The Price of Wartime Ambivalence

The Atlantic

7 days ago

A relatively young Ukrainian state, having freed itself from Moscow's grasp, is trying to find its place as an independent nation in a changing world order. Moscow, however, decides to reclaim what it lost and sends an army to take Kyiv. An outnumbered Ukrainian force intercepts the Russian soldiers just north of the city. Ukraine's fate hangs in the balance.
This is a description not of February 2022 but of January 1918, when the Bolsheviks advanced on Kyiv to crush the Ukrainian People's Republic. The country was only months old, and fell quickly. In the ensuing two years, Kyiv changed hands multiple times among competing Tsarist, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, and German armies, but in the end, Moscow prevailed.
It is during these turbulent years that the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov has set his Kyiv mysteries, an ongoing series of crime novels that follows the policeman Samson Kolechko as he negotiates bandits, speculators, and roaming soldiers of various stripes in his quest to keep order amid the chaos caused by war. Kurkov's mysteries contain enough of the typical tropes of crime fiction to keep fans of the genre satisfied. There is the melancholic police officer with a traumatic origin story (Samson's father was murdered by Cossacks during the revolution); there is the long-suffering love interest (level-headed Nadezhda is the perfect foil to anxious Samson); there are eccentric villains (an ailing Belgian thief steals silver in order to make himself a new skeleton); there are chases, shootouts, and puzzles aplenty.
Kurkov's crime capers are deceptive, however. They lure you into seemingly safe generic territory only to subtly undermine your expectations. In the first novel, The Silver Bone, Samson doesn't even join the police force until about a third of the way in, leaving the reader suspended in the tense atmosphere of occupied Kyiv waiting for the story to begin. In the series' second book, The Stolen Heart, which has recently been published in Boris Dralyuk's English translation, the central crime—the illegal sale of pig meat—seems trivial, except that the Bolshevik secret police, or cheka, consider such 'sabotage' punishable by death. These novels are more than detective thrillers: They are studies in the surprising ambivalence that people living under occupation may feel, even when those in power go to extraordinary lengths to cement their rule through violence, manipulation, and terror. And they are important today not just for their insight into the past but also as a guide for surviving the present.
Samson despises the lawlessness that accompanies the breakdown of states, and he yearns for the restoration of order; less important to him is the ideology of the party in power. In a job interview with his soon-to-be commanding officer, he is asked whom he supports: the Tsarists, the Ukrainian nationalists, the German-backed government, or the 'workers' regime'? He answers, 'I sympathize with you.' He knows this vague answer can be interpreted as ideologically acceptable.
But the inhabitants of a police state can drift in ambivalence for only so long before they are compelled to make a moral choice. Samson realizes that arresting speculators and burglars on behalf of the Bolsheviks will not bring back the stability of his middle-class, prerevolutionary youth. Indeed, he isn't immune to the police's aggression simply because he works for them: His furniture, including his late father's beautiful writing desk, is confiscated, and two Red Army soldiers are billeted in his apartment.
There are echoes here of Kurkov's Kyivan literary predecessor, Mikhail Bulgakov, who died in 1940. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard, published in 1925 and set at the same time, is an elegy for Tsarist Kyiv that detests both Ukrainian national aspirations and Bolshevik rule. (Curiously, its theatrical adaptation was a favorite of Stalin's, a fact that kept its author employed through the terror of the 1930s.) The White Guard hinges on the contrast between the cozy bourgeois home of the Turbin family, based on Bulgakov's family home on Kyiv's most picturesque street, and the barbarism unfolding outside. In The Stolen Heart, Samson sees Red Army soldiers violently dispossessing a middle-class family on that same street. At moments like this, Samson begins to doubt his decision to serve the occupation regime: Yes, order is being established, but at what cost? And is order based on legalized violence and theft really order?
Bulgakov would have had little time for a Bolshevik lackey like Samson. His protagonists are uncompromisingly loyal to class and empire, and, in this sense, less interesting than Kurkov's more hesitant characters. As a writer born in Russia who built his career in Ukraine, Kurkov understands what it means to be caught between fiercely competing political and cultural projects (as, indeed, do several million Ukrainians living in areas now occupied by Russia). Many of Kurkov's other books examine how the instinct not to take sides often conflicts with the moral imperative to do so. The protagonist of his 1996 breakthrough novel, Death and the Penguin, for instance, naively thinks he can work for the Mafia while remaining an innocent civilian. The more recent Grey Bees, which is set in the aftermath of Russia's original assault on eastern Ukraine in 2014, revolves around the inhabitants of the no-man's-land between the Ukrainian and Russian armies and their attempts to remain neutral. In the end, keeping your head down is usually unsustainable, and Kurkov's protagonists tend, eventually, to locate their moral backbones.
In this regard, another early-20th-century influence besides Bulgakov lurks in The Stolen Heart: Mykola Khvylovy. The Ukrainian modernist died by suicide in 1933 in protest of Stalin's arrests of Ukrainian writers. His books were banned for decades, and, unlike Bulgakov's, they rarely reached the outside world in translation. His most famous story, 'I (a Romance),' is about a cheka officer who discovers his mother among a group of counterrevolutionaries and is forced by his superiors to execute her. Khvylovy never did such a thing, but he did fight for the Bolsheviks during the Ukrainian wars of independence that followed the 1917 revolution, and in the end he despaired at what the Russians did to his country and his culture. The story ends with the bewildered officer trudging across the war-torn steppe into the uncertain future, haunted by the moral vacuum within.
Near the end of The Stolen Heart, Samson is ordered by a cheka officer to sign an execution warrant for the pork speculator, whom he has finally apprehended. When he refuses to do so, the officer takes Samson's hand, dips his thumb in red ink, and guides it toward the order, leaving a fingerprint in place of a signature: 'The firm red thumbprint looked strange in this rectangle, like that of a criminal,' Samson reflects. That night, he awakens, weeping, from a dream in which he sits beside the coffin of a man with a seeping bullet wound. Looking at his hands, he notices that 'his fingers were smeared with red ink, as if with blood. He knew it wasn't blood. The ink had a chemical scent. The red lines of the verdict issued earlier that day kept rising up in his memory, and a whisper from the darkness kept on repeating, repeating, 'Samson, repent.'' The price of being part of the occupation bureaucracy has become clear.
In his translator's note for The Silver Bone, Dralyuk (who handles Kurkov's wry tone and the novels' historical fabric with characteristic dexterity) writes of contemporary Ukrainians that 'the Samsons of today have a far clearer sense of who they are and where they stand.' This is perhaps why Kyiv did not fall in 2022 as it did in 1918: Ukrainians understood that the 'order' imposed by an occupation would come at the price of their freedom. They chose freedom, even if it brought instability, even at the cost of their safety and, for some, their life. That lesson is relevant far beyond Ukraine, wherever ordinary people face the threat of becoming cogs in the machinery of malevolent administrations.