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For too long Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, was one of the continent’s most under-reported places. For most of the last century, what little reporting in the foreign press there was, was done in the main by foreign correspondents living in Moscow, who inevitably absorbed some of the imperial and then former imperial capital’s patronizing attitudes.
In a country rich enough to provide its inhabitants with very decent lives, the EU deals were seen as some sort of lifebuoy to grab on to. By linking their fate to the West, many thought that the gradual implementation of the agreements would create the thing that had been missing in their lives—a state of law.
In 1990 the GDP per capita of both countries was similar, as were life expectancy rates. Just before the war began, Poland’s GDP per capita was more than three times greater than that of Ukraine and Poles could expect to live almost six years longer than Ukrainians.
Likewise Russia’s GDP per capita, which started at more or less the same place, was some three and half times greater before the war, and while its life expectancy rate was virtually identical to Ukraine’s it had increased more than its neighbor’s since 1990. Ukraine was and is not a poor country, but the experience of Poland, and even that of the Baltic states rather than oil- and gas-rich Russia, suggested to what extent Ukrainians had been shortchanged by their leaders since independence and explained why they no longer wanted to continue hearing about their country’s potential rather than
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The failure to find the guilty, bad enough in itself, nourished conspiracy theories, namely that the pro-Maidan protesters had killed their own people in order to blame Yanukovych and hasten his downfall. There was no memorial for the eighteen Berkut riot and other policemen, many who came from units brought in from Crimea and the east, who had died fighting the protesters—deaths which were not forgotten or forgiven in the places they had come from, a fact which did much to engender bitterness.
For ordinary people, whatever was happening in the east, bills still had to be paid and the risk of losing your home to the bank was a more immediate and existential threat to them than the idea of losing Donetsk in a war which might or might not come to Kiev. (A year later, $1 was 22 hryvnia, but the Yaroshevych family had been able to solve their problem. Natalyia’s husband sold his office and paid off the home mortgage.)
On April 6, 2014, armed men seized the regional administration building in Donetsk. Then they began to fortify it with sandbags and tires and a few thousand came to show their support.
Sloviansk, which would briefly be a rebel stronghold, a man said that what was happening here was going to be “just like Crimea.”
They thought of bigger Russian salaries and pensions and not of their tiny walk-on roles in starting a war that nobody expected or wanted.
When I asked him about the current conflict he talked of “fascism” just like everyone else. “We want a free Ukraine,” he said, “but the Banderovtsi”—the term once given to followers of Stepan Bandera and now used to insult the post-Maidan leadership and their supporters—“want to take control over the whole of Ukraine.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” The
The battlefields include Facebook, Twitter, vKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and YouTube. On news and other websites tens of thousands of people “comment” on articles in such a way as to make them feel as though they are doing something useful. They are, as a boy who was about to start military training in Kharkiv told me, “sofa warriors.” But some it seems are mercenaries too. According to numerous reliable reports, the Russian authorities contract firms to employ people to “comment” and spread, among other things, the central line of Russian propaganda, which is that the
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In this story, or “narrative” to use the technical term, history is something of a foundation and bedrock and this is why rewriting history is as important as writing the news. What you believe today depends on what you believe about the past. In that sense it is important for the “political technologists,” to use the pithy and apt term popular in post-Soviet countries, who might be understood by Westerners as turbo-spin doctors, to fashion a past which suits the future they are trying to create.
For supporters from Western countries and other foreign admirers of Putin and the rebels, it also provided what seemed like a noble “anti-fascist” cause to belong to, rather than subscribing to an invented and racist interpretation of events in which all Ukrainians were fascists and the Russians or the rebels were heroic liberators. “We can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of [Stepan] Bandera,” said Putin, “Hitler’s accomplice during the Second World War.”
the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.
Putin underlined that one of the most disastrous consequences of the collapse of the USSR was that “for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.” And it is precisely this that Putin has begun to correct.
Ukrainians should be grateful to Stalin, she declared, because he had fashioned the Ukrainian Soviet republic out of diverse bits of territory and this was now the state they had.
Lenin had given it to Soviet Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and civil war when the region, or rather communists here, had declared this to be the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.
short-lived German-supported Ukrainian state, which the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic had resisted. Now, she said, it was a ridiculous irony that Ukrainians were destroying statues of Lenin when they should be grateful to him.
