Overreach, page 5
The Bibikovs became a leading family of Russian ascendancy in Ukraine – and as such the enforcers of Catherine the Great’s vision of Russifying the newest corner of the empire. A decree issued by Catherine in May 1783 prohibited close to 300,000 peasants living on gentry estates from leaving their home villages and obliged them to perform free labour for the landowners, effectively imposing serfdom on swathes of Ukrainian peasantry. Through inheritance and gifts from a grateful empress, General Aleksandr Bibikov came to own 10,000 ‘souls’ (defined as adult male serfs), meaning that over 25,000 human beings were his personal property.
But Russia’s dominion was not, as later Ukrainian nationalist historians would have it, a straightforward colonial occupation. Many members of the Ukrainian elite would be incorporated into that of the empire and would, in time, come to rule it. Oleksandr Bezborodko, born into the family of the general chancellor of the Hetmanate and a graduate of the Kyivan Academy, became one of Catherine’s most senior diplomats. There were twice as many Ukrainian as Russian doctors in the empire, and in the last two decades of the eighteenth century more than one-third of the students at the St Petersburg teachers’ college came from the lands of the old Hetmanate – in other words from central Ukraine.10 Henceforth Ukraine would provide a large proportion of the Russian and Soviet empire’s elite – including Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, both born in Ukraine into Russian peasant families, and the half-Ukrainian Mikhail Gorbachev. Like the 1707 Act of Union that united England and Scotland under the British crown and Westminster parliament, the incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire brought together two nations sufficiently close in culture and language for their elites to be interchangeable – but distant enough for the junior partner to demand back its historical independence when the empire’s gravitational pull faltered.
Putin’s idea of erecting a statue of Prince Vladimir the Great to symbolise the union of the two Slavic peoples was not original. Tsar Nicholas I’s governor of Kyiv – Dmitry Gavilovich Bibikov, a grandson of Aleksandr’s – installed a massive monument to Vladimir on the banks of the Dniepr in 1853.11 New neoclassical boulevards were laid out in Kyiv and Jews were banned from the city. Russian became the language of administration, education and the lingua franca of Ukraine’s increasingly multi-ethnic urban population. By 1897, the year of the first and only imperial Russian census, some 85 per cent of the overall population of the provinces that today form most of modern Ukraine were ethnic Ukrainians – but in the cities Russians formed the majority.12
Reaction to Russification focused, as was fashionable at the dawn of the age of romantic nationalism, on reclaiming Ukrainian language, folklore and history. In St Petersburg in 1840 Taras Shevchenko, the orphaned son of serfs, published a collection of poems in Ukrainian titled Kobzar (‘the Minstrel’). His main theme was to link the notion of ‘Ukrainianness’ to the peasants’ struggle against oppression.13 ‘Do not pay attention to the Russians. Let them write as they like, and let us write as we like,’ wrote Shevchenko. ‘They are a people with a language, and so are we. Let the people judge which is better.’
In Kyiv, Governor-General Bibikov was disinclined to take Shevchenko’s advice. In neighbouring Poland, national cultural revival was going hand-in-hand with rebellion against Moscow’s rule. Bibikov was determined to prevent the same happening in Malorossiya. He extended the network of Russian schools and devoted himself to the destruction of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, a group of Ukrainian language and history enthusiasts. It was Shevchenko, however, who had the last laugh. The central boulevard of nineteenth-century Kyiv had been named in 1855 after General Bibikov. But the Bolsheviks changed it to Boulevard Tarasa Shevchenko to honour Ukraine’s great national poet.
Another General Bibikov (there were to be 11 generals in the immediate family between 1760 and 1942) fought at the siege of the Crimean port of Sevastopol by the British and French in the Crimean War of 1853–56. The defeat in Crimea was painful evidence of the inability of feudal Russia to function in a modern world. Within five years the reforming Tsar Aleksandr II had abolished the institution of serfdom, liberating 23 million people from chattel slavery. By comparison, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed four million souls. Jews, however – including angry young men like Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, later better known as Leon Trotsky – were still excluded by a strict quota system from education in major cities and their residence restricted to a Pale of Settlement that stretched from Western Ukraine through Poland up to Latvia. There, local Russian populations were periodically encouraged to rob and rape Jews in a series of pogroms that left thousands dead.
