Blood and Belonging Read online

  The same feeling that the empire was still alive and well persisted when I spent the rest of the morning on board one of the admiral’s frigates, the Ladni. In the dusty shelves of the captain’s cabin, I found that essential navigational aid Lenin’s Collected Works. The captain mustered four sailors for me to interview—a Ukrainian miner’s son, two scared boys from Azerbaijan, and a Tajik from the fastnesses of Central Asia. They had all been coached to say that the fleet was like the empire, one big happy family of nations. When the officers were maneuvered out of earshot behind a gun turret, the sailors were more forthright. We want to serve the Azerbaijan navy on the Caspian, whispered an Azeri. As for the Tajik, he just wanted to get back to Central Asia as fast as his legs would carry him.

  When I came ashore I watched conscript sailors on the dockside shoveling potatoes into buckets and then carrying them, laboriously, up the gangway to the ship’s kitchens. Their uniforms were dirty, their complexions were sallow, and their dinner was not going to consist of much more than these same potatoes. Against the background of the unending downward spiral of the two economies, Russia and Ukraine’s dispute over the fleet resembles a quarrel between a pair of muddy beggars fighting over the possession of some spuds.

  An empire of paupers impoverished its people for seventy years to put a fleet like this in the water in order to scare us. Now nemesis has arrived. It can barely afford to keep up the huge rusting asset riding at anchor here. The Russians still have the power to scare us, but that power is steadily sinking below the waves of economic disintegration. The thought of the sacrifices demanded of the population to keep this fleet riding at anchor left me feeling coldly furious.

  That is why the sharpest memory of Sevastopol is not of the gray hulls riding at anchor but of a solitary figure resting against the wall of my hotel on the bitterly cold morning that I left. She was in her sixties, wore her hair as educated older women do here, in a chignon, and was dressed in the remains of a woolen frock and a cardigan. She might have been a captain’s widow, and that is certainly the title of the short story Chekhov could have written about her. For she had no shoes, and her face was chapped and red from sleeping rough, and she lay against the wall of the hotel, too exhausted to move farther, weeping tears of pure desolation, amid the broken beer bottles the sailors had left from the night before.

  THE TATARS

  The Crimea is the most contested ground in Ukraine. If Russians are ever likely to fight Ukrainians, it might be here. Ethnic Russians outnumber Ukrainians in the peninsula; all are stridently aware that the Crimea was ceded by Stalin’s successors to Ukraine only in 1954. There are Russian separatists here, with a party of their own in the local Parliament in Simferopol, who want to break away from Ukraine and seek to restore the Crimea’s status as an autonomous republic, which it enjoyed before the Second World War. Yet although Ukrainians may be outnumbered, they have the whip hand, for all of Crimean power and water comes from Ukraine. A Russian separatist republic here could be strangled at birth.

  Not so easily strangled are the aspirations of the peninsula’s oldest inhabitants, the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who have been indigenous to the hills of Crimea for a thousand years. In 1942, as the German armies advanced on the Black Sea, Stalin ordered the deportation of the Crimean Tatars en masse and had them resettled in Soviet Central Asia. In the early years of Gorbachev, they were the first ethnic group in the old empire to stage a sit-in in Red Square, demanding justice and repatriation. They are now returning in their thousands to settle the hillsides around Bakhchisarai, their ancestral capital.

  Pushkin came here in the 1820s and wrote a poem about the fountains in the palace of the Tatar Khans. The sounds of falling water are in every room. The Soviet guidebook tells you about Pushkin, of course, but not a word about the deportion of the people.

  On a bare hillside outside Bakhchisarai, we found a Tatar village, a straggling collection of half-finished cottages, surrounded by building materials, in the middle of an abandoned beet field. Seeing us, a woman in a light blue housecoat beckoned to us to come in, and as we did she pointed with pride to a dark green tar-paper shack: our home before we built this, she explains, telling me to leave my shoes at the door.

