Palaces and Princes at Yalta

Along the coast from Sevastopol, Yalta is also marked by history. What student of modern history would not be stirred by a visit to the nearby Livadia Palace, where the February 1945 Yalta Conference took place, where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on the post-war fate of Europe? To see where the meetings took place, where the document was signed, where the famous photograph of the three leaders was taken?

Where the Yalta Conference Agreement was signed

The Livadia Palace had earlier been a summer residence of Tsar Nicholas II. Upstairs, wandering through rooms where they once stayed, now lined with photos of the imperial family, is also to feel the ghosts of history, from a different era. And the little chapel where the last Tsar and his family prayed, and where the Tsarina was received into the Orthodox Church before their accession to the throne.

A few miles further along the coast is the Vorontsovsky Palace, built as a summer residence for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, a governor-general of New Russia. Vorontsov was raised and educated in Britain, where his father was Russian ambassador. He employed a British architect to design the palace, which mixes the typical style of an English country house with pronounced Moorish influences. It is a striking combination.

Vorontsovsky Palace

The palace sits above the Black Sea, with the Crimean mountains behind, and fits wonderfully into its setting. Churchill and the British delegation stayed at the Vorontsovsky palace during the Yalta conference. He was apparently not impressed, describing Yalta as the ‘Riviera of Hades’. He also joked that one of the lions in the gardens overlooking the sea looked like him.

One of the lions at the Vorontsovsky Palace

Vorontsov had a notable career, serving with distinction in the Napoleonic wars, and later leading Russia’s campaigns to subdue the north Caucasus. But he is perhaps best known for being cuckolded by Pushkin while the latter was exiled to Odessa. Visiting Vorontsov’s former residence in Odessa, looking at the remains of the terrace that overlooks the bay, one can imagine the great poet dancing with and seducing the princess at one of the balls that were no-doubt thrown.

Yalta was once a fashionable resort for the Russian aristocracy. Signs of its previous, now faded elegance remain as one strolls through some of the streets behind the seafront. In Soviet times, the town and its surroundings were designated by Lenin as a resort for the rest and recuperation of the workers. Numerous sanatoria were built up and down the coast around the town. What is left now is a rather gaudy, tacky seaside resort, frequented mainly by tourists from the former Soviet Union. This combination of faded elegance and mass tourist tat is in some ways reminiscent of Brighton.

Sevastopol and Russia

Few places are as brim-full with military history as Sevastopol. Built as a naval base when Russia first took over Crimea in the late 18th Century, it has been an important strategic point ever since. In the Crimean War, fought in the 1850s between Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia on one side, and Russia on the other, Sevastopol was besieged for almost a year, before it finally fell. The Russian defenders scuttled their ships across the mouth of the bay to block the entry of the British navy. In 1920, Sevastopol was one of the last hold-outs of the retreating White armies. And in World War II the city was again subjected to a long siege, before falling to the Germans in July 1942. It was recaptured by the Soviets in 1944, an almost completely ruined city. Sevastopol was declared one of the Soviet Union’s ‘Hero Cities’, which is commemorated by a huge monument in the pugnacious Socialist Realism style.

World War II memorial, Sevastopol

Almost everywhere you go in central Sevastopol are monuments to this military past. To a British visitor, this was an unfamiliar experience of visiting a city whose monuments portray a heroic defence against a British onslaught. To most in Britain, the Crimean War is mainly associated with the futile Charge of the Light Brigade commemorated in Tennyson’s poem. It is a military venture whose purpose seems hard to comprehend from a modern perspective. Yet at the time, Russia was seen as Britain’s main rival, and a threat to Britain’s empire in India. Propping up the ailing Ottomans against persistent Russian encroachments was regarded as a key interest. For the native Tartar population of Crimea, the participation of Ottoman troops must have excited hopes of liberation from Russian rule.

