Byzantium Endures

TEN

THE BOLSHEVIKS SOLD RUSSIA OFF and Ukraine again became a Republic. I remained in prison where the Reds, for reasons of their own, had put me. The Rada did not see fit to release me. I had done nothing. Eventually I was able to explain myself to the Varta security police of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskya; to help them identify the genuine trouble-makers. Then I was free. Trudging back over the bridge I saw my rescuer himself, leading a parade. Skoropadskya looked every inch the Cossack, with his white riding coat, white shapka, silk trousers, decorated red boots, English stallion and silver-hilted sabre. The Germans believed he had his hand on the pulse of Ukrainian thought. He was an infinitely better alternative to the socialists and anarchists. He was able to police Kiev with our German allies and restrict the bandit-gangs of the rural areas. These killed Uhlans as cheerfully as they killed Varta. The Exalted and Glorious Excellency, Pan Hetman Skoropadskya, as he was called in official proclamations, had half the intelligence and twice the swagger of Mussolini. But he had sweeping Cossack moustaches and he shaved his head in the old Zaporizhian fashion. He reminded us of what Cossacks had stood for: self-reliance and courage. My only quarrel with the Hetman was his apparent wish to destroy all signs of the modern world. The three terrible weeks of Bolshevik occupation had lost me a good many of my best business connections. So many had been killed. But the Germans were interested in keeping our factories going. Skoropadskya could not afford to alienate them.

It was obvious that the Hetman was a sentimental romantic with a theatrical gift for holding military displays in which his ‘Free Cossack Host’ (many of them recruited from the dregs of the city and not true Slavs, let alone Cossacks) paraded with grey- and blue-uniformed Austro-Hungarians, Germans and Galicians. This made a change from street-meetings, which were banned.

I found myself naturally falling in with the Germans who were in the main practical, good-hearted fellows. The peasants were the chief cause of all our frustrations. The Germans had been promised grain. But the canny Ukrainian defeated our attempts to wrest it from him. He had learned to hide whole fields of corn, whole herds of cattle, as easily as he had hidden away his gold and his icons. German requisition teams, with official orders from Hetman Skoropadskya, searched barns and houses and found not so much as an egg. Used to threats, the peasants would confuse them, display their poverty, claim that Makhno’s guerillas or Hrihorieff’s bandits or some other force had already taken everything. It was an easy claim to make. Makhno in particular was displaying considerable ingenuity in his attacks. He flew the black banner of Anarchy and seemed to come and go faster than an express train. A favourite trick was to dress in Varta uniforms, claim he was chasing himself, enter a Varta garrison and then shoot down the occupants. To many he had already become a Robin Hood or Jesse James and dozens of legends were current about his daring exploits. It was forbidden to mention him in anything but a bad light in the newspapers. More folk heroes were not needed in Ukraine. There was a need for order, proper transport, proper communications.

In Kiev, at least, there was now a semblance of Law. German businessmen began to come to the city to trade. I was able to discuss my new company and what it could do. It was important to increase production for export and home consumption. I mentioned new British and American machinery likely to outstrip anything we had. I discussed plans for new plants, new kinds of generators, new manufacturing machinery. This impressed the far-sighted Germans. They were by this time hard-pressed themselves. Many of them confided to me they thought Germany might not win the War. There would be a need to build their country up again very rapidly if it were not itself to fall into the hands of socialists. They suggested I consider locating a branch of my firm in Berlin. The sooner our countries were back to normal the sooner the Reds would be thwarted. Through my business friends I made the acquaintance of top-ranking officers and through these I came to meet the elite of Kiev society. I would now give my name automatically as Pyatnitski: I had been born in Tsaritsyn, my family had been killed by peasants in 1905, I had been brought up by relatives in Kiev, Odessa and Petersburg. This was, of course, fundamentally the truth. To have mentioned our rather ramshackle suburb to the crème de la crème would have raised too many eyebrows and closed too many doors. My mother’s family, of course, had been well-born, so I had an innate ability to mix with the very best people. Many of Kiev’s nobility were envious of my ‘Petersburg manner’. They attempted to imitate it. Quite often people made gestures I had made only a moment or two before, or repeated little remarks of mine. I considered adding the title ‘prince’ to my adopted name, but this would have been inappropriate, given the volatile political situation.

