CHAPTER THREE The Russian Sea: Donetsk and Odessa
Shall the Slav rivers merge into the Russian sea?
Or shall the sea itself run dry?
– Aleksandr Pushkin, 1831
‘WE CALL THESE things “Stalin’s hands”,’ said Alexey, pointing at a pair of hinged metal hooks at the bottom of a rusty conveyor-belt. Impervious to the freezing wind, he led me round snow-whipped slag-heaps and half-buried bits of rotting machinery, explaining just what each object was for. ‘These,’ he said, pointing to a stack of pine logs, ‘hold up the walls of the tunnels. The problem is that nowadays they’re very expensive and we don’t have enough of them.’ Earlier, an official at the local branch of the coal ministry had told me that 212 men had died in mining accidents in the Donetsk region the previous year, 32 of them in a single gas explosion. He hadn’t been at all embarrassed about the number: at four lives per million tonnes of coal produced it was well within normal ratios.
Alexey was in his early thirties, and had lived in Donetsk all his life. All his family were miners: during the war even his grandmother had worked down the shafts, losing the fingers of her left hand under the wheels of a runaway trolley-car. Though he had gone into a white-collar union job after college, he still thought of himself as a miner, a shakhtyor – in Russian the word still has a faint heroic ring – too. But beyond that Alexey wasn’t too sure what he was. Like most people in Donetsk he spoke only Russian, no Ukrainian. His family had come here from Russia, as far as he knew, late last century, when industrialisation was just getting under way. Did I know that Donetsk used to be called Yuzovka, after a Welshman, John Hughes, who opened the first foundry on the site? Did I know that Donetsk was twinned with Cardiff? Alexey had been there once on an exchange programme, and kept a little wooden shield painted with the Cardiff city arms in a glass-fronted cabinet in his office. ‘When we told them how we worked here they just couldn’t believe it. We looked at everything they had – the special baths, the clothes, the equipment – and we practically burst into tears.’
Inside the corrugated-iron shed at the top of the mine-shaft we watched the day-shift clocking off. Bent and ragged, with bloodshot eyes and gold teeth shining out of filthy faces, the men looked almost too miner-like to be true – blacked-up actors, perhaps, in some clichéd documentary on the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Most were in their forties or older. The younger ones, Alexey said, had found better jobs elsewhere, driving taxis or trading over the Russian border. He called a group over to meet the foreign journalist. They didn’t want to answer questions, jerking their heads when I asked them what they thought of their new Ukrainian government. As we shook hands, I noticed that many, like Alexey’s grandmother, had fingers missing.
In truth, Alexey said, the ‘Red Guard’ men didn’t much care who they were governed by. ‘Some of them demand that we go back to Russia, but this is just kitchen-talk. We know that Russia doesn’t need us – it already wants to close its own mines. Moscow, Kiev, it’s all the same.’ What they did want was better pay – any pay at all, in fact, since they hadn’t received a kopek for six weeks – and freedom to run their mine the way they wanted. ‘It takes six months to make any decision, because everything has to go through Kiev. The energy ministry takes our coal at three dollars a tonne, but we the producers aren’t allowed to sign our own contracts, though we could sell the same coal at $20 or even $60 a tonne.’ Dolefully Alexey shook his head, the flaps of his fur hat waggling like spaniel’s ears. Outside the snow swirled, the slag-heaps loomed, the tumbledown sheds and bits of broken machinery disappeared into the gathering dusk. It was time to go. As we said our goodbyes he pulled a bundle out of his pocket: two enamelled badges in the shape of his union’s initials, and a triangular banner in shiny red nylon. ‘For you – so you can remember Donetsk.’
Ukraine’s Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire’s belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine’s 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.
To stay independent, Ukraine has to keep its Russian-speaking east sweet. Densely populated and heavily industrialised, it already has a big say in the country. In the first post-independence presidential elections it was the weight of eastern votes that handed victory to Leonid Kravchuk, an ex-Party boss, over Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former dissident and leader of the independence movement. And in 1994 it was eastern votes that threw out Kravchuk, by then the darling of the nationalists, in favour of Leonid Kuchma, ex-director of a missile factory in the Russian-speaking city of Dnipropetrovsk. The previous year, ironically, Kuchma had been forced to resign as prime minister when thousands of Donbass miners arrived in Kiev demanding pay rises. Ukrainian politicians’ worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.
Ukraine’s Russians, though, are neither the oldest nor the most problematic legacy of Ukraine’s 300 years inside the Russian empire. Far more invidious was the effect of Russian rule on the Ukrainians themselves, beginning with the decline and fall of the Cossack hetmanate. Khmelnytsky’s Pereyaslav Treaty had not, in the Cossacks’ eyes at least, made Ukraine east of the Dnieper part of Russia, but simply given it Russian protection. Though subject to increasing Russian interference, the Cossacks still chose their own hetmans (subject to the tsar’s approval), ran their own army, and collected their own taxes. Loyalty to Russia was conditional, a matter of mutual rights and promises. The arrangement fell to pieces at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the disastrous hetmanate of that most un-Cossack of Cossacks – Ivan Mazeppa.
