Unearthing a New War in East Ukraine
Last year I visited Saur-Mogila, an ancient burial mound and WWII monument in Ukraine’s Donbas that commemorates the Soviet soldiers who died driving back Nazi Germany. Today it is a ruined battleground in a new war, sparked by memories of 1943.
By Michael Long
Photos by Sergei Kopylov
An abridged version of this article was originally published in the online magazine In the Fray (http://inthefray.org/2014/09/unearthing-another-war-ukraine-russia/)
In the frigid autumn sunlight I climbed the stone steps of Saur-Mogila. The burial mound, located atop a bluff encircled by the bronzed steppe, covers the bones of 23,000 Soviet soldiers that died for control of the heights during the Second World War. The panoramic view from the summit is coveted for reasons both aesthetic and strategic, and I could easily see why. At 277 meters, Saur-Mogila is the highest point in the Donbas region, the literal and figurative apex of its pro-Russian rebellion.
It was Thanksgiving Day of last year, during Ukraine’s waning days of peace. With a friend I had crossed the border from Russia and hitchhiked my way to Saur-Mogila. Not long after my trip, Russian troops seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, igniting a civil war over other territory in eastern Ukraine. Had I stood on that bluff eight months later, I would have had a grim view of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it hit the ground.
Both beautiful and inherently grim, Saur-Mogila is an imposing landmark that begs some explanation. Mogila is the Russian and Ukrainian word for grave; the bluff is considered a kurgan, one of the thousands of such burial mounds that dot Eurasia. Saur-Mogila, however, is a natural formation, as its impressive size should attest, and its name Saur has many possible origins from Cossack to Turkic. It is a grave, first and foremost, because of the masses of Soviet and German soldiers that died for control of the summit in July and August of 1943. Then, as now, the strategic importance of this isolated bluff was obvious. It towers over the surrounding landscape, with the Russian border running close by the gentle eastern slope, the mining towns of Snezhnoe and Torez just to the north, and a rare swathe of undisturbed forests and scrub lands beneath its sheer western flanks. The undulations of the prairie-like steppe are always evocative, but to a military mind the land has an hard-nosed logic to it. At strategic places like Saur-Mogila, this logic demands blood.
It was to a young Russian whobrought me here, to show me the magnitude of sacrifice that Saur-Mogila represents. On a language-study and internship grant from Oberlin College, I was spending the autumn of 2013 living just over the border in Russia. My home for three months was Taganrog, an unexpectedly cultured, architectural jewel of a town just over the border in Russia, perched between sand cliffs on the Sea of Azov. My Russian visa demanded that I leave and reenter the country once every ninety days, and a brief visit to eastern Ukraine was the obvious option.
My friends assured me that provincial capital Donetsk held nothing worth seeing besides soccer stadiums, so I decided to simply cross the border on foot, buy a Ukrainian bagel, and immediately return to Russia. The most accessible customs post is located on a rural section of very porous border, and I had every reason to expect suspicion, given my status as the rare American with no real reason for being there. Fortunately, my friend Darya agreed to come along as traveling companion and frontier troubleshooter.
When Russians (of all ages) complain of ‘kids these days,’ Darya is emphatically not to whom they are referring. Just out of university, she is exactingly, vivaciously articulate in her politeness, and employs etiquette on the offense. With those qualities in mind, I joked that she could probably have talked me into North Korea.
Naturally, Darya is a patriot. We were trundling down the road in a rickety Korean mini-bus, when she happened to glance out the window and spot a World War II monument. An eighteen-meter-tall steel anchor stood on a valley spur in the distance, marking one of many spots where Soviet infantry dashed themselves upon the machine guns and bunkers of the German defensive line on the Mius Front. Darya seemed suddenly seized by inspiration.
“I wonder… yes! Saur-Mogila!” She began swiping at her iPhone, panning through the local equivalent of Google Maps. “When we cross the border, we should try to get to Saur-Mogila.”
