Putin

But as Tsar Nicholas himself had once exclaimed: “I don’t rule Russia, ten thousand clerks do!” And the local clerks and officials in Shevchenko’s place of exile on the Ural River were only too glad to have their provincial boredom alleviated by welcoming a celebrity into their midst. Shevchenko painted and wrote without much intrusion at all, and was able to live in private quarters and wear civilian clothes.

After ten years of exile, Shevchenko was freed by the new, more liberal Tsar Alexander II on condition that he register with the police and “not misuse his talent.” With his typically Ukrainian walrus mustache and Astrakhan hat, Shevchenko once again became a fixture on the St. Petersburg literary scene, appearing at readings with luminaries like Dostoevsky and Turgenev.

In his most famous poem, “Testament,” he asks to be buried on the steppe but declares that he will not leave his grave for heaven and will “know nothing of God” until Ukraine has risen up against the tyrants, watered its rivers with their blood, and finally joined “the family of the free.”

On March 10, 1861, he died after a night of caroling and carousing at the age of forty-seven.

Shevchenko’s life was a drama of freedom gained and freedom lost, then freedom gained again, that would become every bit as iconic to his fellow countrymen as his work itself. In his youth he had felt that both he and Ukraine were doubly unfree, as serfs and as subjects of a foreign master, the Moskali, as the Russians were called with hatred and disdain. All the serfs of the Russian empire were freed around the time of Shevchenko’s death in 1861 (two years before the slaves in America), but that did not change Ukraine’s subject status one whit. The dream would remain national liberation. Freedom, however, proved as elusive for Ukraine as it had for Shevchenko.

In the four years between the fall of tsarism and the establishment of Communist rule in 1921, Ukraine made three failed attempts at securing its independence. After the last tsar, Nicholas II, abdicated in February 1917, Ukrainians by the tens of thousands took to the streets holding banners of blue and yellow, the national colors, and pictures of Shevchenko. An independent government was formed and lasted a year until internal squabbling and Red artillery put an end to it. A second attempt was made in the western city of Lviv, whose fortunes had changed so often that it had four names—Lviv (Ukrainian), Lvov (Russian), Lwow (Polish), and Lemberg (German)—causing the locals to say: “We don’t travel to Europe. Europe travels to us!” The attempt at forming an independent government in Lviv failed in much less time, falling victim to a shortage of cohesion and an excess of enemies. Guerrillas would, however, fight on for years.

Out of their diplomatic depth, the Ukrainians got very short shrift at the peace talks in Versailles, unlike Poland, which was better equipped diplomatically, more European, and viewed as a better buffer against any new dangers from the east. So newly independent Poland got a part of western Ukraine, and the rest of the country would in time fall under Moscow’s control and become a Soviet republic. It all left a very bitter taste.

But no doubt Ukraine would have been more than content with the defeats and indignities it suffered in those years if it had even a moment’s foretaste of the nightmares soon to come.

* * *

The Soviet twenties were relatively tranquil. Lenin allowed the return of small enterprise, which brought goods back to the shops and added some color and variety to daily life. The arts flourished, there being too many other immediate problems for the authorities to deal with. Meanwhile, practically unnoticed, described by some later as a “gray blur,” Joseph Stalin, the former strike organizer of the Baku oil fields, was gradually rising through the party’s ranks, taking on the tedious tasks that the other, more romantic revolutionaries felt were beneath them but which allowed him to grant favors and build constituencies. Lenin died in 1924, possibly nudged along by Stalin, who was in charge of his medical care. By 1929 Stalin’s archrival for power, Leon Trotsky, had been exiled from the country. The shops were closed, the artists silenced, or worse, instructed.

Officially, the Soviet Union was the land of the workers and the peasants as symbolized by the hammer and sickle. The truth, however, was that while the workers tended to be progressive, “politically conscious,” to use a term of the time, the peasants tended to be recalcitrant and reactionary, especially the wealthier ones known as “kulaks,” meaning “fists.” The Russian peasants were bad enough, but the Ukrainians were even worse. Not only were they greedy, benighted, and obstinate, they were nationalistic as well, preferring an independent Ukraine to one still dominated after centuries by Moscow and the Moskali.