Soviet Empire
It is with my grandfather, Boris Lvovich Bibikov, that my family’s involvement with Ukraine comes into sharp, personal focus. His father Lev had scandalised his anti-Semitic family by marrying Sofia Naumovna, a wealthy heiress to a Crimean flour-milling fortune whose parents had, like many Ukrainian Jews, converted to Orthodoxy to further their social ambitions. Their first son Boris was born in Crimea’s capital Simferopol in 1903. When Boris was 14 the tsarist empire collapsed under the pressure of the First World War, and in October 1917 a Bolshevik coup toppled the provisional government. With its fall the former captive peoples of the Russian Empire, from Turkestan to Ukraine, decided that the moment had come for their break from imperial rule.
In January 1918 the Central Rada, the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, dominated by socialist and leftist parties and led by Ukraine’s most prominent historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, declared the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. It claimed – but in practice did not rule – most of today’s Ukraine, including Donbas, but did not include the parts of western Ukraine still under Austro-Hungarian rule.14 The Bolsheviks, in response, created their own Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic with its capital in Kharkiv. Moscow also invented a notionally independent socialist puppet state known as the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic that held much of the Russian-speaking Donbas.
The Ukrainian People’s Republic was the first time since the Hetmanate two centuries earlier that Ukraine had been a nation-state. And like the Hetmans, the fledgling state’s leaders turned to outsiders to support them against Russia. Western and central Ukraine were occupied by German, then Polish armies. A warring patchwork of pro-Bolshevik, pro-tsarist and anarchist fiefdoms fought over Ukraine’s territory. Between the collapse of the Russian army at the end of 1917 and the Bolsheviks’ eventual victory in August 1920, Kyiv changed hands 16 times.
On 21 February 2022 in the speech in which he recognised the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics Vladimir Putin claimed that ‘modern Ukraine was entirely created by Bolshevik Russia … Lenin and his associates [created] it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia – by separating, severing what is historically Russian land.’ The modern state of Ukraine, Putin claimed, ‘can rightfully be called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine”. He was its creator and architect.’
In a technical sense, Putin was right – Lenin did indeed draw the first borders of the Soviet Republics of Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was the formal union of these three notionally independent states that created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922 – and it was these republics’ decision to dissolve that union at Belovezhskaya Pushcha in December 1991 that spelled the death of the USSR. But Putin ignored the most fundamental reason why Lenin created a separate Ukrainian republic in the first place. Ukrainian aspirations to independence were so strong in the wake of the civil war that granting a degree of autonomy and a status equal to Russia within the Soviet Union was essential if the Bolsheviks were to maintain their control over Ukraine.15 Indeed for the first decade of Soviet power, Ukrainian became the official language of administration and education in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Hundreds of books – including history books – were published in Ukrainian, and the language was codified and given an official grammar for the first time.
Despite – or perhaps in deliberate defiance of – his birth into a prominent Russian noble family, Boris Bibikov became a passionate communist. Exactly why Boris Bibikov and his two younger brothers joined the Bolsheviks is not clear, though they were by no means the only members of their class and generation to do so. Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, was a Polish count and Lenin himself was a hereditary nobleman.
Bibikov joined the Communist Party in 1924, served as a commissar in the Red Army in 1926–28 and then as a Party organiser. As such, he was at the front line of the new Soviet government’s most pressing and existential problem. Ukraine was at the same time the breadbasket of the empire and a hotbed of both active and passive anti-communist resistance. The USSR’s fast-growing new cities needed Ukrainian grain, but the Ukrainian peasantry – far more independent-minded and wealthier than their Russian counterparts – resisted early attempts to give up their private property and force them into collective farms. Moreover, Joseph Stalin – the rising star of the Party – disagreed with Lenin’s expedient accommodation of Ukrainian nationalism. For Stalin, an independent Ukrainian identity was an existential threat to the great Soviet project.