Suave and subtle, famous for his love affairs and his deft hand at political intrigue, Mazeppa was an even unlikelier rebel than Khmelnytsky. Born into a noble Orthodox family in Polish-ruled ‘right-bank’ Ukraine, he was schooled at a Jesuit college in Warsaw before entering the court of King Jan Kazimierz as a gentleman-in-waiting. Keen to create a cadre of Ruthenian nobles loyal to the crown, Kazimierz sent him to study in Holland before putting him to work on diplomatic errands to the left-bank hetmanate. In 1663 the promising young favourite suddenly left Cracow and joined the Polish-ruled Cossacks on the western bank of the Dnieper. Legend – as embroidered by everyone from Byron to Tchaikovsky – has it that he had been discovered in bed with the wife of a neighbour, who stripped him naked and sent him galloping off into the steppe on the back of a wild horse. Whatever the truth, Mazeppa spent the next few years travelling back and forth to the Crimean khanate as the Polish Cossacks’ envoy. In 1674, journeying home from one of these missions, he was captured by the Zaporozhians and turned over to the rival left-bank hetmanate as a spy.
At this point, one might have thought Mazeppa’s career was over. Not a bit of it. Deploying his already legendary charm, Mazeppa sweet-talked his way out of captivity and into a job as assistant to Ivan Samoylovych, the left-bank hetman. Thirteen years later, having ingratiated himself with Moscow and manufactured a conspiracy framing Samoylovych for treason, he was hetman himself. A nonpareil at sizing up the endless intrigues of the Russian court, he managed to stay in favour when Peter the Great overthrew his sister Sophia in 1689, and quickly became one of the young tsar’s closest confidants. Mazeppa sent Peter wines from Crimea; Peter replied with gifts of fish from the Baltic, as well as the new Order of St Andrew and vast Ukrainian estates. ‘The tsar would sooner disbelieve an angel,’ rivals muttered, ‘than Mazeppa.’1 The French diplomat Jean Baluse, on a visit to the Cossack capital of Baturin in 1704, described him at the height of his power:
Conversation with this Prince is extremely pleasant. He has unusual experience in politics, and, contrary to the Muscovites, follows developments in other countries . . . On several occasions I tried very assiduously to direct our conversation toward the present political situation, but I must confess I could find out nothing definite from this Prince. He belongs to that category of people who either prefer to keep completely silent or to talk and say nothing. But I hardly think that he likes the Muscovite Tsar, because he did not say a word against my complaints about Muscovite life. But in the case of the Polish crown, Monsieur Mazepa did not hesitate to declare that it is heading, as did ancient Rome, toward decline. He spoke about the Swedish King with respect, but deems him too young . . .2
As Baluse guessed, Mazeppa’s loyalty was wavering. Apostasy came four years later, precipitated by Peter’s long Northern War with the austere young Charles XII of Sweden. In September 1708 the conflict reached a crisis-point. Charles had already swept over Poland, putting a Swedish puppet on the Polish throne, and now his armies threatened Moscow and St Petersburg. But at the village of Lesnaya, in present-day eastern Belarus, the Swedes suffered their first serious setback, when Russian troops cut off and burned the wagon-train carrying the army’s supplies of powder, food and winter clothing. Unable to push on east, and with winter drawing near, Charles turned southwards to what he had been told was a ‘country flowing with milk and honey’ – to Ukraine.
Here Mazeppa’s genius for picking winners failed him for the first time in his life. Faced with a choice between hostile occupation by Charles’s brutal army, or supporting the Swedes and risking Russian fury later on, Mazeppa stalled, excusing himself from joining Peter by pretending to be mortally ill, then declared for Charles, taking 2,000 of his Cossacks with him. Peter was amazed and furious. ‘It was with great wonderment,’ he wrote, ‘that I learned of the deed of the new Judas, Mazeppa, who after twenty-one years of loyalty to me and with one foot already in the grave, has turned traitor and betrayer of his own people.’3 Peter immediately ordered that Baturin’s 7,000 inhabitants be put to the sword, and the following month, at a solemn ceremony in Moscow’s Uspensky Cathedral, Mazeppa’s name was pronounced anathema, a ritual that was to be repeated annually in all Russian churches for the next 200 years.
Exactly what Mazeppa hoped to get out of his U-turn is a mystery. He may have dreamed of putting himself on the throne of a genuinely independent hetmanate with Swedish backing. He may simply have been infuriated by Russia’s failure to honour the Pereyaslav Treaty by helping defend Ukraine against threatened invasion by the Poles. (Peter’s reply to earlier pleas had been ‘I cannot even spare ten men; defend yourself as best you can.’)4 He was certainly jealous of Peter’s favourite, Aleksandr Menshikov. But whatever his motives, he had picked the wrong man. The following summer, just outside Poltava, a small town east of Kiev, Charles’s and Peter’s armies finally came face to face. Wounded in the foot, Charles could only watch the battle from a litter, leaving command split between bickering generals. Demoralised and badly led, the Swedes suffered one of the most decisive defeats of European history. Sweden’s dreams of the Kremlin were over; Russia, with its first major victory against a modern army, was on its way to becoming one of Europe’s great powers. After the battle Charles and Mazeppa fled west across the steppe to Bender in Ottoman-ruled Moldova, leaving most of their army stranded on the wrong side of the Dnieper. Mazeppa died three months later, his head propped on saddle-bags full of looted diamonds. Charles was killed by a stray bullet in 1718, while besieging a town in Norway. Descendants of the soldiers they abandoned can be found outside the Swedish embassy in Kiev, forlornly applying for citizenship of a country their ancestors left three centuries ago.
