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manure. But it has not forgotten its famous writer. A very deaf old man with gold teeth and a fur hat let me into the collective farm headquarters, where alongside the obligatory pictures of astronauts and folk dancers sepia photographs hung of Conrad on a pony, Conrad at his desk, Conrad in naval uniform. Down at the bottom of the hill, by a frozen lake, he drew a dipper from a square, brick-lined well. ‘Conrad drank this water. It’s a very good well – it never freezes.’ But since Conrad was a Pole who lived abroad most of his life and wrote in English, why should the villagers care? ‘They don’t,’ he said; ‘they think – what did Konrad give us? Nothing!’
    Despite their antagonism, matched circumstances pushed Poland and Ukraine into matching survival strategies. For Poles in the nineteenth century and for Ukrainians right up until 1991, the idea of nationhood took on a religious, almost metaphysical significance. Just as diaspora Ukrainians still tend to regard themselves as part of Ukraine despite having been born and brought up in Canada or Australia, exiled nineteenth-century Poles felt they were no less part of Poland for having spent their lives in Paris or Moscow. Their countries existed in a sort of mental hyperspace, independent of such banalities as governments and borders. ‘Poland is not yet lost’ was the title of a Napoleonic Polish marching song; ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-than-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem.
    With this state of mind went a peculiar approach to the writing of history. In the imagination of both countries, as the historian Norman Davies puts it, ‘the “Word” has precedence over the “Fact” . . . more attention is paid to what people would have liked to happen than to what actually occurred.’ 18 National leaders and national uprisings – no matter that they failed – are given more space and weight than the foreign governments who actually dictated events. Poles revere their ‘Constitution of May 3rd’, Ukrainians, their so-called ‘Bender Constitution’. Never mind that neither even came close to being put into practice, for intentions are more important than results.
    This heroic imaginative effort did not make the political re-emergence of either country any easier. Both have had enormous difficulty persuading the rest of the world to take them seriously. The British historian E.H. Carr, a delegate at the Paris peace talks of 1919, called reborn Poland ‘a farce’. For Keynes it was ‘an economic impossibility whose only industry is Jew-baiting’; for Lloyd George, ‘a historic failure’ – he would no more hand over Upper Silesia to Poland, he swore, than he would give a clock to a monkey. George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech of August 1991, in which he urged Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union. But at least Bush knew Ukraine existed. Six years after independence, many otherwise well-informed Westerners have either completely failed to register that they have a country called Ukraine as a neighbour, or have vaguely heard of it but have no idea where it is, throwing out guesses – Somewhere on the Baltic? Next door to Kazakhstan? – with the gay abandon of a child playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
    For both Poland and Ukraine, the best way to get the West’s attention has been to stress their impact on Russia. Nineteenth-century liberals argued that unless Russia freed Poland, it would never be able to undertake its own constitutional reform. The effort of holding down its most intransigent colony trapped Russia in the role of tyrannical autocracy, hurting ordinary Russians as much as the Poles themselves – hence the slogan of the 1831 Polish rebellion: Tor our freedom and yours.’ The argument Poland used in