Anne Applebaum: Between East and West. Across the Borderlands of Europe. New York: Pantheon, 1994. 314 pp
Anne Applebaum’s travelogue of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s follows a wandering route from north to south, roughly from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Her path frequently takes her along the borders of these borderlands, though the demarcation lines have shifted so much that what is now safely within one country used to be in a completely different one, where now not even the same language may be spoken as a century ago. So this is not just a geographical excursion – it is also a journey into the past.
Her first stop is in the former German province of East Prussia, now part of the Russian Federation. There she looks for German survivors in Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg, and is lucky enough to find one elderly woman whom everyone else identifies as being German – though she calls herself Lithuanian. As she has lived with this identity for decades, it is understandable that she clings to it even after the breakup of the USSR, when it no longer seemed a disadvantage to identify oneself as German.
In Vilnius she comes across a Ukrainian linguist, who says, “I do not know what people mean when they say Ukraine. There are many Ukraines. There is Kiev, central Ukraine, the heart of the Kievan Rus from which we were descended…. There is eastern Ukraine – Donetsk, Xharkov, Dnipropetrovsk – which has been sadly Russian for so many years…. Then there is the Black Sea coast – Crimea, Odessa – conquered by Catherine the Great, called by her Novorossiya, New Russia, settled by her courtiers…. All of this variety, all of this variety, but they [the Soviets] tried to knock it out of us.” (pg. 195f) Perhaps the most sympathetic figure she encounters on her journey, the linguist concludes that Ukraine – while an old nation – has never been a state.
The most unpleasant individual she encounters is, for my money, an enormously fat Lubavitcher from Brooklyn, newly arrived in Minsk. Quick to dispense his opinions of everyone and everything, he questions whether Applebaum is really Jewish, since “Jewish girls don’t dress like you.” Turning his attention to her local guide, he demands to know, “You a spy? … How come you know Yiddish if you aren’t a spy?” (pg. 174f) This Lubavitcher had come to Minsk to prepare local Jews for emigration to Israel. His teaching methods appear to consist of equal parts aggression, suspicion, and narrow-mindedness. For him, the answer to every question – including the geological age of the Earth – was to be found in the Bible. One sees why this character remains unnamed.
Applebaum ventures into Transcarpathian backwaters, where she encounters evidence for the idiocy of provincial life. Then in Czernowitz she meets a professor and his wife; talk turns to the professor’s father, who had grown up in St. Petersburg before the Revolution. Afterwards, he changed his specialty from modern literature to ancient Slavonic, hoping thus “to stay out of trouble.” (pg. 254) Later he was fortunate to land in Bukovina. In the words of his son, while it might be a borderland, it was a European borderland. Nonetheless, over the years his father increasingly fell silent, in part as a form of self-protection. The old professor represents one of the few instances where one would be curious to know his real name. But the fear of attracting attention lingers.
Applebaum rightly observes that of all the empires that failed in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian is the only one that is remembered with any affection. “In their time, the Habsburgs were thought oppressive. Yet they are the only rulers of western Ukraine who still inspire nostalgia. The Poles are remembered as petty dictators, the Russians as tyrants, but in L’viv the Habsburg era is still recalled with fondness.” (pg. 200) A city largely undestroyed during the war that has kept a sense of its own history, L’viv emerges as something of the polar opposite of Minsk.
Just a few pages later, out in the provinces again, village people don’t have to dig very deeply to find unmarked graves containing victims first of the NKVD, then of the SS. When she arrived, a local biology teacher was leading the dig, treating the crime scene as an archeological site – the only way to approach it without being overwhelmed by revulsion. Here one is reminded of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, which covers much of the same territory.
Moldova
I looked forward to the chapter on Kishinev/Chisinau, near the end of the book, since this is a town I know rather well, having lived there in the second half of the 1990s. On the whole, however, I found her discussion somewhat disappointing. The first sign that something is off comes in the historical overview: “the Soviet Union invaded Bessarabia in 1940; the Germany Army [sic] invaded Bessarabia in 1942; the Soviet Union returned in 1945.” (pg. 271) What are the facts? In June 1940, the USSR issued an ultimatum demanding that Romania evacuate Bessarabia in accordance with the terms of the previous year’s Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; under pressure from Berlin, Antonescu agreed to withdraw, and the Red Army moved in. Not to be too technical, but this was an occupation, not an invasion, i.e., it was not an act of war. The Romanian army, in alliance with their German partners, invaded Bessarabia as part of operation Barbarossa, which of course took place in summer 1941 (not 1942). Finally, in August 1944 (not 1945), the USSR retook Bessarabia in a military operation lasting five days. One misstatement, two incorrect dates and a misspelling seem rather a lot in two lines.
When it comes to the city itself, Applebaum seems intent on finding opportunities to express her disapproval, or at least disappointment. “Like Chenivtsi and Kamenets Podolsky, Kishinev had always lain on the edge of empires; unlike those cities, however, none of Kishinev’s rulers had ever thought enough of the city to make it beautiful. Chernivtsi had its lovely squares and Kamenets it astounding castle, but Kishinev had nothing. As we drove through the city I kept looking for something which would give Kishinev a character one could pin down: a notable building, a market square, a memorable street. But most of the buildings had no value in themselves. They were merely provincial monuments, distant echoes of more important buildings in more important cities.”
