Читать книгу Lost Province - Stephen Henighan - Страница 7

1 JOURNEY INTO DIFFERENCE

In early 1989 a few months after the election that sealed the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a long trip through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The prospect of free trade depressed me. I brooded about the survival of the peculiarities of habit, language, architecture, outlook, and attitude, nurtured by local and national cultures, which furnished the world with much of the multiplicity and fascination that made living worthwhile. In Central Europe I thought I glimpsed the revival of the thriving diversity of Mitteleuropa—the return of an older, more complicated Europe. Time would prove this resuscitation of heterodoxy to be a mirage, but in 1989 felt I had received a great gift, stumbling upon a treasure trove of multiplicity in an era when differences were being irreducibly flattened. I promised myself I would return to the far side of Europe.

I went back to Canada and lived for two and a half years in Montreal, writing fiction and journalism and supporting myself with odd jobs. When, in 1992, I decided to give up my freelancer’s life to write a doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, part of my motivation for studying in England stemmed from a longing to be close to the Europe that had intrigued me. On gloomy Oxford days I dreamed of escaping to Mitteleuropa. My next journey east, though, was not to be to the former realm of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but to the Balkans.

In 1989 I had not visited the Balkans: my knowledge of the region derived from literature. One image that made a strong impression on me, having travelled through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland with Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy in my backpack, was the annexation of Bessarabia. Essentially a portrait of a marriage, Manning’s novels are set against the background of Romania’s entry into World War II. Stalin’s annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, though it takes place offstage, contributes powerfully to the suffocation of hope that eventually drives the central characters to flee Bucharest. The Romanian characters, of course, stay behind in Romania. Bessarabians, too, stayed behind—no longer citizens of Romania, but of the Soviet Union.

The image had dimmed by the time I applied for a summer teaching job in Romania in 1994. A year and a half earlier, during a period of boredom with my doctoral thesis, I had started studying Romanian. After taking four hours of introductory lessons with a postdoctoral student who knew the language well, I invested in a grammar book, discovered a cache of tapes, and happily devoted my idle hours to memorizing the unpredictable plural forms of Romanian nouns. By the summer I was aching to practise the language. I had spent the year as president of my Oxford college’s graduate-student association—a wearing responsibility that had added thirty or more hours of commitments every week to my already-packed schedule, binding me to the mandates of a community both demanding and insular. A lingering romantic confusion had pulled the narrow borders of this world a notch tighter. I needed to get away.

Little did I suspect how far away I was going.

Three weeks before I was due to leave for Romania I received a letter informing me that I had been transferred to Chiinu in the Republic of Moldova, in the former Soviet Union. Here, too, the letter assured me, I would be able to speak Romanian. A phone call established that my sponsor organization had been expelled from Romania (rumour claimed its employees had been caught forging Romanian work permits). I did some research, discovered Moldova was Bessarabia, called back, and said I would agree to the transfer on the condition that I was lodged with a Romanian, rather than a Russian-speaking, family. I was told this would be arranged. The voice on the phone mentioned that I would be travelling from London overland to Chiinu (pronounced Kee-she-now). They knew I would enjoy the trip.

I boarded the yellow London-Lvov Liner (the name was painted on the bus’s side) at Victoria Station. The passengers were divided between young volunteers travelling to Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, and elderly British Ukrainians returning to visit relatives. The English teachers’ bulging luggage blocked the ventilation system, and everyone sweated. We crossed the English Channel at midnight and awoke in the morning on a highway that insulated us from difference. Belgium slipped into Holland and then into Germany with scarcely a wrinkle of recognition. Only in eastern Germany did evidence of a transition appear: stretches of older, rougher highway, drab stucco farmhouses, the occasional Skoda or Lada tagging behind faster-moving traffic. At the Polish border the immigration post was flying the blue-and-gold European Union flag optimistically alongside the red-and-white of Poland. Viewed from the highway, Poland appeared emptier than I remembered: the forests dark, the fields untended. Jazzy roadside gas bars erupted in the mid-distance, their restaurants equalling any installation along a U.S. interstate for utter featurelessness. Only the possibility of ordering sausages and pierogies, in addition to hamburgers, french fries, and Cokes, offered a reminder that this was not Kansas. The British teachers, not having encountered Polish food before, looked on with discomfort moderating into fascination as I savoured a culinary favourite I remembered from my Canadian childhood, slurping up a plate of delicious pierogies swimming in spiced cream. Gazing into my colleagues’ disconsolate faces (their french fries were stale), I thought: Another testament to the advantages of multicultural societies!

