The president of Ukraine is no Harry Potter, who can wave his magic wand to make corruption disappear. Corruption is merely the result of hopeless poverty and mean, ruthless bureaucracy — the two invariable paradigms of the “Russian space.” Centuries of beggarly existence of the peoples colonized by the Russian Empire were followed by decades of communism. Wherever it took root, communism depleted the economic resources of these countries, exhausted the professional and moral potential of their societies, affecting work ethics and depriving people of a sense of future purpose. Poverty does not necessarily result in solidarity. It can also lead to jealously, egoism, deceit, corruption, and violence. Put simply, it leads to amorality.
Free speech? There is no abstract freedom of speech. Free speech exists as far as professional and ethical culture (or lack thereof) among citizens, primarily journalists, is concerned. For example, to have free speech means to discuss the price of the cloth used to make the president’s suit, or the name of the tailor who supplied the dress for the former prime minister. Informational murder can also be considered a manifestation of free speech. Free speech can also be used to distort information and when you’re caught red-handed, you can complain about “censorship.”. To put it simply, in a post- totalitarian society freedom of speech is a reflection of the shadowy niches of the absence of mental, political, and other freedoms.
But what about the journalists of the Maidan, the people who put their jobs and lives at risk a year and a half ago? Can they now afford the luxury of disappointment or even depression and invariably caustic and unconstructive commentaries? Granted, some politicians are not coping.
But have journalists themselves as well as the whole spectrum of information specialists lived up to the demands placed upon them? For example, one of the most important tasks today is to provide society with real knowledge of the problems that Europe and the West face by effectively relaying information and analysis to the public. Above all, we must explain to society what the European community is all about, and what makes it radically different from the markedly un-European community, i.e., the Single Economic Space (SES). We must translate and study the legal, institutional, and educational system of the EU, collect and systematize economic indicators and statistics, and compare all this with the real state of affairs in the CIS-SES space.
Finally, we must explain the difference between human rights in Sweden and human rights in Turkmenistan. It might be a good idea for Ukrainian television broadcasters to reduce the airtime they dedicate to the “extremely current” broadcasts of the Russian pop song contest “Pesnia ‘98” and the no less “current” “Pesnia ‘99,” which are aired in between old Soviet movies about the Cheka secret police and contemporary movies on Russian criminal gangs.
This airtime could be better devoted to building knowledge about Europe. Manipulators of public opinion would probably have a much harder time collecting signatures in support of anti-Western referendums. After all, a large part of post-Soviet societies consists of deceived people, who have not seen the world outside the limits of their ignorance. It is the system that made them this way. But they are also to blame for allowing to be turned into what they have become. Do we really want their electoral votes to decide the fates of our unborn children, which already today will place them into the orbit of this Black Hole?
We are facing a paradoxical situation. After all, according to the criteria of democratic reality, Ukraine’s journalistic culture is incomparably higher than in the authoritarian part of the post-Soviet space, where the few free journalists have been forced onto reservations, as is the case in Russia or Belarus.
Meanwhile, neither the authorities nor professionals seem to care about filling nearly empty segments with vitally important information. For example, what has been done to spread real information about Ukraine in the West? We complain that they “do not know us.” But where is our strategy of informational support for the transformations occurring in Ukraine? Where are the institutes of culture, at least in the leading Western countries, that would systemically develop the international community’s knowledge of Ukraine? Where are the press attaches, who could professionally organize a flow of information between the West and Ukraine?
The modern world is a world of hyper-information. Failure in the field of communications can potentially become the beginning of defeats in other, less apparent, but equally dangerous “wars.”
It is common knowledge that Ukraine usually looks for “internal enemies,” while Russia looks for “external” ones. So while some Ukrainian journalists are serving as scribes in internal political battles, Russia has launched a compact informational offensive against Ukraine on numerous fronts. During the past year Russia’s information war against Ukraine in the West and within Russia itself has reached heretofore unseen proportions. Today’s Russian mass media are a reservoir of boiling pathological hatred for Ukraine, which is no longer camouflaged. Bubbling in it is a viscous mass of “leftist” and “rightist” projects for destroying Ukrainian statehood, culture, and language.
But let’s go back to the question of free speech. Today Russian Web sites of the so-called “circle of patriotic resources” are circulating statements and threats against Ukraine that would touch off a string of lawsuits in a law-governed state. Meanwhile, the “natural gas war” is ultimate proof that there is no friendship or any Slavic “brotherhood,” but only the dumb inertia of a colonizer, which has become the main obstacle on the path to real, not rhetorical, normalization of relations between Ukraine and Russia.