In Poltava I stayed with a family of Baptists, introduced by my temporary interpreter Taras, a spotty youth who spent his spare time reading Pilgrim’s Progress (‘What, please, is a Slough of Despond? Who is Mr Valiant-for-Truth?’) and distributing American-produced leaflets showing believers climbing ladders to heaven, and unbelievers burning in hell-fire. (Religious tolerance, in Taras’s book, was ‘a typical decadent Western idea’.) Grandparents, two sets of parents and eight children all shared a newly built, immaculately tidy house on the outskirts of town. Lined up in height order like the Family von Trapp, the children gave their names – Irina, Kristina, Slavik, Yulya . . . – and sang an evangelical hymn: ‘My Father is waiting for me in heaven/Where He has made a crown for mee-eee.’ Afterwards they went back to watching Stop Or My Mom’ll Shoot! on video. Though all the characters were dubbed by the same bored voice, they didn’t seem to mind, laughing uproariously at every joke. The machine, little creamy-cheeked Irina explained, was a present from South Carolinan missionary dentists, who had given them all fillings while spreading the Word. So too was the shiny new poster on the wall, with coloured time-lines showing mankind’s progress from Adam to Last Judgement, via the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. But what had really impressed her was the dentists’ remarkable bulk. ‘There was one’ – a conspiratorial whisper – ‘called Phil. When he sat down his legs went like that!’ And she spread her hands in the manner of a fisherman describing a monster missed catch.
Poltava, it turned out, hadn’t yet decided whether to treat its famous battle as a glorious Russian victory or as a tragic Ukrainian defeat. In the meantime, successive ideologies were being allowed to accumulate, like strata in a sort of historiographical ocean bed. In the middle of town, in a square full of cigarette kiosks and shuffling trolley-bus queues, stood a tsarist monument, all cannons, eagle and laurel wreaths, celebrating the battle’s first centenary. Next came the inevitable Lenin, one hand outstretched, the other deep in his pocket (‘Looking for money for the budget,’ said my driver). Opposite Lenin a big hand-painted billboard had gone up: ‘The Flower Poltava in the Wreath of Independent Ukraine!’ The newest monument of all was a giant stone cross, inscribed ‘To the Cossack Dead’ in folksy Ukrainian lettering. The central post office, a white pillared building that had housed the local Nobles’ Club, chipped in with a mercifully apolitical message of its own: ‘CITIZENS! USE THE SIX-DIGIT POSTAL INDEX!’
In the little museum on the battlefield site – a snowbound muddle of factory buildings and straggling woodland – the traditional Russian version of events held undisputed sway. Socialist-realist oils showed Peter at his more sympathetic pursuits: rolling up his sleeves in a cannon foundry; dividers in hand in the Volga shipyards; spotlit through storm clouds aboard a rearing charger. The grand finale was a diorama of the battle itself – real wagon wheels and cannon balls in front of a painted scene of galloping horses, flying banners and puffs of smoke, all ‘created by artists of the Grekov studio of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR’. But why hadn’t the museum got anything about Mazeppa? The attendant, a pretty blonde in anorak and padded boots, rifled through her desk, produced keys, and led me along a corridor to a distant room. Here, she said, was their new exhibition. It had pictures of Mazeppa in beaten copper, bits and pieces of weaponry and Ukrainian folk costume, and a wobbly fibreglass Cossack gravestone. It was behind locked doors, she said, because ‘we don’t have a man to look after it. If anyone asks, we just let them in.’ Hadn’t the museum come under any pressure to ditch its old, pro-Russian displays? A sigh. ‘At first, yes, but now it has faded away. Nobody’s interested in history any more.’
Following the disastrous Mazeppa adventure, the hetmanate went into rapid decline. The Cossack capital was moved from Baturin to Hlukhiv, closer to the Russian border, and Russians were given command of the Cossack regiments. Government was overseen by a ‘collegium’ of Russian officials, and hetmans who stood on their rights were imprisoned or replaced. Royal favourites were granted vast Ukrainian estates, and began building themselves the neoclassical mansions, designed by Scots and Italians, whose dilapidated hulks still brood over the villages east of Kiev today.
The last of the hetmans was Kyrylo Rozumovsky, younger brother of Oleksiy, an affable but illiterate Ruthenian who caught Empress Elizabeth’s eye while singing in the imperial choir, and subsequently became her lover, maybe even her husband. He was removed by Catherine II in 1764, following his petition for a return to full autonomy and for the hetmancy to be made hereditary in the Rozumovsky family. Now that the hetmans were gone from ‘Little Russia’, Catherine declared, ‘every effort should be made to eradicate them and their age from memory.’5 In 1781 she did away with the hetmanate altogether, splitting its territory into three provinces organised on the same lines as the rest of the Russian empire. The Sich had been razed by Russian troops six years earlier, and its lands given over to Russian grandees and German and Serbian colonists. The surviving Zaporozhians were deported to the Kuban, north-west of the Caucasus, leaving Ukrainians to sing ballads in their memory – and scour the Dnieper reed-beds for their hidden treasure – for ever after.
