Borderland

by Anna Reid

  For Jadwiga, the marriage was a disaster. Handed over to a hairy heathen instead of her promised Austrian fiancé, she pined away, devoting herself to good works and dying childless at the age of twenty-four. Politically, however, it was a resounding success, climaxing with the Union of Lublin in 1569, which turned two separate states with a shared monarchy into The Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations’. From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.

  Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia’. The Ukrainian spoken in western Ukraine has lots of Polish words; the Ukrainian of central Ukraine is full of Russian ones. West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as ‘Pan So-and-So’; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are ‘Gospodin’. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate ‘Uniate’ church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope. Western Ukraine has ruined Renaissance palaces, walled towns, onion-domed churches. Villages dot its rolling valleys, in Conrad’s words, ‘like clusters of boats hidden in the hollows of a running sea’. It is, in short, a far-flung slice of Mitteleuropa. Eastern Ukraine is flat, dreary and covered in beet-fields and slag-heaps – the western edge of the thousand-mile-wide Russian steppe.

  Kiev is where the two legacies meet. The Dnieper, Ukraine’s only major natural feature and the boundary which used to divide the country between Russia and Poland, also splits the city into two. The golden domes of its great Orthodox monasteries and the neo-Gothic spire of its Catholic cathedral jostle on the skyline, and Ukrainian and Russian mingle in a crude slang known as surzhik in the trolley-buses and on the streets.

  The result, surprisingly, is lassitude rather than tension, shadowy cross-hatching rather than stark black and white. Ask a Kievan his background, and his reply will probably be something along the lines of ‘My father is a Ukrainian raised in Siberia, my mother a Russian from Odessa, and our surname sounds Polish.’ Unlike the burningly self-aware inhabitants of Vilnius or Tblisi, Kievans aren’t yet quite sure who they are, and don’t much care. Six years after independence, hammer-and-sickle emblems still top the parliament and foreign ministry buildings, and at the end of the central highstreet, the Khresh-chatyk, Lenin stretches out an ox-blood marble hand to a billboard advertising a newly privatised bank. Engels Street has been renamed, but Karla Marksa has stayed in place. All these survivals are less a product of nostalgia than of a pragmatic inclination to let sleeping dogs lie.

  One of the clues to Kiev’s lack of ethnic or ideological fire is its resolute provincialism. For 700 years it has been a borderland city, a sleepy periphery to a buzzing centre elsewhere. Thrust to stardom on independence, it has not let fame change its style. Newspapers carry little but domestic news, several days late. The state-owned television channels subsist on folk-dancing footage intercut with shaky helicopter shots of Santa Sofia. (Viewing, as one Ukrainian-Canadian diplomat puts it, is ‘an act of patriotism’.) Occasions on which Kiev is required to play the national capital tend to end in farce. When Bill Clinton visited in the spring of 1995 the government asked him to sleep in the presidential jet because none of the hotels were grand enough, and a reception for Prince Charles at the Mariyinsky Palace the following year was thrown into confusion when all the lights went out – a problem cunningly solved by shining police-car headlights in through the windows. Most Kievans have not travelled much, and the lucky exceptions are touch-ingly proud of the fact: a deputy foreign minister I interviewed had a map on his office wall with coloured pins marking all the places in the world he had been to. Foreigners in general, though no longer rarities, are still objects of polite interest and surmise.

  Despite a population of 3 million, Kiev is a small place. Everyone who is anyone – Russians and Ukrainians, communists and nationalists, biznesmeny and politicians – knows everyone else. They studied at the same institutes, have relatives who work at the same ministries, eat beetroot-and-prune salad out of miniature pastry-cases at the same few sepulchral restaurants, and go to the same gloriously awful productions of Tosca and Traviata at the State Opera House in the evenings. The curtain rises, and the chorus is revealed lined up in height order, men in one corner, women in the other. The men wear preposterous beards, peeling around the ears. The women wave dead carnations from side to side, out of time with the music. Clouds of condensed breath spiral up from the orchestra pit to the nymphs on the ceiling, and in the interval there is a scramble for tepid orangeade and synthetic cream-cakes in the bar upstairs.

