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Ukraine: Vagaries of the Post-Soviet Transition

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Ukraine: Vagaries of the Post-Soviet Transition Ukraine: Vagaries of the Post-Soviet Transition IGOR TORBAKOV n the aftermath of the collapse of the outer and inner Soviet empires in 1989 I and 1991 , it was widely believed that the postcommunist states of East-Central Europe and Eurasia, freed from the ¡ron grip of the imperial center, would rid themselves of communism's perverse legacies and , having undergone the appro- priate socioeconomic transformations , become "normal" European countries. Some postcommunist nations did , in fact, act in that manner, and now the most advanced of them are members of NATO and candidate members of the Euro- pean Union, which testifies to the fact that they are indeed on the right track toward European normalcy. Others, however, were not so successful : their tran- sitions to "liberal democracy and market economy" have proved , so far, to be sad failures. Independent Ukraine undoubtedly falls into the latter category . Unlike the Poles or the Balts, proud of their achievements and optimistically looking to the future , most Ukrainians tend to gloomily repeat a fatalistic maxim coined by their first president, Leonid Kravchuk : maiemo te, shcho maiemo (we've got what we've got). Today's Ukraine is a direct successor of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Repub- lic, one of the fifteen "union republics" of the USSR, which was not only an empire but also a totalitarian state. Its disintegration has left Kyiv with a dual and quite unproductive legacy. The imperial nature of the Soviet Union meant when the metropolis collapsed Ukraine was not a complete state but an administrative splinter of Moscow's governing bodies. And totalitarianism was generally respon- sible for the lack in Ukraine (and other successor states, for that matter) of rule of law, civil society, democracy, market economy, and clear cense of national identity. Also, because of the suddenness of the USSR's unraveling, Ukraine retained the bulk of its Communist elites. To understand why Ukraine 's transition has stalled (or rather, resulted in the creation of a peculiar-but definitely "un-European"-social system), in this arti- cle I examine the interrelationship between the Soviet (and, in some cases, even Igor Torbakov, an independent researcher and journalist, is Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. 461 462 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA pre-Soviet) legacy and the political strategies of the newly born country's rulers. In particular, 1 explore the historical peculiarities of state- and nation-building in Ukraine, the character of the 1991 "national-democratic revolution," the quality of the local elites, and the true nature of their policies, as well as popular social and political attitudes in Ukraine. Shaping Ukrainian National Identity : A Historical Perspective Political theorists have, for quite some time, been pointing out that for a demo- cratic transformation to be successful, it has to rest firmlly on a clear sense of com- munity. To borrow from Dankwart Rustow, it is crucial that the population of a democratizing state "have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to."1 What is required is a feeling of national unity, a strong national consciousness. Today's Ukraine was not an independent state dur- ing the whole period of modem times, which significantly slowed down and com- plicated the process of shaping the Ukrainian nation. In contrast to, say, Czechs or Hungarians, who are currently preoccupied with democratization and marke- tization, the denizens of Ukraine face, besides these two, already quite daunting tasks, the necessity of building a viable modem nation. Many contemporary Ukrainian historians would present, in a quiste teleologi- cal manner, the year 1991-Ukraine's annus mirabilis-as a glorious event on the long and thorny path of the Ukrainian people towa.rd political independence and a national state. The major signposts on that path, they would assert, are Kievan Rus', the "Ukrainian Cossack State" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Ukrainian People's Republic of 1917-20. According to this lin- ear master narrative, the referendum on independence in December 1991 caps the millennium-long process of Ukrainian state- and nation-building. Harvard pro- fessor Roman Szporluk, however, believes that the Ukrainian national project is a much more modem phenomenon. In his opinion, Ukraine quite recently was carved out of the peripheries-"Ukraines"-of three historical empires: Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian.2 The process of forging a nation on these diverse lands began in earnest only in the end of the nineteenth century and the begin- ning of the twentieth and is still going on. The heterogeneity of Ukraine's regions accounts for the different pace in the development of a "national idea." In western Ukraine (the Hapsburgs' Galicia), Ukrainians (Ruthenians) were confronted with the virulent ethnic nationalism of the Poles, who administered the territory