Borderland

by Anna Reid

  One blazing Sunday afternoon forty-five years later I interviewed Maxwell on the roof of the London headquarters of his publishing empire. A helicopter gleamed on the Astroturf, and a butler in striped trousers brought up tea things on a tray. Dressed in a scarlet silk shirt that bulged like a spinnaker-sail, he was the fattest and most bombastic man I had ever seen. The lies he told about his business (the subject of the interview was the launch of the European) were transparent, superb, regal in their scope and shamelessness. Eighteen months later, as his companies crumbled around him, he vanished over the side of his motor-yacht into the Mediterranean. Enigmatic to the last, he was another true son of the somewhere in the middle of nowhere that was pre-war borderland Ukraine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Great Hunger: Matussiv and Lukovytsya

  The decree required that the peasants of the

  Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to

  death by starvation, put to death along with

  their little children.

  – Vasiliy Grossman, 1955

  MARIA PAVLIVNA KURYNO, crabbed and shrunken as a Pompeii mummy, has lived in Matussiv all her life. Her cottage has two rooms and a clay floor and smells of horse. On the wall, papered with mismatched offcuts stuck on with drawing-pins, hangs a photograph of her husband, black-bordered and framed in tin foil. He disappeared fifty years ago, somewhere on the Eastern Front. Now Maria spends her days on the warm ledge above the clay stove, dozing or watching the television that stands beneath the icons in the corner. Her daughter and granddaughter are there too – a stout middle-aged woman in a muzhik’s padded jacket, and a wide-eyed little girl who chews the end of her blonde pony-tail and ducks her head when we try to take a photograph. It takes a while to make ourselves understood.

  ‘Babka, there’s someone to see you, a foreigner, from Angliya.’

  ‘Is she really an English girl – really, really foreign? You mustn’t photograph me – look at me, I look like a monkey! I read somewhere that Ukraine borders England . . .’

  ‘And this one’s from Kanada.’

  ‘From Amerika!’

  Roma shrugs her shoulders.

  ‘Yes, from Amerika!’

  Maria wears a scarf over her yellow-white hair and a nylon dress held together with safety-pins. As she talks she crosses herself again and again. She was twelve years old when ‘Nicholas’s war’ began and fifteen at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. She can remember reaping corn with her sisters in her family’s one-and-a-half-acre field, while the daughters of the local big house rode round on horseback. ‘You’d cut five sheaves, keep one, and the other four would go to the Lopukhins,’ she says. ‘But it wasn’t so bad – at least they paid.’ Neighbours worked in the local beet refinery, owned by the Brodskys, the Jewish sugar magnates who endowed, among many other good works, the Bessarabka covered market in Kiev. The village had twice as many inhabitants then, and real shops where you could actually buy things: ‘Jewish magazinchiki. You could say – bring a bag of flour, and they would bring white or brown, right to your house, whatever you wanted.’

  After the Revolution, Maria’s memory gets muddled. Bandyty came and took people away – to the North ‘where they built a canal, poor people’, or to the woods, where they were shot and buried in pits. When was this? Who was doing the shooting? ‘Ah, they were just bandits – such bandits.’

  Matussiv’s undoing, like that of thousands of other villages in central and eastern Ukraine, was not war or revolution but collectivisation, and the massive famine – the ‘Great Hunger’ – which followed it. Finding Ukrainians who are willing and able to talk about the famine is surprisingly hard. The younger generations have been told little about it by their parents and grandparents, for fear that such talk might compromise their careers, even their lives. ‘It just wasn’t something we talked about in our family’ was a typical comment from Kiev friends. The old, who remember the famine at first-hand, are dying off fast, and do not like confiding in strangers.

  My problem was solved by my interpreter, Sergey Maksimov. A gentle, bearded man in his early forties, he was grotesquely overqualified for his job. He had written a thesis on ‘The Use of Dactyl Markers in British Legal Language’ at Birmingham University, could read manuscripts in ancient Goth, and knew the whereabouts of every Scythian gravemound and ruined monastery in the country. But his teaching post at the Foreign Languages Institute only paid twenty dollars a month, so he was happy to spend hours with me in parliament translating dull debates. His lifeline – the place where he went to croon John Lennon and contemplate life – was his dacha at Lukovytsya, a village a couple of hours down the Dnieper by hydrofoil. His neighbour Hanna Hrytsay was a proper villager, not a dachnik, and would be happy to talk.

