Borderland (31 page)

Meanwhile, in March 1990, Gorbachev initiated the final, fatal phase of perestroika, allowing semi-democratic elections to the republican Supreme Soviets, among them Kiev’s Verhovna Rada. Fighting on a platform of ‘real political and economic sovereignty’ – though not outright independence – Rukh and its allies won 108 out of 450 seats. Predictably, they did much better in Galicia and central Ukraine than in the Donbass and the south: a human chain, high point of the campaign, had stretched from Lviv to Kiev, but no further east. Despite being in a minority, Rukh’s presence revolutionised Rada proceedings, hitherto a rubber-stamp for Party orders. ‘The democrats represent only a third,’ wrote an observer, ‘but they are always at the microphones and dominate the hall as if they constituted a majority.’
²¹

The literary scholar Solomea Pavlychko recorded the events of 1990 in a series of letters to a friend in Canada. Over and over, she contrasted Kiev’s defeatism with the reigning sense of optimism and excitement in western Ukraine. In Kiev, she wrote in May, ‘morale is low. Everyone criticises everything, yet at the same time people are apathetic . . . Some people are in despair, others are demoralised . . . Servility is alive and well.’
²²
But on holiday in Galicia, she was amazed to find villagers avidly following Rada debates on television, and blue-and-yellow banners flying in the local town. The gossip was all of independence and even the local drunks sank their vodka with the toast ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ ‘They believe in aid from the West,’ she wrote. ‘How naive!’
²³

By autumn, Kiev was catching up. On 30 September, opening day of the Rada’s second session, the city was brought to a halt by its biggest anti-government demonstration yet:

Two days later students from Kiev and Lviv universities went on hunger strike, camping out under tents on what had been October Revolution and was now renamed Independence Square. They demanded new parliamentary elections, no military service outside Ukraine, nationalisation of all Party property and the removal of Vitaly Masol, the republic’s prime minister. Passers-by, not all of them enthusiastic, watched proceedings from behind rope barriers. ‘Some scolded the layabouts,’ wrote Pavlychko, ‘others passed flowers across the rope, still others said that it wouldn’t make any difference, and why were they wrecking their health?’
²⁵
On 10 October the students were joined by eight opposition deputies, and on the 17th, after a protest march by workers from the Arsenal weapons factory, scene of a pro-Bolshevik uprising in 1918, the government caved in. There would be no more military service outside Ukraine, a commission would be created on the nationalisation of Party property, and Masol would go. When the terms were read out in the Rada, deputies applauded.

With the marches and the hunger strikes, Kiev’s popular independence movement peaked. ‘Remember,’ a friend told me, ‘that a lot of these demonstrators came in buses from Lviv. We were proud of them, we would support them, definitely. But when they left, that was it.’ Rukh was splintering, leaving behind a slew of quarrelsome, disorganised factions. ‘The public,’ Pavlychko wrote despairingly in December, ‘doesn’t give a damn . . . it demands something to eat, but nothing very special, anything will do.’
²⁶
With her parents on New Year’s Eve, she decided that independence was still ten, twenty or even thirty years off. Her four-year-old daughter Bohdana might be the only one to live to see it.

What the Pavlychkos did not realise was that while the opposition lost momentum, the communists themselves were edging towards a change of heart. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Vilnius and Riga in January revealed a split between pro-Moscow hardliners, led by First Party Secretary Stanyslav Hurenko, and an emerging bloc of ‘national communists’ under Leonid Kravchuk, a former Party ideology chief and chairman of the Rada. While the Rada condemned Moscow for its ‘inadmissible . . . use of military force’, the Party’s Central Committee accused the Lithuanians of extremism and provocation.
²⁷
In March Kravchuk joined forces with the opposition to vote in an ambiguously worded supplementary question to Gorbachev’s referendum on a new Union Treaty. Gorbachev asked voters whether they wanted to ‘preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics’; Kravchuk asked if they wanted to be ‘part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States’. In Galicia, Rukh-un local Soviets added a third question of their own: ‘Do you want Ukraine to become an independent state which independently decides its domestic and foreign policies?’ True to their mixed feelings towards the Soviet Union, Ukrainians gave all three questions large Yes votes: 71 per cent for Gorbachev’s USSR; 80 per cent for Kravchuk’s ‘Union of Sovereign States’, and 88 per cent in Galicia for outright independence. As usual there was a clear split between east and west, with 85 per cent support for Gorbachev in Donetsk, compared to 16 per cent in Lviv.
²⁸

To come to any sort of decision on independence, it was clear, Ukraine needed a mind-concentrating jolt from outside. On the 6 a.m. television news on Monday 19 August, Moscow delivered the goods: President Gorbachev had been taken ill, the announcer said, and a ‘State Committee for the State of Emergency’, headed by the defence and interior ministers and the chief of the KGB, had taken power. At 9 a.m. Kravchuk and Hurenko were visited by General Varrenikov, head of the Soviet Union’s ground forces and one of the five men who had taken Gorbachev prisoner in his Crimean dacha the evening before. If they failed to cooperate, Varrenikov told them, the state of emergency would be extended to Ukraine – the Ukrainian government, in other words, would be overthrown.

