Borderland (13 page)

Since Peter’s time, Ukrainians had done well in Russian service. As the Russian empire expanded, their opportunities widened. Though a few continued to mourn the hetmanate, secretly circulating fantastical histories of Khmelnytsky and Mazeppa, most were happy to treat it as a piece of out-of-date antiquaria, taking jobs in the imperial administration and preaching loyalty to the empire. Typical of the loyalist attitude was Viktor Kochubey, chairman of the Imperial Council in the 1830s. ‘Although I was born a
khokhol
’ he told the governor-general of Ukraine, ‘I am more Russian than anybody else . . . My calling and the position I hold put me above all sorts of petty considerations. I look at the affairs of your province from the point of view of the common interest of our country. Microscopic views are not my concern.’
¹⁷
Gogol lampooned ‘those mean Little Russians . . . droves of whom can be found in council chambers and government offices, who squeeze every kopek they can out of their fellow-countrymen, flood St Petersburg with denunciations, finally amass a fortune and solemnly add to their surnames ending in O the letter V.’
¹⁸

Throughout the nineteenth century Russification of Ukrainians proceeded hand in hand with the emasculation of Ukraine’s Poles, who still made up most of the landowning class west of the Dnieper. In 1833 Kiev was given a new Russian university named after St Vladimir and designed, according to the Russian education minister, to ‘disseminate Russian education and Russian nationality in the Polonised lands of western Russia’.
¹⁹
Thousands of Poles involved in the risings of 1831 and 1863 lost their estates, and were sent, often in chains and on foot, to Siberia. Those left behind were subject to intense surveillance: the novelist Balzac, revelling in the luxury of his Polish mistress’s house near Zhytomyr (‘The servants literally throw themselves on their stomachs when they enter one’s presence, beat the ground three times with their foreheads, and kiss one’s feet’)
²⁰
, found his post ransacked by customs. Poorer nobles lost their patents of nobility, reducing them to the status of peasants, and Polish schools were closed, a move which hurt Ukrainians especially, since they could rarely afford to educate their children at home instead. As a result literacy rates actually fell. Better educated than Russia under the hetmanate, by the end of the century Ukraine was producing more illiterate army conscripts than any other part of the empire.

A campaign against the Uniates, begun by Catherine, recommenced under Nicholas I. Whole parishes were converted at the point of the bayonet, and in 1839 the Orthodox and Uniate faiths were officially ‘re-unified’. This was followed by confiscation of the property of Uniate monasteries and the arrest, deportation or imprisonment of hundreds of monks and priests. New laws forbade marriages between the religions, and conversion from Orthodoxy to other faiths.

As with Ukraine’s Western-influenced religion, so with its Western-derived legal system. In 1831 municipal privileges based on the ancient Magdeburg Law were rescinded, and in 1840 Ukraine’s separate legal code, the ‘Lithuanian Statute’, was replaced by ordinary Russian law (though a few obscure legal quirks, last remnants of Duchy rule, survived right up to the revolution). A ballad of the period, ‘The Lament of the Kievans on the Loss of the Magdeburg Law’, decried the fact that ‘the bearded ones’ had taken over Kiev, and condemned the old city government for having lost its rights through corruption and gambling, concluding that now ‘the Muscovite will rule’.
²¹

In 1876 Russification climaxed with the Edict of Ems. Taking the waters in that German spa, Aleksandr II signed a decree banning all import and publication of Ukrainian books and newspapers, all stage-shows, concerts and public lectures in Ukrainian, and all teaching in Ukrainian, even for infants. Ukrainian-language books were to be removed from school libraries, and Ukrainophile teachers transferred to Great Russia. During cholera outbreaks, even public health notices were to be posted in Russian alone.

Russification almost succeeded. By the 1840s, writes the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, ‘the political significance of Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ had become almost terminally ‘vague and emasculated’. Neither the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 nor the Polish rising of 1831 included Ukrainian claims in their programmes, although they took place partly on Ukrainian soil and included Ukrainians among their leadership. In 1825 peasants in the villages around Kiev even helped round up rebel soldiers and hand them over to the authorities.

Cooperating with Russian government, though, was not the same thing as being Russian. The cities might be largely Russian-speaking, and the nobility Russified to the point of indistinguishability from the genuine article. But the process, like Polonisation before it, never went more than skin deep. In the villages, peasants took orders from their landlords in Russian, but still spoke Ukrainian among themselves. And though they did not yet call themselves ‘Ukrainians’ – the term, unlike the ancient word
Ukraina,
was not widely used until the end of the century – they knew very well that they were something different from the loathed Muscovites, the
moskali.
‘The worst label that a Little Russian pins on a wrote Johann Georg Kohl, a German anthropologist who travelled through Ukraine in the 1830s, ‘is a “senseless Pole”; while a Muscovite in the imagination of the Little Russian is always “cursed”. The Little Russians have such widely used proverbs as: “He is a good man but a Muscovite!”; “Be friendly with the Muscovite, but keep a stone under your coat!”’
²²
Kohl’s remarkably prescient conclusion is worth quoting in full:

Kohl got it half right. The Russian empire did fall to pieces, and Ukrainians did get their own separate state, but not under the leadership of the old, suborned Cossack nobility. The authors of modern Ukraine were a brand-new class that rose from the ranks of the peasantry – the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

CHAPTER FOUR

Only look well, only read
That glory through once more,
From the first word to the last,
Read, do not ignore
Even the least apostrophe,
Not one comma even,
Search out the meaning of it all,
Then ask yourself the question:
Who are we? Whose sons? Of what sires?

