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CHAPTER ONE
The Ukraine stretches from Belarus in the north to the natural border of the Black Sea in the south, but its western and eastern borders have always been open to negotiation. In the west, the rising Carpathians form a geological boundary with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, but the political boundaries have not always been so clearly defined. Similarly in the east the border with the Russian Federation has concertinaed in and out over the centuries.
What has remained unchanged is the heart of the Ukraine, a vast expanse – 1,600 kilometres wide, roughly the size of France – of flat, rich farmland. The soil is as black as the Ukraine’s other natural treasure the coal, which is found in such abundance in the Donbas region. The crops that grow in this fertile soil fed the rest of the country to the point where the Ukraine became known as the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. But the massive steppe which blessed the Ukraine with its rich harvests has also proved to be its greatest curse. Such vast bounty will always attract rapacious predators and the endless tracts of gently undulating land have proved almost impossible to defend against successive invaders.
Such was the case in the middle of the eleventh century when the Pechenegs, a nomadic race from the north, set their sights on the Ukraine. They had staged a number of harrying raids on the borders of what would later become the Ukrainian state but in 1036 they were about to strike directly at the heart of Kiev. As the Pechenegs made their camp just outside the city walls the Kievan king, Yaroslav the Wise, was distraught with a mixture of grief and rage at seeing his enemy so close to his city. Yaroslav sought succour in the Blessed Virgin. If she would help defeat his enemy then he would build a great church in her honour. The battle for Kiev was fierce and bloody but Yaroslav prevailed and the Pechenegs were routed. True to his promise he built the magnificent Cathedral of St Sophia on the spot where the battle was won and dedicated it to the honour of the Blessed Virgin. The cathedral presented Yaroslav with a new problem. Magnificent though it was, it now extended the city boundaries and would have to be defended. Yaroslav ordered that new ramparts and defences be built and in the midst of these new city walls he ordered a great gate to be built. The city could already be entered by the Liadsky Gate on the eastern side and the Lvivsky Gate on the western side, but neither of these could compare with this new monument.
The Great Golden Gate of Kiev was twelve metres high with an arch which was twenty-five metres long. From outer wall to outer wall it measured almost eight metres wide. The foundations were three metres deep and the walls were a metre thick. Onlookers were dazzled by the sunlight reflected from the huge granite and quartzite boulders that made up the arch. The effect was set off with doors which were made of oak but held together by sheets of gilded copper. On top of the tower above the gate was a small chapel, the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because Yaroslav was still a devout and grateful man.
It was an architectural miracle. Although not written until 1874, the soaring triumphalism of the first few notes of ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, from Ukrainian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, give some idea of the awe and wonder which this incomparable structure must have invoked.
But even when the Great Golden Gate was built in the eleventh century the city was already old and battle-scarred. The history of Kiev has been shot through with periods of violent conflict and lengthy occupation since it was founded, probably sometime around the fourth century AD. The city sits on the hills overlooking the River Dnieper. The Dnieper is one of the great waterways of Europe. At 2,200 kilometres long it is the fourth longest river on the continent. From its source in the Valdai Hills just west of Moscow it runs south through Belarus, and the very heart of the Ukraine, including Kiev and Dnipropetrovsk, before emptying into the Black Sea. Kiev itself was established on the right, or western, bank of the river before expanding through the centuries to the left bank as well. It is often referred to as ‘The Mother of Russian Cities’ and with good cause.
During the second half of the ninth century a band of Vikings known as Varangians were marauding southwards looking for fresh lands to settle. In 862 the Varangian leader Rurik became ruler of the Russian city of Novgorod and established Varangians as a presence in the region. Twenty years later another Varangian, called Oleg, who was acting as regent for Rurik’s young son Igor, saw the strategic importance of Kiev and its ability to control the river. He had the rulers of the city executed and united Kiev with Novgorod. Oleg settled in Kiev which thus became, in 882, the capital of the first Russian state, which was known as the Kievan Rus. The beginnings of what became known as the Russian Empire were therefore set in the ninth century in a confederacy of states which was ruled from Kiev.
The importance of the city of Kiev cannot be overestimated. Its position on the Dnieper made it a vital trading centre and the river itself became a major trade route. Over the next century the size and influence of the Kievan Rus increased. In 988 Vladimir the Great, sometimes also called St Vladimir, embraced Byzantine Christianity, making Kiev the original centre of Christianity in Russia. Because of the flat geography which offered little hindrance to any would-be marauder and its exposed position close to the Russian frontier, Kiev became a target for almost every invading army over subsequent years. Yaroslav may have been able to drive off the Pechenegs in 1036 but the city was all but destroyed by the Mongol leader Batu Khan in 1240 and remained in the hands of the Mongolian hordes for the next century.