  Indubitable proof of the slim talents required to win fame in Kiev came soon after my arrival, when my ‘fixer’ Sasha – combined impresario, computer-games importer and estate agent – persuaded me to record a song he had composed with English lyrics. The recording took place in a freezing flat in a suburban housing block. In a squeaky schoolgirl voice, I warbled over and over the words ‘Dreaming girl/In the sky/Have a ball/ Live your lie’. A few weeks later we were filmed for television. Tucked away in a basement of the sports stadium, the studio had been decked out with bottles of vodka, a tinsel Christmas tree and posters of AEG white goods. I came on after a group called the ‘Twenty Verhovinas’ – a brand of cigarette. The compère asked me to introduce myself. ‘Well, actually’ – nervous giggle – ‘I’m a journalist.’ Sasha kicked me under the table: ‘Anna is an artist, a singer from misty Albion!’ The result – vodka-flushed face, hopeless lip-synch, novelty camera-work – went out nationwide on New Year’s Eve. I was a Ukrainian pop-star.

  Seven hundred years of provincialism has had its advantages. Third city of the empire, Kiev never felt the grip of government in quite the same way as Moscow and St Petersburg. An early traveller to say so was Paul of Aleppo, an Orthodox cleric who accompanied his father Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, on a fund-raising mission to the tsar in the 1650s. Landing at the mouth of the Dnieper, this smooth Mediterranean pair were initially not much taken with Ukraine. The mosquitoes bit, the food was dreadful, and the services went on for ever. ‘We never left church,’ Paul confided to his diary, ‘but tottering on our legs after so much standing.’18

  Moscow, though, was far worse. ‘Anyone wishing to shorten his life by five or ten years,’ Paul wrote, ‘should go to Muscovy,’ In the monasteries ‘mirth and laughter and jokes’ were forbidden, and spies watched through cracks in the doors to see ‘whether the inmates practise devotional humility, fasting and prayer; or whether they get drunk and amuse themselves’. Drinkers, he was told, were sent to Siberia; smokers were liable for execution – news which put him ‘in great fear’ on his own account.19 After all this, as he wrote on his journey home, Ukraine seemed like paradise:

  For during those two years spent in Muscovy a padlock had been set on our hearts, and we were in the extremity of narrowness and compressure of our minds; for in that country no person can feel anything of freedom or cheerfulness . . . The country of the Kosaks [Ukrainian Cossacks], on the contrary, was like our own country to us, and its inhabitants were to us boon companions and fellows like ourselves.20

  The battered pair were even happier to reach Moldova, where they ‘entered the bath, after twenty-seven months, during the whole of which time we had neither entered a bath nor washed ourselves with water’.21

  As under the tsars, so under communism. Touring churches in the early 1930s, Robert Byron found that Moscow suffered from ‘a stifling air – how stifling I only realised on reaching Kiev, which preserves in some indefinable way its old university tradition of the humanities and allows one to breathe normally again’.22 An elderly professor showed him round Santa Sofia, the Academy of Sciences and the antiquarian bookshops,
introducing him to friends on the way. It was all just like an afternoon in Oxford and ‘quite abnormal after the ferocious isolation of Moscow’.23

  John Steinbeck, on an epic pub-crawl round the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa soon after the war, was similarly struck:

  Everyone had told us it would be different once we got outside of Moscow, that the sternness and tenseness would not exist. And this was true . . . the people in Kiev did not seem to have the dead weariness of the Moscow people. They did not slouch when they walked, their shoulders were back, and they laughed in the streets.24

  Even the girls were prettier: ‘mostly blond, with fine, womanly figures’.

