Borderland (6 page)

Whereas northern Rus fell to the Horde, southern Rus went to the Lithuanians. Warlike and turbulent, worshippers of trees, snakes, hares and streams, they were the only Baltic people to have successfully resisted the efforts of the mighty Teutonic Knights to convert and rule them. When Rus collapsed after the Mongol withdrawal, they filled the vacuum, quadrupling the size of their Duchy in less than a hundred years. In 1362 a Lithuanian army under Grand Duke Algirdas took Kiev, and the following year it inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mongols at the battle of Blue Waters in the bend of the Dnieper. The Lithuanian Grand Duchy now occupied roughly half the territory of old Rus, extending all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Despite their fierce reputation, the Lithuanians proved relatively gentle rulers. Without the numbers or resources to colonise or occupy, they adapted to existing arrangements, co-opting the old Rus nobility into government under the motto ‘We do not change the old, nor do we bring in the new’. Many Lithuanians adopted Orthodoxy, and Ruthenian – the precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian – became the Duchy’s
lingua franca.
’Magdeburg Rights’, common throughout medieval Europe and granted to Kiev and the other old Rus cities in 1494, let burghers elect their own mayors and magistrates, and exempted them from various taxes. All this, according to Ukrainian historians, is why the traditions of Kievan Rus lived on in what was to become Ukraine, while they perished in Mongol-ruled Muscovy.

In reality, it is doubtful whether much of Kievan Rus survived anywhere. What the Lithuanians did do, with endless consequences for East European history, was forge Ukraine’s centuries-long link with Poland. Soon after conquering southern Rus, the Lithuanians decided that to hold on to their new empire they needed an ally – in practice either the Teutons or the Poles. The Poles seemed the lesser of two evils, and in 1385 Grand Duke Iogaila opened negotiations for the hand in marriage of Poland’s eleven-year-old girl-queen Jadwiga. The Polish barons, preferring a non-interfering Lithuanian to a powerful Hapsburg, agreed, and the following year the hastily baptised Iogaila was solemnly crowned King of Poland.

For Jadwiga, the marriage was a disaster. Handed over to a hairy heathen instead of her promised Austrian fiancé, she pined away, devoting herself to good works and dying childless at the age of twenty-four. Politically, however, it was a resounding success, climaxing with the Union of Lublin in 1569, which turned two separate states with a shared monarchy into The Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations’. From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.

Here begins Ukraine’s great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine ‘Eastern Little Poland’; the Russian name for Ukraine was ‘Little Russia’. The Ukrainian spoken in western Ukraine has lots of Polish words; the Ukrainian of central Ukraine is full of Russian ones. West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as ‘Pan So-and-So’; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are ‘Gospodin’. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate ‘Uniate’ church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope. Western Ukraine has ruined Renaissance palaces, walled towns, onion-domed churches. Villages dot its rolling valleys, in Conrad’s words, ‘like clusters of boats hidden in the hollows of a running sea’. It is, in short, a far-flung slice of Mitteleuropa. Eastern Ukraine is flat, dreary and covered in beet-fields and slag-heaps – the western edge of the thousand-mile-wide Russian steppe.

Kiev is where the two legacies meet. The Dnieper, Ukraine’s only major natural feature and the boundary which used to divide the country between Russia and Poland, also splits the city into two. The golden domes of its great Orthodox monasteries and the neo-Gothic spire of its Catholic cathedral jostle on the skyline, and Ukrainian and Russian mingle in a crude slang known as
surzhik
in the trolley-buses and on the streets.

The result, surprisingly, is lassitude rather than tension, shadowy cross-hatching rather than stark black and white. Ask a Kievan his background, and his reply will probably be something along the lines of ‘My father is a Ukrainian raised in Siberia, my mother a Russian from Odessa, and our surname sounds Polish.’ Unlike the burningly self-aware inhabitants of Vilnius or Tblisi, Kievans aren’t yet quite sure who they are, and don’t much care. Six years after independence, hammer-and-sickle emblems still top the parliament and foreign ministry buildings, and at the end of the central highstreet, the Khresh-chatyk, Lenin stretches out an ox-blood marble hand to a billboard advertising a newly privatised bank. Engels Street has been renamed, but Karla Marksa has stayed in place. All these survivals are less a product of nostalgia than of a pragmatic inclination to let sleeping dogs lie.

One of the clues to Kiev’s lack of ethnic or ideological fire is its resolute provincialism. For 700 years it has been a borderland city, a sleepy periphery to a buzzing centre elsewhere. Thrust to stardom on independence, it has not let fame change its style. Newspapers carry little but domestic news, several days late. The state-owned television channels subsist on folk-dancing footage intercut with shaky helicopter shots of Santa Sofia. (Viewing, as one Ukrainian-Canadian diplomat puts it, is ‘an act of patriotism’.) Occasions on which Kiev is required to play the national capital tend to end in farce. When Bill Clinton visited in the spring of 1995 the government asked him to sleep in the presidential jet because none of the hotels were grand enough, and a reception for Prince Charles at the Mariyinsky Palace the following year was thrown into confusion when all the lights went out – a problem cunningly solved by shining police-car headlights in through the windows. Most Kievans have not travelled much, and the lucky exceptions are touch-ingly proud of the fact: a deputy foreign minister I interviewed had a map on his office wall with coloured pins marking all the places in the world he had been to. Foreigners in general, though no longer rarities, are still objects of polite interest and surmise.

