Two Colours

Contents

Preface

Part One At the Beginning

Part Two The Mother

Part Three The Father

Conclusion

Preface

I boarded an overnight train from Odessa to Kiev, Ukraine, and at eight o’clock in the morning arrived at a tiny one-bedroom apartment located in Obolon, a grey urban district typical for this country from Soviet times. It happened exactly one week before my mother’s ninety-eighth birthday celebration. For me it was one more opportunity to see Mother and talk about so many events in her long life, which has been a continuous struggle for survival. She was a rare witness to this life, which others did not know about or forgot or wished others forgot. I wished to write about that extraordinary life, which was a snapshot of millions of her twentieth-century compatriots. And I cherished my longstanding dream to present my special book as a gift for her hundredth birthday jubilee coming in two years.

This country had experienced a plague, the worst tragedy during the catastrophic, revolutionary events of the turbulent twentieth century, and my mother’s personal life was, in some way, a reflection of it. She remembered many things of that bygone era, and her memory of the past included the smallest details back to the earliest days of her childhood. Today she often forgot what had happened yesterday, but she never forgot the horror of nightly visits of drunken, abusive people with guns and red stars on their hats, ninety years ago. These visitors demanded the last crumbs of bread and everything edible and would take whatever they wished. After the visits, more people of the city, who were prosperous not long ago, would die from hunger. From time to time, the people with guns and red stars would take people away from their homes, and nobody would ever see them again. The residents believed that these people were taken east, very far away to inhospitable revolutionary Russia, to the cold north near the Arctic seas and into the frozen Siberian taiga.

I wished to know more about my mother and her life and ask her painful, almost anguished questions: Why had this country of paradise-like nature, inhabited by big strong freedom-loving people, turned against itself and followed such a dreadful way? Where had this land, born out of the struggle of powerful legendary warriors, gone? Some time ago, my mother said the following unusual words, confusing my mind even more with suspicion; what would it be and why? She spoke almost like being in the obscurity of a mystic:

"My, son, take my words in your heart and sober mind

And do not try to understand and judge it right away;

For many it would take the ages to apprehend . . .

We lost the sowers and our best seeds to the strangers . . .

And our soil could no longer bring forth good grain . . .

I see these all around scorched and withered away."

I did not understand it right away, but later I realised that she was speaking according to the immortal parables of the Bible.

I knew that my mother would not be happy to talk about these sad events that her generation went through in the turbulent times of the twentieth century. But one cannot select one’s destiny. It has been the fate for her and millions of my countrymen who left this beautiful land and were dispersed to other countries in search for a better life; they all yearned first of all for human justice. And those who left the country were probably much luckier than those who remained. Many details of that past, when life began to fall apart, were painful and tragic, and I did not wish her to suffer by such recollections. I knew already her accounts of many events, which she narrated to us sporadically from time to time. This time I hoped to hear her recollection as one big story from her childhood, especially the most tragic part of her life, when she was locked in a dungeon in the windy cold steppes and about my grandfather.

As we sat at the table in a kitchen, drinking our traditional tea on my arrival, I heard a singer on the radio: Kvitka (Casey) Cisyk. Her father and mother came from Ukraine, and Casey was born in the United States. Kvitka was lucky, because she was spared the bad memories of her country of origin. Her voice, that special magic coloratura soprano worthy of an opera performer, was perfect, Ukrainian without any accent and with that specific soft flavour of the western Ukrainian language, which was probably the only classical Ukrainian language left without outside intrusion. And the song she sang was a great Ukrainian song: Two Colours:

"As I was ready to depart my home

And wander world unknown roads . . .

Two colours mine . . . two colours . . .

The red is love, the black is sorrow."

As the song played, I saw my mother weep without hiding her emotions; the tears were streaming down her cheeks. I felt emotional and my eyes watered because of her sentiments and because of the influence of the words and the magic voice of the singer. That crucial moment triggered her suppressed memory. She looked at me with her clear, deep blue eyes and said, It’s about us, son, about you and me. You left this home so early and went by roads unknown around the world. I’m now at the end of my road. It has always been two colours . . . I wish to tell you more about it.

And with that, she began the recollection of her life, which was a time of unimaginable progress on the background of dreadful tragedies, a life of hope, aspiration, and tragic failure. At that moment I knew that she was talking not only about her personal life but the tragic life of her beautiful country and its people.