  Now a family of seven lives on the ground floor of what will be a three-story house, very properly whitewashed and plastered inside, with linoleum on the floor over concrete, and two gigantic television sets looming over the dinner table.

  I had expected a dark-haired, dark-skinned Asiatic people, but most of them have no recognizable ethnic similarity. Some of the men are dark, heavy-bearded, and stocky, but others are light-haired, light-skinned, look typically Russian, and speak Russian fluently. One young woman, sitting by the door, with a thin, pale face, says she was born in Central Asia, can hardly speak Tatar, but her parents were and she is.

  They all talk at once. We gave up everything—houses, jobs, gardens—in Central Asia to come here. And now look. A house. And some rows of tomatoes and maize planted in brown topsoil they scrape from roadworks nearby. There is an outhouse among the tomatoes. No running water. It comes in a truck once a week. But there is electricity, and they heat water and grind coffee and serve us dark black Turkish coffee in neat cups, accompanied by honey brought by a relative from Novorossisk who keeps bees.

  The father is a grizzled man in his sixties in a flat cap, with four or five days of graying beard on his face, scars on his right temple. His wife says, much to his embarrassment, strip him, see him naked, you would see scars everywhere; she laughs and shows her gold teeth. She is wearing a flowered housecoat and ankle-length white socks. The women are formidable, the men sadder, more broken; one man lurks at the edge of the conversation, with a thin, wasted face, weeping tears, looking away, like an orphan.

  I tell him I am the child of people who had to go into exile. We made a new life. Why did they refuse the new life in Central Asia? The father says, “Only a person who has no mother knows what a mother is, only a person without land knows what land means.”

  And the young women with the children chime in: You could go to Canada and start a new life and no one cared if you were Russian, but when we went to Central Asia, they abused and humiliated us just for being Tatars.

  And a young man says, “We were called enemies of the people; half of our people died in deportation; they took the women and children and dumped them in Uzbekistan and they took the men and sent them off to die in the war.”

  What do you want? I ask. Your old houses back? No, the woman tells me. I know where my house is. It is in a village a few kilometers away. A Ukrainian lives there now. I don’t want to make them go away, as I did. I just want land on which I can build a house and live. And they call us squatters.

  What do you want politically? We want a Crimean Tatar Republic. We want what we had until 1939—the status of an autonomous republic. We don’t want to drive out the Russians or the Ukrainians, but we want our own tongue recognized as an official language; and we want to control our schools and our communities and have this whole Crimea recognized by name as the Tatar homeland. We do not want a territorial nation; we want an ethnic nation, one of them tells me.

  The lady in the housecoat takes out a crumbling brown piece of paper and passes it across the table. It is her birth certificate, from Stalin’s time, from the days of the Crimean autonomous republic of the early 1930s, and what she wants me to notice is that it is written in two languages, Russian and Tatar. “That is what we want,” she says, crossing her arms. “What we had before.”

  They take me outside and show me the village. A crowd gathers as we go, down a long rutted track with new houses rising on either side, and men waist-deep in foundation work put aside their shovels and come up to talk. I ask one of them, who comes out of a trench where he has been digging, whether he will ever allow his people to be deported again. We are a small people, he says, and bigger ones will always do with us what they want. But I am not leaving this place. They will have to kill me
first.

  A young man, in a faded yellow army jacket and an army cap, with a pipe, mustached, perhaps twenty-five, says that when he was a child in Uzbekistan, his parents used to sneak back here with him to Bakhchisarai, when it was still forbidden, and they would scoop up some soil from where we were standing and take it back to where they lived. “And we prayed over this soil and wept over it, too.”

  I ask the grizzled old man why this particular piece of land means so much and he says, “This is a sacred place for us. My grandfather, my father, were born here and died here. If I had not pushed my children to return, who would have done it? We would have lost our nation, our culture. We have to piece together, brick by brick, our heritage and culture. Believe me. Otherwise, everything was doomed to be destroyed.”

