Black Sea Read online

  Fish brought the Black Sea into history. There were, of course, other factors too: other prodigious sources of food and wealth. The south Russian plains for example, the so-called Pontic Steppe, formed a level expanse of prairie stretching for almost 800 miles from the Volga River to the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the west, a band of open country some 200 miles deep between the sea-coast and the forest country to the north. The grasslands of the Pontic Steppe could feed the horses and cattle of a whole nomad nation; later, its best soil was ploughed up and grew the finest wheat in the world before the cultivation of North America. In the mountains of the Caucasus, whose snowy summits were visible from far out at sea, there were both timber and gold. Across the river deltas wandered flocks of edible birds which darkened the sky with their migrations. But in all that apparently infinite plenty of natural life, the fish mattered most.

  The voyage of the Argo is a Bronze Age legend. When Jason crossed the Black Sea, ran his boat up the river Phasis in Colchis (part of modern Georgia) and tied her fast to the trees overhanging the bank, he was after magical treasure - the Golden Fleece of Colchis. But gold is for heroes. All along the Black Sea coasts, inshore dredgers bring up from the sea-bed big stones pierced with a hole: the anchors of Mycenaean ships. These carried the real Bronze Age venturers. They brought with them from the Aegean luxurious trade goods like ornamental pottery and decorated rapiers, but they were looking for food to bring home, and what they took away seems to have been mostly fish: sun-dried, or cured with salt from the Dnieper and Danube estuaries. When the Mycenaean kingdoms passed away and were replaced by small, hungry city-states perched on Greek and Ionian headlands, the ships returned to the Black Sea on the same errand, which became steadily more desperate as the city-states grew more populous and their small arable hinterlands grew less fertile through over-cultivation. By the seventh century BC, the Ionian Greeks were establishing coastal colonies all round the Black Sea, settling into communities whose first business was the curing, packing and exporting of fish.

  Satisfying this need, a very simple one, led unexpectedly into one of the formative moments of human history. The significance lay not just in the meeting of settled, literate people with pastoral nomads. That had happened before, and would happen again. It was important because the literate people brooded on this meeting, and constructed from it - the first 'colonial' encounter in European experience — a series of questioning discourses which still remain with us.

  One discourse concerns 'civilisation' and 'barbarism'. A second is about cultural identity, and about where its distinctions and limits should be drawn. A third is a deep self-criticism which imagines that technical and social sophistication entails not only gain but loss — a departure of conscious and rational behaviour from what is 'natural' and spontaneous.

  All three themes, provoked by the encounter in the Black Sea, were debated in the classical world. They receded after the dissolution of the western Roman Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries AD. But in the early modern period they returned to European consciousness with a steadily more commanding urgency, prompted by the encounters with the Americas, Africa and Asia and, later still, by the developing ideology of nationalism. On the Black Sea itself, however, these matters were not so much debated as lived. Around the fish-drying screens and the smokehouses, typical patterns of ethnic and social mingling arose which have still not entirely passed away.

  At the outset of his famous book Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, the Russian scholar Mikhail Rostovtzeff wrote: 'I take as my starting-point the unity of the region which we call South Russia: the intersection of influences in that vast tract of country -Oriental and southern influences arriving by way of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Greek influences spreading along the sea routes, and Western influences passing down the great Danubian route; and the consequent formation, from time to time, of mixed civilisations, very curious and very interesting.'

  But it was not only around the northern fringes of the Black Sea, and not only in the classical period, that these Very curious and very interesting' communities appeared. The city of Byzantium (to become Constantinople and finally Istanbul) was such a society through the Middle Ages and up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century. So was the Grand Comnenian Empire of Trebizond (on the south coast of the Sea) during the mediaeval period, and so was nineteenth-century Constanta near the Danube delta, and the city of Odessa on the Ukrainian coast which was founded only in 1794. So, too, on a smaller scale, were towns like Sukhum and Poti and Batumi on the coast of what was once Colchis, which began as Greek colonies and survived until the end of the Soviet period as sites where peoples of many different languages, religions, trades and descents lived together.

  They were 'curious' because power in those places was not concentrated. Instead it was dissolved, like oxygen in the warm upper layers of the Sea, among many communities. The title of supreme ruler might belong to a man or a woman whose family origins were among pastoral steppe nomads, Turkic or Iranian or Mongol. Local government and regulations of the economy might be left to Greek, Jewish, Italian or Armenian merchants. The soldiery, usually a hired force, could be Scythian or Sarmatian, Caucasian or Gothic, Viking or Anglo-Saxon, French or German. The craftsmen, often local people who had adopted Greek language and customs, had their own rights. Only the slaves - for most of these places kept and traded in slaves during most of their existence — were powerless.

  Sudak, on the Crimean coast, was a Greek, then a Byzantine and finally a Genoese colony. Now there remains only an enclosure of mediaeval Italian walls and towers, perched on the slanting sea-cliff west of Cape Meganom. Here I was shown a stone tomb, dug among Byzantine foundations, which had contained the body of a Khazar noble.