One of the reasons Catherine felt able to do away with the Cossacks was that she no longer needed their help against the Turks. In 1774 she had signed a peace treaty with the Sultan handing the Crimean khanate, formerly an Ottoman protectorate, over to Russia. With the khanate came control of the ‘wild field’, the fertile, uninhabited no-man’s-land between Crimea and the Sich lands to the north. The treaty meant that the centuries-old to-and-fro between Tatar and Cossack raiders was over. Ruthenian peasants would no longer be marched south for sale in the slave-markets of Kaffa and Constantinople; Tatars would no longer wake to find their ports torched by Cossack galleys. The ‘wild field’ had suddenly become a safe place.
According to the Russian scheme of things, the peace restored a rightful inheritance. By annexing the Black Sea steppe, Russia was ‘gathering the Russian lands’, rebuilding the ancient kingdom of Rus. Catherine had a commemorative medal struck, engraved with the words ‘I have recovered what was torn away’, and gave her new territories the name Novorossiya – New Russia.
Today, New Russia exists only in the imagination. The endless plains and vast skies are still there of course, but the grey-green grass, the bison, marmots and antelope, the buzzards and wild horses, have long since disappeared under the plough. People who did see and describe the virgin steppe all came up with the same image – the ocean. ‘I sail a sea where waters never ran/My wagon like a boat,’ wrote Mickiewicz.6 Riders disappeared into the rippling grass like a fish into waves; canvas-covered ox-carts rolled over it like ships under sail. Nothing pierced the gently undulating horizon save the occasional line of willows by a river, or the distant gravemound of some Scythian warrior-princess, buried complete with horse and manservant, battle-axe and turquoise-studded jewellery. So featureless was the landscape that the wagoners, like sailors, steered by the stars.
For some the steppe was a desert, but for most, like Nikolay Gogol (a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian), it was an inspiration:
The surface of the earth appeared here like a golden-green ocean, flecked with the colours of a million different flowers. Through the tall, slender stalks peeped pale-blue and lilac cornflowers; the yellow broom thrust its spiky tips upwards; the white clover adorned the surface with its umbrella-like caps; an ear of wheat, blown God knows from where, stood ripening, deep in the grass. Partridges with craning necks darted hither and thither among the slender roots. The air was filled with the song of a thousand different birds. Hawks hung motionless in the air, their wings spread wide and their keen eyes fixed on the grass. The cries of a passing flock of geese carried to their ears from a distant lake. With measured strokes of its wings a gull rose from the grass and bathed luxuriantly in the deep-blue waves of the air . . .7
But once made safe for farmers, the steppe could not stay empty for long. For centuries tall stories had been told about its fertility. Leave a plough in a field overnight, it was said, and next morning you couldn’t find it again for new grass. So numerous were the bison that hunters didn’t even bother to eat their meat, just taking the hides. So packed were the rivers with fish that a spear would stand upright, unsupported, in the water. Growing up on the Sea of Azov in the 1870s, Anton Chekhov saw the wilderness eaten away by windmills and telegraph poles, villages and ploughed fields. His lyrical short story The Steppe, based on boyhood journeys with the old ox-drawn wagon-trains, was written as a memorial to a landscape that was vanishing for ever:
You drive on for one hour, for another . . . You meet upon the way a silent old barrow or a stone figure put up God knows when and by whom; a night bird floats noiselessly over the earth, and little by little those legends of the steppes, the tales of men you have met, the stories of some old nurse from the steppe, and all the things you have managed to see and treasure in your soul, come back to your mind . . . And in the triumph of beauty, in the exuberance of happiness you are conscious of tension and yearning, as though the steppe knew she was solitary, knew that her wealth and inspiration were wasted for the world, unsung, unwanted; and through the joyful clamour one hears her mournful, hopeless call for singers, singers!8
Catherine gave the job of opening up ‘New Russia’ to her one-eyed lover Grigory Potemkin. His job was to attract new settlers into the countryside, and to found naval and commercial ports on the lower Dnieper and along the coast. In both enterprises he was spectacularly successful. Cheap government loans and remissions from serfdom and taxation brought in the farmers, and trading exemptions helped the towns. In 1787, to show off his achievements and celebrate the twenty-fifth year of Catherine’s reign, Potemkin organised a royal progress down the Dnieper to Crimea. Catherine and her entourage left St Petersburg in early January, travelling in gilded coaches mounted on sleds. Reaching Kiev at the end of month, they waited three months for the ice to break on the Dnieper, before setting off downriver in a fleet of eighty boats led by eleven brocade-upholstered Roman-style galleys. At the new town of Yekaterinoslav, the present-day Dnipropetrovsk, Catherine was met by her ally Josef II of Austria, and the two laid foundation stones for a vast new cathedral. Though the city was still nothing more than a collection of wooden houses, Potemkin had grand plans for a university, law courts and a conservatoire. Josef was cynical: ‘I performed a great deed today,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘The Empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid – the last.’9 But further downriver at Kherson, where things were more advanced, the party could not but be impressed:
Imagine on the one hand a quantity, increasing hourly, of stone buildings; a fortress, which encompasses a citadel and the best buildings; the Admiralty, with ships being built and already built; a spacious suburb, inhabited by merchants and burghers of different races; and, on the other hand, barracks housing about 10,000 soldiers. Add to this, almost opposite the suburb, an attractive-looking island with quarantine buildings, with Greek merchant vessels, and with canals constructed to give these vessels access. Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment, for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives were kept for winter.10
The tour climaxed at Sevastopol, where Catherine reviewed her new sixteen-ship Black Sea Fleet, threw roubles to a troop of ‘Amazons’ done up in turbans and ostrich feathers, and enjoyed a spectacular fireworks display, which terrified the natives. As the coloured sparks faded into the hot Crimean night, the letter E – for Yekaterina – appeared on a hillside, etched in 55,000 torches. Potemkin had done well, and Catherine was delighted. An excellent portrait of the empress, taken in Kiev as she set off on her New Russian tour, still hangs in the city’s Tereshchenko Gallery, former town-house of an artistically inclined sugar magnate. Direct, blue-eyed, Germanic, she resembles nothing so much as a shrewd and forceful headmistress.
