Blood and Belonging Read online

  He assures me that he does not want an ethnically based national state in Ukraine. He has invited ethnic Germans to settle in Ukraine; he wants to reassure the 31 million Russian minority that its language rights are secure. On this I believe him, for the simple reason that any other policy would lead to civil war.

  But won’t you get a civil war anyway if the economy continues to spin downward? There, he agrees. “The most important thing is to avoid a deepening economic crisis which could lead to an explosion which in turn could lead to explosions in other spheres.”

  THE STATUE AND THE CAVES

  The next morning, I strap myself into the seat of a Soviet helicopter for a flight over the city. Down below, the mighty Dnieper River has a lustrous green color. Ninety miles north of here is the malediction of Chernobyl, still spilling contaminated water into the big river below me. Nothing did more to hasten Ukrainian disillusion with empire than the Chernobyl disaster; no other single event of the 1980s did more to win support for the nationalist cause.

  Suddenly there is another malignant reminder of Soviet civilization looming right in front of us, a gigantic silver statue of a frowning Amazon in metal robes, sword aloft in one muscular fist, shield in the other, a staggeringly large figure—equal in size to the Statue of Liberty—made of glistening aluminum and appearing to be perspiring with martial effort.

  She is Mother Russia, guarding the Gates of Kiev, facing west to repel intruders, a monument to the Great Patriotic War and to the soldiers who died retaking Kiev from the Germans in 1943.

  This vast aluminum matron was erected, not in the first flush of victory but in 1980, as part of the senescent Brezhnev regime’s attempt to manufacture patriotic ardor. The memory of the war was, more than anything else, what held the empire together. The parades, march-pasts, speeches, and holidays of Soviet institutional life all took the war memorial as their focal point. Soviet brides and bridegrooms laid their wreaths on the tombs of the war dead. As the memory of war receded, giant aluminum matrons went up in the “hero cities” of the Second World War, to maintain and manipulate popular memory. The message of such monuments was unsubtle: the Party saved the empire, and the peoples of the empire sacrificed themselves as one.

  As the helicopter whirls me around, I want to land and walk up to the top, as in the Statue of Liberty, and stare out at the world through her eyes. Isn’t there some observation post inside her head? It can’t be done, the nervous keeper of the shrine tells me later. The observation tower has had to be closed. Even though she was officially opened in 1980, she’s so poorly constructed and her structural iron is rusting away so rapidly, she’s likely to fall over.

  She is meant to symbolize imperial unity in the wartime cause, but here in Ukraine the war was closer to a civil war than a united patriotic outpouring. When German troops poured across Ukraine’s western border in June 1941, they were greeted as liberators by millions of western Ukrainians. For them, the war was an opportunity to escape the prison house. Western Ukrainian nationalists at first thought the Germans would allow them to set up their own state. Bandera and Melnyk, Ukrainian nationalists in exile, returned with the advancing Wehrmacht, fervently proclaiming their belief in the new order in Europe in the hope that the Nazis would reward them with a client state. Too late they discovered that they were regarded as a slave race, fit only for subjugation. Ukrainian nationalists found themselves caught between the German occupiers and the Red Army, sometimes fighting both at once. When the Soviets conquered western Ukraine at the end of the war, some of the fiercest opposition came from the Ukrainian nationalist partisans. They kept fighting until the early 1950s. All this history is neatly suppressed by this statue.

  The helicopter wheels away from the Motherland statue and passes over the golden domes of the Kievan monastery. In Soviet times, the Kievan skyline offered a scene of symbolic competition between two religions—the cult of the war dead and the old faith of the poor and excluded. Kiev is the fountain of all Russian Orthodoxy, for it was the Kievan Prince Vladimir who in 987 married the daughter of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople and at the same time converted, along with all his subjects, to Christianity.

