THE POLITICAL LEADERS OF UKRAINE, 1938-1989: The Burden of History Hiroaki Kuromiya University of Indiana The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research 910 17th Street, N.W. Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20006 TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information* Principal Investigator: Hiroaki Kuromiya Council Contract Number: 819-21g Date: October 25, 2004 Copyright Information Scholars retain the copyright on works they submit to NCEEER. However, NCEEER possesses the right to duplicate and disseminate such products, in written and electronic form, as follows: (a) for its internal use; (b) to the U.S. Government for its internal use or for dissemination to officials of foreign governments; and (c) for dissemination in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act or other law or policy of the U.S. government that grants the public access to documents held by the U.S. government. Additionally, NCEEER has a royalty-free license to distribute and disseminate papers submitted under the terms of its agreements to the general public, in furtherance of academic research, scholarship, and the advancement of general knowledge, on a non-profit basis. All papers distributed or disseminated shall bear notice of copyright. Neither NCEEER, nor the U.S. Government, nor any recipient of a Contract product may use it for commercial sale. * The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U.S. Department of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author. ii Executive Summary1 Where is Ukraine going as a newly independent state? This question has been asked by numerous observers ever since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Yet the question appears to have become even more complex in recent years than before. The present working paper attempts to answer the question indirectly by contexualizing the political thinking of the Ukrainian political leaders who preceded Ukraine’s independence. In the thinking of Westerners, the choice of a “Western” orientation is obvious, because Ukraine’s geopolitical situation is obsolete. Such a choice is possible, but the historical trajectory of Ukraine suggests that Ukraine is likely to meander politically for some time between “West” and “East” (an orientation towards Russia). 1My thanks go to my colleagues in Kyiv, Roman Podkur, Yuri Shapoval, and Valerii Vasil’ev as well as Professor Amir Weiner of Stanford University, all of whom have contributed to this essay by providing to the author archival documents they have collected and engaging me in stimulating discussions. Part of this essay was presented at a working seminar “From Document Collections to Writing History,” Moscow, Russia, 15-18 June 2004. iii Introduction: Past as Prologue in Ukrainian Politics Who will succeed Leonid Kuchma as the president of Ukraine after the presidential election this coming autumn? Will Kuchma manage to manipulate the constitution and the court to stay in power for another term? Will he succeed in placing his favorite in power, just as Boris Yeltsyn did Vladimir Putin in Russia almost five years ago? What is the possibility of an opposition leader emerging as a decisive winner with a clear and determined vision for the future of Ukraine? The prospect, as expected, is not clear. On the one hand, the influence of Ukraine’s former “overlord,” Russia, remains strong. Russia courts Ukraine intensely (especially through Russian business concerns), and Ukraine appears to flirt politically with its eastern neighbor. On the other hand, the lure of the West (represented by the European Union and the United States) remains equally strong. In March 2004, for instance, Ukraine had 2,000 soldiers deployed in Iraq, the third largest (except for the U.S. and U.K. troops) after Italy (2,700) and Poland (2,400), whereas Russia had none. The present preliminary report on the the project in progress “The Political Leaders of Ukraine, 1938–1989” does not pretend to predict the future of Ukraine, but it does analyze some long-term trends in the political thoughts of Ukrainian leaders. Ukraine is one of the largest countries in Europe, much larger than Poland (which is by far the largest among the recent European Union entrants) in geographical and population terms and even larger than France in geographical terms. Ukraine is a new country and, in general, little understood: even specialists of Russia in this country often have only the vaguest of ideas about Ukraine and its history; a great majority of textbooks still refer to Kiev Rus’ as Kiev Russia (Russia as such did not exist then.) The field of Ukrainian studies, in turn, tends to be both isolated and isolationist. This state of affairs obtains in many fields, from international 1 security and political economy to literature and culture. Yet it is inconceivable to envision a stable “Mitteleuropa” (or “Eastern Europe” however one may define these terms) without a finer and more profound understanding of this