[This article appeared in the February
2005 edition of Fortnight]
"To-day we will vote for Ukrainian independence,
because if we don't we're in the shit." The quote, from
Stanyslav Hurenko, the then First Party Secretary of the Ukrainian
Communist Party, dates from August 1991. The attempted coup
had just taken place in Moscow. The Ukrainian communists had
vacillated. Leonid Kravcuk, the chairman of the parliament
(and future president), was forced to resign all his party
posts. And thus the Ukraine came to be.
The name means borderland, (as does the Serbo-Croat
word 'krajina', which we heard so often during the Yugoslav
wars, 12 years ago). The Ukraine is a sea of land, a seemingly
endless expanse of rich, fertile soil. On the Western border
there are the Carpathian mountains, a natural frontier perhaps,
with a number of irregularities, as when Stalin cut off the
tail of Czechoslovakia to give the Soviet Union the common
border with Hungary… (and hence, 1956, of course). But
to the East, there is nothing, just a flat horizon of forest
and steppe, and a huge roadsign in the middle of nowhere saying,
Welcome to Ukraine. The border between Russia and Ukraine
is as meaningless as the line of latitude between Egypt and
Libya, which tries to say that this bit of sand is different
from that. It is an accident of history, but let's keep it
where it is.
A thousand years or so ago, there was no nation
at all. Instead, there were some Slav city states, Kiev (Kievan
Rus) and Yaroslav, for example, and later on, Moscow, while
other peoples, like the Tartars, lived in the Crimea and Kazan.
Each boyar (or duke) slowly extended his domain, either in
battle or in bed, and eventually, one was the winner: only
then did a nation emerge. By this time, Kiev had been sacked
by the Mongols, Orthodoxy had moved to Muscovy, and Ivan the
Terrible (awful or full of awe) was the Tzar (Caesar).
For the next few hundred years, the Ukraine
was the battleground of armies, from all directions. All attempts
at asserting some form of independence, usually based in Galicia
in the West, often involved playing off one conqueror against
another, and invariably backfired.
The real chance came with Gorbachev and perestroika.
Initially, despite Chernobyl, any form of protest was minimal.
(In a 1987 lecture on the medical consequences of radiation,
the speaker quoted western experts and tried to suggest there
weren't any after-effects, and was rather disturbed when I
quoted some other western experts.) By 1990, however, inspired
by student protests in Georgia, the movement for independence,
RUKH, (The Ukrainian Popular Movement for Perestroika), was
beginning to gain confidence, and some students were camping
out in the streets of Kiev, demanding elections. The crunch,
however, as mentioned above, was the failed coup in Moscow.
The communists then combined with the nationalists, and the
modern Ukraine was born.
The 2004 Elections
Initially, as quite often happens, the communist-turned-capitalist
makes a mess of things… except his own nest. And the
Ukraine was the only country in the world where the Russian
rouble was regarded as hard currency. Kravcuk was followed
by President Kuchma, who at least managed to get the economy
on a more stable footing. But everything was still in the
hands of the so-called demokratura, the nomenklatura of Soviet
times in a new set of clothes.
Hopefully, those days are now gone. Like the
peace accord in Northern Ireland, what has happened in the
last few days in Ukraine cannot unhappen. With the victory
of Yushchenko over Yanukovich, a lovely psychological shift
has taken place. American dollars were involved, via Freedom
House and Soros et al, and these cloud the issue somewhat.
Nevertheless, the manifestation of people power on the streets
of Kiev and elsewhere, a protest which was both peaceful and
powerful, was entirely Ukrainian.
Young and old, from West and East, they draw
their inspiration, again from Georgia, where last year Saakashvili
took over from Shevardnadze. The Ukrainian youth movement,
Pora, (It's time to go!), is based to some extent on Otpur
(Repulse), their contemporaries in Serbia who helped Koštunica
take over from Miloševic. For some reason, the Confederate
flag was also flying high, suggesting there may yet be some
confusion in the ranks. And this was confirmed when I was
introduced to a happy set of protesters in one of the tents,
and one young man joyously shouted "Eera" (IRA).
The Future
What's next? After the second round, there was talk of referendums
on autonomy in Donetsk and elsewhere; thankfully, those rumours
have receded somewhat. Ukraine should not be divided. There
is no line between East and West, between rural and urban,
between agricultural and industrial, and even if there was,
it would not coincide with any religious divide, for Orthodoxy
extends well into the West, while the linguistic divide is
as confused as the geographical, as dialectical changes only
slowly accumulate into a linguistic one. Admittedly, in the
election, there was 93% support for Yanukovich in Donetsk
county, and 93% for Yushchenko in the Lvov constituency. But
Yanukovich won by just 51% in Kherson district, on the South
Coast. Partition (as always) would be a mess.
The first task, then, is to keep the country
together. Despite, and not just because of its history, Ukraine
now is. And thus it should remain. Internationally, the Ukraine
should join the EU, and leave NATO well alone. While domestically,
charges of attempted murder against Kuchma and others must
be pursued, but Yushchenko would do well to keep any innocent
members of the previous administration firmly in their posts,
(and not only because he, too, is a former prime minister).
Indeed, he would be well advised to establish (as we must
do) a form of power-sharing, for any resort to the more usual
form of western democracy, majoritarianism (for which the
Russian word, of course, is 'bolshevism'), would not be so
good.
After observing all three rounds of the 2004
elections, I feel that Ukraine is now a fairly firmly established
democracy. The real hope is that those who have witnessed
these events - and some of the campers in Kiev were, after
all, from St. Petersburg - will try to ensure that similar
reforms may soon take place in Russia. And maybe too in the
USA.
Having first visited Kiev and the
Crimea in 1984, Peter Emerson studied Russian
in Kiev in 1987, and travelled across the Ukraine in 1990,
when cycling from Moscow to Tirana.
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