What surfaced, like detritus from wrecked and violated ships, was disgusting: we saw half-eaten human corpses, not savaged by beasts, but by men and women. Peasants were now being shot for cannibalism, for selling human flesh as animal-meat. We saw burnt-out cottages and farms; the shells of honourable old mansions; the broken skeletons of ploughs and carriages; the bodies of untended cattle and sheep, hides and fleeces rotting on stinking bones. It was our shame. We had hidden it in winter, as we always do. But when buds were on those trees not smashed by shells, when shoots sprang from earth not desecrated with oil and fire and human filth, our crimes were revealed. No enemy had committed these atrocities, unless it was Karl Marx. This had been done in the name of the Ukrainian nation: in the name of Russia: in the name of Unity: in the name of Humanity: in the name of Brotherly Love. No Crusade was ever more shamefully perverted. The Holy Sepulchre had been stolen from our hearts. And guilt, as guilt will, made our soldiers even more savage. The tales we heard were terrible: of Jews and Whites toasted over fires on sheets of steel, of mutilations and rape; of the most disgusting sexual atrocities committed on men and women. Spring came, but not peace. In Russian the word for World is Peace; the word for Peace is Us; they are all derivations of the same thing: the word for Us is Earth. That is why we speak of ‘our earth, our world, our peace, ourselves’; why we make that identification foreigners rarely understand. To violate our earth is to violate everything. We are not mystics. It is only our language which is mystical. Because of its resonances. It gives us our great literature, our poetry, our songs, our music. It makes associations a German, for instance, cannot begin to perceive unless he speaks Russian lovingly and fluently. The steppe-dweller becomes touchy and despairing if his land is attacked by unnatural things. The Cossacks fought not for Bolshevism, not for Whites or Greens or Blacks; they fought, purely and simply, against the roads, the railways, the cities. Their idyllic Russia was a Russia of wide skies and small villages, of horses and cattle. If they could have accepted the twentieth century, the world would have been sweet for them. They would have been able to create more freedom than any they had previously known. But they attacked a town to raze it, to loot it, to take their booty home. Even Hrihorieff, even Makhno, both of them strategists of great cunning and not illiterate men, could not understand that the cities were fundamental to their world. This ignorance was the chief cause of their downfall. Control of the cities was the key to the freedom they sought. They discussed this, but they did not feel it. A Cossack must feel something in his bones before he can accept it. It was the Jew, the world over, who controlled the cities; he is its first real, instinctive modern city-dweller. Even those in the shtetls hated the steppe.
Our Ukrainian war was the first great war between Urban- and Country-dweller. To survive today, one must league oneself with the city. Those who leave are at best sentimentalists, at worst deserters. Ukraine was a land of wealthy industrial cities drawing on our mineral resources; of wealthy kulaks drawing on our infinite wheatlands. More than anywhere else in Russia, Ukraine displayed both the dilemma and the solution. That is why we have suffered so much up to the present day. I do not speak from self-pity. There is little of that in my nature. I speak objectively. The problem could have been defined. It could have been remedied. Ukraine could have become the world’s first modern civilisation. Trotsky and the Nationalists between them put an end to that. Two negative forces collided. Ego: they all thought they knew best. Chaos and Old Night were released upon the world.
