Blood and Belonging Read online

  The riflemen of the Sich come into the fray of this bloody dance

  To free their Ukrainian brothers from Moscow’s chains.

  We’ll cast off Moscow’s chains

  And in our illustrious Ukraine we’ll make merry.

  In one room the children are learning the Ukrainian alphabet, while in another there is a folk museum of the Ukrainian peasant past: a wooden spinning wheel, a wooden rake, a blackened iron samovar, the obligatory picture of Taras Shevchenko, the national poet. The rough plank floor is strewn with fragrant grasses. But there is so little left; the historical remains are so poor. The disaster of famine and forced collectivization has stripped the peasant past bare.

  So I learn that a new Ukraine is being made in the house of my great-grandfather. The children learn about Shevchenko, as they once learned about Pushkin; they learn about throwing off Moscow’s yoke as they once learned about the heroic Soviet achievements of Yuri Gagarin; they run their hands over the broken spinning wheel that is all that is left of the peasant culture of these parts.

  Then to the church, where the bell is tolling and the parishioners are assembling for a special pannihida in memory of our ancestors. The priest’s son has come from Vinnitsa with his choir. The priest’s wife lights the thirty candles on the candelabrum and hoists it skyward. The walls are bright with newly completed paintings of saints and holy scenes. I stand to the side with the choir. At the back, a large cluster of old men and women, crossing and recrossing themselves.

  I had felt suffocated in the maze beneath the monastery. Now another feeling began to steal over me, a feeling that, like it or not, this was where my family history began, this was where my graves were. Like a tunneler, I had gone through suffocation, and I had tunneled myself back to at least one of my belongings. I could say to myself: the half-seen track of my past does have its start, and I can return to it. The choir sings, the priest names my father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, the names, some of them Anglo-Saxon, peeking through the seams of his prayers, the choir and their voices singing, the sound filling this church my great-grandfather built.

  Afterward, the priest asks me to speak to his parishioners. And I do, with Lena, the translator, to help me, explaining who I am, thanking them for coming. They stare and stare, and then they come closer. Old women are crying. They take my hand, kiss it. They explain, through broken teeth, that they have walked for miles to be here, they remember, they remember. How Aunt Mika, my grandfather’s sister, ran the dispensary. How well the choir sang when my grandfather conducted it. How strict my great-grandmother was when you waited on table. How they brought mushrooms to the kitchen door, how they collected strawberries, and how they were rendered down in tubs in the pantry. It is impossible to catch these stories, to hold them. Everyone is talking at once, crying, the women clutching my sleeves. They push pieces of paper into my hand. My grandfather served in your stables and went to Canada. We think he went to see your grandfather there. Do you know? No, I don’t know. Threads of connection are established, then broken, across seventy years. They are all weeping, clutching at me, crying hopelessly for the past, seeing the young kerchiefed girls they were before the horror began. One old woman, bent nearly double, slumps against a bench at the back of the church, crying on her own, her mouth a black, stump-filled hole of lamentation.

  The priest shoos them away, and leads me out of the church into the crypt, a low, damp, flagstoned space, with icons ranged along the back wall. In the gloom, against the far wall, I can see piles of lumber. One by one the icon lamps are lit, and in their glow I make out three graves of cut stone. In the center, my great-grandfather’s, with his military rank, and the names of the treaties he had negotiated in the Tsar’s name, embossed on the side. On either side, the grave of his daughter, my grandfather’s sister, who died in a hospital train of typhus tending the wounded in 1915; and my great-grandmother. The priest points out on the white marble of my great-grandfather’s grave cuts in the stone made from a butcher’s knife. This was a slaughterhouse in the 1930s. I run my hands across these black slices in the marble. We stand and sing the viechnaya pamyat, the hymn of memory, the priest blesses the graves, and then they leave me alone, with a candle.

  Nations and graves. Graves and nations. Land is sacred because it is where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves. The graves were profaned. The butchers slaughtered on top of the marble. A person would fight to stop this if he could.

  Looking back, I see that time in the crypt as a moment when I began to change, when some element of respect for the national project began to creep into my feelings, when I understood why land and graves matter and why the nations matter which protect both.

