Borderland (10 page)

For both Poland and Ukraine, the best way to get the West’s attention has been to stress their impact on Russia. Nineteenth-century liberals argued that unless Russia freed Poland, it would never be able to undertake its own constitutional reform. The effort of holding down its most intransigent colony trapped Russia in the role of tyrannical autocracy, hurting ordinary Russians as much as the Poles themselves – hence the slogan of the 1831 Polish rebellion: Tor our freedom and yours.’ The argument Poland used in pleading for military aid last century, Ukraine employs in making the case for IMF funds and diplomatic support today. The (Polish-born) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’ The bottom line is that ‘Russia can either be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.’
¹⁹
If Ukraine does not stay independent, in other words, Russia will not remain a democracy, so Ukrainian independence is as much for Russia’s good as Ukraine’s.

Russians, of course, have some difficulty taking this concept on board. Just as the Polish risings turned even diehard anti-establishmentarians like Pushkin into raging Slavophiles, today’s independent Ukraine brings out the empire-builder in the best of Russian liberals. ‘When you look at nineteenth-century Russian treatments of the Polish problem,’ says Roman Szporluk, head of Ukrainian studies at Harvard, ‘you really think you’re reading all those Moscow think-tankers today on Ukraine.’
²⁰

Today, Polish-Ukrainian relations are rather muted – surprisingly so given their long and scratchy common history. Polish and Ukrainian presidents exchange visits, and Polish economists turn up at Kiev conferences on free-market reform. Numberless Ukrainians do private trade across the border, heaving suitcases full of smoked sausage and tacky clothing on to trains going west, and returning with car parts and kitchen-ware. In Lviv, near the Polish border and a Polish city before the war, Ukrainian yuppies like to assert their Western credentials with a Warsaw-style kiss to the hand. But aside from Ukrainian resentment at the missionary activities of the Polish Catholic Church, the relationship, on the Ukrainian side at least, is a curiously bloodless one. Despite centuries under Polish rule, Ukrainians have none of the fierce love-hate for Poland that they have for Russia – probably simply because Poland no longer affects them much. The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today’s Ukraine balances Russia against America.

Ukraine may have ceased to care about Poland, but Poles have not stopped caring about Ukraine. Ukraine might be an economic joke, a place to make cracks about, but it is also a vital buffer-state. With Ukraine independent, the Russian border stays 600 miles to the east and Poland can convincingly call itself part of Central, not Eastern, Europe. Were Ukraine – or more likely Belarus – to lose its independence, Russia would be back glowering over the frontier wire, and Europe’s centre of gravity would shift away westwards. Solidarity sent representatives to the founding conference of Rukh, the opposition coalition that took Ukraine to independence, and Poland was the first country to give Ukraine diplomatic recognition, the day after the independence referendum of 1 December 1991.

In 1883 the young Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz published his best-selling epic
By Fire And Sword.
A Hollywood-ian drama set during the Khmelnytsky rebellion, the book is not historically accurate. Never having visited Ukraine, Sienkiewicz based his descriptions of the Dnieper on his travels up the Mississippi, decorating its banks with mangrove swamps and ‘vast reptiles’. Nevertheless, it perfectly sums up the mixture of nostalgia, condescension and self-interest with which Poles view their erstwhile borderlands. The novel has two parallel story-lines: Khmelnytsky’s war with Wisniowiecki for Ukraine, and the battle between a savage Cossack otaman and a relentlessly virtuous Polish knight for the hand in marriage of a Ruthenian princess. The Pole ends up getting the girl, but the Polish army does not end up getting Ukraine. Instead the country descends into chaos: the book’s notorious final sentence reads, ‘And hatred swelled in people’s hearts and poisoned the blood of brothers.’ The moral of the story, not lost on the palpitating contemporary readership, was that history should not be allowed to repeat itself. To get rid of Russia, Poles and Ukrainians had to stop fighting, and stick together.

CHAPTER THREE

Shall the Slav rivers merge into the Russian sea?
Or shall the sea itself run dry?

–
Aleksandr Pushkin, 1831

‘W
E CALL THESE
things “Stalin’s hands”,’ said Alexey, pointing at a pair of hinged metal hooks at the bottom of a rusty conveyor-belt. Impervious to the freezing wind, he led me round snow-whipped slag-heaps and half-buried bits of rotting machinery, explaining just what each object was for. ‘These,’ he said, pointing to a stack of pine logs, ‘hold up the walls of the tunnels. The problem is that nowadays they’re very expensive and we don’t have enough of them.’ Earlier, an official at the local branch of the coal ministry had told me that 212 men had died in mining accidents in the Donetsk region the previous year, 32 of them in a single gas explosion. He hadn’t been at all embarrassed about the number: at four lives per million tonnes of coal produced it was well within normal ratios.

