Borderland (9 page)

The transfer of Ukraine’s loyalties from Cracow to Moscow took place in January 1654 at Pereyaslav, a small town on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, not far south of Kiev. From the beginning, the partnership was an unhappy one. The two delegations, headed by Khmelnytsky and the Russian envoy Vasiliy Buturlin, met in a church. Khmelnytsky had expected that in exchange for an oath of loyalty on the Cossacks’ side, Buturlin would, on behalf of Tsar Alexey, swear ‘that he would not betray the Cossacks to the Poles, that he would not violate their liberties, and that he would confirm the rights to their landed estates of the Ukrainian
szlachta
’. Buturlin refused. Polish kings might make oaths to their subjects, he said, but they also often broke them, whereas ‘the tsar’s word is unchangeable’. Furious, Khmelnytsky stalked out of the church, only to stalk back in again a few hours later, and sign a unilateral oath of obedience. The tsar’s title changed from ‘the autocrat of all Russia’ to ‘the autocrat of all Great and Little Russia’, and the Cossack hetman took a new seal substituting the tsar’s name for that of the Polish king.

Symbolism aside, Pereyaslav’s significance became apparent only with hindsight. Over the next thirty years Russian, Polish, Cossack and Tatar armies swept repeatedly through Ukraine in a series of formless wars dubbed ‘The Deluge’ by Poles and ‘The Ruin’ by Ukrainians. The situation did not stabilise until 1686, when Poland and Russia – this time without even consulting the Cossacks – signed a so-called ‘eternal peace’, handing Kiev and all lands east of the Dnieper over to Muscovy. For the next three and a quarter centuries Kiev would be ruled from Moscow.

Khmelnytsky left lots of unanswered questions behind him. Historians disagree about why he started his rebellion, the extent to which he controlled its course, and why he ended it the way he did. Easier than saying what his rebellion was is saying what it was not. One aim he certainly did not have was to free Ruthenian peasants from serfdom. Their interests were consistently ignored during the various treaty negotiations, and one of the prices Khmelnytsky paid for his alliance with the Tatars was allowing them to march whole villages away to the Crimean slave-markets for auction. Nor is it clear that the rebellion – initially at least – was even anti-Polish. Marching westward at the outset of the 1648 campaign, Khmelnytsky wrote letters to the Polish king in the style of a loyal subject protesting his grievances, signing himself ‘Hetman of His Gracious Majesty’s Zaporozhian Host’. For much of the time, the rebellion looked more like a war between different Ruthenian interest groups than an ethnic conflict. Wisniowiecki and Adam Kysil, the chief general and chief negotiator on the Commonwealth side, were both Polonised Ruthenian magnates. Kysil was Orthodox; Wisniowiecki was a great-nephew of the founder of the Zaporozhian Sich and had converted to Catholicism only sixteen years previously.

The Ukrainian version of events, of course, is that Khmelnytsky led an early, failed, war of independence. Probably he never aimed that high. But that the Cossacks did want political and religious autonomy is clear, as proved by the demands they laid down in their various treaty negotiations with the Poles. The abortive treaty of Hadziacz, for example, would have allowed the Cossacks to choose, subject to crown approval, their own treasurer, marshal and hetman. It would have given them their own courts, mint and army, and it would have banished Polish soldiers, Jews and Jesuits from Cossack lands. From whose hands the Cossacks took autonomy, though, seems to have been immaterial. At one point, Khmelnytsky was even in talks with the Ottoman Porte about establishing the same sort of loose protectorate enjoyed by Moldova and Crimea. Pereyaslav itself may only have been intended as a temporary alliance, one more move in the Cossacks’ long juggling act between powerful, threatening neighbours.

Like the historians, today’s Ukrainians are not quite sure what to make of Khmelnytsky. On the one hand he beat the Poles; on the other he delivered up Ukraine to the even tenderer mercies of the Russians. But they are reluctant to jettison him altogether. Ukrainians have not hit the history books often, and under Khmelnytsky, for a while at least, they were genuinely a power to be reckoned with. For a country short on heroes, he is simply too prominent to pass up. Instead, he and his Cossacks have once again been recast to suit the mood of the times – Khmelnytsky as the leader of Ukraine’s first failed stab at independence; the Sich with its Rada as a prototype democracy.

