But Russians grasp immediately what has happened. I am in Moscow watching a session of the Supreme Council of the USSR. The moment is dramatic because Lukianov is speaking — formerly the leader of this council and Gorbachev’s right hand, now accused of being the ideological mastermind of the conspiracy against him. Complete silence reigns in this usually noisy hall.
Suddenly, Laptin, the deputy chairing the session, interrupts the proceedings and announces in a nervous voice: “Comrades, there have been developments in Kiev. A delegation of the Supreme Council of the USSR must fly there at once!” Rudzkoy, Yeltsin’s deputy, and Sobchak, the mayor of Petersburg, depart at the head of the delegation. Both had played leading roles in the defeat of the neo-Stalinist putsch, but both are Russians and thus they understand what Russia is without the Ukraine. “Without the Ukraine,” the Polish historian J. Waswicz wrote back in the thirties, “Moscow is relegated to a northern wilderness.”
• • •
THE FUTURE OF Ukraine will develop in two directions: in terms of its relations with Russia, and in terms of its relations with Europe and the rest of the world. If these relationships unfold propitiously, Ukraine’s chances are excellent. For it is a country of fertile soil and precious natural resources, blessed with a warm, hospitable climate. And it is a large nation of more than fifty million — strong, resilient, and ambitious.
In the fall of 1990, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his plan for the kind of state that he believed should arise in place of the USSR. In the publication — entitled How to Build Russia? — he proposes that the future state comprise Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan. Let us give back the rest, Solzhenitsyn advises, because “we do not have the strength for the peripheries.”
The Ukrainians rejected this plan and others like it. “The only solution to the Ukrainian problem,” Leonid Plushch, the Ukrainian dissident, recently wrote, “is the creation of our own state, which will marshall the defensive mechanisms and the appropriate means for cultural development.” The Ukrainian intellectuals, who once feared Russian Communists, are now vigilantly observing the attitudes of Russian democrats. Nikolai Riabchuk, one of several excellent Ukrainian essayists, expresses the anxieties that have led to this vigilance when, writing about the program of the Russian Movement for Democratic Reforms, he asks: “Impero-democrats instead of Impero-communists?” Sakharov’s widow, Elena Bonner, voiced similar sentiments in early September. “I fear,” she said, that which dwells within Russians, their “spirit of expansion and domination.”
And the relations of Ukraine with the rest of the world? Until 1917—and in certain parts of the country this was true as recently as 1939—the Ukraine was one of the world’s most variegated tapestries of cultures, religions, and languages, an extremely rich, colorful garden in which Westerners immersed themselves with wonder and fascination. How many Polish, Russian, Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, Austrian, German, Romanian traces still remain here, despite the devastation and destruction? In September I visited the Polish cemetery in Żytomierz (150 kilometers from Kiev along the road to Lvov): the grave of the son of Moniuszka, of the wife of Kraszewski, of the sister of Paderewski, of the family of Conrad. The family vault of General Dαbrowski, which served until recently as an occasional brothel.
The strength of Ukraine vis-à-vis the rest of the world is its emigration. A large portion of Canadian wheat grows on the fields of Ukrainian farmers in Alberta and Ontario. The Ukrainians form influential, economically and culturally strong communities in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, as well as in Western Europe. These emigrants are strongly attached to Ukraine. Ukrainian patriotism has a peasant quality: it is firmly rooted in the native soil. In Kiev today there are already many Ukrainians from Canada and the United States. They want to establish banks and businesses, to trade, to start up publishing houses. Soon Ukraine will have its own airlines, its own seagoing fleet, its own currency and army.
Questioned about the future Ukraine, one of its leaders, Mihailo Horyn, told me in Kiev: “We want Ukraine to be an enlightened, good, democratic, and humane state.”
Enlightened, good, democratic, and humane. Amen.
LVOV. One evening, Father Ludwik Kamielowski takes me to his home. He lives with his mother and wants me to meet her.
Mrs. Bronisława Kamielowska is an elderly woman with a warm, kindly face. Bent over, carrying an invisible burden, she speaks calmly, in an even-tempered voice, as though her concern about that which she is describing belongs to her in some former incarnation, an incarnation with which she, the Bronisława Kamielowska who sits before me, now has very little in common. Thinking about her later, I remembered a sentence Paul Claudel wrote in his old age: “I look at my earlier life as on an island receding in the distance.” The frantic acceleration and mutability of history, which are the essence of the times we live in, dictate that many of us are inhabited by several personas, practically indifferent to one another, even mutually contradictory.
Mrs. Kamielowska gave birth to ten children. Six of them died of hunger before her eyes. She is the female embodiment of Job, Job of the epoch of the Great Famine. That she, a woman, survived that cataclysm only confirms the fact that the Great Famine claimed most of its victims among children and men. Women turned out to be, relatively, the strongest, the most resilient. “How good is God,” Mrs. Kamielowska says at one point, “that he gave me so much strength!”
Here, in this tiny apartment, I observe scenes of the Great Famine through the eyes of the mother of Father Ludwik. (The priest is her youngest child.) I do not ask her for the names of the deceased, or whether their graves exist somewhere, because I feel that I shouldn’t ask about anything at all and should only listen to what will be confided to me.
First, briefly, about the history of the Great Famine. At the start of 1929, the sixteenth Conference of the All Soviet Communist Party/Bolsheviks ratifies the program for universal collectivization. Stalin decides that by the fall of 1930 the entire peasantry of his country (which at that time means three-quarters of the population, more than one hundred million people) must be in kolkhozes. But the peasants do not want to join kolkhozes. Stalin proceeds to snuff out their resistance by two methods. He sends hundreds of thousands of them to the camps or deports and resettles them in Siberia, and the rest he undertakes to starve into obedience.
The main blow falls on the Ukraine, on this land where in the village of Butryn, county Szepietowka, Mrs. Kamielowska lives with her husband, Joseph, and her children.
Officially, the matter presented itself as follows: Moscow had determined the size of the quota each village was obliged to deliver to the state — how much grain, potatoes, meat, and so on, but the quotas were significantly greater than what the land could realistically be expected to yield. Understandably, the peasants were unable to fulfill the plan imposed upon them. So then, by force — usually by military force — the authorities started confiscating everything edible in the villages. The peasants had nothing to eat and nothing to sow. A massive and deadly famine began in 1930, lasting seven years and reaping its grimmest harvest in 1933. The majority of demographers and historians today agree that in those years Stalin starved to death around ten million people.