Where East and West Come Apart

On first opening Anne Applebaum's splendid book, I looked for the photographs you would naturally expect to find in a political and cultural travelogue of this kind. Later, I realized that to have included them would have been a mistake. For with the exception of a handful of historic cities -- Vilnius, Lviv, Odessa -- there is little of man-made beauty in the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Nor are its inhabitants in general easy on the eye. Their photographs would have shown only the standardized post-Soviet workers, peasants and black marketeers we all know and love. But there are still at least a few jewels left beneath the grimy, Sovietized blankness, and Anne Applebaum has uncovered them.


Spiritually, her journey was made not in fact through the Western borderlands of the former Soviet Union, but through the Eastern borderlands of the former Poland. With the exception of Moldova and Odessa, the places she visited are all part of "historic Poland," and were lost first to the Russian Empire in the 18th century and then, after a brief restoration of Polish rule, to the Soviet Union in 1939.


Anne Applebaum's family originates in the Jewish shtetls of this region. Her husband, Radek Sikorski, is descended from the minor Polish nobility. She is also an American who has chosen to work in London and identify with British conservatism. On the basis of her own mixture of cultures and perceptions, Applebaum has woven both a vivid and beautifully written travelogue and a wonderfully sensitive account of the different historical and cultural traditions of the region, and how they continue to flow, or at least to trickle, beneath the present post-Soviet face of the human landscape.


The murder of most of the Jews, and the expulsion of most of the Poles, between 1939 and 1947 makes the hunt for their relics in this area an almost archaeological task. Many of the post-Soviet people Applebaum meets, especially in Belarus, are also hunting for some tradition and identity to call their own. In Novogrudok, birthplace of the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Applebaum meets a local Russian girl, Svetlana, who tells her that life in Novogrudok is "very much not interesting." But she recently learnt about Mickiewicz. "He is from here, and I am from here. And he is a great poet. So Novogrudok must be interesting." After a visit to westernized, relatively wealthy Poland, she is now trying desperately to become Polish, and begs Applebaum to help her.


In Minsk she meets a much stranger phenomenon, but one moved by some of the same impulses -- a Belarussian who loves Jews. Not the Jews of today, but "the Jews of the past: the Jews with ringlets round their ears, the Jews in long black coats, the Jewish women in wigs, the Jewish children who studied Talmud and Torah by candlelight, the Jews whose culture once dominated Minsk. He could list the names of the great rabbis, always putting the accent in the right place: 'It was important to them that the names should be right, so it should be important to us,' he told me."


After decades in which their historical meaning was forgotten not just by Europe but by their own surviving inhabitants, the borderlands are today once again a theme of great international importance. Under all the diplomatic blather about "common security" and so on, the debate over the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe is at bottom about where the borders of Europe lie, and whether Russia lies inside or outside them.


Not surprisingly, given her background, Applebaum's book is written from a strongly anti-Russian perspective. This is understandable, and mostly correct. Russian, let alone Soviet, rule brought no good and much evil to this region -- even if Polish rule was also not always as civilized and enlightened as Poles would like to believe. On occasion, however, her sympathies lead her to reproduce Ukrainian or Polish nationalist versions of history with little relation to historical reality.


Thus, in describing the struggle of Russian and Ukrainian nationalism for the historical image and legacy of Kievan Rus, she writes that Russians only started presenting themselves as the heirs of Kiev in the late 18th and 19th centuries, as part of a reaction against the West -- in other words, only shortly before Ukrainians began to develop their own historical claims. But this is grotesque. There is indeed a real question about whether late medieval Muscovy had the right to claim the Kievan legacy and the leadership of the Orthodox world. That it did claim these things, from the 15th century on, is not a matter of serious historical debate.


I am also, I must confess, skeptical about some contemporary Polish agendas concerning Russia and the lands between, involving the expansion of NATO and the recasting the Poland in the role of a bulwark of Western civilization against Muscovite barbarism. Of course, it may be that developments in Russia will eventually leave the West no choice but to draw such a line against Russia and cast Poland in this role. But in the meantime, the West retains a great interest in not prematurely trying to push an infuriated Russia back beyond the Polish borders of 1772.





"Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe" by Anne Applebaum, Papermac, 314 pages, ?10 ($16).