Borderland (21 page)

The Soviet press, of course, denied that the famine existed at all. Arthur Koestler, living in Kharkiv in the ghastly winter of 1932–3, found not the slightest allusion to the disaster in the local papers:

The Western press did little better. Despite a ban on foreigners leaving Moscow, the famine’s existence – though not its extent – was well known in the capital. Tew of us,’ wrote the United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons,

None the less, it went almost unmentioned in despatches, treated at best as a sideshow, a temporary hitch in collectivisation. Though occasional full and honest reports did appear, they were far outnumbered by the dishonest, penned by reporters who feared losing their contacts and their visas, or who simply, found it more convenient to swallow the official propaganda. ‘Even conscientious newspapermen,’ wrote Koestler, ‘evolved a routine of compromise; they cabled no lies, but
nolens volens
confined themselves to official dope and expressed such comment or criticism as they dared “between the lines”, by some subtle qualifying adjective or nuance – which naturally passed unobserved by anybody but the initiated reader.’
³²
The result was a picture fatally distorted by half-truth, contradiction and doubt.

Lyons gives a graphic example of the reigning atmosphere of pusillanimity. The British journalist Gareth Jones, ‘an earnest and meticulous little man’, of the sort ‘who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’, had succeeded in making a secret tour of the Kharkiv area. On his return to London, he sent a detailed account of the horrors he encountered to the
Manchester Guardian.
The rest of the Moscow press corps duly received urgent requests from their editors for follow-ups. These coincided, however, with the opening of a sensational show trial of a group of British engineers, on charges of sabotage. ‘The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors,’ wrote Lyons, ‘was for all of us a compelling professional necessity. Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.’ At a meeting with the chief censor, Konstantin Umansky, the journalists jointly worked out a ‘formula of denial’. ‘We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. That filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and “zakuski”, Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.’
³³

The evasions and omissions of the professional journalists were backed up by the naive fellow-travellers who came to the Soviet Union to admire the results of the first Five-Year Plan. For the marvellously acerbic Malcolm Muggeridge (another journalist who managed to travel through Ukraine during the famine, and reported what he saw), they were ‘one of the wonders of our age’:

The government tourist agency Voks laid on full-scale Potemkin tours of factories, schools, prisons and collectives, complete with singsongs, folk-dancing, politically correct film-shows and enormous banquets. Sometimes these were permanent establishments, kept especially for propaganda purposes; sometimes ordinary villages were dressed up for the occasion. An extraordinary account of the preparations made for the visit of the French Radical leader Edouard Herriot to the ‘October Revolution’ collective near Kiev in September 1933 is worth quoting at length:

When Herriot returned home,
Pravda
was able to report that he ‘categorically denied the lies of the bourgeois press about a famine in the Soviet Union’.

Speaking no Russian, closely chaperoned, and travelling on special trains, visitors came into almost no contact with ordinary homes, workplaces or people. Even those not already determined to turn a blind eye to any shortcomings they might stumble upon were easily misled. The travel-writer Robert Byron, no friend of the Soviet Union (his favourite amusement was to mutter the dread initials ‘GPU’ in public places, and observe the horrified reactions of passers-by), failed to notice anything amiss on a train journey through Ukraine in the horrible winter of 1932 save ‘a mob of maddened peasants’ at a wayside station.
³⁶

But for most visitors, the Potemkin tours were an unnecessary precaution. They had made up their minds before they arrived. George Bernard Shaw, capering around Moscow with Nancy Astor in the summer of 1931, told a banquet in his honour that he had thrown tins of food out of the train window on crossing the border from Poland, so sure was he that rumours of shortages were nonsense. At lunch at the Metropole next day, he was upbraided by Chamberlin’s wife. Waving a hand around the restaurant, Shaw asked, ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’
³⁷
Back in London he told a press conference he had not seen ‘a single undernourished person in Russia, young or old’. ‘Were they padded?’ he wanted to know; ‘Were their hollow cheeks distended by pieces of rubber inside?’
³⁸

