Kyiv

“ Whitelaw Reid has declared Kiev to be one of the four picturesque cities in Europe; certainly it lies in a heavenly place, all up and down hills, with such vistas down the streets to where a mosque raises its gilded dome, or where an historic bronze statue stands out against the horizon. If Kiev had been planned by the French, it could not be more utterly beautiful. The domes of the cathedrals are blue, studded with gold stars; or else pale green or all gold, and the most exquisite churches in all Russia are in Kiev. ”

“ We have been in Kiev several days. Our passports have been handed in to the police station to be viséed and put in order for our return trip to Bucharest. They say a human being in Russia is made of body and passport.
Kiev is full of color. It is framed in green trees that hide the ugliness of modern buildings and seem to lift the gold and silver domes of the churches up into the air. And how many churches there are! Kiev is in truth a holy city. Late afternoon, when the sun shines through the dust of the day and envelops the city in golden powder ”

“ And have you now the heart to slay me, a poor helpless cripple? Know you not that a great calamity has befallen the famous city of Kiev? An unbelieving knight, with a head as big as a beer-barrel, eyebrows a span apart, and shoulders six feet broad, has entered it? He devours a whole ox at a time, and drinks off a barrel of beer at a draught. The Prince is lamenting your absence.”
Then Iliya of Murom drew the cripple’s cloak around him, rode off to the city of Kiev, and going straight up to the Prince’s palace, cried aloud, “Ho there, Prince of Kiev! give alms to a poor cripple.” ”

“ Kerensky’s fiercest battle last summer was with Ukrania, where a real government was established. It was real enough at all events to force a kind of recognition from the central Provisional Government. Ukrania is an enormous territory in the south of Russia. It extends into southwestern Siberia and southward to the Black Sea. Odessa is its principal port, and within its borders are many important cities. Kiev is one of the largest of these. About 35,000,000 people inhabit the Ukraine, as it is called in Russia. The people are not Russian, strictly speaking. ”

“ Since July war has come nearer Kiev. The hospitals are full of maimed and wounded soldiers who fought to defend Russia. They made a bulwark of their breasts. It was as though one single giant breast, hundreds of versts broad, thrust itself between the Germans and home.
And it is winter now. The days are short with an icy, gray mist from the Dnieper, and flurries of snow. There is a shortage of coal, and we sit shivering in our apartment. We drag the covers off the beds and wrap ourselves up in them while we read books from the circulating library or play three-handed bridge. ”

“ The Ukrainian historical tradition has its roots in the ancient Kingdom of Kiev. Altho the historians of Eastern Europe are still undecided as to whether the so-called Old Russian Kingdom was founded by the Varangians in the present Northern Russia, or by the Eastern Slavic tribes of the south in Kiev, I have no doubt that the latter view should be approved. Anthropogeography knows no instance of a pirate band, at most a few thousand strong, which, within a few decades, could constitute a kingdom embracing half a continent. ”

“ Determined to continue my journey through Russia, I proceeded towards Kiow, the principal city of the Ukraine, and formerly of all Russia, for this empire began by fixing its capital in the South. The Russians had then continual communication with the Greeks established at Constantinople, and in general with the people of the East, whose habits they have adopted in a variety of instances. The Ukraine is a very fertile country, but by no means agreeable; you see large plains of wheat which appear to be cultivated by invisible hands, the habitations and inhabitants are so rare. ”

“ How strange it will be to have no longer a Russian army between the Germans and Kiev. No more a wall of flesh to protect us. Poor soldiers, without a round of ammunition, fighting with naked hands. They will cross the Dnieper to one side of the city, crowding, fighting, falling together. And the German cannon driving them on, and crashing into the city, sometimes, wiping out whole streets of townspeople. And then, the gray lines of the Germans running into Kiev. The thousands of blue-eyed Germans and their pointed helmets and guttural speech taking possession of everything. ”

