THERE ARE FEW PLACES on earth as politically volatile as the
lands that lie between Russia and the rest of Europe. Both coveted
and despised, this protean corridor of unobstructed terrain has been a
stomping ground for every grandiose politician - East or West - whose
imagination was ever kindled by dreams of conquest.
"For a thousand years, the
geography of the borderlands
dictated their destiny,"
writes Spectator deputy editor Anne Applebaum in
her probing portrait of the territory
that embraces eastern Germany, Lithuania.
Belarus, Moldova, Eastern Poland and the
Ukraine. "Five centuries ago an army on
horseback could march from a castle on the
Baltic to a fort on the Black Sea without
meeting a physical obstacle greater than a
fast-running river or a wide forest. Even
now, a spy running east from Warsaw to Kiev
would find nothing natural to obstruct him."
And so for centuries the people of these
frontiers endured carnage and plunder, slipping
in and out of identities faster than a cartographer
could record the changes: Mongols invaded,
and then Turks, Swedes, Muscovites, Moldovan princes,
Cossacks, Teutonic Knights, Polish kings, German emperors,
Nazis, Soviet hordes - each raid more catastrophic
than the last. The Swedes destroyed the cities, the
Cossacks set fire to the villages, the Teutonic Knights
brought on a holocaust, wiping out all trace of indigenous
Prussians. "But most of the time," writes Applebaum,
"the Polonizations and Prussifications and Russifications
came to nothing. The borderlands were simply too wide and
too empty, it was too difficult for any invading nation
to maintain permanent rule."
Because of this failure to bring about long-term change
there were, until recently, no nation-states as we know them today.
"For a thousand years the people of the borderlands
spoke their dialects and worshiped their gods,
while the waves of invaders washed over them, mingled, receded,
and washed over them again." Today a traveler can encounter a
native Pole, a person raised in the Soviet Union, a citizen of
the new Belarus - and they in fact may all be one man, an individual
who has never set foot outside his father's village.
A borderland peasant asked his nationality in the 18th century
probably would have replied " tutejszj" - "a person from here."
That sense of the existential still persists. A scene
in Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum captures the mindset:
It is 1945, and as Soviet soldiers pour into the borderlands, terrorizing
the locals, the protagonist's grandmother refuses to flee east or west,
"I am not German enough!" she cries. "And I am not Polish enough, either!"
She belongs to her potato field; it is the only allegiance she considers
worthwhile.
After the war, it was Stalin's plan to have the borderlands "disappear
into Soviet Russia: Call it ethnic cleansing, to use a phrase coined later
in another context, or call it cultural genocide. Either way, it was
very successful." The region was transformed beyond recognition. Whole
nations slid beyond memory, and we in the West hardly took notice,
Kiev became a Russian city, Lithuania a Russian province, and the
colorful, variegated cultures of the borderlands were relegated to
the dusty shelves of emigre bookshops.
Applebaum's Between East and West is a
heroic attempt to bring the region back into
our collective consciousness. Armed with 35 maps and a "forensic passion,"
she leads us into this forgotten land, holding a close mirror to its
villains and heroes and letting us see it warts and all.
She begins, fittingly, in Kaliningrad - Koenigsberg - a district once
famed as the City of Enlightenment - Kant's city - before it was purged
of Prussians and reravaged centuries later by Soviet troops.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" someone asks her on the streets
of the now hideous city. The man is a Belarusian from Pinsk, a slave
laborer in a German prison factory during the war. It is the first of
a multitude of encounters that will lead Applebaum - and us - to a
clearer understanding of who these people are and how history has
transformed their lives.
In Lithuania and the Polish kresy - the outlying, disputed
hinterland - Applebaum encounters the core of hatred that has set
neighbor against neighbor for 50 years. Before the war, some Jews,
encouraged by Soviet propaganda, had collaborated with the communists;
some Lithuanians, encouraged by the Nazi propaganda, had helped send
Jews to concentration camps. "Afterward," writes Applebaum,
"no one remembered that the Red Army had also murdered Jews, or
hat the Nazis had also murdered Lithuanians. "The outcome had been
too dire to parse history that finely: One in ten Lithuanians was
either dead or deported. Several million Poles were forcibly removed
from their homes in Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine, and sent West.
"When it was over, the mixed multiethnic kresy had disappeared
forever. Most of the Poles were gone from
the region, most of the Jews were dead." But
the bitterness remains.
Applebaum negotiates the region intrepidly, suffering
the hardscrabble existence of a traveler in these parts,
looking up improbable witnesses, hitch-hiking with drink-sodden
peasants, arguing history with strangers on the street.
Her insights are sharp, her sympathies far-ranging.
Always there is an unblinking eye on her subjects'
life stories, a finger on history, and a well-tuned ear for
subtle ironies and unexpected poetry.
Whether negotiating with a slick Mafia hotel
manager in L'vov or bedding down with a
pestiferous anti-Semitic harridan in Nowogrodek,
Applebaum reveals an intelligence and sensibility that
are rare in this brand of quick-sweep expeditionary journalism.
But the book is not free of flaws. As we progress from
Kamenets Podolsky to Kishinev to Odessa, we sense a
progressive impatience in our host. When she wraps up her
trip and boards a boat for Istanbul and "the West" with a
distinct sense of relief, we cannot help but recall her
initial statement of purpose: that what she had set out to find
was "proof that difference and variety can outlast an imposed
homogeneity; testimony, in fact, that people can survive
any attempt to uproot them." Applebaum's rush to be
done with her book ultimately leaves her reader hanging on that
question. We understand that history has made the people of the
borderlands at once indomitable and chameleonesque, but that is
our conclusion; Applebaum never tells us hers.
That said, Between East and West is an indispensable guide
to a little-known region that may prove as decisive in our
future as it surely has been in our past. As Churchill wrote
when the various nations of the borderlands first proclaimed
their independence, "When the war of the giants has ended, the
war of the pygmies begins." We would do well to know the territory.
Book review
by Marie Arana-Ward
of
At the Crossroads of History
BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
Across the Borderlands of Europe
Click here for a map from page 21 of this book
by Anne Applebaum
(Pantheon, 314 pp, $24)
Marie Arana-Ward was the deputy editor of Book World, the
book review section of the Washington Post when she wrote this review.
She is now the editor. This article appeared in the Sunday issue of
the Washington Post on November 20, 1994.