We walked along the memorial wall surveying the faces and names of men and women who went to eastern Ukraine to defend their homeland, and the reality sank in: Ukraine is at war, and with Russia—a once-inconceivable notion.
Our stroll eventually led us away from Mikhailov Square, down a path to a headland overlooking the Dnieper, where a daunting, sixty-seven-foot-high statue of Prince Vladimir (Volodymyr, in Ukrainian) surveys the island-studded river and the parks and apartment blocks on the right bank. The statue dates from 1853, the era of the Russian Empire under Nicholas I. Constructed of iron and bronze in neo-Byzantine style for the four hundredth anniversary of Byzantium’s fall to the Turks, Prince Vladimir holds aloft a fifteen-foot cross, as though baptizing the land anew. The monument was meant to both highlight Russia’s spiritual ties to the Eastern Roman Empire and to establish continuity between Emperor Nicholas I and Vladimir the Great. Though what is less advertised is that following his conversion to Christianity, Vladimir led a less than pious lifestyle that induced one medieval chronicler to dub him fornicator maximus. One version of history has it that the still-pagan Vladimir seized the Crimean town of Chersonesus from the Greeks and agreed to return it only if the Byzantine emperor Basil II would grant him the hand in marriage of the emperor’s sister, Anna Porphyrogenita. The Greeks acceded to this demand, on the condition that Vladimir convert to Christianity, which he did, with some historians placing his baptism in Chersonesus, others in Kiev, and with the instatement thereafter of Christianity as Kievan Rus’s religion. For having inducted Rus into Christendom, the church canonized him.
Some medieval Russian sources put it differently: the Russians sent envoys to neighboring lands to assess their faiths for possible adoption. Vladimir rejected both Judaism and Islam—the latter because of its prohibition against alcohol. (“Veseliye Rusi piti est [drinking is the joy of Rus],” purportedly declared Vladimir.) Yet, it was the ethereal, spiritual beauty of the Greek Orthodox liturgy that won over the Russians. Conversion ensued.
In fact, Byzantine Christianity was already making inroads into Kievan Rus and its adoption would have made eminent sense, given Kiev’s trade contacts with Byzantium. However it came about, the acceptance of Christianity by Kievan Rus from the Byzantine Greeks and not the Roman Catholics would have momentous consequences for world history. Ultimately, it placed Russia, spiritually, if not civilizationally, outside Western Europe and fostered a faith-based isolationism, which included the rise of the messianic notion of Moscow as the Third Rome and of Russia as the country destined by God to determine the fate of mankind.
Admiring the pugnacious Vladimir the Great, the atheist Soviets left the statue that Nicholas I erected to him in Kiev, sparing it the fate they reserved for most other monuments glorifying the monarchy or religion. Gazing up at Vladimir’s weathered bronze grandeur, we could not help thinking that the statue looked remarkably Stalinesque. Its baroque laurel wreaths and the bas-reliefs on its pedestal recall Stalinist classicism, which itself derived from Byzantine models. Some have speculated that the bas-relief—just beneath Vladimir’s feet—of a meat cleaver crossed with a torch signifies power and truth, a tribute to Masonic fashions of the nineteenth century.1 In fact, the meat cleaver and torch bear an eerie resemblance to the Soviet hammer and sickle, which also stood, in their own way, for power and truth. Even Vladimir’s hand, raised to grip the majestic cross blessing the city, conjures up the thousands of statues of another Vladimir—Vladimir Lenin—whose giant marble, iron, or bronze right hands all reached out toward the bright communist future across the Soviet Union. In many places in Russia, they still do. Ever inclined to humor, Russians often joke that what Lenin was really trying to do was hail a cab.
