Double-edged Diversity

...Things couldn't get worse' The optimist says cheerfully, "Oh, yes, they could'" Bern een East and West is a timely and insightful book that sheds light on a relatively little-known corner of the former USSR One hopes that CNN will never be covering it daily on oui television sets...

...Pi ussian Nights (movingly translated by Robert Conquest) Solzhemtsyn was a young soldier in that rampaging Army, and he saw what he describes Tlie little daughter's on the mattress, Dead How many have been on it...

...A platoon a company perhaps'' A girl's been ha ned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse An editor of a local newspaper, the one time Komsomolskaya Ptavda, tells Applebaum that in school she had never learned Kaliningrad was once German Now, she says, she knows more She takes special pride m her city's famous philosopher and believes it should be renamed Kantgrad Like other members of her generation, born to veterans of the War, she has come to consider herself "Baltic Russian," not Russian "Unconsciously," the author observes, "she had adopted the attitude of the Germans before her Here, the Baltic coast, was civilized There, the East—that was barbaric " The next stop is Vilnius, where tensions between the Lithuanians and the Polish minority—united centuries ago in common cause against the Germans?are reflected in a controversy over the capital's very name To the Poles, Vilnius is ancient Wilno, birthplace of Jozef Pil-sudski, their great military commander and first chief of state after World War I, whose heart is buried m the Polish cemetery (The body lies in Krakow) Applebaum writes "It was the first time I had run into the borderlands' confusion over names Lithuanian Vilnius fought constantly against Polish Wilno, Ukrainian L'viv disputed Polish Lwow" A professor she talks to at the university recalls a linguistic battle that raged when a scholar tried to prove the Lithuanian language was the indigenous tongue A Polish newspaperman complains of official discrimination and the gradual eradication of his culture Lithuanians fear that Polish irredentists will someday invade Almost 50 per cent of the capital's pie-World War II population spoke Yiddish, the author notes She fails to point out, however, that Vilnius was the Vilna Jews had lived in since the 14th century Known as the "Jerusalem of Lithuania,' it was a major center of Jewish culture and learning Nowhere m her erudite recital of history and mythology, moreover, does Applebaum indicate that much of the vast territory this book covers was, from 1791 until 1917, the Jewish Pale of Settlement Not that she lgnoies anti-Semitism, past or present Her own ancestral Jewish roots are in the Belarusian town of Kobnn, which the Nazis entered on the second day of their Soviet offensive A visit to the villages of EisTskes and Radun, situated on opposite sides of the boundary between Lithuania and Belarus, yields poignant portraits of the remnant of Holocaust survivors There are also evocations of those who did not escape the mass shootings "In this part of the world, there had been no locked ghettos, no trains, no camps Here so far from civilization, the sentiments of the local population did not need to be taken into account, death did not need to be hidden The local police could be counted on to cooperate, or at least not to fight back So there was no need, as in West-em Europe, to take the Jews somewhere else to die " The victims in Radun were rounded up, marched to an open field adjoining the town cemetery, and shot in mass grav es they were f irst forced to dig There is a Soviet monument at the site, bearing an equivocal inscription reminiscent of the one placed at Babi Yar during the waning years of Communist Kiev "Here Lie Buried 1,137 Peaceful Soviet Citizens Shot m 1942 by German Fascists " The Jews of Eisiskes, Applebaum is told, were dispatched in the same way Although she doesn't mention it, this is the town whose Jewish life has been immortalized in the U S Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D C Hundreds of photographs of 65 families—displayed m a Tower of Faces several floors high—were painstakingly gathered from survivors by Yaffa Eliach, professor of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College A native of Eisiskes (in Yiddish, Eishishok), Eliach herself contributed a collection of pictures taken by her grandparents, the town photographers Throughout her travels, Applebaum shows a keen eye for memorable vignettes In Lithuania there is Father Stanislovas, a Catholic priest who waged a "private war against conformity, against enforced equality, against the Soviet personality' by preserving from ruin tokens of the indigenous culture crosses and keys of all sizes and shapes, and vestments for every kind of religious ceremony Storing them m the rectory, he created rooms "where God could be content when He visited Lithuania' In Belarus, she meets two poets One of them, Pan Michal, converses with her in Polish rhymed couplets and declaims the nostalgic legend of a local Romeo and Juliet The other, Igor, is a younger man from Mmsk Despising the Socialist Realist kitsch that Moscow imposed on his country, he has become a leader in the revival of folk art and long-suppressed national traditions Then there is Marta A Ukrainian patriot, she moved from the United States to L'viv in 1989 to help the city recover its past glory This capital of western Ukraine, called Lemberg under the Haps-burgs, is graced by the elegant architecture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Marta threw herself into restoring the old Grand Hotel—a project filled with frustration and conflict—hoping to attract international tourists to her adoptive home Further south, m Chernivtsi (once Czernowitz), a Russian professor whose father was compelled to leave Moscow during Stalin's time also expresses strong support of an independent Ukraine But like other Russians of the "near abroad," he worries about a rising tide of Ukrainian nationalism wrecking his family's comfortable life In Kishinev, the capital of Moldova, Applebaum's guide is a fiercely proud Romanian named Nico He curses Communists and exalts the Romanian character with almost excessive zeal His temper only worsens as they cross over mto Transdmestra, the Russian-dominated section of Moldova that has rejected independence and remained loyal to Moscow The spokesman for the Trans-dmestran president strikes the author as a Russian bureaucrat straight out of Gogol's Inspector General?almost certainly a spoiler, someone sent [by Russian nationalists] to cause trouble for independent Moldova " On the other hand, Nico spends so much energy condemning the iniquities of Russia that she imagines he too might be the agent of a foreign government By the time Applebaum ends her trip, in sui gener is Odessa, she has successfully demonstrated that diversity has outCorrection Anatole Shub's review of Dmitri Vol-kogonov'sLenin A New Biography which appeared in our Winter Books Issue, contained a reference to Lenin's covert collaboration with Imperial Germany "between May 1915 and July 1916' The last digit was a typographical error The dates should have read, "between May 1915 and July 1918 " The political significance of the difference will surely be apparent to New Leader readers lasted Soviet Gleitlischaltuiig in the bor-deilands Still, one wonders whether the age-old hatieds that have elsewhere exploded into hot wars will someday embroil this legion For while it is currently thriving with creativity, it is life with uninhibited antagonisms Indeed, as Russia's ultranationalists rail against NATO's plan to expand its cordon samtan e around Eastein Europe I can't help thinking of the Russian anekdot about the difference between the pessimist and the optimist The pessimist says gloomily...

