NEWS AND VIEWS: Ukraine and the 'Russian school' (04/02/00)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Ukraine and the 'Russian school'

by David R. Marples

Leonid Kuchma's second term as president of Ukraine, according to critics in Russia and some in the West, has erupted into a dangerous outburst of anti-Russian sentiment. The Ukrainian government has reportedly embarked on the course of "suicidal nationalism" of which former U.S. President George Bush warned in July 1991 during his infamous visit to Kyiv.

Several events have sparked the criticism. They include a decision taken late last year to promote the use of the Ukrainian language in education and provide compulsory Ukrainian language tests for all state employees. The movement toward a Ukrainian national culture has coincided with the end of Communist control - identified with a past of domination by Russia - in the Ukrainian Parliament for the first time since independence.

This month, a controversial referendum in Ukraine will decide, among other things, whether to provide the president with the authority to dissolve Parliament in matters of emergency. This decision, again directed against the Communist recalcitrance of the past that is identified with domination by Russia, has been condemned by the Council of Europe, which has threatened to end Ukraine's membership, ostensibly for developing a form of presidential dictatorship that could unhinge a fragile democracy. From the Ukrainian perspective the threat may seem especially harsh. After all, it was early this year that Ukraine abolished capital punishment, thereby resolving its previous impasse with the Council of Europe.

There are, undeniably, many problems in contemporary Ukraine: an economy reliant on Western credit but overloaded with debts; a leadership that has failed to curb state bureaucracy and rising corruption; obsolete and dangerous industries such as the coal mines of the Donbas.

At the same time the observer wonders why there are such outspoken objections to measures that would pass unnoticed in most countries, but which are really no more than attempts at self-identification or a rejection of the Communist past.

Last week, for example, protesters in Moscow picketed the Embassy of Ukraine to demand that Ukraine give equal rights to the Russian language and end alleged persecution of the 11-million strong Russian minority in Ukraine. Oleg Mironov, the human rights commissioner of the Russian Federation, maintains that Ukraine has violated the European Convention on Human Rights with policies of language discrimination. Such policies received attention in countries such as the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, which issued similar laws on languages, but they appear to be even less acceptable in Ukraine because of the widespread perception that Ukraine is not really distinct from Russia.

The Russian protesters have significant support from organizations and individuals in the West.

A case in point is the recent review/article on Ukrainian-Russian relations in The New York Review of Books by former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock Jr., titled "The Nowhere Nation" (February 24). The article was dismissive of Ukraine's national aspirations. According to Ambassador Matlock, around 53 percent of residents of Ukraine are Russian speakers, and "Russia and Ukraine shared essentially the same fate under Communism." Hence, in his view, Ukrainians are wrong to equate Soviet rule with Russian influences.

Mr. Matlock was quick to praise a new book by the British author Anatol Lieven ("Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry"), which is curtly dismissive of Ukrainian cultural and national aspirations different from those of Russia.

According to Mr. Matlock, "[Lieven's book] is the place to start if you are confused about what is going on in today's Ukraine or are inclined to blame its problems on Russia." Mr. Lieven is "unquestionably right when he points out that the 70 years of communism (40-odd years in western Ukraine) created more similar features in Russia and Ukraine than legitimate reasons for hostility." Later in the same paragraph Mr. Matlock adds. "Neither Russia nor Ukraine can properly be considered the exclusive heir of medieval Kievan Rus. Religion has normally been a unifying force, since both countries are predominantly Orthodox."

Regarding the "identical" experience of Russia and Ukraine under Communism, just a few examples prove otherwise: Russia experienced no Famine in the 1930s; the purges in the non-Russian republics affected a far greater portion of society, particularly intellectuals and party leaders; and the German-Soviet war was fought mainly on the territories of Ukraine and Belarus. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church was persecuted along with its Ukrainian Catholic counterpart after the second world war. Even today, apparently unknown to Mr. Matlock, conflict continues between the Russian and Ukrainian versions of Orthodoxy. One could continue ad nauseam, but one is talking to deaf ears.

The observer wonders why Mr. Lieven, a novice to Ukrainian studies, should be considered more reliable than the authors of the other books encompassed by Ambassador Matlock's review: Bohdan Nahaylo, Taras Kuzio, Robert S. Kravchuk, and Paul D'Anieri. Mr. Nahaylo's book, dismissed in a few cursory sentences by Mr. Matlock, represents more than 20 years of accumulated research and documentation. Or for that matter, why should the confused outsider read Mr. Lieven, a neophyte journalist, rather than Prof. Roman Szporluk of Harvard University, author of a new book on Ukrainian-Russian relations, or Dr. Roman Solchanyk, who has spent a good part of his career analyzing this same question?