New Russia may have been the work of the Russian monarchy, but ‘New Russia’ was still a misnomer. Potemkin’s new cities, with their newfangled boulevards and fancy classical names, were certainly not very Ukrainian places. But they were not very Russian either. From the first, New Russia depended on foreigners.
The place that epitomised this was Odessa. Its history begins with the capture by a Spanish-Irish mercenary in Russian pay of a small Turkish fortress called Khadzhibey. A Dutch engineer, Franz de Voland, recommended to Catherine that the fort, with its good natural harbour, be turned into New Russia’s capital. Catherine approved, and gave him the money to build breakwaters. Her city, she decided, should be female – hence Odessa, after the ruins of the ancient Greeks’ Odessos along the coast to the east.
The man who turned Odessa from idea into reality was Armand-Emmanuel, Duc de Richelieu. A great-nephew of the cardinal, he had sat out the French Revolution in Russian service, fighting under Suvorov in Turkey. In 1803 Tsar Aleksandr I made him governor of Odessa, and, two years later, of all three provinces of New Russia. A foreign exile who had done well under the expanding Russian empire, the 36-year-old de Richelieu populated his new kingdom with more of the same. Offering cheap land, religious toleration and exemption from military service, he attracted persecuted minorities from all over Europe and the empire. From the south came Bulgars, Serbs, Moldovans, Greeks and Armenians; from the north Jews; from the west Swiss and hard-working Mennonite Germans; from the east dissenting Molokans, Dukhobors and Old Believers. By 1817, when there was no more virgin land to be given away, Richelieu was able to report that ‘Never, Sire, in any part of the world, have there been nations so different in manners, language, customs and dress living within so restricted a space.”11 Remarkable as much for his incorruptibility as for his energy, when de Richelieu returned home to France to serve as prime minister under the restored monarchy he is supposed to have taken nothing with him but a suitcase containing his uniform and two shirts. A statue at the top of the Odessa Steps shows him in a Roman toga; in its plinth is lodged a piece of round-shot, fired by the British frigate Tiger during the Crimean War.
The next governor-general was another Frenchman, Count Alexandre Langeron. Unlike de Richelieu, he found the New Russian salad indigestible. ‘The territory entrusted to me,’ he wrote gloomily, ‘is as large as all of France and is populated by ten different nationalities . . . There are to be found also ten different religions and all ten are practised freely. One can judge the work which burdens me and the absolute impossibility of my doing it all.’12 His successor, after a brief interregnum, was Mikhail Vorontsov, a Russian but also a passionate Anglophile. He had spent his childhood in London, where his father was Russian ambassador, and gone to university at Cambridge. His father had married an Englishwoman, and his sister an Earl of Pembroke. (Her portrait still hangs, surrounded by beefy in-laws, on the grand staircase at Wilton House in Wiltshire.) Arriving in Odessa in 1823, Vorontsov brought his English tastes with him. On the cliffs near the Crimean fishing village of Alupka, English architects built him an extraordinary palace, half Moghul mosque and half Scottish castle, which he filled with Holbeins and statues of the Duke of Wellington. Suitably, it was in this monstrous piece of Victoriana that Churchill and his suite were housed during the Yalta conference of 1945.
