CHAPTER FIVE A Meaningless Fragment: Chernivtsi

Undefined ourselves, we expected something from Time, which was unable to provide a definition and wasted itself in a thousand subterfuges.

– Bruno Schulz, 1937

OF ALL THE rag-tag foreign leavings that make up present-day Ukraine, the remotest and most obscure is the Bukovyna.

Chernivtsi is duller now. Though its cab-drivers still juggle lei and forints and roubles in their heads, it has lost the old, heterogeneous population that gave it flavour. On market days, wrote von Rezzori, the streets used to fill with a dozen different nationalities: Jews and Armenians haggled over corn and used clothing, Hutsul peasant-women squabbled with Swabians over vegetables and poultry, and gypsy card-sharpers shuffled aces under the noses of gaping mountain men with long matted hair and faces ‘tanned like old goat hams’ – all to the wailing of Caruso from the wind-up gramophones on sale beside the Turkish Fountain, and the stench of raw sheep’s hide.

Now the Jews, Armenians and Swabians have all gone, replaced by stolid Ukrainians – less than half the Bukovyna’s population before the war – and a scattering of lonely Russians: stranded survivors, like von Rezzori’s dotty parents three-quarters of a century ago, of an empire that sank beneath their feet. The Great Synagogue (‘in the Moorish style’, according to Baedeker), has disappeared, as has the statue of a Bukovynan bison goring an Austrian double-headed eagle – a piece of Romanian folie de grandeur – that stood in the Ringplatz opposite the Rathaus and the hotels Adler and Weiss. The cafes have been given bland Soviet names, the ‘Dniestr’, ‘Turyst’ and ‘Kiev’ replacing Baedeker’s Cafe de L’Europe and Cafe Wien. Only the ‘Edelweiss’ carries a reminder of an Austrian past. The old opera house – its sinuous Jugendstil facjade covered in billposters for folksy Ukrainian operettas – has closed for lack of funds, and the Armenian church (‘in a mixed Gothic and Renaissance style’) has been turned into a concert hall. When von Rezzori revisited in the late 1980s, he found the city well preserved architecturally but ‘devoid of soul’.

What does survive is the landscape. To the south, the Prut runs away to the broad Moldovan plain. To the west, the furry blue Carpathians march off towards Poland and Transylvania. Bright with the fluorescent green of aspens and shiny white of silver birch, loud with the percussion of axes and woodpeckers, the mountains cannot have changed much since von Rezzori went shooting with his father as a boy, each with shirt buttoned up tight to the chin in accordance with the sacred laws of Austrian hunting etiquette. The Hutsuls – a picturesque tribe of mountain shepherds, famous for their craftsmanship – believed the forests hid rusalkas, green-eyed nymphs who asked riddles and tickled men to death, and witches whose long pendulous breasts, flung backward over their shoulders, gave them the ability to change shape and to fly. To keep the witches at bay they built themselves fantastical wooden churches – some tiny, dwarfed by shingled pagoda-like spires; others tall and foursquare and roofed in grey tin, riding between the pines like battleships among square-riggers.

It is hard to believe now, but before the war the Bukovyna was a fashionable holiday resort, an alternative to the Alps for middle-class families from Warsaw and Vienna. Their villas – two-storey, with glassed-in verandahs and mansard roofs – are still there, scattered about the hillsides above hamlets of two-room cottages, each with fruit-trees, dungheap and barking dog. Over in the Polish Carpathians the tourists are back, together with such novelties as cars, metalled roads and refrigerated Coca-Cola.