  LVOV

  After saying goodbye to the priest and his wife, his son and the choir, we set off for Lvov in western Ukraine. As the hours pass, the countryside changes, from the flat, black-soil lands of the plain to the rolling and more prosperous villages of the Carpathian foothills. I eat the remains of a boiled duck, the collective farm’s parting present to us, and a mouthful of the ceremonial greeting loaf from the school, I fall asleep, and wake to the sound of the bus clattering over Habsburg cobblestones.

  The Russians call it Lvov. Under the Habsburgs, it was known as Lemberg. To the Jews of the poverty-stricken nineteenth-century Galician stetl, it was their Jerusalem. Ukrainians know it as Lviv. It is one of those fated places in Europe where imperial borders have always met, peoples have clashed, and nations have been born. Now it is witnessing the painfully slow birth of Ukraine.

  The sound of the trams grinding and rasping their way through the cobbled crooked streets makes you think of Vienna. The green copper Baroque spires make you think of Prague. But the tired, worn people in the bread shop, their faces lit by the bleary light of a forty-watt bulb, could be only where they are: foraging for food amid the ruins of the Soviet empire. Lvov is a kind of Habsburg Pompeii, perfectly preserved beneath the dust and ash of the Soviet volcano.

  Lvov has always been the cradle of Ukrainian independence, perhaps because it once was, not a Ukrainian city, but a Jewish and Polish one, and so the Ukrainian minority had to develop an ideology to be heard above the competing din of other people’s.

  The city was always the least Russified, least Sovietized part of Ukraine. Until 1918, the double eagle of Austria-Hungary graced the top of municipal buildings. Between 1918 and 1939, it was ruled by the Poles, and you can still see the Polish street signs just above the new Ukrainian ones. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 handed Lvov to the Soviets, but the invading German army—supported by some Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries—drove them out. The Soviet army retook the city in 1945, and it was not until 1956 that the last resistance from Ukrainian nationalist guerrilla bands was wiped out. Grizzled survivors of those bands now walk the streets, wearing their old forage caps.

  In the more Russified eastern Ukraine, Soviet rule could count on some popular support. Here in western Ukraine, the Soviets ruled as an army of occupation. The Uniate Catholics were banned; their churches were closed and their leaders imprisoned. Nationalism was defined as fascism, and nationalist families were deported. But it is the western Ukrainian nationalist myth—often nurtured in exile—which is now attempting to make itself the official nationalism of a whole state.

  When the late 1980s brought glasnost and perestroika, the repressed force of nationalism returned with a vengeance. Western Ukraine was convulsed with student demonstrations, strikes, and religious processions. The mistake that cost Gorbachev his empire was to believe a new Soviet man had been created here. He was to discover just how bitter, enduring, and unforgiving national memory can be—in the Baltic, in Georgia, and here in Lvov.

  As in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, nationalism and national revival here mean returning to Europe. Returning to Europe means pulling your nation, li
ke a battered horse and cart, from the muddy ditch that is the Soviet system.

  We are Europeans, the waiter tells me in the National Hotel in Lvov’s main square. We are Europeans, a Ukrainian MP who once did six years in Siberia tells me in her tiny three-room apartment with a statue of a Cossack on her piano and a Ukrainian picture of the Crucifixion on the wall. Being a European here means not being Russian. It means being an individual, taking responsibility, standing up for yourself, all the characteristics the western Ukrainians passionately believe are absent in the Russians.

  Being European also means being Catholic. In western Ukraine, nationalism is a political religion. Since 1596, western Ukraine has had a faith all its own, the Uniate Church, a hybrid of Polish Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy. The service sounds Russian Orthodox to me, but I didn’t dare say that to Uniate nationalists. The last thing they will admit to is owing anything to the religious traditions of the Russians. When I asked the Ukrainian MP why she continues to hate the Russians, she shrugged, smiled, and said that if you love something—your country—you also have to hate its enemies.

  Now is the Uniate faith’s hour of glory. In August 1992, they brought home the body of their leader, Cardinal Slipy, who died in exile in Rome. They have reclaimed Saint George’s Cathedral from the Russian Orthodox, and the gilt on the Baroque cupids and the altar screen shines with new radiance. On Sunday, the church is packed with bareheaded men and kerchiefed women of all ages, and when they join the choir in the Alleluia, the sound floats above seven hundred heads like a gently billowing canopy.

