In the Ukraine--1955

by EDWARD CRANKSHAW

1

SCHOOL was finished for the day, and the broad pavements under the trees were alive with children. Croups of serious little girls, groups of giggling little girls, all very neat at the end of the days work, chattered their way home quite purposefully. Nearly always their hair was drawn back Irom the forehead and secured and ornamented with a black bow, worn rather high; and all wore black uniform cross-over aprons with cape-like shoulders of an almost frivolously elegant cut. They had bare legs and solid shoes, and they were happy and well. The very small children, clutching the hands of mol hers or grandmothers fetching them from nursery school, wide-eyed and toddling, were chubby to bursting point.

The small boys, as everywhere, went in gangs, all neatly dressed, mostly with close-shaven heads, some in the uniforms of special schools. About their homegoing there was no purposefulness. They were, in fact, in the seventh heaven of delight, because the spined horse chestnuts were almost ready — though not quite—to split open and fall, spilling from velvety white cradles those visions of transccndental glossiness which in England we call conkers. The little boys could not wait for them to fall; and to the constant peril of passers-by they competed, hurling treasured bits of wood into the treetops to bring the conkers prematurely down. What they got was mostly leaves. Nobody took much notice. There were no policemen about. And only once in a while an irate citizen, after a narrow escape from being stunned, would call out angrily or make threatening gestures, waiting for a moment to see if the offenders would desist —which they did, until the grownup turned his back and plodded on. It was a street scene from any town in the world where horse chestnuts grow. In fact was Kreshchalik Street in the city of Kiev, until four years ago a forbidden city.

The river, far below at the foot of its dizzy cliff, was the Dnieper.

Kreshchalik Street leatls to the very edge of the cliff. There, on a terrace cut in the rock, stands the flaunting baroque church of St. Andrew, one of the masterpieces of the Italian, Rastrelli, who, with his palaces and belfries, brought the elegance of the South to Calheriue’s Russia. On the steps leading up to the church, old women with white headscarves rested in the last of the sun. The great river below was in full light—the extraordinary waterway which took the Vikings from the Baltic to the black Sea and by which, against the current, Christianity traveled from Constantinople to Kiev, whence it Spread like a shallow sea over the whole impenetrable plain.

Kiev stands on a high bluff of heavily wooded rock, Close at hand, reached by the steep cobbled hill, winding and pot holed, called St. Andrew’s Descent, lies the port and the working town, the Podol, which was also the Jewish quarter and suffered much from the Tsarist pogroms. Looking away over the tangle of sirects and factories, the barren surface of the strange, characteristic sand dunes, seamed with winding ravines, on the northern outskirts of the city gleamingly suggest n lunar landscape. It was here, within sound of the city traffic, that on the last two days of September, in the year 1941, 33,771 Jews, who had been rounded up for “resettlement” three days earlier, were massacred by an extermination squad commanded by a disgraced architect from Cologne, then an ornament of the S.S., Colonel Paul Blobel.

The position of the Babi Yar, the Babi Ravine, can be seen quite clearly from St. Andrew’s Church on its terrace in the heart of the city; and in the late afternoon sunlight, with the children dawdling home from school and the old women sunning themselves, it required a violent effort of the imagination to transport oneself fourteen years hack to that scene of desolation and terror when more than 30,000 men, women, and children were lined up along the edges of pits sixty yards long and eight feet, deep, and shot, rank after rank, the si ill living trampling on the bodies of the dying and the dead. Soon the snows of winter came to cover Bahi Yar with its barely conceivable burden. But in March of the following year a Gestapo officer, who had come to examine the condition of religion in the Ukraine, was driving with Colonel Blobel to the country villa of Major General Thomas, the Commander of the German Security Police in Kiev. As they passed Babi Yar he remarked on a strange phenomenon. There were repeated small explosions which threw up columns of earth. “Here my Jews are buried!” Blobel proudly explained. What was happening was that the spring thaw was releasing ihe gases from those thousands of bodies.

But even that was not the end. For in June of that same year this remarkable butcher was required by Ileydrich, who had only a few weeks to live, to remove all traces of his mass burials for fear of a German retreat. So the bodies at. Babi Yar were dug up and soaked with petrol and burned. It requires, as I have said, a violent effort of the imagination even to believe these things, looking out over the dreamlike landscape fourteen years later; but it seems to me a desirable effort.

