6
HOLODOMOR TO CHERNOBYL
Though he didn’t know it yet, Yasinsky had found himself in the middle of the sort of event that had defined Ukraine’s long and unkind history: a foreign invasion.
To understand how Ukraine would come to serve as the battleground for the world’s first full-blown cyberwar, it helps to look back at a millennium of conflict and domination, with Ukraine as the point where the bloodiest edges of two continents meet. Over the last thousand years, incursions into Ukraine have taken the form of Mongol hordes from the east and Lithuanian heathens and Polish imperialists from the west. The nation’s name itself, “Ukraina,” comes from a Slavic word for “borderland.” Ukraine’s existence has been defined by its position, caught between powerful neighbors. But the country’s most perpetual nemesis has been the one with whom it shares not only the longest border but also the most history and culture—its larger, more aggressive, estranged brother from the same mother.
Russia and Ukraine trace the origins of their two civilizations to a common ancestor, the flourishing medieval state of Kievan Rus. That kingdom, growing around Kiev from the tenth century AD, became an eastern outpost of European culture after its king Volodymyr somewhat arbitrarily decided to convert his people from paganism to Orthodox Christianity. Ukrainians like to point out that his son Yaroslav the Wise built Kiev’s iconic St. Sophia Cathedral in 1037, when Moscow was little more than a forest by the Volga River.
But geography was never in Ukraine’s favor. Kievan Rus was destroyed in the thirteenth century by brutal Mongols riding southwest from the Urals across the indefensible landscape of the steppe, led by Batu Khan, one of the grandsons of Genghis Khan. After a long siege, the invaders massacred Kiev’s population, burned hundreds of churches, and razed its city walls.
In the wake of that massive destruction, as Russians tell it, the refugees of Kievan Rus’s early Slavic society migrated to Moscow, where they became Russians. In the Ukrainian version, their culture quietly continued to grow where it was first planted, in the rich black soil of the broad region north of the Black Sea, surviving for centuries despite the successive layers of foreigners who tried to lay claim to it, from Mongols to Poles to Turks to Tatars and finally Russians.
Prior to the last thirty years, however, Ukraine’s attempts at actual independence have been painful, hard-fought failures. Over the last millennium, the country’s hopes for self-rule rose and fell three times: in the seventeenth-century rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks, stubbornly autonomous warrior settlers of the steppes; in the bloody Ukrainian civil war following Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; and again after a brief, tragically misguided alliance with Nazi occupiers during World War II. As Anna Reid wrote in her history of Ukraine, Borderland, Ukraine’s rebellions have long been “nasty, brutish, and above all short.” By the beginning of the twentieth century, Ukraine—or “the Ukraine,” because it was considered little more than a region, not a nation—was a possession of the Russian empire and commonly referred to as “Southwest Russia” or “Little Russia.”
As dark as Ukraine’s history has been, its greatest litany of horrors arguably came in just the last century or so of Russian hegemony. In World War I, 3.5 million Ukrainians were conscripted to fight for their Russian rulers. Even after Bolshevism swept Russia and pulled the country out of the war, fighting raged for years in Ukraine between the country’s own independence fighters, the “Whites,” who remained loyal to Russia’s czarist regime, and the communist army of Vladimir Lenin.
Even more so than World War I, the civil war spilled into tragic and indiscriminate chaos on Ukrainian soil. Soldiers and bandits on all sides committed atrocities against civilians, including many of the Jewish-targeted pogroms that have made “Cossack” synonymous with “murderer” in much of the global Jewish diaspora. In total, about 1.5 million Ukrainians died in the violent years between 1914 and 1921.