“The legend of the Holodomor,” she said, using the name given to it by Ukrainians and which means “hunger-extermination,” was created in Canada by fascist Ukrainian exiles.
In the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany and supplied it with the raw materials it used to make war on the Western allies. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union everything changed of course, but officially the Soviet account could only say that the war had begun in 1941.
The story of the great sacrifices of the Soviet people in the Second World War and the struggle against Nazism has been detached from the years 1939 to 1941, which saw the conquest and annexation of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and eastern Poland; from Romania, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were annexed.
Tens of thousands were deported from the conquered Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and hundreds of thousands of Poles were sent to the Gulag.
Today, what you think of this past, how you relate to it, determines what you think about the future of Ukraine. And what you think of the past is quite likely to be bound up with the history of your own family and where you live. This is true for the Donbass, a mining region, just as it is for anywhere else. People came from all over the Soviet Union to work and settle in this flat land pockmarked by pyramids and hills of slag and scruffy little mining and industrial towns. Donetsk was a working-class mining town. For many of its inhabitants then, Ukraine, which had been part of imperial
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In the west, and in particular in Galicia—the largest former Austro-Hungarian part of Ukraine, annexed by the USSR in 1939 and retaken again in 1944—Soviet memorials decay while more and more are built to honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, of Stepan Bandera. Travel in the Carpathian region though, which was the tip of Czechoslovakia until amputated in 1939, and they vanish, because, as Vasyl Khoma, who runs a hotel in Rakhiv on the Romanian border and who had been its deputy mayor,
It is a monument erected in 1887 by the Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute, which the locals claim marks their discovery of the center of Europe.
Far away, in Ukraine’s east, tourists once came to the monument of Savur-Mogila, an hour and a half’s drive from Donetsk. This was also the site of an annual pilgrimage to commemorate the crucial battle fought here in 1943 in which thousands of Red Army soldiers died. Now the ruins of this vast Soviet memorial are a tragic sight.
During the Second World War Kiev, now a big city of 2.8 million inhabitants, was so badly destroyed that much of it is Soviet, and now increasingly post-Soviet. But churches destroyed under communism have been rebuilt or restored, including the Pecherska Lavra monastery complex, founded in 1051. From its walls you can look down on the mighty Dnieper River below that flows through the city. You can also see the 102-meter-high Soviet Motherland memorial of a woman, sword drawn. Nearby is a memorial complex with walls of giant bronze soldiers and workers on which children climb and play.
With the inauguration as president of Viktor Yuschenko in 2005 after the Orange Revolution of the year before, the position of the Holodomor in Ukrainian life and politics changed significantly. Yuschenko took a far more explicitly nationalistic stance on history than his predecessors had done, and the Holodomor memorial is one of the products of his otherwise disastrous time as president.
With the return of Yanukovych, first as prime minister in 2007 and then as president in 2010, the Holodomor began to fall back again in terms of public remembrance. Because of this political shift and because this was a taboo topic in Soviet times, the Holodomor has not entered into the DNA or soul of Ukrainian politics, or worldview, as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide have in Israel and Armenia.
The point is that it was something done by others against us. In Ukraine, as indeed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–79, it was not something quite so clearly done by others.
In Ukraine, however, communists were the perpetrators and many of them were Ukrainians. Among the security men who prevented peasants leaving their starving villages could have been people to whom those about to die were actually related. There is another element which acts as a break, to a certain extent at least, in discussing the Holodomor. That is the issue of cannibalism, which some of those crazed with hunger resorted to. It is not exactly a forbidden topic, but it is one that any Ukrainian would understandably feel uncomfortable discussing.
One of the greatest Soviet writers was Vasily Grossman. He was born in 1905 in Berdychiv, then one of the main centers of Jewish life in Ukraine, and died in Moscow in 1964. Grossman is rightly best known for Life and Fate, his extraordinary novel of Stalingrad. Far less well known is Everything Flows, a book on which he was still working when he died.
Based on what Grossman knew, his character Anna Sergeyevna recounts her experience in a Ukrainian village where she was working as a bookkeeper in the kolkhoz, or collective farm. First, she explained, had come the period of “dekulakization” when the richer peasants, known as kulaks, were dispossessed, arrested and deported. Quotas of the numbers to be arrested were drawn up and names selected by the village soviet, whose members could be bribed, and because there were “scores to be settled because of a woman, or because of some other past grievance…Often it was the poorest peasants who were
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At first graves were dug for the dead, but then they were just left where they had died. Eventually those who worked for the local administration were taken to the nearby town.