Stalin’s solution was threefold. The rich and fertile farmland of Ukraine was to be turned into a ‘grain factory’, in Lenin’s phrase, in order to feed the great cities and earn hard currency to buy foreign-made machinery. The peasants would have to be forcibly collectivised to cure them of their reactionary attachment to private property and capitalist enterprise. And the coal- and steel-producing areas of eastern Ukraine would be massively expanded, both with an influx of ethnic Russian workers and Ukrainian peasants freed up by the mechanisation of agriculture. Work in the new factories would turn backward Ukrainian peasants into honest Russian proletarians.
In 1929 Stalin published his first five-year plan to bring Soviet agriculture and industry kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. One of the centrepieces was the building of a vast new tractor factory in Kharkiv, known as the KhTZ. Boris Bibikov was appointed the factory’s Party boss.
Bibikov wore striped army shirts and played the bluff proletarian – though he lived in a luxurious four-room apartment with a live-in maid and was driven around town in a giant American Packard sedan. His wife, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak, was a peasant girl from Poltava. When Bibikov’s first daughter – my aunt – was born in 1925 he loyally named her Lenina, after the Revolution’s leader. As the KhTZ’s party secretary he edited the factory’s newspaper and organised ‘storm nights’ accompanied by a brass band to meet brutal deadlines imposed by the Kremlin’s zealous planners. In 1931, on the factory’s completion in record time, he was awarded the Order of Lenin for his work. He was 28 years old.
For Bibikov and the other builders of the KhTZ, the giant fields of Ukraine and the great new factory were anvils where a new kind of society would be hammered out. The tractors they built would free millions from the drudgery, ignorance, drink and viciousness of village life. Though he would have bridled at the comparison, Boris had become the latest in a long line of Bibikovs to impose Moscow’s vision of progress and civilisation onto the lands of Ukraine.
But there was one problem. The new collective farms did not work, and the peasants fiercely resisted their new Soviet masters. Land, grain and livestock had to be forcibly confiscated at gunpoint. Soviet documents from 1930 record 13,794 ‘incidents of terror’ and 13,754 ‘mass protests’ – caused, in the opinion of the OGPU secret police, by resistance to collectivisation.16 Peasants slaughtered and ate their livestock and horses rather than hand them over to the collective farms. The spring sowing of 1931 was hampered by an extreme shortage of grain, horses and tractors. And yet Stalin and the central planners in Moscow continued to insist that Ukraine produce its unrealistic quotas of wheat – much of it for export to buy machinery to fuel its crash industrialisation. In 1929 the USSR exported 170,000 tonnes of grain, in 1930 4.8 million tonnes and in 1931 5.2 million tonnes.17
The result was Stalin’s most horrific crime – the Holodomor, or ‘hunger-death’, remembered in modern Ukraine as a genocide akin to the Holocaust. ‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,’ Boris Pasternak wrote after a trip to Ukraine in the wake of the man-made famine. The young Hungarian communist Arthur Koestler found the ‘enormous land wrapped in silence’. Trucks roamed the streets of Kharkiv, Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk collecting the dead bodies of starving peasants who had crawled into the cities in search of food. By the winter of 1933 between four and seven million Ukrainian peasants had starved to death.
Bibikov must have known of the daily patrols sent out to collect the emaciated bodies of peasants lying in the streets of Kharkiv, the ruthless Red Army units despatched to seize the last kernels of grain from starving people. He must have struggled to rationalise his place in that nightmare. Perhaps he believed his great tractor factory was going to help grow enough food to feed the gleaming cities Stalin promised – but maybe just a little too late to help the dying millions around him. Which is why Boris Bibikov, until then a loyal Party leader in service to the Soviet empire, made a fateful and ultimately fatal choice to push back against Stalin.
