| |
London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. xiv, 258 pp. ?18.99 cloth.
Book Review By Frank E. Sysyn, University of Alberta
Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 1998, No. 2
Subscribers to the Economist
maintain that they receive thoughtful and witty assessments
of world affairs, in contrast to North American news journals'
fare. Anna Reid's Borderland will only reinforce this conviction.
This journalist for the Economist and the Daily Telegraph
in Kyiv (1993-95) and holder of a Master's degree in Russian
history and reform economics from the London School of Slavonic
and East European Studies has produced a fascinating account
of Ukraine's present and past interwoven with its geography
and people. While the author of this ambitious undertaking
does not fully succeed in grouping cultures and historical
narratives in each account of a place and depictions of some
of its inhabitants, this failing, as well as her occasional
historical errors and omissions, can be forgiven.
The ten chapters take the
reader from a description of the all-important Ukrainian capital,
Kyiv, through Kamianets-Podilskyi, Donetsk and Odesa, Lviv,
Chernivtsi, the villages of Matussiv [sic] and Lukovytsia,
Ivano-Frankivsk, Crimea, and Chornobyl. In "The New Jerusalem:
Kiev," Reid introduces Ukraine and the history of its ancient
capital and Kyivan Rus'. Through her discussion of Kamianets-Podilskyi,
she recounts the wars between the Cossacks and the Poles and
Ukrainian-Polish relations. In "The Russian Sea: Donetsk and
Odessa," the role of the Russian Empire in Ukrainian history
and of the Russians of Ukraine is examined. It is with chapter
four, "The Books of Genesis," that some of the structural
strains of the volume emerge. While it is true that the early-nineteenth-century
Ukrainian revival in the Russian Empire that resulted in Mykola
Kostomarov's "Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People"
had its greatest success in Austrian-ruled Galicia in the
late nineteenth century, the discussion of that movement is
dissonant in a chapter that has so little to do with imperial
Russia. A deep analysis of late-nineteenth-century Galician
affairs and twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalism might
have been in order.
In the same way, Chernivtsi
might not have emerged as "A Meaningless Fragment" had Reid
dealt with the role of the Habsburgs (and put the chapter
before the one on Lviv) rather than with the twentieth-century
Ukrainian nationalist movement that was centred in Galicia
and interwar Poland. She is more successful in apportioning
material in the subsequent chapters on the famine in the central
Ukrainian villages, the Jews and the Holocaust (in the chapter
on Ivano-Frankivsk), and the Tatar question and Russian-Ukrainian
tensions (in the chapter on the Crimea). Chornobyl as a place
and event are well placed as seminal in the breakup of the
Soviet Union and the drive for Ukrainian independence. Past
and present, geography, and terminology are brilliantly used
in "Europe or Little Russia? Ukraina," a characterization
of contemporary Ukraine. In the first chapter, Reid asserts
that "Visitors to Kiev usually hate the place, but those who
live there nearly always grow to love it." She follows with
a wonderful description of the Ukrainian capital:
The staircase to my one-room
flat might have stunk of urine and rotten cabbage, but outside
raggedy black crows swung about in the poplars, shaking gobbets
of frozen snow on to the rattling trams below. I liked the
cobbled streets with their elaborately stuccoed turn-of-the-century
houses, so dilapidated that the city authorities strung netting
under the balconies to prevent chunks of plaster falling onto
the pedestrians' heads. I liked the hillside parks with their
brick paths and the rusty wrought-iron pavilions, where teenagers
smooched in summer and children in rabbit-fur bonnets tobogganed
in winter. I liked the old men playing chess on the benches
round the pink-lit fountains on the Independence Square, or
shouldering home their tackle-boxes after a day's ice-fishing
on the Dnieper. I liked the way the dog-owners promenaded
on Sunday mornings, gravely exchanging compliments on their
exquisitely trimmed `Jacks' and `Johnnys'. I liked the echoey,
pigeon-filled covered market, full of peasant women who called
you `little swallow' or `little sunshine,' and dabbed honey
and sour cream onto one's fist to taste. I liked the couples
dancing to an accordion-not for money, just for fun-in the
dripping underpasses on Friday evenings..
All the same, Kiev was
a melancholy city. Its defining features were failures, absences.
Some were obvious: only one supermarket (dollars only), few
private cars (six at an intersection counted as a traffic
jam), a joke of a postal service.. Others one only felt the
force of after time. With benefits and pensions virtually
non-existent, the crudest health care . and no insurance .
Kievans were living lives of precariousness unknown in the
West, destitution never more than an illness or a family quarrel
away. It showed in their wiry bodies and pinched, alert, Depression-era
faces: the faces of a people who get by on cheap vodka and
stale cigarettes, and know they have to look out after themselves,
for nobody else will do it for them. The absences were physical
too. Though better preserved than most ex-Soviet histories,
ghosts haunted every corner.. (Pp. 4-5)
Reid came to love Ukraine
and its people, but this did not dull her critical senses
and fresh approach. This combination makes the book a delight
to read. Those who have been to Ukraine will find so many
familiar images but, at the same time, interpreted in new
ways. Those who have not been there or who know little of
Ukraine and Ukrainians will find clarity and richness in Reid's
account of Ukraine and its past. Most importantly, she presents
the people of Ukraine, thereby giving history and current
events a human face.
