Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

by Anna Reid

Six weeks after Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, pro-Bolshevik troops marched on Kiev, ineffectually opposed by a scratch collection of peasants, schoolboys and ex-prisoners of war under Semyon Petlyura, a leading Ukrainian socialist and the Rada’s minister for war. While the Bolsheviks bombarded the city with heavy artillery from across the Dnieper, the desperate Rada rushed through its Fourth and last Universal, declaring Ukraine unconditionally independent:

‘People of Ukraine! By your efforts, by your will, by your word, a Free Ukrainian People’s Republic has been created on Ukrainian soil. The ancient dream of your ancestors – fighters for the freedom and rights of workers – has been fulfilled . . . From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes independent, subject to no one, a Free Sovereign State

Thirteen days later the Rada fled Kiev for Volhynia, debating as it went. ‘In various obscure towns along the railway line,’ writes Hrushevsky’s biographer, ‘laws were passed about the socialisation of land, about the introduction of the New Style calendar, a new moneta...

the Germans were losing the war. In December they evacuated Kiev, taking Skoropadsky with them, and Petlyura’s Ukrainians entered the city once again, only to flee in the face of a second Red Army advance a few weeks later. At the same time, the Allies made their sole contribution to the anti-Bolshevik cause in Ukraine, landing 60,000 French troops along the Black Sea coast in support of the Whites. They were withdrawn again four months later, after a single unsuccessful skirmish with ‘otaman’ Hryhoryev.

‘When Dmowski related the claims of Poland,’ recalled a despairing American official, ‘he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could only reach 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. Benes followed immediately afterward with the counter-claims of Czechoslovakia, and, if I remember correctly, he began a century earlier and finished an hour later.’

In the end, the Allies split on the Galicia issue. Britain, with oil interests in the region, was inclined to favour the Ukrainians; France, paranoid about a resurgent Germany, strongly supported the Poles. The casting vote therefore went to the Americans. After much dithering, they too came down in favour of Poland.

Polish governments became increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic, especially after Pilsudski’s coup of 1926. Ukrainian schools were closed or turned Polish-speaking, Ukrainian professorships at Lviv University abolished, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians barred from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. Over 300 Orthodox churches were demolished or converted to Catholicism, and up to 200,000 Polish settlers were moved into Ukrainian towns and villages. Poland’s aim, according to the aptly named nationalist politician Stanislaw Grabski, should be ‘the transformation . . . of the Commonwealth into Polish ethnic territory.’

Predictably, far from assimilating the Ukrainians, Polonisation turned them radical. Though the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDO), sought compromise and denounced the use of violence, the national movement passed increasingly into the hands of an underground terrorist group, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

Led by an ex-Sich Rifleman, OUN was neo-fascist in rhetoric and pro-German in sympathy, drawing financial support from Germany and Lithuania. In 1930, in response to hundreds of OUN-led arson attacks on Polish-owned estates, the government mounted a violent and indiscriminate ‘pacification’ campaign in the Galician countryside.

Despite clumsy cover-up attempts (the Chicago Daily New’s man in Lviv was trailed by ‘a woman in gumboots, who spent most of her time looking bored in the vestibule of the George Hotel’) th...

The ‘pacificatory’ system of the Polish soldiers consists of raiding a village suspected of being implicated in the destruction of the farm of a neighbouring Polish landowner. The principal men of the village – the mayor, priest, heads of co-operative societies and leaders of sports and reading clubs – are summoned before the commander of the Polish detachment. The Ukrainians are required to give information regarding acts of incendiarism and to hand over all arms. If their answers are considered unsatisfactory – and this is gener...

The native Ukrainian garb and Ukrainian needlework is destroyed wherever seen in the homes of peasants, for the object of the Polish military commanders is ruthlessly to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian nationality. For this reason the Ukrainian co-operative stores and creameries, reading-rooms and libraries have been destroyed. Priests are forced to cry out ‘Long live Pilsudski!’ (Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, Premier and virtual dictator of Poland) or ‘Hurrah for the Polish Republic’ under threat of being flogged until they are made unconscious if they refrain from so doing.

OUN’s response was an assassination campaign. In the early 1930s OUN killed dozens of Polish policemen and officials, as well as several prominent Ukrainian moderates. Its best-known victim was Bronislaw Pieracki, the interior minister responsible for the outrages in Galicia. Though OUN leaders were eventually rounded up and imprisoned, the organisation continued to expand right up to the Second World War, when it formed the basis of the Ukrainian partisan army.

OUN’s only direct descendant in contemporary Ukrainian politics is the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), a small neo-Nazi paramilitary group which sent volunteers to fight against the Russians in the Moldovan and Georgian civil wars.