On Khortytsya island in Zaporizhya, now a smoggy industrial city and once the site of the Sich, the local museum has installed a new Cossack exhibition, financed by the Ukrainian diaspora. My friend Roma Ihnatowycz – a Ukrainian-Canadian journalist – and I arrived on a bleak Sunday in February, when the museum was half-closed and the surrounding park thigh-high in grimy snow. The curator was surprised to see anyone in such weather, and pleased that a foreigner was writing about Ukraine. She showed us hetmans’ batons and model Viking ships, Scythian arrowheads and a panorama of the Rada in full raucous swing. Did we know, she asked, that Marx had called the Sich the ‘first democratic Christian republic’? Did we know that the Cossacks had helped France defend Dunkirk during the Thirty Years’ War? Did we know that Orly airport, in Paris, was named after Pylyp Orlyk, author of the first Ukrainian constitution? Some might pretend, she said, that the Cossacks were nothing but bandits, but all cultured, scientific people knew they were early social democrats. The Cossack experience might even help the Ukrainian government work out its new constitution. Ukrainians didn’t need to copy America or Germany, for ‘we have our own history, our own system’.

The drive home to Kiev took us through the old Cossack heartlands – the gently folded plains which skirt the northern edge of the Ukrainian steppe. Covered in snow, the countryside looked one-dimensional, like an overexposed black-and-white photograph. Crows, fluffed into balls against the cold, crouched motionless in the bare trees either side of the empty road. Concrete signposts, topped with hammer-and-sickle or block-jawed proletarian, marked the entrances to ‘Labour-loving’ village or ‘Peace’ collective farm. As the monochrome landscape lurched past, I suggested to Roma that as national figureheads the Cossacks weren’t up to much. Weren’t they violent? Weren’t they drunk? Above all, weren’t they failures? Didn’t even Gogol make fun of his Cossack hero Taras Bulba? Roma got cross. ‘Cossacks,’ she said, ‘are all we’ve got. Other people’s heroes might be a bit more polished, but for Ukrainians the rawness of it all, the down-to-earthness of it all is just what we like.’ Persuading her to forgive me took the rest of the trip.

The end of Polish rule over Ukraine turned, a century and a half later, into the end of Poland. Weakened by war, peasant uprisings, foreign machinations and the fecklessness of its own nobility, by the mid eighteenth century Poland was, in the words of Frederick of Prussia, ‘like an artichoke, ready to be eaten leaf by leaf. Shorn of two-thirds of its territory in the Partitions of 1773 and 1793, the Commonwealth finally collapsed for good in 1795. The eastern half of the old Commonwealth lands fell to Russia, the remainder to Prussia and Austria. Like Kievan Rus, Poland had fallen off the map. Like the Ukrainians, the Poles were now a nation without a state.

Shared misfortune did not turn them into friends. During the Polish rising of 1863, Ukrainian peasants rounded up insurgents and turned them over to the Russian authorities. At the end of the First World War Polish and Ukrainian partisans fought over Galicia, left vacant by the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire. Between the wars Ukrainian nationalists in Polish-ruled western Ukraine mounted an assassination campaign against Polish government officials, and the two partisan armies fought again at the end of the Second World War, as the Germans retreated west before the Red Army. The bickering continued right up to 1945, when a wholesale population exchange brought about a crude but effective divorce.

The reason for conflict was simple. Ukrainians regarded Ukraine as Ukrainian. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poles regarded it – along with the rest of the old eastern borderlands – as immutably Polish. The borderlands, in fact, were even
more
Polish than Poland proper, because the provincial nobility, unlike the sophisticates of Warsaw, had stuck to old-fashioned
szlachta
ways. The fact that the actual population of those borderlands was mostly of a different nationality was immaterial. Hence Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet and a man who never visited Warsaw in his life, was able to open his patriotic epic
Pan Tadeusz
with the words ‘Oh Lithuania’.

