In Wartime
Page 25
38. Askania-Nova and the Zebra of Death
Apart from what I learned there about its history, I drew on the rather romantic account Askania-Nova: Animal Paradise in Russia, Adventure of the Falz-Fein Family by L. Heiss (The Bodley Head, 1970). There is also much about the place in the rigorously academic but nevertheless fascinating book by Douglas R. Weiner called Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
Cossack and rebel supporter at an encampment at Paraskoviika, aimed at preventing the Ukrainian military from taking out weapons stored in a salt mine. May 2014.
Much of the early part of the war I covered for the Economist, but a lot of the real groundwork for this book was done while writing for the New York Review of Books. Some of the stories here, particularly from the east, appeared first in the Review and its online blog. Many thanks to Review editor Bob Silvers for sending me, and to blog editor Hugh Eakin.
I was asked to write this book by Stefan McGrath. I asked him what sort of book he wanted, and he answered: “What sort of book do you want to write?” It took time to work that out. Eventually it became clear: a book that, first, I would have read myself if I had not had to write it, and one that looked at things I thought were both interesting and relevant. What was needed, I thought, was not another straight history and not a political science-cum-analytical text. From what I could see on bookshop shelves and online, there was nothing which focused on those bits of history which it is important to understand today, as opposed to Ukrainian history in general, nor was there a book which gave a flavor of what Ukraine is really like and what its people have to say, especially outside Kiev.
A long time ago Marcus Tanner, a friend and colleague, said, after reading an article about Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian breakaway region of Azerbaijan, that it failed to tell him what he really wanted to know, which was: “What does Stepanakert smell like?” Stepanakert is the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. I don’t write about smells, but the point is that often what is needed and what a book gives you the opportunity to do is to make a place and its people easier to understand. What I wanted to do was to mix people, stories, history, politics and reportage rather than explain why this event followed that one.
Some said to me that I needed to go to Russia. But this is not a book about Russia. There are plenty of those. It is about Ukraine and the people who live in it. Thank you, Stefan, for asking me to write it and Josephine Greywoode for editing it. Thanks to Georgina Capel, for making it possible. Thanks to Rosie Whitehouse, my wife, for persuading me to do it and telling me to stop reading books about Ukraine at home, to leave and not come back until I had written my own. Thanks to Harriet Salem for saying “hello” in the Dolce Vita in Mitrovica and then getting me started in the east. Thanks to Dimiter Kenarov for ideas and contacts for some of my favorite stories. Thanks to Liliia Ivaschenko for her assistance in the east.
Many thanks to the German Marshall Fund and its Black Sea Trust. It was because I was invited to participate in several of their study tours to Ukraine for journalists and policy-makers that I was first able to come here and meet people. Thank you, Ivan Vejvoda, Alina Inayeh, Ana Aelenei and Dinu Toderascu. Thanks to the Institute of World Policy in Kiev for also inviting me on a trip. In Odessa, many thanks to Hanna Shelest. In Ukraine, thanks, above all, to Ludmila Makarova for doing the bulk of the translating and fixing.
On this page the picture which shows Khrushchev at the opera in Lviv is a screen shot from Alexander Dovzhenkho’s film Liberation. The painting of Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky on this page hangs in the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts in Lviv. It depicts the metropolitan as Moses symbolically leading his people out of the land of Egypt. It is by Oleksa Novakivsky (1872–1935) and was painted between 1915 and 1919. All the other pictures are by me.
Kiev,
June 2015
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