Black Sea Page 6

  The field-gun shells came wavering through the air and raised harmless plumes of spray, but it was only a matter of time before the gunners registered the range accurately. The admiral decided to pull out. As the battleship came into the open sea, she encountered a drifting barge crammed with soldiers, towed out and then abandoned by a local tug. A line was attached and the barge was brought alongside Emperor of India, which embarked its passengers.

  To cover the retreat, a destroyer raced back into the bay and began to shell the field-guns ashore. By now, more Bolshevik troops were arriving from the south, and were engaged by a small White Russian warship off the cement-works jetty. The railway station caught fire, and then the storage tanks of the Standard Oil

  Company were hit. My father's last snapshot shows black smoke rolling up from the harbour, white smoke patching the roofs. He wrote under it: Town Burning.'

  Denikin, who had been transferred to a destroyer, now began to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire as well as the thump of artillery. The Red Army was entering Novorossisk. 'Then silence fell,' Denikin wrote. 'The outlines of the coast, the Caucasian range, became shrouded in mist and receded into the distance - into the past.'

  It was halfway through the second night on the Moscow barricades, the second night of vigil around the Russian parliament, that I heard the shooting begin. It came from a few hundred yards away, from the underpass on the Sadovaya boulevard behind the parliament building. When I reached the place, this is what I saw.

  A bearded priest was walking through blood. He could have found a way not to tread in the scarlet pools and rivers across the roadway, but that would have meant taking his eyes off the tanks ahead, crouching half-hidden in the underpass tunnel. So he walked straight on, slowly, his head up, not looking at what was under his feet.

  Behind the priest came two captured armoured vehicles, each carrying a dozen human beings clinging to the turret, to the gun, to one another. Driven by amateurs, they moved in low gear, in violent lurches which made the riders sway and grab for support. The tracks moved over rubble and burned metal, over the glass of smashed trolley-bus windows, then over the sketchy rectangles of sticks laid down to keep walkers away from the blood. Afterwards, the people came back and rebuilt those enclosures and made them into shrines.

  The procession behind the priest went slowly down the slope towards the tunnel-mouth of the underpass, in a deafening uproar of tank engines mingled with the outcry of hundreds of people leaning over the parapets on either side. They went on until the bows of the tanks which had gone over to Boris Yeltsin touched the bows of the lead tank still loyal to the army command. Then the demonstrators sprang on board and raised the Russian tricolour and yelled at the crew inside to surrender.

  In that night, between 20 August and 21 August 1991, the coup failed. Most of the foreign journalists wrote afterwards that it had been bound to fail; its preparation had been feeble, its organisation slovenly and chaotic, its leaders drunk and irresolute. But I was there too, and I do not think so. In most of the provinces and republics of the Soviet Union, the leadership submitted or rallied to the plotters. The people, appalled but resigned, for the most part did nothing; if the usurpers had held on for another few days, the coup against Gorbachev might have consolidated. Only the determination of a few thousand people in Moscow and Leningrad, challenging the will of the plot leaders to slaughter them, broke their nerve.

  The front line of the Moscow resistance was a chain of women holding hands. They made a cordon across the far end of the Kalinin Bridge, looking up the dark boulevard along which the tanks would come. Every few minutes, somewhere in the distance, tank engines rumbled and bellowed and then fell quiet again. Behind the women, who were both young and old, stood an anxious support group of husbands, lovers and brothers with flasks of tea, transistor radios and cigarettes. When I asked the women why they stood there, and why they were not afraid, they answered: 'Because we are mothers.'

  Afterwards, when it was over, a Russian friend of mine who had been at the barricades said simply, 'A handful of good, brave people saved Russia.' I still believe that she was right. The defenders stood around the White House of the Russian parliament and around Boris Yeltsin for two rainy days and nights. On the third morning, the sun came out and the plotters ran away.