Russia continues to wage the same “natural gas war” against Ukraine in the West by spreading deliberate disinformation whose main purpose is to prove that Ukraine is not a civilized state with a European future but an emanation of the same old unlawful post-Soviet space, and that Europe itself must help Russia force it into the SES.
Collectively, isn’t all of this the same overgrown Ukrainian- Russian Manilov pond in the middle of his “English garden”? While Russia is building itself by resorting to violence, Ukraine is doing so through resistance, but it is a resistance of disparate forces that expend more energy on internal strife than on external confrontation. This is nothing but Manilov’s book on Russian history with the bookmark eternally on the same page.
Everything that I have said also applies to the economy, social infrastructure, and utilities, or the specific dimensions of the state. There is abstract rhetoric about “brotherhood” as opposed to Russia’s specific strategy aimed at destroying Ukraine, which is assisting the “elder brother” in this undertaking.
The Soyuz Party uses billboards that read “God and Russia are with us,” obviously unaware, because of ignorance, that in a similar way God was once engaged in a different historical drama. “Got mit uns,” or “God is with us,” was the inscription on Nazi soldiers’ belts. Meanwhile, Russian political forces that share Soyuz’s ideology write about “the chimerical formation of Ukraine,” labeling not only Viktor Yushchenko as an Antichrist but also Taras Shevchenko, and summing up with the line: “The Southern Russian, the Little Russian lands are an integral part of the Russian state... there is no ‘Ukrainian’ nation or ‘Ukrainian’ language...all of which are ideological phantoms.” Or, “Ukrainism is a civilizational disease, an epidemic in the entire Orthodox world” (see M. Smolin, Russkii mir i ukrainskii “mif” [The Russian World and the Ukrainian Myth], www.pravaya.ru, Jan. 23, 2006). Plainly speaking, the 19th century began in Russia and never ended. On the contrary, Russia is rolling “forward” into the Middle Ages.
Meanwhile, the European Bank is issuing loans to our utilities to prevent our cities from drowning in feces. Canadian charitable organizations are taking care of Ukrainian orphans. (For some reason, statistically the largest percentage of abandoned children lives in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, which are firmly convinced that “God and Russia” are with them.) The Italian Health Ministry is supplying drugs to Ukrainian children suffering from cancers caused by the Chornobyl disaster. Somebody should also ask the Italians or somebody else to fix the roofs in those hospitals, because on the top floors dying patients are lying in beds in their outer clothing beneath dripping ceilings.
There is another interesting detail. While we are accustomed to enemies of all stripes — we have an entire zoo with all zoological species and subspecies of Ukrainophobia — how can we explain our “friends’ “ penchant for self-destruction, self-annihilation, and self-eviction? Consider the Savonarola- like intonations that emanate from television screens and the grandiose political autos-da-fe at Vladimir Putin’s dinner table, etc.
In return, thankless “fraternal” spin doctors are engaging in what is known in the Kremlin as “the comprehensive shearing of Ukrainian political sheep.” Strangely enough, despite the degree of our freedom of speech, neither Ukrainian journalists nor Ukrainian politicians are demanding any explanations. Apparently they do not understand that playing down humiliations is an invitation to more humiliation.
When we were on the Maidan yesterday, we promised Western prospects to our people, but today we are promising Putin the same SES Black Hole so that he will not worry (and he is not worrying: he is simply biding his time). What is this post-colonial syndrome? If the empire has not finished the job of destroying us, we will do it ourselves — out of fear of acting, a fear inspired by the space of freedom and responsibility, which we have to fill with ideas, energy and institutions. So what if some people have not justified someone’s hopes? Is society really that intellectually impoverished that it cannot produce new personalities?
Finally, after imperial and post-imperial centuries, decades, and years of persecutions, torture, and humiliation, society has managed to stage this unquenchable yet civilized protest thanks to which Ukraine has been recognized as a European nation. Despite all the mistakes, problems, and crises against the backdrop of this depressing mediocrity that characterizes nearly all contemporary leaders of the planet, a question arises: Is there a president in this world who is ready to sacrifice his own life for his country, like it happened in our country and elsewhere?
