Borderland (15 page)

In 1855 Nicholas I died, to general rejoicing. Two years later Aleksandr II gave permission for Shevchenko to return from exile, on condition that he submit to police surveillance and not ‘misuse his talent’. Feted by admirers all the way, Shevchenko sailed from Astrakhan up the Volga to Moscow, and on home to the ‘sinful paradise’ of St Petersburg. In astrakhan hat and grizzled Cossack moustache, he resumed life as a literary celebrity, campaigning for an end to serfdom and joining Turgenev and Dostoyevsky at public poetry readings. A final trip to Ukraine, in the spring of 1859, ended in arrest and despatch back to the capital. There, after a tipsy night’s Christmas carolling, Shevchenko developed dropsy and died, aged forty-seven. Twelve days earlier he had written a final poem:

Straight away, Shevchenko’s supporters began elevating him to sainthood. After lying in state in the chapel of the Academy of Arts, his corpse was given temporary burial in a St Petersburg cemetery. Two months later it was disinterred, put inside a new metal coffin draped with red taffeta, and borne by students down Nevsky Prospekt to the railway station. At Orel and Moscow the coffin left the train for requiem masses, and on arrival in Kiev it was met by a large crowd and shipped, amid much speech-making, downriver to Kaniv, a picturesque village where Shevchenko had been planning to buy a house. Here, on a high bluff overlooking the river, the poet was finally laid to rest. The grave was covered with a Cossack-style mound and marked with an oak cross. In the 1880s the wooden cross was replaced with an iron one, in 1931 with an obelisk, and in 1939 with a hideous monumental bronze statue, which still stands today.

In death, Shevchenko has been subjected to serial hijack, dragooned in support of a string of causes which he never knew or dreamed of. For nineteenth-century Russians he was an icon of liberal opinion. In Ilya Repin’s conversation-piece,
They Weren’t Expecting Him,
which depicts a family open-mouthed at the reappearance of an exiled relative, a portrait of Shevchenko hangs in the background, silent marker of the family’s progressive political sympathies. The Soviets recast him as a prototype revolutionary, erecting busts and statues all over Ukraine. (One, opposite Kiev University, replaced a statue of Nicholas I; the plinth, thriftily, remained the same.) Trees under which he might have mused turned into sacred ‘Shevchenko oaks’ – the Ukrainian equivalent of Russia’s omnipresent ‘Pushkin rocks’. Beetle-browed and glowering, this Bolshevik Shevchenko is a massive, militant presence, equally at odds with the snub-nosed, twinkling fellow of the sketches made from life and with the dreamy, Byronic figure of the self-portraits.

His latest reincarnation is as hero of Ukrainian independence. The man who in life loved pig-roasts, rum and servant-girls (his last romance fell to pieces when he found the girl in question in the arms of the butler) has been turned into Ukraine’s national martyr, doe-eyed embodiment of a suffering people. Nationalist parliamentary deputies sport the Shevchenko moustache, bushy and turned down at the ends, and his works are quoted
ad nauseam,
in the portentous singsong of Slavic poetry recital, on every conceivable occasion. The first of many times I heard Shevchenko quoted aloud was, unsuitably enough, in the company of a tipsy Russian businessman. Taking me to dinner at the Salyut Hotel, a feast of beige carpeting, foxed cheeseplants and Rosa Klebb-lookalike waitresses, he lifted a vodka glass, told me his wife did not understand him, and proceeded to recite Shevchenko’s famous
Testament
in a resonant baritone: ‘When I die, then make my grave/High on an ancient mound,/In my own beloved Ukraine . . .’
¹⁶
Knowledge of Shevchenko, I was intended to understand, was proof positive of sound democratic principles. As a pass-making technique it was a non-starter – but it sounded terrific.

A well-known joke has two old men sitting on a bench drinking beer –
pyvo
in Ukrainian. ‘You know what the filthy Russians call this?’ asks one, ’
Pi-i-i-vo
!’ ‘Horrible!’ replies the other, spitting on the ground; ‘I could shoot them for it!’ Despite its similarity to Russian (the two are about as close as Dutch and German, or Spanish and Portuguese), the Ukrainian language plays a starring role in the Ukrainians’ sense of national identity, making it a delicate political as well as cultural issue. If an Englishman cannot open his mouth without half his compatriots hating him for his accent, a Ukrainian cannot utter a word without half his fellow-citizens despising him for his choice of language.

