FACES AND PLACES: So what went wrong? (02/18/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

So what went wrong?

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline," rock musician Frank Zappa once quipped. "It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least, you need a beer."

Today, Ukraine has all but one of these, writes Andrew Wilson in a recently published book. Obolon is the beer; Air Ukraine International is the airline; Kyiv Dynamo reached the semi-finals of the European Champions League in soccer (known as football) in 1999. If the recent Dnipropetrovsk meeting between Vladimir Putin and Leonid Kuchma to discuss the joint production of intercontinental missiles comes to fruition, Ukraine may eventually have the fourth element. Based on the above criteria, Ukraine's identity ought to be firmly established.

"Ought to be" is one thing. "Is" is something else. By almost any yardstick one chooses - political, religious, economic - Ukraine is still muddling through. So what went wrong? Some of the answers can be found in Andrew Wilson's succinct, scholarly and detached overview of the Ukrainian experience, from Japheth's need to Kuchma's deep pockets. His "The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation" (Yale University Press) is a must read for serious students of modern Ukraine.

The early history of Ukraine can be found in the first four chapters, which review the many theories and myths regarding the origins of the Ukrainian people. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to Ukraine under Russian and Austrian rule, respectively, while Chapter 7 examines the emergence of Ukrainian national consciousness. Ukraine's last 40 years, from the "Shestydesiatnyky" to "crony capitalism" and "creole nationalism," are the focus of the remaining six chapters.

Politically, Ukraine has reached a stalemate. Ukraine's right-wing (nationalist) voters, found primarily in Halychyna and in part of central Ukraine, are the best organized and most patriotic political group, but represent no more than 25 percent of the electorate. Parties of the left, whose political base is in the larger Sovietized cities of the east and south, command 40 percent of the electorate. The remaining voters, theoretically "non-party," are dominated by local barons and corporate lobbies.

Today, the Communists, banned until 1994, represent the "destructive opposition." Once the Communists were allowed to return to the political arena, the right, primarily Rukh, was faced with a Hobson's choice: work with those national communists, who firmly supported independence and thereby preserve Ukrainian sovereignty, or eschew the former apparatchiks and risk pushing them into the united Russia camp. Since the mid-1990s, writes Mr. Wilson, Rukh has been grouping towards a "Grand Bargain" with the Communists. Ignored was Vyacheslav Chornovil's argument that only a " 'thorough de-Communization of Ukrainian society' to remove 'repainted party nomenklatura which has entrenched itself in all levels of the organs of power' could create a Ukraine that was both independent and democratic." As Lev Lukianenko predicted in 1992, the former Communists privatized state property into their own pockets.

Unity with Rukh began to unravel at its 1992 congress, when the organization split into two factions: the larger Chornovil contingent, and the Mykhailo Horyn/Ivan Drach minority. Today, Mr. Wilson believes, the Ukrainian right is divided into three groups: the mainstream national democratic camp, which includes remnants of Rukh and support a kind of civic nationalism; a revived OUN now called the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalist which still flirts with Donsovite ideals but can only muster 2-3 percent of the popular vote; and the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), with its paramilitary Ukrainian Self-Defense Force (UNSO), which has rejected the "parliamentary cretinism" of the national democrats and the outdated ideals of OUN. Fortunately, Ukraine's more powerful left is divided as well.

The picture is not much better in Ukraine's religious arena. The Church is now divided three ways with the Moscow Patriarchate claiming the largest number of parishes (8,168) in 1999. Parishes do not always translate into parishioners, however, since most of Moscow's churches are in eastern Ukraine where only 28 percent of the polled population in a recent survey belonged to a particular church. Although the Kyiv Patriarchate has only 2,270 parishes, an impressive 43 percent of those polled supported the UOC-KP. Only 4 percent supported the Autocephalous Church.

The Ukrainian Catholic Church, which claims 3,315 parishes, accounted for 14.3 percent of the respondents, concentrated overwhelmingly in Halychyna and Zakarpattia. But there are complications here as well. Bishop Ivan Semedii of Mukachevo seems to be leaning towards the recently revived Rusyn movement in Zakarpattia. And then there is the Latin-rite Church in Ukraine. Two bishops were recently elevated to the rank of cardinal in Lviv - one a Ukrainian Catholic, the other Roman Catholic. To my knowledge, no other city in the world has two cardinals-archbishops.

Mr. Wilson reviews two models of Church unity in Ukraine. The first was offered by Catholic Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky, who "sought unity between Ukraine's Churches in the context of broader Christian reconciliation and on basis of common Christian values of love, brotherhood and the sublimation of egoism." A second route was proposed by Orthodox Metropolitan Ilarion, who argued in favor of the restoration of original Ukrainian Church traditions through a total Ukrainianization of the Church with Ukrainian priests "dedicated to the evangelical principle that 'to serve one's people is to serve God.' " These ideas have been ignored in modern Ukraine.

Economically, Ukraine is a black hole. "Whole sectors of production in areas most subject to quality competition (light industry, consumer goods like TVs or fridges) have basically disappeared. Investment has not so much declined as stopped." Foreign reserves, never more than $2 billion or $3 billion, dropped to $482 million in February, 1999; foreign debt was $11.4 billion by the end of 1998 ... Whole sectors of the economy relapsed into barter, an estimated 40 percent of all activity. While Ukraine's nomenklatura was constructing obscenely huge dachas in the countryside, poverty was spreading. Ukraine has one of the world's most corrupt business climates.

Ukraine may have a beer, an airline, a soccer team and the potential of a nuclear arsenal, but its future as a thriving civic society is still in doubt.

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

| Home Page |