“What is Sawragila?” I stuttered, struggling with that halting, clearly non-Russian name.
While explaining her sudden idea, Darya’s enthusiasm morphed into a sense of duty. The conversation turned to Russia’s wartime history. The subject reinforced Darya’s determination to make our journey an educational one, and such determination was called for: Saur-Mogila lay over 50 kilometers away over rural roads, with no public transportation to or from the customs crossing. We would have to hitch-hike.
“But I simply must show you Saur-Mogila! I cannot let you go on thinking that it was some “allies, who won the Great Patriotic War,” Darya exclaimed. The West has long given the Soviet war effort short shrift, and indignant Russians long to set the record straight: the Germans lost more men to the Soviets than to all their other enemies combined. Our discussion of who deserves the credit for victory in WWII (‘What, doesn’t defeating Japan count for anything?’) continued until we found ourselves sitting in a cafe, trying to figure out how to get to the Ukrainian border.
“Of course,” Darya offered, “it’s childish to claim that any single country won the war.”
“Agreed,” I hurried to say. “One might say that the war was fought with American steel and Russian blood.”
Russian blood was shed in a particularly grinding, dismal fashion on the Mius Front, whose lines we had traced all the way north from Taganrog. It was along this wide river valley that the Germans built an imposing system of fortifications, one that held back Soviet counteroffensives until long after the tide of the war turned at Stalingrad. The Second World War here began to resemble the First, a lethal stalemate of artillery and trenches, with kilometers-deep defenses that could only be overwhelmed by human-wave attacks. All the worst Western cliches about the Soviet war effort came true on the banks of the muddy little River Mius, with conscripts herded into minefields and machineguns, and ultimately up the flanks of Saur-Mogila itself. The Soviet Union suffered more than 800,000 casualties in this oft-forgotten operation. In the summer heat, with the need to press ever forward, the bodies were cleared from the slopes of Saur-Mogila and piled up to be burned.
Darya’s father, an avid amateur historian of his city, told me of the horrific bonfires, but could elaborate on little else. “People do not know very much about the Mius Front,” he said. “The story is just too painful. We do not like to remember.” It was a remarkable statement, given the degree to which Soviet and now Russian state nationalism act on a foundation of 1945 and Victory. For once, it seemed, talk of glory rung hollow, restricted to the cruel heedlessness of Soviet-era monuments.
To such a monument we were bound, with the outbound trip achieved in five stages — three on foot, one by bus and one by hitchhiking. Darya’s unflappable earnestness got us past the suspicious Ukrainian border guards, who were incredulous upon hearing our aim. One sharp-eyed man in uniform pointed a finger at me and demanded of Darya, “Aren’t you ashamed to be deceitful in front of a foreigner?” In the end Darya’s unflappable earnestness won them over, but the guards made us promise to bring back pictures of our destination, to prove we had no ulterior motives in Ukraine.
After we crossed the border, we proceeded onfoot. Passing cars were few on the remote poplar-lined roads, and we kept moving in order to stay warm. Surveying the empty landscape, Darya provided a brief description of the locals, that border people located somewhere on the spectrum that distinguishes Russians from Ukrainians.
“The people here are very kind, but they live quite poorly.”
The first part of that assessment was entirely borne out by our encounters: with an old man filling in potholes from his motorbike, with the bus driver who let us travel for free, and with the two young men who finally gave us a ride to our destination. All were marked by that particular Slavic taciturnity, but in an entirely benevolent sense, manifesting as a very somber helpfulness. Having thumbed a ride, we careened down the northbound road at tremendous speeds, listening to accounts of smugglers and contraband. On the way, the car stopped for fresh milk in a tiny hamlet, and Darya jumped at the rare chance to bring some home with her. When Russians speak of Ukraine, they begin to sound like Garrison Kiellor: the people are friendlier, the meat and produce are more natural, and Slavs are Slavs.