The choice now facing the Ukrainian communists was as follows: to throw in their lot with the junta, risking resubordination to Moscow if the coup succeeded and complete loss of credibility if it failed; or to come out for Yeltsin and democracy, leading in all probability to the total collapse of the Soviet Union. Scared of both options, their response was prevarication. At 11 a.m. a delegation of opposition deputies asked Kravchuk to condemn the coup; Kravchuk refused. On Ukrainian television at 4 p.m. he stressed that the state of emergency did not extend to Ukraine, but avoided either condemning or condoning the coup, and asked the public to be ‘calm and patient’. On Russian television that evening he was even more equivocal, saying ‘what was bound to happen was bound to happen’. He also refused repeated opposition requests for an emergency meeting of the Rada.

All next day, as crowds faced down the tanks round Moscow’s White House, the Ukrainians continued to stall. The Rada’s twenty-five-member Praesidium voted a panicky resolution defending Ukraine’s ‘sovereignty’, but again failed explicitly to condemn the coup. Despite Rukh calls for a general strike – not carried in the official press – the streets stayed quiet. While Muscovites rushed to the barricades, Kievans sat tight at home, their radios clamped to their ears. ‘We were scared,’ a friend told me, ‘but we were fatalist. We thought – if dictatorship’s going to come, it’s going to come, and it’s no use protesting.’

But the worst was not to happen. Drunk and disorganised, the coup leaders had lost their nerve. On Wednesday, when it was clear the coup was failing, Kravchuk finally climbed off the fence, going on television to demand Gorbachev’s release. ‘The so-called Emergency Committee,’ he intoned, ‘no longer exists . . . and actually never existed. This was a deviation from the democratic process, from the constitution and the legal process.’ That evening Gorbachev flew back to a revolutionised Moscow, and the coup leaders were put under arrest.

With Soviet power in tatters about their feet, Ukraine’s communists now either had to take Ukraine to independence themselves, or wait for the opposition to do it for them. On Saturday 24 August Kravchuk resigned all his Party posts, and the Rada met in emergency session. At midday the speaker read out the next item of business: Ukrainian independence. Pandemonium broke out, and the speaker announced a twenty-minute break. Nationalists raced up to the third floor, communists down to a cinema in the basement. Upstairs the atmosphere was ecstatic; downstairs, deputies were stunned and afraid. ‘I don’t see why we should be independent,’ one communist said, ‘we’ve done nothing wrong!’ As the hubbub died Hurenko stood up and said slowly, in Russian: ‘Today we will vote for Ukrainian independence, because if we don’t we’re in the shit.’
²⁹
When the deputies reassembled, all save one – from Donetsk – obeyed. ‘In view of the deadly threat posed to our country on the night of 18th–19th August,’ read the final declaration, ‘and continuing the thousand-year-old tradition of state-building in Ukraine . . . The Verhovna Rada solemnly proclaims the Independence of Ukraine . . . From now on only the Constitution and laws of Ukraine will be in force on its territory.’ A lifeboat for the Communists, a Mayflower to a new world for the nationalists, Ukraine thus floated to freedom.

CHAPTER TEN

‘What’s the meaning of all this silence,
lads?’ said Bulba, finally, awaking from his
reverie. ‘Just like a couple of monks! Come
along, pull yourselves together! To the devil
with thinking! Put your pipes in your
mouths and light them up, then spur on
your horses and let us fly forward so that no bird can catch us!’

—
Gogol 1835

I
N A CONSTRUCTION
shed in an industrial suburb of Kiev stands the skeleton of the world’s biggest aeroplane. Spanning 260 feet wing-tip to wing-tip, 250 nose to tail, it covers more ground than a football pitch. Its sister-plane was the star of the 1989 Paris Air Show, but funds for this second model ran out long ago, and it will almost certainly never leave the ground. Inside the cockpit, engineers have mocked up control panels in wood, and pasted up posters of birch forests in place of a windscreen. The plane’s name is the Antonov AN-225
Mriya
— in Ukrainian, the ‘Dream.’

The Mriya may never fly. But what about that even bigger dream, Ukraine herself? Ukrainians won independence on 24 August 1991 by default. Many had dreamed of independence, but none had expected it; none had prepared for it. Like the Mriya, the country was a drawing-board dream sprung to life. Suddenly, Ukrainians had a state, but they had no idea if it could keep to the air and, if it did, where they wanted to fly it.