As well as statues commemorating the defenders of Sevastopol, the Panorama of Sevastopol’s Defence, a large circular building whose interior wall is covered with a vast painting depicting the climax of the siege is a centrepiece of the city’s war memorials. The Black Sea Fleet Museum portrays the war primarily, though not exclusively, from a Russian perspective. It was interesting to find that Russia had its equivalents of Florence Nightingale.

Panorama of Sevastopol's defence

The strategic importance of Sevastopol has continued to cause controversy more recently. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the position of Crimea, and especially of Sevastopol, in newly independent Ukraine was disputed by Russia and by the predominantly Russian local population. Crimea had been a full republic of the Soviet Union until Krushchev, himself Ukrainian, handed it to Ukraine in the 1950s. Sevastopol was of particular importance as the base of the Soviet, now Russian Black Sea Fleet. In 1997, a treaty was signed between Russia and Ukraine. Crimea was recognised as part of Ukraine (although as an autonomous republic), while Ukraine agreed to lease the naval base to Russia for 20 years. In 2010, the new, more pro-Russian government in Ukraine agreed to extend the lease for a further 25 years. This agreement provoked intense opposition in some quarters, including a brawl in Ukraine’s parliament.

So why is Sevastopol so important to Russia? In an age when airpower and missiles can strike anywhere, its attractiveness as a natural harbour looks less valuable. Looking at the ageing ships in the bay, the Black Sea Fleet does not appear especially impressive. In Soviet times, with NATO member Turkey just across the water, one could imagine why it was important. Probably it is partly a matter of national pride. For a city so steeped in Russian history, it is simply difficult to face up to the fact that it is no longer Russia. The proliferation of Russian flags in the city, including on many public buildings, make clear where the hearts of many of its residents lie. Is part of the motivation for Moscow now also to maintain a toehold in Ukraine, to retain leverage, and to undermine its independence? There has been a similar pattern in some other Soviet successor states in Russia’s ‘near abroad’, with separatist territories supported by Moscow in Georgia and Moldova.

Vanished peoples of Crimea

To a modern world steeped in the political culture of the nation state, schooled to believe in the unique value of the nations to which we belong, with their long and illustrious histories, great literary traditions, and irreplaceably distinct customs and cultures, visiting Crimea can be disconcerting. With its ghostly, abandoned cities and settlements, once the homes of thriving civilisations that are now no more, Crimea is testament to all that is transient, insecure and ephemeral in the world. Civilisations grow, flourish, and then pass into history, leaving only haunted remnants of what is gone forever.

In many countries we are used to thinking of our nation’s history as a progression, through different eras, changing, and yet continuous, with layers of heritage building on each other, all contributing to the formation of a modern nation, a gradual accretion of experience and accomplishment, gain and loss, continuing on into the future. Just as the English perceive a thread linking them with Alfred the Great, so nations on every continent find unique value in their heritage. But Crimea bears witness to the vanity of such notions.

Gifted by Krushchev to Ukraine in the 1950s, Crimea had been taken over by imperial Russia only in the 1780s, its colonisation taking place on the back of the displacement of the Tartars. The history of Crimea is not one of continuity, but rather of repeated invasion and migration, each new arrival displacing or assimilating those who were already there.

The landscape around Bakhchisaray and southern Crimea is one of high-cliffed plateaus, with deep ravines in between. Bakhchisaray itself sits in one such ravine, cliffs rising dramatically on both sides. Nearby is the stronghold of Chufut Kale, strung out along one such plateau. Now abandoned, Chufut Kale means ‘Jewish Fortress’ in the Crimean Tartar language. The site had once been inhabited by the Sarmatian Alans, but was taken over by the Tartars when they invaded Crimea. In the 15th Century, it was established as the Khan’s capital, before it was moved to nearby Bakhchisaray. From the 17th Century, the only remaining inhabitants were adherents of the Karaite Jewish sect, hence the name, Chufut Kale.

