UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY: Celebrations throughout North America: Thoughts on an independent Ukraine (10/07/01)

UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY: Celebrations throughout North America

Thoughts on an independent Ukraine

by Robert De Lossa

Address delivered at Boston banquet marking the 10th anniversary of Ukraine's independence. Robert De Lossa is president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, editor of the Journal of Ukrainian Studies, director of publications at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, and a non-resident research fellow of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta.

The idea of an independent Ukraine is a strange beast. And when people talk about it, one is always reminded of the ancient story of the blind men and the elephant: one man felt the trunk and thought it a snake, another felt a leg and thought it a tree, and so forth. So it is with Ukraine today. Some people see only a part of modern Ukraine and see the potential for religious civil war. Others see another part and see reunification with Russia. Still others see another part and see western Ukrainian secessionism and an insurmountable east-west divide.

None of them see Ukraine as a whole; this intellectual blindness with regard to Ukraine is usually due to an ignorance of its history and culture. Part of the reason for this is because people discount the richness and diversity of Ukrainian history and culture, and because they discount the robustness of the Ukrainian ideal. If one takes any single component of Ukrainian history: the princely era, the Kozak State (the Hetmanate), the experience under Polish-Lithuanian or Russian imperial domination, the period of the Ukrainian National Republic, or even the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) - if you take a single component and project it logically forward to the year 2001, you will not get modern Ukraine.

None of the periods before 1954 and the Ukrainian SSR will give you the modern territorial configuration of Ukraine. But the Ukrainian SSR - in which the Ukrainian component in Ukraine's own history was viciously suppressed by the central Communist authorities - will not give you a modern Ukraine in which Mazepa could appear on a hryvnia note, Ukrainian soldiers could take part in maneuvers with American soldiers, and Russian speaking Ukrainian fans in Kyiv, during a soccer match between the Ukrainian and Russian teams, would chant "Bei, bei moskalei!" ("Pummel the Moskals!")

We must be comfortable with the fact that Ukraine is a complex country with a complex history and many, many body parts. We must not mistake any one of those body parts for the whole being. And we must not fall into the trap (which many historians espouse right now) that Ukraine has an "abnormal" history. Most modern states have similarly complex histories if you take them in their totality.

So what are we to make of modern, independent Ukraine? It is worth quickly touching on the highlights that lead to modern independence.

The beginning, I think is Chornobyl in 1986. Reading through the literature and talking with Ukrainians about it, it is important in three critical ways. First, people understood from it that they could no longer trust a central authority that was not in Kyiv. Second, it poisoned the land, and reaffirmed the Ukrainian commitment not only to the territory of Ukraine, but the land itself. Third, it poisoned the children. It poisoned the children irrespective of their language and ethnicity. And it became clear to the people that the Moscow authorities were willing to poison the children (by letting them march in the May Day celebrations) rather than admit their (Moscow's) failings.

This critical event fostered the beginnings of a national movement that became the movement for reform in Ukraine, Rukh. Within the crumbling Soviet Union, this movement began to reaffirm and renew Ukrainian culture, language and self-awareness. It also began to influence the Verkhovna Rada to the point where in July 1990 Ukraine could declare itself a sovereign state within the Soviet Union.

There were freedom movements in other Soviet republics, of course, and there were massacres in Tbilisi and Riga in early 1991. The empire fought back. But the center overplayed its hand in August 1991, when a group of reactionaries sought to turn back time, and initiated a putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. It is clear from the memoirs of Kostiantyn Morozov, Ukraine's first defense minister, that the coup plotters hoped for civil unrest and bloodshed in Ukraine and the imposition of martial law that would frighten the rest of the republics. But they hoped in vain.

In hindsight, Ukraine was somehow ready for the test that the putsch represented. For the first time in a very long time, Ukraine had the right men and women at the right places at the right time: Kravchuk, Morozov, Drach, Pavlychko, Horyn, Chornovil, Yavorivskyi, Dzyuba, Zhulynskyi, and scores of others. The Churches already were re-establishing themselves as an important, open component of public life. The diaspora, nationally conscious in ways impossible for Soviet citizens, was becoming an important component of public life. Ukrainian self-dependence, something that would have been treated as a joke during the high Soviet years, was becoming an important component of public life.

And so, as the putsch fell apart, the Ukrainians moved. The Verkhovna Rada passed the Act of Declaration of Independence on August 24, 1991. And this act was affirmed by a national plebiscite on December 1, 1991. The readiness of the Ukrainian people to govern themselves in their own state is evidenced by the fact that over 90 percent of them voted for independence. America didn't have those kinds of numbers when it gained independence.

What of the period afterward? If we remember what a complicated and varied being Ukraine is, then the complexity of its independent life should not surprise us. Highs include its recognition by the international community as an independent country (Poland and Canada raced to see who would be first to recognize independent Ukraine - Poland won), the renunciation of its nuclear power status and relinguishing of its weapons (Trilateral Accord, 1994), joining NATO's Partnership for Peace (1995), establishment of its territorial integrity (via treaties with all of its neighbors), the first peaceful presidential transfer of power in the former Soviet Union (1994), the control of hyperinflation and introduction of a national currency (1996), the signing of a special charter with NATO (1997), the beginning of a positive expansion of the official economy (2000) and the papal visit (2001). These are just a few of many.

There are low points as well. One need say only three words: corruption, corruption, corruption. This was the socially transmitted disease that the Soviet Union, abusive partner to the very end, gave to all its former brides as they divorced it and set up their own households.

Because Ukraine-watchers have tended to look only at the trunk or leg and then describe all of Ukraine, they have gotten most of their predictions wrong. Ukraine has not slid into civil war. The language and ethnic issue has proved far more complex than just Russian vs. Ukrainian. (Remember the Russophones screaming "Bei, bei moskalei!") The last presidential election showed that the east vs. west divide is too simplistic as well. And the supposedly pro-Russian Kuchma has managed to sit on the Crimea issue until it isn't much of an issue any more. What then is the whole Ukraine?

What is it if you put together the legs and trunk and ears and body, tusks and tail? Clearly, it is something that is informed by a particularism, but embraces a generality. The particularism that gives Ukraine coherence is the Ukrainian language and an idealization of "Ukrainianness" that goes with it. This is the filter by which the great, shining, complex, contradictory and dynamic generality - Ukrainian culture and history - can be understood.

I see it as similar to the American situation. There is in the American tradition an idealization of an Anglophobe protestant-secular ethic, but this is only a touchstone. The reality of "America" is one of many, many histories and cultures - east vs. west, north vs. south, Native American, African American, Hispanic American, Acadian, new immigrant, old established, etc. - but we hold it together through a belief in a common destiny that is fueled by the movement caused by its inherent contradictions.

All of you will recognize a similar competition of histories and cultures in Ukraine. The difference now, is that the dynamic interaction between them fuels a new ideal, which is Ukraine itself - not "empire" or "union" or "commonwealth," but "Ukraine." I believe that this dynamic vision of a whole Ukraine gives us great hope for the future.

| Home Page |