  I fall silent, and watch an old lady in a kerchief eating sunflower seeds cradled in her hand; the old man with the white scarf wiping his eyes; tears also steaming down the face of the old man who has been asked what this land means to him—all silent, staring at this unpromising, rainy hillside, so barren that they have to import topsoil in order to make something grow, a bare hillside overrun by power lines, piles of building sand and bricks everywhere, and holes in the ground, and cats and children running about.

  An old woman, in a red sweater and jean skirt with a kerchief around her head and a healthy red complexion, golden teeth, suddenly says, “I am sixty-three, look at me, why should I give up my house, my work, everything to come out here with nothing and start all over again? Why should I do this, except to be among my people on my own soil and give my children what I never had myself: a home in my own land.”

  The young woman behind her listens, and says she is grateful for the old people who kept the nation alive during the darkest time. “We don’t get any money from the government; we don’t get anything from anybody. When our people arrive they sleep in our houses; we have twenty-five people sleeping in our places at times. We are not going to wait for anything. We are going to build with our own hands.”

  I’ve never encountered anything like this, a people for whom land has such a sacramental importance. In their discipline and dignity and fierceness they are like Israeli pioneers in the 1930s or the 1940s. What is self-evident to them is the connection between nationhood—narod—and personal dignity. Without nationhood, people sneer at you on the bus; people jeer at you for what you are. It is not enough to be a people. In order to have respect, you must have a nation.

  When I ask them why they have survived, they say: We must have some gift for it. Plus, we do not marry outside the Tatars. Big peoples can afford intermarriage. We have to have strict rules. And so we have strong families, and respect for our elders is the way we maintain strength and continuity in our traditions. Yet it is obvious from the faces that they have been intermarrying with Russians and Ukrainians for centuries.

  I ask them whether they are going to build a mosque in the village. Of course, they all reply, and point up the hill to the place where, according to the plan, it is going to be.Again, in Muslim Central Asia they had freedom of religion and were surrounded by coreligionists. It made no difference. It was their land they wanted back.

  For them an independent Ukraine is more or less irrelevant. The crime was committed by the Soviet Union. They don’t really care whether Ukraine is an independent state or not. What matters intensely is getting Crimea returned to its status as an autonomous Tatar republic.

  I fear the Ukrainian nationalists may be as deaf to Crimean Tatar demands as Russian dissidents were when asked to identify with Ukrainian autonomist demands in the 1970s. Is Ukraine going to be able to accept a state within a state? Nothing less will satisfy the Crimean Tatars.

  KING KONG

  From Crimea, I journeyed eastward to Donetsk, the heart of the Ukrainian coal and steel industry. The Tatars are not the only ethnic group demanding autonomy within the new Ukraine. Many Russian miners and steelworkers in the Donetsk region also are demanding autonomy, to protect their language and education rights.

  Donetsk is home of Stakhanov, the coal miner of the 1930s whose heroic and inhuman feats of production at the coal face became central to the productivist iconography of Soviet man. Through the 1980s, coal miners remained the aristocracy of Soviet labor, but with the steady erosion of their wage differentials with other workers in the Gorbachev era, they launched a wave of strikes that helped to weaken Gorbachev’s support among the industrial working class. Then, in August 1991, they suddenly found themselves in another country. Once again, they took to the streets, and their demonstrations protesting the decline in their standard of living have been a persistent challenge to the Kravchuk government.

  At one of those demonstrations in Kiev in front of the Supreme Soviet, I had waded into a crowd of miners in helmets and boots and thick felt jackets. I soon made contact with a huge miner, Vladimir Kolpakov, from Red Star Mine Number 6, Donetsk. Vladimir is a full-bearded, full-bellied giant known to his mates as King Kong. He was the most voluble of the demonstrators, and when I got to Donetsk I rang him up. His wife told me he was down the mine, so I went out to the mine to find him.