Even at the dawn of his rule over the Soviet Union, Stalin, too, admired the ancient Vladimir. He considered Bulgakov’s The White Guard his favorite novel, presumably because it conveyed the grandiosity of the monarchical attributes of statues, state rituals, and military ceremonies. He read the book numerous times. When Bulgakov refashioned it into a play, the dictator frequented its performances at the Moscow Art Theater. In his later years, and especially after the war, Stalin paid a great deal of attention to the symbolism of the imperial Russian state and desired to root his own Soviet empire in Russia’s historical legacy. Vladimir the Great—Saint Vladimir, the Baptizer of Russia—served as his intermediary with Russia’s distant past. To cement the connection, the statue was renovated in 1953 for its one hundredth anniversary—ironically the year of Stalin’s death.
The Ukrainians now view Prince Vladimir differently, having begun, after the 1991 Soviet collapse, to claim him for themselves. For them, he is the Kiev-born prince Volodymyr, the medieval Ukrainian leader who established Kievan Rus a century before Moscow even existed. In The White Guard, Bulgakov wrote,
In winter the cross would glow through the dense black clouds, a frozen unmoving landmark towering above the gently sloping expanse of the eastern bank, whence two vast bridges were flung across the river. One, the ponderous Chain Bridge that led to the right-bank suburbs, the other high, slim and urgent as an arrow that carried the trains from where, far away, crouched another city, threatening and mysterious: Moscow.2
The author, in this and other passages, confirms the timeless dichotomy between the Russian center and its rebellious Ukrainian periphery. In the novel, the action unfolds in 1918 in Kiev, before the Bolsheviks took control, and where Saint Vladimir’s Christian legacy was still intact, as opposed to the soon-to-be-Stalinist Moscow, where another Vladimir, Lenin, would become the god of communism.
The themes with which Bulgakov dealt in his work resonated with us throughout our journeys around Russia. Bulgakov, once a journalist who covered politics and human interest news for the Moscow daily Gudok (The Whistle), famous for its satirical pages, in his later fiction addressed the relations between people and state power. How do they react to the sudden replacement of the monarchy with a dictatorship of the proletariat, which transforms them from being subjects of the czar into members of the proletarian masses?
A similar question concerned us: Russians, as a rule, adore leaders who flaunt their power—and even deploy it, as did Putin in annexing Crimea. Are Russian subjects subordinating their lives to the greatness of the state? Or are they citizens holding individual rights? Now more than ever, almost a hundred years after Bulgakov’s novel, the conflict between open-minded, liberal-spirited Kiev and imperial, autocratic Moscow rages on, both literally—as in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine—and figuratively, in the Russian mind-set.
Fittingly, the double-headed eagle inherited from Byzantium has been playing into the rivalry. One could say that the Ukrainian head wants to turn toward Western democracy, with Ukraine becoming an enlightened European state. The Russian head, however, remains as it has been for centuries, facing the empire in the east. After all, following the fall of Byzantium, Moscow, not Kiev, assumed the historic mantle of the Third Rome and bore the torch of Christian Orthodoxy. Moreover, since the monument was built for the Russian emperor Nicholas I, St. Vladimir is “ours,” they say, just as Krym nash (Crimea is ours).
In 2014 Putin, upon annexing Crimea, justified Russia’s claims to the peninsula in his address to the State Duma:
We are not simply close neighbors but, as I have said many times already, we are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.… Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability. And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian.3
From this and similar declarations one may extrapolate the Kremlin’s reasoning: as the European Union supported the Euromaidan—and Germany, once the country of Nazism that the Soviets defeated, is the most powerful state in the Union—Russia and its historical space are essentially under assault from the West, from those bent on destroying Russian supranational identi
ty.
Because Kiev had lurched westward with its protest movement, Putin argued that Ukrainians had betrayed their cultural roots and endangered Russia’s security. After all, a westward-looking Ukraine might join NATO; the alliance’s promise of eventual membership (made in the Bucharest Declaration of 2008) figured in his thinking.
In 2016 Putin, who happens to be Prince Vladimir’s namesake, had his own statue of Vladimir the Great built in Borovitskaya Square, just outside the Kremlin’s western corner walls. In doing so, he was implicitly calling for Russian national unity and the defiance of enemies at home and abroad, just as the prince did a millennium ago. This move dismayed Ukrainians commemorating the millennial of St. Vladimir’s death in 1015. They complained that Russia has misappropriated a key element of their spiritual heritage. After all, Vladimir the Great had no relation to Moscow.
