Borderland

by Anna Reid

  For Ukrainians, Russia’s conquest and settlement of New Russia was something of a sideshow. The Black Sea steppe had never been part of Ukraine anyway. If it had belonged to anyone, it was to Tatars and Greeks. What affected them much more was the beginning of ‘Russification’, the insidious centuries-long process whereby not only the Ukrainians’ political institutions, but their culture and identity, were fitted to the Russian mould.

  Russification did not only happen in Ukraine. All the nations of the empire suffered it, under tsarism as well as Communism. But Russification was more determined and more successful in Ukraine than elsewhere. First, Ukraine joined the empire early: Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper went to Russia in 1686, Estonia and Latvia were conquered twenty years later, the Caucasus and Finland not until the nineteenth century. Ukraine thus became to Russians what Ireland and Scotland were to the English – not an imperial possession, like Canada or India, but part of the irreducible centre, home. Hence Lenin’s (probably apocryphal) remark that ‘to lose Ukraine would be to lose our head’, and the dream of romantic nationalists such as Solzhenitsyn that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will one day be reunited.

  Second, Russians regarded – and still regard – Ukrainians as really just a subspecies of Russian in the first place. Any differences that did demonstrably exist between them were the artificial work of perfidious, Popish Poles – replaced in today’s Russian imagination by the meddling West in general. Rather than attacking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-ness as inferior, therefore, Russians deny their existence. Ukrainians are a ‘non-historical nation’, the Ukrainian language a joke dialect, Ukraine itself an ‘Atlantis – a legend dreamed up by Kiev intellectuals’ in the words of a parliamentary deputy from Donetsk. The very closeness of Ukrainian and Russian culture, the very subtlety of the differences between them, is an irritation. Why Lithuanians and Kazakhs refuse to consider themselves Russians is perfectly obvious. But that Ukrainians should choose to do the same is simply infuriating. A Ukrainian friend who used to live in Moscow described to me the appalled reaction of her impeccably anti-communist Russian friends to Ukrainian independence:

  When we were part of the empire it was very well taken to be Ukrainian. They patted you on the back, they were very friendly, and they loved your Ukrainianism. We were all brothers in grief. But when Ukraine became independent – horrors! The best democrats immediately became so imperialistic. I had neighbours on my landing – very nice people, very liberal. But when it all happened and I was trying to decide whether to move back to Kiev, they said ‘You’re mad! Ukraine? What kind of Ukraine? What are you talking about?’

  The ethnic Russian I got to know best in Kiev was Yuriy – George as he preferred to be called – Pestryakov, a retired physicist. Speaking courtly English gleaned from Dickens and Maugham, and liable to recite Kipling’s If off by heart at a moment’s notice, he was the model of the old-style intelligent. Many of his friends had emigrated to Israel or America, leaving him rather lonely in a tiny flat dominated by massive mahogany furniture and an out-of-tune grand piano stacked with old newspapers. But for all his devotion to Kipling and the World Service, for all his long years spent debating samizdat in smoky kitchens, Yuri was appalled both by the West – ‘The Americans, they’re robots, they never read, all they do is barbecue!’ – and by Ukrainian nationalism – ‘It’s not renaissance, it’s Nazification!’ Though his father’s family came to Kiev in the 1850s, and his own grandfather, an Orthodox priest, was shot by the Bolsheviks during the Red Terror, he considered himself a Russian through and through. Still, after 150 years in Ukraine? ‘Look. Before 1989, there was never any antagonism between Ukrainians and Russians, never in anything. The only exceptions were some people from the Union of Writers who were unhappy about their inability to distinguish themselves in any other way.’ Ukrainianism, in other words, was a fraud, the self-justifying invention of second-raters.

  Like Polonisation before it, the Russification of Ukraine started at the top. One of the reasons Catherine the Great was able to dissolve the hetmanate so easily was that she simultaneously extended Russian noble privileges to the Cossack ruling class. In 1785, along with the rest of Russia’s nobility, they were exempted from taxes, from government duties, and from military service. In another sop to Cossack self-interest Ukrainian peasants, like Russian ones earlier, were forbidden to leave their landlords, reducing them to the status of serfs.

