Thinking With the Blood. Owen Matthews

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СКАЧАТЬ his class and generation Bibikov was, of course, a slave-owner. His father, General-en-Chef of the Russian army, owned 10,000 ‘souls’ (as adult male serfs were called) as his personal property. But in Ukraine the rules were different. It was a land of free-holding Cossacks, a warrior-caste originally made up of outlaws and runaway serfs, and serfdom was rare. And the valley of the Don in Eastern Ukraine was becoming a land of industry and workers too, as enterprising Welsh mining engineers began to dig out the coal that eventually powered Russia’s tardy industrial revolution. The newly-built Black Sea port of Odessa was a cosmopolitan entrepôt where the Levant and Mediterranean met the Russian Empire. Novo-Rossiya was not an extension of the old Russia. It was old Russia’s window onto Europe.

      My grandfather Boris Bibikov, for his part, saw the giant fields and his great new factory as anvils where a new kind of society could be forged. His new mechanical tractors would free millions from the drudgery, from the dark ignorance, drink, incest and viciousness of village life. The land would become a grain factory, in Lenin’s phrase, for the great cities where a new civilisation was being created. And work in the factory would turn ignorant peasants into honest proletarians. Though he would never have put it in those terms, Boris Bibikov was just the latest of his family to try to impose the Kremlin’s ideas of enlightenment and progress on this unruly borderland.

      Logically, perhaps, my blood should push me to see Ukraine with the patronising eye of Empire. Certainly millions of Russians still do. One of them is Vladimir Putin, who told George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a country.” Indeed Ukraine is a “little brother” to many Russians. Its people are, in the telling Russian phrase, nashy (literally our people), in both the familial and the possessive sense. And many Ukrainians, or perhaps we should say citizens of Ukraine, in the Russophone east will tell you that they are “culturally Russian, not European”. Whatever that means, they feel it and not only because they do not speak the same language as their fellow countrymen. Ukrainian is as different from Russian as English is from Dutch. The two languages are similar, but not mutually comprehensible. At the same time western Ukrainians, Ukrainian-speakers, see themselves as historically closer to Poland, or Austro-Hungary. To them, Russia has always been an alien invader.

      Perhaps the starkest dividing line between the two parts of the country is over the legacy of the Second World War. At the war’s outbreak many western Ukrainians saw the Germans as liberators, and some were enthusiastic in handing over their Jewish neighbours to SS einsatzgruppe extermination squads.

      “I see myself a boy in Belostok,” wrote the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in his 1961 poem Babiy Yar, commemorating a massacre of Jews at the beginning of the war,

      “Blood spills, and runs upon the floors;

       The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded;

       And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.”

      As the tide of the war turned in the wake of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the Germans enlisted Ukrainian nationalists to their cause. They released the firebrand Stepan Bandera from the concentration camp at Saschenhausen and helped to equip his Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, to fight the advancing Reds. The UPA certainly rounded up and murdered thousands of ethnic Poles, as well as Communist partisans. They also, though the evidence is contradictory, seem to have killed a small number of Jews. Whether this is because there were no Jews left to kill or whether they were not particularly anti-Semitic remains moot. Some partisan UPA units continued to fight the Soviet army into the early 1950s. Bandera himself was eventually murdered in 1959 with radioactive poison by the KGB in Paris. In any case, the UPA remains to this day the ultimate political bellwether in modern Ukraine. Is Bandera a great Ukrainian patriot or a collaborating Nazi swine? Choose your side. There isn’t much middle ground.

      Surprisingly, even with such jeopardies inwardly stalking them, the people of Ukraine somehow managed to rub along for 23 years of independence. Chaotic, corrupt and dysfunctional independence, for sure. But even a year ago, on the eve of the protests in December 2013 which were to rock Kiev and tear Ukraine apart no-one (apart perhaps from a science fiction novelist named Fyodor Berezin who became deputy defence minister of the rebel Donetsk Republic, of whom more later) could have predicted that things would fall apart so quickly. When the conflagration finally came in 2014, it burst out quite suddenly and unexpectedly, taking even (I believe), the Kremlin itself by surprise. The resulting war revolutionised both Ukraine and Russia profoundly.

      This book, based on a journey from Kiev to Donetsk in late summer of 2014, is my description of some scenes from that revolution.

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      The things they left behind

      We do not know exactly what they took with them… But we know what the Presidential couple left behind.

      The President’s mistress fled the palace of Mezhgoriye on the afternoon of February 21st. She had ordered everything portable packed; cash salary arrears were hurriedly paid out to the two hundred estate staff. In central Kiev, barricades were going up in flames. Over a hundred protesters had been shot down by sniper fire. The Berkut riot police, the last unit loyal to President Viktor Yanukovych, had abandoned the city to rampaging protesters after three days of bloodshed. Lyubov Polezhay and her lover feared that it would be a matter of hours that the mob would storm their private Versailles 20km outside the city. They were right. It was time to leave.

      We do not know exactly what they took with them, though security camera footage shows that Yanukovych’s staff spent three days removing valuables into a fleet of cars and minibuses. But we know what the Presidential couple left behind.

       In Lyubov’s personal suite in the main palace:

       A large pile of paperback romantic novels, including one entitled Why Do We Need Men? Many apparently chewed by a small lapdog.

       A large Andy Warhol-style silk screen portrait of Polezhay in gold glitter on a black background.

       An empty safe, later cut open with an angle grinder by marauders.

       A small sea of dents from Polezhay’s stiletto heels in the soft oak parquet of her dressing room floor.

       A pedigree cat, and a quantity of cat-shit on the carpets and upholstery after the animal was locked in the room.

       In President Yanukovych’s bedroom suite:

       A dozen hand-made shoe trees, without shoes, all with identical wooden patches corresponding to the President’s bunions.

       In an anteroom off the entrance hall known as the present room:

       A large ledger containing an inventory of gifts various guests have given the President, and on which occasion: birthdays, New Year, and so on. The register is divided into eight sections: Watches, Pictures, Jewellery, Alcohol, Icons, Statues, Electronics, Miscellaneous.

       A large archive of certificates of authenticity for art works, watches and jewellery. Many of these were subsequently revealed to be fake.

       In the Gothic-panelled private film theatre:

       His-and-hers matching brown leather massage chairs.

       A large collection of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. Notably: Run, Fatboy, Run.

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