Alexey was in his early thirties, and had lived in Donetsk all his life. All his family were miners: during the war even his grandmother had worked down the shafts, losing the fingers of her left hand under the wheels of a runaway trolley-car. Though he had gone into a white-collar union job after college, he still thought of himself as a miner, a
shakhtyor
– in Russian the word still has a faint heroic ring – too. But beyond that Alexey wasn’t too sure what he was. Like most people in Donetsk he spoke only Russian, no Ukrainian. His family had come here from Russia, as far as he knew, late last century, when industrialisation was just getting under way. Did I know that Donetsk used to be called Yuzovka, after a Welshman, John Hughes, who opened the first foundry on the site? Did I know that Donetsk was twinned with Cardiff? Alexey had been there once on an exchange programme, and kept a little wooden shield painted with the Cardiff city arms in a glass-fronted cabinet in his office. ‘When we told them how we worked here they just couldn’t believe it. We looked at everything they had – the special baths, the clothes, the equipment – and we practically burst into tears.’

Inside the corrugated-iron shed at the top of the mine-shaft we watched the day-shift clocking off. Bent and ragged, with bloodshot eyes and gold teeth shining out of filthy faces, the men looked almost too miner-like to be true – blacked-up actors, perhaps, in some clichéd documentary on the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Most were in their forties or older. The younger ones, Alexey said, had found better jobs elsewhere, driving taxis or trading over the Russian border. He called a group over to meet the foreign journalist. They didn’t want to answer questions, jerking their heads when I asked them what they thought of their new Ukrainian government. As we shook hands, I noticed that many, like Alexey’s grandmother, had fingers missing.

In truth, Alexey said, the ‘Red Guard’ men didn’t much care who they were governed by. ‘Some of them demand that we go back to Russia, but this is just kitchen-talk. We know that Russia doesn’t need us – it already wants to close its own mines. Moscow, Kiev, it’s all the same.’ What they did want was better pay – any pay at all, in fact, since they hadn’t received a kopek for six weeks – and freedom to run their mine the way they wanted. ‘It takes six months to make any decision, because everything has to go through Kiev. The energy ministry takes our coal at three dollars a tonne, but we the producers aren’t allowed to sign our own contracts, though we could sell the same coal at $20 or even $60 a tonne.’ Dolefully Alexey shook his head, the flaps of his fur hat waggling like spaniel’s ears. Outside the snow swirled, the slag-heaps loomed, the tumbledown sheds and bits of broken machinery disappeared into the gathering dusk. It was time to go. As we said our goodbyes he pulled a bundle out of his pocket: two enamelled badges in the shape of his union’s initials, and a triangular banner in shiny red nylon. ‘For you – so you can remember Donetsk.’

Ukraine’s Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire’s belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine’s 5 2 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

To stay independent, Ukraine has to keep its Russian-speaking east sweet. Densely populated and heavily industrialised, it already has a big say in the country. In the first post-independence presidential elections it was the weight of eastern votes that handed victory to Leonid Kravchuk, an ex-Party boss, over Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former dissident and leader of the independence movement. And in 1994 it was eastern votes that threw out Kravchuk, by then the darling of the nationalists, in favour of Leonid Kuchma, ex-director of a missile factory in the Russian-speaking city of Dnipropetrovsk. The previous year, ironically, Kuchma had been forced to resign as prime minister when thousands of Donbass miners arrived in Kiev demanding pay rises. Ukrainian politicians’ worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.

Ukraine’s Russians, though, are neither the oldest nor the most problematic legacy of Ukraine’s 300 years inside the Russian empire. Far more invidious was the effect of Russian rule on the Ukrainians themselves, beginning with the decline and fall of the Cossack hetmanate. Khmelnytsky’s Pereyaslav Treaty had not, in the Cossacks’ eyes at least, made Ukraine east of the Dnieper part of Russia, but simply given it Russian protection. Though subject to increasing Russian interference, the Cossacks still chose their own hetmans (subject to the tsar’s approval), ran their own army, and collected their own taxes. Loyalty to Russia was conditional, a matter of mutual rights and promises. The arrangement fell to pieces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the disastrous hetmanate of that most un-Cossack of Cossacks – Ivan Mazeppa.