It was during the time of the Mongol occupation when perhaps the region’s greatest hero rose to prominence. In the same year that Kiev was invaded by Batu Khan, Alexander, the son of Yaroslav the prince of the state of Vladimir, won a great and stirring battle against the Swedes on the ice-covered River Neva near St Petersburg. He took the name Alexander Nevsky in honour of his famous victory. Two years later Alexander, who was a prince of Novgorod, drove off the Teutonic Knights in another famous battle at Lake Peipus in Estonia. This battle was later credited with saving Russia from domination by the West. Batu Khan the Mongol leader recognised Alexander’s influence and rather than fight him he enlisted Alexander as a mediator between his Golden Horde and the people of the Kievan Rus. In 1246 Alexander was made Grand Prince of Kiev by the Mongols and six years later he was also made prince of Vladimir. With the three great cities of Kiev, Novgorod and Vladimir under his control, Alexander was able to stabilise and solidify the region and did much to ensure the beginnings of what we now know as the Russian Federation. Alexander died in 1263 and was later canonised by the Russian Orthodox church.
Almost a century later, the city changed hands again. The Lithuanians seized it in 1360, then in 1482 it fell to Tartars from the Crimea before it was ultimately taken by Poland in 1569.
The seventeenth century saw the advent of another great Ukrainian hero when Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a Cossack uprising against the Poles in 1648. The Cossacks were superb horsemen and inspired by their leaders, known as hetmans, they used the huge expanse of the steppe to their advantage as they harried and pursued the Poles in a series of cavalry battles. Khmelnytsky and the hetmans were able to successfully establish an independent Ukrainian republic, but their autonomy was short-lived. The region was still a target for the various conflicting neighbours that surrounded it and in 1654, just six years after winning independence, Khmelnytsky had to ask for Russian protection. This then led to a bitter war between Russia, Poland, the Cossacks and Turkey for control of the Ukraine. The war was ended by the so-called ‘Eternal Peace’ between Russia and Poland in 1686 in which Kiev and the Cossack lands east of the Dnieper were handed over to Russia. This was really a recognition of the status quo by the Poles who, since they could not defeat the Cossacks, had decided simply to leave them with Russia to which they had allied themselves in the first place. The rest of the Ukraine was given to Poland, but after a second partition of Poland in 1793 the whole of present-day Ukraine – with the exception of the province of Galicia which remained under Austro-Hungarian rule – came under the influence of Russia.
During the Russian Revolution of 1917 another attempt was made to set up an independent Ukrainian state that was even more short-lived than Khmelnytsky’s efforts. The Red Army occupied Kiev in January 1918 but in March of the same year the Germans took over the city under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which was designed to end hostilities in the region. The Germans were looking forward to a new supply of rich, fertile land and the new nationalist government of Simon Petlyura was looking forward to independence from their Bolshevik neighbours. Nothing went as either side had planned. The Petlyura government was woefully ineffective and only a few weeks after the assembly had been set up the Germans disbanded it in what amounted to an armed coup. Finally with the war in France going against them the Germans abandoned Kiev and the Ukraine. Petlyura came back and so too did the Red Army. The eighteen months that followed are probably the most volatile in the history of any modern country. Some sources say Kiev changed hands or changed governments as often as eighteen times in that period. The final outcome was that by 1922 Kiev and the Ukraine were formally incorporated as one of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
They were now in the USSR but the Ukrainians do not appear to have been of the USSR. Perversely, the successive changes of government and controlling nations helped to promote an increased feeling of Ukrainian nationalism. It did not matter who was in charge, at the end of the day they were still Ukrainians and their allegiance to their country, to each other, and to the ground they stood on was all that mattered.
Although the country was technically at peace, the arguments between Ukrainian nationalism and Bolshevism continued unabated for almost twenty years. The Ukrainians had good reason to distrust Lenin. After the Russian Revolution and a brief period of Ukrainian independence, he had gone back on his word and sent in the Red Army. The result was that by 1920 the Ukraine was, in name at least, largely Bolshevik. Lenin, and after him Stalin, remained convinced that the Ukrainians’ urge for nationalism had only been suppressed and not extinguished. To some extent they were correct and both men harboured a deep distrust of the Ukraine. That distrust would account for the terrible suffering that awaited the Ukraine in the years before the Second World War.