–
Taras Shevchenko, 1845

All that I can find to say is that a nation
exists when a significant number of people in
a community consider themselves to form
a nation, or behave as if they formed one.

–
Hugh Seton-Watson, 1977

I
HOR
P
ODOLCHAK IS
an artist, and like all good artists, he has a mission. He is trying to persuade the Lviv city authorities to erect a statue to Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the erotic novelist who gave his name to masochism. Sacher-Masoch was born in Lviv in 1836, son of the local police chief. ‘We have three problems,’ admits Ihor. ‘His father was an Austrian official, he wrote in German, and he left Lviv when he was aged fourteen. But I say he was one of the greatest Ukrainian writers because his creative work was very closely connected with Ukrainian culture. It doesn’t matter what language he wrote in – there are more important things,’ Lviv remains unconvinced. The official reaction,’ says Ihor, ‘is – “so now we have people who want to make out that Ukrainians are masochists!”’ But Ihor has achieved the impossible before. A few years ago he arranged for one of his lithographs to be taken aboard the space station Mir – demonstrating, as he puts it, that ‘art can exist outside the cultural context’. A video of the event shows a grinning astronaut floating in zero gravity, picture in hand. To celebrate the millennium, Ihor wants the billionaire financier George Soros to fund the construction of an ice pyramid on top of Mount Everest, symbolising ‘humanity’s striving for eternity in time and space’. Even if the ice pyramid doesn’t happen, the project won’t have been a failure, because it’s the idea that matters, not the actuality. As if Ukraine didn’t have problems enough already, Ihor is determined to give it Concept Art.

That Lviv should adopt an Austrian novelist as a local celebrity is actually not such a bizarre idea. Fifty miles east of today’s Polish-Ukrainian border, Lviv was ruled by Austria from the first partition of Poland in 1773 until the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Christening the city Lemberg, the Austrians made it the capital of the ‘Kingdom of Galicia’, a patched-together province stretching east from Cracow to the river Zbrucz. With the rebirth of Poland the city went back to its ancient Polish name of Lwow, and in 1945 it fell, for the first time in its history, to the Russians, who deported the Polish population and renamed it Lvov. It only became Lviv in 1991, with Ukrainian independence.

Visually, it is Polish Lwow and Austrian Lemberg that have survived best. The Poles built a forest of churches – Dominican, Carmelite, Jesuit, Benedictine, Bernadine – and the inevitable monument to their beloved poet Mickiewicz. The Austrians gave it parks, cobbled boulevards, Jugendstil villas, a flamboyant opera house, municipal buildings painted the Hapsburgs’ reassuring mustard yellow, and the matronly bronze caryatids that grace the lobby of the George Hotel. Though the Austrians themselves have long gone, Lviv is still a Mitteleuropean city, full of students carrying violin cases, the smell of warm poppyseed buns, the tap of footsteps on stone – a shabbier Salzburg, blessedly devoid of von Karajan posters and Mozart souvenirs. In the overgrown Lychakiv cemetery, the initials K & K –
Kaiserlich und Königlich,
motto of the old Austria – can still be made out on the tumbled gravestones, epitaph to bygone generations of colonial bureaucrats. For them, Galicia was a far-flung posting, chilly with ‘the vast breath of the huge hostile tsarist empire’, a place where, in the words of the novelist Joseph Roth, ‘the civilised Austrian was menaced . . . by bears and wolves and even more dreadful monsters, such as lice and bedbugs’ and soldiers in forgotten barrack-towns ‘fell prey to gambling and to the sharp schnapps . . . sold under the label 180 Proof’.
¹

Of all Lviv’s rulers, it is only the Austrians for whom Ukrainians retain any sneaking fondness. It is still just possible to find old men who can whistle the marching song ‘Ich hat’ einen Kamaraden’, and
babushki
who, when asked the time, reply ‘Old or new?’, their clocks still being set to the hours kept under benign, bewhiskered Emperor Franz-Josef. The Hapsburgs might have been foreign autocrats, but at least they weren’t as bad as the tsars. And it was under their indulgent rule, in Galicia, that the Ukrainian national movement was able to take root and flourish, providing Ukrainians with their first modern political parties, and, eventually, with their first short-lived Republic.

