Borderland
Page 11
But now that it is no longer a political centre – on independence, politics moved to Kiev – the old city is having to learn new tricks. The first person I got to know well in Lviv was Oleh, a gangling youth full of political theory and burning ideals, deeply into the student movement. I took him to the Grand Hotel, a Western-owned outfit with real linen napkins, proper cutlery and fleets of nervous newly trained waiters. Oleh was nervous too – he’d never been anywhere like this before, and seven dollars was a terrifying amount of money to be spending on lunch. When we next met, gangling Oleh was transformed. He produced roses, chocolates: this time, he was taking me out to supper. We went to a newly opened café round the corner from his flat. Since we had seen each other last, he said, he had got into the printing trade. Here was a calendar his firm had produced – the butterflies had come out well, but he’d got the dates muddled, so they’d had to do a rerun. He was exporting Christmas cards to Austria and Hungary, and he’d worked out a nice little arrangement with the manager of a local bottling plant: Two hundred dollars for him; 100,000 labels for me.’ Things were going so well that he was even having to pay protection money – 25 per cent of profits – to local racketeers. Wasn’t that rather a lot? ‘No, because they don’t know how much profit we’re making.’ A girl who had been sitting in the lobby as we came in materialised in front of our table in a belly-dancer’s outfit, wiggling energetically. With a flourish, Oleh produced a wad of notes and stuck them in her bra. Not quite Sacher-Masoch, but getting there.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Meaningless Fragment: Chernivtsi
Undefined ourselves, we expected something
from Time, which was unable to
provide a definition and wasted itself in a
thousand subterfuges.
– Bruno Schulz, 1937
OF ALL THE rag-tag foreign leavings that make up present-day Ukraine, the remotest and most obscure is the Bukovyna. Squeezed between the Carpathian alps and the river Prut, it belongs nowhere and has been ruled by everybody: first by Poles and Turks, by the Austrians through the nineteenth century, by the Romanians between the wars. ‘It was cut off from everywhere,’ wrote the historian A. J. P. Taylor, ‘a meaningless fragment of territory for which there could be no rational explanation.’1 In 1940 it was annexed to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic by the Soviet Union, and in 1991 it duly fell to Ukraine. Its capital is Czernowitz in German, Cernauti in Romanian, Chernovtsy in Russian, Chernivtsi in Ukrainian. The Austrian novelist Gregor von Rezzori, who grew up there in the 1920s, called it ‘Tchernopol’, weaving nostalgia-laden stories around its dusty streets and rainbow population for the whole of his life. Home to ‘Jews in caftans . . . spur-jingling Romanian soldiers . . . colourfully dressed peasant women with baskets of eggs on their heads’ and ‘solid ethnic German burghers in . . . wide knickerbockers and Tyrolean hats’,2 his Tchernopol belongs to no one but itself; a sharp-witted, mocking, slovenly place where nothing is permanent and nothing is taken seriously. For all their imperial pomp, the Austrians never really made the city their own; still less the parvenu Romanians. That Romanian interlude,’ von Rezzori wrote of the interwar years, ‘was hardly more than a fresh costume-change in a setting worthy of operetta. The uniforms of Austrian lancers were supplanted by those of Romanian Rosiori . . . and the whole transformation was given no greater weight than the one accorded to the changing scenery at the municipal theatre between . . . “Countess Maritza” and “The Gypsy Baron” or “The Beggar Student”.’3 He wasn’t surprised when the Romanians packed up their costumes and went home again, for ‘how can you get anything done in a town that laughs at everything?’4
Chernivtsi is duller now. Though its cab-drivers still juggle lei and forints and roubles in their heads, it has lost the old, heterogeneous population that gave it flavour. On market days, wrote von Rezzori, the streets used to fill with a dozen different nationalities: Jews and Armenians haggled over corn and used clothing, Hutsul peasant-women squabbled with Swabians over vegetables and poultry, and gypsy card-sharpers shuffled aces under the noses of gaping mountain men with long matted hair and faces ‘tanned like old goat hams’ – all to the wailing of Caruso from the wind-up gramophones on sale beside the Turkish Fountain, and the stench of raw sheep’s hide.