  The Khazars were Turkic-speaking pastoral nomads who arrived out of central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, and put together an 'empire' around the northern shores of the Black Sea, including Crimea. Offered conversion to Christianity by St Cyril, the Khazars preferred to adopt a form of Judaism. So it came about that this particular warrior, with his ancestry in shamanistic Asia, chose to be buried by the Jewish ritual in a city whose overlords were Greek Christians. And there was one extra touch, neither Christian nor Judaic. The funeral was completed by a human sacrifice, and the victim - brained by an axe blow — was thrown into the tomb to lie beside its Khazar occupant.

  Peoples who live in communion with other peoples, for a hundred or a thousand years, do not always like them - may, in fact, have always disliked them. As individuals, 'the others' are not strangers but neighbours, often friends. But my sense of Black Sea life, a sad one, is that latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal.

  Necessity, and sometimes fear, binds such communities together. But within that binding-strap they remain a bundle of disparate groups - not a helpful model for the 'multi-ethnic society' of our hopes and dreams. It is true that communal savagery - pogroms, 'ethnic cleansing' in the name of some fantasy of national unity, genocide - has usually reached the Black Sea communities from elsewhere, an import from the interior. But when it arrives the apparent solidarity of centuries can dissolve within days or hours. The poison, upwelling from the depths, is absorbed by a single breath.

  These lands belong to all their people, but also to none of them. Like the terminal moraine of a glacier, the Black Sea shore is a place where the detritus of human migrations and invasions has been deposited for more than four thousand years. The shore itself, worn and quiet, speaks of the patience of rock, sand and water which have received much human restlessness and will outlive it. This is the voice heard by many writers - Pushkin and Mickiewicz, Lermontov and Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam among them - who learned to listen to the slight sounds and large silences of the Black Sea and to measure themselves against a geological expanse of time. They stepped for a moment out of the confines of their own dangerous lives and, in Konstantin Paustovsky's words, acquired 'the love of wisdom an
d simplicity'.

  This book about the Black Sea begins with Crimea. There are sound reasons for this, and some more personal ones. The Crimean peninsula has functioned as a sort of theatre, an apron-stage, for events important to the whole Black Sea region and its peoples. The Greeks made Crimea the centre of their trading empire and so did the Italians a thousand years later; the Crimean War was fought here in the nineteenth century, and Crimea was the scene of some of Hitler's and Stalin's worst atrocities in the twentieth. In 1945, the Yalta conference held on Crimea's southern tip became the code-name for Europe's division during the Cold War.

  But I also begin in Crimea because, by pure chance, I first saw the Black Sea there. And, finally, because any child shown a map of the Black Sea would by instinct first put its finger on that pendant, on that funny brown tag which sticks out so rudely into the smooth blue oval.

  After Crimea, the book goes in many directions. It is not a guidebook, and I am not a circumnavigator. Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania all get less attention than they deserve. But the intellectual trail I was following led away from those countries on the edge of Europe in the opposite direction, towards the north and east. From Crimea, the investigation of 'barbarism' took me to Olbia, near the estuary of the river Dnieper, and from there - leaping over Crimea again - to the ruins of Tanais and Tana on the delta of the river Don. Soon this trail was approaching the mysteries of nationalism and identity, with all their shameless games with shadows and mirrors and their enormous creative power.

  But the track divided. One branch led to the Cossack peoples of south Russia and Ukraine, to Odessa and to Poland, while another turning took me to north-eastern Turkey, where the Pontic Greeks once lived and the tiny Lazi people still does. A journey to Kerch, to explore the 'Bosporan Kingdom' of classical times, again forked into two investigations: of the genuine historical Sarmatians, who commanded this region for a few centuries before and after the birth of Christ, and of the re-invented, fantasy Sarmatians who rode out of the Polish national imagination and were appointed Poland's ancestors. The newest Black Sea state of all, however, is not imaginary; I reached the end of the road in tiny Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia only in 1992, and I tried there to measure the reality or unreality of Abkhazian independence against all that I had learned on the journey until then.

  The prologue and epilogue to this journey are both at the Bosporus. In between is the Black Sea, which is not only the subject but the leading character of this book. The Black Sea has a personality which is not caught by some adjective like 'unpredictable' or phrase like 'friendly to strangers' and which - because it is not made up of traits or epithets but of the interplay of circumstances - cannot be described in detail at all. These circumstances, adding up to an identity, include fish and water, winds and grass, cliffs and forests, migrating birds and human beings. This is not just a place but a pattern of relationships which could not have been the same in any other place, and this is why Black Sea history is first of all the history of the Black Sea.

  Chapter One

  The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

  Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore

  ON THE BLACK SEA, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.

  The Russian Revolution's final victory over its enemies was the moment at Novorossisk, in March 1920, when British battleships moved out to sea carrying General Denikin's defeated White Army on their foredecks. My father was a midshipman there, a boy of eighteen who then and for the rest of his life understood the significance of what he saw.