As the Holodomor unfolded, Boris Bibikov and many fellow senior members of the Ukrainian Communist Party chose to voice their opposition to Stalin’s policies. Boris attended the 17th Party Congress – the so called ‘Congress of Victors’ – in Moscow in 1934. It would be the last time open opposition to Stalin was voiced in public. Like many of his Ukrainian colleagues, Boris backed Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s main rival and an advocate for slowing the pace of collectivisation. Kirov was assassinated on Stalin’s secret orders in December 1934. When Boris heard the news, his daughter Lenina recalled, he threw himself on the sofa and wept. ‘We are lost,’ my grandfather said. He was right. Between January 1937 and May 1938 a third of the Ukrainian Communist Party – 167,000 people – were arrested.18 Of the 1,277 delegates to the Congress, over 800 who spoke against Stalin – many of them Ukrainians – would die in Stalin’s Great Purge of the Party in 1937. Boris Bibikov was one of them.
My grandmother, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak, was arrested soon after her husband and sent to a Gulag in Kazakhstan for the crime of being the wife of an enemy of the people. She spent 15 years there and went insane. The Bibikovs’ children, my mother Lyudmila and her elder sister Lenina, were sent first to a children’s prison and then to an orphanage in Verhne-Dniprovsk, where Lyudmila nearly died of tuberculosis of the bones. ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood,’ was one of the songs my mother learned at the orphanage.
From the point of view of the Soviet state, the Holodomor and the Terror were part of the same project. Class enemies, dissident Party members and Ukrainian nationalists were all ‘waging a war against Soviet power’, as Stalin wrote to the writer Mikhail Sholokhov in the spring of 1933.19 Such people stood in the way of the great Soviet project and had to be eliminated from the path of history. ‘Not one of them was guilty of anything,’ wrote the Stalin-loyalist journalist Ilya Ehrenburg. ‘But they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.’20 Even as hundreds of thousands of peasants starved in the countryside, the Soviet secret police systematically rounded up Ukraine’s intellectual and political elites. Professors, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats – anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian history, or had been connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917, was targeted for arrest. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the word ‘genocide’, spoke of Ukraine in this era as the ‘classic example’ of his concept: ‘It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.’21
When Hitler’s top lieutenants began to debate plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union in the autumn and winter of 1940, it was the seizure of the riches of Ukraine that interested his economic planners the most. The grain of central Ukraine and the coal, steel and factories of Donbas and Kharkiv would be essential to the Nazi war machine – and the fertile black-earth farmland would provide the Lebensraum for Aryan settlers. ‘The war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war,’ concluded Herbert Backe, the Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture. But Backe also calculated that the Wehrmacht could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food.22 Like Stalin before him, Hitler planned to use mass starvation as a weapon against the Soviet people. The goal of Backe’s ‘Hunger Plan’ – its official title – was for some 30 million people to ‘die out’.
Operation Barbarossa was launched with a series of long-range bombing raids deep into Soviet territory. In the words of a popular Soviet wartime song penned by poet Boris Kovynev, ‘At dawn on June twenty-second; At four a.m. exactly; Kyiv was bombed; And then we were told; That the war had begun.’23 Eighty-two years later, on the morning of 24 February 2022, millions of Russians and Ukrainians would be surprised by almost the same shocking news that bombs were falling on Kyiv.
The build-up to Hitler’s blitzkrieg had been widely signalled by at least 19 Soviet agents from Warsaw to Berlin and Tokyo. Stalin – like the Ukrainian leadership in February 2022 – refused to believe the intelligence reports. The Soviet air force was taken by surprise by massed air attacks that destroyed a large number of planes on the ground. Those that managed to take off – including a Polikarpov Po-2 biplane fighter piloted by Isaac Bibikov, Boris’s younger brother – were quickly shot down by the more modern Luftwaffe. Within two weeks the German divisions has reached the gates of Kyiv. The retreating Soviets, determined not to leave anything for the invaders, mined Kreshchatik Boulevard, the capital’s main street. Further east in Kharkiv, engineers prepared to dynamite the KhTZ.