Multiculturalism, which often boiled down to the doomed exercise of trying to preserve a culture in the absence of the language in which the culture was inscribed, presented both an example and a warning. Riding the bus over the Polish plains, I listened on my Walkman to a trans-European rock music station whose disc jockeys spoke blaring U.S. English: “Whether you’re in St. Petersburg, Russia, or Venice, Italy, we mean rock!” Voices would call in from Athens or Dresden or Zagreb or Madrid and request rock songs in accented English. In this context national European cultures commanded no more authority or integrity than the culture of a Portuguese community in Toronto or an Italian neighbourhood in Montreal. Critics of Canadian multiculturalism argued that it trivialized cultures, shrinking them to picturesque folklore; the same danger, on a vastly larger scale, underlay cultural globalization. All of Italy risked becoming little more than the “Italian neighbourhood” of a culturally homogenized planet incapable of expressing or sanctioning assumptions, attitudes, or emotional, spiritual, or cultural allegiances not comfortably contained within the forms of the rock video or the talk-show confession. The day when all of the world’s business and entertainment would take place in English, demoting national languages and cultures to the property of peasant grandmothers and the poorly educated, did not seem far off as, rumbling through the Polish night, I listened to an American DJ in Amsterdam shout across Europe: “Heinrich in Vienna is just dying to hear Tina Turner!”

I was travelling east in search of differences that had endured. I was destined to be disillusioned and enlightened in a variety of ways. I was looking forward to discovering in Moldova a plucky little republic, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, valiantly recovering its cultural specificity after more than fifty years of Soviet occupation. But this was not what I found.

The first warning shot across my bow struck at the Polish-Ukrainian border. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, supposedly dead and buried three years earlier, was proceeding at roughly the pace at which rust creeps into metal. Border formalities to enter Ukraine consumed three and a half hours. (Having spent two consecutive nights on the Liner, most of us responded badly to this harassment.) Immigration procedures were hamstrung by archaic forms and formalities. We were handed scrappy grey pieces of paper to fill in; all spoke not of Ukraine, but of the Soviet Union. A record of every dollar, deutschmark, zloty, or pound we were carrying had to be crammed into narrow spaces in small, striped boxes. The justification for completing these forms had disappeared: Ukraine was officially a market economy, free of currency controls and the mandatory daily exchanges that had characterized the old Eastern Europe. Yet Soviet norms continued to be enforced. We even had to sign an absurd pledge to present for inspection to the authorities of the Soviet Union all “printed matter, manuscripts, films, sound recordings, postage stamps, graphics, etc.”

Then we were herded single-file from one end of a cavernous room to the other. Our declarations were examined and our transit visas stamped. As we were about to return to the Liner, the officer in charge announced he wanted to “verify our declarations.” He would search every passenger, counting the money each of us was carrying to check that it corresponded to our declarations.

The passengers groaned, too exhausted to retaliate. Our team of three drivers went berserk. They began screaming at the officer, waving their arms and backing him into a corner until guards stepped up on either side to protect him. The drivers, all the while, were surreptitiously motioning us onto the Liner. We took the hint and fled. By the time the drivers had completed their harangue, every passenger was seated. The drivers scrambled onboard, gunned the engine, and pulled away from the border post. A customs official stepped out onto the blacktop and shouted at the driver. But it was too late: we had fled.

Soviet forms and procedures remained in force, but not Soviet power. We couldn’t have made this escape three years earlier.