“ In the north, along their native shores, the Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes had attained a notable degree of political development and a high level of civilisation. On the Black Sea lay the outposts of the Byzantine empire; all the great rivers of Russia led southward, and across the Black Sea was the route to Constantinople.
The political organisation of Novgorod dates from the ninth century, but at the close of this century Kiev became the capital of the Russian realm. ”

“ It must not be forgotten that half-educated, or half uneducated, masses are probably the weakness to-day of most other civilised nations.
Some business on a small scale, however, is transacted at the various fairs held in Kiev, such as the great fair at the beginning of the Russian year. There are many beet-root sugar refineries, the staple industry of the country, and next come leather tanneries, worked leather, machinery, spirits, grain and tobacco. Wax candles are manufactured in huge quantities, and in the monastery there is a very ancient printing-press for religious books. ”

“ For every new case of arson or sabotage, several times this number will be shot. Every inhabitant of Kiev is obliged to report any suspects to the German police. I shall maintain order and calm in Kiev by all measures at my disposal and under any circumstances.
“Kiev, 2 November 1941; Eberhard, Major General and City Commandant.”
I refer to another document which has not even been partially read into the record. I refer to Exhibit Number USSR-63 (Document Number USSR-63) of the Commissar of the Djerjinski District Council of the city of Stalingrad. ”

“ This term was later appropriated by the Great Russians. "Because of the Byzantine commerce, learning and craft," observes the Polish historian Zakrzewski, "Kiev, the 'mother of Russ cities,' was for the Poland of the eleventh and twelfth centuries what Rome had been for earlier Germans." The French geographer Reclus notices that academies flourished at Kiev and Ostrog before the Great Russians owned a single high school, and draws attention to the fact that Russia, during the regenerative period of Peter the Great, received her teachers from Ukraine. ”

“ Oldtime commerce, that of Russia at any rate, must not be thought of as sharply contrasted with militarism. Trade, or to be concrete, the traders, proceeding by land in caravans and by water in fleets of river-going or seaworthy vessels, travelled on a warlike footing, and were organised for war. The trader was also a conqueror, and on occasions a robber or a pirate. Kiev was certainly occupied by such warlike "traders" from Novgorod, and thus became the capital of the realm.
The first development of the state and of civilisation in general took place in fortified towns. ”

“ It is self-evident that a government adapted to the requirements of a village community must assume a different character as soon as the settlement gains in extent and assumes the character of a city. And cities grew up quite early in northern and southwestern Russia. Toward the end of the ninth century Kiev had a wide fame as a large and populous city. Constantine Porphyrogenitus also knows of Novgorod, Smolensk, Linbetch, Tchernigov, Vishgorod, and Vititchev; in the time of Igor more than twenty cities can be named. ”

“ The whole rose is there. It is a solid soft pink mass, and it tastes just as a tea-rose smells. It is simply celestial.
We dearly love Kiev, it is so hauntingly beautiful. You can’t forget it. Your mind keeps returning to it, but it is the sort of beauty that you can’t describe satisfactorily. It is like your mother’s face. You can see the beauty for yourself, but no one else can see it as you do, for the love which is behind it.
In Odessa we began to leave Russia behind us. Odessa is all sorts of a place. ”

“ Are you willing that it become known in America that you prefer to have valuable historical material rot away in Kiev rather than give it to the Petrograd Museum, which is sure to become a world centre for the study of the Russian Revolution and where Ukraina is to have such an important part? ”

“ For the Ukraine, as for all the nationalities of the Russian Empire, the Revolution of 1905 was the bursting of a dam behind which had gathered the pent-up forces of many generations. In South Russia the democratic movement at once assumed a national Ukrainian form, and its swift progress surprised even its own adherents. After thirty years of utter suppression there suddenly sprang up a flourishing Ukrainian press at Kiev, Harkov, Odessa, Poltava, Yekaterinoslav, and Mohilev. ”

