UKRAINE'S INDEPENDENCE: THE SIXTH ANNIVERSARY
A letter to friends on the occasion of the second World Forum of Ukrainians
by James E. Mace
PART I
Being back in America for the first time in two years, I had a chance to reacquaint myself with the Ukrainian American press and was struck by how much and how little has changed.
As I will soon be returning to take part in the second World Forum of Ukrainians and to teach full time in Kyiv, I would like to take this opportunity to share a few perceptions with you, my old friends, about what I have learned during my years of living with the citizens of Ukraine on the same basis as they do.
At the end of the month, when Ukrainians of various stripes meet in Kyiv to have their say, there is sure to be a great deal of soul searching; we are sure to hear the phraseology, once confined to the diaspora and now customary for national democrats, about the eternal virtues of "Nenka Ukraina," her endless sufferings, the beauties of her language, the glories of her culture, the triumphs and tragedies of her history.
The old stereotypes about heroic Ukrainians battling against evil Russians for control of the state don't really fit the far more complex realities of a land and people deeply deformed by an experience that those who underwent it are still groping to understand. Frankly, they have deformed tools for doing so. One of the great dividing lines of culture runs through Ukraine - not the division between a Catholic-Protestant West and Orthodox-Muslim East, so popular with certain American political scientists - but the chasm left by the old pre-1939 Soviet Western border. West of that line, in Lviv as in Poland, the Soviet government never lost the psychological attributes of an occupation regime in the eyes of most of the population. But East of it - where whole generations where born, raised, lived and died knowing nothing else - what was called "a new historical entity, the Soviet people," assumed more reality and emotional content than anyone here, myself included, really understood.
The destruction or, more precisely, deconstruction of Ukrainian society in the USSR during the 1930s created a historical discontinuity, rooting out the world of Hrushevsky and Yefremov, of Khvyliovyi and the young Sosiura, and artificially replacing it with an alternative reality and identity to which a great many people became so accustomed that it became altogether natural for them. The concept of the "Soviet people," whose existence was decreed from above in the 1930s, gained real emotional content in World War II. The experience of advancing to "liberate" Kyiv and on to Berlin shoulder to shoulder with Russians and the other "Soviet peoples" made the "Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland" for a whole generation of frontovyky (those who were at the front) their victory. Thus, in the eyes of many such people the Soviet Union had far more legitimacy than independent Ukraine has today. Moreover, while western Ukraine presents a sociologically complete and relatively healthy national society, in the regions of Ukraine, along the Dnipro River, where 85 percent of the population lives, the urban population got out of the habit of using the Ukrainian language, at least at home.
But then, in Ukraine language is no indicator of political convictions. My acquaintances assure me that a decade ago the supernationalist leader of UNSO (Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization), Dmytro Korchynsky, did not speak Ukrainian. Yet, even before independence, the journal Sociological and Political Thought published a survey indicating that 90 percent of the population of Kyiv has at least some understanding of Ukrainian, and only rarely in Kyiv does a salesgirl mistake the Ukrainian dvi for the Russian tri (although it still happens). In a society where virtually everyone is to some extent bilingual and people use one language for some occasions and another for others, a certain chameleon-like quality seeps into people's personal lives.
There are many ways to understand what a nation is. From the standpoint of how people subjectively understand who they are and to what they owe allegiance, in the early 1980s an American professor, Benedict Anderson, suggested that they might well be understood as imagined communities who adopted their modern national identification (consciousness) only in the last century or two. After all, modern research shows that the majority of the ancestors of today's Frenchmen or Germans had no idea that they were "French" or "German" even 150 years ago. In a world where most people were illiterate peasants who tilled the soil among people like themselves and never traveled more than 10 miles or so in their lifetimes, most people did not need nor could they develop a modern national consciousness. The latter arose only as a result of the complex pressures of modernity.
In this subjective sense, there are really two "nations," two "imagined communities" in today's Ukraine: Ukrainians and "the Soviet people" - in Sovietese, "Sovky" - the former concentrated in, but by no means limited to, western Ukraine, the latter concentrated in pre-1939 Soviet Ukraine.
Strangely enough, it is difficult in Ukraine to find a Russian imagined community, for all the efforts of Oleksander Bazyliuk's Civic Congress and the Congress of Russian Organizations (he heads both), because Russians in Ukraine simply do not feel that they are not at home (in spite of propaganda that the Russian language is, as Mr. Bazyliuk claims, "effectively banned") - even with what seems to many Ukrainians an agonizingly slow and superficial "velvet" Ukrainization of the state apparatus and official mass media.
Unlike in the Baltic states, Russians in Ukraine have not felt the outside pressure that would compel them to form a Russian imagined community as such. One need only look at the fact that all attempts to organize purely Russian mass political movements have fallen flat. Rather, the Left with its yearnings for a return to the "good old days" of the USSR, cuts across purely ethnic categories and is led by such "passport Ukrainians" as Oleksander Moroz and Petro Symonenko. This leads one to conclude that the nationality written in one's old Soviet passport means little or nothing in understanding the political and social realities of contemporary Ukraine.