My interview, with the second-in-command of UNA’s political wing, went like a dream. Dressed in black polo-neck, fatigues and army boots, he delivered the requisite tirade on Ukrainian cultural supremacy and Russian and American ‘diabolism’. Saracens came into it, so did Nostradamus.

Cossack mace sat in a corner, and a picture of the partisan leader Stepan Bandera hung, slightly askew, on the wall, next to a calendar from the Dniproflot riverboat company. I duly mustered my quotes and wrote my piece.

That the Ukrainians should swing to the extreme right, I opined, was not only possible but ‘very likely’. Prices were doubling every month, factories were closing right and left, and fuel shortages had doused the eternal flames on the war memorials. All the Weimar ingredients, in short, were there.

My Ukrainian friends read the piece and got cross. I had got things completely out of proportion, they said. UNA was a tiny group, never likely to get anywhere, and they were fed up with people like me taking down its pat...

Those excitable Russians might vote for a clown like Zhirinovsky, but Ukrainians were a sensible lot who knew how to keep their feet on the ground. They were right. In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of spring 1994, campaigning under the priceless slogan ‘Vote for us and you’ll never have to vo...

When war broke out he reinvented himself. He cut off his hair, took the train to Budapest, and joined – it is unclear quite when or where – the Czech Legion. The Legion took him from Palestine to Marseilles to Liverpool, and he ended the war a much-decorated captain in the British army. When he took British nationality, it was under a name chosen by his brigadier – Robert Maxwell.

The decree required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children. – Vasiliy Grossman, 1955

Matussiv’s undoing, like that of thousands of other villages in central and eastern Ukraine, was not war or revolution but collectivisation, and the massive famine – the ‘Great Hunger’ – which followed it.

Finding Ukrainians who are willing and able to talk about the famine is surprisingly hard. The younger generations have been told little about it by their parents and grandparents, for fear that such talk might compromise their careers, even their lives. ‘It just wasn’t something we talked about in our family’ was a typical comment from Kiev friends. The old, who remember the famine at first-hand, are dying off fast, and do not like confiding in strangers.

People didn’t want to enter these collective farms at all, but they were forced to. They took everything – land, grain, ploughs, animals. And as if that weren’t enough they took the bread out of the house. My grandfather was a blacksmith; he resisted for three years. They took his horses, his smith’s shop, they banged with hammers on the walls to see if he had hidden any grain. They even took the seedcorn for the next year. A barn or a stable was a symbol of wealth. If you had a metal roof on your house, you were considered a kulak, and sent away to the North. You know Tykhon’s house over the road – it had an iron roof. The only reason it wasn’t confiscated was because he was ill and had to have his leg amputated – the activists took pity on him.

Compared to most villages, the Lukovytsyers were lucky, because they could trawl – illegally, using blankets – for fish and molluscs in the Dnieper.

On the other side of the river things were much worse: ‘People were killing their children and eating them.’

Exactly how many people died in the Great Hunger of 1932–3 is unclear. As Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs, ‘No one was keeping count’. Contemporaries spoke of 4 or 5 million. The historian Robert Conquest uses Soviet census data to arrive at a figure of 7 million: 5 million in Ukraine, 2 million elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Another 6.5 million, he reckons, died in ‘dekulakisation’ immediately beforehand. If Conquest is right, the whole operation killed over twice

These may well be underestimates, since Soviet census data are unreliable. When the post-purge census of 1937 turned up an embarrassing population deficit, Stalin promptly had the officials in charge arrested and shot. Subsequent counts, one can assume, erred on the side of optimism.

Crop failure was not to blame, since the harvest of 1932 was only slightly smaller than average, and actually better than that of the previous year.

Nor can it, by any stretch of the imagination, be put down to bureaucratic oversight. By the early autumn of 1932 Stalin and his ministers undoubtedly knew, because local communists repeatedly told them so, that the countryside was starving, but ordered that food requisitions continue none the less. Right through the famine, storehouses full of ‘emergency supplies’ were kept locked and guarded, while people died in thousands in the villages round about.

During the less serious famine of 1921–2 (also the result of grain requisitions), the Soviet government had allowed Western relief agencies to provide food aid; in the far worse conditio...

The official explanation – seconded, until quite recently, by standard Western textbooks – was that collectivisation was a painful but necessary step towards modernising the rural economy, the famine something obdurate peasants brought upon themselves.

I can confirm this. My secondary education textbooks on the Soviet Union were focussed on the industrial progress of the Five year plans and the human cost was downplayed or explained a way as the result of Stalin's paranoia either of foreigners or Soviet people.

But even from this point of view, collectivisation was counter-productive: deporting all the country’s most successful farmers and starving the rest to death was hardly the way to go about boosting agricultural output, and Soviet farming has not really recovered from the blow even now.