But on the Ukrainian side of the border, the mountains are more cut off from the world than ever. The communists’ concrete sanatoria stand empty, since the Ukainian new rich, who are the only people who can afford to go on holiday at all nowadays, head straight for Ibiza or Marbella. After a disastrous attempt at a skiing holiday with my boyfriend, I could hardly blame them. An Englishman of traditional tastes, he was so traumatised by a weekend at the Yuzhtechenergo – property of the local branch of the energy ministry – that he refused ever, ever to come to Ukraine again. It was not so much the families cooking shashlyki over little bonfires in the corridors that he minded, he said, or the bits of reinforcing rod sticking out of the walls, or the strips of newspaper stuck over the cracks in the window-frames, or the cabbage-filled ravioli for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or even the ice-sculpture of an erect penis at the top of the resort’s single chair-lift. It was the fact that when he got back to his room, he found a happy troop of skiers having a picnic on his bed. That they had offered him a piece of sausage on the end of a penknife was no consolation, and as soon as we got back to civilisation he was going to handcuff himself to the nearest heated towel-rail and never let go. Our ski-guide Anton, part-time drummer in a band devoted to something called ‘prison rock’, was unsympathetic. ‘Be glad,’ he told us, ‘you’re not at the Dynamo. That’s a real horse-house.’

Chernivtsi’s ‘Romanian interlude’ was a result of the First World War. When war was declared in July 1914, Ukrainians found themselves conscripted into two opposing armies – 3.5 million into the Russian, a quarter of a million into the Austrian. As ever, Ukraine turned into a battlefield, and Ukrainians often ended up fighting each other.

The Bolshevik coup of November 1917 and the collapse of Austro-Hungary twelve months later ushered in the ‘Russian’ Civil War, most of which really took place in Ukraine. The First World War had at least been fought between regular armies on recognisable fronts; the Civil War was chaos. For Isaac Babel, incongruously attached to a Red Army cavalry unit, it was a war of dusty roads and obscene songs, the ‘odour of yesterday’s blood and slain horses’,⁶ casual rapes and throat-slittings, charred towns and looted churches, all under a sun that rolled across the sky ‘like a severed head’. It brutalised him – an intellectual with ’spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart’ – as it did everyone else: he ends one of his Red Cavalry stories ‘begging fate for the simplest of abilities – the ability to kill a man’.⁷

For three years five different armies – Red, White, Polish, Ukrainian and Allied – rampaged through the countryside, as did dozens of anarchic ‘Cossack’ bands. Hiding their weapons in barns and pigsties, these peasant formations could appear and disappear at will. Machine-guns were mounted on rickety two-wheeled tachankas; ‘haycarts,’ Babel wrote, ‘drawn up in battle formation, take possession of towns’.⁸ The biggest, under otamans Nestor Makhno and Matviy Hryhoryev, were thousands strong and equipped with field-guns and armoured Gars.

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:

The Cossacks divided into numerous separate groups, each of three or four men, no more. They acted not casually... but according to a common plan... A group of Cossacks would break into a Jewish home, and their first word would be ‘Money!’ If it turned out that Cossacks had been there before and taken all there was, they would immediately demand the head of the household... They would place a rope around his neck. One Cossack took one end, another the other, and they would begin to choke him. If there was a beam on the ceiling, they might hang him. If one of those present burst into tears or begged for mercy, then – even if he were a child – they beat him to death... I know of many homeowners whom the Cossacks forced to set their houses on fire, and then compelled, with sabres or bayonets, along with those who ran out of the burning houses, to turn back into the fire, in this manner causing them to burn alive.⁹

The Fastiv massacre is said to have taken 1,500 lives; estimates of the total number of Jews killed in the Civil War pogroms range from 50,000 to 200,000.

Altogether the years 1914 to 1921 killed about 1.5 million people in Ukraine. Amid this slaughter, Ukrainians made two separate attempts at independence. One centred on Kiev, the other on Lviv. Both ended in failure.

When news of Nicholas II’s abdication reached Kiev in March 1917, Ukrainian organisations in the city formed a Central Council, or Rada, in competition with the Russian-dominated Soviet of Soldiers and Workers. Over 100,000 demonstrators turned out in the Rada’s support, marching under blue-and-yellow banners and pictures of Shevchenko. In April a National Congress, attended by 900 delegates from all over the country, elected as President the historian Hrushevsky, newly returned from exile in Moscow, and the following month the Rada issued its First Universal, declaring that ‘without separating entirely from Russia, without severing connections with the Russian state’, the Ukrainian people should ‘have the right to order their own lives in their own land’.¹⁰ In July Petrograd’s Provisional Government reluctantly gave the Rada official recognition, and Britain and France sent accredited representatives.

