Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

by Anna Reid

The Soviet press, of course, denied that the famine existed at all. Arthur Koestler, living in Kharkiv in the ghastly winter of 1932–3, found not the slightest allusion to the disaster in the local papers:

Each morning when I read the Kharkov Kommunist I learned about plan-figures reached and over-reached, about competitions between factory shock brigades, awards of the Red Banner, new giant combines in the Urals, and so on; the photographs were either of young people, always laughing and always carrying a banner in their hands, or of some picturesque elder in Usbekistan, always smiling and always le...

‘Few of us,’ wrote the United Press correspondent Eugene Lyons, were so completely isolated that we did not meet Russians whose work took them to the devastated areas, or Muscovites with relations in those areas. Around every railroad station in the capital hundreds of bedraggled refugees were encamped, had we needed further corroboration . . . There was no more need for investigation to establish the mere existence of the Russian famine than investigation to establish the existence of the American depression . . . The famine was accepted as a matter of course in our casual conversations at the hotels and in our homes.

The British journalist Gareth Jones, ‘an earnest and meticulous little man’, of the sort ‘who carries a note-book and unashamedly records your words as you talk’, had succeeded in making a secret tour of the Kharkiv area. On his return to London, he sent a detailed account of the horrors he encountered to the Manchester Guardian. The rest of the Moscow press corps duly received urgent requests from their editors for follow-ups. These coincided, however, with the opening of a sensational show trial of a group of British engineers, on charges of sabotage.

‘The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors,’ wrote Lyons, ‘was for all of us a compelling professional necessity. Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes – but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation.’ At a meeting with the chief censor, Konstantin Umansky, the journalists jointly worked out a ‘formula of denial’. ‘We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. That filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and “zakuski”, Umansky joined the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.’33

There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of OGPU with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through the anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square .

An extraordinary account of the preparations made for the visit of the French Radical leader Edouard Herriot to the ‘October Revolution’ collective near Kiev in September 1933 is worth quoting at length:

Heriot was one of the loudest and comitted advocates of an alliance between France and the USSR. And so, he was also an active denier of famine and repression in the Soviet Union to French audiences.

Some steers and hogs were slaughtered to provide plenty of meat. A supply of beer was also brought in. All the corpses and starving peasants were removed from the highways in the surrounding countryside and the peasants were forbidden to leave their houses.

When Herriot returned home, Pravda was able to report that he ‘categorically denied the lies of the bourgeois press about a famine in the Soviet Union’.

But for most visitors, the Potemkin tours were an unnecessary precaution. They had made up their minds before they arrived. George Bernard Shaw, capering around Moscow with Nancy Astor in the summer of 1931, told a banquet in his honour that he had thrown tins of food out of the train window on crossing the border from Poland, so sure was he that rumours of shortages were nonsense. At lunch at the Metropole next day, he was upbraided by Chamberlin’s wife. Waving a hand around the restaurant, Shaw asked, ‘Where do you see any food shortage?’

Flattery was an important part of the package. Shaw was delighted to discover that the waitresses in his restaurant-car knew his work intimately and were longing to be introduced. The German socialist Lion Feuchtwanger, visiting Moscow in 1937, met ‘a young girl from the land, glowing with happiness’, who told him, ‘Four years ago I could neither read nor write, and today I can discuss Feuchtwanger’s books with him.’39

The tract Feuchtwanger wrote on his return exhorted his readers to ‘free themselves from their own conceptions of democracy’ and not to indulge in ‘carping, whining, and alarming’ at the Soviet Union’s expense, ending on a note of religious exaltation: ‘It does one good after all the compromise of the West to see an achievement such as this, to which a man can say “Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes,” with all his heart.’

André Gide found the front pages plastered with his picture, and was told that sales of his latest book ran into the hundreds of thousands. He was given so much spending money that he did not know what to do with it: ‘Every time I got out my wallet to settle a restaurant or hotel bill, to pay a cheque, buy some stamps or a newspaper, I was brought up short by an exquisite smile and authorita...

But the palm among apologists for the horrors of the 1930s goes to a journalist – Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Of all the correspondents who denied or played down the famine, he was by far the most cynical and influential. In November 1932, as the famine took grip, he reported that ‘there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be’.42 By March he had subtly changed his tune: ‘There is no act...

In August, in reply to a Herald Tribune piece estimating deaths at no less than 1 million, he wrote that ‘Any report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda’. ‘Food s...

In September 1933 foreign journalists were allowed into the famine areas for the first time. Duranty was given a fortnight’s start over the rest of the corps. When he came back, Lyons ra...

He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone. ‘But Walter, you don’t mean that literally?’ Mrs McCormick exclaimed. ‘Hell I don’t . . . I’m being conservative,’ he replied, and as...

Lyons was not surprised to find that Duranty’s articles on the trip failed even to acknowledge the famine’s existence. When Kravchenko defected to America and published the memoirs I have quoted here, the Western press accused him of being a CIA plant. Duranty’s payback was a Pulitzer Prize, awarded for the ‘scholarship, p...

