“Some did,” Katya admitted starkly. “Not most. Believe me, not most. Not after what we saw.”
At first we had no knowledge. The commissars told us to flee. We stayed fast. They pleaded with us. They told us what horror Hitler wreaks wherever his hordes go. “Your newest lie,” we jeered. Then the German tanks rolled over our horizon, and we learned that for once the commissars had spoken truth. It didn’t happen only to us, either. The war threw me together with people from the whole Soviet Ukraine, not Cossacks, ordinary Little Russians, little people driven to such despair that they fight side by side with the Communists.
Even so, yes, true, thousands and thousands of men have joined the Germans as workers or soldiers. They see them as liberators.
“After all,” she went on hastily, “it’s in our tradition to resist invaders and rise against tyrants.”
The Lithuanians were far away, they mostly left us alone and were content with the name of overlords. But the Polish kings goaded us into revolt, over and over. Mazeppa welcomed the Great Russians in and was made a prince of the Ukraine, but soon he found himself in league with the Swedes, hoping they might set us free. We finally made our peace with the Tsars, their yoke was not unbearably heavy any more; but later the Bolsheviks took power.
Pyotr frowned. “I’ve read about those Cossack rebellions.”
Katya winced. Three centuries fell from her, and she stood again in her village when men—neighbors, friends, two sons of hers—galloped in after riding with Chmielnicki and shouted their boasts. Every Catholic or Uniate priest they or the serfs caught, they hanged in front of his altar alongside a pig and a Jew. “Barbaric times,” she said. “The Germans have no such excuse.”
“And the traitors have less yet.”
Traitors? Vasili the gentle blacksmith, Stefan the laugh-terful, Fyodor the fair who was a grandson of hers and didn’t know it— How many millions of dead there they seeking to avenge? The forgotten ones, the obliterated ones, but she remembered, she could still see starvation shrivel the flesh and dim the eyes, children of hers had died in her arms; Stalin’s creatures shot her man Mikhail, whom she loved as much as the ageless can love any mortal, shot him down like a dog when he tried to take for his family some of the grain they were shipping out in cram-full freight trains; he was lucky, though, he didn’t go on another kind of train, off to Siberia; she had met a few, a few, who came back; they had no teeth and spoke very little and worked like machines; and always you went in fear. Katya could not hold herself in. She must cry, “They had their reasons!”
Pyotr gaped at her. “What?” He rumbled through his mind. “Well, yes, kulaks.”
“Free farmers, whose land that they had from then- fathers was torn from them, and they herded onto kolkhozes like slaves.” Promptly: “That was how they felt, you understand.”
“I don’t mean the honest peasants,” he said. “I mean the kulaks, the rich landowners.”
“I never met any, and I traveled rather widely. Some were prosperous, yes, because they farmed wisely and worked hard.”
“Well, I—I don’t want to offend you, Katya, you of all people, but you can’t have traveled as much as you think. It was before your time, anyway.” Pyotr shook his head. “No doubt many of them meant well. But the old capitalist regime had blinded them. They resisted, they defied the law.”
“Until they were starved to death.”
“Ah, yes, the famine. A tragic … accident?” He ventured a smile. “We’re not supposed to call it an act of God.”
“I said—No matter.” I said they were starved to death. The harvests never failed. The state simply took everything from us. That brought us at last to submission. “I only wanted to say that many Ukrainians feel they have a grievance.” They never quite gave up hope. In their hearts., they resist yet.
Indignation flashed. “They are stupid!”
Katya sighed. “They certainly made a bad mistake, those who went over to the Nazis.”
God help me, I might have myself. If Hitler had been willing, no, if he had been able to treat us as human beings, he would have had us all. This day he would hold Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk; Stalin would cower among his gulags in the farthest comer of Siberia, or be a refugee with the Americans. But no, the fascists burned, raped, slew, tortured, they dashed out the brains of babies and laughed while they machine-gunned children, women, the old, the unarmed, they bayoneted for sport, they racked prisoners apart or doused them with gasoline and set them alight, oh, it sickens me to think of them in holy Kiev!