  A spry, scrubbed old woman with pink cheeks and silver hair done up in a bun, Hanna looked as though she had stepped straight out of a fairy-tale. The whitewashed walls of her cottage were festooned with scythes, wicker baskets, enamel pots, old cartwheels and useful bits of rope and leather. Every inch of the half-acre plot behind was covered with immaculate rows of onions, sweetcorn, potato-plants and tomatoes. One small barn, walled with hurdles, stored the last of the previous year’s hay; another, roofed with tarred cloth held in place by bricks hanging on wires from the roof tree, housed a brown-and-white cow with curly horns. Hanna said she would have preferred asbestos for the roof, but at a million coupons a sheet it was too expensive, and she and her husband were going to have to carry on making do with tar-paper. All Lukovytsya’s running water came from a single standpipe; like Matussiv, it had dirt roads, no shops, no public transport and, in winter, no postal service.

  Hanna was seven years old when collectivisation began in 1929:

  People didn’t want to enter these collective farms at all, but they were forced to. They took everything – land, grain, ploughs, animals. And as if that weren’t enough they took the bread out of the house. My grandfather was a blacksmith; he resisted for three years. They took his horses, his smith’s shop, they banged with hammers on the walls to see if he had hidden any grain. They even took the seedcorn for the next year. A barn or a stable was a symbol of wealth. If you had a metal roof on your house, you were considered a kulak, and sent away to the North. You know Tykhon’s house over the road – it had an iron roof. The only reason it wasn’t confiscated was because he was ill and had to have his leg amputated – the activists took pity on him.

  The local church – ‘it was a beautiful one, with bells’ – was demolished and its icons looted. ‘People protested but it didn’t help. There was a man called Myron who lived right here – people used to go to his place to read the Bible and sing hymns. Then he disappeared too.’

  Hanna’s family sold ‘everything – icons, clothes, pillows’ to buy rye. But by the winter of 1932 they were living off anything they could find. ‘People were eating straw and lime-tree leaves, making kasha out of bark, nettles. I went to see my uncle, and they served a dinner. There was a stew – I saw something strange – tails sticking out of it! It was made from mice!’ Compared to most villages, the Lukovytsyers were lucky, because they could trawl – illegally, using blankets – for fish and molluscs in the Dnieper. Even so, two families died. On the other side of the river things were much worse: ‘People were killing their children and eating them.’

  The famine, though, was a long time ago. What Hanna really wanted to talk about were the iniquities of the present. A few years ago she and her husband had sold five cows and put the proceeds – 2,000 roubles, ‘half the price of a Volyn jeep in those days’ – into the bank. Hyperinflation had since reduced their value – the savings of a lifetime’s work – to absolutely nil: ‘not even enough to buy a box of matches’. They had been keeping the money for their funerals. Now they wished they had bought a refrigerator instead.

  Exactly how many people died in the Great Hunger of 1932–3 is unclear. As Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs, ‘No one was keeping count’. Contemporaries spoke
of 4 or 5 million. The historian Robert Conquest uses Soviet census data to arrive at a figure of 7 million: 5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Another 6.5 million, he reckons, died in ‘dekulakisation’ immediately beforehand. If Conquest is right, the whole operation killed over twice as many people as the Holocaust – thirty-four lives not for every word, but for every letter in this book. These may well be underestimates, since Soviet census data are unreliable. When the post-purge census of 1937 turned up an embarrassing population deficit, Stalin promptly had the officials in charge arrested and shot. Subsequent counts, one can assume, erred on the side of optimism.