Despite a population of 3 million, Kiev is a small place. Everyone who is anyone – Russians and Ukrainians, communists and nationalists,
biznesmeny
and politicians – knows everyone else. They studied at the same institutes, have relatives who work at the same ministries, eat beetroot-and-prune salad out of miniature pastry-cases at the same few sepulchral restaurants, and go to the same gloriously awful productions of
Tosca
and
Traviata
at the State Opera House in the evenings. The curtain rises, and the chorus is revealed lined up in height order, men in one corner, women in the other. The men wear preposterous beards, peeling around the ears. The women wave dead carnations from side to side, out of time with the music. Clouds of condensed breath spiral up from the orchestra pit to the nymphs on the ceiling, and in the interval there is a scramble for tepid orangeade and synthetic cream-cakes in the bar upstairs.

Indubitable proof of the slim talents required to win fame in Kiev came soon after my arrival, when my ‘fixer’ Sasha – combined impresario, computer-games importer and estate agent – persuaded me to record a song he had composed with English lyrics. The recording took place in a freezing flat in a suburban housing block. In a squeaky schoolgirl voice, I warbled over and over the words ‘Dreaming girl/In the sky/Have a ball/ Live your lie’. A few weeks later we were filmed for television. Tucked away in a basement of the sports stadium, the studio had been decked out with bottles of vodka, a tinsel Christmas tree and posters of AEG white goods. I came on after a group called the ‘Twenty Verhovinas’ – a brand of cigarette. The compère asked me to introduce myself. ‘Well, actually’ – nervous giggle – ‘I’m a journalist.’ Sasha kicked me under the table: ‘Anna is an artist, a singer from misty Albion!’ The result – vodka-flushed face, hopeless lip-synch, novelty camera-work – went out nationwide on New Year’s Eve. I was a Ukrainian pop-star.

Seven hundred years of provincialism has had its advantages. Third city of the empire, Kiev never felt the grip of government in quite the same way as Moscow and St Petersburg. An early traveller to say so was Paul of Aleppo, an Orthodox cleric who accompanied his father Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, on a fund-raising mission to the tsar in the 1650s. Landing at the mouth of the Dnieper, this smooth Mediterranean pair were initially not much taken with Ukraine. The mosquitoes bit, the food was dreadful, and the services went on for ever. ‘We never left church,’ Paul confided to his diary, ‘but tottering on our legs after so much standing.’
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Moscow, though, was far worse. ‘Anyone wishing to shorten his life by five or ten years,’ Paul wrote, ‘should go to Muscovy,’ In the monasteries ‘mirth and laughter and jokes’ were forbidden, and spies watched through cracks in the doors to see ‘whether the inmates practise devotional humility, fasting and prayer; or whether they get drunk and amuse themselves’. Drinkers, he was told, were sent to Siberia; smokers were liable for execution – news which put him ‘in great fear’ on his own account.
¹⁹
After all this, as he wrote on his journey home, Ukraine seemed like paradise:

The battered pair were even happier to reach Moldova, where they ‘entered the bath, after twenty-seven months, during the whole of which time we had neither entered a bath nor washed ourselves with water’.
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As under the tsars, so under communism. Touring churches in the early 1930s, Robert Byron found that Moscow suffered from ‘a stifling air – how stifling I only realised on reaching Kiev, which preserves in some indefinable way its old university tradition of the humanities and allows one to breathe normally again’.
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An elderly professor showed him round Santa Sofia, the Academy of Sciences and the antiquarian bookshops, introducing him to friends on the way. It was all just like an afternoon in Oxford and ‘quite abnormal after the ferocious isolation of Moscow’.
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John Steinbeck, on an epic pub-crawl round the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa soon after the war, was similarly struck:

Even the girls were prettier: ‘mostly blond, with fine, womanly figures’.

Unfashionable, easy-going, simultaneously of east and of west, in many ways Kiev represents the country whose capital it has become rather well. But to equate Kiev with Ukraine is to make an error. The ‘real’ Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour’s drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse ‘American spaceships’ for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants. In winter they wrap their two-room cottages in dried maize stalks for extra insulation, and in spring they drown in Bruegelesque seas of knee-high mud. So closed, so absolutely basic is this world that Kievans treat trips out of town like treks through a wilderness, equipping themselves with portable water-heaters and several days’ worth of picnic.

The man who best drew the contrast between Kiev and Ukraine was the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov. Son of a theology professor, he was brought up in a small house on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the steep cobbled lane that winds down from the High City to Podil. His Kiev, immortalised in
The White Guard,
is the middle-class city of the years just before the revolution – the Kiev of the La Marquise confectioner’s and the Fleurs de Nice flower shop, of chiming clocks and Dutch-tiled stoves, of sugar tongs and the green-shaded lamp in his father’s study. Writing from the inflation-wracked Moscow of the early 1920s, Bulgakov turned these vanished comforts into something rich and strange:

But for Bulgakov – a conservative middle-class Russian – Kiev and Ukraine were two different things. Kiev stood for trams, electric light, the civilised and familiar; Ukraine for low dark horizons, a strange language, fear of the unknown. ‘Although life in the City went on with apparent normality,’ he wrote of Kiev during the Civil War, ‘not a single person in it knew what was going on around and about the City, in the real Ukraine, a country of tens of millions of people, bigger than France . . . They neither knew nor cared about the real Ukraine and they hated it with all their heart and soul.’
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