Our driver let us out some distance from Saur-Mogila, allowing us to appreciate the scale of its monolith and the steps ascending the slope. On the summit was a cast-iron statue of a soldier triumphantly brandishing his rifle, rendered in the blocky outlines of Socialist realism.
For those without personal ties to Russia’s wartime history, most Soviet memorials seem inhuman, grotesque in their triumphalistic disregard for the costs of victory. Participants and victims become homogenized paragons. Saur-Mogila contains some of that — complete with the tanks and artillery pieces parked at the entrance — and yet the viciousness of the struggle is not entirely lost in the pomp. The names of all the fallen are etched in stone, with their Soviet diversity of surnames. Darya pointed out several appearances of her own Dagestani surname on the expanse of panels.
“Can you imagine?” she asked as we stood on the summit. “What it must have been like to scale that slope, watching each grenade drop down towards you from above?”
Those days have returned to the mound. Ukrainian forces and their separatist foes are bound by the same immutable military logic that made the position worth so many lives seventy years ago. It is all entirely fitting: many among the Donbas rebels believe that their struggle is the beginning of World War Three. For them, Russia is engaged in yet another struggle against fascist invaders from Europe. And before there were fascists there was the Kaiser, before him there was Napoleon, and the Teutonic Knights before that. Just as the Red Army manned pillboxes and bunkers all across the 1812 battlefield of Borodino, so the Novorossiya rebels have re-excavated the very same trenches that protected Saur-Mogila in 1943. Certain interpretations of Russian history write themselves.
From the summit the towns of Torez and Snezhnoe are easily visible, with their piles of mine tailings like copies of Saur-Mogila in miniature. The rebels’ Buk surface-to-air missile system drove past the monument to be concealed near those towns. On that day in July (if the rebels were in fact responsible), the enormous smoke trail of its launch would have stood out clearly against the sky, as would MH17's rain of flaming debris several minutes later.
Around the time of the MH17 crash, the separatists broke holes into the granite obelisk itself, huddling inside to protect themselves from the intense bombardment. One a single day in July, they counted the impacts of over 600 shells, and amateur video shows the incoming rockets blossom in clouds of brown dust all over the hill. The viewing platform is now crumbled and scarred, the wall of names badly pockmarked. For several weeks, the statue of the gun-waving soldier stood spattered with shrapnel. Artillery and airstrikes ultimately reduced it to a pile of iron scrap. Minus its 9-meter tall statue, one of the obelisk’s sides was a gaping tangle of steel rods, with shot-holes all along its height. Watching the structure’s gradual destruction online, I hoped that it would survive, becoming a monument to both WWII and its last fading echo.
Back in Taganrog, Darya’s father entertained us with his inimitable anecdotes, vodka and port wine. As always, there were the toasts, and I remember one in particular.
“That there will not be war,” he intoned, raising his glass.
Safe among friends, hailing from my sheltered United States, such sentiments on Russians’ part always seemed rather touching, overly dramatic. At that time, November’s Euromaidan protests were just beginning, and the Cold War was far behind us.
But how right they were. Taganrog is now filled with soldiers and military aircraft. Our border crossing has been shelled repeatedly and now overrun: I cannot help but wonder what became of all the duty-free liquor and cigarettes, stranded in the no-man’s-land shop between garrisons of anxious soldiers. As for Saur-Mogila, the obelisk has toppled over, collapsing at the base after the monument was overrun by the Ukrainians and the rebels in quick succession.
Those poplar-lined roads through the steppe have changed since we drove them. They may as well belong to a vanished Ukraine of years past. Standing on Saur-Mogila’s bright summit and thinking of its battles long ago, I could not have dreamed of the new war so soon to come.
Michael Long is a freelance writer who has studied in Saint Petersburg and worked in Taganrog and Moscow.
Many thanks to photographer Sergei Kopylov for sharing his work. Kopylov works in Taganrog. More of his work can be seen at: http://joyful-life.ru/