Now the Jews, Armenians and Swabians have all gone, replaced by stolid Ukrainians – less than half the Bukovyna’s population before the war – and a scattering of lonely Russians: stranded survivors, like von Rezzori’s dotty parents three-quarters of a century ago, of an empire that sank beneath their feet. The Great Synagogue (‘in the Moorish style’, according to Baedeker), has disappeared, as has the statue of a Bukovynan bison goring an Austrian double-headed eagle – a piece of Romanian folie de grandeur – that stood in the Ringplatz opposite the Rathaus and the hotels Adler and Weiss. The cafés have been given bland Soviet names, the ‘Dniestr’, ‘Turyst’ and ‘Kiev’ replacing Baedeker’s Café de L’Europe and Cafe Wien. Only the ‘Edelweiss’ carries a reminder of an Austrian past. The old opera house – its sinuous Jugendstil facjade covered in billposters for folksy Ukrainian operettas – has closed for lack of funds, and the Armenian church (‘in a mixed Gothic and Renaissance style’) has been turned into a concert hall. When von Rezzori revisited in the late 1980s, he found the city well preserved architecturally but ‘devoid of soul’. Plumply uniform, its new inhabitants had nothing of the ‘restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically sceptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers.’5 All the time I lived in Kiev, the sole occasion on which Chernivtsi limped into the national news was when it was discovered that one of its steep, silent streets was sliding quietly downwards into the muddy Prut.
What does survive is the landscape. To the south, the Prut runs away to the broad Moldovan plain. To the west, the furry blue Carpathians march off towards Poland and Transylvania. Bright with the fluorescent green of aspens and shiny white of silver birch, loud with the percussion of axes and woodpeckers, the mountains cannot have changed much since von Rezzori went shooting with his father as a boy, each with shirt buttoned up tight to the chin in accordance with the sacred laws of Austrian hunting etiquette. The Hutsuls – a picturesque tribe of mountain shepherds, famous for their craftsmanship – believed the forests hid rusalkas, green-eyed nymphs who asked riddles and tickled men to death, and witches whose long pendulous breasts, flung backward over their shoulders, gave them the ability to change shape and to fly. To keep the witches at bay they built themselves fantastical wooden churches – some tiny, dwarfed by shingled pagoda-like spires; others tall and foursquare and roofed in grey tin, riding between the pines like battleships among square-riggers.
It is hard to believe now, but before the war the Bukovyna was a fashionable holiday resort, an alternative to the Alps for middle-class families from Warsaw and Vienna. Their villas – two-storey, with glassed-in verandahs and mansard roofs – are still there, scattered about the hillsides above hamlets of two-room cottages, each with fruit-trees, dungheap and barking dog. Over in the Polish Carpathians the tourists are back, together with such novelties as cars, metalled roads and refrigerated Coca-Cola. Strings of polite blond schoolchildren hike up and down signposted trails, and young couples delve about in the blueberry bushes with purple-stained carrier bags.
But on the Ukrainian side of the border, the mountains are more cut off from the world than ever. The communists’ concrete sanatoria stand empty, since the Ukainian new rich, who are the only people who can afford to go on holiday at all nowadays, head straight for Ibiza or Marbella. After a disastrous attempt at a skiing holiday with my boyfriend, I could hardly blame them. An Englishman of traditional tastes, he was so traumatised by a weekend at the Yuzhtechenergo – property of the local branch of the energy ministry – that he refused ever, ever to come to Ukraine again. It was not so much the families cooking shashlyki over little bonfires in the corridors that he minde
d, he said, or the bits of reinforcing rod sticking out of the walls, or the strips of newspaper stuck over the cracks in the window-frames, or the cabbage-filled ravioli for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or even the ice-sculpture of an erect penis at the top of the resort’s single chair-lift. It was the fact that when he got back to his room, he found a happy troop of skiers having a picnic on his bed. That they had offered him a piece of sausage on the end of a penknife was no consolation, and as soon as we got back to civilisation he was going to handcuff himself to the nearest heated towel-rail and never let go. Our ski-guide Anton, part-time drummer in a band devoted to something called ‘prison rock’, was unsympathetic. ‘Be glad,’ he told us, ‘you’re not at the Dynamo. That’s a real horse-house.’