The new monument in Moscow was originally to stand more than seventy feet higher than its prototype in Kiev. The authorities planned to locate it on the Russian capital’s most elevated terrain—Sparrow Hills (formerly Lenin Hills), similar to Vladimir overlooking Kiev. But ecological protests broke out, which prompted municipal authorities to move it to a more prominent—if lower—space a mere hundred yards from the Kremlin.
Another Vladimir, Lenin, is also now separating Russia and Ukraine. Ukraine once had the greatest number of Lenin statues in the former Soviet Union—more than five thousand, according to one count.4 For the past twenty years it has struggled to take them down. During the Euromaidan protests, Leninopady, or “falling Lenins”—as the demolitions of Lenin statues came to be popularly known—proliferated. Often, Lenins that remained standing were “Ukrainianized”—that is, dressed up in vyshivanki, traditional Ukrainian embroidered blouses. For many Ukrainians, tearing down their granite-and-bronze Lenins symbolized their country’s right to determine its own future. Others opposed the demolitions—especially those who were aging and conservative and valued Russia’s close historical ties to Ukraine—and, most of all, pined for the more stable, if less free, Soviet decades.
* * *
Both of us had been to Kiev numerous times before. Jeff first visited in 1985 and kept going back to see his friends and relatives of his wife there. Most notably, though, he sojourned in Kiev after the Orange Revolution and witnessed the deep disillusionment that followed, as President Yushchenko and his prime minister Tymoshenko ignored Ukraine’s pressing problems and became adversaries. At least the Orange Revolution never lost its ability to inspire hope; for a time, people were able to confront Russian pressure and liberate themselves from it.
For Nina, the connection goes even deeper—all the way back to her great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev. Born in 1894 in the Russian village of Kalinovka on the Ukrainian border, he moved at age sixteen to the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka, which is now Donetsk, a hotbed of pro-Novorossiya sentiment following the ouster of Yanukovych and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 1938, Stalin appointed Khrushchev, known for his expertise in agriculture, to be Communist Party Secretary in Kiev and tasked him with returning the republic to normalcy after the devastations of Holodomor. This man-made famine of 1932–1933 had taken between six million and seven million lives and involved state confiscation of grain from Ukrainian and Russian peasants for export, in return for heavy machinery needed for Stalin’s industrialization drive. Khrushchev argued against the Soviet Union’s reliance on Ukraine for a large part of its agricultural production and stressed the need to develop more effective farming elsewhere in the country.
During the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev served at the Ukrainian front, but once the war ended, he took up his old job again—running the Communist Party in Kiev. In 1956, having assumed control of the Soviet Union, he denounced Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality in his now-famous “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress and began de-Stalinization and the reform policy known as the Thaw. Ukraine celebrated the resulting lessening of repression more than any other Soviet republic.
After Khrushchev’s removal from power and Brezhnev’s ascension, the former fell into disfavor in Moscow, but his name has largely enjoyed respect in Ukraine. Of course, some Ukrainians consider him, despite his revelation of Stalin’s crimes, no less a Soviet oppressor than any other Communist Party leader. But more often than not, people’s faces light up at his mention; they remember that, although he was ethnically Russian, at home he often said that “in his soul” he “wanted to be Ukrainian”; he respected Ukrainians for their work ethic and independent spirit. They recount glowingly how Khrushchev tried to improve life in their republic and at times even confronted Stalin about his neglect and abuse of Ukraine’s agricultural potential. With its relatively warm climate and fertile land, Ukraine had historically been known as the “bread basket” of the empire, Russian or Soviet, but Khrushchev argued it should not be the only one.
When in 1954 he transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, he hoped only to improve the peninsula’s governance. At the time, Ukrainians hardly noticed. (Even Khrushchev’s older daughter Rada, who traveled with her father surveying the area before the transfer, remembered, after the Crimea annexation in 2014, that “At the time they didn’t even want Crimea. Apart from historians, few Ukrainians cared about it as the possible original baptismal place of Kievan Rus or considered it to be theirs.”) Over decades, however, the peninsula did come to represent Ukraine’s competitive spirit with the Russians.