It is true that Kishinev has little in the way of distinguished architecture; even the most important government buildings seem designed for some mid-sized provincial center, not the nation’s capital. At the time, it could fairly be described as sleepy and rundown. In the second half of the 1990s, traffic on the city’s main drag rarely got so busy that it disturbed the wild dogs dozing in the gutters. While riding in the run-down trolleybuses, one could inspect the pavement of the roads underneath by looking through gaping holes in the floorboards. These buses, by the way, were often so packed that it greatly eased the work of pickpockets. Once I had my wallet stolen from the inside vest pocket of my sports coat. The thieves later called the school where I worked and arranged a deal: In exchange for some cash, they would return my passport (but not of course the money). Ready for a confrontation, I appeared at the designated spot in front of the circus, but was disarmed when, instead of the robber I was expecting, a little girl in a dirty dress appeared out of nowhere, accepted the cash and handed over my document before running off.
And let it be said that Moldovans recognize their own shortcomings. Applebaum’s eager assistant who served as her local guide even acknowledged that fickleness is one of the nation’s chief characteristics. This character, Nico, is so vividly drawn that I feel as if I know him; indeed, it is quite possible that I did.
But when she claims to be disappointed at Kishinev’s lack of anything really hideous, unlike Minsk, which is “memorably ugly,” it looks like Applebaum is straining to find something to criticize, searching for an opportunity to be disappointed. (pg. 270) But one does not have to look hard to find pleasant locales. A modest Arc de Triumph with its Romanian inscription written in the Cyrillic alphabet stands close to the central park, a charming venue with its statue of Stefan cel Mare, where people meet and go for walks in the evening. She never mentions the bustling farmers’ market near in the town center with its live poultry and interesting smells. In passing, she does mention the prevalence of Kent cigarettes (as opposed to any other brand), but offers no explanation for this state of affairs. When I lived there, it was common knowledge that cartons of Kent were smuggled through Transnistria to avoid paying taxes. Perhaps this is the sort of insight that can be acquired more easily if one stays longer than a few days. Readers looking for a more sympathetic portrayal of the country as it was in the 1990s may wish to consult Tony Hawks, Playing the Moldovans at Tennis – a wonderful, warm and witty book. I met the author when he returned to the city on a promotional tour.
Applebaum also travels to Transnistria and its capital Tiraspol, located near the old Turkish fortress of Bender. As she says, going there is like stepping into the past, a remote region where Soviet symbols are still proudly displayed. In a scene that could have come out of Gogol, she meets with a government bureaucrat covering for his boss, who is in the next room letting himself be fêted. It happened that once I took a circuitous route to Tiraspol to speak to students at the university. Tensions were high at the time because of events in Yugoslavia, and I encouraged them to inform themselves by listening to different points of view. When they asked for examples, I recommended the BBC and the New York Times. They seemed unimpressed. After asking more questions, finally they wanted to know, “What radio do you listen to?” The name of the only local station, the one virtually everyone in Kishinev listened to, popped into my head. In Russian, it’s called “Our Radio.” When I told them this, they all broke into smiles, turned to each other and said, “He’s one of us.”
Applebaum’s journey ends in Odessa, which emerges as her favorite place, “the first beautiful Russian city I had ever seen” – even when compared with St. Petersburg, which she finds overdressed in comparison. “While St. Petersburg strove self-consciously to be a great European capital, Odessa never pretended to be anything but nouveau riche.” (pg. 281) She goes on to quote Mark Twain’s approving words, “Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw only America! There was not one thing to remind us of Russia…” (pg. 284)
Maps
A note on the maps: As Applebaum says, “they are more precise than any official document, more interesting than analysis, more eloquent than prose: the best way to read the history of Russia is to look at maps. Not the new maps, but the old, yellowed maps with the place-names still showing…” (pg. 146) From there, she goes on to discuss how an examination of maps illustrates the growth of Muscovy over the centuries. While this is a topic worth investigating, I had hoped she would consider the political implications of cartography more generally, the often arbitrary ways borders get marked, and how maps can be used – and sometimes falsified – to lay claim to territory. At the very least, some discussion of the maps that are included would not have been amiss.
Basically the book includes three types of maps. The end-leaf ones cover the entire territory from Kaliningrad to Odessa and, as noted above, reveal that she has chosen not just borderlands, but frequently the edges of those lands, places that have changed hands many times over the past century. With the change in ownership have come some changes in names, though in this book such alterations never become a source of confusion.
The second type of map is historical. It must be said that the reproduction of color originals in black and white has led to less than optimal results. Just compare the excellent map on the dust jacket (in color) with its black and white reproduction inside the book (pg. 42), to say nothing of the old Dutch map showing the area between Moscow and the Black Sea (pg. 140), to see what a difference the quality of reproduction can make – the latter in particular is practically unreadable. Nor is there any word on the provenance of these maps that I could find. Who were they made for? One is left to guess about what the red lines on the cover map were supposed to delineate – the claims of Poland’s neighbors on her territory in the eighteenth century?