That life has always been for her in two fundamental colours—the red and black. It was only two days to her ninety-eighth birthday when she said, "My happy and tragic moments have always been connected with bright red lights; I was young and liked to play among the fields with red poppies under the bright sunshine in fields; it was my childish happiness, and I thought the red was created for love only . . . but once it turned to red stars and black guns . . ."

And now I realised for the very first time that most of us have been living between of these two symbolic colours. The red would appeal to us for love but was very often mixed with sorrow, which would then turn into the predestined black reality. My mother, the living witness of the twentieth century, sitting before me in the dark kitchen, knew it well, which I sensed in her sad narration, like a prophecy: We were born for inevitable, relentless tests through our existence; love is only a fleeting dream, and real life will test us by the everlasting challenge.

Two Colours

(Ukrainian Song)

(A Passage)

As I was ready to depart my home

And wander world unknown roads,

The mother then embroiled my shirt,

By colours red and black,

Entwined by threads of red and black.

Two colours mine, two colours

They both are on my shirt flannel

They both are in my soul

Two colours mine, two colours . . .

The red is love, the black is sorrow . . ."

Part One

At the Beginning

A large oared sailboat, most likely a famous trireme, came across the Black Sea from the south. The mariners went a long treacherous way through unknown waters in those ancient days, many centuries before Anno Domini. The mysterious ships with the all-seeing eye painted on the high curved front appeared near the shores of an unknown land. The sailors left the warm Mediterranean waters in spring and navigated through narrow straits into this sea, which some seafarers knew as the sea of cold black waters, winds, and dense fog. The weather was really bad; the legends were correct: it was country of Cimmerians and Scythians, and the land, from the ancient mythology of these people, they believed was Tartarus. And in the confirmation of the worst outcome, as they travelled farther north, dark heavy storm clouds descended over the ship and tormented it for three days; no stars, no moon, and nothing visible could be used to identify the ship’s position.

Now, in this bad situation, no doubts were left in the minds of the mariners; the vessels reached Tartarus. The oldest mariner and navigator of the leading ship said, ‘We have reached the land that comes below Uranus, the sky, Gaia, the earth, and Pontus, the sea; we are going soon into a bottomless dismal abyss, to the underworld.

The mariners began a desperate prayer for their lives; they did not deserve to die in the abyss and knew that Tartarus was a primordial force, a deity, and the gods should hear their praying. It was the prayer of all fifty mariners to Zeus because they knew that the Supreme God fought the Tartarus’s offspring, and he killed the monster Campe, the guard of the Tartarus, and he defeated the Titans in the fight for the possession of Olympus. The hopeful travellers believed that Zeus would protect them and save them from such a bad fate.

Then suddenly, as quickly as it had started, the wind ceased and the fog cleared. The mariners saw the land and cried, "Yalos! Yalos! (Land!)." Under the bright sunshine, the land displayed its wonderful landscape: low green terrain, wide pebble beaches, and White Mountains on the northern horizon. The mariners were Greeks and the land, Crimea. It was the very first contact of the most civilised nation, the advanced culture of the time, with the wild, uncivilised world. The whole land from the warm Crimea to the cold north was a barbaric and nomadic domain, so distant from the civilised Greece like the stars from this planet. The Greeks sowed the seeds into this soil. But it would take the next two millenniums to cultivate the residents into a more civilised society. In the Greek mythology this part of the world was related to Orpheus, Eurydice, Argonauts, and The Odyssey. It was the southernmost part of Ukraine.

To the north from this mythological land extended the flat grassland with high grass (kovil) or feather grass (stipa), which would conceal the innumerable hordes of nomads coming to the Black Sea from the east (nomads had always come from the east). And they were moving incessantly and unstoppably, like oceanic waves, through this rich black soil land; it was an earthly black hole moving the energy of angry invaders from east to west. The historic and planetary destiny of this steppe country was predestined to consume and exhaust the nomadic hordes. For some reason, the Lord had designed these steppes as a buffer zone to protect densely populated western Europe because the Almighty wished to shelter the civilised centre of the world.

