PERSPECTIVES: Europe or Moscow? (06/06/99)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Europe or Moscow?

A recently expanded NATO celebrated its 50th anniversary in April, with a big meeting in Washington. All European heads of state were there, with the prominent exceptions of Russia, Belarus and Yugoslavia. Since Russia made noise about staying away, President Leonid Kuchma's active representation of Ukraine at NATO made a powerful statement. Diplomatically but unmistakably, he made it clear that Ukraine has its own view of things and does not take orders from Moscow. Foreign Affairs Minister Borys Tarasyuk explained that "Ukraine's goal, to integrate into European and Trans-Atlantic structures, remains unchanged."

But not everyone in Ukraine agrees. The chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Oleksander Tkachenko, has an entirely different orientation: he's nostalgic for the Soviet Union and is working to have Ukraine join the union of Belarus and Russia.

This clash of policies between Messrs. Kuchma and Tkachenko is disquieting to be sure, but given where Ukraine is in its national development, the tension between two competing geopolitical orientations is not unhealthy. It represents the resumption of a political-cultural struggle that consumed Soviet Ukraine throughout the 1920s, only to end violently in the '30s. Then, the question was settled by brute force. Today the question has returned: should Ukraine orient itself on Russia or the West?

In the 1920s the writer Mykola Khvyliovy led the debate. He was born in a village near Kharkiv and fought in the tsar's army as a front-line soldier in World War I. When the revolution broke out in 1917, he was caught up in the complicated, bloody power struggle that pitted Ukrainian nationalists, Bolsheviks, tsarist generals, peasant anarchists and a half dozen foreign governments against one another. Ultimately, Lenin's Bolsheviks won, but the strong support for the Ukrainian national movement during the Revolution remained a formidable political factor in 1920s Ukraine.

In 1921 Khvyliovy and his friends assessed Ukraine after nearly 10 years of war and revolution, and concluded that coerced association with Moscow had stifled their country's development. Over the previous 250 years, Imperial Russia had systematically dismantled Ukraine's government, destroyed the Kozak Sich and finally banned even the language. While Russian culture flourished, Ukrainian culture had shriveled into provincialism and insignificance. This is unacceptable, Khvyliovy said. Ukrainian culture, he argued, must aspire to achieve world-class status. His remedy was summarized in two short slogans: "Away from Moscow!" and "Toward Europe!"

"This point is," he wrote in 1926, "that Russian literature has weighed down on us for centuries as master of the situation, as one who has conditioned our psyche to play the slavish imitator." Ukrainians, therefore, must break with Moscow: "Our orientation is to Western European art, its style, its techniques ... We conceive of Europe as a psychological category that thrusts humanity forward onto the great highway of progress." He maintained that Ukraine, located strategically at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and oriented on Europe, was poised to lead a political and cultural revival of the "peoples of the East."

Soon Khvyliovy saw results from his campaign. The Ukrainian government in Kharkiv implemented a "Ukrainization" program designed to reverse generations of Russification and foster cultural rebirth. Before long, Ukrainian literacy flourished, magazines and journals were established, libraries of books were published, and plays were performed. Oleksander Dovzhenko's film studio, for example, became world-renowned.

All these developments did not sit well with Moscow and particularly with Joseph Stalin. In time, Moscow struck back ruthlessly. In April 1929 the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party approved the first Five-Year Plan and its infamous goal to collectivize the land. Three months later the OGPU (secret police) arrested some 5,000 members of a fictitious organization, the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine." In March 1930, after more than six months of beatings and torture, a series of show trials was held where the writers, scholars, critics, theater people, priests and others arrested the previous July, confessed to preposterous crimes. Khvyliovy and his followers found the ground crumbling beneath their feet. In those circumstances, it was suicide to stick to your position and Khvyliovy wrote abject apologies for his views, acknowledging them to be "definite deviations from the proletarian line on internationalism."

In 1932 - the last year of the Five-Year Plan - the party declared outright war against Ukraine. It's a horrible story: well-fed Communists scoured the countryside, taking away every scrap of food. Their orders were to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." In the cities, stomach-turning torture and executions continued: a little-known poet, Maria Dyka, to cite just one example, was torn to pieces by wild dogs in the courtyard of a Kharkiv prison. That kind of savagery was common throughout Ukraine in 1932-1933. Use of the letter "g" became one of the litmus tests for "nationalist degeneracy."

On May 13 of that year, with millions dead or dying in the countryside and Ukraine's intellectual and political elite enduring mass terror, Khvyliovy summoned a group of friends to his apartment in Kharkiv for breakfast. Moments after they arrived, he went into his study and blew his brains out. He decided to commit suicide after all. On the table was a letter to the Communist Party of Ukraine accusing its members of betraying the revolution and their country. Khvyliovy became a non-person, and for the next 55 years it was impossible to find a word of his writings anywhere in Ukraine.

Right now Ukraine is preparing for its third presidential election to be held this fall. In the first election in 1991 there was only one issue: independence. The second election in 1994 proved the country could manage a smooth and peaceful transition of power from one president to another. The third presidential election in October will be about Ukraine's direction: the one Khvyliovy mapped out in the 1920s - "Away from Moscow!" and "Toward Europe" - or Stalin's centralizing policy, with Ukraine looking to Moscow as its point of reference.

Chairman Tkachenko and the leftists in the Verkhovna Rada have never acknowledged, let alone apologized for, what their party did to Maria Dyka, Mykola Khvyliovy or the millions of other victims of Soviet criminal insanity. What's worse, their refusal to return the land to the people or to privatize the agricultural sector perpetuates the evil of the collective farm system Stalin established with the Great Famine. With Stalin as their legacy and Soviet ideology as their platform, the Communists and their allies have no solutions to offer a country that's desperate for progress and growth.

Leftist efforts to reintegrate Ukraine with a moribund Russia, I believe, are bound to fail. Let's hope so. In Bible, Lot's wife looked back on the destruction of Sodom and was turned to salt. Any orientation backward for Ukraine toward the malevolent legacy of Moscow and the Soviet Union promises the same sterility and paralysis. Chairman Tkachenko and followers should educate themselves about their country's past.

They might start by reading the letter Mykola Khvyliovy left on his desk 66 years ago - he wrote it for them.

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