This is the largest successor state of the fifteen that have emerged from the ruins of the twentieth century’s greatest empire. I’ve come here to find out what real difference it makes to have a nation of your own. Does it get ordinary people proper soap, for example? Ukraine is the largest new state to be created in Europe this century: 52 million people in a territory the size of France, a nation with an army of 600,000 men; the legatee of an imperial arsenal that makes it the third nuclear power in the world; the sixth largest naval power by virtue of its claim to part of the Black Sea fleet moored in Sevastopol; a nation of enormous natural wealth ranging from the coal and steel of the Donetsk basin to the agricultural abundance of the black-soil lands.
I have reasons to take Ukraine seriously indeed. But, to be honest, I’m having trouble. Ukrainian independence conjures up images of embroidered peasant shirts, the nasal whine of ethnic instruments, phony Cossacks in cloaks and boots, nasty anti-Semites.
From my childhood in Canada, I remember expatriate Ukrainian nationalists demonstrating in the snow outside performances by the Bolshoi Ballet in Toronto. “Free the captive nations!” they chanted. In 1960, they seemed strange and pathetic, chanting in the snow, haranguing people who just wanted to see ballet and to hell with the politics. They seemed fanatical, too, unreasonable. Hadn’t they looked at the map? How did they think Ukraine could ever be free?
Yet the tendentious fanatics who refused to look at maps, who refused to accept that Soviet power would last an eternity, got it right, and the rest of us were wrong.
Clearing customs, I feel like declaring my basic prejudices on arrival. Isn’t nationalism just an exercise in kitsch, in fervent emotional insincerity? Especially so in Ukraine. It has been part of Russia for centuries. Ukrainians now have a state, but are they really a nation? Into this inauthentic void streams nationalist emotionalism, striving to convince them that there always was a Ukrainian nation; that it has been suppressed for centuries; that it has at last found its freedom, and so on. The reality is different. Some Ukrainians—especially those who joined the Communist Party—did well out of the empire. For most of the last fifty years, the Party was not wrong when it dismissed nationalist feeling here as weak, marginal, and easily suppressed. The glasnost era did see an awakening of nationalist feeling, and in western Ukraine it blossomed into a genuinely broad-based national movement. But elsewhere, in the more justified parts of eastern Ukraine, there was no upsurge of demands for independence.
When independence did come, in the wake of the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, it did not represent—as it did in the Baltic states—the culmination of years of nationalist agitation. It happened because the local Party boss, Leonid Kravchuk, saw that, without firing a shot, he could slip away from the empire and set himself up as the leader of a nation-state. And so he remains, presiding over an apparatus still run by ex-Party people. Ukraine might not necessarily be a story about nationalism at all, perhaps only a story about how a leopard tries to convince you he has changed his spots.
Glumly, I prepare myself for what I fear may be in store: city-dwelling intellectuals lyricizing about peasant roots they have long since left behind; Party apparatchiks conjuring up retrospective indignation at the Soviet suppression of things Ukrainian; fanatics trying to convince themselves that independence will solve all economic problems; and a few old fascists telling me that with a name like mine—Russian, isn’t it?—I don’t belong here.
But I do. The first thirty years of my Russian grandfather’s life were spent in Ukraine, attending the lyceum in Odessa, holidaying in the Crimea, then farming on his father’s estates in central Ukraine, in a village called Kroupodernitsa. He became the head of the Kiev district council, the zemstvo, and then, after the revolution of 1905, was appointed the civilian governor of Kiev region. My grandmother thought their years in the big house in Lipki, Kiev’s linden-shaded residential quarter, were the happiest of their married life. My grandfather spoke the language and, to the end of his life in exile, sang Ukrainian songs, and signed his letters to his sons, not with the Russian word for “father,” but with the Ukrainian word, batko.
For my grandparents, Kiev was more than a Russian town. It was the birthplace of Russian national identity itself. Russian Orthodox Christianity began in 987, when the ruler of Kievan Rus was baptized into the Christian religion. Now, unbelievably, it was the capital of a new independent state.