For people who speak Ukrainian as a first language, those who have no Ukrainian at all, or who speak it badly, are not true co-nationals. Russian-speakers, on the other hand, suspect determined Ukrainian-speakers of zealotry or opportunism. In Bulgakov’s
The White Guard,
set in Kiev during the Civil War, the reader immediately realises that the Turbins’ Baltic-German brother-in-law is a bad hat when he is spotted poring over a Ukrainian grammar. Today’s born-again Ukrainian – the political hanger-on who was never heard to utter a word of Ukrainian until 1991, or the pundit who speaks Ukrainian on the conference platform, and switches back to Russian in his office – is still a stock figure of fun. Prominent among them is President Kuchma himself, who was rumoured to be taking two Ukrainian lessons a day during the election campaign of 1994. ‘You ask them to speak Ukrainian,’ my friend Roma would complain of her interviewees, ‘and they say fine. But then all of a sudden they start sticking in Russian words every now and then, and the next thing you know they’ve switched completely to Russian.’ Even the sincerest Ukrainophiles are prey to this tendency. The director of the Kiev City Museum, a nice man beset with worry that his beloved collection was about to lose its premises to the new High Court, once gave me a peroration on the superiority of Ukrainian over Russian culture. ‘When
we
were building Santa Sofia, over
there’
– waving an arm vaguely eastwards – ‘there was nothing but
wolves.
’ For my benefit, he said, he was talking in Russian. But did he speak Ukrainian at home? He blushed a little and shifted in his chair: ‘Well, you know how it is, it isn’t easy . . .’

Ukrainian is still in a state of flux. Its technical vocabulary is underdeveloped, necessitating extensive borrowings from German and English (anything but Russian.) There are also variations between the Russian-influenced Ukrainian of the central provinces and the Polish-influenced Ukrainian of Galicia, anathematised under the Soviets as not Ukrainian at all, but a bastard form of Polish. A Ukrainian friend brought up near Lviv remembers being told at school that ‘the language we were talking was improper, very bad, incorrect, some kind of dialect . . . and that somewhere there is this correct Ukrainian language, but somehow different – not the language we were talking of course’. There is also a gap between the everyday Ukrainian of the street and the formal, flowery language of books, speech-making and television. People who actually speak the literary version in real life are rare enough to be celebrated for it. ‘You must go and interview him,’ I would be told of this or that person, ‘he speaks
such
beautiful Ukrainian’ – as though speaking the language ‘properly’ were an achievement in itself.

Despite pressure from nationalists, the post-independence governments have held to a sensible line on the language issue. Unlike the ethnic Russians of Latvia and Estonia, Ukraine’s Russians do not have to pass language tests to get voting rights and citizenship, and Ukrainianisation of the education system is taking place on a gentle
ad hoc,
school-by-school basis. Students have to master basic Ukrainian to enter university, but once there, many of their books and lectures are still in Russian. In the Donbass and Crimea, contrary to what the Russian press would have one believe, nearly all schools remain Russian-speaking. In Lviv, on the other hand, a generation of schoolchildren is growing up, for the first time in fifty years, who speak no Russian at all. But through most of the country, urban Ukrainians look set to become what many of them are already – bilingual. Though the language problem is not going to fade away – Russian is too deeply entrenched for that – it has already ceased to be quite the political football it was in the immediate post-independence years.

Shevchenko’s work, though a great boost to Ukrainophiles, did nothing to soften government hostility to Ukrainian cultural revival. His death in 1861 was followed by the century’s second great Polish uprising, provoking a new wave of Russian paranoia. All religious and educational publications in Ukrainian were banned, and a new generation of activists was sent into exile. ‘A Little Russian language never existed, does not exist and never shall exist,’ the interior minister instructed the censors. ‘Its dialects as spoken by the masses are the same as the Russian language, with the exception of some corruptions from Poland.’
¹⁷
Restrictions eased slightly in the early 1870s, only to tighten again with the Edict of Ems in 1876. Under the Edict’s malign influence, the national movement evaporated. Dissent flowed instead into the empire-wide anarchist and revolutionary movements, climaxing with Aleksandr ITs assassination (by a terrorist group led by a Ukrainian from Odessa) in 1881. From the mid-1870s, therefore, the pressure for national revival came not from Kiev but from Austrian-ruled Lviv. Small, poor and backward, Galicia became the unlikely Piedmont of Ukraine.

