“If they say the allies are hurrying to our rescue, do not believe them; the allies are scum.”
“And it began and lasted four years. What happened in the famous city during that period defies description. It was as though H. G. Wells’s atomistic bomb had exploded under the graves of Askold and Dir, for a thousand days it thundered, roared, and blazed not only in Kiev. When the thunder from Heavens (even His patience has a limit) kills all modern writers and a new real Leo Tolstoi appears in about fifty years, a marvelous book will be written about the great battles in Kiev” (from the sketch Kiev City).
Mikhail Bulgakov loved Kyiv with all his heart. He did when a high school, then university student, and as a young physician and loving husband (he and Tatiana Lappa were wed at the Church of St. Nicholas in April 1913), and left it behind the great dividing line set in August 1914. World War I was the beginning of the end of the Old World poetized by the Master with such brilliance. Followed work at a military hospital, participation in the historic Brusilov breakthrough on the Southwest Front in 1916, and an unexpected assignment to a provincial hospital where he met the February 1917 revolution.
We find prophetic words in Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer: “There are historic moments in people’s lives when an apparent, flagrant, and most vicious villainy can only be considered as the greatness of one’s soul, only as the noble gallantry of mankind wrenching free from its fetters.” Being an orthodox monarchist, Bulgakov refused to accept the “madness of those days in March,” that is, the February revolution. He wrote in a letter to his sister Nadiya on December 31, 1917, “I slept and saw a dream: Kyiv with its familiar and beloved faces. In my dream someone played the piano. Will the old times ever return? The present reality is such that I try to live without noticing it without seeing and hearing it! I saw gray crowds smash windows in railroad cars, whistling, yelling, cursing, I saw them strike people. I saw imbecile faces twisted with fury.”
Mikhail Bulgakov returned to Kyiv in early March 1918 (Old Style) to spend the last but one spring in his beloved city. He would finally leave in 1919 and would visit Kyiv several times while living in Moscow, but he would not be able to bear the political, military, and economic orgy.
After the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd [as St. Petersburg was known at the time], the Central Rada took power in Kyiv, supported by tens of thousands of Ukrainian officers and men fresh from the front. Incidentally, the “triumphant march of Soviet power” [that would for decades on end be upheld by Soviet propaganda] was a myth, as the Soviets could seize power for several days in a large part of the former Russian Empire. Ukrainian Socialist Simon Petliura’s troops crushed the Socialist workers’ uprising at the Arsenal Factory in Kyiv with unprecedented cruelty. Very soon on January 26 (February 8, New Style), forces of the Red Army burst into Kyiv. A. Goldenweiser wrote, “The Rada had neither physical nor moral support among the urban masses. And the countryside remained silent.”
In his White Guard, Bulgakov writes that people wearing traditional Ukrainian wide trousers were quickly chased out of the City by gray motley regiments appearing from behind the forest, from the plain leading to Moscow. Talberg said the ones clad in baggy trousers were adventurers and that the roots were traced to Moscow, albeit Bolshevik roots. The fifth coup followed quickly and the Central Rada returned to Kyiv on March 1, 1918, with German and Austria-Hungary’s troops under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He writes in his White Guard about gray German columns marching into the city, wearing red metal wash-basins on their heads. Moscow forces took to their heels after several heavy German artillery blows near the city and hid somewhere behind the misty forest to feed on rotten meat, and men wearing wide trousers dragged their feet back to the city.
The occupiers (numerous Ukrainian historians shamefacedly describe them as having been “invited”) made themselves at home in Kyiv and cared nothing for the Central Rada. Another coup would follow shortly, aided by the Kaiser’s bayonets. And then Pavlo Skoropadsky, a general from Nicholas II’s entourage, came to power. Bulgakov writes that opaque electric balls hummed merrily at the circus on Easter and the place was packed all the way to the cupola. The men in baggy pants (Petliurists) would soon be defeated, Ukraine would remain, but it would be a Ukrainian Hetmanate. Many Kyivans took the operetta seriously (Bulgakov was in Kyiv at the time) and the script had a monarchic touch. Yet the people that had gone through the February and October ordeals were different: for them going back the good old times was out of the question. An uprising was being prepared in Kyiv and the provinces were actually out of control. Enclaves were being formed in guberniyas under the absolute rule of local otamans (warlords). The peasantry’s anarchist Father Nestor Makhno, implacable enemy of the Hetmanate and occupiers was shaping his “republic” in the Huliay Pole. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, an outspoken opponent of the hetman and soon to be head of the Ukrainian Directory, wrote: “What horrible, savage, and immensely cynical and predatory activity began! It was a bacchanalia of class vengeance, extortion, violence, and open pillage. Every village, every village home was imposed a war indemnity, the amount of which was decided by the landlord.”