The main street in Chufut Kale

The religious origins of the Karaites are disputed, as well as the ethnic origins of the Crimean Karaim. Contrary to Rabbinic Judaism, they accept only scripture as having ultimate authority, and not the interpretations of the Talmud. The sect thrived in Mesopotamia a thousand years ago, but the origins of the Turkic-speaking Karaim of Crimea are uncertain. It has often been claimed that they are descendants of Khazars, converts to Judaism who once ruled an empire in swathes of territory in what is now southern Russia and Ukraine.

Following Crimea’s incorporation into the Russian Empire, the Karaim abandoned Chufut Kale, settling in towns on the Crimean coast and elsewhere in Russia. The Karaim managed to avoid some of Russia’s oppressive anti-Semitic laws, citing spurious proofs that the community had been living in Crimea since before the time of Christ, and that therefore they could not share in the perceived collective, inherited Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus. The assertion that they were Turkic converts was also cited in their favour. In a further, even more bizarre twist, during the World War Two German occupation, Nazi bureaucrats in Berlin were persuaded that the Karaim were not Jewish at all, although of inferior racial stock, and that they should therefore be spared the holocaust.

Today, the Karaim are gone from Chufut Kale. The remaining adherents of the sect are found mainly in Israel and the United States, with just a small number remaining in Crimea. Chufut Kale itself is a ghost town, its streets frequented by tourists and a few artists. Some buildings remain intact, including a prayer house and the former home of Avraam Firkovich, now a museum displaying old photos of the once thriving community. It was Firkovich who had provided the falsified ‘evidence’ of the Karaim’s history in Crimea that won favour with the Tsars.

As in many of these high settlements in Crimea, Chufut Kale was partly built below the ground, in caves carved and enlarged out of the rock. Now bare, their windows and doors open to the elements, exploring these caves, with their ledges and niches, it is hard to imagine the people that once lived here, the lives they led. This was a living, settled community for hundreds of years, with traditions, a language, customs, and now it is all over, the people gone.

Cave room, Chufut Kale

Spookiest of all is a stroll through the vast cemetery in the Iosofatova Valley, below Chufut Kale. Here, for centuries, the Karaim buried their dead. The graves are still there, thousands of them, higgledy-piggledy among the trees, many of the tombstones, covered in Hebrew script, overturned or upended by tree roots or subsidence. I walked through this forest cemetery, alone in the silence, in the early evening, with the sun low in the sky sending its beams almost horizontally through the trees. But the feeling of spookiness was not because of the long-dead people at rest there. Rather, it was that walking among these thousands of graves brings home that this is not just a cemetery of the people buried there, but of the civilisation, the world to which they belonged, which is now extinct. There are no Karaim left at Chufut Kale to tend or visit the graves. The tombs are just there, a silent memory of a lost world, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Among the ancient tombs are a handful of graves from recent years, their inscriptions in Cyrillic, Karaim from elsewhere, for whom Chufut Kale is their home soil, in which, together with their ancestors, they would like to rise on judgement day.

Karaite cemetery, Chufut Kale

A few miles south of Bakhchisaray, is the site of another abandoned cliff-top stronghold, Mangup Kale. At one time, Mangup Kale was the capital of the Crimean principality of Gothia. Migrating from north-west Europe, the Germanic Goths conquered much of the northern Black Sea coast, including Crimea, in the 3rd Century AD, before being pushed out by the Huns a hundred years later. But some of the Goths hung on in Crimea, were Christianised and incorporated into the Byzantine Empire. Following a failed attempt to resist the Khazar conquest of Crimea in the 8th Century, the Goths retreated to their plateau at Mangup, and there they remained, worshiping at their basilicas, living their isolated lives until the 15th Century, when, a few years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Turks besieged and conquered Mangup as well.