Ethnically and socially, nineteenth-century Galicia was an unbalanced, unhappy place. Poles owned the land; Jews the shops and inns. Ukrainians – 40 per cent of the province’s population overall, the majority in the east – laboured out of sight in cottages and fields. Over this uneasy mixture lay a thin layer of Austrian officialdom (among them Oberpolitzmeister Sacher-Masoch). Lviv itself was not a Ukrainian, far less a Russian city, but a Polish-Austrian-Jewish one. A Baedeker of 1900 makes the point:

But out of sight of the Franz-Josef-Berg, the views were not fine at all. Like Ireland, Galicia was a byword for rural poverty. In the 1880s it was calculated that of all the ex-Polish territories, Galicia had the highest birth and death rates and the lowest life expectancy. The average Galician ate less than half the food of the average Englishman, yet paid twice as much of his income in taxes. Every year 50,000 people in the province died of malnutrition, and only one in two children reached the age of five. The population grew regardless, and peasant plots shrank from an average of twelve acres to six. What spare cash the peasants did have went on drink: in 1900 eastern Galicia had one tavern per 220 inhabitants, compared to one hospital per 1,200, and one elementary school per 1,500. Though speculators struck oil in the region in the 1860s, the resulting wealth flowed away to London and Vienna. A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is ‘the struggle of the Workers against Capital’. ‘In that case,’ replies the policeman, ‘you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other,’
²

The escape route for many was emigration. In the twenty-five years before the First World War more than 2 million Ukrainian and Polish peasants left Galicia, including an extraordinary 400,000 people, or almost 5 per cent of the province’s population, in 1913 alone. Some went to the new factories of Polish Silesia, some to France and Germany. But most took ship to Canada and the United States, founding today’s 2-million-strong North American Ukrainian diaspora. The New World was glad to have them. Some of the first Ukrainians into America were shipped over as strikebreakers by a Pennsylvania coal mine; the Canadian government used them to settle the prairie – not very different, they were assured, from the Ukrainian steppe. Fleeced by predatory commission agents, their first homes were often no more than brushwood wigwams; in time they progressed to mud-and-thatch huts and elaborate wooden churches just like the ones back home. As a Canadian home minister wrote: ‘I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, bom on the soil, whose forefathers have been peasants for ten generations, with a stout wife and half-a-dozen children, is good quality.’
³

The second great wave of emigration came at the end of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of Galicians fled west before the advancing Red Army, finding their way via Displaced Persons’ Camps in Allied-occupied Germany to Canada, America and Britain’s industrial Midlands. The stories they have to tell are amazing: tales of midnight knocks, abandoned feather beds and dowry chests, carts strafed from the air, divided families, last trains. The journey was well worth it, for no better argument for nurture over nature exists than the tragicomic contrast between the escapees’ ‘hyphenated’ descendants – multilingual, well travelled, university-educated – and their cousins who were left behind to grow up in the Soviet Union. One young Ukrainian-American Reuters journalist I knew always had her swish Kiev flat piled high with sacks of potatoes, lugged into town by kindly relatives on a remote collective farm. ‘They really think,’ she would groan, ‘that otherwise I won’t have anything to eat.’

Born of a mixture of political rivalry and Romantic preoccupation with peasant culture, the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national movement relied, like all national movements, on a large element of invention, not all of it even on the part of the Ukrainians themselves. Though it came to fruition in Galicia, it had its roots in eastern Ukraine, where Russia saw the Ukrainian peasantry as a potential counterweight to Polish influence. Most early Ukrainophile writing and research came out of Kharkiv University, founded in 1805 to train imperial bureaucrats, and one of the first histories of Ukraine,
History of the Russes or Little Russia,
was published by Moscow’s Imperial Society for the Study of Rusian History and Antiquities. In the 18 60s the movement passed into the hands of a group of young Kiev-born Poles, who took to the villages in embroidered peasant shirts to demonstrate their opposition to serfdom and discreetly lobby for support for Polish emancipation, and towards the end of the century it drew encouragement from Austria, which intermittently used the Ukrainians to counter Polish pretensions in Galicia.

For the educated inhabitant of Ukraine, national identity was a question of personal taste. In many families, some individuals turned into prominent ‘Ukrainians’, while others continued to think of themselves as Russians or Poles. Volodymyr Antono-vych, professor of history at Kiev University and leader of the Ukrainian national movement in the 1860s and ’70s, was born of a noble Polish family, as was Andriy Sheptytsky, Metropolitan of the Uniate Church in Galicia from 1900 to 1944. Asked his nationality, he would say that he was ‘like St Paul – a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews’. Andriy’s brother Stanislaw, meanwhile, remained a conventional Roman Catholic Pole, spelling his surname Szeptycki and ending up as minister of defence in one of the interwar Polish governments. Though the Ukrainian peasant knew very well he was not a hated Pole or
moskal,
it was not until the end of the century that he started thinking of himself as a ‘Ukrainian’. Asked his identity, he would probably have replied that he was a
muzhik
– a peasant – or ‘Orthodox’, or simply one of the
tuteshni
– the ‘people from here’.