Ukraine’s situation was not unique. The collapse of the Union came as a shock to all the Soviet nationalities, including the Russians themselves. Each newly independent republic had to reshape itself top to bottom. Where Ukraine was worse off than others was in the vague but vital matter of national identity. Elsewhere, the past provided inspiration. The Baits had the in-terwar years to look back on; the Central Asians had Islam and the nineteenth-century khanates; the Russians, more problematically, a mighty 400-year-old empire. All Ukrainians could come up with was the Rada débâcle of 1918, the violent, failed heritage of the Cossacks, and, even further back, the misty, disputed splendours of Kievan Rus. Divided between rival powers for centuries, talking about history at all only emphasised disunity. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Baits all knew they were rejoining Europe; Ukrainians were not sure where they belonged or even where they wanted to belong. In academic jargon, they were faced with two tasks — ‘state-building’ and ‘nation-building’ — at the same time. The first — the creation of the institutional paraphernalia of statehood — they shared with all the other ex-Soviet nationalities. The second — the creation of a workable idea of what it meant to be a ‘Ukrainian’ — was theirs alone.

Independence was the result of an unspoken deal between Ukrainian nationalists and the republican Communist Party. In exchange for support for independence, which they lacked the strength to achieve on their own, the nationalists gave the communists control over the new government. In effect, there was no real change of power. In elections held on 1 December 1991 Leonid Kravchuk, former communist number two, became Ukrainian president, setting up his administration in red-carpeted Party headquarters. Vyacheslav Chornovil, the fiery ex-dissident who led the rump of Rukh, won only 23 per cent of the vote, mostly from Galicia. Communist-appointed ministers carried on in the same old posts behind the same old desks, and the Rada turned, without fresh elections, into the new national parliament.

Having spent their lives taking orders from Moscow, few of these people had a clue how to run an independent state. Speaking of his colleagues in the foreign ministry, the first British ambassador to Kiev, Simon Hemans, told me, ‘When I arrived in Ukraine it was a brand-new country and didn’t know quite how to be one. I was a brand-new ambassador and didn’t know quite how to be one either. We learned together.’ For many, it was too late to learn new tricks: despairing Western agency officials dubbed Ukraine’s first post-independence finance minister ‘cement-head.’ Though Ukraine had its liberals and reformers, they were — and still are — few and far between, the result of decades of brain-drain to Moscow. None has ever had the influence of a Balcerowicz in Poland or a Gaidar or Chubais in Russia.

The result was three years of stasis. Caught between Russian-speaking east and nationalist west, in whatever direction Kravchuk took Ukraine he was sure to antagonise one side or the other. ‘We thought — we’ll go independent and everything will change,’ a Rukh deputy told me. ‘The communists thought — we’ll go independent and everything will stay the same.’ A grey-faced bureaucrat who delivered platitudinous speeches in a robotic monotone, Kravchuk responded by doing nothing at all. Ukraine acquired a new flag and a new national anthem, but no new policies. Initially, Ukrainians interpreted their president’s immobility as shrewd caution. Kravchuk’s nickname was ‘the sly fox’; he didn’t need to carry an umbrella, wags said, because he could dodge between the raindrops. Nationalists, keen to idolise the man they credited with leading Ukraine to freedom, excused him on the grounds that ‘nation-building’ had to come before ‘state-building.’ It was expecting too much, they argued, for Ukraine to launch reforms before it had even digested independence.

But Kravchuk’s mystique soon wore thin. By the end of 1993 Ukraine was reeling under higher inflation than any country anywhere not actually at war. Shops were empty, wages had gone unpaid for months, public services and most factories had collapsed. In new presidential elections in the summer of 1994, brought forward in the face of miners’ strikes, Kravchuk was duly booted out in favour of Leonid Kuchma, an ex-missile factory director with a shaky grasp of Ukrainian but a snazzy line in green checked suits, a brisk platform manner — ‘I only take questions from real men, and you’re not one, so I’m not answering!’ he told one (male) reporter — and a reputation for getting things done. As usual, voting patterns split dramatically between west and east. Kuchma won less than 4 per cent of the vote in Galicia, but over 80 per cent in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Since Kuchma’s election, domestic politics have increasingly become, as in Russia, a matter of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring between shady regional-industrial clans. In the summer of 1996 a bomb exploded under prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s car. Lazarenko blamed the assassination attempt on ‘criminals’ angry at his closure of loss-making coal-mines. More likely it was the work of groups disgruntled by his handout of a multibillion-dollar gas distribution duopoly to cronies from his own and the president’s home-town of Dnipropetrovsk. A few months later Yevhen Shcherban, parliamentary deputy for Donetsk and another of Ukraine’s richest men, was shot dead in Donetsk airport, and in 1998 the reformist head of the national currency exchange met the same fate as he entered his apartment block. Shortly before the presidential poll of 1999, two unknown men threw hand grenades at a leading left-wing candidate, Natalya Vitrenko, as she left a rally. Vitrenko was only slightly injured, but one onlooker lost a foot, and another an eye. Though the government made great shows of shock and mourning following all these crimes, nobody has yet been brought to book for any of them.

