INTERVIEW: Bohdan Hawrylyshyn on "new Ukraine's" economic system
Dr. Bohdan Hawrylyshyn recently presented a survey of changes in Ukraine's economic system and structure over 1991-1996 at a conference, "Towards a New Ukraine," hosted by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa.
Dr. Hawrylyshyn has chaired the Council of Advisors to the Presidium of the Ukrainian Parliament since it was established in January 1990 at his request and is also the chairman of the Ukrainian Renaissance Foundation, a branch of the Soros Foundation, chairs the International Center for Policy Studies, and is chairman of the International Management Institute-Kyiv.
He is a member of the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee, a prestigious body of statesmen, politicians and international experts chaired by President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Dr. Hawrylyshyn serves on the Club of Rome's executive board, is a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and the International Academy of Management.
Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj conducted the following interview with Dr. Hawrylyshyn on March 22 in Ottawa.
CONCLUSION
Q: Throughout your presentations at the "Towards a New Ukraine" conference, your identification with Ukraine and its government was striking. You often referred to matters in terms of "our economic problems" and "our industry." Is this something you've arrived at since your "return," or is it something that you've always felt?
A: I remember somebody asked me at a press conference, or after a lecture I delivered in Ukraine, "Where do you live?" and I answered, "I reside in Geneva, but I live in Ukraine." That's my situation. I'm a citizen of Canada, I reside in Geneva, but I live in Ukraine.
Many people from the diaspora have strengthened my conviction in this regard. In recent years, people would come up to me and refer to Ukrainians as "they." For me, it has always been "us." If you feel the affinity - cultural, linguistic, national and other affinity, then it's not "they," but "us." Maybe the fact that I'd never formed close ties to the diaspora made it easier for me.
In fact, this identification [with Ukraine] came to me very naturally. It was not a product of reflection - it came spontaneously and fairly early. There are several reasons.
First, I left Ukraine already as an adult. I was 17 1/2, but you mature quickly under harsh circumstances. Secondly, my brother was arrested in 1940, and only recently I learned he'd been liquidated in 1944. Much of my family was liquidated or repressed in one form or another.
In Canada, a country I embraced, I gained my personal freedom, my freedom to think and judge for myself. It is a country that provided my education and my trampoline to jump into the world.
All the same, I felt a very strong moral obligation not to amputate myself from my own, from Ukraine, and I made every effort to stay in contact with the country in one way or another. More so after I'd left Toronto, because there you can live in the Ukrainian community in an ersatz Ukraine and lose your feel for the real thing. At any rate, I moved to northern Québec for about five years where there were no Ukrainians at all, and then on to Geneva, where there was only one Ukrainian family.
But I read. I found the Digest of Soviet Ukrainian Press, published by Prolog [in New York City and Munich] very helpful, and vastly preferred it to some of the émigré material published in Toronto. In that way, I felt I remained in spiritual and intellectual contact with Ukraine.
As people from Ukraine came to Geneva to the United Nations agencies, I often invited them to our home, and I could see that even under the terrible Soviet regime some individuals were trying to accomplish things. One lawyer I met was trying to defend human rights within the framework of the Soviet Constitution. He'd received a U.N. prize for his defense of human rights, but was roundly denounced in the diaspora, and when he was in Geneva, he came to my home and almost cried, saying "I really tried to do what I could."
I was already traveling to Ukraine in 1971 and 1972. In 1980, I'd written a book predicting that the Soviet Union would disintegrate. I believed in this so strongly I took early retirement, five years early, just so I could be free to see my prediction come to pass. It became realistic to do this in 1988, and from then on I became quite active in Ukraine.
While in Kyiv in 1988, I happened to turn on the television and saw a broadcast from Moscow of a Communist Party congress where Borys Oliynyk said, "Our mothers and sisters did not die for Stalin, nor for the USSR, they died for our homeland, and that homeland is Ukraine." The next day I met Dmytro Pavlychko at the Writers' Union to discuss how we were going to design the Ukrainian state - what should be the set of values, its political institutions, its economic system.
The decision to establish the management school [International Management Institute, Kyiv] came out of my desire to help the country with the logistics of the process of setting up a state, creating a system of governance, and developing managers who would manage this new system. That was my priority.
One of the laws of human behavior is that your commitment to something is a function of your capacity to influence. It can even be expressed as a mathematical formula. Therefore, my commitment to Ukraine is very strong because I'm playing a role there. If I were an observer, or an outside analyst critiquing it, I wouldn't feel this sense of "us."
When I arrived, the Soviet Union was still very much in existence, but I could set up a management school since it was essentially neutral. The decision to do was made in December 1988, and I remember meeting with people who had just left concentration camps in early 1989. Ironically, we met at the Zhovtnevyi [October] Hotel, which used to belong to the Party's Central Committee, and that's where we planned how we would disband the Communist Party.
At the same time, I knew [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr] Ivashko - I was trying to get him to go to a commemoration of [capitalist theoretician] Adam Smith in Edinburgh - and I knew Ivashko's successor, [Stanislav] Hurenko.