My difficulty in taking Ukraine seriously goes deeper than just my cosmopolitan suspicion of nationalists everywhere. Somewhere inside, I’m also what Ukrainians would call a Great Russian, and there is just a trace of old Russian disdain for these “little Russians.”
THE DOLLAR ZONE
The Kreschatik is the curving boulevard where Kiev strolls at night beneath the trees. In the metro station concourse below, a jazz band is playing, a mime troupe is improvising, ten drunks are begging and weeping, three old ladies are selling flowers, one woman in a white coat is available to weigh you at her weighing machine, one man sells posters of Samantha Fox in a wet T-shirt from one kiosk and the formerly banned history of the anti-Communist bandit guerillas from another. All of this, from Samantha Fox to the jazz band, is as it was before independence. What is new are the money changers. Young men in leather jackets cruise up and down the metro concourses and up onto the sidewalk with small imitation dollar bills clipped to their lapels, or just the dollar sign, or sometimes the ruble. The other new feature of post-independence Ukraine is the special militia, armed with revolvers, knives and rubber batons. They strut up and down, ignoring the money changers who ply their trade on every corner.
Here the hard currency, the money of choice, the power that defines nearly all striving from the President to the hotel bed-makers, is the American dollar.
The dollar divides the society into two zones: the dollar zone and the ruble or kupon zone. In one, the domain of plenty: peroxide-blond women, food, and technology; in the other, the domain of shortages, queues, bad temper, and the old days. The dollar zone is the hard-currency shop, the joint venture, the hotel bar, the casino, the brothel. In the dollar zone, if you make a phone call home—using an American satellite line with a Dallas-based operator—the connection is instantaneous, but it costs you between nine and fifteen dollars a minute. In the kupon zone, it can take hours or days to get an international line, and the cost of the call is nine to fifteen dollars an hour. In the dollar zone, there are no shortages. At the Apollon Restaurant, in a street off the Kreschatik, you are in the dollar zone; it is a Swiss-Ukrainian joint venture. Almost everything, from the frozen pasta to the beer, from the tablecloths to the kitchen dishwasher, is flown in from Switzerland. Apart from bread and butter, the restaurant buys nothing from local suppliers, because, says the Ukrainian manager with a shrug, “we have too many problems.” You can’t eat a Russian dish here. It is a Swiss version of Italian pasta that is on offer, washed down with German beer. It’s one of those little outposts of the capitalist no-man’s-land, establishing itself in the gray East. The old zones of Party privilege, policed by State Security, are now replaced by new zones of privilege, where there may be no policemen on the door, but where access is barred to anyone who does not come with a credit card or a wallet full of dollars.
At the Apollon I meet Christia Freeland, who writes for the Financial Times and The Economist in Kiev. She’s a Canadian Ukrainian from a farming family in the Peace River country of northern Alberta, one of thousands of those second-generation Ukrainian Canadians who were raised to dream about an independent Ukraine by their exiled parents and now have come back to live and work in the reality of independence. It is common, she says, for Canadian Ukrainians to think of themselves as the true Ukrainians, the ones who kept the faith while among the actual Ukrainians the compulsion and fatalism of the Communist system was working its way into their bones. The Ukrainian Canadians return “home” expecting a fervently nationalist and religious people, and find instead phlegmatic, ironic, sober, and
fatalistic Soviet souls. Independence requires a new human type, but, she says, with an equal measure of affection and irritation, it will be a long time coming.
Independence, moreover, has done nothing for the economy. Inflation is rocketing, production is plummeting, there are real shortages everywhere. Most people in Kiev actually get by through knowing someone in the countryside who can supply them with potatoes, or by cultivating their own allotment. The government is afraid to embark on market reforms, for the good reason that market freedoms might eventually dislodge them. Democracy is more apparent than real. The President rules by decree: everything from Kievan food supply to foreign trade policy is decided by him. There is no organized party opposition in Parliament; democratic debate is weak. The old elite is still in power, parroting nationalist rhetoric, in practice holding on like grim death, waiting for something to turn up. I haven’t been here three hours, and already it looks as if national independence has been a disaster.