Suave and subtle, famous for his love affairs and his deft hand at political intrigue, Mazeppa was an even unlikelier rebel than Khmelnytsky. Born into a noble Orthodox family in Polish-ruled ‘right-bank’ Ukraine, he was schooled at a Jesuit college in Warsaw before entering the court of King Jan Kazimierz as a gentleman-in-waiting. Keen to create a cadre of Ruthenian nobles loyal to the crown, Kazimierz sent him to study in Holland before putting him to work on diplomatic errands to the left-bank hetmanate. In 1663 the promising young favourite suddenly left Cracow and joined the Polish-ruled Cossacks on the western bank of the Dnieper. Legend – as embroidered by everyone from Byron to Tchaikovsky – has it that he had been discovered in bed with the wife of a neighbour, who stripped him naked and sent him galloping off into the steppe on the back of a wild horse. Whatever the truth, Mazeppa spent the next few years travelling back and forth to the Crimean khanate as the Polish Cossacks’ envoy. In 1674, journeying home from one of these missions, he was captured by the Zaporozhians and turned over to the rival left-bank hetmanate as a spy.

At this point, one might have thought Mazeppa’s career was over. Not a bit of it. Deploying his already legendary charm, Mazeppa sweet-talked his way out of captivity and into a job as assistant to Ivan Samoylovych, the left-bank hetman. Thirteen years later, having ingratiated himself with Moscow and manufactured a conspiracy framing Samoylovych for treason, he was hetman himself. A nonpareil at sizing up the endless intrigues of the Russian court, he managed to stay in favour when Peter the Great overthrew his sister Sophia in 1689, and quickly became one of the young tsar’s closest confidants. Mazeppa sent Peter wines from Crimea; Peter replied with gifts of fish from the Baltic, as well as the new Order of St Andrew and vast Ukrainian estates. ‘The tsar would sooner disbelieve an angel,’ rivals muttered, ‘than Mazeppa.’
¹
The French diplomat Jean Baluse, on a visit to the Cossack capital of Baturin in 1704, described him at the height of his power:

As Baluse guessed, Mazeppa’s loyalty was wavering. Apostasy came four years later, precipitated by Peter’s long Northern War with the austere young Charles XII of Sweden. In September 1708 the conflict reached a crisis-point. Charles had already swept over Poland, putting a Swedish puppet on the Polish throne, and now his armies threatened Moscow and St Petersburg. But at the village of Lesnaya, in present-day eastern Belarus, the Swedes suffered their first serious setback, when Russian troops cut off and burned the wagon-train carrying the army’s supplies of powder, food and winter clothing. Unable to push on east, and with winter drawing near, Charles turned southwards to what he had been told was a ‘country flowing with milk and honey’ – to Ukraine.

Here Mazeppa’s genius for picking winners failed him for the first time in his life. Faced with a choice between hostile occupation by Charles’s brutal army, or supporting the Swedes and risking Russian fury later on, Mazeppa stalled, excusing himself from joining Peter by pretending to be mortally ill, then declared for Charles, taking 2,000 of his Cossacks with him. Peter was amazed and furious. It was with great wonderment,’ he wrote, ‘that I learned of the deed of the new Judas, Mazeppa, who after twenty-one years of loyalty to me and with one foot already in the grave, has turned traitor and betrayer of his own people,’
³
Peter immediately ordered that Baturin’s 7,000 inhabitants be put to the sword, and the following month, at a solemn ceremony in Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral, Mazeppa’s name was pronounced anathema, a ritual that was to be repeated annually in all Russian churches for the next 200 years.

Exactly what Mazeppa hoped to get out of his U-turn is a mystery. He may have dreamed of putting himself on the throne of a genuinely independent hetmanate with Swedish backing. He may simply have been infuriated by Russia’s failure to honour the Pereyaslav Treaty by helping defend Ukraine against threatened invasion by the Poles. (Peter’s reply to earlier pleas had been ‘I cannot even spare ten men; defend yourself as best you can.’)
⁴
He was certainly jealous of Peter’s favourite, Aleksandr Menshikov. But whatever his motives, he had picked the wrong man. The following summer, just outside Poltava, a small town east of Kiev, Charles’s and Peter’s armies finally came face to face. Wounded in the foot, Charles could only watch the battle from a litter, leaving command split between bickering generals. Demoralised and badly led, the Swedes suffered one of the most decisive defeats of European history. Sweden’s dreams of the Kremlin were over; Russia, with its first major victory against a modern army, was on its way to becoming one of Europe’s great powers. After the battle Charles and Mazeppa fled west across the steppe to Bender in Ottoman-ruled Moldova, leaving most of their army stranded on the wrong side of the Dnieper. Mazeppa died three months later, his head propped on saddle-bags full of looted diamonds. Charles was killed by a stray bullet in 1718, while besieging a town in Norway. Descendants of the soldiers they abandoned can be found outside the Swedish embassy in Kiev, forlornly applying for citizenship of a country their ancestors left three centuries ago.