by Anna Reid
CHAPTER TEN
Europe or Little Russia? Ukraina
‘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
IN 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 licensin
g 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 . . .’
Disillusioned Shevchenko-lovers apart, Ukraine’s fuzzy sense of national identity has paradoxically turned out to be something of an advantage. Lviv may be unmistakably Ukrainian and Donetsk unmistakably Russian, but the vast swathe of country in between is neither quite one nor the other. The population is thoroughly mixed — not only in the Bosnian sense that two different peoples have lived there side by side for a long time, but also in the sense that there is no longer any sharp cultural dividing line between them. The typical twenty-something Kievan speaks a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian at work and to his children, Russian to his parents, and Ukrainian to his grandmother down at the dacha at weekends. All share Orthodoxy, a potent force in pulling Russians and Ukrainians together ever since Khmelnytsky signed up to Russian protection at Pereyaslav.
Another potential liability with an unexpected upside is the sheer ghastliness of Ukraine’s recent history. Wracked by a century of suffering and upheaval, Ukrainians long for peace and stability. Lvivites may cultivate angry Russophobia, but the instinct of the man on the Khreshchatyk omnibus is to stay out of politics at all costs. After all, for several generations any Ukrainian who made himself conspicuous had a good chance of being shot. ‘My house is outside the village,’ runs a proverb; ‘I don’t know anything.’ If one word sums up the national character, it is ‘stolid.’ Get into a lift with a Russian, and you will be deep into debate on the theory of capitalism or the existence of God before you reach the top floor. Chat up a Ukrainian, and he will tell you about his mother-in-law’s stomach problems and the prospects for next year’s tomato-crop. All through the hy-perinflationary winters of 1993–5, when lights went out and flats froze, Kiev remained eerily quiet. There were grumbles but no big demonstrations, still less riots. ’Eto sytuatsiya,’ people said with a shrug — ‘It’s the way things are.’ Visiting journalists, ghoulishly anticipating Weimar-style disintegration, went home disappointed.
If Ukraine’s success story is the ethnic issue, its disaster story is the economy. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine was supposed to be the republic with the best chance of doing well economically. It produced a third of the Union’s steel, nearly half its iron ore, over half its sugar. It lacked Russia’s oil wells and gold mines, but its workforce was well educated, and its ‘black earth’ fabled for fertility. A World Bank report said it had the potential to become one of ‘the richest countries in the world.’
By the time I arrived in Ukraine in the winter of 1993, whoever wrote those words must have been wishing them unsaid. The ‘bread-basket of Europe’ had turned into an economic basket-case. The budget deficit stood at 40 per cent of gross domestic product, prices were doubling every month, and one enterprising factory was using the national currency, the aptly named coupon, for the manufacture of lavatory paper. Except for the lucky few with dollars, the country’s savings had been wiped out. Living in Kiev was like watching a textbook lesson on the evils of inflation come to life. All day long, as I sat with my feet propped inside the oven for warmth, old men in once-respectable overcoats dug through the rubbish-bins outside my kitchen window. Sometimes I ran down and shamefacedly persuaded one to take some grubby notes: a handful was worth less than a dollar, the lower denominations fractions of a cent. In the outdoor markets, women stood in the snow for hours, holding out a glassful of sunflower seeds, a single garlic bulb or a pathetic handful of plastic bags — all they had to sell. Even with money enough, supplying oneself with basic necessities required wartime determination and ingenuity. Each week, wild rumours swept the city — matches, sugar, flour, postage stamps were about to go into shortage — and everyone raced to stock up. Step onto a trolleybus with a loaf of bread under your arm, and people crowded round to ask where you had bought it, then leapt out and dashed for the bakery themselves. Flash a dollar note in public and everyone stiffened, as if you had produced a suitcase full of gold or a loaded gun.
That winter and next, the only thing that saved Kiev from starving was its remarkable ability to grow its own food. Most urban Ukrainians are only a generation or two away from the farm, and still have access to their own or relatives’ plots of land somewhere in the countryside. Come each spring, seed packets ousted Snickers bars from the oddments stalls in the metro ticket-halls, as Kievans trekked off to dig over their potato-beds and pl
ant out tomatoes. Even people like my scholarly, relatively well-off interpreter Sergey spent their summers growing and bottling industrial quantities of fruit and vegetables, to tide them over the long winters when the shops emptied and prices in the private bazaars shot sky-high. The last time Kiev had emptied in this way was during the war, when 60 per cent of the population fled to the villages to escape Nazi food confiscations.
By the time Kuchma took office in the summer of 1994, it was obvious to the most bone-headed central planner that without drastic changes, Ukraine would turn back into a nation of peasant farmers. With Russia knocking at the door for unpaid oil and gas bills, it might even lose independence. In October the new president accordingly announced a comprehensive economic reform programme. He would liberalise prices and exchange rates, lift restrictions on trade, privatise state-owned firms and cut subsidies to loss-making farms and factories. In return, the International Monetary Fund promised a $1.5 billion loan, most of which was to go on paying Ukraine’s fuel debts to Russia.
Kuchma has done some of what he promised, but not all. His great achievement has been to end hyperinflation. In September 1996 the government was able to ditch the loathsome coupon in favour of the hryvnya, named after the currency issued by the Rada government of 1918. By early 1997 price rises were down to around 2 per cent a month. But parliament’s subsidy-guzzling industrial and farming lobbies have kept budget deficits high, forcing the IMF to hand out aid in grudging monthly dollops. The average wage grew to $80 a month by 1998, then halved when the government forcibly rescheduled its hard-currency debt. The overall economy — black market included — is still shrinking.