So what would you do? I ask her. She reels off a list: land to the peasants, radical market reform, convertibility of the kupon, and then, with a ruthless laugh, she says, “Let’s see what happens.” What will happen, the Ukrainians fear, is what has been happening in Russia: ever-deepening chaos.
No one knows exactly how to convert a failed command economy into a liberal market society. No one can afford easy confidence about the advantages of Western shock therapy. I find myself thinking about what that astute historian of nationalism Eric Hobsbawm had told me before I left London: “We have nothing to teach these people. None of our lessons are applicable. Free-market snake oil won’t work. Democracy won’t necessarily work. Nothing we export is necessarily going to work. They are all going to have to find their own way.” It is not that Eastern Europe is hopeless. It is merely that the capitalist triumphalism, which assumes that what works for us must inevitably work for them, will be found wanting. Western liberal market societies cannot be exported in the same way that you can export the frozen pasta, dishwasher, and place mats of the Apollon. The fallacy is to suppose that we live in one world, with one solution to all available problems. There may not be a viable systemic alternative to capitalism. But that does not mean that capitalism is the only answer in this world. It looks to me, on the first night, that he is right. And it still looks that way, three weeks later, when I leave.
On the way back from the Apollon, I follow the Kreschatik in the dark, past the curving four-story apartment blocks, late Stalin style, erected along either side of the boulevard to replace those destroyed in the fighting for the city in 1943. There is a burly confidence in these buildings, a ruthless civic grandeur. Every building is still adorned with a hammer and sickle, or the granite standards of the battle regiments of the Great Patriotic War. These buildings represent the high-water mark of empire, an architecture of intimidation, the embodiment of pure power. The pediments, the massive granite out of which they are hewn, proclaim: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! They were supposed to imply: We will be here forever. In reality, the empire was to last only forty years more.
As I pass the Kiev Soviet, site of the city government, I notice that the entire front façade, hammer and sickle and all, has fallen into the street and lies in rubble and ruin behind a wooden hoarding, leaving it a building without a face.
A GENTLE NATIONALIST
Next day I return to the Kiev City Hall to meet one of the quiet heroes of the Ukrainian independence movement, Mikola Horbal, now a sober-suited, middle-aged deputy in the Kiev municipal Parliament.
If you are a Ukrainian nationalist, you could be forgiven for a sense of disillusion these days. Horbal went to prison in the 1970s and 1980s for demanding the right to speak his own language and to worship in the Uniate Church (the Catholic Orthodoxy practiced in western Ukraine), and now he has a state of his own, and the people running it are the people who put him in prison.
But that is not how Mikola Horbal sees it. He was, by his own description, “an everyday Soviet teacher and a musician,” whose music, he says wryly, “did not happen to proclaim Communism.” The KGB held his songs in such esteem that they gave him five years in prison, followed by two years of exile. They put him to work cutting stones with a jackhammer in a quarry, and that soon put paid to his fingers. He has never played an instrument since. His jailers could not understand him. Sober materialists that they were, they asked him, “You have everything in Kiev, even a flat; why are you making trouble?”
Because he grew up in a religious family in western Ukraine. Because denial of his language rights seemed an issue of conscience to him. Because he wishes to be an honorable man. He is not sure why this was evident to him and not to others. “When you are not allowed to speak your language, and are persecuted for it, then you have to go to prison.” Prison, he now says, perhaps with the nostalgia of hindsight, was the making of him. Before he went to prison, he had never questioned the idea that the empire was one great family of peoples. He met other nationalist figures and through them came to retrace the Ukrainian via dolorosa through the Soviet period: the famines of the 1920s and 1930s, the forced collectivization that destroyed Ukrainian peasant agriculture, as well as the liquidation of most of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Much later, in 1990, when he took his first visit to Ukrainian communities abroad in the U.S.A., he came back convinced that Ukrainians will always—whether they be in the prison house of the Soviet system or in the soft, assimilative freedom of the capitalist world—remain Ukrainian.