Chernivtsi’s ‘Romanian interlude’ was a result of the First World War. When war was declared in July 1914, Ukrainians found themselves conscripted into two opposing armies – 3.5 million into the Russian, a quarter of a million into the Austrian. As ever, Ukraine turned into a battlefield, and Ukrainians often ended up fighting each other. In September 1914, after the Russians’ defeat at Tannenberg in East Prussia, the Austrian army advanced north-east into Russian-ruled Poland. The Russians immediately counter-attacked, capturing Lviv and Chernivtsi. Through the following spring and summer, the Austrians and Germans fought eastwards again, occupying the whole of western Ukraine and Belarus. Another Russian offensive under General Brusilov in June 1916 resulted in the capture of 400,000 prisoners, but failed to retake its principal objective of Lviv. A year later Russia’s final westward push collapsed in ignominy when the rank and file, thoroughly demoralised by poor leadership and Bolshevik propaganda, laid down their weapons and fled. Accused of collaboration by both sides, Ukrainian civilians suffered terribly throughout, being shot, deported or interned in thousands.
The Bolshevik coup of November 1917 and the collapse of Austro-Hungary twelve months later ushered in the ‘Russian’ Civil War, most of which really took place in Ukraine. The First World War had at least been fought between regular armies on recognisable fronts; the Civil War was chaos. For Isaac Babel, incongruously attached to a Red Army cavalry unit, it was a war of dusty roads and obscene songs, the ‘odour of yesterday’s blood and slain horses’,6 casual rapes and throat-slittings, charred towns and looted churches, all under a sun that rolled across the sky ‘like a severed head’. It brutalised him – an intellectual with ’spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart’ – as it did everyone else: he ends one of his Red Cavalry stories ‘begging fate for the simplest of abilities – the ability to kill a man’.7
For three years five different armies – Red, White, Polish, Ukrainian and Allied – rampaged through the countryside, as did dozens of anarchic ‘Cossack’ bands. Hiding their weapons in barns and pigsties, these peasant formations could appear and disappear at will. Machine-guns were mounted on rickety two-wheeled tachankas; ‘haycarts,’ Babel wrote, ‘drawn up in battle formation, take possession of towns’.8 The biggest, under otamans Nestor Makhno and Matviy Hryhoryev, were thousands strong and equipped with field-guns and armoured Gars. On all sides, soldiers had little idea what they were fighting for, and deserted whenever they could.
For Ukraine’s Jews, it was the worst period in their history since the Khmelnytsky massacres. Victimised by all sides, but by the Whites and Ukrainians in particular, they suffered looting, rape and wholesale murder. Massacres took place in Berdychiv, Zhytomyr, Odessa, Poltava, Chernihiv and Kiev, as well as dozens of smaller cities. One of the worst, the work of White troops, took place in Fastiv, a small town south-west of Kiev, in September 1919:
The Cossacks divided into numerous separate groups, each of three or four men, no more. They acted not casually . . . but according to a common plan . . . A group of Cossacks would break into a Jewish home, and their first word would be ‘Money!’ If it turned out that Cossacks had been there before and taken all there was, they would immediately demand the head of the household . . . They would place a rope around his neck. One Cossack took one end, another the other, and they would begin to choke him. If there was a beam on the ceiling, they might hang him. If one of those present burst into tears or begged for mercy, then – even if he were a child – they beat him to death . . . I know of many homeowners whom the Cossacks forced to set their houses on fire, and then compelled, with sabres or bayonets, along with those who ran out of the burning houses, to turn back into the fire, in this manner causing them to burn alive.9
The Fastiv massacre is said to have taken 1,500 lives; estimates of the total number of Jews killed in the Civil War pogroms range from 50,000 to 200,000.
Altogether the years 1914 to 1921 killed about 1.5 million people in Ukraine. Amid this slaughter, Ukrainians made two separate attempts at independence. One centred on Kiev, the other on Lviv. Both ended in failure.
