EXCLUSIVE: Excerpts from Kostiantyn Morozov's forthcoming book "Above and Beyond"

by Robert De Lossa

When Kostiantyn Morozov arrived at Harvard University as a senior research fellow in the fall of 1994, he had an ambitious agenda. It included collaboration with scholars at the Kennedy School of Government and the Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI); lectures around the country; meetings with the Ukrainian American community; and consultations with leading politicians and specialists in Washington. In spring 1995 he also began work on a book about how he became independent Ukraine's first defense minister and what he did in that role.

What follows here (and next week) are excerpts from that book, "Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder," published by HURI and available later this month.

"Above and Beyond" traces Mr. Morozov's family history, early years and military career. He talks honestly and with emotion, as a former Soviet pilot and general officer, about military life and the Communist Party's intervention in the armed forces. The turning-point of the book is Mr. Morozov's narrative of the August 1991 putsch. He provides a detailed account of what he and others did at the time, and the events that led Leonid Kravchuk to choose him to be Ukraine's first defense minister. Gen. Morozov became the man responsible for managing the huge Soviet armed forces presence on Ukrainian soil. He had to make sure that it would not be used to end Ukrainian independence. He also had somehow to transform it, peacefully, into a Ukrainian military.

In 1991 and 1992 most pundits in the West and in Russia said that rebellion and massive bloodshed would result from his efforts. But Gen. Morozov managed to pull off the unimaginable. By the time he retired from his post, Ukraine had a loyal army that was one of the largest in the world. "Above and Beyond" ends with the high point of his work - the oath of loyalty drive of spring 1992. Mr. Morozov provides further narration in three extensive photo collections with 39 photographs from his family photo album that range from his early life to Ukraine's emergence onto the world arena in 1992 and 1993. Thirteen important documents with translations round out the book.

"Above and Beyond" is more than the usual book from a university press. It is a good read - a gripping story that makes it not only a "must-have" volume on independent Ukraine, but also a moving tribute to the bravery and patriotism of men and women who, like Kostiantyn Morozov, made Ukrainian independence a reality.

* * *

"Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder" by Kostiantyn P. Morozov; introduction by Sherman W. Garnett. 320 pp., four maps, 39 color and black-and-white photos, 13 documentary facsimilies and translations, notes, index. $29.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0-916458-77-6. For ordering information call HURI Publications at (617) 495-4053, e-mail [email protected]; or fax (617) 495-8097.

"So, you are Ukrainian?"

(Excerpts from Chapter 1)

Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov and I always had a healthy regard for each other. We both were pilots and had worked together for years. Yevgeny Ivanovich had graduated from the Gritsevets Kharkiv Higher Military Aviation School, as had I. We had similar career paths and temperaments. He was the one who had nominated me for my post as commander of the 17th Air Army and had personally flown to Kyiv to present me to the troops in my new command. Most of all, we respected and trusted each other - and that respect and trust had helped see us through the recent coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev.

But all this faded away, and now it was my attitude toward the USSR that concerned him at this crucial juncture of political and military uncertainties. The abortive coup attempt against Gorbachev on August 19, 1991, had called into question the Soviet Union's political and military stability. Deputies in the Ukrainian Parliament had declared Ukraine an independent, sovereign nation, no longer a part of the USSR. The Soviet Union itself was falling apart.

Appointed minister of defense for the USSR, Shaposhnikov was a resolute man staunchly devoted to the idea of a single military under central, Russian control - the traditional Soviet ideal. He had no use for those who stood in the way of his mission, and the idea must have occurred to him that I, once his protégé, now stood in his way. He was confronted with the fact that the Parliament of Ukraine - our Verkhovna Rada - had recently approved my appointment as Ukraine's first minister of defense. I could imagine his irritation, perhaps his shock. After all, he knew what was all over the newspapers as soon as I was appointed minister of defense: Kostiantyn Morozov is half-Russian, half-Ukrainian. Although he was a reformer and had quit the Communist Party immediately after the putsch - as I had - he still believed firmly in the USSR, first and foremost. For Shaposhnikov and anyone with that old Soviet outlook on the world, being half-Russian meant being all Russian, and that was supposed to "inoculate" me against the Ukrainian patriotism that had so consumed many of my countrymen.

In the fall of 1991, after my appointment as minister of defense of Ukraine, I was still working closely with (and, theoretically, still under) the USSR Ministry of Defense. Shaposhnikov confronted me there. He fixed his gaze on me and, with a look of dismay, asked a question to which he already knew the answer:

"So, Konstantin Petrovich, it turns out that you're Ukrainian?"