When I began to work in Ukraine, I adopted a set of principles. I decided I would not join any political party; I would not run for political office; and I would not make any money. I made a conscious decision to get to know the society, and meet people along its entire spectrum. So yes, I sought opportunities to meet the first secretary - I wanted to learn the mentality of the people, what made them tick - whether their identities as Ukrainians could be reconcilable with their beliefs as Communists. Obviously, it was.
Q: Since it was certainly reconcilable in the 1920s and early 1930s, why not in the 1980s and 1990s?
A: That's right. In addition, there were the truly noble people who had survived the concentration camps. In some sense, for many of them it was a beneficial process, not that I'd wish it on anyone. In those kinds of circumstances, if you're weak, you're crushed, but if you're strong, you become stronger.
When I was young, I was raised as a nationalist. Until 1948 I was a Banderite, and as a youth in Canada, when I was a lumberjack, I would work in the bush and in the evenings, it seems absurd now, I'd try to get people to go to meetings.
However, in 1988, 40 years later, I became very worried about the extreme nationalists in western Ukraine and their anti-Russian rhetoric. The tolerance of people like [former dissident and Ambassador to Canada Levko] Lukianenko sustained me. No hatred, great tolerance. And yet there were others, great patriots, who did not understand that Ukraine would exist as a pluralistic, multi-ethnic state, or it would not exist.
One of the missions I assigned to myself was to sustain faith. There are not too many objective realities that stand up to scrutiny. The perception often becomes the reality, and if you believe in something strongly enough, the probability of it becoming a reality is greater.
When I lecture abroad, at conferences, when I make presentations to world leaders, I can present Ukraine with a certain objectivity. I can maintain my sense of distance. But when I'm in Ukraine it changes. I won't say things I don't believe in, but I don't concentrate on so many of the negative points.
When I was about 18 or 19, I became fascinated by psychology and began applying it to myself, to learn more. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that I wasn't a very attractive personality and that there were scores of weaknesses I should eliminate.
But in doing so, I realized that I would waste a lot of time and accomplish nothing if I focused on weaknesses; it was much better to concentrate on strengths. I think this applies to Ukraine.
Q: One ostensible "Ukrainian weakness" that some believe has long undermined attempts to establish statehood is a deep-seated anarchism. Could that be seen as a strength that enabled the country to emerge from between the two huge monoliths coming from the East and from the West - the Soviet/Russian and that of the U.S.-led alliance?
A: That's a very good example, because for all the incompetence, for all the lack of any political savvy, Ukraine has managed itself amazingly. You can't attribute it all to luck.
The wisdom, despite our "otamanshchyna" [fragmentation, too many chiefs] the Ukrainian elite decided on a project of statehood - from nationalists to communists. It was decided: "we have to be, not just tolerant to minorities; we have to make good on all commitments to maintain cultures, languages."
This was amazing for a country that had suffered so much. You'd think that a people who had been downgraded, discriminated against, trodden upon, would surely do unto others as was done unto them. And yet they didn't. They showed a nobility of spirit that was truly fascinating to behold.
Unfortunately, some of these very people became corrupt, in the normal economic sense. Oddly, the same people who participated in this very noble process and moved it along gave way under financial pressure. They found themselves in a very peculiar economic situation and became disoriented, to my mind.
Q: As a multi-ethnic state, is there a model Ukraine should follow? The Swiss, the Canadian, the American?
A: Ukraine could learn something from Switzerland, but it does not have an exact model to follow. Switzerland's ethnic groups are far more distinctly regionalized.
I don't share the view of those who have the standard prescriptions for the building of nationhood. The element of cohesion does not have to be language, ethnicity or religion, it can be a political process. What has held Switzerland together until now is direct democracy.
The Italian-speaking Swiss who live near northern Italy, and the French-speaking Swiss who live on the French border - neither would want to be part of Italy or France, because then decisions would be made for them, in Paris or Rome. In Switzerland, in Geneva, they decide their own destinies. In Switzerland, de-centralization holds the whole together.
Therefore, I disagree with those who insist that Ukraine must be a unitary state, and that otherwise it would fall apart. On the contrary, I think the more federal it is, the greater cohesion there will be. That way, if Kyiv allows people to manage their own affairs regionally and locally, their allegiance to Ukraine will be much stronger in the face of a Russia which aims to control them from afar, in the old fashion.
In late 1991, just prior to the referendum on independence, I organized a meeting of representatives of 16 nationalities living in Ukraine in order to ask them how they would vote, and debate them as to their reasons. I remember the surprising unanimity of support for independence. Both at that meeting and in the referendum itself, the non-Ukrainians were more consistently for independence than Ukrainians themselves. They told me that they felt they had a better chance to preserve their own specificity in a Ukrainian state than they would under a larger entity.
Q: Do you think they still feel that way in 1997?
A: I still think they feel that way as far as cultural preservation is concerned. The doubts people express about independence arise as a result of the dire economic conditions. Freedom to speak Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Tatar or Russian doesn't do you much good if you don't have a job.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 25, 1997, No. 21, Vol. LXV
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