Edited by Roman Solchanyk Ukraine From Chernobyl’ to Sovereignty A Collection of Interviews Foreword by Norman Stone ‘In this collection of interviews, Ukrainian voices can now speak hopefully about their present and future. These voices include tones which, in the past, might have been discordant. There is now, however, a good chance that people in Ukraine, whether of Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, or other origin, will have a state they can call their own — Norman Stone Ukraine, a country of 52 million people that became independent in 1991, plays a key role in the rapidly changing political situation in Eastern Europe. Often referred to as the ‘reservation of stagnation’ during the early stages of perestroika , Ukraine has emerged as a forceful advocate of state sovereignty and one of the main exponents of political and economic reform among the republics of the former USSR. Asserting their national, cultural and political rights at home, Ukrainians are determined to play a more visible role in the international arena as well. A crucial turning-point was the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl’, which became a national issue capable of mobilizing vast numbers of people irrespective of their political, social or ethnic ties. The popular movement ‘Rukh’ united democratic reform- ers of various nationalities in the struggle against conservative forces intent on salvag- ing the remnants of a decaying system. The central issues in this process of transform- ation are reflected in this collection of interviews with leading political, cultural and scientific figures who have made significant contributions to these changes. For a note on the editor, please see the back flap Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from University of Alberta Libraries https://archive.org/details/ukrainefromchernOOsolc 01C< rese me: iscc han Ikrc /ill Jkr; >eca n th last res< tag is a ind ind he :ulti ire ;he A. c disj nati nur pol mo ers aga ing cer ati( int< sci cot Fo UKRAINE: FROM CHERNOBYL’ TO SOVEREIGNTY Also by Roman Solchanyk UKRAINE UNDER PERESTROIKA: Politics, Religion and the National Question Ukraine: From Chernobyl to Sovereignty A Collection of Interviews Edited by Roman Solchanyk RFE/RL Research Institute, Munich Foreword by Norman Stone Professor of Modern History Oxford University Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press University of Alberta © RFE/RL, Inc. 1992 Foreword © Norman Stone 1992 Published 1992 by Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E8 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Ukraine, from Chernobyl’ to sovereignty ISBN 0-920862-82-9 1. Ukraine—Politics and government— 1945— I. Sol’chanyk, Roman. DK508.84.U47 1992 947’.71085’4 C92-091151-X All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Printed in Great Britain by Billing and Sons Ltd, Worcester Contents Foreword by Norman Stone vii Preface xi Introduction xiii 1 Vechimii Kyiv, the Voice of Perestroika in Ukraine: An Interview with Vitalii Karpenko 1 2 The Beginnings of “Rukh”: An Interview with Pavlo Movchan 7 3 Little Russianism and the Ukrainian-Russian Relationship: An Interview with Mykola Ryabchuk 19 4 Language, Culture, and the Search for a Ukrainian Hero: An Interview with Yurii Pokal’chuk 31 5 The Current Situation in Ukraine: A Discussion with “Rukh” Chairman Ivan Drach 40 6 Ukraine and Poland: An Interview with Adam Michnik 57 7 The Democratization Process in Ukraine: An Interview with Anatolii Pohribnyi 67 8 Filling in the “Blank Spots” in Ukrainian History: An Interview with Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi 81 9 Ferment in Western Ukraine: An Interview with Rostyslav Bratun’ 95 10 Roman Szporluk and Valerii Tishkov Talk about the National Question 105 11 Inside Ukrainian Politics: An Interview with Dmytro Pavlychko 117 v VI Contents 12 Ukraine, Russia, and the National Question: An Interview with Aleksandr Tsipko 127 13 An Insider’s View of Chernobyl’: An Interview with Yurii Risovannyi 139 14 The Communist Party and the Political Situation in Ukraine: An Interview with Stanislav Hurenko 150 15 Ukrainian-Jewish Relations: An Interview with Oleksandr Burakovs’ kyi 160 Name Index 170 — Foreword “The Estonian people has been cultivating its existence on the shores of the Baltic for the past two thousand years,” ran one of the historic documents of communism. It came out in September, 1988; and it amounted to a statement ofindependence—technically, “sovereignty” by the one and a half million inhabitants of Estonia, the smallest of the republics that make, or made, up the USSR. This tiny pebble, in slipping,was the first sign of what has become a landslide. Now, three years later, Moscow itself has crumbled too: with