FACES AND PLACES: Where is our hetman, now that we need him? (10/31/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Where is our hetman, now that we need him?

By the time some of you read this, Ukraine will have held another presidential election. Not that it matters. Regardless of who wins, very little will change in Ukraine because the president has little power. According to the 1996 Constitution, the prime minister has the authority to appoint ministers and heads of local state administrations. That's why President Kuchma has fired any prime minister who became a little too ambitious.

By most measures, but especially economically, Ukraine today is a mess. How can people trust a government which has failed (if it ever really tried) to corral corruption? Some Ukrainians are pining for a Pinochet to save Ukraine. They would like to see some Communists "disappear." A better choice would be a Lee Kuan Yew, the former president of Singapore who transformed the city-state into one of the most prosperous, safest, cleanest, crime- and drug-free nations in the world. American liberals didn't like him but, hey, his people did.

If neither of these models are possible for Ukraine, how about a hetman, the kind visualized by Viacheslav Lypynsky, back during the 1920s. His major premise following modern Ukraine's first failed attempt at statehood was that Ukrainians had been ethnonationally unprepared for statehood, especially the peasants of eastern Ukraine.

Lypynsky's vision of a future Ukrainian state was cased on what he called a "classocratic" society wherein all productive classes - laboring, technical, academic - would have roles to play under the benevolent guidance of a hereditary hetman who would be a kind of philosopher-king, a person above party and class interests. Lypynsky rejected republican forms of governments, and characterized socialist democracies as "mobocracies" ruled by "nomadic barbarians united by some kind of primitive fanatical faith and a primitive morality" based on "the rule of the fist" and "the authority of fear."

His model for Ukraine was Great Britain, which, he wrote, is not an "oligarchichal classless military bureaucracy that constantly stands guard over the nation"; nor is it a "magical democracy" that does not recognize classes. England, he believed, enjoys class cooperation because the right of the productive classes to participate in the economic life of the nation is recognized along with the moral authority that resides with the aristocracy within each class.

Initially a supporter of Ukraine's last hetman, Pavlo Skoropadsky, Lypynsky broke with the hetman in 1930, alleging that he had behaved in an autocratic manner and had agreed to renounce all future claims to Carpatho-Ukraine in return for a yearly stipend from the Hungarian government.

During the 1920s, the monarchist vision was a very popular political ideology among Ukrainians in North America. At the time, only the Communists could boast of a larger organizational membership.

America's "hetmantsi" eventually established their own organization, the hetman Sich (named after the Kozak stronghold), initially headed by Dr. Stepan Hrynevotsky, a Chicago physician. Following the lead of Polish Americans who organized Polish legions to fight for a free Poland after World War I, the charismatic Hrynevetsky convinced some 100 young Ukrainian Americans to join the American militia (national guard) and to form a "Ukrainian" company to be trained by American officers. Similar companies were formed in Detroit and Cleveland, and three airplanes were purchased to train a Ukrainian air force. It was all a very serious business until the FBI, acting in response to the "concerns" of the Soviet ambassador, became involved.

Sich also published a weekly newspaper, Sichovi Visti (later Sich), which provided many thought-provoking articles for its readership. On January 15, 1928, for example, the periodical explained why Ukrainians needed Sich and a hetman to lead them: "An organization is created when the people know what they want - that means, when they have one idea. We did not have strength or a nation until now because we did not have one idea. There was only a cry: 'we want Ukraine.' But each person who made that cry wanted a different Ukraine. Every editor and every newspaper, every meeting, wanted something different, but no one knew what they wanted." (I ask you, has anything charged in the past 70 years?)

The editorial continued: "In order to eliminate once and for all the fighting among our 'leaders,' where each believes that only he is capable of being the 'head' of the people - condemning and defaming all others - Sich in America ... has said: 'Over all parties and leaders there must be one - the hetman.'"

The idea of a constitutional monarchy for Ukraine is not as weird as it may sound at first blush, especially in Europe; England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Monte Carlo seem to do quite well with such governments. And it was King Juan Carlos who transformed Franco's authoritarian regime into Spain's first stable democracy. Today there is talk of Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia taking charge and healing the ethnic divisions which plague that unfortunate nation. The prince even has his own dynastic website (www.RoyalFamily.org).

Until Ukraine gets a benevolent hetman, or an effective president, the people are stuck with what they have: a slate of candidates, most of whom appear to be debased, mendacious mediocrities eager to dip their snouts into the national trough.

In the meantime, tired, haggard and anxious Ukrainians are lining up in front of the American, Canadian, German, South African, Australian, Argentina and Brazilian embassies beginning at 6 a.m., hoping to emigrate.

A Canadian friend of mine living in Ukraine wrote recently that it takes five seals from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Justice to certify one document, and each ministry is located as far as possible from the other, keeps the oddest hours, and hires staff that delights in finding a minor discrepancy in a document. He saw women who had come from the far reaches of Ukraine break down and sit on the steps, crying their hearts out, only to have two burly apes, heads shaved, knuckles dragging on the ground, boot them onto the street. Slava Ukrayini!

Perhaps the hetmans were right. Perhaps Ukrainians don't know what they want. Perhaps Ukraine still isn't ethnonationally ready for democratic self-rule. Ready or not, the Ukrainian people have voted, as they did during Soviet times, and the result, I'm afraid, may very well be the same.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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