Borderland (25 page)

But if Ukrainian society is coming to terms with its living Jews, the same cannot be said of its dead ones. As in Soviet days, the Holocaust is one of the great unmentionables, fitting in as badly with Ukraine’s new story-book self-image of doughty Cossacks and martyred poets as it did with the Soviets’ square-jawed Slav brothers standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the fascist invader. ‘Ukrainians don’t want to talk about it,’ a Jewish friend told me. ‘They prefer talking about Ukrainians fighting Germans and Russians, and Ukrainians being sent to Siberia.’ When Ukraine’s first post-independence president, Leonid Kravchuk, made a speech at Babiy Yar on the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre ‘it was a real shock, because before that, people didn’t even pronounce the word “Jew” – they used euphemisms, they talked about “individuals of Jewish nationality”.’ Babiy Yar has a new menorah-shaped memorial to remind passers-by that the people killed there were not just ‘Soviet citizens’, but hundreds of other sites round the country remain forgotten and unmarked. The subject is not taught in schools, nor much discussed in the media. This selective amnesia applies, it should be added, not only to Jews, but to all Ukraine’s vanished minorities – Poles, Germans, Greeks and Armenians. All are uncomfortable muddiers of the waters in a country that has not even begun to come to terms with a history strewn with more than its fair share of blood and paradox.

Among the Ukrainian diaspora, the Holocaust is still an acutely touchy issue, alternately the subject of flaming polemic and defensive silence. The entry for Babiy Yar in a new English-language guidebook to Ukraine, published in Baltimore and obviously aimed at a diaspora readership, consists of a single astonishing sentence: ‘O. Teliha (1907–42), a poetess and a leading activist of the Melnyk faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, executed by the Germans, is buried here.’ Nazi-hunters and Ukrainian organisations have had frequent spats, the most notorious and longest-drawn-out being the Ivan Demjanjuk affair. In 1986 a Cleveland car-worker, a post-war Ukrainian immigrant, was extradited to Israel on the charge of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, one of the operators of the gas chambers at Treblinka. The case collapsed (Demjanjuk having already spent seven and a half years in prison) when it was proved that prosecution evidence provided by the Soviet government had been faked.

In reality, the question of Ukrainian anti-Semitism is an increasingly academic one. There are few anti-Semites left in Ukraine, because there are few Jews. They were less than 1 per cent of the population in 1989, and are fewer still now. Back in Ivano-Frankivsk, Moishe-Leib tells me that 150 families have emigrated in the last three years – most to Israel, some to America or Germany. ‘Every month another two or three lots go, and the old people left behind are dying. The rest are assimilated – half-Ukrainian or married to Ukrainians – and they don’t come to synagogue.’ Even on festival days his congregation numbers only fifty or so – elderly, courteous men dressed with the painstaking respectability of the old Soviet middle class. Moishe-Leib gives Sabbath school to the children and Hebrew lessons to the adults – ‘so they don’t arrive in Israel like wild people’ - and helps with visa applications.

Wouldn’t it be better, I ask, to try to get people to stay, to rebuild something of what was lost? Impossible, he says: ‘The fact is, people have lost their traditions.’ Besides, most of the Jews living in Ivano-Frankivsk today are Easterners who moved in after the war. The real Galician
shtetl
communities are already long gone. When he has no congregation left, Moishe-Leib will emigrate himself: ‘I’m only here because there are still people I can help. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, I will have gone too.’ What will happen to the synagogue and the graves then, he doesn’t know.

Driving back through town, Moishe-Leib tells one last oh-so-Ukrainian story. As we bump past a routinely hideous Intourist hotel, he points to the bit of empty pavement where Ivano-Frankivsk’s Lenin statue once stood. ‘I’ve done a deal to re-use the stone for a Holocaust memorial’ he says. ‘We’re paying them back in their own currency.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

The person of Selim Giray is comparable to a
rose garden; the son who is born to him is
a rose. Each in his turn has many honours in
his palace. The rose garden is ornamented
by a new flower; its unique and fresh rose
has become the Lion of the padishah of
Crimea, Selamet Giray Khan.

–
Arabic inscription above the portal of the
royal mosque at Bakhchisarai

O
N THE
M
ALAKHOV
bastion at Sevastopol two rows of cast-iron cannon-balls have been laid out in the shape of a cross. They mark the place where, on 28 June 1855, Admiral Paul Nakhimov, laconic, frock-coated commander of the city’s defences for the previous eight months, was shot in the head by a French sniper. He had been viewing the enemy batteries through a telescope, and his last words, before the instrument fell from his hands, were ‘They’re shooting better today.’

It is a quiet grey day in early March. In Kiev there is still snow on the ground; down here the streets are dry and the breeze from the sea smells of spring. Showing me round are Arkady, a journalist from Simferopol, and Nataliya, a student born and brought up in Sevastopol itself. Both are typical Crimeans: Nataliya’s father is a retired naval officer, Arkady’s a Russian bus-driver whose Stakhanovite feats of long-distance travel earned him a nice little vine-covered house in the sunny south. Nataliya’s parents are less fortunate: the tap-water in their housing block is undrinkable, so they heave buckets up five flights from a pump in the yard. Do they have hot water? ‘Oh yes – but only twice a week.’