The old Jewish cemetery, with graves dating back to the seventeenth century, was demolished in the 1960s, to make way for a tatty Kosmos cinema.

Many Jews arrived as agents to Polish landowners, who deputised to them the collection of rents and taxes, and management of taverns and mills, at which the surrounding peasantry were often obliged by law to buy their drink and grind their corn. They lived huddled under the protection of Polish palace walls, and built their synagogues like mini-fortresses, with gun-embrasures and cannon on the roof.

Hence when Khmelnytsky rebelled in 1648, his peasant army’s murderous fury was directed as much at Jews as at Poles. The Polish fortified towns, to which Jews fled for protection, fell like ninepins. In some places Poles shut Jews out, in others they handed them over in exchange for their own lives.

As the decade progressed, the tsarist government increasingly used anti-Semitism to offset the rising tide of revolutionary dissent.

As the empire began its long slide towards revolution, right-wing monarchist groups took to blaming Jews for all Holy Russia’s reverses, publishing rabidly anti-Semitic pamphlets and employing uniformed thugs, the ‘Black Hundreds’, to beat up Jews and students.

In 1905, when naval defeat at the hands of the Japanese forced Nicholas II to grant Russia’s first-ever constitution, they vented their fury in a new wave of pogroms. In Odessa 302 people are known to have been killed; more deaths went unrecorded. ‘On Tuesday night October 31st,’ the shocked American consul reported home, ‘the Russians attacked the Jews in every part of town and a massacre ensued. From Tuesday ’til Saturday was terrible and horrible. The Russians lost heavily also, but the number of killed and wounded is not known. The police without uniforms were very prominent. Jews who bought exemption received protection. Kishinev, Kiev, Cherson, Akkerman, Rostoff and other places suffered terribly, Nicolaev also.’

The fact that Jews – like all non-Russian minorities – were murdered in disproportionate numbers during Stalin’s purges did little to shake this perception.

Ukrainian–Jewish relations were not all bad. In 1918 the Ukrainians’ short-lived Rada government declared ‘national-personal autonomy’ for Jews and set up a special ministry for Jewish affairs. Its banknotes were printed in four languages – Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish – and the head of the Ukrainian delegation at the Paris peace talks, amazingly, was a Jew, Arnold Margolin.

In Galicia too, Ukrainians and Jews sometimes cooperated: in 1907 four Zionists were elected to the Vienna Reichsrat with Ukrainian support (both sides hoping to shake off the Poles), and in 1922 Jewish and Ukrainian parties foug...

But in the 1930s, as Polish democracy crumbled, attitudes hardened. Popular support for the moderate Ukrainian party UNDO fell away in favour of the underground terrorist group OUN, which borrowed its philosophy from fascist Germany. (Members swore to a Decalogue of ten commandments, the first of which was ‘You will attain a Ukrainian state or die in ...

In 1940, six months after Germany and Russia had carved up Poland between them, OUN split in two – the more moderate ‘Melnykivtsi’, under the Civil War veteran Andriy Melnyk, and the fanatical ‘Banderivtsi’, under the young head of OUN’s terrorist unit, Stepan Bandera. Released from prison by the Germans in 1939, Bandera explicitly declared war on Ukrainian Jewry. ‘The Jews in the USSR,’ an OUN congress in Cracow resolved, ‘constitut...

For all Ukraine, the war years were ones of unparalleled violence, destruction and horror: 5.3 million of the country’s inhabitants died during the war – an astounding one in six of the entire population.

Of these, about 2.25 million were Jews. Most died in situ, rounded up, shot and buried in woods and ravines outside their own home towns. Others were sent to the gas chambers at Belzec – just over the present-day border with Poland – or to the slave-labour camp on Janowska Street in Lviv. Two hundred thousand people died in Janowska Street,10 and of all 600,000 people deported to Belzec – greeted at the railway station by a poster, ‘First a wash and breakfast, then to work!’ 11– only two are known to have survived.

Altogether, the Holocaust killed 60 per cent of the Jews of Soviet Ukraine, and over 90 per cent of the Jews of Galicia.12

For Ukrainians, the war was fratricidal. Caught between Stalin and Hitler, they split three ways. The vast majority of direct participants – 2.5 million men 13– were conscripted straight into the Red Army. Several tens of thousands – known as ‘Hiwis’ – short for Hilfswillige or ‘willing-to-helps’, joined the Nazis in various capacities. At least 12,000 worked as police auxiliaries14 helping round up, deport and massacre Jews, and others became camp guards. Survivors re...

Some were volunteers; others joined to escape the German prisoner-of-war camps, where death rates ran at a frightful two in five.16 ‘Russian war prisoners,’ wrote Leon Weliczker, a Janowska Street survivor, ‘consisted of the most varied types of characters. There were some who were really worse than the SS, but, on the other hand, there were also man...