The transition from Poland to Ukraine was dramatic. We had barely crossed the border when the first silver onion dome soared into sight. The poorly maintained road wound between tiny farmhouses, walled off behind low stone walls. In the yards stood scarved old women, children without shirts or shoes, dust sifting upward around them. The abundant Orthodox churches provided the only glimmer of elegance in this degraded landscape. The fields were smaller and scrubbier than those in Poland, and there were no forests. Half an hour beyond the border a stinking, whitish smog descended, swathing everything in an unhealthy glow that escorted us most of the way to the hideous high-rise blocks on the outskirts of Lvov. Europe’s border had advanced since 1989. Poland might not join the European Union for years to come, yet culturally it had leaped over the East European wall.

Unlike Poland, the former Soviet republics retained their cultural eccentricities, their obedience to Soviet bureaucratic norms that Moscow was no longer in a position to enforce, and their poverty. Their cultural reference points consisted of an unlikely conflation of a lingering belief in the centrality of Moscow, and exposure to global mass culture through television; in contrast to the mood in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw, a yearning to “return to Europe” did not enter the equation. Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus lay on the wrong side of an imaginary perimeter beyond which Europe did not penetrate.

The trait that distinguished Moldova from the other republics was its historical tie to Romania. Moldova was not Russian and, initially, it had not been part of the Soviet Empire. At various points in its history, most recently from 1944 until 1991, it had been kidnapped. The country was a shard of the Balkans that had been tossed incongruously into the post-Soviet brew. It was prone to Balkan conflicts, such as the brief 1992 war when the fearsome Russian General Alexander Lebed had thrown the Soviet Fourteenth Army into battle in support of Slavic separatists in the city of Tiraspol, where Russian and Ukrainian speakers formed a majority of the population. Lebed, a former battalion commander in Afghanistan, had put out nationalist brushfires in Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1989 and 1990, but it was in Moldova that he came into his own as a defender of the Russian Empire. In the Fourteenth Army—the massive invasion force groomed by the Soviet Union to overrun Greece and Italy in the event of an all-out war with NATO—Lebed discovered his ideal instrument. As a result of his intervention, an unrecognized Slavic statelet called the Trans-Dniestrian Republic had emerged. Trans-Dniestria’s autonomy was guarded by Lebed and his weaponry. No one could be certain where the borders of Moldova ended or began.

But the Republic of Moldova was merely a slice of a larger entity. Moldavia (Moldova in Romanian) was one of the three constituent regions of Romania, the others being Wallachia (Tara Romaneasca in Romanian) and Transylvania (Ardeal in Romanian). It was the union of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859 that had created modern Romania. In 1940 the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced Romania to cede Northern Bukovina, a mountainous region of great cultural richness, to the Soviet Union. Most of Bukovina, including the important city of Cernauti, is now inside the borders of Ukraine. Cernauti is famous in Romania as the city where Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet, was educated in the 1860s; in the 1930s Paul Celan, the great German-Jewish poet, received his education in the same city, where he began his writing career in Romanian before switching to German. Yet the most serious consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was that the eastern half of Moldavia was combined with a thin strip of Ukraine and incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

In a sense, it was not Romania that was dismembered by the victors of World War II, but Moldavia. Chiinu, the region’s second city, vanished from the Romanian-speaking world. The blow to Romanian identity, which had entered a phase of unprecedented self-confidence during the interwar years, was crippling. With the exception of the witty playwright I. L. Caragiale, a precursor of absurdism and a native of Wallachia, the pillars of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century literature—the country’s classics—were all Moldavian: Vasile Alecsandri, the early Romantic poet who was instrumental in developing an indigenous Romanian theatrical tradition; the poet Eminescu; Mihail Sadoveanu, the Balzac-like novelist of gargantuan energy who drenched his dozens of books in the history, language, and teeming natural world of Moldavia; Ion Creanga, the peasant storyteller who mythologized traditional Romanian life. The dismemberment of Moldavia, which had occurred periodically throughout history, seemed this time to have stopped an emerging national tradition in its tracks.