It was the next decade between the wars, however, that for many Ukrainians still resonates as a memory of deep, even unforgivable oppression. The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”
The starvation began through simple exploitation: Ukraine’s fertile black soil offered a tempting breadbasket for Russia. During its own civil war from 1917 to 1922, Russia seized as much grain as it could at gunpoint to alleviate its own wartime food shortages. “For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!” Lenin wrote in a telegram to Soviet forces in Ukraine in 1918. The secret police force known as the KGB, initially called the Cheka and then the OGPU, was formed in part to find and take grain from Ukrainian peasants by whatever means necessary. When American Relief Administration workers were sent to Russia to help relieve the food crisis, Soviet forces kept them out of Ukraine, obscuring the fact that it was Ukrainians who were experiencing the worst of the shortages.
By 1932, starvation had become a far more purposeful Soviet tool of control. Moscow, now under the rule of Joseph Stalin, had imposed agricultural collectivization, moving peasants off the land they had owned for generations and onto communally held farms. At the same time, the most prosperous peasants, known as kulaks, were branded as class traitors and subjected to exile, imprisonment, and massacre. When the result, inevitably, was massive shortfalls in food production, the Soviets only redoubled their efforts to seize every ounce of grain possible from Ukraine’s peasants. They searched systematically, using hooked and spiked poles to dig behind walls, under floorboards, and even in the earth outside homes in search of hidden food. When they found it, they piled the confiscated grain in locked warehouses. OGPU guards patrolled fields, shooting scavengers on sight.
Peasants responded with scattered resistance, butchering their livestock rather than give it to collective farms and taking up arms in guerrilla bands. Those acts of rebellion only stoked Stalin’s paranoid fears of a Ukrainian nationalist rebellion, refreshing Bolshevik memories of war with Ukrainian freedom fighters just a few years earlier. So famine soon became not only the cause of Ukrainian subversion but its solution too: The Soviet regime simply starved the country into submission.
The Soviet government restricted travel, preventing hungry peasants from fleeing to other regions or countries. Bodies piled up in railway stations and along roads. The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.
Roughly 13 percent of Ukraine’s population at the time died, but no Ukrainian survived the period untouched by the trauma. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who lost forty-nine relatives in the next decade’s Holocaust and went on to coin the term “genocide,” later cited the Holodomor in a 1953 speech in New York as a quintessential example of his neologism. “This is not simply a case of mass murder,” Lemkin said. “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”
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Ukraine’s greatest misfortune, aside from finding itself in Russia’s inescapable shadow, was that it was destined to serve as the battlefield between East and West. World War II was no exception. Like a bloody rerun of the country’s civil war from two decades earlier, Hitler’s war with Russia’s Red Army split Ukraine into three warring sides: those supporting the Nazis in an ill-fated hope of a life better than the one under Stalin, those conscripted into the Soviet forces, and a small faction fighting in vain for an independent Ukraine.
In fact, the Soviet atrocities had begun even before the Nazis arrived, during the brief period of German-Russian nonaggression. When Hitler seized
Poland in 1939, the region of western Ukraine known as Galicia that had until then been under Polish control suddenly fell to Moscow. Stalin and his Ukrainian Communist Party subordinate Nikita Khrushchev wasted no time in purging the region of anyone who might possibly fight the Soviet Union’s annexation: farmers who resisted collectivization, Poles, Jews, lawyers, priests, and government officials.
Between 800,000 and 1.6 million people were arrested and deported from western Ukraine to labor camps in Kazakhstan and Siberia, as much as a fifth of the region’s population. When Hitler did invade two years later, in a surprise attack that shattered the two countries’ pact, the Soviets hurriedly massacred the Ukrainian prisoners they hadn’t yet deported before fleeing to the east.
In the years that followed, the Nazis took their turn brutalizing Ukraine. As Hitler’s army marched east, SS troops followed, murdering as many Jewish civilians as they could find, killing them mostly with firing squads and dumping bodies in mass graves rather than bothering with trains to concentration camps. Ukrainians who had welcomed the Germans and even aided in the Holocaust’s slaughter were rewarded with a policy that treated all Slavs, Russians, and Ukrainians alike, as Untermenschen. The Nazis rounded up 2.8 million Soviet citizens, more than 2 million of whom where Ukrainian, and shipped them to Germany to work in factories for slave wages.