The citadel, Mangup Kale

Little is known about the Crimean Gothic realm. Linked by religion and its long association with Byzantium with the Greek world, at the end Gothia was allied with the Empire of Trebizond (modern-day Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey). Probably Mangup had been a true Crimean ethnic mix, Gothic, Greek, Sarmatian, Jewish. Certainly there were Karaim there. Walking up through the forest to the Mangup plateau, one passes through another Karaite cemetery, hundreds more tombs eerily bearing witness to the people that were once there. At the top, there is not much left. The monumental gateway to the citadel is still standing. The basilica of Saint Constantine is no more than a couple of overgrown walls. At the tip of the plateau, beyond the citadel, overlooking terrifying precipices, are more elaborate cave rooms, hewn out of the rock, with stairways, alcoves, windows and doors.

The Mangup plateau is a beautiful place to stroll on a hot summer’s day, broad meadows with a profusion of wild flowers, with walls, towers, the foundations of buildings scattered about here and there, the remains of the city that once stood. Walking there is a humbling experience. Here was a city, with fine buildings and monuments, a distinct people with their own language and traditions. And it is all gone, bar a few almost forgotten ruins, returned to dust.

Remains of the basilica of St Constantine
Mangup Kale

What a romantic idea! That once upon a time, in the mountains of southern Crimea, far away from the Germanic peoples of western Europe, a Gothic realm endured from ancient times almost to the modern era. It is an idea that excited travellers and scholars. Adolf Hitler too was interested, and plans were discussed by the Nazis to resettle Germans from South Tyrol, the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, in a renewed Gothia, in Crimea, its cities renamed to reflect the Gothic heritage. But it was a fantasy. The Crimean Goths are long gone. But where did they go to? Most likely they simply converted to Islam and were assimilated into the Crimean Tartar people. As my hostess in Bakhchisaray told me, in different regions of Crimea the Tartars have different physiognomies, reflecting their various ethnic antecedents. Some of them are probably more than a little Gothic.

Return to Crimea

There are few places in the world where the migrations of peoples, the ebb and flow of empires, have left so many and such diverse traces in such a small area as Crimea. Scythians, Sarmatians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Jews, Italians, Mongols, Turks, Russians, all have passed through. Some have been swept out or assimilated by the next wave of invaders; others have hung on for thousands of years. Their remains have been left, layer upon layer, the remnants, in some cases, of civilisations that have passed away.

The Crimean Tartars have been more tenacious than most. The Crimean Khanate, with its capital in Bakhchisaray, a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, was annexed by imperial Russia in the 1780s. Their homeland steadily swamped by Russians, politically marginalised, over subsequent decades the Tartars left in droves for Turkey, many of them perishing on the journey.

The Khan's palace, Bakhchisaray

Persecuted by the Soviet regime, their elite killed or imprisoned, those that remained suffered their greatest tragedy in May 1944. As a collective punishment for the collaboration of some of their community with the Germans (hardly surprising considering their sufferings at the hands of the Soviet regime), the Crimean Tartar population was deported en masse to central Asia. As my guest house hostess in Bakhchisaray explained, they were given only 15 minutes to pack their things, before being herded into trains. Many did not survive the journey, and others died not long after their arrival. This despite the fact that thousands of Crimean Tartar men served in the Soviet army. They returned to Crimea at the end of the war to find their families gone, and were themselves packed off into exile.

Yet my hostess spoke proudly of the resilience of her people. Many of those who survived prospered in central Asia. She and her husband were teachers in Uzbekistan, and built themselves a big house. According to her, the Crimean Tartars were harder working and better educated than the Uzbeks. But, she said, they always knew they would return one day to Crimea. It was a rich and beautiful land, and it was theirs, even though she herself was born in Uzbekistan.

Their chance came as the communists began to lose their grip. She and her family came back in 1991, just before the end of the Soviet Union. It was easier then, as it was still one country. As they were already settled in Crimea when independence came, they automatically received Ukrainian citizenship. And because they bought a house before the new, Ukrainian currency was introduced, they did not, like some later returnees, see the Roubles they received for their home in Uzbekistan lose their value. They were luckier than many, who having sold their homes in central Asia, were left without money to buy a new place in Crimea. Even so, initially the best they could afford was a tumble-down old house, much poorer than the one they had had in Uzbekistan.