Meanwhile Odessa was booming. When Vorontsov took office the population stood at 30,000. By the time he left it had more than doubled, and continued to grow at breakneck speed right up to 1914. Grain from the hinterlands rolled into the city by oxcart, later by train, for export to the great corn-marts at Genoa, Leghorn and Marseilles. Laid out on a grid-shaped street plan and surrounded by sea and prairie, it reminded Mark Twain, researching a comic travel book in the 1860s, of the boom towns of the American West:
It looked just like an American city; fine broad streets and straight as well; low houses (two or three stories), wide, neat, and free from any quaintness . . . a stirring business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and everything; yea and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored American way. Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw only America!13
Foreigners founded Odessa; foreigners made it grow. The export trade was dominated by Greeks and Italians, prompting hand-wringing articles in the Russian press about the lack of native entrepreneurial drive. A German firm installed the gaslights, Belgians the trams, British the waterworks. The paving-stone for the roads came from Trieste; after the eruption of Mount Etna in 1900, some were re-covered in black Sicilian lava. The opera house, completed in 1887 after its predecessor burned down, was the work of Austrians, and the acacias shading the boulevards were descendants of trees imported by de Richelieu from Vienna. Even the famous Odessa Steps, nearly twice as wide at the bottom of the flight as at the top, were installed by a shady English engineer named Upton, who had fled Britain while on bail on a charge of forgery. In Odessa, wrote a visitor in the 1840s,
the Russian jostles against a Turk, a German against a Greek, an Englishman against an Armenian, a Frenchman against an Arab, an Italian against a Persian or a Bucharestian . . . Everything surges and mixes together: the dress coat, the swallowtail coat of the West European mixes together with the kaftan and robes of the oriental. Here there is glimpsed . . . the modern hat of a Frenchman, the high towering cap of a Persian and the turban of an Anatolian and the fez of a Morean and a Dutch sailor in a wide-brimmed low hat.14
Commercial, apolitical, foreign, Odessa was a city for runaways, for outsiders. For the poor it was a place to change one’s life, to make a fortune. Serfs fled there in their thousands, knowing that the demand for labour meant they were unlikely to be returned to their owners if discovered. They were nicknamed neznayushchiye – ‘I don’t knowers’ – for their refusal to say where they came from. Later most of the immigrants were Jews fleeing the impoverished shtetlech of the Pale. For the rich, it was an escape from the stifling atmosphere of St Petersburg – not quite abroad, but almost as good. Exiled from the capital, Pushkin and the Polish poet Mickiewicz both spent pleasant, frivolous summers strolling the boulevards and seducing star-struck poetry groupies – Pushkin going so far as to have an affair with Vorontsov’s wife. Retiring world-weary Onegin to Odessa after his fatal duel with Lensky, he describes nights of oysters and opera; mornings smoking and sipping Turkish coffee while a doorman swept the pavement in front of the casino. ‘But why succumb to grim emotion?’ asks Onegin. ‘Especially since the local wine/Is duty free and rather fine./And then there’s Southern sun and ocean./What more my friends, could you demand?’15
Odessa is still a lovely city. Unspoilt by war or planners, it is a place for idling away one’s time in outdoor cafés – it has more of them than anywhere else in Ukraine – and quizzing the passing crowds. In most ex-Soviet cities people shuffle; they keep their eyes to the ground and don’t swing their arms or legs. Not so in Odessa. Odessans have style, self-confidence. In winter they eat stuffed pike in little basement restaurants, in summer they snorkel for mussels on the breakwaters, and brew their own wine from the vines trailing across their sagging balconies. Their city is somewhere everyone in the Soviet Union used to dream about, and they know it. After the helpless degradation of places like Donetsk, watching Odessans go about their business is a relief and a pleasure.
Quicker than anywhere else, Odessa is stripping away its monochrome Soviet varnish to reveal the old multi-ethnic identity underneath. Ulitsa Karla Marksa has turned back into Yekaterinskaya, Lenina into Richelyevskaya, Karla Libknechta into Grecheskaya – ‘Greek Street’. Babelya, named after the great Odessan novelist Isaac Babel, has become Yevreyskaya – ‘Jewish Street’. Just as foreigners built the city, foreigners are bringing it to life again. A Swiss firm has done up the grand old Londonskaya Hotel, now a favourite haunt of conspiratorial businessmen. Cypriots have opened a casino in the old stock exchange building, staffing it with bemused Liverpudlian croupiers, and Italians have renovated the port, from which boats full of petty traders and prostitutes ply again the old routes to Haifa, Alexandria, Istanbul.
The most remarkable bit of foreign-led reconstruction is of the city orchestra. Odessa has a proud musical history. ‘All the people of our circle – brokers, shopkeepers, bank and steamship office employees – taught their children music,’ wrote Babel of his turn-of-the-century childhood in the poor Jewish quarter, the Moldavanka.16 Though Babel himself made noises ‘like iron filings’ before running off to play hookey on the beach, it was a tradition that produced great violinists, among them Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh. So I went to hear a concert – a concert, as it happened, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day.
It took place in the old stock exchange building, downstairs from the Cypriot casino. A riot of barley-sugar columns, Egyptian friezes and Gothic heraldry, the hall was filled with the kind of people who look as though they march on May Day and want to rebuild the Soviet Union. Old boys in boxy blue uniforms, dangling tiers of medals, sat next to their tiny, fierce wives. Schoolgirls in long white socks and frilly pompoms bobbed up and down expectantly. The orchestra came on and struck up tunes for each of the Allies – Bizet for the French, Elgar for the British, de Sousa for the Americans, a grand, grim bit of Shostakovich, all snowy plains and rumbling tank columns, for the Russians. The conductor, a handsome young man, was obviously something of a local hero. In between numbers, the girls and grannies lined up in front of the stage and handed him bunches of lilac wrapped in silver paper. But there was something odd here. The figure at the centre of this festival of Soviet valour wasn’t a Russian, he wasn’t even a Ukrainian. He was, in fact, an American: nash Hobart – ‘our Hobart’ to Odessans.
Visiting Odessa as a guest conductor a few years previously, Hobart had fallen in love with the place and decided to stay. When he arrived the woodwind had run out of reeds, the strings hadn’t had their bows re-haired for years and the trombones were using washing-up bottles as mutes. The repertoire was antiquated. ‘In Soviet days,’ a clarinettist told me, ‘we had a kind of percentage plan – so much modern music, so much Ukrainian music, and so on. If Schnittke wasn’t a favoured composer we didn’t play him. You didn’t actually get a letter or a phone call – it was just kind of in the air.’ Now that Our Hobart was in charge, the players were still only being paid ten dollars a month, but life had begun to perk up. There was new music to learn and they had performed abroad in Germany, Spain and Britain, even in America. To save money on these trips they took all their food with them and busked in shopping malls between concerts. I asked Hobart if he ever worried that his orchestra might simply melt away mid-tour, resurfacing as a bunch of illegal waiters and cleaning ladies. He didn’t. ‘We had one musician who went to Poland where he earned ten times as much on a building site. But he came back. He missed the orchestra, he missed Odessa, and he missed me.’
