Between east and west Read online

  Post-Soviet nationalism certainly would prove to be dangerous, destabilizing, and uncomfortable for diplomats. But there were other things to say about it as well. In the nineteenth century, nationalism had been considered a liberal movement, intimately and inextricably connected to democracy, and in the former Soviet Union this remained, in some instances, the case. After all, in order for democracy to work at all, citizens of the post-Soviet republics needed to vote for local and national leaders, not distant Russians in Moscow; in order for new institutions to gain credibility, they could not only be Soviet institutions with new names. The freedom to speak native languages, to read native literature, to discover the truth about national history also went along with the freedom to participate in local politics, and in the early 1990s, a cultural revival on a vast scale engulfed the nations which lay on the borders of Russia. What some called nationalism others called patriotism, and still others called freedom: the stability so beloved of international statesmen had also been a prison.

  While it was true that the republics of the Soviet Union had ostensibly been at peace with one another, that peace had also been a fiction, enforced by terror, lies, and the traditional Russian belief in «divide and rule»; make little nations hate one another, the theory went, and they will have less energy to rebel against a large one; make minorities resent the majority and they will be unable to join together to rebel against Russian rule. Undoing the terror, setting straight the lies required precisely the sort of re-examination of history which the nationalists were calling for. Equally, the Soviet era could not be erased: however artificial, hatreds implanted in both the Russian colonisers and the non-Russian colonies during the seventy years of Soviet power remained. A man who has lived in a given town for forty years feels he has as much right to it as a man whose family lived in the same town for two thousand years, but has lived elsewhere for forty.

  Dangerous, liberating, or perhaps both: the nationalist leaders who brought down the Soviet Union wore double-faced masks, in more senses than one. They looked back to the past, sometimes the very ancient past, to justify their actions and legitimize their claims; they also looked towards the future, hoping that by means of education or repression, democracy or war, they would be able to create new states out of old nations. They could work good or evil, create havoc or peace; but finally, it was to see how their new ideas affected the people whom they claimed to represent — the people who had once called themselves tutejszy — that I went back. In the days of waning Soviet power, not long after such trips first became possible, I travelled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Kaliningrad to Odessa, along the western border of what had been the Soviet Union, across East Prussia, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, through Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the Bukovina, Bessarabia.

  It was not an effortless journey. There are no guidebooks to this region, no sign posts and no obvious tourist attractions. Most of the beautiful buildings and houses have suffered from at least a century's worth of neglect. Travel here demands a forensic passion, not a love of art or architecture or natural beauty; there are many layers of civilization in the borderlands, but they do not lie neatly on top of one another. A ruined medeival church sits upon a the site of a pagan temple, not far from a mass grave surrounded by a modern town. There is a castle on the hill and a Catholic church at its foot and an Orthodox church beside a ruined synagogue. A traveller can meet a man born in Poland, brought up in the Soviet Union, who now lives in Belarus — and he has never left his village. To sift through the layers, one needs to practise a kind of visual and aural archeology, to imagine what the town looked like before the Lenin statue was placed in the square, before the church was converted into a factory and the main street re-named. In a conversation, one must listen to the overtones, guess what the speaker might have said fifty years ago on the same subject, understand that his nationality might then have been different — know, even, that he might have used another language.

  By the time I got there, the region had lain for more than forty years under the ice of Soviet rule, and it still seemed, at times, as if the past were crushing the present. There were days when it seemed as if no one could talk of anything which was not tragic, as if no one could remember anything without bitterness. But then there were other days, days when I would, quite unexpectedly, meet someone who saw the past not as a burden but as a forgotten story, now to be retold; there were days when I would find an old house, an old church, or something unexpected like the cemetery in L'viv, which suddenly explained something about a place which I hadn't known. That was part of what I was looking for: evidence that things of beauty had survived war, communism, and Russification; proof that differency and variety can outlast an imposed homogeneity; testimony, in fact, that people can survive any attempt to uproot them.

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