As my hostess told me, no Crimean Tartar had tried to reclaim the homes their families had owned, now occupied by Russians, even though in some cases the keys they had taken with them into exile still fitted the locks. Many Russians had not welcomed the Tartars’ return, and, said my hostess, there had been peer pressure not to sell houses to Tartars. Those returnees who had not been able to buy houses, as her family had, had taken over unoccupied land and built shacks there. According to the law, after a certain period of occupation, they could claim the land as their own, and build proper houses. All this, my hostess averred, was evidence of the determination and resilience of the Crimean Tartars. And just as she was proud of their success as exiles, in Uzbekistan, so she contrasted the spirit of the Tartars with the Russian settlers who had taken their homes. You can imagine, she said, what kind of people would take over the houses of others. They were lazy, she said. They had not even maintained the Tartar houses they had occupied.

And indeed, walking through Bakhchisaray there is plenty of evidence of Tartar success since their return to Crimea, with thriving restaurants and guest houses catering for tourists. My hostess told me that, on her return, she had only been able to get a teaching job in a village several kilometres away from Bakhchisaray. But she had got up early every morning and walked there. She and her husband had saved and eventually knocked down the rickety house they had bought, and built a bigger, better one, with space for paying guests. Now her son was studying to be a lawyer, because, as she said, it is important to know your rights and how to fight for them. The Crimean Tartars, she told me, had twice been left with almost nothing, when they were sent to central Asia, and when they returned to Crimea. And both times they picked themselves up and thrived. Hers was a story of tragedy, but also of pride and of hope.

The Crimean Tartars are back, and though a minority in their land, they are a force that cannot be ignored. But who are they? My hostess told me that it is in fact incorrect to refer to them as ‘Tartars’, a name given to them by the Russians. Indeed, the name ‘Tartar’ is a misnomer. The Tartars were one of the tribes conquered by Genghis Khan as he united the people who became the Mongols. According to my hostess, the Crimean Tartars were an ethnic mixture of the varied peoples who had lived in Crimea, including Mongols, Goths, Greeks, Italians and others who had been united by their conversion to Islam. They were the native people of Crimea, and should be known simply as Crimeans.

Not all Crimeans speak their own, Tartar tongue, a Turkic language, closely related to Turkish. In their exile, many switched to Russian. Indeed, although my hostess told me she and her family spoke Tartar, I noticed that, among themselves the family spoke Russian. When introducing me to her (non-English speaking) husband, I noted a look of surprise on his face that she spoke to him in Tartar, and they quickly switched to Russian. She told me there were now 14 Tartar schools in Crimea, including one in Bakhchisaray, but most of the tuition was in Russian. Before the exile, she told me, many of the Russians in Bakhchisaray, the minority at that time, could speak Tartar. On their return, they found some elderly Russians who had been there since before their departure, who could speak the Tartar language better than many Tartars themselves.

Khan's Palace gardens, Bakhchisaray

The former palace of the Crimean khans has been renovated and turned into a museum. And even if one cannot help suspecting that some features, such as the stained glass and the rose gardens, might be more in the taste of 21st Century Russians than of the 18th Century Khans, it gives some impression of the Islamic civilisation that preceded the Russian takeover, a provincial outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Especially famous is the Fountain of Tears, commissioned for the last Khan, to mark his grief for the unrequited love for a Polish woman, enslaved in his harem, who had pined away, unable to accept her new life. Moved by the story, Pushkin wrote a poem about it. He also started the tradition of leaving a red rose for love, and a yellow one for chagrin, at the fountain. The story may have its charm, but it reveals a dark side of Crimea’s past. Under the Khans the slave trade was one of the most important pillars of the economy, with raids into Ukraine, Poland and Russia to provide perhaps millions of slaves for the Ottoman Empire.