“ At Kiev people still remember that the earliest Russian civilization had its beginnings in the Ukraine. There Christianity first took root, and there were the first Russian Princes.
Before Shevchenko’s arrival there was organized at Kiev the Society of Cyril and Methodius, called after the great apostles of Russia, and the leading spirits of the Society were professors in the University of Kiev.
Into this brilliant company Shevchenko was welcomed. Its leaders became his devoted friends. A chair of painting in the University was to be established for him. ”

“ Kiev is the most convenient emporium for the forest and grain regions of the Ukraine, which border on one another here. In the last decades a considerable factory industry has developed in Kiev, embracing all possible branches of industry. Above all, the sugar industry has its center here. Kiev has a Russian University and a technical college. Ukrainian cultural life, which has always had its main headquarters in Kiev, has experienced an unexpected rise here since 1905. ”

“ For no one is able to repeat the impressions which fill the soul of every Ukrainian when he looks down from this beautiful observation point of Shevchenko’s grave upon the majestic river below. How many thoughts, then, arise about the glorious, and yet so unspeakably sad, past of the Ukraine, about its miserable present and the great future toward which the nation tends, amid great difficulties, as does the Dnieper toward the Black Sea over the porohs. ”

“ Kiev on the Dnieper was the mother of Russian culture; Moscow and St. Petersburg became afterwards the heirs of Kiev.
Another factor of vital historical importance which had an indirect effect on the history of Russian literature was the coming of the Norsemen into Russia at the beginning of [Pg 11] the ninth century. They came as armed merchants from Scandinavia; they founded and organized principalities; they took Novgorod and Kiev. The Scandinavian Viking became the Russian Kniaz, and the Varanger principality of Kiev became the kernel of the Russian State. ”

“ In 882 he set out from Novgorod with an army composed of Varangians and the subject Slavo-Finnish tribes—Tchuds, Merians, Vesians, Ilmen Slavs, and Krivitchi—sailed down the upper Dnieper, took Smolensk, freed the Radimichi and the Severians from the yoke of the Chazars and incorporated them in his empire, and finally reached Kiev. Askold and Dir were then got rid of by an act of treachery, and Kiev was made the capital of an empire embracing nearly all the eastern Slavs. ”

“ What petty town is this of Kiev? My palace alone covers five miles, my halls of white oak [164] are hung with pelts of the grey beaver, the roof with skins of the black sable. The floors are of silver and the locks and bars are of steel.
“Furthermore, Prince Vladimir, I have thirty young men in my hire, each one a master shoemaker. With never a pause the thirty continue making shoes, and I wear a pair for one day and only by a chance wear them a second day. ”

“ The mingling of nations and races has important bearings upon the origins of Kiev and Novgorod. It is unquestionable that Finnish and other European and Asiatic racial elements enter into the composition of the Russian people, but it is today impossible to ascertain with anything approaching precision, when, whence, and how these interminglings and Russifications occurred. In the present state of research it is extremely hazardous to make extensive use of theories of race and nationality to explain the characteristics of Kievic Old Russia. ”

“ Kiev, with Pereiaslavl, is the only one strictly confined within it; but Volhinia puts the basin of the Dnieper in communication with those of the Bug in the south and of the Vistula; Polotsk connects it with the basins of the Niemen and the Dvina, Novgorod-Seversk with that of the Don, Tchernigov and Smolensk with that of the Volga. Between these principalities, water-courses everywhere establish communications. Russia, though divided into appanages, was already making toward a great united empire. ”

“ In Kiev, though there is every sign of its being in the minds of all, materially the war is hardly felt. It is in fact wonderful how little effect of this kind it seems to have made on the body of Russia. On the other hand, the atmosphere of nervous tension begins to disappear the moment one begins to get really near to the front. ”

“ As the weeks went on, the rumors grew thicker and there began to come through to Poland, our land of the fields, the news that the country lands of the Ukraine were ablaze. Then it was heard that Kiev had fallen, then Lvov, the city of the Lion, and now there was naught between the savage band of warriors and the fair city of Krakow, save a few peaceful villages and fertile fields.
The Tartars came through the world like a horde of wild beasts. They left not one thing alive nor one green blade of wheat standing. ”