Byzantium Endures

A brief account is to be found in Appendix B (p.398). I have been content to rely very heavily on Lobkowitz’s own understanding of the situation in the Ukraine at this time, on the few occasions where I needed to clarify the narrative. One thing is obvious: considerable issues were at stake there. With its history of bloody

Cossack fighting, its appalling pogroms (notably those of 1905-6), its geographical position as a ‘border-land’ (which is what U-kraine actually means) rich in mineral and agricultural wealth, it would always have suffered violence, given the nature of the times. But without Bolshevik and Allied intervention it is fair to say it might not have suffered so much violence (including Stalin’s planned famines) at least until the German invasion of 1941 where all the terrors were repeated with increased force and efficiency. In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world and that is one of the reasons why I became so fascinated by Pyat’s account. It was why I thought it was worth trying to make some sort of linear story out of material which was in its original state almost entirely associative and non-linear.

I had no interest at all in the Ukraine or its troubles until I met Colonel Pyat and I must admit that many of my ideas about the Russian Empire, developed from information he gave me, have since proved at very least inadequate. His view of events in Russia between 1900 and 1920 is as biased as any other view he held and Lobkowitz suggests that I make it clear to the reader that Pyat’s accounts are not always to be taken as accurate impressions of what was happening during that period, although, apparently, many of his claims, where simple fact is involved, have been adequately verified.

He was a difficult and exhausting man to interview and working with him took more than two years out of my life. (Editing the rest of his manuscript, which will tell his story up to the concentration camps and 1940, will take much longer.) Yet I look back almost with nostalgia to those Sunday afternoon sessions when my wife and I would visit his untidy two-storey flat and listen to his frequently harsh, sometimes sardonic, sometimes rolling tones as he pontificated against this race and that, against this political party and the other, against everyone who, in his view, had conspired to cheat him of his just rewards on Earth.

The flat was over his shop. It had originally been an ordinary second-hand clothes shop where, as a boy, I had often bought pieces of worn-out Edwardian finery. I think it had been one of Mrs Cornelius’s sons - almost certainly Frank - who, in the 1960s, had suggested renaming it ‘The Spirit of St Petersburg Used Fur Boutique’ to exploit the boom in tourism and fashion, which was to me a most unwelcome development. The premises are now run by a Hindu family which sells clothes manufactured in the new sweatshops of the East End.

Colonel Pyat’s place smelled of the former owners of his stock: of moth-balls, stale perfumes and sour old age; of bortsch and a brand of Polish vodka he favoured called Starka, a matured, mellow vodka with the colour of Irish whiskey. The vodka was his single extravagance and I believe he drank it because it was a private link with the Russia of his boyhood. It is for some reason cheaper than brands like Stolichnaya which are more familiar to Westerners, but it is almost impossible to buy in England. He obtained his supply, I gather, through Russian seamen spending their shore-leave in London and Tilbury. It had a more pungent odour than most vodka and was also a stronger proof. He only once offered us a glass, and that in return for some papyrussa cigarettes I had been able to obtain for him during my own travels.