On a territory the size of a full continent, from western Europe to China and from the Mediterranean Sea, Asia, and the Indian Ocean to Siberia, there were fully 15,000,000 square kilometres of wild land, occupied by millions of horsemen subsisting from horse and cattle, moving all the time. From time to time, most of these shrewd horsemen would appear in the desert’s skin-built hovels and call for the other placid horsemen to move. And the hordes would move with happiness to change places and get promised slaves, women, and other possessions. They predominantly moved west, because to the east was the bellicose, well-organised country of China, even in those early ages defended by the Great Wall and populated by millions of vicious, brave fighters. Also to the east were mountains, which the horsemen could not overcome. The west was open through boundless, unresisting steppes, occupied only by other horsemen and simple peasants, very easy prey for the hordes, united by strict battle order and mission. Probably the idea of such invincibility came to the minds of the leaders as they observed locusts eating their way through the steppes; no one could stop the locust.

The nomadic hordes would be consumed and exhausted in Ukrainian steppes and stopped by the Alps and Carpathian mountains before Western Europe. But some would trickle further west and destroy the most powerful society in this world—the western Roman Empire—by the strength of Huns and treacherous Vandals. All these events happened much later after the Greeks arrived in the Crimea. That distant moment, their great god Zeus saved the mariners from Tartarus. It was a hopeful augury for the Argonauts and other native inhabitants, who hoped that the ancient gods would not forget them.

* * *

This part of the Russian Empire has always has been a very special. The south-western region of the empire, on the border with western Europe, Asia, and Turkey, was the most important part of the empire’s outer frame. Therefore, the tsar paid very special attention to the Ukraine; the tsar’s diplomacy and struggle was directed southwest. Tsarina Catherine the Great turned her thoughts to recovery and restoration of the wealth of that part in the Black Sea steppes from Azov Sea to the borders with Romania and Bulgaria. The Huns, Mongols, and other nomads were no longer a threat to the flat domain; only the Turks remained consistently belligerent.

The aggressive neighbours on the southern Black Sea were probably still under the zeal of the victories over the Eastern Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire by Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II four centuries ago. The Turks were profoundly wrong and short-sighted; the country was much smaller and was unjustifiably reckless to challenge the Russians. Now the largest imperial entity in this world took over the steppes, to get a premium prize: the rich black soil.

The most prominent ruler of Russia, Catherine the Great, knew that she committed very bad things to that richest part of her possession, and she wished to compensate for it. Her prominent lover, Gregory Potemkin, was put in charge of the task to rehabilitate and overhaul the economics of the south-western part of the Russian Empire, the Ukraine, which was endowed by nature with great potential. The tsarina probably said something like, Dear Earl, after you and other brave hero-generals finally defeated our southern foes, we have to polish this black diamond in my crown. The Ukrainian soil will feed all my subjects for centuries. You’ll go there and work that land for us.

The loving earl jumped into the carriage and rushed south almost 2,500 km to the northern capital of Russia, St. Petersburg. Gregory Potemkin did not realise he was being exiled from the court. And at the same time it was a great assignment, and the tsarina was confident that only this man could do a quick, efficient job, because he knew Catherine’s thoughts. The man possessed incessant energy and could travel day and night through the steppes, which he liked and called "Novorossia’ (New Russia"). He cultivated this new land for the loving woman but inevitably lost her. Soon a younger lover appeared in the tsarina’s bedroom; she wanted a lot of passion for her passionate reign over Russia.

The tsarina chose well her Prince of the South, who was given the name "Tavricheskiy by the old name of this southern part (Taurica and historical inhabitants Tauri). And the powerful man was doing a really great job. Some indiscriminate historians could blame the earl for the theatrical staging of Potemkin villages," but they did not realise that the earl had really built villages, cities, and even dockyards on the absolutely depopulated soil. The modern villages for those days were settled by hard working settlers and peasants and produced a lot of wheat for the empire. The earl brought colonists from Europe, and their descendants still reside along the river Dniper. It was the first attempt to civilise the peasants’ life in Ukraine. And the tsarina personally blessed the southern city of Berislav once upon a time. The earl took her in a carriage all across the south of Ukraine, demonstrating new roads, villages, and green fields. It was a special road along the Dniper River with the jungles of flood land fed by pristine clean waters.

The tsarina’s cortège stopped on a high hill on the shore of the river. Before them, to the left, was the flood land and the blue, wide, powerful river. On the right were a couple of white houses, covered by reeds, shaped in a short street of a nameless village. The air was clean and fresh with an aromatic scent coming from the fields and ravines on the northern terrain on the village. Catherine was very much impressed and said to Potemkin, "These glorious shores are really a black diamond in my crown; we should call this village Berislav, ‘A Glorious Shore.’"