  Unfashionable, easy-going, simultaneously of east and of west, in many ways Kiev represents the country whose capital it has become rather well. But to equate Kiev with Ukraine is to make an error. The ‘real’ Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour’s drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse ‘American spaceships’ for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants. In winter they wrap their two-room cottages in dried maize stalks for extra insulation, and in spring they drown in Bruegelesque seas of knee-high mud. So closed, so absolutely basic is this world that Kievans treat trips out of town like treks through a wilderness, equipping themselves with portable water-heaters and several days’ worth of picnic.

  The man who best drew the contrast between Kiev and Ukraine was the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. Son of a theology professor, he was brought up in a small house on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the steep cobbled lane that winds down from the High City to Podil. His Kiev, immortalised in The White Guard, is the middle-class city of the years just before the revolution – the Kiev of the La Marquise confectioner’s and the Fleurs de Nice flower shop, of chiming clocks and Dutch-tiled stoves, of sugar tongs and the green-shaded lamp in his father’s study. Writing from the inflation-wracked Moscow of the early 1920s, Bulgakov turned these vanished comforts into something rich and strange:

  Beautiful in the frost and mist-covered hills above the Dnieper, the life of the City hummed and steamed like a many-layered honeycomb. All day long smoke spiralled in ribbons up to the sky from innumerable chimney-pots. A haze floated over the streets, the packed snow creaked underfoot, houses towered to five, six and even seven storeys. By day their windows were black, while at night they shone in rows against the deep, dark blue sky . . .25

  But for Bulgakov – a conservative middle-class Russian – Kiev and Ukraine were two different things. Kiev stood for trams, electric light, the civilised and familiar; Ukraine for low dark horizons, a strange language, fear of the unknown. ‘Although life in the City went on with apparent normality,’ he wrote of Kiev during the Civil War, ‘not a single person in it knew what was going on around and about the City, in the real Ukraine, a country of tens of millions of people, bigger than France . . . They neither knew nor cared about the real Ukraine and they hated it with all their heart and soul.’26

  The battle The White Guard describes – between Reds, Whites and Ukrainian partisans – is not only a battle for a city, but a battle for an identity, for an imprimatur from something far older and grander than the participants themselves – in other words, for Kievan Rus. St Volodymyr – the polygamous prince who ordered Perun to be drowned and beaten – hovers above the action in the form of the cast-iron statue, holding an illuminated cross, which still stands above the Dnieper in one of Kiev’s parks. At the close of the book, as the Bolsheviks prepare to take the city from the partisans, Bulgakov turns the saint back into a warrior:

  Above the bank of the Dnieper the midnight cross of St Vladimir thrust itself above the sinful, bloodstained, snowbound earth toward the grim, black sky. From far away it looked as if the cross-piece had vanished, had merged with the upright, turning the cross into a sharp and menacing sword.27

  For Bulgakov, Volodymyr was defending a lost empire, perhaps a lost way of life. For Ukrainians, he stands for a lost history; the first equivocal staging post in a battle which stretches over a millennium.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Poles and Cossacks: Kamyanets Podilsky

  You boast, because we once

  Brought Poland to calamity.

  And so it was; Poland fell,

  But you were crushed by her fall as well.

  – Taras Shevchenko, 1845

  May you croak in the faith of the Poles!

  –Traditional Ukrainian curse

  KAMYANETS PODILSKY HAD one functioning café, a dark, damp cell built into the medieval city walls. It sold ersatz ‘Jacky’ coffee and cardboard biscuits, and its only other customer was a wispy young man in a tweed jacket and fogeyish leather brogues. Hearing foreign voices, he came over and produced a business card, a flimsy photocopied rectangle with a home-drawn logo above the words ‘Valery Chesnevsky, Architect’. Underneath, in careful Latin lettering, he pencilled in the word ‘Unemployed’. The reason he was unemployed, he said, was that he was a Pole – the only one left in Kamyanets.

