Ukraine: The long goodbye

On August 1, 1991, George H.W. Bush, no more aware than other world leaders that the Soviet Union was but five months from extinction, flew to Kiev and urged caution on Ukrainians. “Freedom is not the same as independence,” the US President told the then Soviet republic’s parliament. “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” The remarks bitterly disappointed anti-communist Ukrainian democrats and nationalists, and were disparaged in the US media as his “chicken Kiev” speech.

Almost 25 years later, Ukraine finds itself waging a grim struggle on two fronts. The first, fought against Moscow-backed separatists and President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, aims to preserve Ukraine’s independence and restore as much as possible of its territorial integrity, violated by the Kremlin’s seizure of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March 2014 and an insurgency in the southeastern industrial Donbass region. This conflict flared up anew on November 21, 2015, after anti-Russian saboteurs blew up transmission lines in southern Ukraine that carry electricity to Crimea.

Ukraine’s second struggle is scarcely less arduous. It is a fight against domestic corruption, lawlessness, financial mismanagement, bureaucratic inertia and other malign phenomena that obstruct the nation’s path to prosperity and stability.

As each of the three excellent books under review makes clear, the causes of Ukraine’s troubles are only distantly connected to the spectres of “suicidal nationalism” and “ethnic hatred” conjured up in Bush’s speech. Serhy Yekelchyk puts it best in the closing words of “The Conflict in Ukraine”, a succinct, lucid text that is ideal for newcomers to recent Ukrainian events.

“Viewed from a longer historical perspective, it is clear that the crisis in Ukraine is only masquerading as ethnic strife,” writes Yekelchyk, a professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. “It is a conflict over what type of a state and society will develop in the post-Soviet political space, and a part of Putin’s challenge to the unipolar world that emerged after the Cold War.”

In “The Gates of Europe”, an assured and authoritative survey that spans ancient Greek times to the present day, Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, constructs a similar argument. He contends that the modern Ukrainian identity is fundamentally civic in nature and not characterised by ethnic exclusivity, a point buttressed by the fact that many people in Ukraine’s ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking communities are loyal to the Ukrainian state and disapprove of the Donbass separatists.

“Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional and ethnic lines,” Plokhy writes. “While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms.”

For his part, Tim Judah, an experienced war reporter who writes for the “Economist” and the “New York Review of Books”, concludes from his travels across Ukraine that many citizens simply want their state “to be a normal European country, not one that continued to linger, as it had done since independence in 1991, in the grey zone between Russia and the rest of Europe, all the while crushed by a culture of economic and political corruption that left poor a country which should be rich”. The strength of Judah’s “In Wartime” lies in the depth, range and balance of his reportage and his eye for telling details.

He compares Poland and Ukraine, noting that the two ex-communist neighbours had similar levels of per-capita economic output in 1990 but that Poland’s has since risen to more than three times that of Ukraine. While EU membership doubtless accounts for much of Poland’s progress, so does the execution of economic reforms of a kind that, until very recently, have made little headway in Ukraine.

The appearance of these three books reminds us that the study in Western countries of Ukraine as a subject distinct from, albeit connected to, Russia was before 1991 the specialised pursuit of a hardy band of scholars, many — such as Plokhy and Yekelchyk — of Ukrainian descent. In the era of independence there has emerged a broader market for accounts that place the accent on what is distinctive about Ukraine’s national development. Two of the best are Paul Robert Magocsi’s “A History of Ukraine” (1996) and Andrew Wilson’s “The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation” (2000).

As Plokhy and Yekelchyk are at pains to point out, the three East Slavic peoples — Belarusians, Russians and Ukrainians — share common origins in the medieval state of Kievan Rus’, but their paths diverged in later centuries. Unfortunately, Russia’s long domination of much of Ukraine, excluding the western regions centred on Lviv that formed part of Austria-Hungary and later Poland, blinds Russian nationalist ideologues to the rise of Ukrainian consciousness in the modern era.

The dream of Ukrainian statehood was briefly realised after the 1917 Russian Revolution but was snuffed out after the Bolshevik victory in the ensuing civil war. Nonetheless, the Ukrainian identity continued to toughen itself in opposition to Polish nationalism, for western Ukraine was under Polish rule in the interwar years, and Stalinism, which was responsible for the deaths of at least 3 million Ukrainians in the man-made Soviet famine of the 1930s.

Today Ukraine’s sense of identity is strengthening in reaction to the war of the past two years. In this sense, Putin’s gambit has backfired. Russia may hold on to Crimea indefinitely but the war has set back the Kremlin’s apparent goal of discrediting the concept of separate Ukrainian statehood.

Instead, it has inspired a new patriotism in millions of Ukrainians, including many whose native regions have deep historical connections to Russia. As Plokhy suggests, it has also fuelled Ukraine’s desire to be more closely integrated with western and central Europe.

All that said, the first quarter-century of independence has been far from comfortable for Ukraine. Although its elections have usually been freer than anything Russia has managed, its political scene is often riotous and unsavoury. Its economy has see-sawed and its population has shrunk because of emigration, falling life expectancy and low birth rates. Above all, Russia under Putin has turned into a hostile neighbour.

Matters stood differently at the time of Bush’s “chicken Kiev” speech. To the US President and his advisers, it seemed that to throw Washington’s support behind Ukrainian and other nationalist movements in individual Soviet republics would be to risk widespread violence, social breakdown and a loss of control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Moreover, the US had formed a constructive relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader, who opposed Ukrainian independence.

In an intelligence assessment prepared for Bush in June 1991, CIA and other analysts had concluded that Ukraine was highly unlikely to make a peaceful transition to independence. Out of four scenarios, only one foresaw Ukrainian independence — and that as a result of a violent break-up of the Soviet Union. The rest involved “muddling through”; a hardline coup that kept the Soviet Union intact; and a partial collapse that would free the Baltic states, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova but leave Ukraine with Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the central Asian republics in a Moscow-led union.

The analysts’ third guess was right: there was a hardline coup, launched less than three weeks after Bush departed from Kiev. What they did not foresee was that the coup would fail, prompting Ukraine’s parliament on August 24 to declare independence, a step approved in every region of the country, including Crimea, in a December 1 referendum. Ukraine embarked on the road to a new, sovereign future — but it felt in some respects like a road that its leaders and citizens had stumbled upon by accident.

This perspective emerges from a conversation Judah recounts with an unnamed Ukrainian security official in Kiev. The official tells Judah that his nation did not fight with weapons for freedom in 1991, but now it is waging “a classical war of independence ... we have to force, or persuade the Russians to consider us a separate people, entity and state.”

He is hardly exaggerating. Judah’s book contains another revealing interview with Sergei Baryshnikov, a pro-Russian politics professor in Donetsk and organiser of the rebellion there against Ukrainian rule. “We have to destroy the idea of Ukrainian identity and its national idea,” Baryshnikov says flatly. “Who are Ukrainians? They are Russians who refuse to admit their Russian-ness ...”

One might also recall Putin’s words when he announced the annexation of Crimea. Tracing the evolution of Russian-Ukrainian relations, he maintained: “We are not simply close neighbours but, as I have said many times already, we are one people ... Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.”

It would be interesting to know if Putin was aware that Richard Nixon, visiting Ukraine in 1972 as US President, had made an almost identical reference to Kiev as “this mother of all Russian cities” in a dinner toast to his Soviet hosts. Objectively, neither Nixon nor Putin was wrong. Yet Kiev — or rather Kyiv, in its Ukrainian spelling — is the mother of all Ukrainian cities, too. Its indelible place in the story of Ukrainian independence was assured by the pro-democracy Maidan revolution of February 2014 that overthrew Viktor Yanukovich, the corrupt, Russian-backed autocrat.

Yekelchyk and Judah are good at puncturing the Russian propaganda claim that the Maidan events were a Western-inspired coup that thrust power into the hands of fanatical Ukrainian neo-Nazis. As they point out, armed radical nationalists played a part in the revolution but their weak performance in Ukraine’s subsequent parliamentary elections illustrated their thin support across most strata of society.

Still, it is disturbing that many Ukrainians, especially in western regions, glorify the exploits of Stepan Bandera, an ultranationalist of the mid-20th century, and his movement, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In the post-Second World War years Bandera became revered as “a proverbial father of the nation”, as Plokhy puts it, for his anti-Soviet resistance efforts. Yet such recollections are selective. Ukraine’s wartime ultranationalists also left a “poisonous legacy”, in Judah’s words, of atrocities against Poles and Jews and, in some cases, collaboration with Nazi forces.

Yekelchyk is surely right when he says that the cult of an old-style ethnic nationalist such as Bandera is incompatible with the kind of liberal society that Ukraine must become, if it is to get along with its European neighbours. The task of defending Ukrainian statehood against Russian belligerence is difficult enough. The nation can certainly do without additional wounds inflicted from within.

–Financial Times