* * *

The farmers got the land on the Glorious Shores. What was most remarkable, and a historical fact, was the Ukrainian peasants of the southern steppes have never been slaves, similar to their unfortunate colleagues in Russia, who were in a special feudal-style slavehood: the "krepostniye" or those affixed to one and only landowner. The landowner was in complete possession of his krepostniye and even could kill them without any punishment for such a crime. All those in Ukrainian steppes remained free farmers, however, not without a restriction and limitation: the rich landlords here could be the same as in Russia to the north and east. The Russian tsars did not encourage peasants to be slaves in Ukraine; they knew that the slaves would never be as productive as free farmers, and they would never grow the best wheat in this part of the world.

Tsar Nicolas II was not the ruthless autocrat portrayed by later democrats and Bolsheviks. The man with deep hereditary roots from western Europe and with direct connection to Britain’s and Denmark’s royalties was well aware that a disaster was coming from the so-called false democrats-revolutionaries. The tsar tried hard to swap and resist; he understood what this land needed. The tsar sponsored a very special agriculture process in the south-western part of his empire, in Ukraine. Here was the most advanced scientific support of this industry by the Committee of the Imperial Agricultural Society of the South of Russia. It was the approach by the major European institutions to agricultural problems. The tsar selected the best man for this job: Pyotr (Peter) Stolypin.

Stolypin served as prime minister and the leader of the third Duma (Russian Parliament), from 1906 to 1911. He brought the ideas and projects of agrarian reforms, which were especially important for the Ukrainian peasants. These reforms aimed to stem peasant unrest by creating a category of small landowners and expend the wide agricultural market around the country. The man had clear economic policies; he was probably the best statesman among the leaders of the Duma, who were always fighting the government. This great man was brought to politics in the beginning of unfortunate revolutionary unrest and discontent among the population.

These terrorists, who called themselves leftists, waged the real war against Stolypin’s reforms; they assassinated many officials throughout Russia, justifying it as a response to Stolypin’s reactionary deeds. The terrorists, the physical and ideological basis of future Bolsheviks, were conscious that Pyotr Stolypin’s bills would bring more prosperity to poor people, and the revolutionaries would lose their momentum to agitate and to fool the poor into supporting their bloody deeds. Stolypin’s end came as a tragedy, and his noble bravery of rejecting special protection proved fatal.

On September 14, 1911, a leftist radical, Dmitri Bogrov, assassinated Pyotr Stolypin. By a sad irony of history, it happened in Kiev’s Opera House, while he and Tsar Nicolas II attended a performance of Rimsky Korsakov’s The Tale of the Tsar Saltan. The revolutionary terrorists cleared one more obstacle on the way to their revolution. At the time nobody would imagine that the killing of one man would have a direct impact on the life of hundreds of millions people of the Russian Empire and especially this southern country, which foremost was in need of Stolypin’s reforms.

Part Two

The Mother

Anna was born in Berislav at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father (Alexander Litvinenko) and her relatives were well-known craftsmen, and their products were in great demand in the predominantly peasant areas of the southern part of Ukraine. Her father, her uncles, and her brothers were smiths, masons, and carpenters, but they were also hard toiling farming people, because the black soil was the best treasure of this country for a thousand years. Anna’s early recollection of her father was of his craftsmanship; she often told me, My father and brothers would bring into the yard rough shapeless pieces of wood and iron, and in one week these all would be transformed into a fashionable carriage, pulled from the yard by a pair of horses.

Anna was the fourth child in the family; they all lived together except the oldest sister, Polya, who lived separately in the northern part of the city called Poydinivka; she was fourteen years older than her small sister. Anna was a petite girl and looked like a baby among the giants. Her brothers and sisters, even those younger than her, were tall like their father and Evdotia, their mother, and they would look at tiny Anna from their six-foot-plus height. But she had one special distinction: incessant energy. With her inquisitive, large blue eyes, she would stare at the world with permanent questions: what and why. She also had curly black hair, coming down on her rosy cheeks, prettified by a tiny Roman nose that fit well for the little girl. Her brothers and sisters knew that Anna could do any work or study twice as fast as any of them; there was no contest, and nobody even tried to match the little one. They all loved her and called affectionately, Ann the firefly.