I still saw women-friends at The Cube, but I had moved back to The Yevropyaskaya, where many of my German acquaintances also stayed. I preferred the classical elegance of silver and gold, of big, clear mirrors, of plush and crystal, of properly-dressed waiters and clean, white linen. All this had returned as the Bolshevik butchers departed. The Germans appreciated it, as did the latest wave of Russian émigrés.

If Kiev were becoming packed again, at least it was packed with a better class of people: people with money, common-sense and concrete notions of how to counter Bolshevism. Factory-owners from Petrograd and Moscow had always argued for faster and better industrialisation. They had foreseen the Revolution and blamed the Tsar for his short-sightedness. They said the ‘socialist experiment’ would last about as long as Cromwell’s Commonwealth. It would be a bad time: a time of destruction and intolerance. Cromwell had killed the King, torn down churches, destroyed cathedrals, but there were still kings, churches and cathedrals in England to this day. It was a powerful argument and an encouraging one, but it was a delusion. Now I know all that can save the world, to paraphrase Lenin, is God plus electricity.

My mother found the changes alarming. While the Bolsheviks had occupied the city and red flags had flown and I had been in prison she had seemed cheerful and content. Every vicissitude had been met with a joke. Esmé and I had marvelled at her courage. She had bluffed the Reds away from a search of her home. She had wheedled them into providing her with extra rations. She had become personal laundress to a Chekist commissar. She knew the names of many minor Bolsheviks. She praised Comrade Lenin to the skies. She casually dropped the names of Zinovieff and Radek as if they were old friends. She had almost certainly delayed my execution and thus saved my life. But the strain had taken its toll. As the Bolsheviks retreated, she had had an attack of her old bronchial trouble and had gone to bed. By the time the Hetmanate was established, she was still coughing but insisting on going to work. She began to smell of sal-volatile and carbolic soap. The flat was returned to its previous impeccably clean state. She kept apologising for her ‘selfishness’. She said she had been a ‘bad mother’ to me, that it was her fault I had no father.

‘I should never have gone with him,’ she would say. ‘He was bad for me and I was bad for him. We were never suited. But it was ten years. And they were not all miserable.’

I found her reasoning difficult to follow. She had overtired herself in every way. She became worried by the new wave of pogroms in Podol. I assured her the fires would not spread. Then she said she was afraid the Hetman’s army would conscript me. I set her mind at rest. My friends would look after me.

‘You were never any trouble,’ she told me one evening at supper. ‘Everyone said so. They envied me. “He’s so good. How do you do it?” You were always good. From a baby. You’re too kind-hearted, Maxim. Don’t let some woman hurt you.’

‘I won’t mother. I’m only eighteen...’

She smiled. ‘The girls love you, eh? Esmé! Don’t the girls all love him?’

‘They must do,’ said Esmé. ‘He’s quite a dandy.’

‘Remember when you and Esmé used to sleep here? You over the stove, Esmé in her room?’ She became excited. ‘Didn’t we all have fun?’

I did not remember anything in particular. But I could not bring myself to say so. ‘It was great fun,’ I said. I had to leave then, to do some business.

It was still light as I turned the corner into Kirillovskaya and began to walk down the hill towards the city. The summer evening had a lazy yet unsettled quality to it. There were fewer factory chimneys smoking. Many of the smaller concerns had completely closed down. There was a darker mass of smoke over Podol. The sounds were muted in the streets, yet I heard the wail of a river-boat quite clearly, as if it were only a few feet from me. Gold and green domes of distant churches had a dull, deep shine; yellow brick was warm, it seemed to radiate heat; and the smell of grass, trees and flowers from the wooded gorges mingled with scents of soot and oil and that hint of leather always associated with a large occupying army. I could smell horses, too. Here it was as if the town and country met and blended in almost perfect harmony. I wanted to pause, perhaps hoping a tram would come by, but I knew better than to make myself prey for the gangs occupying some of the outlying parks. I glanced automatically up at an embankment. There was nothing but evening haze on hedges. As I walked down the hill into the city, I had a definite sense of God’s biding His moment. What puzzles me, to this day, is in what manner we failed. Certainly, the churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, were never fuller, from morning to night, than in that uncertain summer.