The Rada survived less than a year. Manned by young left-wing idealists who refused to adopt the existing administrative apparatus or the army units voluntarily formed in their support, it was more a talking-shop than a government, never extending its authority much beyond the cities. From the outset, wrote a (sympathetic) observer, it was ‘a real Tower of Babel... a parliament of national elements rather than of political parties’.¹¹ Six weeks after Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, pro-Bolshevik troops marched on Kiev, ineffectually opposed by a scratch collection of peasants, schoolboys and ex-prisoners of war under Semyon Petlyura, a leading Ukrainian socialist and the Rada’s minister for war. While the Bolsheviks bombarded the city with heavy artillery from across the Dnieper, the desperate Rada rushed through its Fourth and last Universal, declaring Ukraine unconditionally independent: ‘People of Ukraine! By your efforts, by your will, by your word, a Free Ukrainian People’s Republic has been created on Ukrainian soil. The ancient dream of your ancestors – fighters for the freedom and rights of workers – has been fulfilled... From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes independent, subject to no one, a Free Sovereign State...’¹² Thirteen days later the Rada fled Kiev for Volhynia, debating as it went. ‘In various obscure towns along the railway line,’ writes Hrushevsky’s biographer, ‘laws were passed about the socialisation of land, about the introduction of the New Style calendar, a new monetary system, a coat-of-arms for the Republic, Ukrainian citizenship...’¹³ After eight precarious months, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was no more.

While fighting continued around Kiev, German, Russian and Ukrainian delegations were negotiating an armistice in the Belarussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Two separate agreements – one with the Bolsheviks, one with the Rada – handed Ukraine, along with the Baltics, Russian-ruled Poland and most of Belarus, to Germany. For the Bolsheviks, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the only way to stop the war. For Germany, it secured a rich source of food supply and freed up troops for the Western Front. For the Rada, promised autonomy under German protection, it was a route back into government. In the event, only Bolshevik expectations were fulfilled. The Germans occupied Kiev in March 1918, bringing Hrushevsky and the Rada with them. But a few weeks of the Ukrainians’ interminable bickering convinced them that the Rada was incapable of running even a puppet government. On 28 April, soldiers marched into a debate on the new Ukrainian constitution and disbanded the assembly. The next day Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Russified landowner who had earlier offered military support to the Rada and been turned down, was declared ‘Hetman of All Ukraine’. Sympathetic soldiers smuggled Hrushevsky out of the city on foot, his long beard hidden inside his overcoat.

Given an illusory stability by the Germans’ presence, Kiev filled with Russian refugees: ‘grey-haired bankers and their wives... Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres.’¹⁴ Nightclubs – the ‘Lilac Negro’ and the ‘Dust and Ashes’ – opened to cater for those determined to fiddle while Rome burned. All that summer, wrote Bulgakov, ‘the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne’.¹⁵

Meanwhile, in the trenches of Flanders, the Germans were losing the war. In December they evacuated Kiev, taking Skoropadsky with them, and Petlyura’s Ukrainians entered the city once again, only to flee in the face of a second Red Army advance a few weeks later. At the same time, the Allies made their sole contribution to the anti-Bolshevik cause in Ukraine, landing 60,000 French troops along the Black Sea coast in support of the Whites. They were withdrawn again four months later, after a single unsuccessful skirmish with ‘otaman’ Hryhoryev.