Flattery was an important part of the package. Shaw was delighted to discover that the waitresses in his restaurant-car knew his work intimately and were longing to be introduced. The German socialist Lion Feuchtwanger, visiting Moscow in 1937, met ‘a young girl from the land, glowing with happiness’, who told him, ‘Four years ago I could neither read nor write, and today I can discuss Feuchtwanger’s books with him.’
³⁹
The tract Feuchtwanger wrote on his return exhorted his readers to ‘free themselves from their own conceptions of democracy’ and not to indulge in ‘carping, whining, and alarming’ at the Soviet Union’s expense, ending on a note of religious exaltation: ‘It does one good after all the compromise of the West to see an achievement such as this, to which a man can say “Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes,” with all his heart.’
⁴⁰
André Gide found the front pages plastered with his picture, and was told that sales of his latest book ran into the hundreds of thousands. He was given so much spending money that he did not know what to do with it: ‘Every time I got out my wallet to settle a restaurant or hotel bill, to pay a cheque, buy some stamps or a newspaper, I was brought up short by an exquisite smile and authoritative gesture from our guide: “You are joking! You are our guest, and your five companions with you.”’
⁴¹

But the palm among apologists for the horrors of the 1930s goes to a journalist – Walter Duranty of the
New York Times.
Of all the correspondents who denied or played down the famine, he was by far the most cynical and influential. In November 1932, as the famine took grip, he reported that ‘there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be’.
⁴²
By March he had subtly changed his tune: ‘There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.’
⁴³
In August, in reply to a
Herald Tribune
piece estimating deaths at no less than 1 million, he wrote that ‘Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda’. ‘Food shortage’ had, however, ‘caused heavy loss of life’.
⁴⁴

In September 1933 foreign journalists were allowed into the famine areas for the first time. Duranty was given a fortnight’s start over the rest of the corps. When he came back, Lyons ran into him with a group of friends in a restaurant:

Lyons was not surprised to find that Duranty’s articles on the trip failed even to acknowledge the famine’s existence. When Kravchenko defected to America and published the memoirs I have quoted here, the Western press accused him of being a CIA plant. Duranty’s payback was a Pulitzer Prize, awarded for the ‘scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity’ of his reporting.
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CHAPTER SEVEN

You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.

–
Paul Celan, 1968

T
HREE
BABUSHKI,
STOUT
and sturdy as ponies, wiggle their spades under a rectangular flagstone and heave it over. The underside is inscribed in Hebrew: ‘Here lies buried a righteous woman, Sarah, daughter of Shmeor. She died on nth October 1929.’ The next stone in the search also bears traces of lettering, but is too worn to read.

I am in Ivano-Frankivsk, a nondescript town in south-western Ukraine. The tombstones have been here – in a yard round the back of the railway station – ever since the war, when German troops demolished the town’s Jewish cemetery and used the remains to pave what was then an army repair-shop. Locals had always known that the stones came from Jewish graves, since some lay face-up, with the inscriptions showing. ‘It wasn’t normal, having people walking all over them,’ says one of the women, wiping her hands on her fluorescent orange apron. ‘They should have been back in the cemetery where they belong.’

‘So why didn’t you do anything about it earlier?’

‘Because nobody told us to.’

The man who chivvied the city authorities into action is Viktor – or, in the Hebrew version he prefers, Moishe-Leib – Kolesnyk, the town rabbi. Unlike most of the rabbis in Ukraine, he is not an American, but was actually born here, to a conventional Party family – father a local soviet deputy – that much disapproved of his unexpected interest in religion. Sacked from his teaching job in a village school, he earned a living touring the mountains taking photographs of peasant weddings, before being ordained by New York Lubavitchers in Moscow and sent back to Ivano-Frankivsk to reopen the town synagogue, then used as a dance-hall by the local medical institute. The familiar bureaucratic battle ensued. ‘First we were given a small house in the yard – a shed really. Then, while building works were going on next door, the shed collapsed. We took all the holy books and came in here – we just said no, we wouldn’t go. A year later, we got it officially.’ But despite black mackintosh and patriarchal beard, rabbinical dignity is something Moishe-Leib is happy to put on and off with his homburg. Ensconced among old calendars and piles of books in a makeshift office at the back of the synagogue, he cracks open a packet of Dollar Gold cigarettes and reverts to his other incarnation, as local fix-it man and historian.

Ivano-Frankivsk, he says, was founded in the seventeenth century as a Polish frontier town. A photocopy of an old map shows the zigzag outline of a fortress, long since disappeared. On the first partition of Poland it found itself in Austro-Hungary, between the wars it went to Poland again, and in 1945 it was handed over to the Soviet Union. Until 1962 it was called Stanyslaviv, after a Polish prince; today’s name is that of the Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. But the name changes are unimportant, for the people the town really belonged to for most of its history were the Jews.