"Yes, I am Ukrainian," I replied. I forced a small joke: "It looks as if they made a mistake on my documents, Yevgeny Ivanovich."

Shaposhnikov was stunned and simply repeated the question to me, "So, it turns out you're a Ukrainian?!"

I answered honestly what I knew - that I was half-Russian, half-Ukrainian, born and raised in Ukraine.

It speaks volumes about the confusion and turmoil of the time that even at that high level our Soviet comrades were shocked upon finding out that colleagues whom they had assumed to be "safe" Russians were actually "dangerous" Ukrainians determined to gain independence. But it was not so easy for the Soviet mind to bend itself around the idea that a successful man could want to be anything but a Soviet. And at its core that meant "Russian." So how could it turn out that a general officer - Shaposhnikov's own man! - was a Ukrainian, when his passport said "Russian"?

Shaposhnikov tried one more time. "But but, how come?"

Just how that came about is, in part, the story of the first 47 years of my life. I had always assumed that I was Ukrainian on my mother's side and Russian on my father's. My Soviet internal passport, which had no place for "hyphenated ethnicity," said simply that I was Russian.

Exactly where my ancestral roots lie is a question I cannot answer, given how sketchy our family records are. Even as a child, I knew that my mother's ancestors were Cossacks [Kozaks] named Semenchuk from the area near Chernihiv. In the 1920s her father moved the family to the Donbas region in hopes of building up his small business for the manufacture of household items, footwear and harnesses.

[...]

In the early 1950s, my father was promoted from foreman to manager of a unit that installed and repaired electrical equipment in the mines. Soon thereafter - in 1954, at the age of only 39 - he was fatally injured in a workplace accident. I don't remember many of the details. I was only 10 years old at the time. But I know that he never regained consciousness and died at the hospital.

When my father died, my mother was instantly thrust into the role of head of household with three children to support on an elementary schoolteacher's salary. Everyone in our little town knew Kateryna Morozova, not only because they had had her as a teacher, but also because their children - in some cases, even their grandchildren - were now in her classes. By the time I was an adult, three generations in my hometown knew our family.

Mother was an immensely courageous and principled woman who always had a strong religious faith, even in a society that officially had no use for such "excesses." Like her parents she was baptized in an Orthodox service and, despite the prevailing ideology against religion, she risked both her job and her family when she insisted that the three of us children should also undergo the Orthodox sacrament of baptism. Had what she had done been discovered, she could have been fired from her teaching post and banned from all contacts with us children.

After my father's death, we lived an increasingly frugal existence. Like her father, Mother was very good with her hands and throughout her life used a hand-operated sewing machine to make and repair our clothes. Until I entered the 10th grade, the last grade of our high school, I had only one shirt to my name, which I had worn since the seventh grade and which I had long outgrown. We knew exactly what we could or could not ask our mother to buy. And knowing how difficult her situation was, we rarely asked for anything.

[...]

Close to 40 years after my father's death, I was looking through the family papers for biographical information. Among some scattered letters and registration forms, I found my birth certificate, officially listing the place and date of my birth, as well as important information about my mother and father, including their ethnic identity. Reading quickly through some familiar data, I stopped abruptly at the line giving the details about my father's ethnic background. There on the document was the name Petr Morozov, officially registered as Ukrainian! He was not Russian, as I had always assumed. Rather than sharing ethnic identities, I was fully Ukrainian. This was the first inkling I had of my true ethnic roots, and the revelation left me speechless.

To my knowledge, no evidence exists as to why I was kept in the dark about my ethnic heritage. There was no intentional cover-up, no attempt to deceive me or make me into something that I wasn't. Perhaps my parents simply assumed that all the while I knew, but more likely they understood the political realities of the Donbas region at that time in our history. Whatever the case, the introduction of this new information caught me by surprise and caused me to re-evaluate my family life, my loyalties and my military career - in essence, the core values of my being. This book flows from the fact that during a critical period in the early 1990s I had to set new priorities and reassess the principles that have been with me, I believe, since my earliest experiences.

Back on that fall day when I stood across from Marshal Shaposhnikov I was at the middle point of my new journey. I did not know then that my "Ukrainianness" was not only spiritual and psychological, bound up with my love of my country and sense of duty toward it, but that I was ethnically Ukrainian on both sides of my family. Irrespective of the family details, the process of my "re-Ukrainianization" had taken deep hold and I was well aware of it. With a broader and deeper understanding, I could now look across the table directly into the eyes of Marshal Shaposhnikov and say to him, as an equal, "Yes, I am Ukrainian."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 12, 2000, No. 46, Vol. LXVIII

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