Even after the Red Army turned the tide of the war with an immensely costly victory in 1943 at Stalingrad—where more than 1 million Soviet soldiers died—the Nazis continued to kill en masse, starving 2 million captured Soviet prisoners as they death-marched them westward. In all, 1 in 6 Ukrainians died in the war, and about 1 in 8 Russians, with a staggering total of 26.6 million deaths across the U.S.S.R., a number unparalleled in the history of war.
In the postwar decades that followed, Moscow’s treatment of Ukraine settled into a slower-burning repression of a subjugated state. In the 1950s, through the last years of Stalin’s terror and the rise of Khrushchev to take his place, more Ukrainians were sent to the U.S.S.R.’s gulags than any other nationality. Through the 1960s and 1970s, groups like the Sixtiers and the Helsinki Group fought for Ukrainian autonomy and human rights, only to be quickly swept away to a life of destitution and hopelessness in Siberian labor camps.
The 1980s and the rise of Gorbachev would lay the groundwork, after eight hundred years, for Ukrainian independence. But not before giving Ukraine one more lasting keepsake of its Soviet rule.
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On the night of April 25, 1986, engineers were conducting a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near the northern Ukrainian town of Pripyat, population fifty thousand. The experiment was designed to check how long the reactor would continue to function in the case of a total electric failure. Just after midnight, operators turned off the system that would cool the reactor core with water in the case of an emergency and initiated a power shutdown.
Exactly what happened next remains a subject of controversy among scientists, even today. But at 1:23 a.m., a massive eruption—perhaps caused by a sudden buildup of steam or perhaps a nuclear explosion that subsequently triggered that steam blowup—tore through the plant, rupturing the reactor core and killing two engineers. A jet of radioactive material immediately shot more than three thousand feet in the air.
Firemen rushed to the scene to extinguish the plant’s burning roofs, many unwittingly receiving fatal doses of radioactivity. But no public warning went out to the citizens of nearby Pripyat, where people went about their Saturday routines unaware of the nuclear fallout spewing from the meltdown just a few miles down the river. Only thirty-six hours later did Communist Party officials enact a limited evacuation, starting with just a small area of a few miles around the plant. In fact, a radioactive plume was already spreading through the atmosphere that would reach as far as Sweden, with an invisible toll on the health of its victims that still eludes measurement.
For weeks after, Moscow-based state news agencies made no mention of the ongoing disaster. Nor did Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Six days after the explosion, as nuclear fragments continued to rain down from Chernobyl’s toxic cloud, party officials evacuated their own children to safety on the Crimean peninsula, even as they instructed Ukraine’s citizens to carry on with their annual May Day parade. Just sixty miles south of Chernobyl’s ground zero, thousands of people—including countless children—marched down Kiev’s main drag of Khreshchatyk Street. They carried flowers, flags, and portraits of Soviet leaders, unaware that those same leaders had knowingly exposed them to the fallout of one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
7
MAIDAN TO DONBAS
On my first night in Kiev in the spring of 2017, I stepped out of the towering Hotel Ukraine—formerly the Hotel Moscow, a Soviet-era luxury hotel now devolved into a cheap and run-down relic of U.S.S.R. tastes—and into the Maidan below, the central square of Ukraine’s capital. Before my jet-lagged brain had even oriented itself, I found myself in a crowd around the steps of the Monument to the Founders of Kiev, where a man dressed in black holding a guitar was belting out the Ukrainian national anthem, his fist across his chest, flanked by soldiers in camouflage fatigues, one wearing sunglasses in the dark.
Behind the singer were pictures of friendly faces wearing balaclavas and helmets. Only later would I make the connection that these were photographs of ordinary Ukrainians who had been killed near that very spot three years earlier. Many had been shot by snipers positioned in the top floors of the Hotel Ukraine I’d just checked into. The hotel’s lobby, too, had been conscripted into the revolution, one side turned into a field clinic for wounded protesters, the other into a morgue.