  Since Peter’s time, Ukrainians had done well in Russian service. As the Russian empire expanded, their opportunities widened. Though a few continued to mourn the hetmanate, secretly circulating fantastical histories of Khmelnytsky and Mazeppa, most were happy to treat it as a piece of out-of-date antiquaria, taking jobs in the imperial administration and preaching loyalty to the empire. Typical of the loyalist attitude was Viktor Kochubey, chairman of the Imperial Council in the 1830s. ‘Although I was born a khokhol’ he told the governor-general of Ukraine, ‘I am more Russian than anybody else . . . My calling and the position I hold put me above all sorts of petty considerations. I look at the affairs of your province from the point of view of the common interest of our country. Microscopic views are not my concern.’17 Gogol lampooned ‘those mean Little Russians . . . droves of whom can be found in council chambers and government offices, who squeeze every kopek they can out of their fellow-countrymen, flood St Petersburg with denunciations, finally amass a fortune and solemnly add to their surnames ending in O the letter V.’18

  Throughout the nineteenth century Russification of Ukrainians proceeded hand in hand with the emasculation of Ukraine’s Poles, who still made up most of the landowning class west of the Dnieper. In 1833 Kiev was given a new Russian university named after St Vladimir and designed, according to the Russian education minister, to ‘disseminate Russian education and Russian nationality in the Polonised lands of western Russia’.19 Thousands of Poles involved in the risings of 1831 and 1863 lost their estates, and were sent, often in chains and on foot, to Siberia. Those left behind were subject to intense surveillance: the novelist Balzac, revelling in the luxury of his Polish mistress’s house near Zhytomyr (‘The servants literally throw themselves on their stomachs when they enter one’s presence, beat the ground three times with their foreheads, and kiss one’s feet’)20, found his post ransacked by customs. Poorer nobles lost their patents of nobility, reducing them to the status of peasants, and Polish schools were closed, a move which hurt Ukrainians especially, since they could rarely afford to educate their children at home instead. As a result literacy rates actually fell. Better educated than Russia under the hetmanate, by the end of the century Ukraine was producing more illiterate army conscripts than any other part of the empire.

  A campaign against the Uniates, begun by Catherine, recommenced under Nicholas I. Whole parishes were converted at the point of the bayonet, and in 1839 the Orthodox and Uniate faiths were officially ‘re-unified’. This was followed by confiscation of the property of Uniate monasteries and the arrest, deportation or imprisonment of hundreds of monks and priests. New laws forbade marriages between the religions, and conversion from Orthodoxy to other faiths.

  As with Ukraine’s Western-influenced religion, so with its Western-derived legal system. In 1831 municipal privileges based on the ancient Magdeburg Law were rescinded, and in 1840 Ukraine’s separate legal code, the ‘Lithuanian Statute’, was replaced by ordinary Russian law (though a few obscure legal quirks, last remnants of Duchy rule, survived right up to the revolution). A ballad of the period, ‘The Lament of the Kievans on the Loss of the Magdeburg Law’, decried the fact that ‘the bearded ones’ had taken over Kiev, and condemned the old city government for having lost its rights through corruption and gambling, concluding that now ‘the Muscovite will rule’.21

  In 1876 Russification climaxed with the Edict of Ems. Taking the waters in that German spa, Aleksandr II signed a decree banning all import and publication of Ukrainian books and newspapers, all stage-shows, concerts and public lectures in Ukrainia
n, and all teaching in Ukrainian, even for infants. Ukrainian-language books were to be removed from school libraries, and Ukrainophile teachers transferred to Great Russia. During cholera outbreaks, even public health notices were to be posted in Russian alone.

  Russification almost succeeded. By the 1840s, writes the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, ‘the political significance of Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ had become almost terminally ‘vague and emasculated’. Neither the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 nor the Polish rising of 1831 included Ukrainian claims in their programmes, although they took place partly on Ukrainian soil and included Ukrainians among their leadership. In 1825 peasants in the villages around Kiev even helped round up rebel soldiers and hand them over to the authorities.

