Borderland (7 page)

The battle
The White Guard
describes – between Reds, Whites and Ukrainian partisans – is not only a battle for a city, but a battle for an identity, for an imprimatur from something far older and grander than the participants themselves – in other words, for Kievan Rus. St Volodymyr – the polygamous prince who ordered Perun to be drowned and beaten – hovers above the action in the form of the cast-iron statue, holding an illuminated cross, which still stands above the Dnieper in one of Kiev’s parks. At the close of the book, as the Bolsheviks prepare to take the city from the partisans, Bulgakov turns the saint back into a warrior:

For Bulgakov, Volodymyr was defending a lost empire, perhaps a lost way of life. For Ukrainians, he stands for a lost history; the first equivocal staging post in a battle which stretches over a millennium.

CHAPTER TWO

You boast, because we once
Brought Poland to calamity.
And so it was; Poland fell,
But you were crushed by her fall as
well.

–
Taras Shevchenko, 1845

May you croak in the faith of the Poles!

–
Traditional Ukrainian curse

K
AMYANETS
P
ODILSKY HAD
one functioning café, a dark, damp cell built into the medieval city walls. It sold ersatz ‘Jacky’ coffee and cardboard biscuits, and its only other customer was a wispy young man in a tweed jacket and fogeyish leather brogues. Hearing foreign voices, he came over and produced a business card, a flimsy photocopied rectangle with a home-drawn logo above the words ‘Valery Chesnevsky, Architect’. Underneath, in careful Latin lettering, he pencilled in the word ‘Unemployed’. The reason he was unemployed, he said, was that he was a Pole – the only one left in Kamyanets.

Kamyanets used to guard Poland’s south-eastern border against the Turks. Encircled by the rocky gorge of the Smotrych river and accessible only by soaring single-span bridges, it was one of Christendom’s mythic outposts, remote yet uniquely impregnable. A Turkish sultan, passing by at the head of his army, is said to have asked who fortified the city. ‘God himself,’ came the answer. ‘In that case,’ replied the sultan, let God himself storm it.’ In 1672 the Turks did capture the city, albeit briefly, and the spell was broken. A minaret went up in the courtyard of the SS Piotra i Pawla Cathedral, and the words There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Apostle of God’ were inscribed in Arabic – as reported by a startled Victorian missionary – over the door. The nearby Polish fortress of Khotyn, its curved curtain walls the work of Genoese military engineers, housed the local pasha’s harem: the young Prince Adam Czartoryski, touring with his tutor in the 1780s, when the region had fallen to the Turks for a second time, thought its women ‘very untidily dressed’.
¹
Today there is nothing to show that Khotyn was built by Italians on behalf of Poles, the guidebook on sale at the ticket-booth baldly informing visitors that it symbolises ‘the struggle of the Ukrainian people against foreign invaders’.

Being an architect in Kamyanets, said Valery, was a depressing business. Run by Ukrainian nationalists, the local government would not give work to a Pole. Outdoors, hunched against a bitter wind, it didn’t look as if there was much work to be had anyway. From a distance the city – all pepper-pot fortress and baroque bell-towers – had looked picturesque, poster-cute. Close up, it was falling to bits. Stained, cracked, swathed in black plastic and wooden scaffolding, its historic buildings stood about like relics of some lost civilisation, as irrelevant to their surroundings as Inca temples to a Peruvian peasant. There were no shoppers, no strollers, no tourists; in the weed-grown central square, the only sign of life was an old woman grazing a scabby pony. Passing a buttressed wall, Valery made me kneel down and peer between a pair of wooden doors, half off their hinges. All I could see was a mess of rubble and puddles, bird-droppings and fallen beams. This, he told me, had been a Benedictine monastery. A clothing factory had set up shop in the medieval cloisters the previous summer, and some bales of cotton had caught fire. ‘The fire station isn’t far away, but they mainly tried to save the factory. Nobody cared about the church, so it burned out.’

Not all Kamyanets’s churches were as forsaken. Walls might sag and ceilings might drip, but bit by bit some at least were coming back to life. Catholic monks from Cracow had put a new copper roof on the cathedral and installed two or three pews – all they needed, since most of the city’s Poles were deported by Stalin after the war. A card pinned up by the door outlined a four-point plan for new communicants: ‘1. GET BAPTISED. 2. GET MARRIED IN CHURCH. 3. HAVE YOUR CHILDREN BAPTISED. 4. SEE OUR PRIEST.’ The other churches were being taken over by the Orthodox and the Uniates. In Trinity Church technicolored icons, draped with embroidered napkins, filled the niches where Polish madonnas once stood; the nave of St George’s, a planetarium under communism, had been cut in two by a new plywood iconostatis. Valery’s star exhibit was in the cathedral vestry, a leftover from its days as a Museum of Atheism. On a window-sill stood a knee-high mechanical model of a monk shouldering a wicker basket. Valery turned a handle and the lid of the basket opened, revealing a naked girl. This is how they taught us that monks were not monks, and monasteries were whorehouses.’

