Читать онлайн «Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe»

Anne Applebaum

Between east and west

For a thousand years, the geography of the borderlands dictated their fate.

The borderlands lie in a flat plain, crushed between the civilizations of Europe and those of Asia. East of Poland, West of Russia, their lack of mountains, seas, deserts and canyons has always made the borderlands easy to conquer. 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. Even now, a spy running East from Warsaw to Kiev would find nothing natural to obstruct him. Distances are great, but messages to the King or the Khan or the Grand Duke or the Czar have always been easier to send here than in the more mountainous parts of Europe, because so little stands in the way of the messenger.

The borderlands' featurelessness attracted invaders, and the most celebrated — the most threatening — always came from the East. Long after the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, the name of the Golden Horde was still uttered in whispers, and the fame of the Turks, who attacked again and again from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, has persisted as well. From the North came the most destructive invaders — the rapacious Swedes, who destroyed the region utterly in the great Deluge of 1655, and the Muscovites who began their incursions into the borderlands at about the same time. The least expected invaders came from the South, where Moldovan princes rose up to claim more territory in the sixteenth century, and Cossacks rebelled, setting fire to villages, in the seventeenth. Those who ruled the longest always came from the West. From the twelfth century onwards, Poles and Lithuanians administered vast regions of the borderlands, while the Teutonic Knights controlled the northern Baltic corner, reigning for so long that their descendants, the Germans, came to believe East Prussia would belong to them in perpetuity.

The invasions came and subsided, each time leaving traces: ideas about architecture and literature and religion, words and idioms, boys with black eyes or girls with blonde hair. The pagan, Lithuanian names for rivers and forests stuck; so did the love of Turkish carpets and German tools. Sometimes there were larger changes. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian nobility had abandoned their older languages in favour of Polish. In the thirteenth century, the Teutonic Knights completed the region's first holocaust, destroying the indigenous people of Prussia and replacing them with Germans.

But most of the time, the Polonizations and Prussifications and Russifications, the drives to win Catholic converts, the crusades to build Orthodox churches, the plans to change churches into mosques came to nothing. The borderlands were simply too wide and too empty, it was too difficult for any invading nation to maintain permanent rule. Instead of uniformity, the waves of invasion created odd hybrids: the cathedral with a minaret in Kamenets Podolsky, or the town of Trakai, where five religions (Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Moslem, Karaim) once set up their houses of worship around a single lake. Throughout most of the borderland's history, the borderland peoples — the peasants and the woodsman and even the nobility — remained various. From town to town the local legends changed; from village to village the people sang different folk tunes with different melodies.