By the end of the twenties famine caused by desperate shortages of meat and grain stalked the new Soviet Union. In 1921 and 1922 five million people died through starvation and the associated diseases of typhus, cholera and dysentery. People were living on a ration of 200 grams of bread per day and regarded with a mixture of incredulity and envy reports that in Petrograd some skilled workers were being allocated as much as 800 grams a day. People fled the cities into the country in search of food. The population of Moscow, for example, dropped by almost half in the three years after the Revolution. The rural communities had both meat and grain, but because what they produced was being requisitioned, their response was simply to produce less. There was no incentive to produce anything more than what they needed for themselves. The official price of grain, for example, was less than it cost to grow and even if farmers were inclined to barter there was nothing in the cities they wanted. Instead they simply stored it or ate it. The rural communities were a constant thorn in the flesh to Stalin and Lenin before him. Unlike in the cities which were areas of dense population, communism did not have much of an impact on the agrarian population which at that time still made up some 80 per cent of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s solution to the shortages in the cities and the relative plenty in the country was to bring in a policy of collectivisation with every head of cattle, every ear of grain, every bushel of wheat becoming the property of the state. Anyone attempting to profit for themselves would be severely punished. Under the so-called ‘Seven Eighths Law’ – it was passed on 7 August 1932, the seventh day of the eighth month – anyone who cut even a single ear of corn could be, and frequently was, sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. Stalin’s policy exploited the jealousy and greed born of real suffering and, in the very antithesis of communist philosophy, turned neighbour against neighbour.
Stalin declared war on the ‘kulaks’. This was a new classification which the officials had devised when they came to categorise the peasants. They could be split into three classes – poor, middle, and kulak, a word that although it meant ‘fist’ had passed into common usage as a derogatory term for a moneylender. Basically, a kulak was a farmer who had shown enough enterprise to build his farm into a size where it was necessary to hire help to work it. But on 30 January 1930 Stalin announced that all farms were to be collectivised and the kulaks were to be destroyed as a class. There were three penalties for being a kulak. The most severe offenders were shot, and their families joined those in the second category who faced deportation to labour camps, while the third category were forced to leave the collective and start up again on a new farm. As one final sadistic twist, these new farms were without exception sited on land which could not be cultivated, otherwise it would have been part of the collective to begin with. After months of back-breaking toil these unfortunates were unable to meet their quota to the collective and were deported anyway.
The process of ‘dekulakisation’ produced an orgy of pettiness and betrayal as neighbours settled scores by accusing others of being kulaks. Once the accusation had been made there was almost no way of disproving it and, even if the accused was fortunate enough to disprove the case, they were invariably tagged as kulak sympathisers and therefore still liable to be punished. Between 1930 and 1933 some 2 million people were sent to Corrective Labour Camps in remote areas such as Siberia. Few of them returned. The Ukraine which was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union was particularly hard hit by the war against the kulaks and the collectivisation which followed.
Stalin continued to doubt that the Ukraine, in particular, was wholehearted or enthusiastic in its endorsement of communism. He believed that the Ukraine would much rather be a separate state and was wary of these nationalist tendencies. One way of dealing with this was to ensure that the region was treated far more harshly than anywhere else. At one point more than 70 per cent of Ukrainian peasants were working on collective farms, a much higher figure than anywhere else in the Soviet Union. The effect of the collectivisation was to force down what had been an abundant harvest. In 1931 the official harvest was down to 18 million tons, a figure which represented just enough to feed everyone with a little surplus left over. Nonetheless the state demanded almost 8 million tons of this harvest, leaving the Ukraine on the point of starvation. The consequences were inevitable. The following year the harvest dropped to just over 14 million tons and once again the state demanded almost 8 million. This was later reduced to a little over 6.5 million tons but the effect was the same. Starvation was rife and millions of Ukrainians perished in what came to be known as the Great Hunger. Those who survived knew that this famine had been artificially engineered solely as a result of Stalin’s policies. Official figures for the death toll in the Ukraine are not known but the generally accepted estimates place the number of dead in 1932-3 at somewhere between 5 million and 7 million. In the Soviet Union as a whole the number of deaths in this politically-induced famine is put at 14 million, but as Khrushchev later famously remarked ‘no one was keeping count’. Indeed the official census of 1937 showed that the population had dropped so alarmingly that those organising the census were among the victims of Stalin’s purges for ‘treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR’.
