Borderland (11 page)
Authors: Anna Reid
In Poltava I stayed with a family of Baptists, introduced by my temporary interpreter Taras, a spotty youth who spent his spare time reading
Pilgrim’s Progress
(‘What, please, is a Slough of Despond? Who is Mr Valiant-for-Truth?’) and distributing American-produced leaflets showing believers climbing ladders to heaven, and unbelievers burning in hell-fire. (Religious tolerance, in Taras’s book, was ‘a typical decadent Western idea’.) Grandparents, two sets of parents and eight children all shared a newly built, immaculately tidy house on the outskirts of town. Lined up in height order like the Family von Trapp, the children gave their names – Irina, Kristina, Slavik, Yulya . . . – and sang an evangelical hymn: ‘My Father is waiting for me in heaven/ Where He has made a crown for mee-eee.’ Afterwards they went back to watching
Stop Or My Mom’ll Shoot!
on video. Though all the characters were dubbed by the same bored voice, they didn’t seem to mind, laughing uproariously at every joke. The machine, little creamy-cheeked Irina explained, was a present from South Carolinan missionary dentists, who had given them all fillings while spreading the Word. So too was the shiny new poster on the wall, with coloured time-lines showing mankind’s progress from Adam to Last Judgement, via the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. But what had really impressed her was the dentists’ remarkable bulk. ‘There was one’ – a conspiratorial whisper – ‘called Phil. When he sat down his legs went like
that
!’ And she spread her hands in the manner of a fisherman describing a monster missed catch.
Poltava, it turned out, hadn’t yet decided whether to treat its famous battle as a glorious Russian victory or as a tragic Ukrainian defeat. In the meantime, successive ideologies were being allowed to accumulate, like strata in a sort of historiographical ocean bed. In the middle of town, in a square full of cigarette kiosks and shuffling trolley-bus queues, stood a tsarist monument, all cannons, eagle and laurel wreaths, celebrating the battle’s first centenary. Next came the inevitable Lenin, one hand outstretched, the other deep in his pocket (‘Looking for money for the budget,’ said my driver). Opposite Lenin a big hand-painted billboard had gone up: ‘The Flower Poltava in the Wreath of Independent Ukraine!’ The newest monument of all was a giant stone cross, inscribed ‘To the Cossack Dead’ in folksy Ukrainian lettering. The central post office, a white pillared building that had housed the local Nobles’ Club, chipped in with a mercifully apolitical message of its own: ‘CITIZENS! USE THE SIX-DIGIT POSTAL INDEX!’
In the little museum on the battlefield site – a snowbound muddle of factory buildings and straggling woodland – the traditional Russian version of events held undisputed sway. Socialist-realist oils showed Peter at his more sympathetic pursuits: rolling up his sleeves in a cannon foundry; dividers in hand in the Volga shipyards; spotlit through storm clouds aboard a rearing charger. The grand finale was a diorama of the battle itself – real wagon wheels and cannon balls in front of a painted scene of galloping horses, flying banners and puffs of smoke, all ‘created by artists of the Grekov studio of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’. But why hadn’t the museum got anything about Mazeppa? The attendant, a pretty blonde in anorak and padded boots, rifled through her desk, produced keys, and led me along a corridor to a distant room. Here, she said, was their new exhibition. It had pictures of Mazeppa in beaten copper, bits and pieces of weaponry and Ukrainian folk costume, and a wobbly fibreglass Cossack gravestone. It was behind locked doors, she said, because ‘we don’t have a man to look after it. If anyone asks, we just let them in.’ Hadn’t the museum come under any pressure to ditch its old, pro-Russian displays? A sigh. ‘At first, yes, but now it has faded away. Nobody’s interested in history any more.’
Following the disastrous Mazeppa adventure, the hetmanate went into rapid decline. The Cossack capital was moved from Baturin to Hlukhiv, closer to the Russian border, and Russians were given command of the Cossack regiments. Government was overseen by a ‘collegium’ of Russian officials, and hetmans who stood on their rights were imprisoned or replaced. Royal favourites were granted vast Ukrainian estates, and began building themselves the neoclassical mansions, designed by Scots and Italians, whose dilapidated hulks still brood over the villages east of Kiev today.
The last of the hetmans was Kyrylo Rozumovsky, younger brother of Oleksiy, an affable but illiterate Ruthenian who caught Empress Elizabeth’s eye while singing in the imperial choir, and subsequently became her lover, maybe even her husband. He was removed by Catherine II in 1764, following his petition for a return to full autonomy and for the hetmancy to be made hereditary in the Rozumovsky family. Now that the hetmans were gone from ‘Little Russia’, Catherine declared, ‘every effort should be made to eradicate them and their age from memory.’
