7. CONCLUSIONS
I must mention here a TV program that stirred up so much comment in the Ukrainian press. This was an appearance by Russian State Duma Vice-Speaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the ICTV channel on the eve of the 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine. What struck me was not his predictable freakish style but the response to it from Klara Gudzyk, a talented Den/The Day journalist. “Zhirinovsky’s appearance on the talk show made a lasting impression on our country. It emphasized again that Russians and Ukrainians are such different people with such dissimilar mentalities that they should not live in a shared apartment. It is better to move quietly apart, so that if necessary, we can shut the door tight against all kinds of Zhirinovskys” (Den, March 24, 2006).
This message is basically wrong. Firstly, one should not jump from Zhirinovsky to Russians and Ukrainians: this kind of generalization is groundless. Secondly, “quietly moving apart” will not work. We can, of course, deny Zhirinovsky entry into Ukraine, although this would only do him too much honor. But we cannot abandon a shared apartment or move out of the room in which we all live on 603,000 square kilometers. The heart of the matter is not the attitudes of certain Russian politicians, who wish to seize these square kilometers, but, above all, our own.
Ukrainian citizens should grasp the essence of the “Russian question” that arose in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR. By ignoring it, our political elite cannot properly address the following multifaceted problem: what attitude should we adopt to the Russian Federation and to Russia inside us? We pretend that these are two different questions and disregard the sentiments of millions of people, which can be figuratively called inner Russia. This may raise the danger of a union between “inner Russia” and the Russian Federation in a crisis situation. In that case we may cease to exist as a people distinct from the Russians and as a country independent of Russia.
We are “doomed” to cooperating with the Russian Federation, but this should be done on the principle of equality. It is no good reiterating that Ukraine is not Russia while at the same time quietly consuming cheap Russian energy resources. Too many people in both states are convinced that Ukraine is still part of Russia. When politicians begin to use this conviction in an attempt to win or strengthen power, they run the risk of sitting on a powder keg.
Russia should not be accused of being dangerous to us. The conditions that made a considerable proportion of Ukrainians think that the prospect of being absorbed by Russia is not a tragedy have been forming for long centuries. The same historical conditions instilled a firm conviction in many Russians that we do not exist as a self-sufficient nation. The “Russian question” must be reconsidered and resolved.
It would be equally wrong to blame Russia for the woes that befell Ukraine in the 20 th century. Like citizens of Soviet Ukraine, Russian citizens are not responsible for what the Kremlin did because they could not influence the totalitarian government, either.
Time does not wait. Ukraine must develop dynamically to defend its right to exist outside of Russia’s borders. The outside world must understand that the vast majority of this country’s population regards absorption within Russia as a tragic and undesirable prospect.
The Russian Federation long ago exited from the crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet system. President Vladimir Putin declared that the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” The Kremlin wants to restore control over the post- Soviet space and give Russia a place that corresponds to its nuclear potential and raw-material resources.
In its relationship with “inner Russia,” the Ukrainian state should display understanding, tolerance, and restraint. The Russians should not be treated as a national minority that came to settle on the land of ethnic Ukrainians. About a half of Ukraine’s present-day territory (excluding the western regions with their different historical destiny) was once colonized jointly with the Russians in the wake of the Russian Empire’s conquests during and after the 17 th century. The Ukrainian Central Rada succeeded in drawing the borders of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) on an ethnographic basis, and the Bolsheviks also recognized them, albeit not immediately, as the borders of Soviet Ukraine.
Bilingualism in Ukraine is a problem that requires special attention. When the Ukrainian Institute of Sociology asked the question “Do you think it necessary to grant Russian the status of an official language in Ukraine?”, 52 percent of respondents answered in the affirmative in 1995 and 48.6 percent in 2005, while a negative answer came from 32.6 and 34.4 percent, respectively. Out of all respondents, 15.3 percent were unsure in 1995 and 16.8 percent in 2005. Therefore, society is increasingly inclined to accept Russian as an official language.
When addressing this problem, one should have a clear picture of what bilingualism in Ukraine is. It would be wrong to claim that the entire population of Ukraine has a command of the two languages. In fact, you will not find a Ukrainian who does not speak Russian. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of ethnic Russians do not know Ukrainian. This results from the fact that in the Soviet Union the Russian language was the medium of interethnic communication. If an individual knew Russian, s/he did not feel it necessary to master local languages.
Our duty is to create comfortable conditions for non-speakers of Ukrainian to exist in a Ukrainian- language environment. One must still remember that, in spite of all concessions, the introduction of Russian as a second official language will immediately thwart attempts to form the Ukrainian political nation.
To make this conclusion convincing for everyone without exception, citizens of Ukraine, we must look at the problem through the eyes of Russian nationalists. Between Feb. 20 and March 7, i.e., on the eve of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine, the www.km.ru Internet portal carried a colossal (five quires) propagandistic opus entitled “Ukrainian Matrix: Overloading” by Aleksei Orlov.
Orlov cannot see Ukraine or the Ukrainian people under his very nose. After perusing Ukrainian history school textbooks, he exclaims in an emotional outburst, “In our age of electronic media, before everybody’s eyes, an unbelievable history of an entire ‘country’ is being concocted. This history has a direct bearing on the interests of Russia and really takes your breath away: they are not writing a history of ‘Ukraine’ but are butchering and rewriting our history, the history of Russia and Russians as a great ethnos. All that has occurred in the past on the territory of present-day Ukraine is being automatically declared as ‘Ukrainian’ history. Caution: the largest ever project! ‘Ukraine’ has declared itself the successor of Ancient Rus’, i.e., it has in fact robbed Russia of her history!”