Over the next year and a half, Kiev changed hands with dizzying frequency. ‘The inhabitants of Kiev reckon that there were eighteen changes of power,’ wrote Bulgakov. ‘Some stay-at-home memoirists counted up to twelve of them; I can tell you that there were precisely fourteen.’¹⁶ The Ukrainians’ last throw came in 1920, when Petlyura did a deal with the Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski, recognising Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia in exchange for a joint Polish–Ukrainian advance on Kiev. Pilsudski duly took Kiev in May, only to abandon it again just over a month later. Petlyura fought on with the typhoid-ridden remnants of his army until November, before accepting internment in Poland. In 1926 he was assassinated in Paris by a middle-aged watchmaker, Sholem Schwartzbard, in revenge for his troops’ massacres of Ukrainian Jews. 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

In Lviv, Ukrainian independence was even shorter-lived. In October 1918, when it became clear that Austro-Hungary was falling apart, officers from the Sich Riflemen, an all-Ukrainian unit of the Austrian army, ran up blue-and-yellow flags over the public buildings, and posted placards announcing a West Ukrainian National Republic. House-to-house fighting immediately broke out between the Riflemen and Pilsudski’s Polish Military Organisation. Three weeks later the Ukrainians fled east to Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), where they managed to form a rough-and-ready government and gather an army. The following summer the Poles pushed them over the river Zbruch into central Ukraine, where they joined Petlyura in defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Why did the Ukrainians fail to get independence at the end of the First World War, when the Poles, Czechs, Balts, Romanians and Albanians all succeeded? That they should fail was not a foregone conclusion. In 1918 some strands of Western opinion saw the establishment of an independent or semi-independent Ukrainian state in eastern Galicia as a real possibility, in accordance with Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Pilsudski was also initially in favour, on the grounds that an autonomous Ukrainian state, federated with Poland together with Lithuania and Belarus, would act as a buffer between Poland and Russia.

But even before the Ukrainians were beaten on the battlefield, rendering an independent Ukraine a practical impossibility, they had lost the argument at the conference table. At the Paris peace talks of 1919 the Ukrainians had to make their voice heard among a host of vociferous newly freed East European nations, all of whom based their claims more on historical precedent than Wilson’s Fourteen Points. ‘When Dmowski related the claims of Poland,’ recalled a despairing American official, ‘he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could only reach 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. Benes followed immediately afterward with the counter-claims of Czechoslovakia, and, if I remember correctly, he began a century earlier and finished an hour later.’¹⁸ The Poles’ argument, laid out in arch-nationalist Roman Dmowski’s impressively fluent French and English, was that Poland needed sovereignty over East Galicia, the better to act as counterweight to a resurgent Germany. Ukrainian national feeling was a German invention and the Ukrainians were dangerously inclined towards Bolshevism, as witnessed by their bloody raids on Polish-owned estates. The Ukrainians could and should not, therefore, be given any sort of independence. The White representatives at the conference agreed – though of course as far as they were concerned Ukraine was part of ‘one and indivisible’ Russia.

Hopelessly out of their depth in the gilt and green-baize world of international diplomacy, the Ukrainians fought their corner as best they could. The head of the Ukrainian delegation, Arnold Margolin, dashed to and fro between the European capitals, vainly trying to stir up enthusiasm for the Galician cause. ‘In interviews with Philip Kerr... chief of Lloyd George’s cabinet,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I could elicit no definite opinion in regard to events in Warsaw and the Ukraine. “Qui vivra, vena” was his enigmatic reply to my questions.’ Herbert Asquith expressed polite interest in Ukrainian peasant customs, and asked ‘which Ukrainian party corresponded to the British Liberal Party’.¹⁹ In Berlin, Rathenau assured him that Bolshevik Russia was bound to turn democratic; an American diplomat asked him why Ukraine and Russia didn’t form ‘a federation similar to our American commonwealth’. Americans in general, Margolin discovered, were ‘as uninformed about Ukrainians as the average European is about the numerous African tribes’.²⁰

In the end, the Allies split on the Galicia issue. Britain, with oil interests in the region, was inclined to favour the Ukrainians; France, paranoid about a resurgent Germany, strongly supported the Poles. The casting vote therefore went to the Americans. After much dithering, they too came down in favour of Poland. On 25 June the Allied Council of Ambassadors accepted Poland’s right to occupy Galicia ‘in order to protect the civilian population from the dangerous threat of Bolshevik bands’. In exchange Poland gave a vague promise, never fulfilled, of a plebiscite permanently to decide the region’s future.