If the emotional cornerstone of the old Soviet identity and living heroes were provided by the war, the structural origins of the contemporary Ukrainian state come, not from a return to the ideals of the Ukrainian National Republic, but from the Khrushchev reforms of the 1950s. To paraphrase the argument made by the late Ivan L. Rudnytsky back in 1963, the shift in budget allocation policy from Stalinist hypercentralization to one of devolution to the republics (in 1952 the union republics accounted for only 20 percent of the USSR's total budgetary expenditures, but by 1958 the figure was over 50 percent) created strong republic territorial elites, fated to "grow into" the soil of their respective republics, but still as products of the communist system and bereft of any national sentiments.
Structures, once formed, resist change. When the center fell apart, representatives of this same elite in Ukraine, initially looking to the national elite (primarily national democrats) for a new ideology and adapting themselves according to the character of their local environment (more "Red" in the east and south, more "Ukrainian" in the west), remained the dominant political factor in independent Ukraine. The fact that both presidents of independent Ukraine were colleagues on the last Soviet-era Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine in the Ukrainian SSR, while Messrs. Symonenko and Moroz were but regional functionaries, is an obvious indicator that Ukraine's ruling establishment institutionally is more a continuation of Soviet Ukraine than those who ostensibly want to return to the Soviet past.
"Sovdepia" (a less than fond abbreviation for the land of the councils of deputies going back perhaps to the wars of the Russian Revolution), to paraphrase Marx, is that dead hand of past generations hanging like a curse on the brain of the living. It has deformed Ukraine in other complex and profound ways. There were no such things in the USSR as economics, political science or the social sciences in general. They were long ago supplanted by ideologized pseudo-sciences with Orwellian terminology such as political economics and something called "scientific communism," which perfectly suited the Soviet ancien regime but provided precious little of use for understanding how the world outside the "socialist camp" really works.
Suffice it to recall how Dmytro Vydrin, former internal affairs adviser to the president of Ukraine, and Dmytro Tabachnyk, former head of the presidential administration, wrote in the first paragraph of the first chapter of their book, "Ukraine on the Threshold of the 21st Century: Political Aspects," that Ukraine, like other post-Soviet states, lacks a civil society in its "generally understood" meaning, i.e. that most citizens share the same basic values, moral behavior patterns and such.
Given that civil society is in fact generally understood as a network of institutions independent of government and capable of influencing it, we have a situation where, say, these then prominent political figures could speak with a Western aid administrator and agree that Ukraine lacks and should immediately create a civil society, blissfully unaware that what each had thought he had said was quite different from what the other thought he had heard and agreed with. And this could be extended to such concepts as "democracy," "rights," "market economy," "reforms," "fighting corruption" and on down - a virtually endless list resulting in the fact that each side sooner or later feels lied to.
This drives Western aid officials, often with no prior knowledge of the country and the system it has inherited, to distraction. One American agricultural expert described to me a typical "business plan" drawn up at the Ministry of Agriculture to privatize the agro-industrial complex: the national government would retain a 20 percent interest, the regions another 20 percent, management and local entities 20 to 25 percent, leaving a non-controlling stock package to be offered to private investors. This would mean that the whole operation would not only be controlled by bureaucrats, but by representatives of different bureaucracies which never have and never will work efficiently together. "And I couldn't make them understand why this is insane," he said.
Behind this is not just the imperatives of bureaucrats seeking to retain their functions and power, and thus their jobs. The Soviet mentality has ingrained the notion that only the state can protect "the people" (whoever that might be) from "exploitation." As one national deputy recently put it, "I'm not for investment for its own sake, but that it improve the functioning of domestic (read existing) enterprises." A Western economist might reply that enterprises also don't exist for their own sake but to efficiently produce goods and services, thus making it possible to pay employees more money, create demand, more jobs and more wealth, and that less efficient businesses ought to go bankrupt, shut down and thus free up resources for more effective use, thereby improving the well-being of society as a whole.
This is not to say that there are no competent experts in Ukraine. Although they are a minority, there are plenty. But the crisis of competence reigning as a result of the dominance among local advisers of repackaged "scientific communists" cum political scientists, repackaged "political economists" masquerading as economists, and other such creatures, has rendered such would-be reformers as Viktor Pynzenyk and Serhii Holovatyi virtually impotent.
I remember one competent economist, who out of a desire to "earn" an apartment took a government job (the fact that one works in order to be awarded housing rather than to buy it is one symptom of what is wrong) and left after six months without one. When I asked him what happened, he said, "Jim, you have to understand that economics just didn't exist here. We had political economy, and that's something altogether different. So, on any given issue there may be, say, 60 advisers (yet another symptom), and maybe 10 of them understand something and suggest some concrete step. But the other 50 with identical paper qualifications don't understand anything. And, since the decision-makers also don't understand anything, they just go with the majority."
James E. Mace is professor of political science at the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He is also a current laureate of the journal Suchasnist in the category of scholarship and publicistics.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, August 24, 1997, No. 34, Vol. LXV
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