Up to 1941, over 60 per cent of Ivano-Frankivsk’s population was Jewish. It had fifty-five synagogues and produced dozens of distinguished rabbinical dynasties. Proudly, Moishe-Leib reels off the names – the one I recognise is Shneor Zalman ben Baruch, one of the founders of Hasidism. With the war, 300 years of history came to a swift and savage end. Conveniently placed on the railway-line west to Poland, the town turned into a deportation centre for Jews from all over Ukraine. ‘According to my calculations,’ says Moishe-Leib, lighting another Dollar Gold, ‘120,000 people came through Stanyslaviv. Sixty or seventy thousand were killed here, the rest were taken to the camps.’ It all happened amazingly quickly: Ivano-Frankivsk’s ghetto opened in September 1941, three months after the German invasion, and closed again early in 1943, when there was no one left to kill.

Donning his homburg again, Moishe-Leib takes me back out through the synagogue hall. Inky wooden school-desks do duty as pews, and the walls are stencilled with patterns touchingly designed to look like real wallpaper. We climb into a battered Zhiguli for a tour of Jewish landmarks, Moishe-Leib swivelling round to point things out as we go. There is not much left to see. The old Jewish cemetery, with graves dating back to the seventeenth century, was demohshed in the 1960s, to make way for a tatty Kosmos cinema. Nearly all the synagogues have gone too – of the seven surviving buildings, one is used as a laboratory, one as a school, one as a deaf-mute centre and one as a storehouse; the last two have been divided into flats and shops. The only thing marking the site of the wartime ghetto is a small metal plaque on what used to be its boundary wall. Vandals have scraped off its six-pointed Star of David.

What also remains is a mass grave. On the edge of town the road peters out into a dirt track. We clamber out of the car, and pick our way through the ruts to a patch of open ground. Surrounded by peasant cottages, each with its hens, fruit-trees and sagging chain-link fence, the only thing that distinguishes it from any other bit of suburban wasteland is a series of oddly shaped lumps and hollows. These are the ditches where, during the war, the town’s entire Jewish population were shot and buried. An old woman is sweeping round a pink granite monument with a birch-broom. ‘In this place,’ runs the inscription, ‘German Fascist invaders shot over 100,000 Soviet citizens and prisoners of war.’ The number is cheapened by exaggeration, and, as at the larger Babiy Yar memorial in Kiev, there is no mention of the fact that the victims were Jews.

‘It’s very peaceful,’ I remark, groping for something appropriate to say about this grisly and neglected spot. ‘Not really,’ says Moishe-Leib cheerfully, offering a strip of chewing-gum. ‘People have parties here, they get drunk and fight. You can see where they’ve stolen part of the fence.’ A concrete shelter – he calls it a chapel – marks the spot where one of the town’s famous rabbis is supposed to be buried. Somebody has scratched graffiti into the paintwork: ‘Yids’; ‘Ukraine hates you.’ ‘It’s nothing,’ says Moishe-Leib, ‘just kids playing.’ My interpreter looks appalled. Though she has lived in Ivano-Frankivsk all her life, she never even knew this place existed.

There have been Jews in Ukraine since before the word ‘Ukraine’ existed. The Greek colonies of the Black Sea coast had their Jewish traders, and the earth embankments of ancient Kiev were pierced by a Jewish Gate. The first record we have of the existence of the city is a letter written in Hebrew by the Jews of Khazaria, an eighth-century Turkic kingdom on the Black Sea steppe, to a synagogue near Cairo. There were Jews in Lviv in the fourteenth century, and in the Volhynian town of Lutsk in the tenth. But they did not start arriving in large numbers until 1569, when the Union of Lublin allowed Poles and Jews to migrate east into the Lithuanian Grand Duchy. Through succeeding centuries, despite waves of emigration in the face of pogroms and poverty, Ukraine’s Jewish population grew steadily, totalling about 3 million people – 8 per cent of the population – by the outbreak of war. When the Nazis struck, Odessa had 180,000 Jews, Kiev 175,000 – as many each as the whole of the Netherlands. Kharkiv had 150,000, Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv 100,000 each. In the sleepy
shtetlech
of Galicia and Volhynia – places like Ivano-Frankivsk – they made up 40 per cent or more of the population.