The most convincing explanation for the famine is that it was a deliberate, genocidal attack on rural Ukraine. The groups the Bolsheviks most hated and feared, and had had most difficulty subduing during the Civil War, were the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities.

When Stalin ordered collectivisation, Ukraine was where it encountered most resistance and where it was enforced most harshly. Though there was also widespread famine in the Russian Kuban (where many Ukrainians also lived), and among the Kazakhs, Don Cossacks and Volga Germans, proportionately higher grain quotas in Ukraine ensured that it bore the bulk of deaths.

Petro Hryhorenko,

Apparently his name is now more commonly rendered in English as Petro Grigorenko, I could find no trace of him under the name Hyrohenko.

But even at its height, korenizatsiya never meant intellectual freedom. Kravchenko recalled a friend pointing at some public toilets, signed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ in Ukrainian, and hissing, ‘There’s the whole of our national autonomy!’ The former Rada president, Hrushevsky, was lured back to the Soviet Union in 1924 with the offer of a chair at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, only to find himself tailed day and night by the OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police.

An American visitor who had applied for a job at the faculty was shocked to find that Hrushevsky took this for granted, and went straight back home again. He was right to be nervous: the OGPU had already drawn up lists of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be dealt ‘a crushing blow when the time comes’. These ranged from all ex-members of defunct Ukrainian organisations to shopkeepers, traders, ‘all foreigners’ and ‘all those with relatives or acquaintances abroad’.

What collectivisation was to the countryside, the purges were to the towns, the two running side by side through the late 1920s and early ’30s.

In Ukraine the purges started early, with the arrest in July 1929 of some 5,000 members of a fictitious underground organisation, the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’. The following spring a series of show trials kicked off with the pillorying of forty-five Ukrainian writers, scholars, lawyers and priests in the Kharkiv opera house.

The following year the OGPU ‘uncovered’ another conspiracy, putting Hrushevsky at its head. Though Hrushevsky himself was only exiled to Moscow, many of his colleagues and almost all his students were sent to the camps or shot. At the same time the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had re-formed in the early 1920s, was disbanded and its clergy deported.

With the arrival of Stalin’s new viceroy, Pavel Postyshev, in January 1933, the purges intensified. Postyshev denounced korenizatsiya as a ‘cultural counter-revolution’ whose aim was to fan ‘national enmity’ and ‘isolate Ukrainian workers from the positive influence of Russian culture’.7 Entire commissariats, judicial boards, university faculties, editorial departments, theatre groups and film studios were duly arrested and sent to their deaths. Several hundred of Ukraine’s wandering bards, the kobzars, were summoned to a conference and never seen again.

At the same time, Postyshev set about decimating the Ukrainian Communist Party itself, on the ironic grounds that it had showed insufficient ‘Bolshevik vigilance’ during collectivisation. By the end of the year, it had lost 100,000 members. As Postyshev’s report to Stalin of November 1933 boasted, ‘almost all the people removed were arrested and put before the firing-squad or exiled’.

Between 1937 and 1939 a third wave of terror swept the whole of the Soviet Union. Victims spanned all types: factory-workers and scientists, priests and atheists, shop-girls and Party wives. For every Party member arrested, six or seven non-Party members also went to the cells, where they were threatened or tortured into denouncing colleagues and neighbours. In one Kiev district sixty-nine people were denounced by one man; in Odessa, over a hundred.

The victims’ actual identity mattered little, bald quotas for desired numbers of arrestee...

One night – it happened all over the place under Stalin – they were warned by friends in the local soviet that they were on the list of tomorrow’s arrests. That night they left everything and fled, to another small town not very far away. You didn’t have to really hide because Stalin didn’t care about who was on the list and who was not on the list, it didn’t matter. What the Stalin regime cared about was the constant threat, the constant fear . . .

Ironically, the system allowed some genuine anti-Communists, like Vera’s grandparents, to fade into the background. Mykola Stasyuk, an ex-minister in the Rada government, took a job as a park attendant in Mariupol, surviving to become a partisan leader during the Second World War.

Exactly how many people died in the purges is unclear. Conquest reckons that between 1937 and 1938, in the Soviet Union as a whole, 1 million people were executed, and 2 million died in labour camps, the total camp population at the end of the period being about 7 million, and the prison population another 1 million. Adam Ulam comes up with...

What percentage of these were Ukrainians we do not know. A mass grave of purge victims in the Bykivnya forest outside Kiev, rediscovered in the late 1980s, contains an estimated 200,000 bodies. Another at Vynnytsya, uncovered during the war underneath a Park of Culture and Recreation, holds at least 10,000, all shot in the back of the head. In Ukrainian villages, quite casually, one hears of other sites...

Faced with old battleaxes prone to rhapsodising about the good old days of the Soviet Union, I found that a failsafe riposte was to inquire gently whether any of their relatives had been ‘repressed’ u...