  Standing among men and women who do not hide the intensity of their feelings, I understand what nationalism really is: the dream that a whole nation could be like a congregation; singing the same hymns, listening to the same gospel, sharing the same emotions, linked not only to each other but to the dead buried beneath their feet.

  Every Sunday they dream, and on Monday they return to the sour reality of the queues outside the shops. The promised land is far away here. Independence is a year old, and it will take a generation before the Soviet system is lifted off people’s backs. A generation? A tram driver I talk to laughs and shrugs. Two generations, maybe three. The tragedy for those who fought for Ukrainian independence is that they may never live to see the promised land.

  The “dull compulsion of everyday life,” as Marx called it, grinds on here. It will exert its compulsion for a long time to come. The nationalists and democrats who fought to bring it down are realizing that what people here so touchingly call the “spiritual” benefits of independence are relatively easy to come by. It is getting the phones to work, the food to come to market, the toilets to flush properly which is the hard part of building a nation.

  For the moment, everyone knows what the “spiritual” benefits of independence are. When I ask my tram driver friend what he means by spiritual, he smiles. “You can kiss your girlfriend in the streets, drink beer in the park, and cross yourself in church.”

  It is impossible to be cynical about freedom when you see it in the faces of the young couples who come to hear the Gadukin Brothers, Lvov’s best rock-and-roll band, play a free concert in front of the magnificent Austro-Hungarian opera house in the center of the square. The crowd is wearing a wild array of costumes and funny faces; they are decked out with old Soviet army hats, decorated with the blue-and-yellow ribbons of independence; a girl walks by with a toy pistol inside a militiaman’s holster. Nobody is imitating the West here; they are doing their own strange Galician, Carpathian thing, and the Gadukin Brothers up on stage are saying what is on everybody’s mind. Through the guitars and drums, you can hear them sing:

  The old red cart went into the ditch

  Lenin was the driver

  Now the cart is blue and yellow

  And no one knows where it’s going.

  CRIMEA

  From Lvov, I traveled overnight by train to Odessa. As with Lvov, Odessa in the nineteenth century wasn’t a Ukrainian city at all. Ukrainians were peasants mostly, while a southern port town like Odessa belonged to the Russian navy, the Jewish gangsters and merchants who figure in Isaac Babel’s Odessa stories, and the Greek, Turkish, Bessarabian, and Romanian merchants who dominated the Black Sea trade in wine and grain. Seventy years of Soviet power, plus German occupation and extermination, have silenced the ethnic babble of old Odessa. Now the Ukrainians have it all to themselves.

  We spent all night on a ferry at the foot of the Odessa steps, waiting for it to leave for the Crimea. No fuel, the ship’s purser told me, shrugging his shoulders. As we waited, the decks filled with Azeris and Armenians, Crimean Tatars and Russian families going on holiday, and from the stern of the berthed ferry you could see the steps, like a bolt of black cloth rolled down the heights to the shore.

  This is where the baby carriage started to roll in Sergei Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin. After independence, a French producer screened the film on the steps themselves, and Odessans came out to watch. They hated it, chiefly for its portrayal of Cossacks sent to disperse the crowd. Cossacks are heroes to Ukrainians, and on every festive occasion in Ukraine, you meet fancy-dress Cossacks, in boots and sheepskin hats and capes, with daggers in their belts. That is what independence can do for you: a great film Ukrainians once loved now just seems like a low piece of Soviet propaganda.

  I went to bed on the ferry, fully expecting to wake by the Odessa steps again, but, mirabile dictu, fuel was found, the ferry sailed, and I woke next day to the sight of the Crimean cliffs and the villas and gardens of Yalta stretching up the terraced hillsides. A bus took us along the Crimea coast road that night, past the villa of Foros, where Gorbachev had been placed under house arrest during the August 1991 coup. This whole ravishing southern ledge of Europe, with its cliffs plunging into the sea, was once the preserve of the Moscow elite. No more. The rumor has it that Foros is now used by the Kravchuk family.