  The term ‘famine’, with its implication of natural disaster, is the wrong word for what happened. Unlike the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, the deaths of 1932–3 were a deliberate, man-made event. Crop failure was not to blame, since the harvest of 1932 was only slightly smaller than average, and actually better than that of the previous year. Nor can it, by any stretch of the imagination, be put down to bureaucratic oversight. By the early autumn of 1932 Stalin and his ministers undoubtedly knew, because local communists repeatedly told them so, that the countryside was starving, but ordered that food requisitions continue none the less. Right through the famine, storehouses full of ‘emergency supplies’ were kept locked and guarded, while people died in thousands in the villages round about. During the less serious famine of 1921–2 (also the result of grain requisitions), the Soviet government had allowed Western relief agencies to provide food aid; in the far worse conditions of 1932–3, it denied that famine existed at all.

  The official explanation – seconded, until quite recently, by standard Western textbooks – was that collectivisation was a painful but necessary step towards modernising the rural economy, the famine something obdurate peasants brought upon themselves. ‘You can’t make an omelette,’ Stalin is said to have declared, ‘without breaking eggs.’ But even from this point of view, collectivisation was counter-productive: deporting all the country’s most successful farmers and starving the rest to death was hardly the way to go about boosting agricultural output, and Soviet farming has not really recovered from the blow even now. Like Stalin’s purges, which killed hundreds of thousands of stalwart Party supporters and most of the Red Army officer corps, the collectivisation famine of 1932–3 is so incredible, so seemingly self-defeating, that it is unsurprising that many historians have interpreted it as some sort of self-perpetuating blunder, a freak act of God.

  The most convincing explanation for the famine is that it was a deliberate, genocidal attack on rural Ukraine. The groups the Bolsheviks most hated and feared, and had had most difficulty subduing during the Civil War, were the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities. The Ukrainian countryside – home to the Soviet Union’s largest and most turbulent ethnic minority and to its richest and most self-reliant peasantry – embodied these twin demons in one. For centuries visitors had contrasted Ukraine’s ‘smiling’ farmhouses, so clean that ‘a traveller might fancy himself transported to Holland’,1 with Russia’s rural hovels. Their prosperity was not only the result of a richer soil and milder climate, but of the fact that most Ukrainian farmland was individually owned by independent smallholders, whereas Russian land was held communally, and periodically redistributed by councils of village elders. Communism – which to the peasant meant collectivisation – was thus even less popular in Ukrainian villages than in Russian ones. By 1928 there was one Party member per hundred and twenty-five peasant households in the Soviet Union as a whole, compared to only one per thousand in Ukraine.2 When Stalin ordered collectivisation, Ukraine was where it encountered most resistance and where it was enforced most harshly. Though there was also widespread famine in the Russian Kuban (where many Ukrainians also lived), and among the Kazakhs, Don Cossacks and Volga Germans, proportionately higher grain quotas in Ukraine ensured that it bore the bulk of deaths. ‘Truly, truly,’ wrote Vasiliy Grossman in his autobiographical novel Forever Flowing, ‘the whole business was much worse in the Ukraine than it was with us.’3

  The attack on Ukraine was a reversal of policy for the regime. In the mid-1920s the official line towards ethnic minorities was korenizatsiya or ‘taking root’. Korenizatsiya meant encouraging non-Russian languages and cultures (though not political organisations), with the aim of broadening communism’s appeal. Ukrainian-language books and newspapers were printed in large numbers, and hundreds of new Ukrainian-language schools opened, under the aegis of Mykola Skrypnyk, a close friend of Lenin’s and one of the few Ukrainians with a senior post in the Ukrainian Communist Party at the time. It was at one of these that Petro Hryhorenko, a Soviet army general who turned dissident in the 1960s, ‘first saw and heard played the Ukrainian national musical instrument, the bandore. From them I learned of Kobzar, written by the great Ukrainian poet Taras Grigorye-vich Shevchenko. And from them I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko, that I was Ukrainian.’4 Even Party officials were made to take courses in the language and use it in government business. Viktor Krav-chenko, an aeronautics student at the Kharkiv Technological Institute, described how korenizatsiya shook up the education system:

  Another dimension of confusion was added to our life in the Institute soon after I entered by an order that all instruction and examinations be conducted in the Ukrainian language, not in Russian. The order applied to all schools and institutions. It was Moscow’s supreme concession to the nationalist yearnings of the largest non-Russian Soviet Republic.

