In Wartime Read online

  Compared to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and the Tsitsernakaberd museum and memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915 in Yerevan, Kiev’s memorial is tiny. There is a reason for that. It reflects the place the Holodomor has in Ukraine’s national consciousness. Obviously the famine, which was caused during the period of forced collectivization, when peasants were compelled to give up their land and join collective farms—a policy enforced in such a way that millions died unnecessarily—was not going to be commemorated in Soviet times. Now, making the Holodomor a seminal event in modern Ukrainian history has to depend on who is in power. In the early post-independence years the issue was discussed and among other things memorial postage stamps were issued, but, as everyone in power was a former communist, this was not a subject to be played up too much. It was a question of calibrating the political usefulness of the Holodomor versus any potential harm it could cause by association.

  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. It was his quarreling with Yulia Tymoshenko, the other hero of the Orange Revolution and his prime minister, which opened the door for the return to office of Viktor Yanukovych, who, thanks to the revolution, had failed in his bid to cheat his way to winning and holding the presidency.

  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. Besides, there is another element here which is different from the other two genocides. The Holocaust was an act committed by the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews and, more randomly, Roma. Likewise, in 1915 Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Turks or Kurds led by them. 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. The lack of a major memorial in Kiev until 2008 can thus stand in stark contrast to what happened in Armenia. As communists had no role in the genocide, they could sponsor the building of its 44-meter black stele and memorial, which opened in 1967. 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.

  At the memorial schoolchildren are led underground to see the exhibits. You can look at books incorporating death registers in which, incredibly, many but not by any means all who died had their ends recorded by Soviet bureaucrats. The victims’ ethnic nationalities were also noted and you can see that it was not just Ukrainians who died, but Russians, Germans, Bulgarians, Jews and so on. At the center of the circular underground memorial chamber is a glass and black stone shrine holding grain, representing, says Oleksandra Monetova, the young guide who showed me around, the souls of those who died. She dipped her hand in the grain and then let it slip through her fingers. I told her I thought it was odd that this monument is next to the Soviet memorials, since those who died in the famine were victims of Stalin and communism. She told me that many people from the west of Ukraine, where there was no famine because it was then part of Poland, say that this is indeed a contradiction. Then she added, like a person who had reflected on this and had no nationalist agenda to pursue or persuade me of, “To us from the east and the center it is not. My great-grandfather fought in the war and people in my family also suffered in the famine…People did not join the Soviet army because they loved the Soviet Union, but because they had to.”

  Oleksandra Monetova, guide at the Holodomor memorial, Kiev. The grain she is holding represents the souls of those who died. October 2013.

  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. Because it was never finished it is a patchy affair, but his chapter on collectivization and the famine is simply unparalleled, and worth recording here for its power to explain something about the period, the Holodomor and its legacy.

  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 listed as kulaks, while the richer peasants managed to buy themselves off.” Worse, however, but relevant today in an era where the power of propaganda is as strong as ever, is the description of what happened to people as the campaign took hold. “The activists were just villagers like anyone else, they were people everyone knew, but they all seemed to lose their minds. They seemed dazed, crazed, as if they had fallen under a spell.” People convinced themselves, she says, that kulaks were evil and should be shunned. As they ceased to be equal human beings, it was but a short step to seeing them dead, which was of course the aim of Soviet propaganda then and Russian wartime propaganda now by which Ukrainians are dehumanized as “fascists.”

  The anti-kulak campaign Anna recounts was at its height in February and March of 1930 as thousands were packed on trains and sent eastward, but it often left chaos in its wake. The amount of land cultivated fell, as did production, but “everyone kept reporting that, without the kulaks, our village life had immediately started to blossom.” Lies about how much was being produced went up the chain of command because “everyone wanted Stalin to rejoice in the belief that a happy life had begun…” Orders came back down that the village was to produce a grain quota “it couldn’t have fulfilled in ten years,” and if the village could not produce the grain then people were “idlers, parasites, kulaks who had not yet been liquidated! The kulaks had been deported, but their spirit endured.” The deportation of the kulaks, some 300,000 by the end of the campaign in Ukraine, out of 1.7 million deported in the entire Soviet Union, was obviously not the only cause of the fall in production, but whatever the reasons “the authorities searched for that grain as if they were searching for bombs and machine guns. They stabbed the earth with bayonets and ramrods; they smashed floors and dug underneath them; they dug up vegetable gardens.” Later Anna asks: “Who confiscated the grain?” and answers her own question. It was overwhelmingly locals, not people sent from Moscow. It was local communist officials, local policemen and men from the secret police and occasionally soldiers.