Not that German atrocity accounts for all the suffering to which the enchanting children will one day find themselves the heirs. Too often Moscow has been the enemy; and for more than twenty years, broken only by the occupation, Stalin was the scourge, one of his main instruments being Nikita Khrushchev, who is not loved by the Ukrainians. But at no time anywhere have Russians exhibited anything to compare with the positive hysteria of cruelty and villainy displayed by Germans, who have forfeited the right to speak of Russian barbarity. They have, moreover, irredeemably betrayed what we like to think of as Western civilization, because they have made it impossible for the West, so long as Germany is considered a part of it, to maintain any just pretension to superiority over a, historically more barbaric people.

I am not going to dwell on the inhumanity of Russians to Russians— and Ukrainians, There is little chance of anybody in the West forgetting that. And everybody knows that Kiev, as the capital of the Ukraine, with Its deep-smouldering resentment against Great Russian domination, has had more than its share of Russian inhumanity. Today that inhumanity is muted, for how long nobody knows. But watching the children so blissful in the autumn sunshine, I found myself thinking for the first time that they had a chance for a belter life.

2

I HAD come from Moscow to Kiev; and although I know Moscow better than any other city in the world except, perhaps, London and vienna, where I spent the impressionable years, Moscow is too big, and at the same time too uncharacteristic, to base any firm opinions on. Soxact Moscow is the one city in the world whose streets are really paved with gold; the Soviet citizen who can get a foothold in Moscow is all right — so long as he can keep it and stay able-bodied. Moscow has everything: food and clothes and television, electric gadgets, theaters, and bright lights. It is no wonder that it finds itself the most chronically overcrowded city in Europe. The people prefer Moscow, even if it means a sixth share of a room, to anywhere else in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union is by no means as hard up as it was; and now there arc other cities which can guarantee survival to those fortunate enough to live in them. Kiev is one of them. But only seven years ago, Kiev, with the whole of the Ukraine, was deep in famine; and it was not until 1951 that this lovely and most ancient monument was considered fit for foreigners to see. My own memories of the Soviet Union are wholly of the hard years: the dreadful first years of the war, the cruel years afterwards when Stalin elected to mobilize Russia against the world, and 1946 when he was forced to cope with the worst drought and crop failure since 1891. In Moscow now it is difficult to remember those hard times, the place is so slicked up; and life, except for the poorer workers, is comparatively rich and easy. But in Kiev it is easier to remember.

The city is full of peasants. It is a city of markets. In Moscow one can live on Intourist for a month, perhaps for a year, and never see one of the great kolkhoz markets, where prices find their true level and reflect the realities of life. But in Kiev they form an inescapable part of the urban landscape. The kolkhoz markets are bare, sandy spaces enclosed behind sagging wooden fences, their green paint faded, where the peasants come to sell their surplus produce. At any time of day the streets ol the city are full of peasant women, mostly old and wrinkled, short-skirted above thick, gray-stockinged legs, bulked out with shawls, doing their own shopping, or resting with their baskets on the curb.

Off the main shopping center there stands the cream-colored opera house, modest and charmingly proportioned. It was here in 1911, at a gala performance, that the reforming prime minister Stolypin, who tried vainly to save the Romanovs from the deluge, was shot and fatally wounded by the social revolutionary, Bagrov. The Opera, facing Kreshchat ik St rect, is set back from the street behind a formal garden. At night it is a place of splendor and light. Just behind it is one of Kiev’s larger food shops; and one evening, moving round the corner from the floodlit facade, I found outside the food shop a monstrous queue, stretching into the darkness for many yards, patient and scarcely murmuring. The queue consisted chiefly of peasant women who had sold their produce in the kolkhoz market and had a little money. They were queuing to buy sugar. Kiev is still, as it was before the Revolution, the center of the sugar-beet industry; and some of those old women who now queued in the darkness weeded and singled the interminable fields of pallid roots, to be made into the sugar which they could not buy.

