Byzantium Endures (60 page)

The train stayed another day in a siding, then took us away from Hrihorieff’s garrison to a nearby Bolshevik camp. This contained more uniforms but it was only slightly less orderly than the partisan camps. Many Red Cavalry Cossacks were drunk, though Chekists tried to control them. These commissars had far more authority than any ordinary officer. They were greatly feared, as Lenin wanted them to be. I was doubly glad I was an ‘activist’, with comrades who still talked of ways and means of getting me to Odessa. We were thirty or forty versts closer, I think. I was not good at judging distance or the passage of time. Nikolaieff, if that were our destination, was relatively near to Odessa, east along the coast. Kherson was even further east, on the Dnieper, as Nikolaieff was on the Bug. The two towns were strategically important. They were served by main railway lines and rivers leading directly to the sea. Large ships docked at both. With these cities taken, an army approaching from Alexandriya would be able to attack Odessa with its large well-equipped Allied and White garrison. This was the substance of most debates over the coming days. Allied ‘interventionist’ forces defended Kherson and a reluctant German garrison occupied Nikolaieff. Though supported by French or English warships, the cities were vulnerable. However there was considerable dispute between Hrihorieff and the Bolsheviks about strategy. I suspect Antonov wanted any victories for himself. Brodmann claimed to be winning partisans over to the Bolshevik cause daily. They were now, he said, describing themselves as ‘Bolsheviks’ instead of ‘Barotbists’. I was unimpressed. They seized on slogans and Parties for comfort because they could no longer fight for God. At least the Whites knew what was of value to them. With better leaders, they would have given us back God and our Tsar. The Roman Empire never fell. It lives on in spirit. God will return to Russia. There is a religious revival. Byzantium remains in the soil, in the hearts of the people.

The train moved a few versts a day. Grubby snow melted and revealed a ruined land; as bandages are peeled away from an unhealed body.

What surfaced, like detritus from wrecked and violated ships, was disgusting: we saw half-eaten human corpses, not savaged by beasts, but by men and women. Peasants were now being shot for cannibalism, for selling human flesh as animal-meat. We saw burnt-out cottages and farms; the shells of honourable old mansions; the broken skeletons of ploughs and carriages; the bodies of untended cattle and sheep, hides and fleeces rotting on stinking bones. It was our shame. We had hidden it in winter, as we always do. But when buds were on those trees not smashed by shells, when shoots sprang from earth not desecrated with oil and fire and human filth, our crimes were revealed. No enemy had committed these atrocities, unless it was Karl Marx. This had been done in the name of the Ukrainian nation: in the name of Russia: in the name of Unity: in the name of Humanity: in the name of Brotherly Love. No Crusade was ever more shamefully perverted. The Holy Sepulchre had been stolen from our hearts. And guilt, as guilt will, made our soldiers even more savage. The tales we heard were terrible: of Jews and Whites toasted over fires on sheets of steel, of mutilations and rape; of the most disgusting sexual atrocities committed on men and women. Spring came, but not peace. In Russian the word for World is Peace; the word for Peace is Us; they are all derivations of the same thing: the word for Us is Earth. That is why we speak of ‘our earth, our world, our peace, ourselves’; why we make that identification foreigners rarely understand. To violate our earth is to violate everything. We are not mystics. It is only our language which is mystical. Because of its resonances. It gives us our great literature, our poetry, our songs, our music. It makes associations a German, for instance, cannot begin to perceive unless he speaks Russian lovingly and fluently. The steppe-dweller becomes touchy and despairing if his land is attacked by unnatural things. The Cossacks fought not for Bolshevism, not for Whites or Greens or Blacks; they fought, purely and simply, against the roads, the railways, the cities. Their idyllic Russia was a Russia of wide skies and small villages, of horses and cattle. If they could have accepted the twentieth century, the world would have been sweet for them. They would have been able to create more freedom than any they had previously known. But they attacked a town to raze it, to loot it, to take their booty home. Even Hrihorieff, even Makhno, both of them strategists of great cunning and not illiterate men, could not understand that the cities were fundamental to their world. This ignorance was the chief cause of their downfall. Control of the cities was the key to the freedom they sought. They discussed this, but they did not feel it. A Cossack must feel something in his bones before he can accept it. It was the Jew, the world over, who controlled the cities; he is its first real, instinctive modern city-dweller. Even those in the shtetls hated the steppe.