Strolls through Odessa

I had long been attracted by an idea of Odessa. I imagined a romantic city, a city of writers (Isaac Babel, Pushkin, Gogol were all there), of revolution (the uprising commemorated in Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film “The Battleship Potemkin”), a cosmopolitan melting pot, like a number of other great multi-ethnic ports of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Of course, some of the romance of Odessa was either fantasy or had slipped irrevocably into the past. But the city retains plenty of allure. Its name, it is said, was to be Odessus, after a former ancient Greek port along the coast. But Catherine the Great decided that the city should be feminine, and named it Odessa.

Odessa views

Like Salonika, Trieste and Istanbul, its multi-ethnic character suffered under the blows of the modern nation state and the conflicts of the 20th Century. Most of the city’s Jews, perhaps a third of its population at one point, those who survived Nazi occupation, left for Israel or New York. Eisenstein’s famous scene of the massacre on the Potemkin Steps was a fabrication (killings had taken place elsewhere in the city during the 1905 revolution). Indeed, the Potemkin Steps, the city’s most famous feature, are an anti-climax today. Looking down them, from the top, they lead nowhere. Just a main road and a wall, with a high-rise hotel behind it. What a shame. Once the steps swept down to the sea, linking the port with the city above. It does not help that the stages between the flights of steps are tarmacked over, or that they are flanked on the sides by corrugated iron and wasteland. Looking up from the bottom, however, the drama of the steps is more evident, the tarmac invisible, and the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, governor of New Russia early in the 19th Century (and later a prime minister of post-revolutionary France), majestic in classical pose at the top.

The appointment of a Frenchman as governor, a general in the service of the Tsar during the French revolutionary wars, was an indication of the cosmopolitan nature of the city, whose inhabitants came from around Europe to build the new city, a free city that flourished in the first half of the 19th century, its wealth built on trade. And maybe something of that spirit has survived. There is still a Jewish population. Wandering through the tree-lined streets of the 19th Century city centre, I came across the synagogue, across the road Orthodox Jews sitting and chatting at an outdoor café, while their children, the boys sporting kippas, ran about on the pavement.

Odessa still has a vibrant atmosphere, and an active cultural life. The bottom of the Potemkin steps and a few modern eyesores notwithstanding, it is a stylish city, both its buildings, in their faded, and in some cases restored elegance, and its inhabitants. One of its most elegant inhabitants told me Odessa was a “slut”, in that its people follow whichever rulers come along. Now, she told me, it is potentates from Donetsk who call the shots, and impose their tastes on Odessa. Yet Odessa’s charms have survived revolution, Stalinism and Romanian occupation during the Second World War. They survived the drabness of the Brezhnev era, and hopefully they will survive the vulgar tastes of Donetsk tycoons as well.

Odessa is a joy to stroll through. Street after street of elegant buildings, many of them with beautiful courtyards, some with statues or old wells. Will these lovely old buildings, with their great iron gates, survive the impetus to modernise? Odessa is a green city, almost all its streets lined with great old trees. Loveliest of all was walking down the central Deribasovskaya Street on a cool evening, with the pungent scent of the linden trees in bloom.

Catherine the Great, Odessa

There are many statues in Odessa, of the people who made the city or who lived there: its founder, de Ribas, the Spanish-Irish soldier who founded the city, as well as Pushkin and Richelieu. Statues have also been a cause of controversy. Not far from the top of the Potemkin Steps is a statue of Catherine the Great, in whose reign Odessa was founded. Her statue had been erected in 1900, but was dismantled by the communists, and later replaced by a monument commemorating the 1905 mutiny. The decision to put Catherine back in her place, in 2007, sparked the ire of Ukrainian Cossacks and many other Ukrainians, who revile Catherine as the ruler who subdued the Zaporizhia Cossacks in eastern Ukraine, and incorporated Ukraine into imperial Russia. More recently, there was an unsuccessful move to raise a statue of Stalin in the city.

Odessa is an under-appreciated jewel of the Black Sea. Still stylish, with little of the tourism tat that has afflicted Yalta and many other places. It is a beautiful city, with a relaxed pace of life reminiscent of the Mediterranean, and a cultivated city, proud of the legacy of the writers who lived there, and with a rich cultural life still.