Russia is not the only place in the world where this sort of thing happens, but it is the only country which pretends to be above such things. Although I could not find a Russian or a Ukrainian (officials apart) to admit that life was anything like so easy as it had been in 1940, which is not saying much, I came home finally with a strong feeling that Soviet society was moving ahead now with considerable momentum. I had better say at once that I am not one of those who look forward to another Russian revolution. I do not believe that any foreigner who has genuine feeling for the Soviet people can wish them any such thing. They have had enough. At one time, during the last years of Stalin, I did not see how their society could ever be radically changed without violence; and yet it quite clearly had to be changed. But now I think that it at least has the chance of settling into a long spell of more or less steady evolution.

Under the collective system, the peasants are not producing enough food for the country’s needs, and the government is casting about desperately for ways and means of ensuring greater agricultural production. The means foreshadowed in recent issues of the magazines (the transformation of the peasant from a member of a self-contained cooperative into a hired laborer employed by the state) could well run the Soviet Union into further t rouble. The peasants are still enjoying the benefits of some remarkable concessions, and, in spite of certain signs which should be enough to warn them, I do not think it has yet occurred to them that they are simply not producing the goods the concessions were designed to secure. All this is to say that if evolution has to give way to revolution once again, it will not be because of the secret police or because of discontent in the great towns (diseontenl in the small neglected towns is another matter, and counts for next to nothing). It will be because the present rulers of the Soviet Union will have proved incapable of fitting the peasants into the Soviet economy and lifting them up from the mud.

In the cities, in Kiev scarcely more than in Moscow, one is not conscious of this. One is conscious only of an immense effort of construction which seems to be winning through. A few years ago the Krestyachik, the great main thoroughfare in the valley between the cliff and the hill behind, was totally destroyed. Now it has been rebuilt, not in a makeshift manner, hut on a grand scale and designed to last. The effect, to my mind, is the last word in monumental hideousness; but some foreigners and all Ukrainians think it splendid. The drive behind this rebuilding is, however, quite unmistakably the sort of drive that produced the early skyscrapers of the United States, the railway station architecture of Britain. And one reflects, a little sadly, on the iron law of nature which sees to it that the overweening confidence engendered by the first, heady successes of an industrial revolution coincides with a collapse of taste.

In addition there are many new blocks of flats for workers, more solidly built than the average in Moscow. And above the new buildings hangs the spidery mast of Kiev Television — though there are not so many sets as in Moscow and in the countryside for fifty miles around the capital. (In some houses there is clearly a TV set to almost every room — an indication of the desperate housing shortage.) There are also new restaurants; pleasant open-air summer ones perched among brilliantly landscaped cliff-top gardens, looking out across the gleaming river and the great view; and deep in one of the great parks, the smart Dynamo with its imposing staircases, its dance band. The restaurants arc always full, and the people who go to them give the outsider a sharp insight into the way the new Soviet society is developing, and particularly into the strength of the increasing numbers who, quite unconcerned with politics, nevertheless have a positive vested interest in the status quo.

If you go to a different restaurant each day, you are first struck by the number of times you see the same people. On the airplane from Moscow to Kiev I was interested in the number of prosperous-looking individuals who had the air of businessmen rather than of Party officials. There were seven or eight of them, and I kept on running into them again in the more expensive restaurants of Kiev. I found out who some of them were. And in fact, although they were officials of a kind, they were much closer in temperament and activity to the Western businessman, or sales representative, than to anything out of a Leninist textbook. They wore officials of this or that ministry, or trust, traveling round on what is known as a kommandirovka sent out from headquarters on tours of inspection, and enjoying life on a liberal expense allowance. These executives all have a very big stake in the regime.

In every restaurant there are always soldiers in uniform; and among the soldiers in uniform I was struck again and again by the emergence of a new type of subaltern, or junior officer—very smart, consciously elegant, and clearly modeled in haircut, carriage, dress, and expression (a kind of languid, moody insolence) on the pictures of subalterns of the Imperial Guards at. the turn of the century.