All the same, Nataliya is proud of her city. ‘This,’ she says, pointing across a ravine with a wrecked bus at the bottom, ‘is where the enemy were camped. They fired on us for 349 days before they took the hill.’ Sandbags and a row of bronze cannon mark the Russian emplacements, and the whole area is dotted with monuments and memorials. A bas relief of Tolstoy, here as a young artillery-officer, shows him beardless and in profile, glaring from between jug-ears. Across the other side of the hill stands the ‘Museum of the Heroic Defence and Relief of Sevastopol’, a giant stone rotunda built in 1905 to mark the siege’s fiftieth anniversary. Niches round the outside wall house a series of busts: whiskered generals and admirals, the surgeon Pirogov – ‘the first person to use anaesthetics on the battlefield’, says Nataliya – and a nun – ‘Dasha of Sevastopol, our Florence Nightingale’. Inside, a woman with a white baton is talking a group of Central Asians through a 360-degree, three-dimensional diorama, all heaped bodies, gleaming bayonets and fluttering tricolors. From her commentary one would never guess that Sevastopol actually surrendered. On the way out we pass a faded little fun-fair, still closed up for winter. ‘On Young Pioneers’ Day,’ Nataliya says, ‘all the schools used to come up here. First we’d go to the cinema – it was free just for that day – then we’d come and take rides on the carousel, all in white dresses.’

Sevastopol is a holy city twice over – sacred not only to Russian military sacrifice, but also to Russian Orthodoxy. On the edge of the town, on a windy, half-drowned peninsula lined with boarded-up summer cottages, stand the remains of Cherso-nesus, the Greek city where the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius first landed in Rus, bringing the Gospel and the Cyrillic alphabet with them. In the chilly dusk, we wander among sunken streets and shattered columns, lapped by a gun-metal sea. Near the shore a giant bell hangs on a wooden frame. ‘Strike it,’ Arkady says; ‘it’s good luck.’ The clapper has disappeared so I throw a stone at the bell instead, producing a long, melancholy buzz. A nineteenth-century basilica marks the spot where Prince Volodymyr, converter of Kievan Rus, was once thought to have been baptised. Later the archaeologists changed their minds, and now trees are growing through the church’s roof. ‘They’re supposed to be repairing it,’ says Arkady with a shrug, ‘but they haven’t got the money.’

Hypnotised by its glorious past, Sevastopol is caught in a time-warp. The city is tidy in the old, dour Soviet way. There are no billboards, no money-changers or gypsy beggars, few kiosks with their jumbled rows of Western cigarettes and psychedelic liqueurs. Every third man is in uniform – the officer’s handsome black and gold, or the sailor’s bell-bottoms and brimless ribboned caps. The local newspapers are called things like
Glory to Sevastopol
and
The Motherland Flag,
and the clock on top of the Sailors’ Club bangs out the tune ‘Legendary Sevastopol’ every hour. On May Day veterans gather at the railway station to lay flowers beside an old steam train painted with the slogan ‘Death to Fascists’. When the Soviet Union collapsed, nearly all the naval base’s officers went over to Russia, refusing to swear new oaths of loyalty to Ukraine and running up the tsarist St Andrew’s Cross over the battleships rusting in the oily harbour. They also hung on to the fleet’s fine neoclassical headquarters, shoving the disgruntled Ukrainians off to dilapidated barracks in the suburbs. Ashamed to let me see his office, a Ukrainian lieutenant gave me an interview outdoors in the rain. ‘It’s all lies what the Russians say about us having four ships and eight admirals,’ he grumbled, as a birch-tree dripped on to his collar. ‘These are very old political tricks – we’ve got
four
ships,
four
admirals.’ Back in the old headquarters overlooking South Bay, a Russian officer had told us that he still couldn’t quite believe that Russia and Ukraine were separate countries: ‘It will take dozens of years before we realise that we live in different states. Nobody takes all these customs controls seriously.’ And the Ukrainian ships? ‘We’re always happy when they get back to base by themselves – they don’t always manage it, they’re so inexperienced.’ His father was with the Black Sea Fleet before him, but he didn’t know where he would end up. ‘Most officers think of themselves as citizens of Crimea and of Russia. As for me, I grew up in Crimea, but Russia is my Motherland.’

Until 1996 Sevastopol was a closed city. All non-residents, Ukrainian citizens as well as foreigners, needed special permits to visit. After days of fruitless run-around for the right papers in Simferopol, I got past the check-points into town with the aid of a borrowed Ukrainian passport and a discreet twenty-dollar note. ‘I brought some Germans here a while ago,’ Arkady said. ‘They looked really Western in their big anoraks, so I took them in through the vineyards. But you look just like one of ours, so we won’t bother.’ I resolved to take this as a compliment. Months later I collared Sevastopol’s notoriously old-guard mayor at a London conference devoted to Ukrainian economic reform. A beetle-browed, brown-suited dead ringer for Brezhnev, he looked uncomfortable among the chattering, blazered businessmen. ‘So when,’ I asked, ‘is Sevastopol going to stop being a closed city?’