and wanted to turn it into a bridgehead for the revival of the Polish state. A bitter and fierce struggle ensued., in the course of which Ukrainian peasants, facing the threat of Polonization and having a dis- tinct religious, social, and ethnic culture, have shaped a strong and clear-cut sense of national identity. However, the overwhelming majority of ethnic Ukrainians lived in "Russian Ukraine" as subjects of the Russian czar. The officials of His Imperial Majesty were preoccupied not with national consciousness but with the political loyalty of the governed peoples. Unlike in Polish-ruled Galicia, in the Rornanov Empire Ukrainians were offered a two-tiered identity-an imperial one (which was much Ukraine: Vagaries of the Post-Soviet Transition 463 broader than the ethnic term russkii) and a regional one (malorusski)-as long as the latter was politically compatible with the former. A distinct Ukrainian nation- al identity-one implying a radical shift of loyalty away from empire and toward the Ukrainian nation-was very rare before 1917 and was confined predomi- nantly to a narrow circle of local intellectuals. Even at the peak of national mobilization during the Revolution and civil war, a sense of group identity in Ukraine remained rather amorphous and Huid. In the words of an English diplomatic report dated May 1918, The peasants speak the Little Russian dialect; a small group of nationalist intelli- gentsia now professes a Ukrainian identity distinct from that of the Great Russians. Whether such a nationality exists is usually discussed in terms in which the ques- tion can receive no answer. Were one to ask the average peasant in the Ukraine his nationality, he would answer that he is Greek Orthodox; if pressed to say whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole, or a Ukrainian, he would probably reply that he is a peasant; and if one insisted on knowing what language he spoke, he would say that he talked the "local tongue." One might perhaps get him to call himself by a prop- er national name and say that he is "russkii," but this declaration would hardly pre- judge the question of a Ukrainian relationship; he simply doesn't think of national- ity in the terms familiar to the intelligentsia. Again, if one tried to find out to what State he desires to belong-whether he wanted to be ruled by an All-Russian or a separate Ukrainian Government-one would find that in his opinion all Govern- ments alike are a nuisance, and that it would be best if the "Christian peasant-folk" were left to themselves.3 The turmoil of the revolutionary period raised somewhat the level of national consciousness of Ukrainian peasants. They came to distinguish between them- selves and the scores of intruders from the (Russian-speaking) cities, who would talk a different tongue and sneer at the local dialect and culture. Red Army units (prodotriady) would ransack the Ukrainian countryside and take wheat from the peasants to feed their troops. "They quickly perceived that the conflict between themselves and these strangers was a struggle to control the food they grew."4 Out of their "petty bourgeois" indignation and economic wrath a political notion was born that "alien rule is illegitimate rule," that Ukrainians-those honest and hard- working land tillers-should be govemed by the people of their kin. Guided by this idea, millions of Ukrainian peasants became a social base (albeit a rather volatile one) for a succession of Ukrainian independent governments in 1917-20. Although that first attempt lo establish a sovereign Ukrainian state failed, the level of national self-consciousness attained by the Ukrainian masses compelled the victorious Moscow Bolsheviks to seek a compromise with the regained for- mer imperial borderland to legitimize Communist rule. This compromise was realized through the establishment of the Socialist Ukrainian (quasi) state- Ukrainian SSR-the Communist Party of Ukraine, and an affirmative action-like cultural and linguistic policy-Ukrainizatsiya. It is important to stress, however, that from the outset the "policy of national rebirth" in Ukraine was under Moscow's control, with the Main Political Directorate and the People's Com- missariat of Internal Affairs policing "excesses" in the spheres of local academia and culture. 464 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA Even at its height, Ukrainianization produced quite mixed results. In 1930 the Soviet Ukrainian writer Borys Antonenko-Davydovych was complaining, One could live one's entire lile in a Ukrainian city and not know Ukrainian. You could ask the conductor in a Kyiv streetcar a question in Ukrainian and he would not understand or would pretend that he did not understand you. A Ukrainian writer, appearing before a provincial audience, might discover that ninety percent of the audience had never read any of his works or heard anything about him al all. But it should be axiomatic that it is best and most "natural" to learn Ukrainian in a Ukrain- ian city, for the most part to hear Ukrainian on Kyiv's streets, and for eighty per- cent of the readers to borrow Ukrainian books from urban libraries.
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