  Cooperating with Russian government, though, was not the same thing as being Russian. The cities might be largely Russian-speaking, and the nobility Russified to the point of indistinguishability from the genuine article. But the process, like Polonisation before it, never went more than skin deep. In the villages, peasants took orders from their landlords in Russian, but still spoke Ukrainian among themselves. And though they did not yet call themselves ‘Ukrainians’ – the term, unlike the ancient word Ukraina, was not widely used until the end of the century – they knew very well that they were something different from the loathed Muscovites, the moskali. ‘The worst label that a Little Russian pins on a wrote Johann Georg Kohl, a German anthropologist who travelled through Ukraine in the 1830s, ‘is a “senseless Pole”; while a Muscovite in the imagination of the Little Russian is always “cursed”. The Little Russians have such widely used proverbs as: “He is a good man but a Muscovite!”; “Be friendly with the Muscovite, but keep a stone under your coat!”’22 Kohl’s remarkably prescient conclusion is worth quoting in full:

  Before their subjection, all Little Russians were freemen, and serfdom, they maintain, had never been known among them. It was the Russians, they say, that reduced one-half of the people to slavery. During the first century after the union, Little Russia continued to have her own hetmans, and retained much of her own constitution and privileges, but all these have been swept away by the retrograde reforms of the last and present century . . . Should the colossal empire of Russia one day fall to pieces, there is little doubt but that the Little Russians will form a separate state. They have their own language, their own historical recollections, seldom mingle or intermarry with the Muscovite rulers, and are in number already more than ten million. Their national sinews may be said to lie among the rural nobility living in the villages, from among whom every great political movement has hitherto emanated.23

  Kohl got it half right. The Russian empire did fall to pieces, and Ukrainians did get their own separate state, but not under the leadership of the old, suborned Cossack nobility. The authors of modern Ukraine were a brand-new class that rose from the ranks of the peasantry – the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Books of Genesis: Lviv

  Only look well, only read

  That glory through once more,

  From the first word to the last,

  Read, do not ignore

  Even the least apostrophe,

  Not one comma even,

  Search out the meaning of it all,

  Then ask yourself the question:

  Who are we? Whose sons? Of what sires?

  – Taras Shevchenko, 1845

  All that I can find to say is that a nation

  exists when a significant number of people in

  a community consider themselves to form

  a nation, or behave as if they formed one.

  – Hugh Seton-Watson, 1977

  IHOR PODOLCHAK IS an artist, and like all good artists, he has a mission. He is trying to persuade the Lviv city authorities to erect a statue to Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the erotic novelist who gave his name to masochism. Sacher-Masoch was born in Lviv in 1836, son of the local police chief. ‘We have three problems,’ admits Ihor. ‘His father was an Austrian official, he wrote in German, and he left Lviv when he was aged fourteen. But I say he was one of the greatest Ukrainian writers because his creative work was very closely connected with Ukrainian culture. It doesn’t matter what language he wrote in – there are more important things,’ Lviv remains unconvinced. The official reaction,’ says Ihor, ‘is – “so now we have people who want to make out that Ukrainians are masochists!”’ But Ihor has achieved the impossible before. A few years ago he arranged for one of his lithographs to be taken aboard the space station Mir – demonstrating, as he puts it, that ‘art can exist outside the cultural context’. A video of the event shows a grinning astronaut floating in zero gravity, picture in hand. To celebrate the millennium, Ihor wants the billionaire financier George Soros to fund the construction of an ice pyramid on top of Mount Everest, symbolising ‘humanity’s striving for eternity in time and space’. Even if the ice pyramid doesn’t happen, the project won’t have been a failure, because it’s the idea that matters, not the actuality. As if Ukraine didn’t have problems enough already, Ihor is determined to give it Concept Art.

  That Lviv should adopt an Austrian novelist as a local celebrity is actually not such a bizarre idea. Fifty miles east of today’s Polish-Ukrainian border, Lviv was ruled by Austria from the first partition of Poland in 1773 until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Christening the city Lemberg, the Austrians made it the capital of the ‘Kingdom of Galicia’, a patched-together province stretching east from Cracow to the river Zbrucz. With the rebirth of Poland the city went back to its ancient Polish name of Lwow, and in 1945 it fell, for the first time in its history, to the Russians, who deported the Polish population and renamed it Lvov. It only became Lviv in 1991, with Ukrainian independence.

