The people
I must admit that I have run out of things I can talk about in any knowledgeable way about the Ukraine. I will close with a couple of quotes from Colin Thubron’s book Among the Russians. This book was published in 1983, and it was based on Thubron’s travels through Russia (western Russia), Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was still a behemoth at the time, albeit a rotting one. But all of these countries were still under the thumb of Moscow. Thubron drove around these countries in his car, camping in camp sites, and talking with people. It’s kind of a depressing book, actually. There is next to no intimation of the cataclysmic changes which would rock the world a mere six years later. The entire Soviet system is just maintaining. Like that joke about all of Russia on a broken train, and the Soviet leaders pull the shades down and demand that everybody on the train pretend that they are still moving.
The first quote is from Thubron’s vodka-soaked experience at one camp ground in Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine. He ends up hanging out with a group of 20 year old students. Music is playing, and he dances with one girl:
From Among the Russians, by Colin Thubron:
She was a 19 year old student from the local polytechnic … She looked embarrassed and lost. “You’re English?” She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. “You’re not really English?” She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn’t really English?
I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry; one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. “They’re just students,” he said. “They don’t know anything. They’ve no experience of life.” And they seemed indeed to be of a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. “You’re my guest,” Albert mumbled, “not theirs …”
They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offense. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. “No, no, no,” they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.
I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough, and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.
“They’re too young,” he said.
End quote…
I’ll take a couple of more quotes from his book, on the major cities of the Ukraine (it’s very interesting), and then I will call it a day.
On Odessa:
I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Grrek, Jewish, and Italianite cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture. But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk … leaving Odessa becalmed among its 19th century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses … The Odessans show an old humor and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafes.
On Yalta:
Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus … Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a 19th century heart of parks and verandahed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children’s funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.
The Crimea
The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.
On Kiev:
Kiev, “the mother of Russian cities,” still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric — within 15 years the population has doubled to two and a half million — while opposite, where the Church of St. Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands …
Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia’s holiest shrine, the 11th century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery’s gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks’ catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques — the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust — until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church’s tarnished icon-screen…
You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev’s cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure 11th century core, built at the zenith of Russia’s early power…Inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler… He looks unfit to rule…
The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art … Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated … And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.
But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the paster, into their unimaginable centuries.
“It was just superstition,” a guide said. “Primitive daydreams…”
Thubron was tailed by the KGB his entire time in Kiev. He was afraid to visit the friends he had there, because it would have gotten them into trouble. His room was searched, his diaries gone through.
It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discolored in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth!
Thubron meets up with Julian in the Crimea. Julian lives in the Ukraine. He is Russian. They travel together for a couple of days. This final anecdote brings tears to my eyes.
It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasion dessert wine — we never normally drank much together — and we celebrated a somber farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. “You’ve heard the news?”
It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.
We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. “It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back,” Julian said. “It’s not time for us to report for duty.” He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.
“Sometimes I think of my father,” Julian said, “and of that whole war generation, and I think: ‘Let the dead bury their dead.’ ” He grimaced. “Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?” Then out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart’s in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself …
Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the consensus of the rest. “In the Kruschev years, the golden years,” Julian said, “I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero — the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me.” We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. “I don’t know how to talk about our meeting like this” — he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. “It’s important, you and I … like two people meeting in outer space … ” He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.
As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said, “If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle — I’ll miss.”
“And I won’t fire at all.”
We laughed, but with deep emotion. I’ve never felt so brief a friendship more.