Bulgakov stresses the illusive quality of hopes for the coming of yet another rescuer, using expressive language verging on grotesque.
Nikolka Turbin in The White Guard writes on the side of the stove: “If they say the allies are hurrying to our rescue, do not believe them; the allies are scum.” Shervinsky, not believing his own words, says that Greeks and two Senegalese division have docked at the Odesa port and are disembarking. Mikhail Bulgakov and his brothers joined the Hetman’s army to fight Petliura, and Skoropadsky fled with the Germans. In The White Guard, Colonel Malyshev tells his men that Hetman Skoropadsky and their commanding officer, Belorukov, have abandoned them and fled in a German train. He denounces them as swine and unspeakable rogues. Then came Petliura and his men started rounding up and shooting White officers, cadets, staging Jewish pogroms. Yet the new government was also doomed. Vynnychenko comments on the reasons for the Directory’s defeat: “The non-Ukrainian residents of Kyiv burned with hatred of the Ukrainian authorities. For example, the otamans naively thought that they could use military means to force the non-Ukrainian bourgeoisie to become Ukrainized.” Suffice it to recall the notorious decree of March 1919, ordering all city signboards translated into Ukrainian “within three days.” Simon Petliura rode the city streets, looking so very smug, happily taking in Ukrainian notices over shop entrances. This was enough for the otaman (and especially Petliura’s) mentality; just so everything looked proper outwardly, on the face of it all.
The people living in Kyiv felt they were losing the value of life (reflected in Bulgakov’s short stories The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor and I Have Killed). In January 1919, the writer was drafted into the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. “The notice read, ‘Upon receiving this, you are to report to the Sanitary Department within two hours to receive an assignment.’ So this was the glorious army leaving dead bodies on city streets and staging pogroms under ‘Father’ Petliura’s command and I was now part of the company, with a red cross armband.” (From I have Killed)
The following excerpt is from the diary of a Kyiv physician, about the coming of the Bolsheviks in February 1919, “They marched out on Khreshchatyk to the accompaniment of the Internationale. The public was shouting hurrah, all baring their heads. All those ‘insulted and humiliated’ rose their heads higher. There was loud talk about the bourgeoisie of which there were plenty in the city. I was fired for reasons of redundancy (02.21.19) and mobilized (02.22.19). Life seems so utterly senseless! This senselessness makes me dead tired.” There was more “order” under the Bolsheviks, but the Cheka basements were being packed as the Red terror began with prison tortures, shootings, and requisitions.
From the diary of a female college student of Kyiv (February 1919): “The Bolsheviks have entered the city today (February 2). Such constant changes in power could drive one insane. Which government do we have since January 1, 1917? There have been the tsarist, provisional, Rada, Bolshevik, Rada, Hetman’s, Directory, and now the Bolsheviks again.”
It was Bulgakov’s last spring in Kyiv. He was leaving for the North Caucasus after being drafted into Denikin’s army in October 1919. Why couldn’t his troops hold the port in Kyiv? In his “Sketches on the Russian Times of Trouble” the author ruthlessly and unequivocally exposes the reasons for the defeat of the White Guard: moral degradation, Jewish pogroms, absence of discipline, but most importantly the fact that “political leaders commanded the revolution and the military did the counterrevolution.”
Petliura’s and Denikin’s men remained in Kyiv after the spring of 1919; those of Denikin threw Petliura’s people out of the city in several hours. Then the Reds came, followed by White Poles in 1920. (At the turn of the second month a Soviet cavalry unit rudely and matter-of- factly rode their horses into the wrong place and the [Polish] gentlemen left the bewitched city within an hour” (from Kiev City), this time meaning to stay away for long. The all-devouring Moloch of Communist power entered Kyiv.
The closing lines of The White Guard are remarkably penetrating: All will pass: the suffering, blood, hunger, epidemics. The sword will vanish, but the stars will remain after even the shadows of our bodies and deeds will have disappeared from the face of the earth. There is not a single person who dies not know this. Then why do we not want to raise our eyes to them? Why?