As in Kiev, the national movement in Lviv got much of its initial impetus from imperial efforts to play Ukrainians off against the more powerful Poles. Austria experimented with the technique in 1848, during the Europe-wide popular risings known as the ‘Springtime of Nations’. When the barricades went up in Cracow and Lviv, the governor of Galicia, Count Franz Stadion, encouraged Ukrainian leaders to submit a loyal petition to the Emperor, asking for official recognition for their nationality and for Galicia to be split in two. He helped organise a ‘Ruthenian Supreme Council’ under a Uniate bishop, and gave funding for the first Ukrainian-language newspaper. An elected parliament with Ukrainian representation was, however, dissolved once order had been restored.

In 1861, following Austria’s defeat at the hands of the French in Italy, parliament and constitution reappeared, this time permanently. As well as sending delegates to the Reichsrat in Vienna, each province had its own local Diet, with jurisdiction over schooling, health and trade. But the electoral system was designed to give solid majorities to the conservative landowning class – which in Galicia meant the Poles. Whereas only fifty-two votes were needed to elect a deputy to the landlords’ curia, peasant delegates needed almost 9,000, and urban workers had no votes at all. The result was that although Ukrainians made up about half Galicia’s population, they never held more than a third of the seats in the Lviv Diet. Moreover, the Galician government was notoriously addicted to vote-rigging: ballot-box stuffing, intimidation and non-registration of candidates and voters were all common. Though Galicia introduced direct and universal suffrage in 1907 – several years after Vienna, thanks to Polish opposition – Ukrainians remained heavily under-represented.

In 1867 Austria lost another war, this time with the Prussians. The result was the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, giving the Hungarians direct rule over about half the empire, and reducing the Austrian-Hungarian connection to a shared monarchy and army. In exchange for Polish support for the battered empire, from then on Vienna gave the Poles a free hand in Galicia. Poles replaced Germans and Austrians in the local bureaucracy, Polish became the language of education, and Poles took the Galician governorship. ‘Whether and to what extent the Ruthenians may exist,’ said an Austrian politician, ‘is left to the discretion of the Galician Diet.’
¹⁸
Ukrainians’ acquiescence in the arrangement, and continued loyalty to the Hapsburgs, was bitterly satirised by the Ukrainian socialist Ivan Franko in his short story, ‘Budget of the Beasts’. In it the Lion, ruler of the animal kingdom, proposes a ‘budget’ of Sheep and Chickens (Ukrainians) for the Wolves, Bears and Eagles (Poles) to eat:

Despite everything, Galician Ukrainians were far better off than their cousins over the Russian border. With freedom to publish and associate, real though limited participation in imperial politics, and the proverbially well-organised Czechs and Germans on hand as inspiration, they developed a remarkable penchant for activism. The largest and oldest of the Ukrainian organisations in Galicia was the
Prosvita
or ‘Enlightenment’ society. Established in 1868, it concentrated on teaching peasants to read. By 1914 it had 200,000 members and nearly 3,000 village libraries and reading-rooms. Around the reading-rooms sprang up choirs and theatre groups, gymnastics clubs and voluntary fire-fighting associations, taken from Czech models. The 1880s and ’90s saw the appearance of hundreds of rural cooperatives and credit unions, allowing peasants to raise cheap loans and cut out middlemen. Ukrainian-language newspapers multiplied, and in 1890 the Galicians finally formed their first political party, a decade before Russia’s Ukrainians were able to follow suit. Led by Franko, it put socialism before independence. The rival National Democratic Party made its appearance nine years later, quickly overtaking the Radicals on a platform of loyalty to the Hapsburgs and moderate liberal reform.