Ukraine’s relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising; Ukraine inarticulate and put-upon. Ukraine resents Poland for hogging the limelight; Poland resents Ukraine for stealing its lines. Ukrainians, like the Irish, rebelled against their Polish landlords at every opportunity; Poles, like the English, responded with a curious mixture of affection, scorn and fear. The Ukrainians, one interwar Polish memoirist wrote of the tenants on her lost Volhynian estates, were ‘singers of songs as beautiful as any in the whole world; a slothful bovine people whose torpor concealed an element which might break out into a hurricane at any moment . . .’
²

That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila’s marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time. Power was divided between the king and the Sejm, a representative assembly elected by the nobility or
szlachta.
Uniquely, the
szlachta
comprised around 10 per cent of the population, giving a level of representation that would not be bettered elsewhere until the nineteenth-century British Reform Acts, and forcing princely magnates to share power on an equal basis, in theory at least, with poor smallholders whose pride was the only thing differentiating them from the surrounding peasantry. Only the Sejm could make legislation, and the king could not raise taxes or troops without its consent. From the late sixteenth century onward the
szlachta
also appointed the king himself, at a rowdy gathering in a field outside Warsaw. Poland thus became that constitutional oddity, an elective monarchy, and a Republic of Nobles.

Compared to
szlachta
status, religion and race were unimportant. The nobility included Ruthenians (the Polish name for what were to become Ukrainians and Belarussians), Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Moldovans, Armenians, Italians, Magyars, Bohemians and even Muslim Tatars. ‘One is born noble, not Catholic’ was the motto. Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox all served in the upper house of the Sejm, and the legal system used six different languages – Ruthenian (precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian), Polish, Hebrew, Armenian, German and Latin. The Reformation saw an influx of recherché nonconformist refugees, who were allowed to build churches and proselytise. Lviv, in present-day western Ukraine, became the only city in the world besides Rome to host three Christian archbishoprics – Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian. Zygmunt August, last of Iogaila’s descendants, called himself ‘King of the people, not of their consciences’, and his father Zygmunt the Elder put down a bumptious cleric with the words ‘Permit me, Sir, to be King of both the sheep and the goats’.
³

But the virtues of the Polish system were also its weaknesses. Unfettered by a strong monarchy, the wealthiest magnates – Ruthenians and Lithuanians as well as Poles – operated like independent rulers. In the wide, underpopulated eastern borderlands they accumulated vast estates as big as many a Western kingdom. Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, a French military engineer who worked for the Polish crown in Ukraine through the 1630s and ’40s, wrote that these ‘kinglets’ had ‘the right to place crowns on their coats of arms, in the manner of minor sovereigns, to cast as much cannon as they please, and to build fortresses as strong as their means may permit. Neither the king nor the Commonwealth may prevent them. Indeed, they lack only the right to coin money to be sovereign.’
⁴
Quarrels between ‘kinglets’ were frequent, and settled in full-scale battles involving thousands of armed retainers. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted: one magnate paraded at court in a suit fashioned from all the writs he had received and ignored. Poles still use the expression ‘Write to me in Berdychiv’ – a small town west of Kiev – to mean ‘Catch me if you can’.

With the rise of the great landowners, Polish society, once so tolerant and inclusive, began to atrophy and fossilise. In the early sixteenth century, just as the rest of Europe was abandoning serfdom, Poland introduced it, the better to exploit an export boom in grain. Rather than extract money rents from peasant farmers, landowners preferred to take the land in hand and turn it over to wheat, using the peasantry as free labour. ‘Ukraine was treated,’ in the words of the historian Adam Zamoyski, ‘by its own elite as well as by the Poles, as a sort of colony.’
⁵
Laws were passed making it difficult for peasants to leave the land, and they lost their rights of appeal, leaving them at the mercy of local manorial courts. De Beauplan described the results:

The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of ‘Sarmatism’, based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population. In line with their newly-invented Sarmatian credentials, the
szlachta
developed a bizarre taste for the bejewelled and exotic. Turkish carpets and enamelled coffee pots started appearing in wood-girt Polish manor houses; Polish knights shaved their heads, wore Arab-style chain-mail armour, and dyed their horses’ hides cochineal pink or patriotic red-and-white on special occasions. Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks.

With serfdom and Sarmatism came the end of religious toleration. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, with the Counter-Reformation and Poland’s wars against the Swedes and Turks, Polishness became increasingly identified with Catholicism. Nonconformists were banished, entry to the
szlachta
was barred to non-Catholics, and a new chain of Jesuit colleges set about converting the sons of the Orthodox nobility. The high point of the Catholic push came when Piotr Skarga, an influential Jesuit divine, persuaded a group of Orthodox bishops, hopeful of being admitted to the upper house of the Sejm, to acknowledge papal supremacy while retaining their own Slavonic liturgy and their priests’ right to marry. In 1596 an Act of Union was signed at Brest creating the ‘Greek-Catholic’ or Uniate Church, which dominates western Ukraine to this day. The rest of the Orthodox were furious, denouncing the Union and calling for an anti-Catholic alliance with the Protestants. Alarmed by the uproar, two of the four new Uniate bishops turned tail and reverted to Orthodoxy. ‘Your dear Union,’ the chancellor of Lithuania wrote to one of the remainder, ‘has brought so much bitterness that we wish it had never been thought of, for we have only trouble and tears from it.’
⁷