The other great example of the borderland mentality is Joseph Conrad. Born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he grew up in Terehovye, a small village eighty miles south-west of Kiev. His family were crazily, pathologically, patriotic. Jozef’s father Apollo celebrated his birth in 1857 with a poem entitled ‘To My Son, born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression’. With baptism came another poem: Tell yourself that you are without land, without love, without Fatherland, without humanity – as long as Poland, our Mother, is enslaved.’ Conrad’s own earliest surviving work is a note to his grandmother, thanking her for sending cakes to Apollo, by then in gaol for anti-Russian agitation in a Warsaw coffee-shop. The six-year-old solemnly signs himself ‘grandson, Pole, Catholic, nobleman’. Later, his most vivid childhood memories were of his mother wearing black in mourning for Poland’s demise, and of a great-uncle’s tales of eating roast dog on the retreat from Moscow with Napoleon. When Conrad set off, aged sixteen, to join the French merchant navy, a family friend saw him on to the train with the words ‘Remember, wherever you sail you are sailing towards Poland!’. Surfeited with Polishness, Conrad only ever went back home once, ending his days in the undemanding county of Kent. His Canterbury tombstone muddles up his English and Polish names, rechristening him ‘Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski’.

The Korzeniowskis’ house is still there in Terehovye, used now as the village school. Though not very big, one can see that it once belonged to gentry. The doors are thick and panelled, the walls have cornicing round them, and plaster rosettes show where chandeliers once hung. The drawing room has been turned into the school gymnasium – lines painted on to the parquet, basketball hoops screwed to the walls, and a portrait of Lenin propped up behind a pile of hockey-sticks in a boarded-up bay window. Outside a line of lime trees marks the edge of what was once a terraced garden.

The village is a tiny place, silent save for a chained dog, and smelling of melting snow and horse manure. But it has not forgotten its famous writer. A very deaf old man with gold teeth and a fur hat let me into the collective farm headquarters, where alongside the obligatory pictures of astronauts and folk dancers sepia photographs hung of Conrad on a pony, Conrad at his desk, Conrad in naval uniform. Down at the bottom of the hill, by a frozen lake, he drew a dipper from a square, brick-lined well. ‘Conrad drank this water. It’s a very good well – it never freezes.’ But since Conrad was a Pole who lived abroad most of his life and wrote in English, why should the villagers care? ‘They don’t,’ he said; ‘they think – what did Konrad give us? Nothing!’

Despite their antagonism, matched circumstances pushed Poland and Ukraine into matching survival strategies. For Poles in the nineteenth century and for Ukrainians right up until 1991, the idea of nationhood took on a religious, almost metaphysical significance. Just as diaspora Ukrainians still tend to regard themselves as part of Ukraine despite having been born and brought up in Canada or Australia, exiled nineteenth-century Poles felt they were no less part of Poland for having spent their lives in Paris or Moscow. Their countries existed in a sort of mental hyperspace, independent of such banalities as governments and borders. ‘Poland is not yet lost’ was the title of a Napoleonic Polish marching song; ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-than-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem.

With this state of mind went a peculiar approach to the writing of history. In the imagination of both countries, as the historian Norman Davies puts it, ‘the “Word” has precedence over the “Fact” . . . more attention is paid to what people would have liked to happen than to what actually occurred.’
¹⁸
National leaders and national uprisings – no matter that they failed – are given more space and weight than the foreign governments who actually dictated events. Poles revere their ‘Constitution of May 3rd’, Ukrainians, their so-called ‘Bender Constitution’. Never mind that neither even came close to being put into practice, for intentions are more important than results.

This heroic imaginative effort did not make the political re-emergence of either country any easier. Both have had enormous difficulty persuading the rest of the world to take them seriously. The British historian E.H. Carr, a delegate at the Paris peace talks of 1919, called reborn Poland ‘a farce’. For Keynes it was ‘an economic impossibility whose only industry is Jew-baiting’; for Lloyd George, ‘a historic failure’ – he would no more hand over Upper Silesia to Poland, he swore, than he would give a clock to a monkey. George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech of August 1991, in which he urged Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union. But at least Bush knew Ukraine existed. Six years after independence, many otherwise well-informed Westerners have either completely failed to register that they have a country called Ukraine as a neighbour, or have vaguely heard of it but have no idea where it is, throwing out guesses – Somewhere on the Baltic? Next door to Kazakhstan? – with the gay abandon of a child playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.