  Monks had lived in caves on these bluffs before Vladimir’s conversion, and their remains, embalmed in coffins lodged in niches in a deep underground network of passageways, were a site of pilgrimage for Orthodox believers. Since Ukrainian independence, these saints are on what for Russians is foreign soil. Worse, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church is seeking to wrest exclusive jurisdiction over them from the Russian patriarch. For Ukrainians, the monastery consecrates the site of the beginning of Ukrainian national consciousness; for Russians, Kievan Rus is the beginning of the Russian national experience. The “loss” of Ukraine is thus, from Russia’s point of view, the loss not merely of a province but of its own symbolic beginnings.

  When I make my descent into the caves beneath the monastery, it is dark and cold, and the doors have long since been closed to tourists. At the bottom of a long flight of wooden plank steps, a small light blue antechamber is lit by a single oil lamp in front of an icon in an upper corner of the ceiling. In the faint light, I almost trip over what I take to be a bundle of rags on the stone floor. Stepping over it, I see that it is an old couple curled up against each other, beneath their ragged coats, lying together on a piece of cardboard to ward off the damp. They are sleeping or resting on their sides with their hands under their heads, for neither has a pillow. The old woman is wearing her kerchief, the man an old flat cap, and they sleep together in spoon position. As I discover them, I turn and see that several old couples are asleep on the floor, and two more are sitting on a bench in the near darkness beneath the icon. Leaving the antechamber and resuming my descent, I come across more of these silent old couples sleeping on the stairs, propped up against a banister, bundled up against the biting cold, almost inert, as if dead. These are pilgrims, old people whom the Church allows to sleep here night after night in the subzero cold, close to the saints.

  The final door to the caves is guarded by a tiny old lady in a Ukrainian shawl and head scarf, a thick coat and slippers, who gets up from her bed behind the huge warm Dutch stove to unlock the door and let me in. She watches me suspiciously as I light my candle, and shadows me as I wander through the maze of tunnels. I lose my way down blind alleys, run up against locked doors, in a damp darkness lit only by my candle and the flames in icon lamps. In niches dug into the tunnel walls are the burnished wooden coffins and stone sarcophagi of the saints. The coffins and sarcophagi are open, and in the dim light of the icon lamps the faces of the dead saints are shrouded, but in several I make out the withered brown claw of a hand clutching the vestments of burial. The dead do not return to dust here; the atmosphere and the properties of the earth preserve their hands, brown-black claws, with long nails. The old woman is suddenly behind me, watching to make sure I do not reach out and touch. Her life is spent here, deep in the earth, lying behind the stove, watching suspiciously over the saints. Something about this cult of the dead, this loving preservation of bodies that ought to have turned to dust, this association between faith and death, makes me nauseous. Two nations, two languages, two histories originate in this dark maze underneath the monastery. But all I want is to get out. I need to climb those stairs, over those sleeping bodies if need be, in any case as fast as I can. I need light. I need air.

  THE FAMILY GRAVES

  About two hours southwest of Kiev, by the river Ros, in the district of Vinnitsa, amid the undulating expanse of sugar-beet fields, is the small village where my great-grandfather bought an estate in the 1860s while he was Russian ambassador to Constantinople. In 1908 he died there; in 1917, before the Revolution could dispossess her, his wife died, too. They are both buried in the crypt of the church. No one from my family has been back here since February 1917. The road gives out some miles away and our bus struggles over the rutted, cobbled farm road that winds through the featureless, flat beet fields. Darkness falls. Past a tow
n called Pogribiš če, we pass a huge sugar-beet factory, working in the dark, sending up plumes of steam into the cold night air. Then, as the headlight beams pick out objects in the dark, I begin to have an eerie sense of familiarity. I’ve been looking at photographs of the place since childhood. There is the long, low, flat stone barn by the railway line. This must be the road Grandfather took every morning in the trap when he went out to the railway siding to collect the Moscow papers off the Moscow-Odessa express. And this must be the church, its dome and cross lit up in expectation of our arrival, poking up above the trees by the riverbank, just as it looked in the Box Brownie photographs taken of it by my father’s English nanny.