  It is a small mine, a hundred years old, employing about 250 men who all know, as they stand outside the dressing rooms taking their last drags on their cigarettes before suiting up for the trip down into the cages, that the place is on its last legs. They tramp off to the cages in their coal-blackened work clothes, beneath a now redundant portrait of Lenin.

  The pithead was run by women, wrapped up tightly in scarves and woolen jackets against the freezing damp. They were curiously stylish, these chunky female characters with compact bodies, nicely made up, their mouths full of gold teeth. They slung the coal trucks out of the cages, slammed the doors shut with brisk brutality, and operated the antiquated lifts and telephone systems. King Kong, I was told, would be up at the end of his shift. One of the mine ladies took me by the arm and led me to their tearoom behind the lift cages, a cozy spot with wooden benches set close to the big heating pipes, and decorated with pictures of Western film stars of the 1950s. There, beneath pictures of Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, these women drank their tea and joked about me. It was a touching place—infernal, yes, out of Zola, yes, but also dignified somehow. I could feel their camaraderie, their shared sense of danger, even a kind of gaiety.

  King Kong finally appeared at the back of the lift, grinning like an enormous dirty raccoon, his face black with coal, his helmet and work clothes dripping wet from the constant stream of water in the shaft. I asked him whether I could go down with him on the next shift and he said: Out of the question. Far too dangerous.

  After showering and dressing, he still looked like a giant raccoon, with the coal dust rimming his eyes. He took out his cigarettes, spat out some phlegm, and lit up. What about your lungs? I ask him. He shrugs and grins. We have checkups every year. Besides, he says, with a laugh, “You just don’t feel you’ve done any work unless you end the day with a cigarette.”

  We went back to his flat, four bare rooms on the eighth floor of a cooperative block built by the miners themselves. He pours the vodka and shows me around the flat, which is considerably bigger than those inhabited by deputies in Parliament. The miners were indeed the elite of Soviet labor.

  But they are an elite fallen on hard times. Inflation is eating away their monthly paychecks, and food—in this, the former bread-basket of the empire—is expensive and hard to come by. “A box of matches used to cost one kopek,” he says indignantly, “and now it costs one ruble and fifty kopeks. A loaf of bread used to cost twenty-two kopeks and now it costs seven rubles.” Pensioners have been left to their fate.

  Instead of dealing with these problems, Vladimir suddenly thunders, the nationalists—meaning the Ukrainians—are spending their time in Parliament passing laws to change the signs from Russian to Ukrainian and altering the speaking clock on the telephone to Ukrainian.

  But, I counter, the nationalist argument is that Russian control of the econom
y has kept Ukraine back, and that if the country could cut loose from Moscow, it would soon be prosperous. Vladimir is contemptuous. “How can Ukraine exist without Russia? Ukraine has no gas or oil, and there is very little wood left. Can Ukraine live without all these? Sugar has all been sent to Russia. Nothing is left. Next to us lies a very strong neighbor. We have always been together.”

  Like millions of Russians in Ukraine, he simply cannot get over his amazement that he lives in a foreign country, and that, whereas he once traveled freely there—working in the Vladivostok region, going to see his parents in Perm—now he can’t, because he can’t afford the ruble-kupon conversion rate. Where the nationalist agenda is not irrelevant, it is actively threatening to Vladimir and his wife. “Little by little,” he says, “they are ousting the Russian language.” We always got on well in Donetsk, he says, not just Ukrainians and Russians but all the nationalities, Jews, Armenians, everyone who lived here.

  Mind you, he has nothing against Ukrainians. His wife is Ukrainian and they both speak the language. They don’t mind if their son is given Ukrainian classes every day, where he learns to stumble his way through one of Shevchenko’s national epics.

  If you press him, he admits “the whole structure” of the former Soviet Union “was wrong.” “Sooner or later it was bound to fall apart. Moscow was in charge of everything, and it all came to the point when every republic wanted to break away.”