We have a divine ability to produce unique phenomena. But we also have a fatal ability not to treasure what we have or even stubbornly to destroy it — as though the empire had indeed instilled in us a program of self-destruction that is working even though the empire itself has collapsed ignominiously.
Robinson created a world out of nothing. Manilov saw his ideal in the clouds and lived, drowning in a sea of boundless swinishness. Let us ask ourselves: Whom do we resemble more? And in which of these two worlds would we like our children to live?
The question is whether our country will chose a “Robinson” or “Manilov” strategy of development. The first strategy is complex and full of dangers, and will not pay off in the immediate future. The second strategy sees us building an “English garden” right now on the banks of a puddle. Regretting that it is not the way we would have liked it to be, we would expand this puddle to connect it with that of our northern neighbor. And on its bank we would build a joint “temple of solitary reflection” [a reference to an outhouse — Ed.]. And from this “temple” we would sell weapons to terrorist countries in the East while shipping human cargo to the West. Then all of Ukraine would become “a huge house with such a tall gazebo that even Moscow could be seen from it.” The zenith of political ambitions!
Still, I am sometimes overcome with fatigue. And a question begins to haunt me again: What if...? What if Huntington is right? Then this world is incurably “eastern,” i.e., it really has no future in terms of real democracy. Recent events can inspire pessimism. When our society was sending a signal of energy and overcoming difficulties, the world fell in love with us.
Now that this society is starting to send signals of inconsistency, frustration, and absurd confrontations, the world is turning away from us. The West has things to attend to in the planet’s hot spots with their genocides, earthquakes, and epidemics. It is from “Robinson’s” world, not “Manilov’s,” that doctors, mine sweepers, and rescuers travel to such hot spots. So no one is interested in our “disappointment.” You have not made it — so adieu!
That is why it is a crime to challenge the moral capital of the Orange Revolution, primarily because this moral capital belongs to society. Should this capital be lost, Russia would have to be the first to lament its loss, for this would mean the end of civilized prospects for the entire post-Soviet space.
Two polarities intersect in my memory. At a bazaar sellers are dozing through the midday heat among their dust-covered goods. The radio is droning monotonously — it feels as though the singer is dozing off as well. In his sleep, as if in a trance, he is rhyming the names of famous Western brands of chocolate bars with Russian swear words. Let your imagination picture how he turns all those innocent Snickers, Bounties, and Twixes. This creates a sense of paralysis of consciousness, the clinical death of society.
Then there is the cold and the tents, a whirligig of life and creativity, laughter and color, and fearlessness in the face of challenge. It turns out that society is full of energy; it is young and promising in all of its expressions, regardless of age, nationality, and professional affiliation.
After the French referendum on the European Constitution in May 2005, the famous philosopher Andre Glucksmann wrote that Paris is no longer Europe’s capital — it is Kyiv, because on a lazy afternoon during the referendum the Frenchmen said “NO” to Europe. Meanwhile, amid the snows and in the crosshairs of snipers Ukrainians said “YES” to Europe.
This is what makes it paradoxical. A desire for freedom is the all- important first step on the way to securing this freedom.
So, from time to time let us recall the lonely image of Robinson Crusoe on his uninhabited island. He teaches us to work silently and purposely, cope with failures, and find the strength to prepare for a new victory after this failure. Only in this case will Rudyard Kipling’s words lose their fatal meaning. Instead of Manilov’s lofty palaces drowning in daily swinishness, we will populate the uninhabited space of our history with calming welfare, functioning institutions, and noble forms of being and government.
Recall the conduit of Robinson’s negatives and positives, which he composed in an accountant’s fashion as “debit” and “credit”:
BAD: I am stranded on a horrible uninhabited island; I have no hope of rescue.
GOOD: But I am alive; I did not drown like the other crew members.
BAD: It is my fate to be cut off from the rest of mankind; my fate is unhappiness.
GOOD: But of all those who were onboard the ship, I was the only one destined to escape death; He who miraculously saved me can help me one more time.
We also can write:
BAD: Colonialism and totalitarianism have devastated our society; we have no hope of rescue.
GOOD: Nonetheless, we are alive after centuries of slavery.
BAD: We have been alienated from Europe for centuries; it is our fate to be cut off from the rest of mankind; our fate is unhappiness.
GOOD: But of all those who suffered a similar lot, we are one of the few who were destined to survive. Therefore, we can make a choice; we have enough wisdom, hands, abilities, and, when necessary, irony; He who miraculously saved us can help us once again — on condition that we help ourselves.