  We stop by the churchyard gate. Not a sound. The emptiness of the countryside at night. No streetlights, just the black dome of the sky and a few stars. There are a couple of small brick cottages behind us, their lighted windows visible above faded picket fences, but we do not know which one to approach. Eventually a truck driver from the collective farmstops and picks us up, my translator and me, and drops us off in front of a blue-and-white brick house, covered with vines and plants, at the end of a dirt road in the dark. He bangs on the door, and after many minutes a priest emerges, pulling his black cassock around his stomach, smoothing out his beard with his fingers, and muttering about the lateness of the hour and the rudeness of strangers. His wife, kerchiefed, bustling about, brimming with energy, leads us back down the path in the dark to a hata, where we will sleep. A room for the woman, meaning my translator, she says; this one for the men, she says, meaning me, plumping up the beds she has ranged against the wall; and a good fire, she says, banging on the coal stove which heats a Dutch oven that runs the length of the room. She lights the lamps in front of the icons in the corner, crosses herself, and bustles about in the kitchen, clattering in and out bearing tea, a soup tureen full of potatoes, her jars of pickled tomatoes and onions and cucumbers, several bottles of vodka, and some cognac. The priest returns and I ask him to bless the food, which he does in song, joined in with a high quaver from his wife, both of them crossing themselves unceasingly.

  We eat together on a trestle table in the center of the room, beneath a single light bulb. They keep stealing glances at me, the priest and his wife: Is this really the Count’s grandson? Why doesn’t he speak Russian? Is he a believer?

  When they came to the parish in the 1950s, they said, the church was boarded up and the machine shop for the collective farm stood in the churchyard. When they tried to get the machine shop out of the churchyard, the priest was arrested, his wife says. But we are still here, he says phlegmatically, chewing on a piece of black bread. Thirty-five years. We restored everything. We have kept your graves. We have not forgotten, they say, quietly and undemonstratively, perhaps wondering to themselves why, exactly, I am worthy of this unrewarded devotion.

  What has independence meant for them? I ask, over the vodka and cognac. The priest and his wife share glances. A Ukrainian Church, with the tacit blessing of the state, is demanding to take over all the Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine, and will require services to be sung in Ukrainian. The priest himself trained in the Russian seminary, yet he speaks Ukrainian to his parishioners. But the service can only be in Church Slavonic, and the only Church authority he is prepared to recognize is the ancient one that flows from the Bishops of Moscow and Constantinople, not some upstart in Kiev. Already there are fights at church doors all over Ukraine, between defenders of the old faith and the new nationalist Church. Their son is choirmaster of the cathedral in Vinnitsa, the big town nearby. The new Kievan bishop has come to Vinnitsa to demand the handover of the cathedral. The son is prepared to fight. “People will be killed,” the priest’s wife says gloomily.

  The next morning, I am at the well, winding up the water to wash in and make the tea with. Village children pass by with satchels on their backs on the way to the school on the hill. Women in bedroom slippers and wrapped up against the cold scratch about in their back gardens, hanging out washing, cutting off the head of a cabbage, shooing geese away. A horse cart clops by with two farm workers sitting in the hay with their legs bouncing over the side. An ancient woman, bent and crooked, straggles by, leaning heavily on a stick.

  The atmosphere is heavy with desolation. It is not merely that people are old and poor and that the village is depopulated. It is that so many of the faces have the stunned and defeated air of survivors.

  No one wants to work now, the head of the collective farm tells me later. Why don’t you give them the land? I ask. Who do I give it to? Who has the capital? Look at these fields. He spreads his hands out to the huge, featureless fields of beet. What he implies is crucial: if agriculture is the backbone of the new Ukraine, who will save it now? Where are the peasants? Where are the small farmers? He takes me down to the river, near the church, to have a look at the kolkhoz flour mill. Erected in 1886, it says over the front door, at the same time as the church, and inside I find all the machinery Great-grandfather imported from Leipzig and Dresden, still working, with hammered bits of Soviet tin and iron replacing those parts that have worn out. I watch as women in flour-covered kerchiefs pour sacks of grain into the old machines and watch the fine cone of white flour emerge beneath. I move the flour dust away from one of the labels: “Leipzig, 1886.” “Still the best flour mill in the region,” the head of the collective farm says.