According to Ambassador Matlock, the answer is first - implicitly - that authors of Ukrainian ancestry writing about Ukraine are not to be trusted: "The assumption held by nationalists from western Ukraine that the current Russian Federation is essentially the same as the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire that preceded it is no longer a strong current of thinking in Ukraine, but it lives on in foreign scholarship and journalism.

For foreign scholarship and journalism, one can substitute the names of Messrs. Nahaylo and Kuzio, and others, whose works are subjected to critical review by the ambassador.

Second, Mr. Lieven adheres to the simplistic but pervasive view that the problems of Ukraine are self-induced, while the influence of Russia, especially in the Soviet period, has been exaggerated. Russia and Ukraine, we learn, are not enemies, but fraternal rivals.

This sounds like something Stalin might have said. It presumes, for example, that Ukrainian national aspirations in 1918-1919 were insignificant, and that the formation of an army to fight the incoming Red Army in the latter stages of the German-Soviet war did not reflect a desire for an independent, non-Soviet Ukrainian state.

This negates the dissident movement of the 1970s that was always more pervasive in Ukraine than elsewhere. It also fails to explain why, even in the period of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev preferred to maintain hardliner Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, an appointee of Leonid Brezhnev in his prime (1972), as party boss of Ukraine when reformers on all sides were crying out for change.

The "Russia School" - it seems appropriate to call it such - has many supporters in Western academic circles. It argues that the Ukrainian state is an unwieldy conglomeration of disparate and different regions: the Ukrainian-speaking West; the Russian-speaking East; the southern Crimean peninsula, which remains an enclave with a Russian majority; areas with different histories and traditions that can never form a composite and satisfactory whole. In short, it is a "Nowhere Nation."

In dismissing Ukrainian national aspirations, the Russia School neglects three fundamental points.

First, similar comments could be made about any modern European nation. Spain, for example, not only has distinctive groups such as the Basques and Catalans, but there are significant historical and cultural differences also among its various regions. These differences have enhanced rather than inhibited what is termed "Spanish culture."

Second, Ukraine may have failed in many areas since independence, but there is general consensus that it has a model record in its treatment of and respect for minorities. In this sphere, the contrast with Russia or even Latvia is remarkable. Russians in Ukraine have hardly represented a Fifth Column in Ukrainian society. Even in Crimea, it was leaders from the Russian Federation, who including Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov, induced much of the agitation that occurred in the early 1990s on the peninsula.

Third, the position of the Russia School is both facile and ignorant. The Russification of Ukraine began in tsarist times, but was accelerated in the Soviet period. Not only was the Russian language and culture promoted in Ukraine, but also it became essential for Ukrainians to know and speak Russian in order to secure career advancement. In Ukraine today, residents are still subjected to Russian television, newspapers, books and journals. One wonders if there is another capital city in Europe (Miensk excepted) in which the language heard in the street is not the native one. This is the case in Kyiv, or should one say "Kiev"?

Russian chauvinism evidently is not dead. It has permeated even the Western academic establishment, wherein the history of new nations of the former Soviet Union is still seen through a Russian prism. In turn, Russia takes heart from such perspectives. When Mr. Putin claims that he cannot deal with the Chechens because they represent terrorism, Western spokespersons may raise their eyebrows, but by and large they do not question the assertion.

The truth is more likely that Russian imperialism still wins votes in elections, whether that imperialism is active - the military invasion of Chechnya - or passive, such as Russia's policies toward Ukraine or Belarus. One would not expect a Vladimir Zhirinovsky to accept the existence of an independent Ukraine, but only the most naive optimist would anticipate such an acknowledgment from Grigorii Yavlinsky or Anatolii Chubais either.

One can be critical of a new Ukrainian state that has descended into a petty authoritarianism in government and has seemed reluctant to embark on a program of radical economic reforms, but why would one object to the national and cultural development of an emergent nation of 50 million people?

Ambassador Matlock's response is that Ukrainians never voted to be independent from Russia: "That independence [December 1991], however, was from the Soviet Union, not from Russia. Ukrainian citizens in the Crimea and the border regions with Russia were never asked whether they wanted to be part of an independent Russia or an independent Ukraine."

Do the answers to Ukraine's problems then lie in a new union with Russia? It is time to place such conceptions where they really belong: on the garbage heap of history. If Ukraine is to survive in the 21st century, it must find its own path, based on historical antecedents and current circumstances.

Dr. David R. Marples is a professor of history and acting director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.

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