication in a Failed Soviet Irrigation Project, or, How Sasyk Has Been Kept from the Sea.” It was published in 2014 in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2014.
21. The Deep Hole
The descriptions from Balthasar von Campenhausen’s account of Izmail and the siege of 1789 come from pp. 79–80 of his Travels Through Several Provinces of the Russian Empire with an Historical Account of the Zaporog Cossacks and of Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia and the Crimea (Richard Phillips, 1808). The book can be found online.
23. The Coal Launderers
The report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is called “Ukraine’s Illegal Coal Mines: Dirty, Dangerous, Deadly.” It was written by Denys Kazansky and Serhiy Harmash and published on May 26, 2014.
24. The Welsh and the Wild East
Many of the details about the life of the founder of Donetsk come from Roderick Heather’s The Iron Tsar: The Life and Times of John Hughes (Authors Essentials, 2010); the quotes are from pp. 59–60 and the population statistics from pp. 131–32. William Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of the former Soviet leader is called Khrushchev: The Man, His Era (Free Press, 2005); the quotes are from pp. 31–32. The quote from Heather, which ends with Lenin’s view on the importance of the Donbass, is on p. 196. Colin Thomas’s 1991 three-part documentary about Donetsk comes as a DVD together with his book Dreaming a City: From Wales to Ukraine (Y Lolfa, 2009). His quote about the arrests of engineers in 1928 comes from p. 45, and the story about and quotes from Gareth Jones on starvation in the city from p. 49. About the wartime fate of the Jews in eastern Ukraine, see pp. 193–95 of Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
25. The View from the Terricone
The report discussed and quoted is in Urban Shrinkage in Donetsk and Makiivka, the Donetsk Conurbation, Ukraine (SHRINK SMART @ EU FP7 Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Research, March 2010) by Vlad Mykhnenko, Dmytro Myedvyedyev and Larysa Kuzmenko. It is packed with graphs, statistics, maps and photos. An updated report was issued in 2012, and there was also a summary from which I quote. All the documents can be found at shrinksmart.eu. For the surveys from 1991 and about children of different backgrounds, see the King’s College London MA thesis of Charlie Hutchinson from October 2014 called “Waking the Beast: Along What Lines Is the Population of Ukraine’s Donbas Mobilized into Supporting the Pro-Russian Insurgency?”
26. Getting to “Yes”
Results of the various referendums mentioned are widely available online, and for English speakers most easily consulted via Wikipedia. See also the Wilson and Yekelchyk history books mentioned above. For a detailed account of the end of the USSR, there is Serhii Plokhy’s The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (Oneworld, 2014).
/> 30. Tsar v Cossacks
The statistic about Ukraine as an arms exporter comes from “Measuring the Arms Merchants,” a graphic published by economist.com on March 18, 2014. The report that Boris Nemtsov was working on when he was murdered and which is quoted here is called “Putin. War: Based on Materials from Boris Nemtsov” and can be found at 4freerussia.org. It was published in English in May 2015. The details of the Ukrainian investigation into the Ilovaysk catastrophe are from “Up to 459 Soldiers Killed Near Ilovaisk in 2014—Ukraine’s Chief Military Prosecutor,” a story published on April 17, 2015, on en.interfax.com.ua.
31. The Wolf’s Hook Club
The report by Anton Shekhovtsov referenced and quoted is called “The Creeping Resurgence of the Ukrainian Radical Right? The Case of the Freedom Party.” It was published in the journal Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 63, no. 2, March 2011, pp. 203–28. I have also taken from this report the speech by Oleh Tyahnybok that he cites on p. 216. The BBC Panorama program “Stadiums of Hate” was originally broadcast in May 2012. Both are freely available online.
33. Leaving Home
The statistics from UNHCR come from its operational updates, which can be found on its Ukraine site.
34. Surviving Sloviansk
The Guardian article mentioned was “Rinat Akhmetov Pays Record £136.4m for Apartment at One Hyde Park.” It was by Alex Hawkes and was published on April 19, 2011. The Amnesty International briefing quoted was published on September 8, 2014. It is called “Ukraine: Abuses and War Crimes by the Aidar Volunteer Battalion in the North Luhansk Region.” Sadly, there have been plenty of other such reports about abuses on both sides and in Russian-annexed Crimea, which can be found on their site. The wonderful book by Charles King mentioned is Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams (W. W. Norton, 2011).