  By winter the village was starving but people were not dying yet. Party officials said that villagers should not “have lazed about.” People were desperate. There was no help from the state or party and the grain was being exported for cash, which was being used for industrialization. The descriptions of the full-blown famine that now set in are harrowing. Grossman’s Anna explains how people, who were prevented from going to the railway station, would beg
by the track of the Kiev–Odessa express hoping that someone would throw them a scrap of bread. This was something Grossman witnessed himself. Meanwhile, some managed to escape to towns where, with no permission to be there or coupons for bread, they died on the streets. Anna recounts in horrific detail how villagers lay in their homes barely breathing, incapable of moving. “The whole village died. First it was the children, then it was old people, then it was the middle-aged.” 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.

  A Stalin medal on the breast of a veteran, on Victory Day. Sloviansk, May 2014.

  After this settlers from less fertile Oryol, in Russia, were brought to repopulate the village. First the men had to clear the corpses with pitchforks and then the women were brought to clean and whitewash the walls. Whatever they did could not get rid of the smell of the dead though, so they left to return to Oryol, but in many other places demography was changed like this, a legacy with which Ukraine lives today. At the end of the chapter Anna remembers the life of the village: “There had been love. Wives leaving husbands, and daughters getting married. People had drunken fights, and they had had friends and family to stay.” The children had gone to school, she recalls, people had sung songs and when the mobile cinema came they had gone to see a film.

  And nothing remains of all that. Where can that life have gone? And that suffering, that terrible suffering? Can there really be nothing left? Is it really true that no one will be held to account for it all? That it will all just be forgotten without a trace?

  Grass has grown over it.

  How can this be?—I ask you.

  The scale of the catastrophe was unparalleled, but Kiev’s Holodomor museum apart, the reticence about dealing with this part of history is nowhere better symbolized than in the city’s large national history museum, which devotes one single cabinet to the famine. An explanation on the wall in slightly shaky English reduces the deaths of millions to one sentence.

  Industrialization brought up Ukraine to a new level of development. For a decade (1929–1938) hundreds of plants, factories, tens of power stations and mines had been constructed.

  In 1929, the Bolshevik power had begun a mass collectivization of agriculture which was carried with forcible methods by a dispossession of kulaks and eviction of peasant families to the north and to Siberia. In 1932–1933, Ukraine went through the scourge of famine (Holodomor), which was artificially organized by the Soviet totalitarian regime and resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

  The aims of cultural revolution were literacy campaign, development of national education, science, culture. In 1923 the policy of an Ukrainianization was brought in.

  When I asked Olesia Stasiuk, the thirty-four-year-old director of the Holodomor museum, about Ukraine’s patchy memory of the famine, she told me the story of her mother. When she had begun researching the Holodomor her mother found out from her own mother that more than ten people in the family had died. Olesia’s mother had known nothing about it and when she asked her mother why she had never told her, she said, “Because it was a taboo subject and to protect you.” If she had mentioned the subject at school, then her parents, who worked in a kolkhoz in the Vinnitsa region, could easily have lost their jobs. The legacy of this Soviet-era denial is that it makes it easy now to persuade those who want to rehabilitate Stalin, who want to forget the reality of his regime, that, yes, while there were tough times as the USSR industrialized, it is not a subject really worth spending more than a sentence or two on.

  Karapyshi is heartland Ukraine. The village is ninety minutes’ drive due south from Kiev. Everyone here speaks Ukrainian and feels Ukrainian and there is not a scintilla of doubt about who is right and who is wrong in this conflict. Galya Malchik, aged seventy, who wears a red headscarf and knitted waistcoat, told me that a local man with a truck asked people for help for soldiers on the front. He gathered jars of pickles, potatoes and salo, which is traditional Ukrainian salted pork fat. Galya wanted to help, but by the time she got there, he had already filled his truck and left. So, she said, “I gave money when they were buying underwear for soldiers.” During the Maidan revolution period many, especially young people and teachers, went at weekends to join the protesters and, said Galya, “our neighbor collected food to send to the Maidan.”