5
In 1781 she did away with the hetmanate altogether, splitting its territory into three provinces organised on the same lines as the rest of the Russian empire. The Sich had been razed by Russian troops six years earlier, and its lands given over to Russian grandees and German and Serbian colonists. The surviving Zaporozhians were deported to the Kuban, north-west of the Caucasus, leaving Ukrainians to sing ballads in their memory – and scour the Dnieper reed-beds for their hidden treasure – for ever after.
One of the reasons Catherine felt able to do away with the Cossacks was that she no longer needed their help against the Turks. In 1774 she had signed a peace treaty with the Sultan handing the Crimean khanate, formerly an Ottoman protectorate, over to Russia. With the khanate came control of the ‘wild field’, the fertile, uninhabited no-man’s-land between Crimea and the Sich lands to the north. The treaty meant that the centuries-old to-and-fro between Tatar and Cossack raiders was over. Ruthenian peasants would no longer be marched south for sale in the slave-markets of Kaffa and Constantinople; Tatars would no longer wake to find their ports torched by Cossack galleys. The ‘wild field’ had suddenly become a safe place.
According to the Russian scheme of things, the peace restored a rightful inheritance. By annexing the Black Sea steppe, Russia was ‘gathering the Russian lands’, rebuilding the ancient kingdom of Rus. Catherine had a commemorative medal struck, engraved with the words T have recovered what was torn away’, and gave her new territories the name
Novorossiya
– New Russia.
Today, New Russia exists only in the imagination. The endless plains and vast skies are still there of course, but the grey-green grass, the bison, marmots and antelope, the buzzards and wild horses, have long since disappeared under the plough. People who did see and describe the virgin steppe all came up with the same image – the ocean. ‘I sail a sea where waters never ran/My wagon like a boat,’ wrote Mickiewicz.
6
Riders disappeared into the rippling grass like a fish into waves; canvas-covered ox-carts rolled over it like ships under sail. Nothing pierced the gently undulating horizon save the occasional line of willows by a river, or the distant gravemound of some Scythian warrior-princess, buried complete with horse and manservant, battle-axe and turquoise-studded jewellery. So featureless was the landscape that the wagoners, like sailors, steered by the stars.
For some the steppe was a desert, but for most, like Nikolay Gogol (a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian), it was an inspiration:
The surface of the earth appeared here like a golden-green ocean, flecked with the colours of a million different flowers. Through the tall, slender stalks peeped pale-blue and lilac cornflowers; the yellow broom thrust its spiky tips upwards; the white clover adorned the surface with its umbrella-like caps; an ear of wheat, blown God knows from where, stood ripening, deep in the grass. Partridges with craning necks darted hither and thither among the slender roots. The air was filled with the song of a thousand different birds. Hawks hung motionless in the air, their wings spread wide and their keen eyes fixed on the grass. The cries of a passing flock of geese carried to their ears from a distant lake. With measured strokes of its wings a gull rose from the grass and bathed luxuriantly in the deep-blue waves of the air . . .
7
But once made safe for farmers, the steppe could not stay empty for long. For centuries tall stories had been told about its fertility. Leave a plough in a field overnight, it was said, and next morning you couldn’t find it again for new grass. So numerous were the bison that hunters didn’t even bother to eat their meat, just taking the hides. So packed were the rivers with fish that a spear would stand upright, unsupported, in the water. Growing up on the Sea of Azov in the 1870s, Anton Chekhov saw the wilderness eaten away by windmills and telegraph poles, villages and ploughed fields. His lyrical short story
The Steppe,
based on boyhood journeys with the old ox-drawn wagon-trains, was written as a memorial to a landscape that was vanishing for ever:
You drive on for one hour, for another . . . You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom; a night bird floats noiselessly over the earth, and little by little those legends of the steppes, the tales of men you have met, the stories of some old nurse from the steppe, and all the things you have managed to see and treasure in your soul, come back to your mind . . . And in the triumph of beauty, in the exuberance of happiness you are conscious of tension and yearning, as though the steppe knew she was solitary, knew that her wealth and inspiration were wasted for the world, unsung, unwanted; and through the joyful clamour one hears her mournful, hopeless call for singers, singers!