By the way, the history department at the University of Rochester has a small framed photocopy of a map of Eastern Europe hanging on the wall of the secretary’s office. I was told it had been placed there years ago along with an explanatory note, now missing. No one could account for the red marks on it, apparently made by crayon. These were Stalin’s indications of Germany’s new eastern borders, the famous Oder-Neisse Linie. But I digress.
The final group consists of the smaller maps placed at the head of each chapter, useful for quick orientation. At least one of them, however, is inaccurate: to judge by the one on page 268, Moldova would seem to be some ways from the Black Sea. In actual fact, it literally comes within spitting distance – a matter of a few feet. A later map (pg. 282) avoids the issue by showing the same area without including Moldova at all.
Related: See the reviews of John Reed: War in Eastern Europe; Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands, and Edward Judge: Easter in Kishinev, elsewhere at this site.
See also this BBC article by Sarah Reid:
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200205-celebrating-a-nation-that-doesnt-exist
Index
This is not the sort of book to have an index or footnotes, since a good part of it consists of conversations with local folk, many of whom are identified only by first name – which is just as well, at least for the most part. Nevertheless, for ease of reference I have compiled my own partial index, which I offer here. In it, I have largely respected Applebaum’s decision to let non-historical figures remain anonymous.
Aksakov, Ivan 150
Austro-Hungarian Empire 200
Bandera xvii
Baranauskas, Antanas 51
Bessemer, Alabama 189
Bieniakonie 107ff
Black Sea 295ff
Brest 176ff
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of 178f
Burleigh 16, 309
Carpathia – see Transcarpathia
Catherine II 149
Chadayev, Piotr 151
Chernivtsi/Czernowitz 239
Chisinau – see Kishinev
Churchill xii
Corridor, Lithuanian 28
Custine 8
Davies, Norman 48
de Ribas 284
de Tocqueville xviii
Dobrowolski, Stanislaw 72
Dobrynin 184. 280
Dönhoff 26
Dostoevsky 150
Drohobych 225
Eisiskes 90
Enokyan 209f, 213ff
Euler 24f
Frank, Jacob 119
Genschaft 205ff, 216
Hel, Ivan 211
Henderson, E. 157, 262, 310
Herder 24
Herman von Salza 13
Hermaniszki 100ff
Hrushevsky, Mykhailo 155
Iaroslav the Wise 145
Jadwiga 46
Jogaila/Jagiello 46, 51f
Kamenets Podolski 258ff
Kant 23
Kennan, George 20
Kent cigarettes 269
Khmelnytski 152
Khotim/Chocim, Battle of 244
Kishinev 268
Kobrin 188
Kohl, J.G. 268
Komsomolskaya Pravda editor 26f
Konrad, Duke of Mazovia 13f
Krasinski, Zygmunt 265f
kresy, Polish for “borderlands” 46
Kuprin, A. 283
Lehndorff 18f
linden trees 36
Lviv/Lvov 119, 199ff
Mackevicius, Antanas 76
Mackiewicz, Jozef 55
Maximilian Emanuel, Duke of Württemberg 153
Maxwell, Robert 241
Mazovia – see Konrad
Memel/Klaipeda 33
Mickiewicz, Adam 50, 114ff
Milosz 39, 53, 119, 158f
Minsk 164ff
Morfill, W.R. 157f, 311
Murat 49
Nowogrodek 114, 119f, 128f
Odessa 282ff
Osterode, East Prussia 19
Paberze 71f
Perloja 81f
Pilsudski 511, 53f, 64, 137
Pogodin, Mikhail 155
Poland, 1939 Soviet invasion of Eastern part 119f
Potrek, Karl 19
Ptashitz, Vasily 181f
Pushkin 150, 285
Puttkammer 101 (?), 120
Radek – see Dedication
Radun 96ff
Rauschen – see Svetlogorsk
Radziwill 53
Rezzori, Gregor von 252
Ribas – see de Ribas
Richelieu 284
Sami Swoi (Our Own Kind) 56
Saveraux, Bishop 145
Schleiter, Josephine 19
Schulz, Bruno 227f
Salza – see Herman
Shevchenko, Taras 155f, 162
Sienkewicz 47, 50, 152
Skaryna, Francis 169ff
Sobieski 48, 260
St. Sophia cathedral 145
Stankevic 159
Svetlogorsk-Rauschen 29
Tocqueville – see de Tocqueville
Tolstoy 151
Transcarpathia 232ff
Treitschke 16f
Trotsky 178
Twain, Mark 284
Uniates 154, 170
Vilnius/Wilno 57ff
Vorontsov, Count Mikhail 284
Vytautas 52f, 81, 85
Wallenrod, Konrad 114, 118
Wawel Castle 103, 129
Woroniaki 219ff
Z—-, Professor, looks like Beethoven 67
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