Ironically enough, one of the few Western voices raised against the decision was that of the historian Lewis Namier, a Polonised Galician Jew who had taken British nationality and spent the war working for British intelligence. Despite knowing that Ukrainian marauders had burned down the family manor-house and kidnapped his mother and sister, he wrote:

For all my personal loss and anxieties I do insist that a grievous wrong has been done the Ukrainians. Left in peace to establish a strongly radical but decent government, they might well have organised themselves. Driven to despair, insidiously pushed daily toward bolshevism and into committing atrocious crimes, they know – and we shall see – that a Polish military occupation, as foreshadowed in the Foreign Minister’s decision of 25 June, means disaster without end. And I insist that no number of atrocities, however horrible, can deprive a nation of its right to independence, nor justify it being put under the heel of its worst enemies and persecutors. If the horrifying excesses reported by the Poles are true, they only prove the intensity of the Ukrainians’ detestation of them...’²¹

The Treaty of Versailles, signed three days after the decision on Galicia, split Ukraine in four. Galicia and western Volhynia went to Poland; the Bukovyna to Romania, and the district around Uzhorod and Mukachevo, known as Ukrainian Transcarpathia, to Czechoslovakia. Central and eastern Ukraine stayed with Russia, pending the outcome of the Polish–Soviet war. The treaty, Namier told his boss, was ‘worse than incomprehensible’, it was ‘a scandalous letting down of the Ukrainians.’²² Poland’s border with the Soviet Union, left open at Versailles, was formalised at the Treaty of Riga in February 1921, with no Ukrainian participation whatsoever.

Namier’s forebodings were all too prescient. The Treaty of Versailles created plenty of grievances among the East European nationalities. But none matched the Ukrainians’, who, though numbering tens of millions, had been left with no state of their own at all. Their hostility to the Galicia settlement became one of the major factors destabilising Poland between the wars.

In 1923 the League of Nations recognised Poland’s permanent sovereignty over Galicia and western Volhynia on condition that it grant the region an autonomous administration, allow the use of the Ukrainian language in government, and establish an independent Ukrainian university. But despite numerous complaints to the League, these promises were never fulfilled. Though almost a third of interwar Poland’s inhabitants were non-Polish (Ukrainians made up 14 per cent of the population, Jews 9 per cent, Belarussians 3 per cent, Germans 2 per cent), Polish governments became increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic, especially after Pilsudski’s coup of 1926. Ukrainian schools were closed or turned Polish-speaking, Ukrainian professorships at Lviv University abolished, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians barred from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. Over 300 Orthodox churches were demolished or converted to Catholicism, and up to 200,000 Polish settlers were moved into Ukrainian towns and villages. Poland’s aim, according to the aptly named nationalist politician Stanislaw Grabski, should be ‘the transformation... of the Commonwealth into Polish ethnic territory.’²³

Predictably, far from assimilating the Ukrainians, Polonisa-tion turned them radical. Though the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDO), sought compromise and denounced the use of violence, the national movement passed increasingly into the hands of an underground terrorist group, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Led by an ex-Sich Rifleman, OUN was neo-fascist in rhetoric and pro-German in sympathy, drawing financial support from Germany and Lithuania. In 1930, in response to hundreds of OUN-led arson attacks on Polish-owned estates, the government mounted a violent and indiscriminate ‘pacification’ campaign in the Galician countryside. Despite clumsy cover-up attempts (the Chicago Daily New’s man in Lviv was trailed by ‘a woman in gumboots, who spent most of her time looking bored in the vestibule of the George Hotel’) the campaign provoked an outcry in the Western press:

The ‘pacificatory’ system of the Polish soldiers consists of raiding a village suspected of being implicated in the destruction of the farm of a neighbouring Polish landowner. The principal men of the village – the mayor, priest, heads of co-operative societies and leaders of sports and reading clubs – are summoned before the commander of the Polish detachment. The Ukrainians are required to give information regarding acts of incendiarism and to hand over all arms. If their answers are considered unsatisfactory – and this is generally the case – they get sixty or ninety blows from the knout, which used to be employed in Poland only by emissaries of the Russian Czar. If the victims faint under the blows, they are sometimes revived by throwing cold water over them, and then flogging begins anew.