  The succeeding years have shown that this was not the end of what the good and brave handful called 'fascism'. The monster returned again in October 1993. An alliance of Russian nationalists and neo-Communists, sworn to avenge the 'betrayal' of the old Soviet imperium, tried to launch another coup d'etat from the White House itself. This time, the parliament and its defenders were bombarded into submission by the same tank divisions which had refused to open fire in August 1991. But Russia has not heard the last of the plotters, and Yeltsin himself, who had shown such courage and such sureness of leadership in 1991, soon degenerated into one of those erratic tsars — now sunk in apathy and now suddenly lashing out with absurd violence - who have so often misgoverned Russia.

  All that is true. And yet, in one important way, the defeat of the Yanayev putsch in 1991 was irreversible. The peasants, the industrial workers, the soldiers had all rebelled in the past. But now, for the first time in Russian history, the liberal-minded middle-class minority had come out into the street, built their own barricades and faced the guns in the name of freedom.

  The coup against Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and his Perestroika failed, but its consequences destroyed both man and policy. Gorbachev never regained the initiative from Yeltsin and was thrust aside; Party-led perestroika was replaced by far more ambitious designs for the introduction of market capitalism and plural democracy. Within days, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was suspended and the Central Committee building on Staraya Ploshchad was sealed off. The Party was not yet dead, but its great head had been cut off and its limbs had been paralysed. It never thought or moved again.

  A few months later, the Soviet Union itself dissolved and the nineteenth-century empire of the Russian tsars fell to pieces, and even the eighteenth-century conquests of Catherine the Great — her glorious province of 'New Russia' curving all around the northern shore of the Black Sea — were almost all lost. Ukraine, which had incorporated Crimea since 1954, now became an independent state, following the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Russia's broad windows to western seas, won and widened at such cost over so many years, closed to a chink. On the Baltic, Russia lost the ports of Klaipeda, Riga and Tallinn and kept only Kaliningrad (Königsberg) and St Petersburg itself. On the Black Sea - Krasnov's 'blue sea, the fairy-story of Russia's children' - Russia now peered out only through Novorossisk on the Kuban coast, and through the shallow, silting harbours of the Sea of Azov. The port-city of Odessa, the new harbour at Ilichevsk, the shipyards at Nikolaev, the ports of Balaklava, Feodosia and Kerch all passed out of Moscow's control. So, above all, did the naval base of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, in Crimea.

  But there is a sense in which Sevastopol can never be cut out of Russia. It is not just that Russia built it - a majestic stone city full of southern space and air, its blue creeks jammed with warships. Sevastopol also provided some of the inmost mental shrines of Russia. This is twice a 'Hero-City': once for its ten-month siege when it held out against the Nazis, once for its two-year defence against Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey during the Crimean War. And Sevastopol has a still deeper sanctity. It was here, in legend and perhaps in fact, that Christianity entered Russia.

  The ruins of Cherson (or Korsun, or Chersonesus) cover a cape on the edge of the city. In summer, families come to swim here, filing down among the tall Byzantine columns and round the honeycomb of excavated buildings to reach low cliffs, a beach of boulders, a green and transparent sea. In its life, as a Greek colony and then as the Byzantine Empire's biggest trading city on the Black Sea, Cherson was periodically wrecked by pagan attackers from the steppe (the Mongol-Tatars finally extinguished the town in the late thirteenth century).
In its death, the site has been devastated by fortress-building and bombardment and above all by early Russian archaeologists, ploughing down through the substrata to find 'evidence' of the baptism of Vladimir of Kiev in 991.

  The place is dominated by a gigantic basilica, with trees growing through its smashed cupola, which was put up in 1891 to celebrate the millennium of Russian Christianity. It is now agreed that the church is in the wrong place, and pious visitors are directed to the ruins of a small Byzantine baptistery a few hundred yards away. Within its walls there is a deep, circular pit or dry pool and a cross incised on the pool's floor. Here, possibly, it happened: this sacramental moment which re-invented an irritable tyrant as a saint and turned the Russian imagination for a thousand years towards the Black Sea and the city of Constantinople.