Although for the past fifteen years Kiev has been undergoing something of a Westernizing renovation with loans from the European Union to help, at least for the past few years, the sum effect is still less café cappuccino than café vareniki (Ukrainian dumplings). Andreyevsky Descent, where Bulgakov once lived, has slowly become a bustling market street on which one can buy locally sewn vyshivanki (in sizes promoted as large enough to fit Lenin statues), artisanal pottery, and traditional Ukrainian dresses and blouses superior in quality to if not always as fashionable as, say, Ivanka Trump’s made-in-China brand. A large banner stretched across the road proudly announced, in Ukrainian, that Andriivskii uzviz—tse Monmartr abo Grenich Villidzh Kiiva (Andreyevsky Descent neighborhood is the Montmartre or the Greenwich Village of Kiev).
Down in the city center, we would later walk around Kiev Passage, a pedestrian street off Khreshchatyk. There, high-end designer boutiques—Max Mara, Gucci, Louis Vuitton—give off an air of European chic.
Kiev may be the capital of a country aspiring to join the West, but much about it retains whiffs of the provincial Soviet midsize town. The pedestrian underpasses running beneath major thoroughfares in the center, like the labyrinthine tunnels leading to the subway entrances, recall scenes from the Moscow underground of the 1990s—kiosks of various shapes and sizes sell everything from milk to pastries, stockings and local Ukrainian handicrafts. Patriotically emblazoned in the yellow-and-blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, T-shirts and even kitchen towels also feature portraits of poet Taras Shevchenko, the nineteenth-century anti-Russian nationalist.
We chose to stay in the Hotel Dnipro, which once welcomed Communist Party apparatchiks from Moscow; a convivial and convenient temporary abode, it nevertheless remains unmistakably Soviet. The downstairs bar asks patrons to purchase cocktail nuts from a nearby store; the top floor breakfast room features a black grand piano on which, at seven o’clock in the morning, a musician played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C-Minor; the elegant waiters served food that surely came straight from tin cans. Outside, though, an almost Swiss-style orderliness prevailed and public transport ran on time.
The next day, in Budinok Kavi (House of Coffee), an upscale café tucked away on a placid pedestrian street off Independence Square, we met Bohdan Yaremenko, a Ukrainian diplomat in his mid-forties who had served as his country’s general consul in Edinburgh and as its ambassador in Istanbul. These days, he directs a foreign-policy think tank, the Maidan of Foreign Affairs. Bushy-haired, with a bon vivant’s corpulence and an easy smile, Yaremenko
told us that he sees the vestiges of a bygone decade as evidence not of failed modernization, but as characteristics typical of a small country, one whose capital was not striving after the imperial grandeur of Moscow. The recent noise about whose Vladimir statue—that of Kiev or the Russian capital—is bigger and better stirs nationalist pride here.
“But Ukraine,” he went on to say, “should concentrate on genuine European integration, a desire for which was at the center of the Euromaidan revolution, rather than make remodeling Kiev the goal of reforms. The symbolism of Europe is attractive, but the country needs to do a lot before it gets there. Ukraine’s power system needs to change and function not so Kiev can look like Europe but because a bankrupt and corrupt society cannot form a part of Europe.”
In Yaremenko’s view, an inversion of goals has allowed Ukraine’s post-Maidan president Petro Poroshenko to consolidate power in preparation for the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2019. Yaremenko worried that although Poroshenko, the wealthy owner of the Roshen candy company, is the opposite of Putin, a former KGB colonel, he has augmented the role of the SBU, Ukraine’s Security Service. Some reforms—those concerning the judicial system, the pension fund, and the state bureaucracy—are slowly making their way through the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s often tumultuous parliament. Others, including those dealing with public health care and land reform, have stalled. Moreover, the government’s unwillingness to tackle corruption—the principal obstacle to the country’s westernization—has proved a major matter of contention between Kiev and the European Union.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 5