Our Ukrainian war was the first great war between Urban- and Country-dweller. To survive today, one must league oneself with the city. Those who leave are at best sentimentalists, at worst deserters. Ukraine was a land of wealthy industrial cities drawing on our mineral resources; of wealthy kulaks drawing on our infinite wheatlands. More than anywhere else in Russia, Ukraine displayed both the dilemma and the solution. That is why we have suffered so much up to the present day. I do not speak from self-pity. There is little of that in my nature. I speak objectively. The problem could have been defined. It could have been remedied. Ukraine could have become the world’s first modern civilisation. Trotsky and the Nationalists between them put an end to that. Two negative forces collided. Ego: they all thought they knew best. Chaos and Old Night were released upon the world.

Brodmann and I became friends, of sorts. He admired me and would often ask for practical advice. I did what I could to modify his excesses. I invented examples drawn from my fictitious Red activist life. As a result, my reputation grew. My engineering skills were often called upon as we moved from camp to camp. I was still a prisoner. Of course, they did not know it. Dozens of times I pointed out I would be more useful to them in Odessa. I was now ignored. They began to plan in earnest the assassination of Hrihorieff. They had received direct orders from their Moscow superiors. The Ataman was acting out of hand, refusing to take orders, winning over Bolshevik liaison men to his own point of view, seducing some of their best people. I was asked to make an infernal machine to blow up the Cossack chieftain. My conscience would not let me. I claimed materials were hard to come by. Of course they offered to requisition everything I needed. I said it was a dangerous business. Whoever used the bomb might also be blown up. They would employ someone not particularly ‘useful to the Party’. I mentioned the possibility of people other than Hrihorieff dying. I was told that those who had gathered about him were as much responsible as the Ataman himself. I heard the whole litany: the now-familiar Bolshevik rationalisation of cold-blooded murder. This, too, would establish itself in the consciousness of all kinds of socialists, including the National Socialists, who hampered their own cause by adopting the tactics of those they opposed. They also inherited the Bolshevik talent for efficient-sounding neologisms. Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin have a great deal to answer for. Stalin regarded himself as a philologist. I was not surprised to learn that. It was easy for him. He had invented the very language he pretended to examine. Zamyatin, with his eloquence and insight, pointed this out in his book
Mi (We
in English). He had all his ideas stolen by Huxley and Orwell, those poor imitators of H.G. Wells. The Anarchists on the other hand were always bad at inventing new words, though most of their best slogans were taken over by the Bolsheviks. This was probably the reason for Anarchism’s failure. It could not simplify problems. Lenin understood how effective simplification could be.
Cheka.
The word is a chilling abbreviation of words meaning Special Commission for Internal Affairs. We would be wary of such a name, but we would not immediately fear it. In Scandinavian the word for terror is something like
Skrek.
Skrek would have the same mixture of coldness and authority: a no-nonsense sound. And how the Chekists loved to use their name!

‘Cheka!’ And off would come the hats and caps. Men and women would even kneel. Russians were still scarcely aware they were no longer serfs, let alone that they were ‘comrades’. ‘Cheka!’ And out would come the pathetic little hoards, or the papers, or the pleas for mercy. And the machine-guns would go
cheka-cheka-cheka
just to prove what mercy meant: a quick death rather than a slow one. Of course the Chekists turned on one another in the end. Down they went, in cellars, in ditches, in camps, until the name was so foul it had to be changed and Beria began his rule, whispering words of fear in Stalin’s ear. They say he laughed when he saw Stalin was really dead. He strutted about as if he had achieved that death himself. He thought he had triumphed entirely. We should have had a Jewish Tsar sitting on the Russian throne. Luckily Beria met the fate of Rasputin, an amateur at manipulation compared to his famous successor. Stalin was ready to begin an action against the Jews. That was why Beria poisoned him. But these facts are obscured. What did Stalin do, for instance, with .Hitler’s body? To that uncertain, Georgian mind it was his by right of vendetta. Or was Stalin the first true robot; this Man of Steel? Is that the joke Beria played upon the world? In Russia they still call KGB ‘cheka’: it has become a slang word.

Brodmann confided to me, at last, that he wanted no part of the assassination plan. I told him I agreed. As a professional saboteur, the killing of Hrihorieff was beneath me. ‘My violence is done to machines and communications,’ I said. We shared a Wagon-Lit. It had been parked in a siding somewhere to the north of Nikolaieff. We got few reports. Hrihorieff seemed undecided which town to attack first. Antonov did not want Hrihorieff to attack either. He claimed he wished to ‘save’ the citizens from outrage. He really needed to prove himself to his masters, to claim Hrihorieff’s glory. Hrihorieff, in turn, boasted of a dozen conquests a day. Half the towns taken were shtetls or gypsy camps. But his boasting had the desired effect. More and more partisans joined him as he moved towards the cities: firing threatening cables before him as an ancestor might have fired human heads; to frighten the garrisons and undermine their morale.