  The bus brought us to a stop at a roadblock in the dark, sixteen kilometers from Sevastopol. Hushed parleys ensued among translators and the Russian military police. We were to be the first foreigners ever allowed to spend the night in Sevastopol, home base of the Black Sea fleet.

  The next morning we find a ferryman in the harbor prepared to take us out for a look. As the captain pilots the ferryboat Saturn into the fingers of Inkerman inlet, I catch my first glimpse of an awesome sight: the Russian Black Sea fleet riding at anchor. The ferry gets in so close its wake tickles their mooring chains, and an endless line of vast gray hulls, some as high as a five-story house, loom up and pass by over my head. The pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships, read in childhood, seem to fly by in the bright harbor air: frigates, corvettes, navy tugs, troopships, landing craft, hospital ships, minesweepers, destroyers, and cruisers. Some are two hundred meters long. Their masts bristle with communication aerials and satellite dishes, and their decks are crowded with missiles, antiaircraft guns, torpedoes, and attack helicopters. I try counting them all and lose track after sixty. After an hour’s sweep through the inlets of many-fingered Sevastopol harbor, I’ve still seen only about a third of the fleet.

  A graveyard for ships, a Ukrainian friend sniffs disdainfully as we pass them in review. If not a graveyard, then a retirement home. Some of the older ships resemble a line of seafront codgers in deck chairs. But not all the ships are decrepit. The Slava, a 12,000-tonne cruiser barely eleven years old, displays its fangs in the morning sunlight and strains at its anchor chain like an attack dog on its leash.

  The Black Sea fleet may be a wasting asset, but it is still the twelfth largest naval force in the world, and its 337 ships constitute one-third of the total Russian fleet, whose dead-liest components—the nuclear submarines and the aircraft carriers—are moored elsewhere, in Murmansk and Vladivostok. Yet the Sevastopol fleet still has the force to make Russia a power to be reckoned with throughout the Mediterranean basin, in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe. Anyone tempted to write off Russia as a military power should take a ride o
n the Inkerman ferry.

  The problem for the Russians is that Sevastopol is now in a foreign country. Ukraine claims the base and a portion of the ships, and bitter negotiations between President Yeltsin of Russia and President Kravchuk over a division of the fleet have only produced an agreement to put off its carve-up for another three years.

  To anyone with a military mind, the situation of the Black Sea fleet is unthinkable. Two states want to run their flags up over it; two admirals compete to give it orders; one ship has already bolted to Odessa and run up the Ukrainian flag; and the fleet’s future officers, the cadets in the naval academies, were given a vote as to which flag to serve when they graduate. Eighty percent chose to serve Ukraine, though as yet the new state has only one coast-guard cutter to its name. No one on board these mighty ships actually knows who will be giving them the orders in a year’s time.

  In the anteroom of the commander of the fleet, Admiral Kasatonov, his orderlies weren’t taking their extraordinary situation too seriously. Captains and commanders, lieutenants and young ratings were all clustered around the television set outside the admiral’s office, glued to the smash-hit Mexican soap opera Even the Rich Shed Tears.

  A worried-looking man in his late fifties who runs his hands anxiously through wisps of gray hair, Admiral Kasatonov directs his rusting war machine from a bank of a dozen telephones on his desk and a large Compaq computer with a mouse. Looming behind his chair is a portrait of the man who made Russia a Black Sea power, Tsar Peter the Great. The message could not be clearer: Russia is the sole heir of the Russian and Soviet imperial naval tradition; Ukrainians, be warned.

  When interviewed, he was all smiling platitudes, briefed by his chiefs in Moscow to say nothing that might add fuel to the fire. The two countries, he assured me in the most emollient way, had the same strategic interests in the Black Sea. He was just a simple military man who wanted to leave the matter to politicians, who were bound to work out an agreement. But, I persisted, how did he feel, being the commander of a huge fleet whose home base was now on foreign soil? “What do you mean foreign?” he cut in immediately. “Just because political formulas change, it doesn’t mean that anything essential has changed.” In at least one imperial mind, the idea that Ukraine is independent has not taken root.