Anna Reid > Quotes

“One of the most oft-quoted records of the siege, scribbled in pencil over the pages of a pocket address book, is that kept by twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva:

28 December 1941 at 12.30 a.m. – Zhenya died. 25 January 1942 at 3 p.m. – Granny died. 17 March at 5 a.m. – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2 a.m. – Uncle Vasya died. 10 May at 4 p.m. – Uncle Lyosha died. 13 May at 7.30 a.m. – Mama died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. (...) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“Towards the end of the fifteenth century, invaded from the east in its own turn, the Golden Horde fell apart, and the northern princes stopped paying tribute and ruled independently again. But by then the habit of violent, Asiatic-style despotism was there to stay. Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar. Whereas northern Rus fell to the Horde, southern Rus went to the Lithuanians.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today’s Ukraine balances Russia against America.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“I even – sign of the true convert – grew to like salo, the raw pig-fat, eaten with black bread, salt and garlic, that is the national delicacy and star of a raft of jokes turning on the Ukrainian male’s alleged preference for salo over sex.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“The ‘real’ Ukraine, the Ukraine that has outlived armies and ideologies, lies in the countryside. Half an hour’s drive out of the city one enters a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights. The people here live off their own pigs and cows, fruit-trees and hives; they drink themselves to death on home-brewed vodka, roll cigarettes out of old newspapers, and curse ‘American spaceships’ for dropping Colorado beetles on the potato-plants.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“The Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations’. From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Venetian visiting in the 1470s described it as ‘plain and poor’.13 Catherine the Great, passing through on her way to Crimea in 1787, could hardly believe that this was Kiev the City of Glory, Kiev the New Jerusalem. ‘From the time I arrived,’ she complained, ‘I have looked around for a city, but so far I have found only two fortresses and some outlying settlements.’14 On into the 1800s, visitors bemoaned its wood-paved streets, crowds of crippled beggars, frequent floods and fires, lack of good stone buildings and dreadful drinking water – so bad, apparently, that even horses wouldn’t touch it. The city only began to revive mid-century, with the arrival of the railways and the sugar boom.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Initially garrisoned with Tatar mercenaries called ‘kazaks’ or ‘free adventurers’, they soon attracted runaways of every class and nationality – escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Unlike other dictators, Stalin and his satraps never made the mistake of believing themselves beloved -- on the contrary they saw plots under every stone.”
― Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

“In 1596 an Act of Union was signed at Brest creating the ‘Greek-Catholic’ or Uniate Church, which dominates western Ukraine to this day. The rest of the Orthodox were furious, denouncing the Union and calling for an anti-Catholic alliance with the Protestants. Alarmed by the uproar, two of the four new Uniate bishops turned tail and reverted to Orthodoxy. ‘Your dear Union,’ the chancellor of Lithuania wrote to one of the remainder, ‘has brought so much bitterness that we wish it had never been thought of, for we have only trouble and tears from it.’7”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“In 988 Volodymyr ordered that the old thunder-god Perun be dragged down to the river and beaten with sticks, and herded the Kievans into a tributary of the Dnieper for mass baptism. ‘Some stood up to their necks,’ wrote the chroniclers, ‘others to their breasts, and the younger nearer the bank, some of them holding children in their”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Northerners, with their poor soil and never-ending winters, ate black bread made from rye; southerners, with their rich black earth and longer growing season, ate white bread, made from less hardy wheat.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“In 1299 Kiev lost its religious status too, when the Metropolitan, Rus’s senior churchman, transferred his see to Vladimir, and thence, a few decades later, to Moscow.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral. It is hard to make out”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Polish rule robbed Ukraine of its nobility. But it also saw the emergence of a new power in the region – the Cossacks. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks are to the Ukrainian national consciousness what cowboys are to the American. Unlike the remote and sanctified Rus princes, the Cossacks make heroes Ukrainians can relate to. They ranged the steppe in covered wagons, drawing them up in squares in case of Tatar attack. They raided Turkish ports in sixty-foot-long double-ruddered galleys, built of willow-wood and buoyed up with bundles of hollow reeds. They wore splendid moustaches, red boots and baggy trousers ‘as wide as the Black Sea’. They danced, sang and drank horilka in heroic quantities.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“But Kievan Rus’s glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to ‘love one another’ for ‘If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .’11”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine

“Thus the heirs of Rus are not the Ukrainians, with their funny language and quaint provincial ways, but the far more successful Russians themselves.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila’s marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founder of the Great Slav Brotherhood, the Moses who led Ukraine out of Polish bondage into the welcoming arms of Muscovy. In Kiev, the tsars erected a statue of him astride a rearing charger, pointing his mace towards the north-east and Moscow. According to its original design, the hetman was to have been represented trampling the cowering figures of a Polish nobleman, a Catholic priest and a Jew. Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“The best surviving key to Rus greatness is Kiev’s Santa Sofia Cathedral, built in 1037 by one of the greatest Riurik princes, Prince Yaroslav the Wise. From the outside it looks much like any other baroque Ukrainian church, its original shallow Greek domes and brick walls long covered in gilt and plaster. But inside it breathes the splendid austerity of Byzantium.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as ‘Pan So-and-So’; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are ‘Gospodin’. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate ‘Uniate’ church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“Many Lithuanians adopted Orthodoxy, and Ruthenian – the precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian – became the Duchy’s lingua franca.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“What widened the split between the two halves of Rus dramatically was the arrival of the Mongols. Kiev and southern Rus suffered devastation, but were abandoned again in little over a century. The northern principalities, in contrast, became permanent tributaries of the Golden Horde. The Mongols ruled by proxy, granting charters to local leaders in exchange for tribute. The most successful northern princes became those who could squeeze most men and money out of their territories for delivery to the khan at his capital on the Volga.”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

“The Bolsheviks desanctified but never quite dared demolish it; during perestroika Ukrainian nationalists demonstrated outside it; in 1993 members of a New Age sect sprayed it with fire extinguishers while threatening mass suicide; and in 1996 Orthodox believers tried – illegally since it is now a museum – to bury their patriarch within its walls, making do with the pavement outside after scuffles with police. Although of course neither ‘Ukraine’ nor ‘Russia’ existed in his day, Volodymyr – Vladimir in Russian – became the patron saint of both Ukrainians and Russians, celebrated in countless folk-tales and in the large statue, erected by the Ukrainian diaspora, that puzzles residents of London’s Holland Park. For all”
― Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine