The recent statements by individual Russian politicians about how Russia could not tolerate a Yushchenko Bloc including some people whose forebears might have fought into the 1950s on the side of the UPA, perhaps because they remembered the mass slaughter perpetrated in Western Ukraine by the retreating NKVD in the summer of 1941 and did not want to have their own brains blown out or worse “for the Motherland, for Stalin” (and to whom the current government is committed to awarding war veteran status) leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. This is especially so after the televised “documentary,” PR, which inter alia seems designed to convince the viewer that the former prime minister wants to sell Ukraine out to the Americans.
As an American citizen with no right to be for or against anybody in an election appropriately to be decided by the citizens of Ukraine, I remain a human being bound by certain rules of fairness. The US Embassy has rightly responded to charges it is supporting a given candidate by reiterating that it supports only free and fair elections. It has not said anything against, say, the Communists or other forces whose election victory would clearly not be in America’s interest. Contrast this to the statements of Russian officials, who might or might not represent their president, which The Day has duly reported and condemned. As a historian of Ukraine, I can only think of the three centuries of friendship trumpeted by such defenders of their East Slavic brethren against the background of the 1708 massacre of an estimated 28,000 peaceful inhabitants of the hetman’s capital of Baturyn, the nakaz of Catherine II enserfing millions of hitherto free but poor Ukrainian Cossacks, shortly thereafter the abolition of the hetmanate that had over a century earlier agreed to join Muscovy on condition of the observance of its thenceforth completely ignored rights, the Ems ukaz of 1876 banning the Ukrainian language from the schools and printed page, the post-Revolutionary Bolshevik invasions to install an unpopular and bloody puppet regime, the Manmade Famine of 1932-33 duly carried out under the able and direct supervision of Molotov and Kaganovich, postwar deportations, and the General Pogrom of 1972. Some friendship, indeed.
Of course, all who wish Ukraine well wish it good relations with all its neighbors. It was not me but former Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland Dmytro Pavlychko, who argued at a presentation not long ago that Ukraine has no choice but to go with its western neighbors. In the other direction, he said, lays only death. Perhaps he was overstating a bit, but the recent statements by Russian officials constituting crude interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine cannot help by remind one of the immortal words of Russian Minister of Education who in 1863 issued a circular banning the Ukrainian language, saying a Little Russian language “never did, does not, and must never” exist separately from its Russian counterpart. From the Russian statements recently heard about the Ukrainian elections, it might well seem that old habits die hard.