The Polish soldiers have been no respecters of sex, and in many villages women have been subjected to these merciless whippings. Sometimes in their search for arms the soldiers remove the thatched roofs from the cottages and then depart, leaving the hapless occupants exposed to the less brutal treatment of the elements.

SIGNS OF NATIONALITY DESTROYED

The native Ukrainian garb and Ukrainian needlework is destroyed wherever seen in the homes of peasants, for the object of the Polish military commanders is ruthlessly to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian nationality. For this reason the Ukrainian co-operative stores and creameries, reading-rooms and libraries have been destroyed. Priests are forced to cry out ‘Long live Pilsudski!’ (Marshal Joseph Pilsudski, Premier and virtual dictator of Poland) or ‘Hurrah for the Polish Republic’ under threat of being flogged until they are made unconscious if they refrain from so doing. (New York Herald Tribune, 15, October 1930)

OUN’s response was an assassination campaign. In the early 1930s OUN killed dozens of Polish policemen and officials, as well as several prominent Ukrainian moderates. Its best-known victim was Bronislaw Pieracki, the interior minister responsible for the outrages in Galicia. Though OUN leaders were eventually rounded up and imprisoned, the organisation continued to expand right up to the Second World War, when it formed the basis of the Ukrainian partisan army.

OUN’s only direct descendant in contemporary Ukrainian politics is the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), a small neo-Nazi paramilitary group which sent volunteers to fight against the Russians in the Moldovan and Georgian civil wars. In December 1993, just after Vladimir Zhirinovsky shocked the world in Russia’s first free parliamentary elections, my editor told me to go and find out more about them. Was neo-fascism, he wanted to know, about to sweep Ukraine too?

UNA’s headquarters happened to be just around the corner from my flat, in a shabby basement at the end of a boarded-up cul-de-sac. In the mornings, its khaki-clad devotees could be spotted queueing, rather self-consciously, amongs the shuffling pensioners outside the local bread shop. My interview, with the second-in-command of UNA’S political wing, went like a dream. Dressed in black polo-neck, fatigues and army boots, he delivered the requisite tirade on Ukrainian cultural supremacy and Russian and American ‘diabolism’. Saracens came into it, so did Nostradamus. By trying to persuade Ukraine to give up its nuclear missiles, the West was ‘going in the direction of a third world war’. A Cossack mace sat in a corner, and a picture of the partisan leader Stepan Bandera hung, slightly askew, on the wall, next to a calendar from the Dniproflot riverboat company. I duly mustered my quotes and wrote my piece. That the Ukrainians should swing to the extreme right, I opined, was not only possible but ‘very likely’. Prices were doubling every month, factories were closing right and left, and fuel shortages had doused the eternal flames on the war memorials. All the Weimar ingredients, in short, were there.

My Ukrainian friends read the piece and got cross. I had got things completely out of proportion, they said. UNA was a tiny group, never likely to get anywhere, and they were fed up with people like me taking down its pathetic ravings and splashing them all over the Western press. Those excitable Russians might vote for a clown like Zhirinovsky, but Ukrainians were a sensible lot who knew how to keep their feet on the ground. They were right. In the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of spring 1994, campaigning under the priceless slogan ‘Vote for us and you’ll never have to vote again’, UNA won three out of 450 seats, and quietly dropped out of the news. I had learned my lesson in one of Ukraine’s most enduring characteristics – pragmatism.

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 cafe 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 published when war broke out, was shot dead by an SS officer as he walked home with a loaf of bread.