Yet more Ukrainians – somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 – fought both Russians and Germans, in the Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya (UPA), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

In Avhustivka villagers were summoned to a meeting, where they were told to create a ‘Committee of the Poor’ – the usual prelude to collectivisation – and regaled with the charms of life under communism. ‘The representative,’ Oliynyk wrote, ‘vividly described how well people lived in the Soviet Union, how the disabled and elderly were provided with all necessities – housing, heating, shoes, food, clothes . . .’ But having seen their stores stripped bare and the contents of their village library burned in the market-place, the villagers were not fooled, quickly declaring themselves ‘fed up with having to listen to these children’s fairy-tales’.22

‘At the same time,’ Khrushchev goes on without a trace of irony, ‘we were still conducting arrests.’ The arrestees – in a terror campaign that got fully under way in the spring of 1940 – were almost the entire Galician middle class: landowners, businessmen, peasants who resisted collectivisation, Polish bureaucrats and officers, Jewish refugees, lawyers, priests and politicians of all stripes, left as well as right. In a few cases, the upper grades of entire schools disappeared.

The whole family, including daughter-in-law and grandchild, were sent to Siberia.25 In little Avhustivka, the NKVD took away six young men, despite the absence of any anti-Soviet protest in the area. One died of ‘suffocation’ in prison, four of starvation in the Urals. Altogether, in the two years preceding the German invasion, the Soviets deported between 800,000 and 1.6 million people – 10 to 20 per cent of western Ukraine’s entire population.26

Retreating in front of the overwhelming German advance, the Soviets massacred their remaining prisoners: in Lviv corpses were found piled five deep in the cellar of the NKVD gaol. ‘The Poles didn’t find as many “political criminals” among us in twenty years,’ the Avhustivka villagers mourned, ‘as “older brother” Russia did in a year and a half.’29

Along with millions of other Ukrainians, they believed Nazi rule could not possibly be any worse than Stalinism. Photographs (some cooked up by Soviet propagandists,) show smiling Galician peasants running out of their houses to welcome the Panzer crews with bread and salt.

Six days after the city’s capture by the German and Romanian armies, a bomb exploded in Romanian headquarters, killing several officers. The next day, Romanian soldiers herded 19,000 Jews into a fenced square near the port, where they were sprayed with gasoline and burned alive.

Another 16,000 were marched to the nearby village of Dalnik, where they were tied together in groups, pushed into anti-tank ditches and shot. When this method proved inefficient the Romanians drove the remainder into four large warehouses and machine-gunned them through holes in the walls. Three of the warehouses, containing women and children, were then set on fire, and the fourth demolished with artillery fire.

The rest of Odessa’s Jews were sent to concentration camps – Dumanovka, Bogdanovka, Atmicetka and Vertugen – sixty miles to the north, where they died, along with tens of thousands of others from central Ukraine and Moldova...

Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, the aged, semi-paralysed head of the Uniate Church, sheltered fifteen Jews in his episcopal palace, arranging for another 150, mostly children, to be hidden in nunneries and monasteries. Early in 1942 he wrote to Himmler protesting that ‘Ukrainian auxiliary police are being forced to shoot Jews’, and in November of the same year he issued a pastoral letter under the title ‘Thou shalt not kill’, which was read out from pulpits all over the country.

At the other end of the scale a professional burglar, Leopold Socha, hid twenty-one Jews in the Lviv sewers, which he knew well having used them to stash stolen goods. For fourteen months he brought food every day – including a bottle of vodka to celebrate Stalingrad – and arranged for the weekly laundering of their clothes. He produced a Jewish prayerbook, and provided potatoes instead of leavened bread every Sabbath.

Gentiles who did hide Jews were scared of reprisals from neighbours. Weliczker, who spent the last months of the war huddled with twenty-three others in a cellar under a Polish farmer’s barn, remembered his rescuer begging them not to come back and thank him because ‘it would go hard for him if it were known that he had hidden Jews’.

It was no idle fear – Slavs too were Untermenschen. For Erich Koch, the knout-wielding head of Reichskomissariat Ukraine, Ukrainians were ‘niggers’ fit only for ‘vodka and the whip’. ‘If I find a Ukrainian worthy of sitting at the same table with me,’ he once remarked, ‘I must have him shot.’

Himmler wanted the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be ‘decimated’;47 Göring thought the solution was to kill all Ukrainian males over the age of fifteen and ‘send in the SS stallions’.48

Hitler himself, visiting advance headquarters near Vynnytsya, instructed that Ukrainian education should be restricted to ‘one single sentence...

Ukrainian nationalists had had high hopes of Germany, believing it might back an independent Ukrainian state. In the 1930s the Nazis had provided a haven for leaders of the underground group OUN, encouraging its terrorist campaign in Poland. And in 1939 they released Bandera, leader of OUN’s radical wing, from a Polish prison, allowing him to ...