  Valentina Trotsenko teaches Ukrainian at the local school and is also the curator of the village museum. When I asked her what people would do if the conflict continued, she replied, “Well, as people say: ‘We will pickle and plant more.’ ” Referring to the devaluation of the hryvnia since the beginning of the Maidan revolution, she said stoically: “Half my salary has gone. I go to the supermarket and realize that I can get only a couple of kilos of sugar and cereal for porridge now, so I will have to grow the rest. But I don’t consider it a catastrophe. It is just life, and how it teaches us to save.”

  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 also sits squarely at the center of Ukraine’s modern history and experience. Its stories echo those of thousands of other villages and small towns.

  Most of Karapyshi’s museum is frozen in aspic, remaining just as it was in the late Soviet period, with the last major addition being an exhibition celebrating those who had fought in Afghanistan. It has a bust of Taras Shevchenko (1814–61), who is considered one of Ukraine’s two national poets along with Ivan Franko (1856–1916). Next to Shevchenko are objects of ethnographic interest such as an old village loom, earthenware jugs and so on. The only concession to the post-Soviet period are sheets with the names of villagers deported to the Gulag during the era of collectivization in the 1930s. They have been printed on A4 paper and stuck over a stylized mural of Lenin leading a group of armed men and one woman to victory.

  No one knows the origin of the name Karapyshi for sure, said Valentina, but there are two theories. One is that it means “black earth”—kara means black in Turkish and Turkic languages such as Tatar. Another theory is that it means “black small bread.” Village lore holds that the ancestors of the people of Karapyshi offered this to marauding Mongols in the thirteenth century in the hope that they would just pass by and not burn and pillage the village. 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 were nineteen mills, thirteen shops, one hotel, two taverns and a well-developed market. Today, said mayor Sergiy Rudenko, as we walked around the museum, there are 3,100 inhabitants in the village, though in the 1960s there were up to 8,000. Many began to move away after that, either to Kiev or even just to nearby Mironovka, where there was more work because it was the regional center.

  During the period of collectivization, 300 people deemed kurkuls, which is the Ukrainian word for kulaks, were arrested and deported. The war memorial records 485 confirmed dead during the Second World War, though more went missing or just never came back and their fate is unknown. In the cemetery there is a tall black crucifix which, said Sergiy, as we stood before it at dusk, marked the place where many who died in the Holodomor of 1932–33 were buried in a mass grave. The inscription at the base says “Eternal Glory to Those Who Died,” but it does not record how they died, why they died or how many died. Sergiy is unclear why this should be. Moreover there is no consensus about
the number. Valentina believes it was around 2,400 but others think it was far fewer than this. There are no lists of names of those who died.

  In a small village everyone has long memories of other people’s history. Nadya Shermet, aged sixty-three, is the sister of Galya Malchik. She lives in Kiev and works in the office managing property belonging to the municipality. She is about to retire and intends to return to the village. The sisters think perhaps only 400 died here in the Holodomor, while their brother Sergiy Makarov told me he thought it was fewer than thirty. I find it hard to understand how the numbers can vary so enormously in such a small place. Surely in a village like this, everyone would know exactly who had died, even if the reason why had been a taboo topic for so long. According to Nadya, Valentina’s father was a kurkul while theirs was a tractor driver in the kolkhoz or collective farm. Because he was an employee he got paid in food and had no land to be forced out of; in this way, the family was fed in hungry times. Valentina, however, has the inherited psychology of the kurkul, she said, which is to say that of “someone who has had something taken away from them,” which would explain why they were “angry” and might exaggerate what all would nevertheless agree were communist crimes. Galya concurred and remembered that after the war Valentina’s family got rich again because her father became the chief accountant in the kolkhoz. Hence his daughters had “silk dresses and we had cotton ones and were envious.” Still, they had it better than others. Their mother made them bread and little pyrizhky pies to take to school, but those whose fathers had not come back from the war did not have anything, so they shared what they had with them.