The idea that the past of every republic, region, or city belongs to the indigenous population is so simple and logical that any other opinion on this matter seems unnatural. In Soviet times, the Kremlin quite ably camouflaged this “inconvenient” idea with the claim about the common historical origin of the three Eastern Slavic peoples. In other words, the problem came to be regarded from a different angle. But today’s Russian nationalists do not wish to share the historical legacy. It was quite easy to advocate this view before the 1917 revolution, when Ukraine was just a combination of nine mostly Ukrainian-populated provinces of European Russia. But now the times are different.
What are the Russian nationalists counting on now? Orlov says, “The return of Ukraine into the fold of Russia requires Herculean efforts that must involve Russia, on the one hand, and Russians in Ukraine, on the other. This work needs a comprehensive program of actions.”
Orlov’s booklet offers a program. Without going into detail, I will name the main points: education, missionary work, more intense research, propaganda of Russian culture, repelling information attacks, giving Ukrainian citizens access to Russian television, supporting compatriots (ethnic Russians in Ukraine), and supporting the Russian Orthodox Church. It is necessary “to openly publicize the goal of “Russia’s Ukrainian policy:” uniting Russia and Ukraine, i.e., reuniting the historically common lands and the divided nation.”
Orlov admits that we may not like this. What is to done in this case? Here is his answer:
“Beat with the ruble. Pursue an extremely tough economic policy towards present-day Ukraine. No concessions, no exemptions. Pure pragmatism, by no means confined to immediate monetary profit and intended for a long-term political prospect.”
The point “Beat with the ruble” answers the question of whether it was an accident that this program appeared on the very eve of the Verkhovna Rada elections. Here it is:
“In purchasing Ukrainian goods, we are in fact sponsoring Ukrainian separatism. Why not impose prohibitive duties on Ukrainian goods and pass something like the US Jackson-Vanik amendment? We must also make a strenuous effort to explain to the population of Ukraine that we are struggling against the anti-people government, not against the people, that the election of other rulers in the imminent elections will not only be a correct step from the viewpoint of the Russian people’s history and common human justice but will also be of concrete and tangible benefit to each voter.”
It is the government of Russia that should implement the aforesaid program items. Yet, according to Orlov, the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine should also care about “the restoration of Russian unity.” The main thing is to organize a referendum on the status of the Russian language.
“The status of Russian as a second official language all over present-day Ukraine is a crucial question in the struggle between Western and Russian civilizations for Little Russia. Granting this status will immediately thwart the efforts to force the populace to learn the ‘mova’ (Ukrainian language — Ed.). The overwhelming majority of the citizens of today’s Ukraine speaks and thinks in Russian, which most convincingly proves that they are part of the Russian nation.”
Why were these undisguised utterances made just on the eve of the elections? Fifteen years of living without a dictatorship is too short a period for society to be able to dictate to the state about how to bring order in the country. It takes longer spans of time for a civil society to mature. For this reason, the constitutional dependence of political figures on society can only be put into practice during an election. So the election becomes a moment of truth, when the public voice gains strength. This is the time that Ukrainian and foreign politicians make desperate efforts to manipulate the will of voters.
The manipulators can expect success. It is no secret that in Ukraine, like in other ex-Soviet republics, millions of socially disadvantaged people feel nostalgic for the Soviet era. They do not regard the horrible Leninist-Stalinist terror as part of their own lives. The repressions bypassed them (except for the population of the western regions), and in the early 1950s the government put an end to mass-scale terror altogether. This made the Soviet state unstable, and, to retain its power, it had to enlist public support by showing genuine care about the people’s well-being.
In addition, millions of people, including those who achieved success in post-Soviet times, are also feeling nostalgic for imperial grandeur. There are many more people of this kind in Russia, but they are not so few in Ukraine. Many representatives of the Russian political elite take into account the feelings and views of these people. Reviving Russia’s might has been the official course of its leadership since 2000. For various reasons, this course should not look like a policy of restoring the empire. This is why Russian nationalists are on the rise now.
Nationalist propaganda is convenient because it removes the problem of the direct subordination of other CIS states to the Russian Federation. Nationalists stubbornly refuse to see Ukraine and Belarus as independent states. They look upon Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as one and the same nation. In their propaganda they have replaced the goal of restoring the empire with the problem of reuniting the single Russian ethnos that was disunited after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Finally, one must underline the differences in the historical experience of the older generation that still remembers the postwar years. Mass-scale repressions were carried out in Ukraine’s western regions only. Residents of central and eastern Ukraine, as well as the Russian population, did not see all the horrors of Stalinist terror, while the members of the previous generation, who are no longer alive, failed to hand down their life experiences to their children.
These children, and their children, were educated in a school system that was unable to paint a true picture of the Soviet system, which on the one hand was very populist, and on the other, painstakingly carried out the evil will of the dictator. As a result, the residents of the southern and eastern regions do not accept the evaluations in school textbooks, which are borrowed from the Ukrainian Diaspora and Western historiography. It should be admitted that these appraisals are often based on pure emotions rather than scholastic assessment. For example, it is wrong to claim that the Soviet Army occupied Ukraine, when it was liberating the latter from the German, Romanian, and Hungarian invaders in 1943-1944.
The historical memory of Ukrainian citizens is an important element of state building. So the state should make special efforts to enable the current generation of Ukrainian citizens to know their unembellished national history.