At some time in March we learned Hrihorieff had taken Kherson by storm. His telegrams ‘To All, All, All!’ came back and were posted up throughout South Ukraine. The city was occupied in the name of ‘The Working People of the World’, but the tone of his messages was clear: Hrihorieff, Ataman of the Zaporizhian Cossacks, had done what the Bolsheviks could not do. The pogroms continued. Even Antonov, in control of Kiev, had been unable to stop the sacking of Podol by regular Red Army soldiers.

There was a multitude of rumours. We were fifty versts behind the lines and received no direct information. I was only interested in Hrihorieff as far as he concerned me. I still could not get permission to go to Odessa. Antonov had become suspicious of Bolsheviks playing ‘happy ships’ with Hrihorieff. This naval term describes what happens when one crew falls in love with another. The Bolshevik officially in command of irregular units did whatever Hrihorieff ordered. We were not all so sure of the chieftain’s ability to hold his gains. This was why Antonov wanted him liquidated.

What had happened in Kherson was this: Hrihorieff issued an ultimatum to the garrison’s C-in-C. The dignified Greek replied it was his duty to defend the city to the last. He had confined leftist hostages and their families in a warehouse. The French frigates in the river opened fire on Hrihorieff’s Cossacks as they swept into Kherson. The French used incendiary shells. These set the warehouse alight. Hundreds of men, women
and
children were burned alive. Hrihorieff took ghastly revenge. The French escaped, but not a single Greek was spared. They were killed as they fought or as they surrendered. Hrihorieff filled a ship with their bodies and sent it down the river to Odessa: the first modern corpse-ship. The effect on the morale of the French garrison in Odessa and, when the news came, Nikolaieff’s German garrison, was of course devastating.

Kherson had given up her materiel: tanks, guns, ammunition, food. The city was looted in true Cossack fashion. Hrihorieff continued to pretend he served ‘Soviet’ authority. His men were seen selling their booty in our camp, in every village they stopped at: women’s dresses, suits, boots, crucifixes, ikons, paintings, delicacies, antiques. Half the ‘boorzhoos’ had sought refuge in Kherson. The Cossacks had found them easy victims.

Nikolaieff surrendered soon after this and Hrihorieff gained greater strength. Thousands of Cossacks, Haidamaki, partisan divisions, tanks, infantry in armoured trains, began to move on Odessa. Panic filled me. Anything could happen to my mother and Esmé. I applied through Antonov’s field commanders to be returned to Odessa. I received no reply.

I heard a rumour. One of our trains was leaving for the ‘Odessa Front’. It carried Bolshevik troops. Antonov hoped to strengthen Hrihorieff’s units and pretend Bolsheviks were responsible for the victory. With Brodmann and one other, I at last got myself assigned as political commissar: because I knew the city well I could contact Bolshevik comrades already spreading propaganda amongst the French, local people and Whites.

I shared the staff-carriage with a dozen half-drunk Red Army officers, Brodmann and the other commissar. His name was something like Kreshchenko. When the train was on its way the officers revealed their orders. We were not going direct to Odessa. Our first job was to contact Makhno to try to gain his sympathy and help in curtailing Hrihorieff. Apparently Makhno disapproved of Hrihorieff. His support, the equal to the Ataman’s, had been given reluctantly. The Red Army men said the French were weak, divided at home, confused in their orders, understanding nothing of the issues involved. Those Moscow Bolsheviks could as easily have said the same of themselves. They had no clear idea of Makhno’s or Hrihorieff’s political stand. Their distaste for the irregulars was evident (they were all ex-Tsarists). I sympathised, but I had been forced to survive amongst the rabble. I knew at least how feelings ran. Even the Red Cossacks believed ‘Russian chauvinists’ were not true Communists. The Cossacks, they argued, were Communists by tradition and experience. The single fact Trotsky understood was that Ukrainian partisans were hard to discipline. It had been easy enough for him to take over the remnants of the Tsar’s army; but he loathed the peasant fighters. He would destroy as many as he could once they had served their turn. Stalin completed his work. Every Bolshevik success involved a revival of Tsarist methods. Tell me who was vindicated. Tell me who was responsible for Pan-Islam? We have no Cossacks now.