These were pious places, poor and tradition-bound. Men wore side-curls and velvet hats with squirrel-tails; their wives kept the children quiet with tales of dybbuks and golems, and shone their hair with kerosene. It was the land of miracle-working rabbis and the mystical kabbalah, of arranged marriages and strict Sabbaths full of prayer and song and ritual. The exception was bustling, brash Odessa, synonymous, in Jewish lore, with frivolity and irreligion. Odessa produced musicians and orators (among them Trotsky and the early Zionist Leon Pinsker), and from its poor Jewish quarter, the Moldavanka, a legendary tribe of gangsters. Travellers remarked on the self-confidence and dignity with which Jews walked the city streets, and if a Jew wanted to say that a man was prosperous, he might say that he ‘lived like a God in Odessa’.
¹

As old as the history of Ukrainian Jewry is the history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. One of the first written records we have of Jewish settlement in Ukraine is also a record of anti-Jewish violence. On the death of Prince Svyatopolk in 1113, according to the Rus chronicles, the Kiev mob rioted, looting the homes of Jewish merchants who had profited from Svyatopolk’s hated monopoly on salt. For the next several centuries, there were too few Jews in Ukraine to be much of an issue, but with Jewish immigration following the Union of Lublin, the potential for hatred increased.

Many Jews arrived as agents to Polish landowners, who deputised to them the collection of rents and taxes, and management of taverns and mills, at which the surrounding peasantry were often obliged by law to buy their drink and grind their corn. They lived huddled under the protection of Polish palace walls, and built their synagogues like mini-fortresses, with gun-embrasures and cannon on the roof. Hence when Khmelnytsky rebelled in 1648, his peasant army’s murderous fury was directed as much at Jews as at Poles. The Polish fortified towns, to which Jews fled for protection, fell like ninepins. In some places Poles shut Jews out, in others they handed them over in exchange for their own lives. Usually both groups were massacred together. In Nemyriv, Khmelnytsky’s soldiers burned the synagogue, murdered Jews with their own ritual knives, and tore up the covers of their holy books to make shoes. Similar massacres took place during the uprisings of the next century, notably at Uman, seat of the Polish Potockis. Again, Poles and Jews shared jointly in the peasants’ fury: a common practice was to hang a Pole, a Jew and a dog from the same tree, with the words, ‘Pole, Yid and hound – each to the same faith bound.’
²

Through the 1800s, Orthodox attitudes towards Jews hardly improved, and at the end of the century they actually worsened. While in Western Europe Jews were beginning to integrate, with spectacular success, into middle-class gentile society, in the Russian empire they remained legal and social pariahs. Save in the big cities – from which most Jews were excluded by the Pale of Settlement – the old pattern of Polish or Russian landlord, Jewish tradesman and Ukrainian peasant hardly shifted, all three groups locked together in a frozen web of mutual dependence and resentment. To the peasant, Jewry represented die alien Polish- or Russian-speaking town, the mysterious money economy which paid little for his labour and charged much for manufactured goods. Anti-Semitism became ‘the socialism of the imbecile’. When pogroms broke out in Yeliza-vetgrad (today’s Kirovohrad) in 1881, the local paper blamed the Jews’ precarious dual role as money-lenders and tavern-keepers: ‘Let the Jew deny a drink to a drunken or penniless peasant, and the hatred begins.’
³
Even in rich, easygoing Odessa, as the Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky remembered of bis schooldays in the 1890s, integration was only skin-deep:

Odessa was the site of the first modern pogroms. In 1871, on the night before Easter, drunken sailors started throwing stones at Jewish homes and shops. Though deaths were few, the looting went on for three days before the police restored order. As the decade progressed, the tsarist government increasingly used anti-Semitism to offset the rising tide of revolutionary dissent. When Aleksandr II was assassinated by anarchists in 1881, riots swept southern Ukraine. In Kiev a barefoot mob looted the Brodsky vodka warehouse and rampaged through the poor Jewish suburbs. Though police kept the peace in the wealthier districts, and here and there university students turned out to help defend Jewish property, most townspeople looked the other way. ‘It was a calm and sunny Sunday holiday,’ wrote an onlooker. ‘Christians were strolling about. I don’t know what astonished me more, the boldness of the plunderers or the shocking indifference of the public.’
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