My mother blossomed under Petlyura even more wonderfully than she had under the Bolsheviks. I offer no interpretation. Admittedly things were quieter in the outlying suburbs. There were no more fires burning in Podol. My mother was distressed by inhumanity of any sort. When people expressed their dislike of Jews she always became upset, refusing to join in. The usual talk was harmless enough. But she would say ‘God has designed a role for each of us. It is not the race or the religion, it is the man or the woman that is important.’ I was thus brought up in a more tolerant atmosphere than most Kievan children. It has helped me understand people, encouraged my humanity, allowed me to mix, without feeling uncomfortable, with all sorts, black or white, high or low. When we heard that French Zouaves had occupied Odessa, in support of Denikin, that the city was ‘colonised by black men’, as the papers put it, we were all horrified. But Mother made a joke of it. ‘It will be lovely,’ she said, ‘to see a bit of extra colour in Ukraine.’ I began to understand how she and my father had come together. She had a broad, humane and trusting faith in the beauty of the world, of people’s natural tendency to help one another. He shared her ideals but felt betrayed by those he had sought to support. People were far more complex and yet far more ordinary than he wished to believe. The socialist Utopia did not spring from the ground overnight. He began to attack those whom he regarded as responsible for threatening his hopes. The simple fact is that my mother was mature, in the way of women, and could see that the best way of improving things was to lead a good, clean, kindly life.
Revolutionists almost invariably attempt to simplify the workings of the human heart. This planet of ours is full of generous, warm-spirited, good-humoured and intelligent women supporting raving, idiotic fools like my father. All that was ever betrayed was his own humanity. How long can a woman live with a jealous man? That is the simple question in which lies the answer to my own background, I think.
Those months of the Directorate became relatively easy. I began to move into the world again. Many of the new politicians were sympathetic to my schemes for mechanisation and industrialisation. ‘We must use the wealth of the Ukraine,’ they said, ‘to make ourselves strong and independent.’ So, for the time being, I became a nationalist, couching my arguments in terms of the province rather than the country. Luckily the letter-heads and cards I had had printed: ALL-UKRAINE ENGINEERING CONSULTANTS,