Though all save Schulz lived most of their lives abroad, none stopped writing about the strange, indefinite borderlands in which they grew up. Their work is linked by a sense of limbo and disorientation – not the disorientation of exiles, but of people whose own homeland has no fixed identity. In his wonderful novel The Radetzky March, Roth turns Galicia into a literal and metaphorical swamp: ‘Any stranger coming into this region was doomed to gradual decay. No one was as strong as the swamp. No one could hold out against the borderland.’²⁴ In Schulz’s surreal Drohobycz, pots and pans fly about the room, men turn into doorbells and cockroaches, and comets descend chimneys from green, millennial skies. His characters wander about in a timeless, somnambulant daze:

Waking up, still dazed and shaky, one continues the interrupted conversation or the wearisome walk, carries on complicated discussions without end. In this way, whole chunks of time are casually lost somewhere; control over the continuity of the day is loosened until it finally ceases to matter... ²⁵

What has cut the town from its moorings is the passing of the Hapsburg empire, an empire which ‘squared the world like paper... held it within procedural bounds, and insured it against derailment into things unforeseen, adventurous, or simply unpredictable’.²⁶ Even Celan, born two years after Austro-Hun-gary’s collapse, called himself a ‘posthumous Kakanier’, after the Hapsburgs’ omnipresent K & K. In von Rezzori’s Tcherno-pol, similarly lit by the ‘sunset glow of the sunken dual monarchy’, Hapsburg certainties have been replaced with cynicism, with a ruthless appreciation of the grotesque. His novel The Hussar has an impossibly correct Austrian, a left-over from the old regime, quixotically defending his nymphomaniac sister-in-law’s honour by fighting a series of duels. The incredulous city authorities duly commit him to an insane asylum:

He couldn’t help it that he was virtuous. It was the heritage of the world from which he came, a world that had gone under. In the idiom of Tchernopol, one would have said he just happened to be one of the slow ones who can grasp only very gradually that times have changed.²⁷

One last magnificently Rezzori-esque figure from the pre-war borderlands deserves mention – Jan Ludvik Hoch. Hoch was born in 1923 in Slatinske Doly (now Velyky Bychkiv), a muddy little town wedged between the Carpathians and the river Tisza in what was once Czechoslovakia and is now Transcarpathian Ukraine. It had a main street, two wooden synagogues, a few shops, one bar and five cars. It didn’t need a cemetery, jokers said, because everyone either emigrated or ended up on the gallows.

On birth, Jan had been called Abraham, but when the birth was registered at the town hall an official insisted that the baby take a Czech name. His father was a woodcutter and cattle-dealer, and probably, like the rest of the town, a part-time smuggler, ferrying shoes and clothing across the Tisza to Romania in exchange for food and alcohol. The family lived in a two-room cottage with its own wooden verandah and well but no oven; instead dough was sent to the communal bakery. The seven children shared beds and shoes, and every year gypsies cleared out the pit below the outdoor privy and spread its contents on the vegetable patch in the yard. Jan wore a skullcap and long Hasidic curls, and learned to read and write in Hebrew at the local yeshiva. When war broke out he reinvented himself. He cut off his hair, took the train to Budapest, and joined – it is unclear quite when or where – the Czech Legion. The Legion took him from Palestine to Marseilles to Liverpool, and he ended the war a much-decorated captain in the British army. When he took British nationality, it was under a name chosen by his brigadier – Robert Maxwell.

One blazing Sunday afternoon forty-five years later I interviewed Maxwell on the roof of the London headquarters of his publishing empire. A helicopter gleamed on the Astroturf, and a butler in striped trousers brought up tea things on a tray. Dressed in a scarlet silk shirt that bulged like a spinnaker-sail, he was the fattest and most bombastic man I had ever seen. The lies he told about his business (the subject of the interview was the launch of the European) were transparent, superb, regal in their scope and shamelessness. Eighteen months later, as his companies crumbled around him, he vanished over the side of his motor-yacht into the Mediterranean. Enigmatic to the last, he was another true son of the somewhere in the middle of nowhere that was pre-war borderland Ukraine.