I returned to my hotel to enjoy a second dinner with a Prussian major, an Austrian colonel, a Ukrainian banker and two émigrés recently arrived from Vologda where, they said, anyone with a vocabulary of more than two hundred words was liable to be shot by the Cheka out of hand. I heard stories of Bolsheviks capturing ‘government’ officers, of stripping them naked and cutting their rank-insignia into their living flesh before killing them. The days of the French Revolution, the days of the Commune, were as nothing compared to the years and years of the Bolshevik Terror. And what did we have to counter it? Humanity? Religion? All we had was pazhlost, that grey, half-dead spiritual state one is in during the winter, when nothing is worthwhile and one can only hope to survive until spring.

In those days ordinary military operations did not exist; the entire pattern of war had gone crazy. It was gradually to become our Civil War. In the North-East were Czechs and Japanese, Russian Whites and small numbers of Americans and British. Finns, Letts, Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, Poles, French, Greeks, Italians, Rumanians and Serbs were all fighting somewhere. Few of these groups, even if they had been allies against the Germans, were able to agree either strategy or a common aim. Out of China, across the border, there were even raids from mixed groups of Chinese and renegade Cossack bandits bent entirely on looting and pillaging whatever they could get away with. It was like the Middle Ages, only worse. Tanks, machine-guns, aeroplanes and armoured trains were available to vicious, uneducated barbarians. In America it had been a crime to sell guns to Indians. This crime was as nothing compared to that of the British who put arms into the hands of Tatar tribesmen. It is like Africa today, where grenades and rocket-launchers replace the knobkerry and assegai. A small war, with few casualties, becomes a total war with thousands of civilians killed.

We face the Dark Age and we go into it whistling The Red Flag as if it were a music-hall song. Only a few stand back, shouting warnings. Soon they shall be sucked into the black maelstrom, too. There will be no escape this time, no little island monasteries where enlightenment can flourish. The whole world shall be conquered in the name of Zion and Mao. Yet we must resist. If it is a test, we must succeed or be eternally deserted by God. Sometimes I fear He has already left this planet to its fate; that there is another planet, in a distant star-system, which has proven itself a worthier place; where Eden still flourishes.

My mother took, in the coming weeks, to sending me notes in which she apologised for disturbing me, told me not to visit her and insisted I look after myself and be careful. The notes were brought by various means, often left at the hotel by Esmé on her way to work. Sometimes she would enclose a message of her own, insisting I stay away ‘for your own sake and your mother’s’. My poor mother was suffering from hysterical exhaustion. She would soon recover. I continued to feel extremely uncomfortable.

My days and evenings were spent advising people on the installation, siting or repair of machinery. For these services I was paid in a variety of ways. Sometimes they were direct cash transactions. Sometimes shares or bonds. I was able to invest money in France, Switzerland, England and, of course, Germany. Without even possessing an office, living entirely out of the hotel, I was becoming a man of means. I knew this could not last forever. I had still not received decisive backing for my main projects. The political climate remained too unsettled for anyone to consider serious investment in Ukraine. There was, as well, a certain amount of ‘pogromchik’ activity in Kiev and outlying regions. This made the German financial people nervous. Many of them had Jewish connections of their own: Jewish masters to whom they were liable. I considered travelling to Berlin, but my mother’s health stopped me from coming to a proper decision.

As the evenings grew darker and colder, we began to hear rumours of heavy German defeats, of revolutionary activity similar to the kind which had sparked the Petrograd risings. It was obvious that my German acquaintances were wondering if they themselves would have a country to which they could safely return. In the meantime Ataman Petlyura was gaining strength. His Cossack cavalry and his Sich riflemen were joined by many irregulars and it seemed he represented a more popular and stronger force than Skoropadskya’s. The Germans were thinking they had backed the wrong man.