Images of Kiev

Kiev is a city of hills. One of those, along the bank of the Dnieper, has for centuries been a favoured site for some of the city’s most important monuments. Three of these, spread out along the top of the hill, present very different images of Ukraine from different phases in its history.

At one end of the hill is the colossal ‘Rodina Mat’, the ‘Motherland’ monument, a 62-metre high statue of a female warrior, which sits atop the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. It is an imposing sight, a memorial to the victory that for several decades was perhaps the most important legitimising achievement of the Soviet Union.

Rodni Mat memorial, Kiev

In front of the statue is a park of socialist realism sculptures of Soviet soldiers and workers in heroic poses, biceps bulging, fists punching, weapons held aloft, defiant, all-sacrificing, unconquerable. There is also a series of stone blocks depicting the names of the cities awarded the title of ‘Hero City’ for their courage during the war of 1941-1945. Behind them are photographs of elderly people in uniform, their breasts covered with medals, some of them looking grimly dignified, others with chirpy smiles.

All these images, the statue, the sculptures, the hero cities and the heroic defenders of the motherland appear to have an almost religious significance. Indeed, this is a shrine, as important for the Soviet Union as any Christian shrine, and much of the imagery is reminiscent of and borrowed from Christian images. Rodina Mat reminds at the same time of the figure of Jesus on the cross, arms outstretched, and also of Christ transfigured, shining in glory. Such statues peppered the Soviet Union. They were the cathedrals of communism, marking its victory over its foes. The heroic sculptures are like statues in churches, idealised depictions of workers and soldiers, much like saints and angels in a different setting. The photos of the veterans are like icons of the saints, encouraging people by their example to strive to be model Soviet citizens.

The museum itself walks the visitor through the Soviet Union’s struggle against the German invaders. It is a striking, informative and at times moving display, depicting as well as the titanic struggle between the two countries, the terrible, immeasurable sufferings of the people of Ukraine and the Soviet Union at the hands of the occupiers. But the monument itself stands as a museum to a bygone realm. Like a medieval Christian cathedral standing in a secularised country, a lasting symbol of a religion, in this case communism, that has lost its appeal and its relevance in a world that has moved on.

Next door to Rodina Mat is the Lavra monastery complex. Originating in the 11th Century, it was largely rebuilt in the 18th, in Baroque style, although some medieval elements remain. It did not escape the devastation inflicted on religious buildings around Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union during the communist period. At the centre of the monastery, the Dormition Cathedral was blown up during the Second World War, probably by Soviet Partisans. Following the end of communist rule, a replica of the cathedral was rebuilt.

Such vandalism occurred in many places. The 12th Century St. Michael’s monastery in central Kiev was demolished by the Soviets in the 1930s, and rebuilt after the end of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the nearby 11th Century St. Sophia’s Cathedral was left intact.

One of the holiest sites for Orthodox Christians, the revival of Lavra is a turning back to an older spirituality, and away from the discredited prophets of communism represented at the Rodina Mat statue. As at St. Michael’s and elsewhere, the numerous young monks in their long black cassocks (surely horribly uncomfortable in the summer heat) bear witness to the resurgence of Orthodox belief. The Church has recovered its position of respect. Walking through the grounds, monks are repeatedly waylaid by pilgrims asking to receive their blessing and to kiss their hands.

Of particular interest to pilgrims and tourists alike at Lavra is the maze of catacombs, where the original monks lived, prayed and were laid to rest when they died. Their bodies, preserved and mummified in the cool, dry atmosphere, are still there, inside glass cases, in some cases their shrivelled black hands poking out of vestments that cover most of their bodies. For the pilgrims these are saints. They murmur prayers, cross themselves and kiss the glass cases, as they wander through the low, dim passages, lighting their way with candles. For them, it is clearly an intensely moving, even ecstatic experience. For the foreign outsider, it is a little uncomfortable, like a snoop gawping at the private rapture of others which they cannot share and do not understand.