We are not a nation-state yet, he concedes. We have to build one, with a consciousness of our own history and distinctiveness. And then he corrects himself. We do not have to build this nation. It will build itself.
Horbal’s is the most ecumenical of nationalisms. Of course Russians who want to become Ukrainians will be welcome in the new state. “One Russian defending the interests of Ukraine is more dear to us than a Ukrainian who does the same, for that is expected of him.” He does not hate the Russians for imprisoning him, for they were perhaps the empire’s greatest victims.
What kind of nationalism is this? Horbal denies he is a nationalist. “Nationalism that causes the humiliation of other nations is simply chauvinism.” A patriot then? Yes, a patriot. A man who admits that the sight of the Ukrainian army marching in uniform for the first time in the Independence Day parade moved him deeply.
But the very Communists who imprisoned him are still in power. “I do not hate them. The Communist who is still in power shall have two sandwiches and I shall have only one. But he shall never have three.” Yes, he says with an engaging, quiet smile, “I should hate Kravchuk.” When Horbal was in prison, Kravchuk was Party ideology chief, responsible for the condemnation of nationalists like Horbal as ideological fascists. Now Kravchuk dons a Ukrainian peasant shirt when he makes public appearances, and nationalist discourse has become his native tongue. “I should hate him, but I don’t. When I see him at the United Nations, speaking for Ukraine, I feel proud of my country.”
THE PRESIDENT
When you go to see the President, in his office in the leafy heights of Lipki, security keeps you waiting at the bottom of a huge wide flight of marble, red-carpeted stairs. Men in suits with earpieces have you under surveillance. It is all very Soviet, with one comic and jarring difference. By the door, refusing to budge, unintimidated by the heavy men in suits, stand three old peasant ladies, clutching papers in their hands, demanding to see the President, as if this were the Middle Ages and he were not the master of a modern nuclear state but the booted, robed Good Old Tsar of old.
Finally, I get the nod from the men with earpieces and ascend the carpeted stairs to the President’s office. Everything about the place brings back the bare sobriety of Soviet-style power, the empty marbled corridor, the long, vanishing red carpet, the heavy padded doors off to each side, the silent shining room adjacent to the President’s office where I am to hold the interview. What else should I expect? Is there a Ukrainian style of power? Of course not. There is
only the Soviet, just as for the Gallic and Teutonic chiefs who succeeded the Romans the available models of authority were a Roman breastplate, a fasces, a toga.
The President is a solidly built, immaculately groomed, white-haired man in his late fifties, urbane, relaxed, not noticeably drawn or harassed, the very picture of a confident Soviet official of the Gorbachev era. He seems to have a sense of humor, seems to relish authority and office, seems to believe it is an easy matter to deal with foreign journalists. He incarnates the ambiguity of Ukrainian independence—a western Ukrainian by origin, a fluent Ukrainian speaker, who rose within the Party hierarchy through the 1970s and 1980s, became Party boss in the late Gorbachev era, and then, with a fine sense of timing, declared independence, using the rhetoric of the nationalists he had arrested only years before.
I ask him to explain how a Communist becomes a nationalist. He gives me his most engaging smile, the one that says, I am being perfectly frank with you. “This puzzles not only you but also people here and abroad. But is my behavior exceptional in history? There are plenty of examples of where a person has lived in a certain system, within certain coordinates, and has gone on to lead the rebellion against this system.”
He now says he always knew that the formal autonomy of Ukraine within the Soviet federal structure was a sham. He knew that Soviet collectivization had decimated Ukraine in the 1930s and that Stalin had murdered the flower of the Ukrainian Communist Party. “I saw it all with my own eyes.”
But, I say, many believers in independence are disillusioned. So many from the old apparatus are still in power. Here, his eyes narrow. He ceases to be urbane and amused. “You are misinformed.” The only people available at independence who knew, as he puts it, “the art of governing” were the 3.5 million members of the Communist party. We will bring on new people, but they need to be educated and trained. And besides, he says, what is so bad about the Communists? Some are more democratically inclined than the so-called democratic opposition.
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