Then the snow arrived from the steppe, windblown and fine, covering the vastness of Ukraine in a blanket, and it was soon impossible to distinguish among the dead. The whole country was one enormous cemetery under the blizzard. There were the soldiers of the Great War, the victims of the Holomodor (the Great Famine inflicted on Ukraine by Stalin), the Jews of the Shoah, the peasants exterminated by the Nazis, the deported prisoners of the Gulags, and they were now being joined, in the squares of Lviv, by the dead of 2014. The candles I had brought for the fallen of 1914 now passed effortlessly to the victims of the revolution of a century later.
The Ukrainians were putting thousands of them under the pictures of the victims, walking past them in an orderly procession, murmuring litanies. It was a peaceful protest. Their rancor was political, directed at the crooks, not at the Russians, and the word Europa was pronounced with the sweetness of a filial attachment that Brussels did not deserve. But on a giant screen, amid the crowd in Lviv, I could see, live from Kiev, the signs of a worrisome metamorphosis: on one side, assassins, invisible in the sleet, positioned on the rooftops of turn-of-the-century buildings, and on the other side, hymns, agitated speeches, priests with flowers, patriots with crosses, the word Ukraine repeated ad nauseam. In the crowd, a mild-mannered old woman spoke terrifying words to me: “The revolution can’t be accomplished without bloodshed.”
I detested Putin’s arrogance and his oil-baron blackmail. I saw the pro-Russian mercenaries terrorizing the people, but it was clear that in Ukraine, too, primitive nationalism was in ferment, fed by mass media in the service of the old and new power bandits. I could see them there; I knew their faces by heart: the perfect human prototypes of post-Communism. There was the imminent risk of a re-edition of the Balkan tragedy. The same old story: the palaces of power attempt to avoid paying the price of their failure by diverting the enraged masses toward ethno-national targets. A murderous trap into which had fallen not only naive and ingenuous ordinary people, but also the plenipotentiaries of the West. Looking on, I thought to myself: the people here want to join Europe, but does Europe really need this archaic and intolerant way of identifying with the nation? Or worse, isn’t the EU already weaker and less united after the entry into the club of post-Communist countries like Poland, too susceptible to the appeal of crude, Wild West capitalism and enthralled by the divine notion of the nation? Aren’t Catalonian separatism, the anti-Europe populism of the English, the explosion of xenophobia in France, and the bankruptcy of Greece already signs of Balkanization? How can a Europe that is so divided extend its borders to welcome still other turbulent countries?
I was running on steaming hot cups of tea toward the Dniester River and the boundless East, through a wild, unsettled landscape of pitched battles and the last great armies on horseback. In that whirling whiteness that had swallowed up millions of men, in the face of time zone upon time zone of steppes, cavalry raids, and caravans, I could feel my fear for the destiny of united Europe growing stronger. Peace was not written in our DNA; that’s why this Union was indispensable for us. My journey to the sites of the Great War had reinforced my faith in alliance as the only possible antidote to decline and fragmentation. But it was a faith riddled with bleak doubts.
What legitimacy could we express as Europeans in the face of the great crisis of the Maghreb, the disaster in Syria, the authoritarian drift of Turkey? How could Brussels oppose the division of Ukraine after having consented to the separation of Kosovo from Serbia? How could the United States of Europe prevent the minorities—be they Russian or Ukrainian—from being ghettoized in the east or west of the country if in the Baltic republics, and thus inside the European Union, so many Russians had already been reduced to the status of “aliens”?
On my way back to Italy, I passed through Przemyśl, in Poland, on the edge of the border with Ukraine. Every hilltop around the city was a fortress. From the time of the Tartars all the way to the Second World War, the city had been the site of furious battles. Its bastions, made of white stone and red brick, devastated by neglect and ignored by the Poles, looked like huge toads nestled among the thornbushes. It was there, from those walls now become archaeology, that my Polish friend Tomasz Idzikowski pointed out to me, just a few yards away, hidden in the underbrush, the blue and white stakes and barbed wire marking the Ukrainian border.
Nothing, it seemed to me, better expressed the fragility of fortress Europe. It was all so clear! The external threats to the Union were in large part the consequence of its own internal fragility and contradictions. That barbed wire was useless as well as pathetic. So from atop those formidable ruins, I thought how good it would be for the Union in order for it to react positively, to have a healthy sense of its own precariousness. We’d just have to remind the Eurocrats that even the lords of the old empire must have believed their fortresses were eternal, as the new ones believe their bunker in Brussels is today. We’d just have to remind them of the madness of the Great War.
INTRODUCTION: JOURNEY’S END
THE TRAIN TO ODESSA is careening along at ninety miles an hour in the green light of dusk, hurdling copper-colored rivers, plunging south toward the Black Sea across the long, tilted plain of Ukraine. The compartment is quaking as though possessed by the devil, sending everything on the little table topsy-turvy, and the three-hundred-pound guy in the overhead bunk is snoring and tossing around so loudly that I’m afraid he’s going to come crashing down on me. I’ve already been hit by his backpack, a shower of loose coins, and a bottle of mineral water. As we were pulling out of the station, he asked me, “Where are you from?” I answered, “Italian,” and laughing in disbelief, he asked, “Why in the world did you come to this country?” I replied with a sigh, “Your country is a marvelous land,” but he just turned his huge bearlike body on its side and plummeted into an instantaneous lethargy, anesthetized into a deep night of the senses.
The first stars, already sporting the fiery yellow of Provence or Turkey, are so luminous they make halos on the windowpane, like the celestial torches of a hallucinating Van Gogh. The Ukrainian giant is snoring but there’s no way I can get to sleep in this mad race verging on derailment. The map shows the names of cities I’ve never heard of, Zhmerinka, Kolyma, Kotovsk. But no, Zhmerinka I’ve heard before; Primo Levi passed through there after he was freed from Auschwitz, on the long train ride that took him to Belarus and then back home through the Balkans. The locomotive accelerates again. For more than two hours now it has been clinging to the same straight line—that’s how it is in the East, from the Carpathians to the Urals, no curves and no tunnels. It’s as though this train is trying to make up for the crazy zigzag route of the longest uninterrupted journey of my life, thirty-three days now, from the frozen Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean, a giant slalom, crisscrossing the eastern frontier of the European Union.