  In theory we Ukrainians in the student body should have been pleased. In practice we were as distressed by the innovation as the non-Ukrainian minority. Even those who, like myself, had spoken Ukrainian from childhood, were not accustomed to its use as a medium of study. Several of our best professors were utterly demoralised by the linguistic switch-over. Worst of all, our local tongue simply had not caught up with modern knowledge; its vocabulary was unsuited to the purposes of electrotechnics, chemistry, aerodynamics, physics and most other sciences.5

  Notwithstanding Kravchenko’s misgivings, korenizatsiya was a success. It taught thousands of peasants to read and write – in Ukrainian – for the first time, and produced a brief literary renaissance. Ukrainian had its Symbolists, its Modernists, its Neoclassicists and its satirists, many of whom exercised their wit on the korenizatsiya programme itself. One of the most popular was Ostap Vyshnya, who lampooned his countrymen under the name ‘Chukrainians’:

  There were lots of Chukrainians – more than thirty million of them, although most didn’t know themselves who they were. If someone asked them ‘what’s your nationality?’ they would scratch their heads and answer ‘God knows – we live in Shengeriyivka, we’re Orthodox’ . . . Academics say that ancient Chukrainians covered their milk pots with poetry books – proof of how highly developed their culture was even then . . .

  But even at its height, korenizatsiya never meant intellectual freedom. Kravchenko recalled a friend pointing at some public toilets, signed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ in Ukrainian, and hissing, There’s the whole of our national autonomy!’ The former Rada president, Hrushevsky, was lured back to the Soviet Union in 1924 with the offer of a chair at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, only to find himself tailed day and night by the OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police. An American visitor who had applied for a job at the faculty was shocked to find that Hrushevsky took this for granted, and went straight back home again. He was right to be nervous: the OGPU had already drawn up lists of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be dealt ‘a crushing blow when the time comes’. These ranged from all ex-members of defunct Ukrainian organisations to shopkeepers, traders, ‘all foreigners’ and ‘all those with relatives or acquaintances abroad’.6

  The ‘crushing blow’ – and the end of korenizatsiya – came with the first Stalin purges. What collectivisation was to the countryside, the purges were to the towns, the two running side by side through the late 1920s and early ’30s. In Ukraine the purges started ear
ly, with the arrest in July 1929 of some 5,000 members of a fictitious underground organisation, the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’. The following spring a series of show trials kicked off with the pillorying of forty-five Ukrainian writers, scholars, lawyers and priests in the Kharkiv opera house. (Close to the Russian border, Kharkiv was republican capital from 1922 to 1934; if it had remained so a few years longer, more of Kiev’s churches might have been spared demolition.) The following year the OGPU ‘uncovered’ another conspiracy, putting Hrushevsky at its head. Though Hrushevsky himself was only exiled to Moscow, many of his colleagues and almost all his students were sent to the camps or shot. At the same time the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had re-formed in the early 1920s, was disbanded and its clergy deported.

  With the arrival of Stalin’s new viceroy, Pavel Postyshev, in January 1933, the purges intensified. Postyshev denounced korenizatsiya as a ‘cultural counter-revolution’ whose aim was to fan ‘national enmity’ and ‘isolate Ukrainian workers from the positive influence of Russian culture’.7 Entire commissariats, judicial boards, university faculties, editorial departments, theatre groups and film studios were duly arrested and sent to their deaths. Several hundred of Ukraine’s wandering bards, the kobzars, were summoned to a conference and never seen again. Skrypnyk, the Old Bolshevik in charge of Ukrainian-language education, committed suicide at his desk, using a revolver he had kept hidden since Civil War days. At the same time, Postyshev set about decimating the Ukrainian Communist Party itself, on the ironic grounds that it had showed insufficient ‘Bolshevik vigilance’ during collectivisation. By the end of the year, it had lost 100,000 members. As Postyshev’s report to Stalin of November 1933 boasted, ‘almost all the people removed were arrested and put before the firing-squad or exiled’.8