Corruption in high places is taken for granted. Eyebrows were scarcely raised when a former prime minister, Yuhym Zvyahilsky, fled to Israel in November 1994, accused of having pocketed tens of millions of dollars of public money via illegal oil exports. Three years later he reappeared as a Rada deputy, safe from prosecution thanks to a vote for parliamentary immunity. In December 1998 Lazarenko was arrested as he tried to enter Switzerland on a Panamanian passport. He is now doing time for money-laundering in a California gaol. The foreign trade minister shows off snaps of skiing holidays that he could not possibly afford on his salary to fellow-passengers on trans-Atlantic flights, and Kravchuk is rumoured to own property in Switzerland. ‘We used to look at Kravchuk’s Mercedes,’ a friend who had been at university with the president’s son told me, ‘and we worked out that he would have had to work non-stop for 136 years to pay for it.’

Investigative journalism on such subjects is scarce, since opposition media are routinely harassed by licensing agencies, tax inspectors, state-owned printers and in some cases, by the Security Service and police. The parliamentary elections of 1998 saw Ukraine’s only good current affairs programme taken off the air under what its presenters called ‘political pressure,’ and an opposition newspaper closed on the grounds of an irregularity in its registration documents. The editor of a second paper, a feisty popular tabloid, was arrested three weeks before the presidential poll on charges of tax evasion. State-owned television slavishly supports the government — in the week prior to the 1999 presidential poll, for example, the state-run national channel gave Kuchma three times more airtime than all the other candidates put together — and private channels tend prudently to confine themselves to Mexican soaps. What pluralism there is within the media reflects rivalry between government factions, so scandals only come to light when factions fall out. Other authoritarian hangovers include the bizarre
propiska
system, whereby Ukrainians need official permission to move house, and a gruesome enthusiasm for capital punishment: in 1996 no fewer than 167 criminals were executed, by firing squad, in Ukrainian gaols. Though executions were suspended the following year under pressure from the Council of Europe, the death penalty remains on the statute books.

Ukraine’s democracy is not perfect; perhaps it is naive to think it could be. But violence and corruption are only half the story. On the plus side, democracy looks secure. The elections held so far have all been free and — barring harassment of the media — more or less fair. Voter turnout is impressively high, and a new constitution strikes a sensible balance of power between president and parliament, making cancellation of elections hard. Best of all, political infighting has never turned into tanks on the streets — a great point of pride for Ukrainians, who like to contrast their opaque but clubby way of getting things settled with dramatic convulsions in Moscow. ‘It’s all very Slav — just like getting past some concierge,’ says He-mans. ‘First you have a shouting match, then you give her five dollars, then you come to an agreement and tell her what a help she’s been.’ And of course — though Ukrainians will never admit it — it is all far, far better than anything they have had before.

Independent Ukraine’s big success story is the ethnic issue. In the winter of 1993, when hyperinflation was at its worst, a leaked CIA report predicted growing ethnic tension between nationalists in the west and Russians in the Donbass and Crimea. Ukraine, the spooks said, might turn into another Yugoslavia. They were wrong. Automatically given full citizenship on independence, Russian-speakers always felt more at home in Ukraine than their cousins elsewhere in the ‘near-abroad.’ They were never forced to take language tests to get the vote, and Ukrainianisation of the education system was piecemeal and largely voluntary. The new constitution of 1996 confirmed Ukrainian as the sole ‘state language,’ but also guaranteed continued funding for Russian-language schools. Ethnic-Russians have their fair say and more in national politics. A Donbass miners’ strike brought forward the elections that threw out Kravchuk, and it was the weight of eastern votes that replaced him with Kuchma. The current presidential administration is packed with men from Kuchma’s Russian-speaking home-town of Dnipropetrovsk. Roman Waschuk, a Ukrainian-Canadian diplomat, actually fears ethnic backlash more from the Ukrainian than the Russian side. The emerging market economy, he thinks, is concentrating wealth in Kiev and the eastern industrial cities, leaving the old west-Ukrainian intelligentsia out in the cold: ‘There is an increasing crankiness in the Ukrainian cultural milieu. They think — why doesn’t the state help us? Well — the government isn’t able to help them. And the guys in the Jeep Cherokees aren’t really that interested in nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry . . .’