FACES AND PLACES: Welcome to the club, Mr. Klebnikov (09/15/96)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Welcome to the club, Mr. Klebnikov

It never fails. Just about the time I think Ukraine is home-free, along comes a kick in the shins.

Such was the case with Paul Klebnikov who, in an article in the September 9 issue of Forbes magazine, penned one of the most phantasmagoric articles about Ukraine I've read in months.

"Even with fighting in the former Yugoslavia stopped, at least for now," begins Mr. Klebnikov, "the world may not have seen the end of turmoil in Eastern Europe. Watch Ukraine. This former member country of the Soviet Union, the size of France, with 52 million people, is riven between those who want reunion with Russia and those who want to remain independent. It is not a dispute likely to be settled amicably."

Ukraine is a tinderbox, folks, and Russia has just about had it. "Russia is now a democracy, and the Russian president cannot ignore the pleas of the Russian-speakers in Ukraine if they ask for his help," writes Mr. Klebnikov.

Russia a democracy? Is that why Communists, nationalists, authoritarians, anti-Westerners and Socialists won far more seats in the Russian Duma last December than democrats, free marketeers, and pro-Westerners? The Communist Party alone won about 22 percent of the seats. If Russia is a democracy, why has Boris Yeltsin sacked so many economic reformers and why did Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman recently write that "70 percent of all businesses there [in Russia] say they pay protection money to crime cartels"?

I'm sure Boris Yeltsin is just aching to come to the assistance of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. After his glorious victories in Chechnya, Ukraine should be a piece of cake.

Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine are forced to watch "turgid, Ukrainian-language programming" because the "relatively entertaining fare" of Moscow TV "has been banished to a weak third channel, hardly visible in most places," continues Mr. Klebnikov. How about that for a reason to secede?

There are other reasons. For Russian speakers, Mr. Klebnikov opines, "economic injury is being added to political insult" because "the vast majority of the country's export earnings and tax revenues" emanates from eastern Ukraine. "Where does the money go? To subsidize the poorer, Ukrainian-speaking regions of the west."

What nonsense. Eastern Ukraine is a rust belt of inefficient, dying industries that would collapse tomorrow if they weren't subsidized by the government. Russia has enough dead industry of its own without having to fish for more useless property.

Mr. Klebnikov admits that "Russia has a stranglehold on Ukraine's economy." But later he writes: "Russian President Boris Yeltsin's government has refrained from either squeezing Ukraine economically or fanning the ethnic flames in the eastern part of the country." Which is it? When is a stranglehold not a squeeze? Ask any Ukrainians in Ukraine and they'll tell you all about Russia's expertise in fanning ethnic flames.

"Ukrainians are ethnically almost indistinguishable from Russians," Mr. Klebnikov informs us, something like Spaniards and Portuguese. Bad comparison. The people of Spain and Portugal are very distinguishable ethnically and, like Ukrainians and Russians, they have competed and fought with each other for centuries.

"Reintegration with Russia would alleviate many of these [Ukraine's] problems, Mr. Klebnikov writes, "but the electorate is of two minds on the subject. In March 1991 over 70 percent of Ukrainians voted in a referendum, to stay in the Soviet Union. Eight months later, after the Soviet Union was dissolved anyway, 92 percent of Ukrainians voted to approve their new independence."

Not quite the whole story, Mr. Klebnikov. On July 16, 1990, before the collapse of the USSR, the people of Ukraine proclaimed their sovereign status. In March of 1991 70.2 percent of the people of Ukraine voted to preserve a Union of Soviet, Socialist Republics as "a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics." On August 24, 1991, the Ukrainian Parliament declared Ukraine's independence. On December 1, 1991, 92 percent of the people of Ukraine sanctioned the declaration in a referendum: As David Pryce Jones points out in "The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire," Ukraine's action was the coup de grace.

I hasten to point out that not everything Mr. Klebnikov wrote is fantasy. "Because of opposition from both the old communists and many nationalists, privatization in Ukraine is proceeding at a snail's pace," he writes. "Some of the country's most attractive assets are still government-owned...the investment law has been changed four times since 1992, and taxes sometimes take up 93 percent of companies' profits...While Kuchma says he wants foreign investment, local politics makes it unwelcome." No argument there.

Although his article does little to promote Ukraine, Mr. Klebnikov could be ignored if it weren't for one thing. His motives in writing his article become clear towards the end when he inserts a little side bar called "Messianic Mission." Borrowing a page from Morley Safer of CBS infamy, Mr. Klebnikov writes about Dmytro Korchynsky, described as "the head of Ukraine's most powerful paramilitary nationalist organization: Ukrainian National Self-Defense UNSO." To read the piece is to conclude the UNSO, which holds only three seats out of 420 in the Ukrainian Parliament, is an organization of thousands of young Ukrainian nationalists committed to a kind of Jacobinistic purification of the Ukrainian nation. "The Ukrainians are the only barbarian nation in all of Europe," Mr. Korchynsky is alleged to have told Mr. Klebnikov. "Irrational?" concludes Mr. Klebnikov. "Rationality doesn't always win. Think Iran. Think Bosnia. Think Chechnya. Think..."

I welcome Mr. Klebnikov, who speaks Russian but not Ukrainian, to the Thrash Ukraine Club which includes such malefactors as Stephen Budiansky (who demonized Bohdan Khmelnytsky in U.S. News and World Report), Abraham Brumberg (who condemned "creeping Ukrainization" in eastern Ukraine in the New York Review of Books), Thomas M. Nichols (who compared Ukrainian behavior to that of Libya, North Korea, and Iraq in the Christian Science Monitor), Michael Ignatieff (who moaned on PBS TV that the children of Russians in eastern Ukraine were being "tyrannized" into learning Ukrainian in school), and, of course, that old miscreant Morley Safer, the 1994 winner of the Walter Duranty Award for Journalist Dissimilitude.

Why is Ukrainian independence so threatening? Why is union with Russia, which has never brought anything but the most horrendous of agonies, good for Ukraine? And, finally, when will serious American journals stop publishing such drivel?