The Hetman should at least have made some pretence of deferring to peasant demands, but he was too honourable to do anything save obey his own conscience and God’s will. And so he fell. Winter drew down upon Kiev and my hopes were dashed. Almost overnight, my German colleagues left, my Hetmanate contacts deserted me, and the politicians drove me again from The Yevropyaskaya hotel. Germany’s Hindenburg Line had been breached. The German Chancellor proposed to accept an armistice plan drawn up by the Americans. The British refused to consider the idea. They wanted blood. By November a Communist Soviet was established in Bavaria and revolution broke out in Berlin itself. The Kaiser abdicated. Prince Max of Baden, the Chancellor, relinquished his position to a socialist. Germany became a Republic and was no longer an ally against Bolshevism. Maps were taken out and lines were re-drawn. We had lost our Crimean territories to Tatars. In spite of the treaty signed with the Don and Kuban Cossacks we had not gained a real ally against the socialists. Just before Christmas, 1918, Petlyura was back in full command promising, in Ukrainian, a secure national future. Not only Russians found his posturing dangerous; a good many Ukrainians decided it would be wiser to give up the struggle. Half the industrialists vanished. During the festive season I again entertained my family at a good hotel; again I spoke of my plans for my engineering business. But it seemed I had achieved little beyond making some money, most of which I should probably never be able to claim. Even my work was likely to be curtailed by the socialists. I had no Special Diploma. I had no career worth speaking of. There was hardly any working industry in Ukraine. I was unable to read most of the newspapers because they were suddenly in an alien language. I had trouble filling in simple forms. I was insulted if I did not ask for my tram-fare in Ukrainian. I had again become some sort of second-class citizen. I thought of going to Odessa where at least now it would be possible to book passage on a ship. But I would bide my time for a little while, until the Greens settled in. I moved back to my mother’s flat. She was cheerful and well again. This was a relief. But her moods remain a mystery to me to this day.

Esmé had continued nursing through at least three different regimes. She was beginning to look drawn. It was Esmé, I thought, who suffered from exhaustion now. My mother devoted herself, with maniacal quixotism, to learning Ukrainian from the badly-printed books available. New schools and universities had been established. All, of course, taught in Ukrainian. There was no longer a chance for me to work as a teacher. I had not received a single reply to my requests for a position, though it was generally accepted amongst my friends and the business community that I had done brilliantly at Petrograd. I admit the impression was useful. I was often, these days, addressed as ‘Doctor’ and more than once I was called ‘Professor’. I found this comforting. It did no harm. When I received my Special Diploma I could go on to receive a proper doctorate almost anywhere. I want no one to think I made these claims for myself. But life is often hard. If people wish to have illusions about one, then it is sometimes foolish to spend unnecessary energy denying them. Doubtless because she was overworking, Esmé could sometimes be condescending and irritatingly sharp when I wanted to discuss my plans for the future. On the other hand my mother would sometimes call me ‘Doctor’ just for the sound of it. She would stand on our landing and say, for instance: ‘Well, well, Doctor, here’s our old friend Captain Brown to see us.’

Captain Brown was beginning to decay almost by the day. His face was blotchy and his hands had an obvious drunkard’s shake. His craving for alcohol was pathetic. Sometimes I was tempted not to pander to him. But Esmé would say ‘What else has he to live for?’ and I could not argue. His stories became more confused, though substantially familiar. He was baffled by what he called ‘this fake language with its fake government, its fake bank-notes and its fake history.’ We hushed him when he uttered such sentiments in Russian. It did not matter when he spoke English, as he did most frequently now. Esmé had learned a little English from me, but not enough for her to understand him clearly. Once, she told me, he had been found in Bessarabskaya market where he had gone up to one of Petlyura’s Sich riflemen and asked him which circus he belonged to. He had spoken first in English, then in French, then in German, then in Russian and then, it seemed, in Polish. The soldier had either misunderstood him or had not bothered to take exception to the insult. A couple of friends had brought the captain home.

I visited Bessarabskaya myself. Cocaine was plentiful and cheap there, though not of particularly good quality. I was building up a supply for a rainy day, as they say in England. The market was booming, with old family heirlooms to be purchased for a mere chag or two. Chags and karvovantsis were the new monetary units. The notes were so easily forged nobody bothered to check them unless it was in the post office. Inflation was running at a ridiculous rate. At least for a while the prostitutes became younger and prettier. Two of them actually turned out to be the virgins they claimed to be. I was again in a mood to take my pleasures as they came, in case they should not come too frequently later.

If only all Cossacks and those claiming Cossack freedoms had managed to work together in one huge host we would easily have driven the Reds back to Moscow (now their capital). Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and the rest would have ended their days as querulous old exiles. The genuinely humane people would have encouraged a Russian renaissance. Our country would have been the most glorious centre for the flowering of art and science the world had known since the days of the Italian Medici. Everybody says so. What drove Sikorski away? Bolsheviks. What drove Prokofiev away? Bolsheviks.