As the Maidan crowd around the singer bellowed out the national anthem along with him, their hands on their hearts and some draped in Ukrainian flags, their voices were charged with an eerie intensity that raised the hair on my skin. “Ukraine’s freedom has not yet perished, nor has her glory,” they sang. “We will not allow others to rule in our motherland.” In my first hour in Ukraine, I felt I had stepped into the buzzing epicenter of a postrevolutionary nation at war.
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After centuries of bloody fighting for its independence, Ukraine’s liberation had originally arrived in 1991, almost by accident. With the U.S.S.R.’s collapse, a stunned Ukrainian parliament voted to become a sovereign nation, with only the far eastern region of Donetsk, the most ethnically Russian slice of the country, opposing the decision.
But for the decades that followed, Moscow maintained a powerful influence over Ukraine, and the two countries transitioned in tandem from communism to kleptocracy. Ukraine’s prime minister and then president for its first fourteen years of independence, Leonid Kuchma, became known for siphoning a stream of boondoggle deals and cheap loans to cronies. In the year 2000, a bodyguard released tapes of Kuchma discussing the torture and killing of an investigative journalist who had been found dead in the woods south of Kiev, as well as vote rigging, bribe taking, and selling weapons systems to Saddam Hussein.
For a population inured to corruption and fed lies by state-run news for as long as they could remember, even so-called Kuchmagate failed to oust the president. Instead, he lasted until his chosen successor, Viktor Yanukovich, an oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ran for president in 2004. His opponent was Viktor Yushchenko, a Ukrainian nationalist, financier, and reformer who promised to finally bring the country out from under Russia’s thumb.
Sensing a shift, the Kremlin determined to tighten Ukraine’s leash. Russian political operatives began working secretly for Yanukovich, and soon Yushchenko was finding his speaking venues closed and his plane diverted from campaign stops. Then, a month before elections, Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned with dioxin, falling deathly ill. He barely survived, his skin left scarred and disfigured by the attack. Later, two Russians were arrested in
a failed attempt to blow up Yushchenko’s campaign headquarters in Kiev.
When Yanukovich was declared the winner of the elections that November, the vote rigging was barely hidden. Yushchenko had, by this time, recovered enough from his poisoning to return to campaigning and was winning by double digits in polls. But the cheating was evident: Putin had gone so far as to send Yanukovich his congratulations before the results were even tallied.
This time, Ukrainians had had enough. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Kiev, filling the Maidan and waving orange scarves, the chosen color of Yushchenko’s campaign. Facing a mass uprising, Yanukovich stepped down a month later. The Orange Revolution, finally, was Ukraine’s first step toward real independence. Yushchenko won a legitimate election the next month and declared a new era of the country’s history.
But politics in Ukraine are never so simple. Yushchenko turned out to be an inspiring but disorganized leader, warring with his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. The government deadlocked and the economy foundered. Amazingly, Yanukovich managed to wheedle his way back into the spotlight, thanks in part to his Russian backing and a makeover overseen by the U.S. lobbyist Paul Manafort, the future campaign manager of Donald Trump. From 2006 to 2007, Yanukovich even served as prime minister under his former archrival Yushchenko. In 2010, he defeated Tymoshenko in the presidential election, definitively ending the Orange Revolution five years after it had begun.
Ukraine took four years to simmer to the boiling point again. As president, Yanukovich proved himself to be even more ambitious in his mass theft than Kuchma, openly pillaging state coffers. His group of blatantly corrupt associates, known as the Family, tucked away as much as $100 billion of government funds into their private accounts. Yanukovich’s estate north of Kiev, called Mezhyhirya, became a mobster’s Xanadu, complete with a menagerie of exotic birds, a bowling alley, a rifle range, a boxing ring, and $46.5 million worth of chandeliers.
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