For Ukrainians, Russia’s conquest and settlement of New Russia was something of a sideshow. The Black Sea steppe had never been part of Ukraine anyway. If it had belonged to anyone, it was to Tatars and Greeks. What affected them much more was the beginning of ‘Russification’, the insidious centuries-long process whereby not only the Ukrainians’ political institutions, but their culture and identity, were fitted to the Russian mould.
Russification did not only happen in Ukraine. All the nations of the empire suffered it, under tsarism as well as Communism. But Russification was more determined and more successful in Ukraine than elsewhere. First, Ukraine joined the empire early: Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper went to Russia in 1686, Estonia and Latvia were conquered twenty years later, the Caucasus and Finland not until the nineteenth century. Ukraine thus became to Russians what Ireland and Scotland were to the English – not an imperial possession, like Canada or India, but part of the irreducible centre, home. Hence Lenin’s (probably apocryphal) remark that ‘to lose Ukraine would be to lose our head’, and the dream of romantic nationalists such as Solzhenitsyn that Russia, Ukraine and Belarus will one day be reunited.
Second, Russians regarded – and still regard – Ukrainians as really just a subspecies of Russian in the first place. Any differences that did demonstrably exist between them were the artificial work of perfidious, Popish Poles – replaced in today’s Russian imagination by the meddling West in general. Rather than attacking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-ness as inferior, therefore, Russians deny their existence. Ukrainians are a ‘non-historical nation’, the Ukrainian language a joke dialect, Ukraine itself an ‘Atlantis – a legend dreamed up by Kiev intellectuals’ in the words of a parliamentary deputy from Donetsk. The very closeness of Ukrainian and Russian culture, the very subtlety of the differences between them, is an irritation. Why Lithuanians and Kazakhs refuse to consider themselves Russians is perfectly obvious. But that Ukrainians should choose to do the same is simply infuriating. A Ukrainian friend who used to live in Moscow described to me the appalled reaction of her impeccably anti-communist Russian friends to Ukrainian independence:
When we were part of the empire it was very well taken to be Ukrainian. They patted you on the back, they were very friendly, and they loved your Ukrainianism. We were all brothers in grief. But when Ukraine became independent – horrors! The best democrats immediately became so imperialistic. I had neighbours on my landing – very nice people, very liberal. But when it all happened and I was trying to decide whether to move back to Kiev, they said ‘You’re mad! Ukraine? What kind of Ukraine? What are you talking about?’
The ethnic Russian I got to know best in Kiev was Yuriy – George as he preferred to be called – Pestryakov, a retired physicist. Speaking courtly English gleaned from Dickens and Maugham, and liable to recite Kipling’s If off by heart at a moment’s notice, he was the model of the old-style intelligent. Many of his friends had emigrated to Israel or America, leaving him rather lonely in a tiny flat dominated by massive mahogany furniture and an out-of-tune grand piano stacked with old newspapers. But for all his devotion to Kipling and the World Service, for all his long years spent debating samizdat in smoky kitchens, Yuri was appalled both by the West – ‘The Americans, they’re robots, they never read, all they do is barbecue!’ – and by Ukrainian nationalism – ‘It’s not renaissance, it’s Nazification!’ Though his father’s family came to Kiev in the 1850s, and his own grandfather, an Orthodox priest, was shot by the Bolsheviks during the Red Terror, he considered himself a Russian through and through. Still, after 150 years in Ukraine? ‘Look. Before 1989, there was never any antagonism between Ukrainians and Russians, never in anything. The only exceptions were some people from the Union of Writers who were unhappy about their inability to distinguish themselves in any other way.’ Ukrainianism, in other words, was a fraud, the self-justifying invention of second-raters.
Like Polonisation before it, the Russification of Ukraine started at the top. One of the reasons Catherine the Great was able to dissolve the hetmanate so easily was that she simultaneously extended Russian noble privileges to the Cossack ruling class. In 1785, along with the rest of Russia’s nobility, they were exempted from taxes, from government duties, and from military service. In another sop to Cossack self-interest Ukrainian peasants, like Russian ones earlier, were forbidden to leave their landlords, reducing them to the status of serfs.