Like any journalist's account,
Reid's captures the Ukrainian present at a certain time-1993-95,
only partially mitigated by the writing process in 1996. At
the beginning of 1999 one has the advantage of knowing what
changed and what did not, regrettably in Ukraine primarily
not for the better. Still, in general Reid provides acute
observations on the forces and processes, internal and external,
shaping Ukraine.
Much of the history recounted
in the book is well told and accurate, albeit episodic. Still,
the volume has its share of errors. Certainly Dnipropetrovsk
and Kharkiv did not fall to the Germans before Kyiv in 1941
(p. 151), and while one may debate the place of fascist thought
in the OUN in the 1930s, it certainly could not be neo-fascist
(p. 106). In other instances the information is misleading,
as when Reid informs the reader that less than half of Bukovyna's
population before World War II was Ukrainian, without the
clarification that she is not referring to the current Ukrainian
province of Bukovyna (prewar northern Bukovyna), in which
they were the clear majority (p. 94). At times her observations
are questionable, as when she calls the government of the
Western Ukrainian People's Republic of 1918 "rough-and-ready"
(p. 102), thereby missing the great pride that the Galician
population had for generations about the functioning of that
government. In other cases her comments are neither proven
nor placed in a comparative context, such as her assertion
that the recorded examples of Ukrainians hiding and helping
Jews during World War II were not numerous relative to the
size of the Jews' slaughter (p. 156).
The major historical shortcoming
of Reid's book is her failure to integrate the history of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ukraine and the Cossacks
into her account. Her account of Kyiv as a backwater for half
a millennium after its fall to the Tatars, or her use of an
unflattering quote from Catherine II about the city after
her visit in 1787, will not inform the reader that Kyiv was
the intellectual centre of the Orthodox world under Metropolitan
Peter Mohyla in the mid-seventeenth century or that the glory
of Kyiv of the Golden Domes had re-emerged by the early eighteenth
century under the patronage of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (p. 12).
Her mention of the lost architecture of Kyiv (p. 4) and the
career of Mazepa (pp. 49-52) will alert only the most careful
reader to such issues. By neglecting the myth of Kyiv the
Second Jerusalem, which pervaded early modern Ukraine, Reid
missed an opportunity to deepen her discussion in chapter
1, "The New Jerusalem: Kiev."
The inadequate handling
of the Cossacks emerges in Reid's comment that after the cultural
Polonization of the old Ruthenian nobility in the late-sixteenth
and early-seventeenth centuries "Ukrainians and Belorussians
did not get their national leaders again until the mid-nineteenth
century" (p. 30). While this is true for the Belarusians,
the Cossacks and hetmans such as Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny,
Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Petro Doroshenko, Ivan Mazepa, and Pylyp
Orlyk certainly were comparable to the old Ruthenian nobility
as national leaders of the Ukrainians. Reid's rather simplistic
view of the Cossacks and her failure to examine the evolution
they underwent in the Hetmanate results in such errors as
stating that Cossack polities did not have borders and written
laws (p. 31).
Reid's commentary might
have benefitted if she had engaged in a wider reading of Ukrainian
history. While the works that she cites in the notes and selected
bibliography undoubtedly do not represent the totality of
her reading, one is struck by her not mentioning the Canadian
Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press volumes on Ukrainian-Polish,
Ukrainian-Russian, Ukrainian-Jewish, and Ukrainian-German
relations in a work that deals with these topics so extensively.
It can only be hoped that
Borderland establishes a new genre of sojourners' delving
into the present and past of Ukraine. Authors such as Myrna
Kostash (in Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe, 1993)
and Janice Kulyk-Keefer (in Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family,
1998) have given us accounts of travel through the space and
time of family ties that draw them to Ukraine, as has Michael
Ignatieff from the perspective of the Russian diaspora, rather
than the Ukrainian diaspora, in Blood and Belonging: Journeys
into the New Nationalism (1993). Anne Applebaum's Between
East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1994) and
Neal Ascherson's Black Sea (1995) have taken readers to Ukraine
while on a regional journey. All of these accounts have been
possible because Ukraine is no longer sealed off from the
wider world and the world wishes to know what this large state
is and whence it came.
Canadian Institute
of Ukrainian Studies, Toronto Office
1 Spadina Crescent, room 109, University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, M5S 2J5, Canada
telephone: (416) 978-8669; message: (416) 532-7367; fax: (416)
978-2672
http://www.ualberta.ca/~cius/cius/press-frame.htm
http://www.ualberta.ca/CIUS/eu/home-eu.htm
|
|
back