Then there are the intelligentsia, in Kiev represented mainly by actors and act resses from t he State Theater; and the children of professional men and university professors, trying very hard, and often succeeding, to look very smart and to copy Western fances. The younger generation of this stratum merge imperceptibly into the stilyagi — the startlingly new type of Soviet play boy, dressed with calculated extravagance and eccentricity, and rat her pathetically aping what he takes to be Western manners. His lower-class equivalent is the young spiv, or hooligan, with his costly clothes modeled, heaven knows how, on those of his English prototype, and taking up the best part of his earnings. These clothes have to be specially made in one or another of the innumerable little back-room “ateliers,where Soviet citizens with any pretensions at all to style take their own cloth. And when one considers that a fairly good conventional mans suit, off the peg, costs 1300 rubles, or nearly the price of a small television set, one sees how desperately strong must be the urge to achieve some sort of distinction not laid down in the Communist Party handbooks.

There are also sober citizens — decent workers, decent small officials—dressed like workers and small officials. They enjoy their night out. They too have a stake in society. And into the middle of this remarkable public there will suddenly erupt something very remarkable indeed: a group of cheerful and healthy youths encased from top to toe in sky-blue siren sails, wearing on their feet the sort of boots that boxers wear in the ring. Each has a girl with him, conventionally dressed. They arc cheerful and talkative and gay, settle down with much chaff at a reserved corner table, and proceed to order a big meal.

“Who on earth are those?” you ask the waitress.

“Oh those,” she replies, with a fond look at the young men. “Those are our physieult urists. Thursday is their night.”

These youngsters who spend their Thursday evenings in the magnificent municipal gymnasium and then come to a smart restaurant for supper with their girls these too have a stake in the regime.

3

THIS is not the whole of Kiev society; for from it. But it is an important part. It is certainly not revolutionary, and I do not think it ts counterrevolutionary either, though I may be wrong. Discontented often, grumbling always, yes. But there is a deep gulf bet ween discontent and grumbling on the one hand and active revolt on the other.

The people with the biggest vested interest of all are not seen. They do not go to restaurants. They do not queue in the big stores — though they may send their servants to do so. They live in large Hats in the most modern blocks (that means they have three or four rooms to a family), and they have villas in the country outside, like the one requisitioned for S.S. Major General Thomas, in the days when the spring thaw released the gases of the corpses buried in the Babi Yar ravine.

They are the new ruling class, they and their relatives — ministers and Party chieftains and senior officers of the services. They live in their own society, as the aristocratic families of France live by themselves. They regard the masses as belonging to a different species; and t hey do not care to mingle with the rank-and-file citizenry, whether in the theater, the restaurant, or anywhere else. It is customary to say that they could be swept away overnight if there was a turn for the worse, if the men in the Moscow Kremlin decided to change the line, to assert themselves, to start filling the labor camps instead of slowly emptying them.

But I am not so sure of this. I am not sure, that is, that any individual in the Moscow Kremlin is strong enough to gather round him a following powerful enough to exalt him into an autocrat in the Stalin manner. Too many of them, like their inferiors, have vested interests in the status quo They are self-made men of great ability. Many of them are ruthless and unscrupulous and have done terrible things in the climb to prominence under Stalin. But most of them today, I think, in the absence of a towering personality to cling to, find safely and securily in the idea of collective rule.

There are not so many of them in Kiev as there are in Moscow only a handful by comparison. But they are there, behind the scenes. And in a sense they are already becoming the prisoners of their own environment, which includes their families. They belong to a world apart, a close selfcontained world, with much intermarriage, which knows next to nothing of the realities of life as lived by their fellow citizens. This, no doubt, is an oversimplified picture; but it is a truer picture than the normal view of Soviet high society as a poker-faced phalanx of coldly scheming revolutionaries.

The other people who never appear in public are at the far end of the scale, the very poor. But the very poor, except in small provincial towns, where they teem, are found increasingly among the old and helpless. There are very many of them; but they grow fewer, and they count for less and les-,.

And so we come back to the children, many of them from quite poor families, and some, through lack of ability, doomed to perpetual poverty unless the miracle happens and the transition from “socialism” to “communism” is achieved in their lifetime. But more of them will rise above the level of their parents, so tremendous is the demand for skilled and educated manpower — and womanpower too. And it seems to me they have nothing to fear unless there is some terrible and lethal fight for power in the highest tier of the leadership — or unless the dark peasants, scattered over the great plain which stretches away from the city, come once more into head-on collision with the central government. So long as neither of these things happens, their lives, though poverty-stricken and overcrowded by our standards, will steadily improve.