‘I can’t believe, Anoushka’ – eyebrows raised in bonhomous concern – ‘that foreigners have any problems getting in.’

‘But they do – I had to bribe the
militsiya.
’

‘But you should have called me! We want tourists, but élite, controlled tourism only. We can’t have lots of tourists, because we have no hotels!’

‘Yes, you do – I stayed in one.’

‘They have no water!’

‘But if you stay closed you’ll never get any investment, any new jobs. Your own businessmen say so.’

‘You shouldn’t have been talking to these people – they’re bandits, just little bandits!’ What he wanted, he said, was for Sevastopol to become a ‘free economic zone – because for every economic zone you need a fence, controls. And we have all this already!’ As he manoeuvred away through the crowd, his stubby hands started to shake – whether the effect of too much vodka or suppressed fury, I couldn’t tell.

With its passionate Russian-ness, its stunned refusal to acknowledge the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sevastopol is the whole of Crimea in concentrated miniature. Sixty-six per cent Russian-speaking, the peninsula has not been part of Ukraine for long. Khrushchev handed it over to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1954 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Pereyaslav; Crimeans say he must have been drunk. Staid and balmy, it was the place where every Russian dreamed of going on holiday, and where Party functionaries and military types came to retire.

When Gorbachev held his referendum on maintenance of the Union in March 1991, 88 per cent of Crimeans voted in favour, the highest percentage anywhere in Ukraine. Crimeans did in fact sign up to Ukrainian independence nine months later, but on a low turnout and by a margin of only 4 per cent. Since then, the peninsula has been a continual thorn in Kiev’s side. It elected a pro-Russian regional parliament, which has twice passed ‘constitutions’ declaring virtual independence, and voted, in an illegal referendum of March 1994, in favour of dual Russian–Ukrainian citizenship. Though the pro-Russian demagogue Yuriy Meshkov was easily booted out of the Crimean presidency once he got into turf-wars with his own parliament, the peninsula remains terminally unenthusiastic about being part of independent Ukraine. Unable to reconcile themselves to the new order, but nervous of demanding outright union with Russia, Crimeans daydream of turning the clock back to a rebuilt Soviet Union, to a make-believe world where Russians and Ukrainians were much the same thing. One of Meshkov’s more irritating achievements was to put the peninsula on to Moscow time.

Crimea’s wistfulness about Russia is reciprocated. If Russians find accepting independent Ukraine painful, taking on board the fact that Crimea – with its Cyprus trees and Massandra wines, its lapis-lazuli sea and shining cliffs – is part of it, is even worse. ‘Crimea is Russian, Russian!’ an otherwise impeccably democratic Moscow acquaintance told me one evening. ‘It’s never been anything else!’ And the Donbass slag-heaps? ‘Oh well, that’s another question.’

Russian or not, one can see why Crimea is worth making a fuss about. In my grandmother’s attic, I found travel diaries written by my great-great-great-uncle, a roving Scottish MP. ‘Climbing to the top of a hill overhanging the sea,’ he wrote in 1878, ‘I lay down under a pine tree and felt like a lotus-eater. Blue water, green trees, wild precipices, smiling orchards and vineyards, stately villas, and rude mountain villages, all lay around me in panorama . . .’ Avert your eyes from the communists’ shabby sanatoria, and the view from the cliffs above Yalta is just as lovely today. Another wandering Victorian, the Reverend Thomas Milner, was patronising – Crimea was no match for the Alps, and its reputation for romantic scenery due only to the flatness of everything else. But most travellers were happy to rhapsodise. ‘If there exist upon earth a spot as a terrestrial paradise,’ wrote the polymath Cambridge don Edward Daniel Clarke in the early 1800s,

Like so many ingredients of Russia’s self-image, the Crimea-as-Russian-heartland story has a hole at its centre. For the happy Golden Agers Clarke was talking about were neither Russians nor Ukrainians, but Crimean Tatars – still, when he visited, the large majority of the peninsula’s population.

Muslim and Turkic-speaking, the Tatars arrived in Crimea in the thirteenth century, with Batu Khan’s mighty Mongol army. Intermarrying with the tribes of the interior, they ruled the peninsula for the next 500 years, first as an offshoot of the Horde, and when the Horde crumbled, as a semi-independent khanate under Ottoman protection. ‘Henceforth,’ Khan Mengli Giray promised the sultan in 1478, ‘we are the enemy of your enemy, the friend of your friend.’
²
Though Soviet historians tried to deny the Tatars historical legitimacy by painting them as mere Turkish vassals, in fact the arrangement was a loose one. The sultan had the final say in the choice of khan, elected from among eligible Girays by the ‘kurultai’, a Horde-inherited assembly of Tatar nobles. But the khanate had its own legal system, bureaucracy and coinage, and above all its own army, with which it was able to exact yearly tributes from Poland and Muscovy (the Russian payments only came to an end under Peter the Great), and launch regular slave-raids deep into Ukraine.