When news of Nicholas II’s abdication reached Kiev in March 1917, Ukrainian organisations in the city formed a Central Council, or Rada, in competition with the Russian-dominated Soviet of Soldiers and Workers. Over 100,000 demonstrators turned out in the Rada’s support, marching under blue-and-yellow banners and pictures of Shevchenko. In April a National Congress, attended by 900 delegates from all over the country, elected as President the historian Hrushevsky, newly returned from exile in Moscow, and the following month the Rada issued its First Universal, declaring that ‘without separating entirely from Russia, without severing connections with the Russian state’, the Ukrainian people should ‘have the right to order their own lives in their own land’.10 In July Petrograd’s Provisional Government reluctantly gave the Rada official recognition, and Britain and France sent accredited representatives.
The Rada survived less than a year. Manned by young left-wing idealists who refused to adopt the existing administrative apparatus or the army units voluntarily formed in their support, it was more a talking-shop than a government, never extending its authority much beyond the cities. From the outset, wrote a (sympathetic) observer, it was ‘a real Tower of Babel . . . a parliament of national elements rather than of political parties’.11 Six weeks after Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, pro-Bolshevik troops marched on Kiev, ineffectually opposed by a scratch collection of peasants, schoolboys and ex-prisoners of war under Semyon Petlyura, a leading Ukrainian socialist and the Rada’s minister for war. While the Bolsheviks bombarded the city with heavy artillery from across the Dnieper, the desperate Rada rushed through its Fourth and last Universal, declaring Ukraine unconditionally independent: ‘People of Ukraine! By your efforts, by your will, by your word, a Free Ukrainian People’s Republic has been created on Ukrainian soil. The ancient dream of your ancestors – fighters for the freedom and rights of workers – has been fulfilled . . . From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes independent, subject to no one, a Free Sovereign State . . .’12 Thirteen days later the Rada fled Kiev for Volhynia, debating as it went. ‘In various obscure towns along the railway line,’ writes Hrushevsky’s biographer, ‘laws were passed about the socialisation of land, about the introduction of the New Style calendar, a new monetary system, a coat-of-arms for the Republic, Ukrainian citizenship . . .’13 After eight precarious months, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was no more.
While fighting continued around Kiev, German, Russian and Ukrainian delegations were negotiating an armistice in the Belarussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Two separate agreements – one with the Bolsheviks, one with the Rada – handed Ukraine, along with the Baltics, Russian-ruled Poland and most of Belarus, to Germany. For the Bolsheviks, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the only way to stop the war. For Germany, it secured a rich source of food supply and freed up troops for the Western Front. For the Rada, promised autonomy under German protection, it was a route back into government. In the event, only Bolshevik expectations were fulfilled. The Germans occupied Kiev in March 1918, bringing Hrushevsky and the Rada with them. But a few weeks of the Ukrainians’ interminable bickering convinced them that the Rada was incapable
of running even a puppet government. On 28 April, soldiers marched into a debate on the new Ukrainian constitution and disbanded the assembly. The next day Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Russified landowner who had earlier offered military support to the Rada and been turned down, was declared ‘Hetman of All Ukraine’. Sympathetic soldiers smuggled Hrushevsky out of the city on foot, his long beard hidden inside his overcoat.
Given an illusory stability by the Germans’ presence, Kiev filled with Russian refugees: ‘grey-haired bankers and their wives . . . Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres.’14 Nightclubs – the ‘Lilac Negro’ and the ‘Dust and Ashes’ – opened to cater for those determined to fiddle while Rome burned. All that summer, wrote Bulgakov, ‘the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne’.15
Meanwhile, in the trenches of Flanders, the Germans were losing the war. In December they evacuated Kiev, taking Skoropadsky with them, and Petlyura’s Ukrainians entered the city once again, only to flee in the face of a second Red Army advance a few weeks later. At the same time, the Allies made their sole contribution to the anti-Bolshevik cause in Ukraine, landing 60,000 French troops along the Black Sea coast in support of the Whites. They were withdrawn again four months later, after a single unsuccessful skirmish with ‘otaman’ Hryhoryev.