Reading Mircea Eliade’s history of Romania as the bus carried me eastward, I learned that Moldavia had reached the zenith of its power under Stephen the Great (1457–1504), one of the most admired monarchs of his day. After Stephen’s death, Moldavia fell under Ottoman rule. At the close of the Russo-Turkish War in 1812, Tsar Alexander I sliced Moldavia in half. The area east of the Prut River, renamed Bessarabia, remained under Russian rule. In 1817 the Russians conducted the first census of Bessarabia and discovered that eighty-six percent of the population spoke Romanian, 6.5 percent Ukrainian, and 1.5 percent Russian. By the end of the nineteenth century, after eighty years of forced migrations and assimilationist education policy, only half of Bessarabians spoke Romanian. When Bessarabia was reintegrated into Romania after World War I, Bucharest dispatched Romanian-speaking schoolteachers and administrators to Chiinu to reinforce its claim.

The ebullient if troubled interwar years reconfirmed Bessarabia’s Romanian character but also some of its peculiarities. Older people during the 1920s and 1930s retained an attachment to the Cyrillic alphabet, while the upper classes continued to take their cultural cues from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Bucharest’s administrators, though often insensitive to local customs, opened new markets to Bessarabian goods and paved roads at a pace that put the Russians to shame. The Romanian schoolteachers raised the literacy rate to thirty percent. In the minds of many intellectuals the two halves of Moldavia, severed for more than a century, had been reunited.

Mihail Sadoveanu expressed this consciousness in historical novels such as Nunta Dominitie Ruxanda (Princess Ruxanda’s Wedding, 1932) set in the seventeenth century when Moldavia, though under Ottoman rule, remained whole. The novel’s characters gallop indiscriminately across the length and breadth of Moldavia. The Prut River is stripped of political significance and becomes important primarily as a place to water the horses. At the same time the struggle for cultural wholeness is never far from the centre of the novel’s action. Subsequent Soviet propaganda would decry the “primitive” state of the Bessarabians at the time of the 1940 annexation, but during the interwar years a Romanian middle class took root. Bessarabia in 1940 was inextricably entwined in the Romanian national equation. After the 1940 annexation, the Romanian fascist leader General Ion Antonescu fought to recover Bessarabia. In 1941 the Romanian army drove out the Soviet occupying forces. Penetrating deep into the Soviet Union, Antonescu’s troops captured the Black Sea port of Odessa. From 1941 to 1944 Bessarabia returned to Romania, plaguing today’s Moldovans with the uncomfortable paradox of being one of the few communities in the world that considers itself to have been liberated by a fascist.

In 1944 the Soviet Union reconquered Bessarabia. Vyacheslav Molotov and Joseph Stalin worked far harder than the tsars to alter the territory’s character. The respected Romanian dissident Paul Goma, who fled Bessarabia at this time, reports that the Soviet troops burned on large bonfires all books printed in the Latin alphabet. The Red Army staged mass executions of captured Romanian soldiers. Tests performed on a swamp near the northern Moldovan city of Balti have suggested that it may contain the bodies of up to fifty thousand Romanian soldiers. This represents a massacre several times the size of the notorious slaughter of Polish officers by Soviet troops at Katyn in 1943; yet, unlike Katyn, Balti has never entered the world’s historical consciousness.

During the first year of Soviet occupation, three hundred thousand Romanians were removed from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina and scattered through Siberia and other remote tracts of the Soviet Union. By 1953 authorities in Moscow had dispatched more than two hundred and fifty thousand Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars to Bessarabia to serve as civil servants, teachers, soldiers, and police officers. The tally of Romanian-speaking deportees to far-flung districts of the Soviet Union surpassed 1.1 million. The 1946–47 famine killed more than one hundred thousand peasants. The society of “Moldavia beyond the Prut,” as Romanians called the region, had been decapitated. Few Romanians endowed with education, initiative, or professional skills were allowed to remain. The Soviet claim of having uplifted a society of peasants maintained in ignorance by the fumbling monarchy in Bucharest was not true in 1940, but within a decade the Romanians of Bessarabia had been reduced to a state nearly as pathetic as that portrayed by Soviet propaganda.