  Visually, it is Polish Lwow and Austrian Lemberg that have survived best. The Poles built a forest of churches – Dominican, Carmelite, Jesuit, Benedictine, Bernadine – and the inevitable monument to their beloved poet Mickiewicz. The Austrians gave it parks, cobbled boulevards, Jugendstil villas, a flamboyant opera house, municipal buildings painted the Hapsburgs’ reassuring mustard yellow, and the matronly bronze caryatids that grace the lobby of the George Hotel. Though the Austrians themselves have long gone, Lviv is still a Mitteleuropean city, full of students carrying violin cases, the smell of warm poppyseed buns, the tap of footsteps on stone – a shabbier Salzburg, blessedly devoid of von Karajan posters and Mozart souvenirs. In the overgrown Lychakiv cemetery, the initials K & K – Kaiserlich und Königlich, motto of the old Austria – can still be made out on the tumbled gravestones, epitaph to bygone generations of colonial bureaucrats. For them, Galicia was a far-flung posting, chilly with ‘the vast breath of the huge hostile tsarist empire’, a place where, in the words of the novelist Joseph Roth, ‘the civilised Austrian was menaced . . . by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs’ and soldiers in forgotten barrack-towns ‘fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps . . . sold under the label 180 Proof’.1

  Of all Lviv’s rulers, it is only the Austrians for whom Ukrainians retain any sneaking fondness. It is still just possible to find old men who can whistle the marching song ‘Ich hat’ einen Kamaraden’, and babushki who, when asked the time, reply ‘Old or new?’, their clocks still being set to the hours kept under benign, bewhiskered Emperor Franz-Josef. The Hapsburgs might have been foreign autocrats, but at least they weren’t as bad as the tsars. And it was under their indulgent rule, in Galicia, that the Ukrainian national movement was able to take root and flourish, providing Ukrainians with their first modern political parties, and, eventually, with their first short-lived Republic.

  Ethnically and socially, nineteenth-century Galicia was an unbalanced, unhappy place. Poles owned the land; Jews the shops and inns. Ukrainians – 40 per cent of the province’s population overall, the majority in the east – laboured out of sight in cottages and fields. Over this uneasy mixture lay a thin layer of
Austrian officialdom (among them Oberpolitzmeister Sacher-Masoch). Lviv itself was not a Ukrainian, far less a Russian city, but a Polish-Austrian-Jewish one. A Baedeker of 1900 makes the point:

  Lemberg. – Hotels. HOTEL IMPERIAL; GRAND HOTEL; HOTEL METROPOLE; HOT. DE L’EUROPE; HOTEL DE FRANCE; HOT. GEORGE.

  Cafés. THEATRE CAFE, FERDINANDS-PLATZ; VIENNA CAFE, HEILIGE-GEIST PLATZ.

  Lemberg, Polish Lwow, French Léopol, the capital of Galicia, with 135,000 inhab. (one-fourth Jews), is the seat of a Roman Catholic, an Armenian, and a Greek Catholic archbishop. There are fourteen Roman Catholic churches, a Greek, and Armenian, and a Protestant church, two synagogues, and several Roman Catholic and Greek convents . . .

  The handsome Polytechnic Institution, in the Georgs-Platz, completed in 1877, contains a large chemical-technical laboratory and is otherwise well-equipped. In the Slowacki-Str., opposite the Park, is the large new Hall of the Estates. In the Kleparowska-Strasse rises the fine Invaliedenhaus, with its four towers. At the Theatre (closed in summer), in the Skarbkowska-Str., Polish plays and Polish-Italian operas are performed (the solos generally in Italian, the chorus in Polish).

  Ossolinski’s National Institute, in the Ossolinksi-Strasse, contains collections relating chiefly to the literature and history of Poland, including portraits, antiquities, coins, and a library . . .