It was during the First World War. The residents of this century probably do not remember that far back in time. I heard on the news recently that the last veteran of that war died this year, a British woman named Florence Green, aged 110. Anna did not remember any impact of the war on life in the peaceful rural city of Berislav. The city, which Catherine the Great named, remained a small provincial settlement on the shores of the great Ukrainian river Dniper. A long time ago it was the main highway of the eastern nomads, but not in Anna’s time. The eastern horse nomads were no longer a danger for the city and its residents; other vicious nomads were readying to arrive from north in the twentieth century.

The city faced the river Dniper and green jungles of a flood land 12 to 15 km wide; the locals called it "plavny, from the word for notion, meaning to float on the surface." In spring, around the end of April, this whole area on the left and right shores of the river would be flooded by water coming from fields and rivers from the other country on the north, Belorussiya. The clean and fresh water would flood over all the low land with green willows and mulberry trees already covered by tender spring leaves. The fresh spring air filled the lungs of all the boys and girls. It was a very special and exciting time on the shores of the river.

Anna liked to sit on the high rocky shore, watching the water pouring down the stream, towards the Black Sea; the river delta was only 100 km south. The local boys and girls anxiously waited for the water to recede into the main bed between sandy dunes. Then the most wonderful thing would happen. The mighty flood of the river would leave many precious trophies: thousands of fish in small pits, channels, and rivulets; the local youngsters would hunt for the prize from early morning till late night; they would compete for the main trophy: the largest pike.

The river carried more than just fish down the stream to Berislav. There would be more serious treasures: trees, boards, boats, and even houses. Once upon a time, which was just before Anna’s birth, the river brought a church, absolutely the whole wooden structure of large church decorated with icons (pictures of prominent Christian saints). Luckily the church was grounded on a shallow bank of the river and the entrepreneurial residents quickly realised what to do next. The rescue operation was arranged with hundreds of row boats and just as many horses (tractors were not yet available in the nineteenth century, at least in Ukraine). The church was built of hard wood and was safely taken on shore and delivered to its present spot. Nobody claimed it back, as the people of the far north, which could be as far as to Belorussiya and Russia, would never expect that the church would survive intact.

The church was taken to the northern part of Berislav and installed on a high spot, right near the margin of the steppes. They named the church "Vedenskaya (Initiation"); it was constructed with fifteen steps leading inside, which was a special sign: the holiest Mother of God, Mary, walked fifteen steps to enter the Jerusalem temple. All people thought that it was the sign of the godsend benediction, brought to this city by angels. The church made its way through the thousands of small and large obstacles along the waterway and did not break a board. The icons and pictures of the saints were preserved in pristine condition. Why it had beached in Berislav, passing thousands of opportunities through its 1,000-km voyage? No doubt it was God’s command.

The people who looked after the church, including the pastors, would hear strange sounds at night, like a choir chanting nice sad music. It would usually come at midnight in an empty chamber, and the people did not wish to come inside and look at the source of the music; they all believed in holiness and not magic; the holy things do not need any intrusion by human beings. The church became a special place for parents with young girls to visit. The parents did not intend to place their kids into the church for God’s dedication but they believed that the young girls visiting the church would be brought in this world with great morals and chastity. If they only knew what kind of chastity was in store for them in the coming century. The sad night music was God’s premonition of the sad times coming to this land soon.

Traditionally this was the most developed agricultural region of the country, and all the people were relatively rich, at least able to feed their families well and send all their children to school. They were lucky, the residents of this country in the pre-war and pre-revolutionary years, the years of great prosperity in Ukraine. It would be later that even the arrogant Bolsheviks would acknowledge the year of 1913 as the basis of the best economic achievements almost in all industrial fields and especially in agriculture. Ukrainian wheat and agricultural produce were traded to many markets around the world. And finally the peasants began to appreciate the happiness of a prosperous life.

Many people came and settled on the Glorious Shores for good. For four generations, Anna’s forebears worked very hard on this land. They built a large stone house on Main Street, probably the best such construction in Berislav for the time. The reason for this was very simple and justifiable: they had a large family and they were big guys; they all needed a lot of space. But there has never been any competition for the life space. In summertime most folks would settle outside of the house or in the fields, looking after the crops and resting in the open clean environment in a straw-built hut or even under the open sky. Those days the meaning of clean did not associate directly with nice clean