big yet obscure country called Ukraine. The present project concentrates on the post-Great Terror leaders of Ukraine. No part of history is truly discrete. Although the Great Terror of 1937–38 had liquidated most of the Ukrainian political leadership who had believed in the pro-Ukrainian policy of Moscow (“Ukrainization”), it was the post-Great Terror leadership who defined the complex course of history leading to the 1991 independence of Ukraine. Their term of tenure coincided roughly with the unification (in 1939 under Stalin) of most Ukrainian ethno-linguistic territory which had been divided among several neighboring powers. Ukrainian Identity and Soviet Leaders Some top Ukrainian political leaders are well known, but many others are not. Nikita S. Khrushchev and Lazar M. Kaganovich (who led Ukraine in the 1920s and briefly in the 1940s) are perhaps the most famous. The political records of both are infamous in Ukraine: their roles in political repression are widely documented. Yet it is little known that, for example, Kaganovich, a native of Ukraine and perhaps the most ruthless executioner of Stalin’s policy, spoke the Ukrainian language and, according to his own account, became a professional revolutionary inspired by the literary work “Talisman” (whose hero was a Jew, like Kaganovich himself) by none other than the Ukrainian nationalist and writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Kaganovich’s 2 political enemy. 2“Dve besedy s L. M. Kaganovichem,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 1999, no. 2, 120–21. Kaganovich fondly shared this critical episode in his life with his interviewer seventy years after the fact! 2 As this story of Kaganovich suggests, a preliminary picture of the Ukrainian leaders that emerges from our work to date is that they were violently anti-separatist3 but not necessarily anti-Ukrainian (in fact, many had very fond feelings for Ukraine and its people), promoted Ukrainian interests so long as they did not interfere with all-Union interests, and were very proud of the fact that it was under the Soviet regime that Ukraine achieved a stable “statehood.” However, they remained ambivalent about Ukraine’s future in world history, a reflection of Ukraine’s precarious position between the “East” (a Russian orientation) and the “West” (a European orientation). This ambivalence accounts at least for the enigmatic course of post-Soviet leadership in Ukraine. It is not clear yet whether future Ukrainian leaders will be able to extricate themselves from this historical bind. Khrushchev, who ruled Ukraine from 1938 to 1949 (with a short hiatus after the war when Kaganovich replaced him), may have been purely hypocritical when, at the beginning of WWII, on 6 July 1941, he addressed the Ukrainian people as “Comrades Workers, Peasants, Intelligentsia of the Great Ukrainian people! ”, using the heroic history of the Ukrainian people to full effect: The cursed enemy has captured part of our native Ukraine by a perfidious attack. This cannot frighten our mighty militant people. The German dog-knights were slashed by the sword of the warriors of [Prince] Danylo of Galicia [who founded L’viv in the thirteenth century], by the sabres of Cossacks under Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, and the kaiser’s hords were destroyed by the Ukrainian people under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin in 1918. 4 3According to Khrushchev, Kaganovich “was fond of saying that every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist.” Khrushchev Remembers, tr. and ed. Strobe Talbott, introduction, commentary, and notes by Edward Crankshaw (Boston, 1970), p. 172. 4Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads’kykh ob"iednan’ Ukrainy [TsDAHO] (Kyiv, Ukraine), f. 1, op. 13, spr. 17, ark. 11–12. 3 True, Khrushchev did not fail to remind the “great Ukrainian people” of their “brother, the great Russian people.” Yet it was also Khrushchev who consciously promoted the awakening of Ukrainian national sentiments (within certain limits) to win the war.5 This new awakening led to serious complications after the war, and a civil war against the Ukrainian nationalists was fought ruthlessly, mainly in western Ukraine. Khrushchev made it clear that the independence of Ukraine was anathema. As soon as Western Ukraine was liberated from the Germans, Khrushchev addressed the population, “Dear Brothers, Ukrainians, and All Citizens who Reside in the Western Region of Our Native Ukraine! ” Emphasizing the Soviet liberation of Ukraine, Khrushchev challenged the Ukrainian nationalists: What [kind of] independent Ukraine can exist, when now Ukraine already is free and Soviet, where the Ukrainians are the masters of their situation? Everything is set to serve the Soviet Ukrainian people: our workers live by the laws decided according to their will, develop their own native culture, speak in their native tongue, lay their own national cultural foundations, create their own poems, their own arts.