Holodomor and Lavra monastery

A little further on from Lavra is the ‘Holodomor’ memorial, marking the artificially induced famine which killed millions in Ukraine, as well as southern Russia, in the early 1930s, as a result of the disastrous policy of collectivisation. In front of the monument is a small statue of a frail little girl, dressed in a simple dress, distressingly thin, with an empty, hungry expression. It is an affecting representation of the tragedy of the famine. And it is in sharp contrast to the bombastic sculptures with their heroic figures at the Rodina Mat statue. The little girl seems to stand as a quiet admonition to all the false claims and promises of communism glorified at Rodina Mat.

Underneath the monument is an exhibition, including agricultural implements and household objects from the villages of that era. Screened around the interior walls of the monument, a film is shown, detailing the forced collectivisation and the famine that followed. With footage from the time and documents concerning the policy and its implementation, the film is a distressing and moving account of one of the great crimes of the 20th Century.

With its conclusion, that only since the achievement of Ukraine’s independence has it been possible to discuss the Holodomor openly, the film asserts that all Ukrainians need to realise that only in an independent state can they realise their national consciousness. In a country many of whose people remain attached to Russia and to the Russian heritage, and whose identity as a distinct nation is questioned by some, the Holodomor memorial thus also serves a nation-building purpose.

The film’s presentation of the famine as a deliberate attack on the Ukrainian nation, as part of a policy aimed at the subjugation of the country and its people, is disputed by some. As committed communists, Stalin and his regime saw collectivisation as a crucial element in building the future socialist paradise. They were never comfortable with Lenin’s New Economic Policy, the compromise of the 1920s which sought to restore agricultural production by allowing private farmers to continue to work their land as they knew how. For Stalin, socialism meant the end of private enterprise and the extermination of the class of better-off peasants, the ‘Kulaks’, who farmed the land most effectively.

Collectivisation and the end of private enterprise were a part of the communist creed. The policy was identified with Stalin personally. So when agricultural production fell, it could not have been because the policy was wrong. Rather, as Stalin saw it, it must have been because of sabotage by peasants resisting the building of the socialist future, hoarding food and deliberately failing to meet their quotas. And so they had to be taught a lesson. The grain had to be seized. Their resistance spirit had to be stifled. Protestations that the grain being seized was the last they had, leaving them not enough to plant for the following year, were met without sympathy.

Ukraine and southern Russia were the breadbaskets of the Soviet Union. So collectivisation was particularly significant there, and the consequences of its failure especially serious. When Ukrainian peasants did not deliver the quantities of grain expected of them, they were identified as enemies of the revolution, and as such had to be dealt with without mercy.

So where does the tragedy of the Holodomor leave the proud Soviet veterans, bedecked in medals, the saints of a discredited religion? Of course, most of them had no personal responsibility for the mass murder of the Holodomor. But how to be a hero of a wicked regime once its crimes have been exposed?

During a previous stay in Ukraine, I met a regional leader of the lingering Communist Party, mainly a party of nostalgic elderly people disorientated and left out after the end of the regime. He came across as a kindly, decent man, courteous and friendly. But how, I could not help asking myself, in the light of what we know about the famine and other monstrosities of the communist period, could he continue to fly the banner of a party with such a heritage, with such a responsibility? Should he not rather apologise in the name of his party for the horrors perpetrated in its name?

No doubt the positive personal experiences of some during the communist era, like the feted veterans, outweighed for them its dark side, which most of them must have been aware of, even if only at the dim margins of their consciousness. Although the heroic images at the Rodni Mat statue may be a myth, the sufferings of millions who endured Nazi occupation and fought to defeat it were real enough. But the image presented at Rodni Mat has been brought into disrepute. The older image of the onion domes, the icons and the saints of Lavra, has endured and been revived and holds far greater resonance among Ukrainians today. And the image of the Holodomor memorial, with the statue of the innocent little girl, stands as a far truer testament of the nature of the communist regime than the secular idols of Rodni Mat.