Since Peter’s time, Ukrainians had done well in Russian service. As the Russian empire expanded, their opportunities widened. Though a few continued to mourn the hetmanate, secretly circulating fantastical histories of Khmelnytsky and Mazeppa, most were happy to treat it as a piece of out-of-date antiquaria, taking jobs in the imperial administration and preaching loyalty to the empire. Typical of the loyalist attitude was Viktor Kochubey, chairman of the Imperial Council in the 1830s. ‘Although I was born a khokhol,’ he told the governor-general of Ukraine, ‘I am more Russian than anybody else . . . My calling and the position I hold put me above all sorts of petty considerations. I look at the affairs of your province from the point of view of the common interest of our country. Microscopic views are not my concern.’17 Gogol lampooned ‘those mean Little Russians . . . droves of whom can be found in council chambers and government offices, who squeeze every kopek they can out of their fellow-countrymen, flood St Petersburg with denunciations, finally amass a fortune and solemnly add to their surnames ending in O the letter V.’18
Throughout the nineteenth century Russification of Ukrainians proceeded hand in hand with the emasculation of Ukraine’s Poles, who still made up most of the landowning class west of the Dnieper. In 1833 Kiev was given a new Russian university named after St Vladimir and designed, according to the Russian education minister, to ‘disseminate Russian education and Russian nationality in the Polonised lands of western Russia’.19 Thousands of Poles involved in the risings of 1831 and 1863 lost their estates, and were sent, often in chains and on foot, to Siberia. Those left behind were subject to intense surveillance: the novelist Balzac, revelling in the luxury of his Polish mistress’s house near Zhytomyr (‘The servants literally throw themselves on their stomachs when they enter one’s presence, beat the ground three times with their foreheads, and kiss one’s feet’)20, found his post ransacked by customs. Poorer nobles lost their patents of nobility, reducing them to the status of peasants, and Polish schools were closed, a move which hurt Ukrainians especially, since they could rarely afford to educate their children at home instead. As a result literacy rates actually fell. Better educated than Russia under the hetmanate, by the end of the century Ukraine was producing more illiterate army conscripts than any other part of the empire.
A campaign against the Uniates, begun by Catherine, recommenced under Nicholas I. Whole parishes were converted at the point of the bayonet, and in 1839 the Orthodox and Uniate faiths were officially ‘re-unified’. This was followed by confiscation of the property of Uniate monasteries and the arrest, deportation or imprisonment of hundreds of monks and priests. New laws forbade marriages between the religions, and conversion from Orthodoxy to other faiths.
As with Ukraine’s Western-influenced religion, so with its Western-derived legal system. In 1831 municipal privileges based on the ancient Magdeburg Law were rescinded, and in 1840 Ukraine’s separate legal code, the ‘Lithuanian Statute’, was replaced by ordinary Russian law (though a few obscure legal quirks, last remnants of Duchy rule, survived right up to the revolution). A ballad of the period, ‘The Lament of the Kievans on the Loss of the Magdeburg Law’, decried the fact that ‘the bearded ones’ had taken over Kiev, and condemned the old city government for having lost its rights through corruption and gambling, concluding that now ‘the Muscovite will rule’.21
In 1876 Russification climaxed with the Edict of Ems. Taking the waters in that German spa, Aleksandr II signed a decree banning all import and publication of Ukrainian books and newspapers, all stage-shows, concerts and public lectures in Ukrainian, and all teaching in Ukrainian, even for infants. Ukrainian-language books were to be removed from school libraries, and Ukrainophile teachers transferred to Great Russia. During cholera outbreaks, even public health notices were to be posted in Russian alone.
Russification almost succeeded. By the 1840s, writes the Ukrainian-Canadian historian Orest Subtelny, ‘the political significance of Ukraine and the Ukrainians’ had become almost terminally ‘vague and emasculated’. Neither the Decembrist rebellion of 1825 nor the Polish rising of 1831 included Ukrainian claims in their programmes, although they took place partly on Ukrainian soil and included Ukrainians among their leadership. In 1825 peasants in the villages around Kiev even helped round up rebel soldiers and hand them over to the authorities.
Cooperating with Russian government, though, was not the same thing as being Russian. The cities might be largely Russian-speaking, and the nobility Russified to the point of indistinguishability from the genuine article. But the process, like Polonisation before it, never went more than skin deep. In the villages, peasants took orders from their landlords in Russian, but still spoke Ukrainian among themselves. And though they did not yet call themselves ‘Ukrainians’ – the term, unlike the ancient word Ukraina, was not widely used until the end of the century – they knew very well that they were something different from the loathed Muscovites, the moskali. ‘The worst label that a Little Russian pins on a Pole,’ wrote Johann Georg Kohl, a German anthropologist who travelled through Ukraine in the 1830s, ‘is a “senseless Pole”; while a Muscovite in the imagination of the Little Russian is always “cursed”. The Little Russians have such widely used proverbs as: “He is a good man but a Muscovite!”; “Be friendly with the Muscovite, but keep a stone under your coat!’”22 Kohl’s remarkably prescient conclusion is worth quoting in full:
Before their subjection, all Little Russians were freemen, and serfdom, they maintain, had never been known among them. It was the Russians, they say, that reduced one-half of the people to slavery. During the first century after the union, Little Russia continued to have her own hetmans, and retained much of her own constitution and privileges, but all these have been swept away by the retrograde reforms of the last and present century . . . Should the colossal empire of Russia one day fall to pieces, there is little doubt but that the Little Russians will form a separate state. They have their own language, their own historical recollections, seldom mingle or intermarry with the Muscovite rulers, and are in number already more than ten million. Their national sinews may be said to lie among the rural nobility living in the villages, from among whom every great political movement has hitherto emanated.23
Kohl got it half right. The Russian empire did fall to pieces, and Ukrainians did get their own separate state, but not under the leadership of the old, suborned Cossack nobility. The authors of modern Ukraine were a brand-new class that rose from the ranks of the peasantry – the Ukrainian intelligentsia.