Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writing from Russia and the Soviet Union. David Satter
reasons were mixed. The last letter from Shaya K., my great uncle, to his brothers arrived more than 40 years ago, but I thought it was still possible that we could learn something of his fate. I also wanted to try to understand better the traditional animosity between Ukrainians and Jews.
The pogroms which swept the Ukraine 70 to 80 years ago ensured that millions of Jews would emigrate, that others would fervently back the 1917 revolution and that Zionism would find its base of mass support in Russia. The antagonisms of the Ukrainian farmlands affected the shape of the modern world.
We submitted our itinerary to the Foreign Ministry 10 days in advance of our trip and it was, at first, approved. The approval was cancelled the day before our departure, however, because Yanov, a railway station six miles from Chernoble and apparently the site of the Chernoble atomic energy station, was said to be “closed.”
Four re-routings and 36 hours later, we at last found ourselves driving north on the Kiev to Chernoble road accompanied by an Intourist driver and an official “guide” whose presence we were forced to accept and to pay for in hard currency in order to be allowed to proceed.
The trip, however, began to seem worth the trouble. If the Ukraine had endured more than most areas due to the upheavals of the present century, there was little sign of it that sunny afternoon. Swaddled old women shooed cows off the road with rope lashes, moving them in the direction of the brick barns of nearby collective farms.
The scenery opened into vast green plains broken only occasionally by stands of birch and pine trees, reminding one that it had once been possible to earn a living from timber in the area, as my mother’s family had done.
As we approached the outskirts of Chernoble, a town of 20,000 people, we saw a long row of modern housing blocks on the plain, but driving down the main street into the town itself, it was obvious that physically at least, very little had changed.
We left our guide and car and began walking down narrow, shaded streets, past white log and plaster cottages with stacks of wood piled neatly in the yards. Cottonwood floated in the air and the sounds of motorcycles in the distance competed with the crowing of cocks.
We saw an old woman standing near a water tap and, acting on an instinct, I asked her if she could direct us to the Jewish cemetery. She told us how to get there and then, her curiosity aroused, asked us which grave we were trying to find. I asked her if she had ever known anyone by the name of K――.
Seventy years after all but one member of the K―― family had left Chernoble, the old woman smiled and said, “of course I know them. My sister studied with one of the K daughters. They lived in a house on the main street.”
We agreed to visit the old woman and her 80-year-old sister later in the day, but walking back towards the main street, we were met by our guide who told us we were wanted in the city hall.
We followed her to the city hall where we were greeted by Mr. Nikolai Zhavoronkov, the mayor of Chernoble. He seemed uneasy about our presence but immediately assumed responsibility for organising a “programme” for us although we had not requested one.
He called a procession of old Jewish and Ukrainian women to his office and they, comparing recollections in a mixture of languages agreed that Shaya K. had lived in a house on the main street but that he and his daughters had not been seen in Chernoble since the late 1920s.
We were unable to learn anything more definite from them and we wanted to continue walking around the town. But Mr. Zhavoronkov, apparently in his role as tour organiser, presented us with flowers and insisted on taking us to the Jewish cemetery.
Chernoble had once been three-quarters Jewish but only 2,000 Jews live there today. The Jews who did not flee ahead of the advancing Nazis were rounded up and brought to the old cemetery and forced to dig a long, deep trench within sight of their ancestral graves.
The trench is now covered with a marble slab about 300 ft long and closed off by a metal fence with a small gate. A monument above the common grave reads in both Yiddish and Russian, “Here lie the ashes of citizens beastially murdered by the fascists on November 19, 1941.”
Mr. Zhavoronkov waited respectfully as we laid the flowers at the monument but as soon as we had left, he signalled to our driver to take us back to Kiev. I got out of the car and approached him but his friendliness had disappeared. He said the visit was over and if we did not leave immediately there would be “unpleasantness.”
Just how well co-ordinated was the effort to foreshorten our visit became clear when the Intourist driver and guide refused my request to drive us back into town. This forced me to tell my mother and sister to get out of the car and the three of us then began walking back in the direction of Chernoble.
The driver and guide relented, as I knew they would, and after some hesitation, they turned the car round, and drove us back into Chernoble.
We left them sitting in the parked car and began to stroll through the main square with its gilded statue of Lenin decked with red flags. By the time we arrived at Sovetskaya Street and the large brick house at number 33, our presence had been noticed and was beginning to attract a crowd.
We may have been the first foreigners to visit Chernoble since the revolution and after we had told people who we were, they clustered round us on the tree-shaded main street, showering us with questions. Women hugged my mother, calling her a “Chernobylyanka” although she was born in the U.S. and children were dispatched to knock on the doors of elderly Jewish people to ask them to come out.
The size of the crowd in front of my great-uncle’s house increased—at one point, it even included a passing militia man—and finally a white-haired man in his 60s emerged who said he had actually been a friend of my great uncle’s.
He said that the K family owned a lumber yard which was expropriated after the revolution, but that they continued to live in the house on Sovetskaya Street until it was also requisitioned in 1927.
Shortly after collectivisation began, the K family left Chernoble. It was at this time, perhaps because of the Stalinist terror, that the letters from Shaya K stopped arriving. He then moved to Kiev where he got a job buying equipment for a collective farm and when the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, he and his family were evacuated.
The family returned to Kiev after the war and Shaya K died peacefully in Kiev in the 1950s, a “kindly old man” in his 80s.
Satisfied at last with our visit, we left Chernoble for Kiev that evening and then went by train to Moscow. Several weeks later, however, an article appeared in Pravda Ukraina, the Ukrainian newspaper, accusing me of having been rude and abusive to officials. The authors never called me for comment but they did manage to reach my Intourist driver who told them if he had his way, I would be thrown out of the country.
It may be a long time before another foreigner visits Chernoble but the secretiveness and xenophobia that Soviet officials showed during this episode were all the more puzzling because they were so unnecessary. Chernoble makes a favourable impression.
The peace and apparent lack of racial hatred in Chernoble may only reflect collective exhaustion, but in a world which underwent civil war, collectivisation, famine and Nazi occupation, I think they must be counted a form of progress too.
ERZEUGT DURCH JUTOH - BITTE REGISTRIEREN SIE SICH, UM DIESE ZEILE ZU ENTFERNEN
Financial Times, Saturday, September 29, 1979
Russia assumes no Soviet citizen will return
home of his own free will: From Moscow,
David Satter reports on defections
The Crime That Can Only Exist
Behind Closed Borders
Defection is probably the quintessential Soviet crime. Whenever prominent Soviet sportsmen and artists make the decision to defect, it has a disproportionate impact on their society, and only in a society like the Soviet Union could the