  Kamyanets used to guard Poland’s south-eastern border against the Turks. Encircled by the rocky gorge of the Smotrych river and accessible only by soaring single-span bridges, it was one of Christendom’s mythic outposts, remote yet uniquely impregnable. A Turkish sultan, passing by at the head of his army, is said to have asked who fortified the city. ‘God himself,’ came the answer. ‘In that case,’ replied the sultan, let God himself storm it.’ In 1672 the Turks did capture the city, albeit briefly, and the spell was broken. A minaret went up in the courtyard of the SS Piotra i Pawla Cathedral, and the words There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Apostle of God’ were inscribed in Arabic – as reported by a startled Victorian missionary – over the door. The nearby Polish fortress of Khotyn, its curved curtain walls the work of Genoese military engineers, housed the local pasha’s harem: the young Prince Adam Czartoryski, touring with his tutor in the 1780s, when the region had fallen to the Turks for a second time, thought its women ‘very untidily dressed’.1 Today there is nothing to show that Khotyn was built by Italians on behalf of Poles, the guidebook on sale at the ticket-booth baldly informing visitors that it symbolises ‘the struggle of the Ukrainian people against foreign invaders’.

  Being an architect in Kamyanets, said Valery, was a depressing business. Run by Ukrainian nationalists, the local government would not give work to a Pole. Outdoors, hunched against a bitter wind, it didn’t look as if there was much work to be had anyway. From a distance the city – all pepper-pot fortress and baroque bell-towers – had looked picturesque, poster-cute. Close up, it was falling to bits. Stained, cracked, swathed in black plastic and wooden scaffolding, its historic buildings stood about like relics of some lost civilisation, as irrelevant to their surroundings as Inca temples to a Peruvian peasant. There were no shoppers, no strollers, no tourists; in the weed-grown central square, the only sign of life was an old woman grazing a scabby pony. Passing a buttressed wall, Valery made me kneel down and peer between a pair of wooden doors, half off their hinges. All I could see was a mess of rubble and puddles, bird-droppings and fallen beams. This, he told me, had been a Benedictine monastery. A clothing factory had set up shop in the medieval cloisters the previous summer, and some bales of cotton had caught fire. ‘The fire station isn’t far away, but they mainly tried to save the factory. Nobody cared about the church, so it burned out.’

  Not all Kamyanets’s churches were as forsaken. Walls might sag and ceilings might drip, but bit by bit some at least were coming back to life. Catholic monks from Cracow had put a new copper roof on the cathedral and installed two or three pews – all they needed, since most of the city’s Poles were deported by Stalin after the war. A card pinned up by the
door outlined a four-point plan for new communicants: ‘1. GET BAPTISED. 2. GET MARRIED IN CHURCH. 3. HAVE YOUR CHILDREN BAPTISED. 4. SEE OUR PRIEST.’ The other churches were being taken over by the Orthodox and the Uniates. In Trinity Church technicolored icons, draped with embroidered napkins, filled the niches where Polish madonnas once stood; the nave of St George’s, a planetarium under communism, had been cut in two by a new plywood iconostatis. Valery’s star exhibit was in the cathedral vestry, a leftover from its days as a Museum of Atheism. On a window-sill stood a knee-high mechanical model of a monk shouldering a wicker basket. Valery turned a handle and the lid of the basket opened, revealing a naked girl. This is how they taught us that monks were not monks, and monasteries were whorehouses.’

  Ukraine’s relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising; Ukraine inarticulate and put-upon. Ukraine resents Poland for hogging the limelight; Poland resents Ukraine for stealing its lines. Ukrainians, like the Irish, rebelled against their Polish landlords at every opportunity; Poles, like the English, responded with a curious mixture of affection, scorn and fear. The Ukrainians, one interwar Polish memoirist wrote of the tenants on her lost Volhynian estates, were ‘singers of songs as beautiful as any in the whole world; a slothful bovine people whose torpor concealed an element which might break out into a hurricane at any moment . . .’2