The chaos that created Ukraine
Bulgakov also wrote The Master and Margarita
Those: RIA Novosti / picture alliance
Should Ukraine be an inalienable part of Russia? Ukrainians see it differently. At least since 1918. Then the Bolsheviks came and crushed the desire for independence. The chaos of that time is described by Mikhail Bulgakov in The White Guard. You have to read it right now.
AMiraculously, long after the author’s death, Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard continued to grow fat. The copy printed in the GDR with the stamp “Library of the Grenztruppen Halberstadt”, which was sold in a Braunschweig antiquarian bookshop after the reunification, was only about half as thick as the most recent translation of Alexander Nitzberg. Apparently, the fact that the Bolsheviks did not appear as pure luminaries seemed problematic. On the other hand, the theatrical version of the book was a favorite of Stalin’s.
The novel begins with an upper-class idyll: the description of the home and way of life of the Turbin family in Kiev (in whose description there was a lot of autobiography). And then it is shown with great sympathy, but also cold consistency, how this world perishes in the turmoil of the Ukrainian struggle for independence in 1918/1919. Anyone who doesn’t believe that Ukraine has always been a natural part of Russia and wants to understand where the roots of the current conflict lie should read the book.
Independent Ukraine was born of chaos at the end of World War I. Like other nations – Finland, the Baltic States, Poland – the country was trying to extricate itself from the bankruptcy of the collapsing Tsarist Empire. Independence came after the October Revolution, but it remained fragile because the nationalist governments were at the mercy of Germany and Austria. The latter, to whose dominion a part of today’s Ukrainian state belonged, had long recognized the Ukrainians as “Ruthenians” as an independent ethnic group – in contrast to Russia, where they were classified as “Little Russians” (alongside Russians and Belarusians) in the large Russian people (back ) wanted to force.
One has to imagine the fighting at the end of the 1910s as confusing as the conflicts between the Popular Front of Judea, the Judean Popular Front and their competitors in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian – only not at all funny.
“Epaulettes” made from peeled skin
When the anarchist-nationalist peasant revolutionaries Symon Petlyuras invaded Kiev after the Germans withdrew, pogroms and massacres of the troops of the conservative hetman Ivan Skoropadskyj took place. They are particularly after Russians and “junkers”. The latter are given “pauldrons” (an insignia of senior officers) by skinning their shoulders. A heartbreaking moment for Bulgakov is the murder of a Jew who ventures into the streets at night to seek medical attention for his wife who is giving birth.
What Stalin liked about it – beyond the sheer quality of the novel – is not clear. It will hardly have been sympathy for the idea of a Ukrainian identity. Although in the 1920s, after the Bolsheviks conquered Ukraine and incorporated it into the USSR, its language and culture was promoted until 1931, Stalin was also responsible for the starvation of millions of Ukrainians from 1929 onwards.