I remember those ‘Lorelei’ days of the twenties. The Reds tried to lure their artists, scientists and intellectuals back. The sweet voices deceived many. They went back: Gorki, Alexei Tolstoi, Zamyatin, and many more; and they were almost all dead by the time the thirties ended. That was the value Bolsheviks put on Russian talent. When the Nazis came Stalin had to release starving, wretched ex-Red Army ‘heroes’ to run the War. Not that it would have mattered. Stalin ran the War. Lucky for the world he did, as someone once said of Hitler. It was a war between a couple of psychotics who had the talent of being all things to all men. It wasted millions of lives and achieved nothing but a small shift of boundaries. Better lock them away with maps and toy soldiers, where no real harm is ever accomplished. That is what H.G. Wells advised a friend of mine.

My mother blossomed under Petlyura even more wonderfully than she had under the Bolsheviks. I offer no interpretation. Admittedly things were quieter in the outlying suburbs. There were no more fires burning in Podol. My mother was distressed by inhumanity of any sort. When people expressed their dislike of Jews she always became upset, refusing to join in. The usual talk was harmless enough. But she would say ‘God has designed a role for each of us. It is not the race or the religion, it is the man or the woman that is important.’ I was thus brought up in a more tolerant atmosphere than most Kievan children. It has helped me understand people, encouraged my humanity, allowed me to mix, without feeling uncomfortable, with all sorts, black or white, high or low. When we heard that French Zouaves had occupied Odessa, in support of Denikin, that the city was ‘colonised by black men’, as the papers put it, we were all horrified. But Mother made a joke of it. ‘It will be lovely,’ she said, ‘to see a bit of extra colour in Ukraine.’ I began to understand how she and my father had come together. She had a broad, humane and trusting faith in the beauty of the world, of people’s natural tendency to help one another. He shared her ideals but felt betrayed by those he had sought to support. People were far more complex and yet far more ordinary than he wished to believe. The socialist Utopia did not spring from the ground overnight. He began to attack those whom he regarded as responsible for threatening his hopes. The simple fact is that my mother was mature, in the way of women, and could see that the best way of improving things was to lead a good, clean, kindly life.

Revolutionists almost invariably attempt to simplify the workings of the human heart. This planet of ours is full of generous, warm-spirited, good-humoured and intelligent women supporting raving, idiotic fools like my father. All that was ever betrayed was his own humanity. How long can a woman live with a jealous man? That is the simple question in which lies the answer to my own background, I think.

Those months of the Directorate became relatively easy. I began to move into the world again. Many of the new politicians were sympathetic to my schemes for mechanisation and industrialisation. ‘We must use the wealth of the Ukraine,’ they said, ‘to make ourselves strong and independent.’ So, for the time being, I became a nationalist, couching my arguments in terms of the province rather than the country. Luckily the letter-heads and cards I had had printed: ALL-UKRAINE ENGINEERING CONSULTANTS, Managing Director Dr M. A. Pyatnitski, still had the appropriate ring and The Hotel Yevropyaskaya, having become something of a headquarters for Petlyura’s henchmen, was a perfect address. I moved back into my old suite. I began to entertain as I had done before. Inflation, the retreat of the Germans, a lack of faith by Russian and Ukrainian investors in Petlyura’s reforms meant I had to augment my income again. It was easy enough to do. I had contacts in every part of the city. But it was irritating, for instance, to be a courier for someone who did not want it evident he sniffed cocaine; or to arrange girls for some under-Minister anxious that his wife should not find out; or to act as a go-between for a factory-owner needing certain forms stamped in a hurry; but it continued to help me keep my way of life and my friends. I was an agent of change, a catalyst. Much which was good about Petlyura’s government was directly or indirectly to do with help and advice I had been able to provide.