  Russian state nationalism has always dreamed of parthenogenesis. It has always hankered after a myth of isolated origin in which the Russian people developed its own genius, as a huge seed unfolds its own predestined stem and leaves and fruit. The 'Varangian' interpretation, which emphasises the historical fact that the first Russo-Slav state was founded around Kiev on the Dnieper by Viking raiders and settlers, was roughly treated by Slavophil educators under the last tsars and by the intellectual policemen of Stalinism. The 'Byzantine' version, interpreting early Russian culture and institutions as foreign imports which arrived with Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople, has also had a hard time with those bureaucrats who draw up 'patriotic' or 'progressive' curricula and decide which scholar should be dismissed for unreliable views.

  Under Stalin, the myth of parthenogenesis (or 'autochthony') was driven to an insane extreme. Soviet archaeology was purged of the very notion of migration. Cultural change, the new Party archaeological bureaucrats laid down, had come about by development within settled communities and not by the entry of new populations from east or west. The phrase 'Migration of Peoples' [Völkerwanderungen) to describe Eurasian population movements after the collapse of the western Roman Empire was banned. The Crimean Goths, for example, were declared to be not Germanic invaders but 'formed autochthonously and by stages from the tribes present here before them'. The Khazars ceased to be Turkic nomads from the east and became the ancient inhabitants of the Don country and the northern Caucasus: 'the results of autochthonous ethnogeny [sic] created by the intermarriage of local tribes'. The Tatars were rediscovered as Volga aboriginals. More ominously, the Scandinavian Varangians who had created the first 'Rus' state around Kiev were re-identified as Slavs.

  From the early 1930s to the late 1950s, the Party officials in charge of Soviet archaeology designed and reared up a skyscraper of chauvinist imbecility. This was the assertion that the whole area of modern Russia, Ukraine, eastern and even central Europe had been inhabited by proto-Slav populations since the middle Iron Age: say, 900 BC. Stalin fired his revolver in the air and the entire past of the Black Sea steppes, which had been a history of ceaseless migrancy and ethnic mingling, froze terrified in its tracks and turned into a history of static social development.

  And the shots were not only metaphorical. Mikhail Miller, a Russian archaeologist who took refuge in the West after the Second World War, recorded in his Archaeology in the USSR the fate of his colleagues when the new line was enforced between 1930 and 1934. Some 85 per cent of the profession fell victim to the purge. Most of them were deported to Siberian or Asian labour camps or exile. Some were shot or committed suicide when the NKVD came to arrest them. But most — including Miller's brilliant brother Alexander — died in the Gulag.

  It was not until well after Stalin's death that the past of the southern steppe dared to move again; at first, only cautiously. A. L. Mongait was a Party loyalist under instructions to write a book for western consumption which would undo some of the damage done by Miller's revelations. Mongait's own Archaeology in the USSR, published in an English version in 1961, tiptoed up to what he delicately called 'the Scythian problem': the patent fact that the Scythians had entered the Dnieper-Don steppe from somewhere else. He let the Scythians migrate - but only a little. 'They would have thrust forward from the lower Volga area', where, Mongait implied, they had originated some time in the Bronze Age. The truth known to scholarship for nearly fifty years — that the Scythians were an Indo-Iranian-speaking confederation which had arrived from Central Asia - was still too much for him.

  Today migration theory is securely back in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology, but it has returned with tatters of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography still flapping around it. Unpopular to this day remain those who argue that the whole balance of Russian history-writing about 'civilisation' and 'barbarism' is skewed, who ask why the steppe nomads and the non-Slav cultures, encountered by Kievan Rus and then by the mediaeval Russian state which arose around Novgorod and Moscow, must still be dismissed as backward and 'barbaric'. The centuries of Mongol-Tatar conquest, beginning in the early thirteenth century, remain for most Russians 'the Mongol Yoke': a time in which the leaders of Russia manned the outposts of Christian civilisation against a tide of ultimate savagery and disorder. But this traditional version now shows increasing symptoms of Russocentric myth.

