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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Anna Reid
Read between
May 19 - July 14, 2021
Moreover, until very recently Ukraine’s neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland.
‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’
The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev’s Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes,
choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus’s ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.
‘The Russians learned from the Mongols,’ writes the historian Richard Pipes, ‘a conception of politics which limited the functions of the state to the collection of tribute (or taxes), maintenance of order, and preservation of security, but was entirely devoid of any sense of responsibility for public well-being.’
‘This Republic could be compared to the Spartan,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian envoy, Alberto Vimina, ‘if the Kozaks respected sobriety as highly as did the Spartans.’
‘Tell yourself that you are without land, without love, without Fatherland, without humanity – as long as Poland, our Mother, is enslaved.’
uprisings
The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’
Ukrainian politicians’ worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.
A joke of the period has a Polish socialist being stopped by a policeman as he crosses the Galician frontier. Asked what he means by socialism, he says it is ‘the struggle of the Workers against Capital’. ‘In that case,’ replies the policeman, ‘you may enter Galicia, for here we have neither the one nor the other.’2
The escape route for many was emigration. In the twenty-five years before the First World War more than 2 million Ukrainian and Polish peasants left Galicia, including an extraordinary 400,000 people, or almost 5 per cent of the province’s population, in 1913 alone. Some went to the new factories of Polish Silesia, some to France and Germany. But most took ship to Canada and the United States, founding today’s 2-million-strong North American Ukrainian diaspora.
Our grandmother was part of this.
For Ukraine’s Jews, it was the worst period in their history since the Khmelnytsky massacres. Victimised by all sides, but by the Whites and Ukrainians in particular, they suffered looting, rape and wholesale murder. Massacres took place in Berdychiv, Zhytomyr, Odessa, Poltava, Chernihiv and Kiev, as well as dozens of smaller cities. One of the worst, the work of White troops, took place in Fastiv, a small town south-west of Kiev, in September 1919:
Altogether the years 1914 to 1921 killed about 1.5 million people in Ukraine.
Despite having been arrested standing over Petlyura’s body with a smoking revolver, after a sensational three-week trial Schwartzbard was acquitted. ‘There are times,’ he wrote in his confession, ‘when private sorrows disappear in public woe, like a drop of water in the sea.’17
Western Ukraine produced four great writers between the wars: von Rezzori, Paul Celan, Joseph Roth and Bruno Schulz. Von Rezzori and Celan both grew up in Chernivtsi, Roth and Schulz in small towns in Polish-ruled Galicia. Von Rezzori was Austrian; Celan (born Paul Antschel), Roth and Schulz all Jews. Except for von Rezzori, still mixing with the literati in Italy, they all led tragic lives. Roth died a penniless alcoholic at a café table in Paris. Celan’s parents were both killed by the Nazis; haunted by survivors’ guilt, he threw himself into the Seine. Schulz, having just started being
...more
Jan Ludvik Hoch.
But the palm among apologists for the horrors of the 1930s goes to a journalist – Walter Duranty of the New York Times.
Duranty’s payback was a Pulitzer Prize, awarded for the ‘scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity’ of his reporting.45
Again, Poles and Jews shared jointly in the peasants’ fury: a common practice was to hang a Pole, a Jew and a dog from the same tree, with the words, ‘Pole, Yid and hound – each to the same faith bound.’2
When the Bolsheviks, came to power in 1917, Jews were able to take government jobs for the first time – hence the connection, in the minds of peasants whose first sight of a Jew in a position of authority was a commissar come to requisition grain or conscript men for the Red Army, between Jewishness and the nastier aspects of communism.
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
‘Of course we don’t represent a majority of the Crimean population. But it isn’t our fault. The fact that we were annihilated doesn’t lessen our rights to our native land.’
Nobody expects tanks to roll into Kiev as they did into Grozny, but Russia could stir up secessionism among ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbass, as it did in Moldova, Georgia and Tadzhikistan.
(A pocket cartoon in the Financial Times showed one NATO general saying to another, ‘We’re not just talking tough on Russia, we’re threatening to act tough too.’)
