'Some Godforsaken Province'

After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the poet Aleksander Wat fled to Lwów, already occupied by the Soviets. He was arrested by the NKVD the following year and held in a military prison in that city, then moved to Kiev, the Lubyanka in Moscow, and Saratov, more than five-hundred miles southeast of Moscow. In My Century (trans. Richard Lourie, 1988), Wat describes his arrival in Kiev on a prison train and being shuttled around the city in a Black Maria: 

“The roads were packed dirt, mud; sometimes there’d be a few kilometers of cobblestones. Crooked log cabins, with misshapen thatched roofs, a barracks-like brick building every once in a while. I would have thought I’d been transported back a hundred years to some godforsaken province straight from Dead Souls if the area hadn’t been so depopulated.”

 

A familiar twentieth-century landscape, whether in Warsaw, Vilnius or Phnom Penh. (Cambodia, like Korea, has been called the Poland of Asia.) These are cities not leveled but devoid of most of their former populations. Between 1918 and 1920 alone, Kiev changed hands sixteen times. In 1934, it became the capital of Soviet Ukraine The Nazis occupied it from 1941 to 1943. In 1941, Babi Yar. Wat continues:

 

“Golden autumn. Everything quiet and deserted. When a human form flitted past, it would be dark, indeterminate. The hands on the clock had stopped for good or had been broken off. The clatter and rumble of our vehicle was accompanied by dead silence. We must have passed some trees, but I didn’t notice them; birds must have been chirping, but I didn’t hear them.”

 

The twentieth century’s gift to the clichés of surrealism and science fiction: stopped clocks, empty streets, ghostly human figures. Another Russian offensive is underway in Ukraine.