Thinking With the Blood. Owen Matthews
their power in 1920 with the final defeat of White General Pyotr Wrangel.
More recently, too, the rich farmland of the North Ukraine, the black earth country which made this region the bread basket of the Empire, was where Iosif Stalin committed his most horrific crime, and achieved some of his greatest victories. Crime and victory were both part of the first Five Year Plan of 1929, which called for land and livestock to be forcibly confiscated from the dangerously reactionary peasantry. But the new “collective farms” did not work: by the winter of 1932-3 between four and seven million Ukrainian peasants had starved to death, as the Soviet State sold grain abroad at Depression prices to buy machinery for heavy industry. The tragedy is commemorated by Ukrainians today as the Holodomor — literally the hunger-death — as a genocide of their people by the Soviets. But the machinery bought at the expense of the starving was an economic triumph: bringing Russia kicking and screaming into the twentieth century through a prodigious campaign of crash industrialisation which was as wasteful of human life as it was spectacularly successful.
I should say, at this point, that I have a personal interest in the history of this turbulent borderland.
My mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkov, a Russian-speaking industrial city in northern Ukraine, in 1934. Her father, Boris Bibikov was one of the “hero-builders” of the Kharkov Tractor Factory, a showpiece of the First Five Year Plan, and a holder of the Order of Lenin. His career as a Bolshevik commissar notwithstanding, my grandfather was born in the Crimea in 1902 into a prominent Russian noble family. The Bibikovs had played a major role in the Russian Empire’s colonisation, if one wishes to see it that way, of Ukraine.
It began with Captain Alexander Alexandrovich Bibikov, one of the Russian officers who accepted the surrender of the last Crimean Tatar Khan, Devlet Giray, in 1777. Five years later he accompanied the Empress Catherine the Great on her first Imperial progress through Novorossiya — New Russia — the term coined for the newly-conquered lands of south and west Ukraine. A later General Bibikov was, somewhat less heroically, an enthusiastic anti-semite who, as Governor-General of Kiev, ruthlessly enforced the cruel restrictions on Jews enacted by Tsar Nicholas I. (The main boulevard of Kiev was named for Bibikov until the Soviets renamed it Boulevard Tarasa Shevchenko, after Ukraine’s great national poet).
If we imagine Ukraine being to Russia what Ireland was once to England, the Bibikovs were a leading family of the Russian ascendancy. Mikhail Bulgakov described the culturally Russian upper class of Ukraine in his 1925 novel The White Guard. “Kiev,” he wrote, “was a Russian island in a sea of Ukrainian life, of which the well-born inhabitants knew nothing.”
Boris Bibikov, my grandfather, played the bluff proletarian. But I imagine he channelled the imperious spirit of his ancestors when he ordered thousands of unwilling workers to build the giant Kharkov Tractor Factory literally from the clay dug by hand out of its own foundations. He edited the factory newspaper, organised ‟storm nights” accompanied by a brass band to meet the brutal deadlines imposed by the Kremlin’s zealous planners, and chalked Lads, lets meet the Plan! on the lavatory walls. He wrote editorials in Izvestia, was praised in Pravda, was driven around town in a giant American Packard. He attended the 17th Party Congress in Moscow in 1934 — the so-called Congress of Victors — the last time when open opposition to Stalin was voiced in public.
Of the 1,277 delegates, over 800 who had spoken against Stalin at the Congress were to die in Stalin’s Great Purge of the Party in 1937. Boris Bibikov was one of them.
A thick, dusty file records my grandfather’s progress from life to death at the hands of the the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, between his arrest at an exclusive Party sanatorium in Gagry in July 1937, to his execution near Kiev on October 14th the same year. Three pounds of paper that equalled a human life. I read the file on my first visit to Kiev in 1995, in the old NKVD headquarters on Volodimirskaya Street, near the Kiev Opera House, now, mutatis mutandis, the HQ of the Ukrainian Security Service.
“Your grandfather believed,” the young Ukrainian Security Service Officer who sat with me reading the file said to me as we took a cigarette break in the gathering gloom. “But don’t you think that his killers believed also?”
The answer is yes, of course, they all believed — in a better world, in a bright future.
“In order to do evil a man has to believe that he is doing good,” wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?”
My grandmother, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak, was arrested soon after her husband and sent to the Gulag in Kazkhstan as the wife of an ‟enemy of the people”. You understand why I shudder when I hear that term used, in all seriousness, in today’s Russia. Martha went insane in the camps, but survived. My mother and her elder sister Lenina (named for Lenin) were sent first to children’s prison, and then to an orphanages in Verhne-Dniprovsk before being separated by the advance of the German army in 1941. But that is a long story for another place.
We like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with the blood. My blood thinks this about Ukraine: that among many other things, it was always a place of new beginnings.
The eighteenth century Alexander Bibikov, sweating in his heavy serge Guards uniform in the infernal heat and dust of a Crimean summer, would have seen in the great new lands of New Russia — newly rid of the danger of Tatar slave raiders — a fertile, empty, prairie ripe for population by his countrymen. The Russian Empire’s Wild West, if you like. Like all of his class and generation Bibikov was, of course, a slave-owner. His father, General-en-Chef of the Russian army, owned 10,000 ‘souls’ (as adult male serfs were called) as his personal property. But in Ukraine the rules were different. It was a land of free-holding Cossacks, a warrior-caste originally made up of outlaws and runaway serfs, and serfdom was rare. And the valley of the Don in Eastern Ukraine was becoming a land of industry and workers too, as enterprising Welsh mining engineers began to dig out the coal that eventually powered Russia’s tardy industrial revolution. The newly-built Black Sea port of Odessa was a cosmopolitan entrepôt where the Levant and Mediterranean met the Russian Empire. Novo-Rossiya was not an extension of the old Russia. It was old Russia’s window onto Europe.
My grandfather Boris Bibikov, for his part, saw the giant fields and his great new factory as anvils where a new kind of society could be forged. His new mechanical tractors would free millions from the drudgery, from the dark ignorance, drink, incest and viciousness of village life. The land would become a grain factory, in Lenin’s phrase, for the great cities where a new civilisation was being created. And work in the factory would turn ignorant peasants into honest proletarians. Though he would never have put it in those terms, Boris Bibikov was just the latest of his family to try to impose the Kremlin’s ideas of enlightenment and progress on this unruly borderland.
Logically, perhaps, my blood should push me to see Ukraine with the patronising eye of Empire. Certainly millions of Russians still do. One of them is Vladimir Putin, who told George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a country.” Indeed Ukraine is a “little brother” to many Russians. Its people are, in the telling Russian phrase, nashy (literally our people), in both the familial and the possessive sense. And many Ukrainians, or perhaps we should say citizens of Ukraine, in the Russophone east will tell you that they are “culturally Russian, not European”. Whatever that means, they feel it and not only because they do not speak the same language as their fellow countrymen. Ukrainian is as different from Russian as English is from Dutch. The two languages are similar, but not mutually comprehensible. At the same time western Ukrainians, Ukrainian-speakers,