Apart from those who had starved in the Great Hunger there were also a great many people in Kiev who had suffered at the hands of the NKVD in the thirties during what became known as ‘the Terror’. The NKVD were the successors of OGPU, the organisation which had handled the deportation of the kulaks to the wastes of Siberia. Only the name had changed, in essence they were still Stalin’s secret police, enforcers of his singular will by any means necessary. It was the NKVD who were behind the dreaded knock on the door in the night that usually resulted in interrogation, torture, a show trial and then death or deportation, although in many cases these were effectively the same thing. Thousands of good and experienced Red Army officers had fallen victim to these trials on trumped up accusations of disloyalty or being bourgeois.
Again, Stalin’s pathological distrust of the Ukraine was manifest in the Terror. In 1937 he had decided to liquidate the entire leadership of the Ukrainian Soviet and the local Communist Party. By the following June the seventeen most senior ministers had been arrested and executed and the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Soviet, Liubchenko, had killed himself. It is estimated that around 170,000 people in the Ukraine were expunged, prompting Nikita Khrushchev, who was now in Kiev as the First Secretary of the Communist Party, to remark that the Ukrainian Party had been purged spotless.
In the Ukraine, as everywhere else in the USSR, the victims of the Terror had nothing in common except their misfortune. One unfortunate industrialist was jailed for ten years because he had been the first to sit down during a standing ovation for Comrade Stalin. Another newspaper editor was purged because he was Jewish. A man reportedly fell victim for removing a portrait of Stalin while he was painting the wall behind it.
In Kiev alone one woman is alleged to have denounced 8,000 people, all of whom were put to death. The Terror thrived on denunciation. Worker informed on workmate, brother on brother, husband on wife. They may have begun believing they were doing the right thing, but by 1938 when the Terror was at its height people were denouncing others simply out of fear of being denounced themselves, thus getting their revenge in first. The greatest crime was the catch-all accusation of being ‘bourgeois’. The charge was practically impossible to disprove: almost anything could be interpreted as evidence of bourgeois behaviour.
There were some, like Konstantin Shchegotsky, who were high profile targets. Despite being a good and loyal Stalinist, Shchegotsky’s lifestyle antagonised a great many within the Party. He was handsome, popular, well-liked, a social gadfly, something of a womaniser, and a hero to the bright young things of Moscow and Kiev. Shchegotsky inspired jealousy almost effortlessly and given the flamboyance of his lifestyle it is perhaps not surprising that he attracted attention.
Even though his lifestyle was a little wayward and extravagant, occasionally bordering on the indiscreet, Shchegotsky was respected by the Communist Party for his skills as a footballer and a sportsman. In 1938 he was given a decoration by the Party for his services to sport and, as was the custom, the award was announced in the newspapers. At the time he was in a sanatorium recovering from a football injury. His room-mate there wrote to the Party organisation complaining that obviously Shchegotsky did not value his decoration sufficiently to wear it. Shchegotsky was summoned to answer the accusations and when the local Party secretary told him of the charges he simply laughed. Shchegotsky pointed out that the story in the newspaper had merely been the announcement of his decoration, he had not yet received the medal. His accuser was brought to confront him, but Shchegotsky laughed in his face.
‘I do not wear it because I have not been given it,’ said Shchegotsky. ‘Once I receive it I shall wear it proudly.’
Shchegotsky was allowed to leave without a blemish on his reputation – although he would not be so fortunate on another occasion – and his accuser then had to answer charges himself for having denounced such a faithful servant of the Soviet Union.
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CHAPTER TWO
Football seems to have arrived in the Ukraine in much the same way that it was introduced to the rest of the world: it came from Britain. The game of football spread from its British origins at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as a direct consequence of Britain’s seafaring dominance. The South American countries, for example, whose players would dominate the game in the latter half of the twentieth century, learned to play football originally from Scottish and English sailors who called in at Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and other major ports on the trade routes. In the Ukraine, there are two schools of thought on the matter. One claims that the game was introduced by Czech engineers who were working on local industrial projects, but this seems to be a revisionist theory designed to deprive the imperialists of any credit for a sport which began as an eccentric hobby and turned into one of the Soviet Union’s national pastimes. The more credible theory is that football came to the Ukraine as a consequence of locals being intrigued by, and ...