  There is no denying the ferocity of the Mongols at war, or the devastation created in a subsistence-peasant society by the arrival of perhaps half a million horses with a single nomad army. And yet the Mongols had access to literacy, and their political, military and administrative institutions were in some ways more sophisticated than those of Novgorod Russia. When Russian cultural pessimists blame their nation's lack of democracy on 'the Mongol inheritance', as they always have, they ignore the tradition of the quriltai - the assembly of Mongol-Tatar nobles and clan chiefs who gathered to elect a new khan. This was a limited, oligarchic dispersing of power, but mediaeval Russia did not even have that. (The Poles, whose kings were elected by a mass assembly of aristocrats gathering in a field outside Warsaw, have always brought up this custom to prove their attachment to 'Western democracy'. The practice was introduced into Poland only in the late sixteenth century, and the precedent then advanced for it was the oligarchy of the Roman Republic, but this was also plainly a form of quriltai) probably borrowed from the Crimean Tatars.)

  Under Stalin, equally hostile to religion and to any suggestion that the Russian state had foreign origins, Byzantinologists had become an endangered species. (Doom was more certain only for 'Varangian historians, who were accused of inventing Germanic origins for the nation.) But at length, during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, a sort of corrupt relaxation set in as Jews sacked from other university departments were resettled - whatever their original academic backgrounds - in obscure seminars of Byzantine history. From total suppression, the subject crawled up to the status of an intellectual internment camp.

  Now, after the fall of the Soviet state, Byzantine studies are hugely fashionable in Russia. This was why the World Congress of Byzantinology met in Moscow in August 1991, two weeks before the coup d'etat, and why it was opened by the Patriarch Alexei with a theatrical obeisance to the heritage of Byzantium. Russia was looking westwards for a new politics and inaugurating a cargo cult to bring Western prosperity and the market economy. But in their search for a new identity, the Russians had gone down to the Black Sea shore and were staring towards Constantinople.

  This meant that there were really two Congresses going on. One was the intricate mating and challenging display of Western Byzantinologists who come on heat only once every four years; at this Congress, factions gathered behind the terrifying Professor Armin Hohlweg of Munich, editor of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, or behind Professor Vladimir Vavfinek of Prague, editor of the rival Byzantinoslavica. Funny as this was, nobody in the Great Auditorium of Moscow University dared to satirise it in public. These are solemn occasions. As a translated Georgian paper on hagiography remarked: 'in Christianity it is the death that laughs, the devil, the mermaids laugh their hands off, but the Christian deity never laughs.'

  The other Congress was th
e mass of young Russians, some of them in the black robes of priesthood, who pressed into the seminar rooms determined to find nothing less than their souls, their roots, their own Russian path to revelation and holiness. I found my way to one of their meetings, in a small fifth-floor room so crowded that I had to clamber over listeners sitting on the floor in order to lean against a wall. This is what I wrote in a notebook:

  Marina is sitting reading in rusty French, the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up. Each sheet of notes is tattered and creased, and she throws each down on the pile as she comes to the end of it.

  Her hair is long and tangled, greasy. She has big hands, like a man. The room is absolutely rapt. Out of the window, beyond a belt of dark-green woods, I can see the black wall of a storm-cloud and, against it, the rampart-blocks of the Moscow suburbs glittering silver.

  She is talking about Russia's Christological conflicts with the West. WTien she finishes, there is violent applause. Now comes Father Ilarion, young, his smooth hair parted in the middle, grave. He asks: 'Shall I speak in English or Russian?' These audiences are normally so respectful, so considerate to the foreigners among them. But now the whole room is imploring together: 'Po Russki! Po Russki!1

  Father Ilarion begins. He is reading poetry, his own verse translation from Greek into Russian of the 'Hymns of Divine Love' by Symeon the New Theologian (an eleventh-century Byzantine mystic and saint). Again, these boys and girls are seized. Some are staring at the floor. Some are biting their fists.

  WTien Father Ilarion finishes, there is silence and then clumsy clapping. Marina, drowsy as if she had just woken from a dream, stares at him. Then she turns her head and looks out of the window, where there is a rainbow.