...Double-edged Diversity Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe By Anne Applebaum Pantheon 314 pp $24 00 Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty THE PLAIN of Eastern Europe between Poland and Russia is so flat that, as Anne Applebaum reminds us, "five centuries ago, an army on horseback could march from a castle on the Baltic to a fort on the Black Sea without meeting a physical obstacle greater than a fast-running river or a wide forest" These borderlands were vulnerable from both West and East In medieval times the invaders included Lithuanians (the last pagans in Europe who worshiped trees) and Poles, Teutonic Knights (who galloped across the screen in Sergei Eisenstein's^/excOTito Nevskv) and Mongols of the Golden Horde They were followed later by Muscovites, Moldovan princes, Cossacks, Napoleon's Grande Armee, and, of course, Hitler's Panzer divisions and the avenging Red Army that pursued them back to Germany The author, a Polish-speaking American, is deputy editor of the Spectatoi in London and a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist She crossed this level killing field just before and after the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent republics What a gutsy woman to have traveled by herself, carrying dollars and riding at times with such doubtful characters as black marketeers' Her account of the experience combines pertinent historical background with empathy for the many ethnic groups that were victims of cleansing long before Bosnia Speaking with people high and low from 20 cities and towns, Kaliningrad to Odessa, she uncovers the conflicts that persist among the region's disparate nationalities "There were days," Applebaum recalls, when it seemed as if no one could talk of anything that was not tragic, as if no one remembeied anything without bitterness But then there were other days, days when I would, quite unexpectedly, meet someone who saw the past not as a burden but as a forgotten story, now due to be retold, there were days when I would find an old house, an old church, or something unexpected like the cemetery in L'viv, which suddenly revealed the secret history of a place or a nation That was part of what I was looking for evidence that things of beauty had survived war, Communism and Russification, proof that difference and variety can outlast an imposed homogeneity, testimony, in fact, that people can survive any attempt to uproot them " Applebaum's journey begins in the Baltic port of Kaliningrad, known from 1255 to 1945 as the German city of Ko-mgsberg, home of Immanuel Kant Today it is an enclave of the Russian Republic, separated from Western Russia by Lithuania and Belarus The Soviet troops that captured the city in April 1945 caused enormous devastation Monuments were burned, the populace raped and slaughtered Applebaum talks with several surviving witnesses to these atrocities, adding to their testimony a passage from Aleksandr Solzhemtsyn's long narrative poem...