8
Catherine gave the job of opening up ‘New Russia’ to her one-eyed lover Grigory Potemkin. His job was to attract new settlers into the countryside, and to found naval and commercial ports on the lower Dnieper and along the coast. In both enterprises he was spectacularly successful. Cheap government loans and remissions from serfdom and taxation brought in the farmers, and trading exemptions helped the towns. In 1787, to show off his achievements and celebrate the twenty-fifth year of Catherine’s reign, Potemkin organised a royal progress down the Dnieper to Crimea. Catherine and her entourage left St Petersburg in early January, travelling in gilded coaches mounted on sleds. Reaching Kiev at the end of month, they waited three months for the ice to break on the Dnieper, before setting off downriver in a fleet of eighty boats led by eleven brocade-upholstered Roman-style galleys. At the new town of Yekaterinoslav, the present-day Dnipropetrovsk, Catherine was met by her ally Josef II of Austria, and the two laid foundation stones for a vast new cathedral. Though the city was still nothing more than a collection of wooden houses, Potemkin had grand plans for a university, law courts and a conservatoire. Josef was cynical: ‘I performed a great deed today,’ he wrote to a friend. The Empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid - the last.’
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But further downriver at Kherson, where things were more advanced, the party could not but be impressed:
Imagine on the one hand a quantity, increasing hourly, of stone buildings; a fortress, which encompasses a citadel and the best buildings; the Admiralty, with ships being built and already built; a spacious suburb, inhabited by merchants and burghers of different races; and, on the other hand, barracks housing about 10,000 soldiers. Add to this, almost opposite the suburb, an attractive-looking island with quarantine buildings, with Greek merchant vessels, and with canals constructed to give these vessels access. Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment, for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives were kept for winter.
10
The tour climaxed at Sevastopol, where Catherine reviewed her new sixteen-ship Black Sea Fleet, threw roubles to a troop of ‘Amazons’ done up in turbans and ostrich feathers, and enjoyed a spectacular fireworks display, which terrified the natives. As the coloured sparks faded into the hot Crimean night, the letter E – for Yekaterina – appeared on a hillside, etched in 55,000 torches. Potemkin had done well, and Catherine was delighted. An excellent portrait of the empress, taken in Kiev as she set off on her New Russian tour, still hangs in the city’s Tereshchenko Gallery, former town-house of an artistically inclined sugar magnate. Direct, blue-eyed, Germanic, she resembles nothing so much as a shrewd and forceful headmistress.
New Russia may have been the work of the Russian monarchy, but ‘New Russia’ was still a misnomer. Potemkin’s new cities, with their newfangled boulevards and fancy classical names, were certainly not very Ukrainian places. But they were not very Russian either. From the first, New Russia depended on foreigners.
The place that epitomised this was Odessa. Its history begins with the capture by a Spanish-Irish mercenary in Russian pay of a small Turkish fortress called Khadzhibey. A Dutch engineer, Franz de Voland, recommended to Catherine that the fort, with its good natural harbour, be turned into New Russia’s capital. Catherine approved, and gave him the money to build breakwaters. Her city, she decided, should be female – hence Odessa, after the ruins of the ancient Greeks’ Odessos along the coast to the east.
The man who turned Odessa from idea into reality was Armand-Emmanuel, Due de Richelieu. A great-nephew of the cardinal, he had sat out the French Revolution in Russian service, fighting under Suvorov in Turkey. In 1803 Tsar Alek-sandr I made him governor of Odessa, and, two years later, of all three provinces of New Russia. A foreign exile who had done well under the expanding Russian empire, the 36-year-old de Richelieu populated his new kingdom with more of the same. Offering cheap land, religious toleration and exemption from military service, he attracted persecuted minorities from all over Europe and the empire. From the south came Bulgars, Serbs, Moldovans, Greeks and Armenians; from the north Jews; from the west Swiss and hard-working Mennonite Germans; from the east dissenting Molokans, Dukhobors and Old Believers. By 1817, when there was no more virgin land to be given away, Richelieu was able to report that ‘Never, Sire, in any part of the world, have there been nations so different in manners, language, customs and dress living within so restricted a space.’
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Remarkable as much for his incorruptibility as for his energy, when de Richelieu returned home to France to serve as prime minister under the restored monarchy he is supposed to have taken nothing with him but a suitcase containing his uniform and two shirts. A statue at the top of the Odessa Steps shows him in a Roman toga; in its plinth is lodged a piece of round-shot, fired by the British frigate
Tiger
during the Crimean War.