  The Revolution ran its course, as the English and French Revolutions had done in their own centuries, and by the summer of 1991 it was an old and frail thing. Many say that the Revolution was already long dead: that it perished when Lenin substituted the Bolshevik Party for direct workers' power, or when Stalin began his economic acceleration by terror in 1928. But it seems to me that, while Mikhail Gorbachev still sat in the Kremlin and dreamed of a clean, modern Leninism which might transform the Soviet Union into a socialist democracy, the last embers were still warm in the ashes. In the summer of 1991, suddenly and finally, these embers were kicked apart and the fire went out. The Russian Revolution — not as a project but as a phenomenon, as a shape drawn on the paper of time - was completed.

  That end was signalled to me by a light in Crimean darkness, a light which I did not understand at the time and recognised only in the days and months which followed. This light glittered at me for no longer than a few seconds. I saw it through the window of a coach making its way back along the corniche highway from Sevastopol to Yalta, after a long day spent in the Greek ruins of Chersonesus. I was the only passenger still awake. Around me slept Italian, French, Catalan and American savants, rolling a little in their seats as the coach began its climb up to the road tunnel which penetrates the range of mountains above Cape Sarich. The moon had set. The Black Sea was invisible, but the white wall of the mountains still glowed above us to the left. Somewhere below us lay the little resort of Foros, where Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and his family were taking their summer holiday in a villa kept for the sole use of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  At the Foros turnoff, there was a confusion of lights. An ambulance was waiting at the crossroads, its blue roof-beacon throbbing and its headlights on. But there was no accident to be seen, no broken car or victim. For an instant, as we swept by, I saw men standing about and waiting. As the darkness returned, I wondered for a moment what was going on. It was the night of 18 August 1991.

  What I had seen was the conspirators' candle, the spark carried through the night by men who supposed that they were reviving the Revolution and saving the Soviet Union. Instead, they lit a fire which destroyed everything they honoured. Five months later, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - the Tarty of Lenin' - had been abolished, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had collapsed and even the continental empire of the tsars which underlay the Soviet Union had been reduced to a Russia with only little windows — a few miles of shore - opening on the Baltic and the Black Sea. At first, for a day or so after the plotters had captured Gorbachev at Foros, the flame of the conspiracy seemed to burn high and straight, and the terrified land was quiet. But then a very few men and women gathered in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, raising their bare hands against tanks. They blew the flame back over the conspirators, until it consumed not only the plotters themselves but all the dried-out palaces and prisons and fortresses of the Revolution behind them.

  In Yalta, next morning, the hotel staff and the coach driver and the Ukrainian interpreter all evaded our eyes. The television in the foyer, which had been working the day before, was now out of order.

  Puzzled, we boarded the coach to visit Bakhchiserai, the old capital of the Crimean Tatars, and after a few miles on the road our guides told us. Mr Gorbachev had been taken suddenly ill. A Committee of National Salvation had been established to exercise his powers; it included Gennadi Yanayev, the Vice-President, Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, and General Dimitri Yazov, minister of defence. A proclamation had been issued, stressing certain errors and distortions in the application of perestroika. They thought that a state of emergency existed, at least in the Russian Republic if not in Ukraine (to which Crimea belonged).

  Now I remembered the ambulance guarding the crossroads at Foros and the men standing about. Illness? Nobody among us believed that. But everybody in the coach, and everyone we were to meet that day, believed in the force of what had happened, and to that they knelt down in homage, whatever their private emotions might be. The interval of liberty, that faltering experiment in openness and democracy called glasnost, was over.
Nobody in Crimea, neither the officials in the provincial capital of Simferopol nor the holiday crowds at Yalta setting out on their morning pilgrimage to the shingle beaches, supposed that the coup might be reversed or resisted. The Crimean newspapers contained only the rambling proclamations of the Committee, without comment. On the coach, the radio by the driver was out of order too.

  I sat back and reflected. Would the airports be closed? We were delegates from the World Congress of Byzantinologists which had just taken place in Moscow, and we were near the end of a post-Congress tour of historic sites in Crimea. The biggest group on the coach was Genoese - historians, archivists and journalists. They had come with their families to see the ruins of their city's mediaeval trading empire along the northern Black Sea shore. Now they grew animated, then uproarious. To live through genuine barbarian upheavals on the fringe of the known world seemed to them another way of following in their ancestors' footsteps.

  The coach ran through the little beach resort of Alushta and turned inland towards the mountain pass leading to Simferopol. I tried to imagine the panic in the world outside, the cancelled lunches and emergency conclaves at nato in Brussels, the solemn crowds which would be gathering in the Baltic capitals to resist with songs and sticks the return of the Soviet tank armies. There might, I thought, be a few demonstrations in Russian cities; some devoted boy might try to burn himself alive in Red Square. But the putsch -as an act of force - seemed to me decisive. I had seen something like it ten years before, in 1981, when martial law was declared in Communist Poland. That blow had proved irresistible. So, I assumed, would this one.