the election of Boris El’tsin as President of the Russian Republic, a new Union treaty for the whole of the Soviet Union has been drafted. The place will no longer be called “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” but "Union cf Soviet Sovereign Republics”; it will be a confederation, not a centralized state as before. Even then, a great many people in many of the republics want more: they want formal independence, in some cases membership in the Common Market. In all this, the Ukraine plays a key, in many ways the key, part. It is the second largest republic, its boundaries stretching from the Polish border in the west to the northeastern shores of the Black Sea. Its population, over fifty million, makes it one of the largest European states; and it is also naturally very rich, its soil and climate making it Europe’s breadbasket and its minerals—coal, preeminently in the Donets Basin; oil; rare and very valuable metals, essential for enriching sophisticated steel—making it an all-important source for the things that ultramodern economies need. Its people, though historically divided, have their own language: Ukrainian is quite distinct from Russian, although, as with the Scandinavian tongues (Finnish apart), if you can read the one, you can make out the other. There is a sizable Russian minority, and the great cities, L’viv in the west apart, are in majority Russian-speaking: Kiev, Kharkiv, Odessa. Ukrainians will tell you (and they are probably right) that the populations there would revert to speaking Ukrainian if they were allowed to; but in the past the emphasis was all on Russian, and you were penalized if you used Ukrainian, or even protested. Time was, quite recently, when typewriters did not sport the three distinctive Ukrainian letters. But there are other minorities. The Crimea is formally part of the Ukraine, and it contains not only Russians but also Tatars, once the majority of its population. There are Romanians, even Greeks; there are Poles—by one account, vii Vlll Foreword over half a million. And there are Jews, though no one knows quite how many. The question is: will this vast and variegated mass become not “the Ukraine”-—a term that really means “the edges”—but “Ukraine,” a new state within the European community? If this were to happen, then Russia itself—much of the country subarctic—would become, in Alain Besan$on’s phrase, not a USA, but a Canada. Many Russians on the democratic side might not object: after all, Russians have suffered as much as, and maybe more than, their own subjects in the effort to maintain an empire. Events are now moving so fast that some kind of division of the old USSR could easily happen quite soon. Who, after all, would have thought, three years ago, that we could quite seriously be talking about Ukrainian independence? For a very long time, that matter was purely speculative. Nationalism is in any case rather difficult to discuss: you can fall, all too easily, into a mixture of lists and poetry. In the Brezhnevite USSR, with media so tightly controlled, evidence for the growth of national feeling was very slight indeed. Brave dissidents, a handful, surfaced and suffered, as Vyacheslav Chornovil and Levko Lukyanenko did in the Ukraine, emerging from years and years in prison to become leaders of the democratic forces as these were eventually allowed to win free elections. Remarkably, they survive with their energies and self-control in good shape: prison, far from breaking the best, can often make them even better. Now, they are in charge in the Western Ukraine—the L'viv, Temopil’, and Ivano-Frankivs’k regions—and their allies have done very well even in the largely Russified city of Kiev. Relations with the local Russians (and Jews) seem to be rather good. Unlike the cases of the Baltic states, there is no antinationalist grouping of Russian immigrants in the Ukraine, no “Interfront,” as such organizations are called. True, the population of Odessa so far has not been greatly penetrated by Ukrainian nationalism. But the movement has spread now, quite far into the Eastern Ukraine, that half of the country on the left bank of the river Dnieper or Dnipro, which, once upon a time, was quite Russian—Russian in its Orthodoxy, much of its language, and some of its population. Nowadays, we can at last say something positive about this, because we are allowed to have evidence—unfaked elections, a free press, visas (even for declared nationalistic exiles) are now on hand, though there are still restrictions in different places and in different ways. One very important thing is the ability of Western observers to read the opinions of Ukrainians who have lived through the past generation or two, in which everything was kept down under a Soviet ice cap.