I was not distracted, now, by notes from my mother. I did make use, though, of Esmé’s free time. With her strawberry-blonde hair and her superlative taste she made a perfect hostess for my special evenings. Everyone complimented me on Madame Pyatnitski if they were under the impression we were married, or on my ‘fiancée’ or on my ‘cousin’. To intimates I let it be known she was my half-sister. I think that spiritually she was my sister through and through. It was no lie to claim a little blood, too. We had mingled it, often enough, in our childish games. Esmé found enjoyment in what she called my ‘farces’. She would cheerfully lend her energy and her imagination while always insisting that her world outside was ‘real’. This was because she was a nurse and saw so much of the disease, malnutrition and physical destruction. Gangs of homeless children, bezhprizhorni, were beginning to become a serious problem. They had the courage of the pack, the hunger of starving dogs. Cripples and wounded in the streets were impossible to count. Beggars were given public handouts but there were far too many for the system to accommodate. A strong police force was badly needed. Haidamaki militia were inclined either to sudden savagery or absolute laziness when it came to maintaining the Law. There were attempts to recruit former police officers back into the service. But this was only partially successful. In time, Petlyura might have modified and improved conditions, and even rid himself of the hampering burden of nationalism. He did not hate Russia, he said. He hated the ‘enslaving institutions’. He also, I know, hated the Orthodox Church. He had been raised a Catholic, like so many Ukrainians, and here was a fundamental difference few were anxious to touch upon. We were witnessing a low-key religious war. One of my Petlyurist friends actually expressed it best in a joke at his own expense: ‘Some say that a Jesuit is just a Jew who happens to have been born a Christian.’ And there you have it. Many ‘old Bolsheviks’, and a number of new ones in today’s Party, have secret links with the Church which they dare not admit. How much better for us all if they did. A little sanity would return to Russia.

We had a taste of the old rivalry between the Roman Empire of the West and the Hellenic Empire of the East. Kiev saw as many emperors come and go in as short a time as Rome or Constantinople when those Empires fell apart. As my mother said in her merry way: ‘At least under the Rus or the Tatars people had time to get used to their rulers. These days it’s impossible to know who you’re supposed to cheer.’ But she liked Petlyura and his white horse and his gaudy Haidamaki with their baggy trousers and fancy waistcoats and scalp-locks. The Haidamaki had saved Ukraine from Polish oppression in the eighteenth century. They represented another calling on the past in support of a hoped-for future. Ends are defeated by means. The future will always be defeated by the past. The past is a useful metaphor but it is a terrible precedent.

My mother hoped the laundry would be nationalised. As manageress, she would have security without the same responsibility. Petlyura’s brand of socialism, she said, seemed fair enough. Petlyura needed to court what remained of the business people. Again I found myself rising in the world. I knew everyone. I was invited to various high-level meetings. I was called ‘Doctor Pyatnitski’ by everyone and regarded as a scientific Wunderkind. I was allowed to expand on the possibilities of Ukrainian monorails, Ukrainian civil airlines, Ukrainian garden-cities for the workers. My ideas no longer struck people as fantastic. All Ukraine’s potential was to be used. I mentioned special cinemas, education centres, aerial guard-ships which could protect our frontiers from Bolshevik aggression. We should soon have the cream of Russian genius, I pointed out, back in Kiev. Kiev could become the capital of a new Russian Empire (diplomatically I termed it ‘an expanded Ukrainian state’). I spoke of my dreams and I helped others to dream. That was my gift. I offered it to the government and at last the government began to accept. I had no official position. I thought it foolish to accept one. I was only just nineteen years old. At last I had found a ready audience for more complicated ideas, such as my invisible ray device. I made no large claims. Such machines could, however, form a defensive ring (‘an iron ring of light’ as someone said) about a city, making it almost invulnerable. This was the nearest thing to the recent force-field notions of the Americans.

We needed something quickly. We had Poles attacking from the West, Whites from the South, Reds from the North. There were Rumanians invading Bessarabia. French and Greek forces had been landed in Odessa. A variety of Cossack and pseudo-Cossack insurgent chieftains (atamany) and Anarchist brigands, such as Makhno, changed sides almost as rapidly as the regular units, a few of which still supported Skoropadskya. Ataman Hrihorieff (sometimes called Grigoriev in English) had turned against the Directorate to join the Bolsheviks. He took with him a large rabble of so-called ‘insurgent cavalry’; looters and pogromchiks to a man. We in Kiev believed no rumours whatsoever. If Bolsheviks were said to be occupying the Left Bank Dnieper, we cocked our heads. If we heard no unusual artillery- or rifle-fire, we continued about our business. At that time Petlyura seemed likely to drive the Bolsheviks out of Russia altogether. Then he allowed the farce of ’Ukrainianisation’ of the Church. Suddenly Orthodox services we’re performed in Ukrainian and half the Church’s intellectuals were dismissed from their offices or actually killed by their parishioners, simply for arguing the unchallengeable fact that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian Church, since all were subordinate to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The nationalist mania was spreading.

It was to destroy my homeland, the birthplace of Russian culture.