As the crow flies Karapyshi lies midway between Donetsk, proud of its Soviet heritage, and Lviv with its Galician, Austro-Hungarian and Ukrainian nationalist one. What makes Karapyshi quintessentially Ukrainian is that historically Ukrainians were villagers, while Russians and Russian-speakers, Jews and others tended to be the townspeople. It is a generalization of course, but basically true. Karapyshi sits in the middle of Ukraine, forty minutes’ drive from the mighty Dnieper River which physically divides the country, flowing from the north and out into the Black Sea. But more than that, it
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In more modern times the village was part of the estate of a Polish noble family. As elsewhere in the Russian empire the serfs here were freed in 1861. A census of 1896 records that there were 6,326 peasants and 173 others. Many, but not all, of the others were Jews who had a synagogue. There
During the period of collectivization, 300 people deemed kurkuls, which is the Ukrainian word for kulaks, were arrested and deported.
But this memory does not mean they confuse a former patriotism with an admiration for Vladimir Putin and his Russia, which wants to claim the sole mantle of the glory of the Soviet Union’s role in the crushing of the Nazis, while forgetting the Holodomor, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin’s purges and so on.
for Britain and the U.S. They expected them to give weapons to the Ukrainian army so it can better fight the Russians, because until now all they had given the country, said Nadya, was the equivalent of feeding “a fly to a dog”—in other words, nothing.
“The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl,” wrote Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, in 2006, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.”
The explosion happened at 1:23 in the morning of April 26, 1986.
Ukrainians, for example, now understood that the plant was not under their control but run from Moscow. Hence it made sense for many people, as the USSR began to unravel, to think that the authorities in Kiev should be in control of what was going on in Ukraine.
More than 500,000 participated in the cleanup operation and it continues to this day. An exclusion zone was imposed covering some 2,600 square kilometers. There is an inner core around the plant and the second, wider, surrounding belt. This includes the town of Chernobyl itself, home to a few thousand who now maintain the defunct plant or work on building the new “sarcophagus” to encase the reactor that exploded.
From the top of the blocks you can see the plant and the colossal Duga-3 military radar. It is a complex structure divided into two separate vast metal grids which look like some extraordinary art installation. Together they stretch 2,460 feet from end to end, one part is 480 feet high and the second is 295 feet. This was a Soviet “over-the-horizon” system designed to give early warning against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was one of two; the second was in eastern Siberia.
During the Austro-Hungarian period, which lasted from 1772 to 1918, the city, the heart of eastern Galicia, was officially known by its German name. From 1918 to 1939 it was the third-biggest city in Poland. Then it was taken by the Soviets, followed by the Nazis, and the Soviets returned in 1944. Like Thessaloniki in Greece and Vilnius in Lithuania, it is one of those European cities whose population today is so different from what it used to be that few people who live here nowadays can say that their families lived here before 1945.
According to the historian Timothy Snyder, some 780,000 Poles were sent to Poland from what was now Soviet Ukraine. Including Belarus and Lithuania, the official number sent was 1,517,913, of whom 100,000 were Jews who had survived the Holocaust, but the total number of people who left was larger because “a few hundred thousand left without registering for official transports.”
Just as the Poles were being sent to Poland, some 483,099 Ukrainians were sent to Ukraine from the regions they inhabited in what was to remain in Poland. In the so-called Operation Vistula another 140,660 Ukrainians were ethnically cleansed from their homes and sent to settle in other parts of Poland. Those who came to Ukraine were not sent to Lviv though because most were peasants and they were needed in the countryside to replace the Polish peasants who had been sent to Poland. Whole villages on either side of the border were uprooted, but their inhabitants were often kept together and
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Still, by 1950 Lviv was already well on the way to becoming the almost totally Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking city that it is today. By then about half of the population were Ukrainian, 27 percent Russian and 6 percent Jewish, though many of the latter had not been natives of Lviv before the war.
In the past, in the areas of Ukraine which had been part of the Russian empire, Ukrainian was considered by many, especially the educated, as a peasant language or dialect of Russian rather than a language in its own right. Many Ukrainians who came to town were educated and, as they began to move up the social ladder, they started to speak Russian and many in this way “became” Russian.