  I cannot shake off the sensation that these people are the survivors of a great catastrophe. From the family album, and the pictures taken by the English nanny, I know some of the names of the peasants who used to live here in my grandfather’s time. Their names are inscribed in white ink beneath their pictures: full-bearded Sessoueff, the estate steward, with his ample wife and their seven children. Rudnitsky, the sly-looking head of the stables. What had happened to them all at the Revolution? In the churchyard, I found the grave of Sessoueff, buried next to the family vault. And his children? All “repressed” in the 1930s. And Rudnitsky? Repressed, too. Why? The priest shrugs his shoulders. They were kulaks, rich peasants, grain hoarders, moneylenders, enemies of the state, two victims among Stalin’s hecatomb.

  Walking along the empty, dusty tracks of Kroupodernitsa toward the big house, past some cottages in brick with tin roofs, past others still wattle daub and thatched, as they were in the nanny’s photographs, I sense the reasons for the sadness that hangs over this place like a shroud. Something like 3 million Ukrainians died of hunger between 1931 and 1932. A further million were killed during the collectivization of agriculture and the purges of intellectuals and Party officials later in the decade. An additional 2 to 3 million Ukrainians were deported to Siberia. The peasant culture of small farmers and laborers that my grandfather grew up among was exterminated. This was when the great fear came. And it never left. It remains in the eyes of the old women who stare at me over the picket fences of their kitchen gardens as I make my way up the muddy track to my great-grandfather’s house.

  It is on high ground, looking down on the village, a capacious two-story mansion, in white stucco, with a ceremonial front porch, before which the family brougham used to draw up when the family arrived to spend the summers. The ceremonial gardens have long since gone. One wing burned down, another is in ruins. But it is still recognizable from the old family photographs.

  The teachers greet me on the steps. A girl in a peasant costume and Ukrainian headdress, made of purple and pink plastic flowers, curtsies and presents me with a round loaf of bread, decorated with pastry leaves and a pastry sheaf of grain, and a small bowl of rock salt. Thus was my grandmother greeted when she came here, as my grandfather’s bride, in 1902. From cottage to cottage they went, and each peasant family presented them with bread and salt. Now it is my turn, but I do not know what to do—my translator whispers that I must take a piece of bread and dip it in the salt and eat. Instead, I bow, in embarrassment.

  They lead me through a house that my aging uncles in exile in Canada can still remember room by room, corridor by corridor
. I feel I am sleepwalking through their memories. I walk across thick plank floors, pass through long low corridors, with children clattering behind me. I hear the school director tell me, pointing, that it was there, just there, at the bottom of those stairs, that my great-grandfather died, one morning in 1908. How he knows this he does not say. The house seems to relay its mythology, some of it untrustworthy. Is it true, the principal wants to know, that Honoré de Balzac spent a night here? He leads me into a long room, with a raised platform at the end, which might have been a stage for family theatricals or recitals. Now it is hung with pictures of Soviet pioneer heroes of the Great Patriotic War, and I am asked to give a little speech. I tell the children that I am the great-grandson of the man who built this house. I present them with copies of my family album’s photographs. They stare at them and at me with awe and disbelief.

  No one knows exactly what happened after the Revolution here. My grandfather’s sister, Aunt Mika, who ran a dispensary in the village, stayed on, and then was spirited away to Kiev, where she went into a nunnery. Everyone says, without ceasing, how all the children in the village were my family’s godchildren, how Aunt Mika looked after them. This is true. It is also true that the house must have been put to the sack. Not a stick of furniture, not a picture, not a samovar, not a spoon remains, although one old man comes up holding a faded photo of my great-grandfather at the end of his days, wearing his old general’s greatcoat, leaning on his wife’s arm, rheumy, tired, his mustaches untrimmed and drooping, slippers on his feet, in the ornamental garden. By the 1930s, it was a dwelling house for many families; after the war, an orphanage, now a school. In one room, eight- and nine-year-old children are singing Ukrainian patriotic songs, mournful, violent songs about the Cossack warriors who will overthrow Moscow’s yoke: