The following is a collection of readers’ comments carried by Rossiyskaia gazeta (www.rg.ru) on Jan. 29, 2010, entitled “What kind of Ukraine do we love?” For a Russian-government-run periodical, considering Russia-Ukraine relations that are anything but simple, this approach serves as an example of professional journalist integrity. A dialog, however difficult, is better than mounting estrangement caused, among other things, by misunderstandings and inability to speak the same language. Here is a brief background of this publication.
Toward the end of December 2009, Moscow hosted a regular meeting of the standing roundtable “Kyiv dialogs” (this time between the editors of Ukrainian and Russian newspapers). Larysa Ivshyna told those present that after Den/The Day learned about the Russian poll that showed Ukraine ranked as Russia’s third biggest enemy, preceded only by the US and Georgia, the editors asked their readers about the kind of Russia they loved.
She went on to explain, “Political and other prejudices aside, Ukrainians and Russians are closely connected nations; their historical paths have crossed and continue crossing. The question is: What is Russia like today? What it will be like tomorrow? What kind of Russia do Ukrainians love? Readers’ answers were published by Den on March 25, 2009.” RG Editor in Chief Vladislav Fronin reprinted this article on Jan. 11, 2010, along with Ivshyna’s foreword, and asked the RG readers about the kind of Ukraine they loved. The result was an RG article of January 29.
There is also a photo of Dasha, an ailing seven-year-old girl, resident of Odesa, who can be helped by doctors in Moscow. This takes money, so the RG journalists asked their readers to help. It was a moving gesture on the part of our Russian colleagues, considering that we at the Kyiv editorial office receive letters with similar requests on a daily basis. We publish them and place them on our website — this is all we can do to help. As it was, the editors in chief of Den/The Day decided to write to the Ukrainian Ambassador to Russia, Kostiantyn Hryshchenko, and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Zurabov, asking what intergovernmental agreements and quotas could help Dasha and other people in such critical situations and an exchange of information about the possibilities of medical treatment in Ukraine and Russia can be arranged. In their letters Ivshyna and Fronin wrote that they hoped Hryshchenko and Zurabov would help “mitigate the pain in both countries.”
The editors in chief of several Russian newspapers wrote to their colleagues in Kyiv and invited themselves over. Honestly, we were all sick and tired of reading, hearing, and watching all that disgusting stuff about Russia and Ukraine. We wanted to try to somehow change the situation.
Four editors of Russian newspapers arrived in Kyiv. We met our Ukrainian colleagues and set up an open roundtable. In other words, anyone could join it without any “intermediaries.”
Unexpectedly, history became the first topic of what turned out to be an intensive debate — ranging from the Battle of Poltava to the Great Patriotic War [Russians still adhere to this Soviet propaganda cliche — Ed.].
In the course of the debate both sides were keenly aware of their grievances and complexes.
Stereotypes made up the second topic. Larysa Ivshyna, the editor in chief of the Ukrainian newspaper Den, told us about the polls carried out in Russia by the Levada Center and said she was stunned to discover that Ukraine is Russia’s third biggest enemy after the US and Georgia. We were also surprised (Rossiyskaia gazeta would later investigate the origin of these findings), but there were other things that stunned us, in our turn.
For some reason our Ukrainian colleagues believe that Russia is now exposed to rampant Stalinism.
Being aware that intense hostility can only add to the large number of such stereotypes, we tried to find a different language for our dialog.
Ivshyna told us that Den had published readers’ letters with answers to the question “What kind of Russia do we love?” I suggested that Rossiyskaia gazeta reprint it (see No. 2 [5081], Jan. 12, 2010) and then invited my Russian readers to answer the question “What kind of Ukraine do we love?”
Here is the newspaper page with the article. Honestly, I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the Ukrainian and Russian readers’ answers. Hurt feelings and misunderstanding are apparent in both cases. However, this long and patient dialog must go on, without either party losing the desire to understand the other one.
[We discussed] the Holodomor that also affected the Volga Region, my homeland, and the Ukrainian demand that the Russians repent of the crimes committed by the Soviet regime. However complicated the subject is and however big the misunderstandings are, we must keep discussing them, trying to find facts and names in those events that unite us. The victory in the Great Patriotic War — Russia is getting prepared to mark its 65th anniversary — is our common victory. It is, no doubt, a unifying event, regardless of the surprising attitude certain Ukrainian politicians have adopted to this great historic event.
Unless our elites rid themselves of the provincial stereotypes (in Ukraine) and ever-the-center ones (in Russia), we’ll have to learn to sacrifice certain positions that keep us apart for the sake of a good cause.
Shortly before my trip to Kyiv we had a small party in my kitchen with a married couple from Odesa, my old friends. The man is an army officer who was posted to Odesa by the Soviet Ministry of Defense (currently a retired Ukrainian national with a monthly allowance equal to 100 dollars a month). His wife followed him after graduating from a medical institute. She also has Ukrainian citizenship and earns 130 dollars a month. The family is faced with a serious problem: their seven-year-old daughter Dasha is afflicted with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Physicians in none of the countries where Ukrainians prefer to receive medical treatment, according to Ukrainian polls (Germany, Israel, and Turkey), can help her, but there are such unique specialists and methods of treatment in Moscow. There we sat in the kitchen racking our brains, trying to figure out how we could help the girl. Under the Russian law, a physician can’t treat a Ukrainian national free of charge — in other words, at the cost of the budget. Paid treatment means 38,000 rubles for each injection, and a course of treatment means an injection every two weeks for two years.
I told this story at the roundtable because I was sure that, however interesting it was to debate grievances and claims of past centuries, it was best to do good things today. We live next door, and there is no way we can do without each other, among other reasons because we have very close family contacts. We can’t but help each other. A concrete individual, under concrete circumstances.
Dasha is visiting Moscow this week for another injection. [Den carried this article on Feb.2, 2010 — Ed.] Aleksandr Kanshin, chairman of the board, National Association of Reserve Officers of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, overwhelmed me by responding immediately and helping pay for 10 injections (a large part of the treatment course). We keep looking for sponsors. If we help this girl get well, it will be the first serious result of our dialog. The next editors’ roundtable is scheduled to take place in Odesa.
Please send your comments and proposals to www.rg.ru.
Gleb PAVLOVSKY, political scientist:
“I was born in Ukraine. I have two family lineages: the cosmopolitan one in Odesa and in the far more ethnic area of Kherson. Therefore, my impressions about this country come not only from books because I’ve seen different visages of Ukraine.
“I have always loved the special — balanced and soft — Ukrainian spirit. I would describe it as a culture of moderation. It is manifested not only in daily life, but also in actions and movements — I might as well point out that this is something Russians aren’t very adept at.
“In Ukraine domestic things don’t contradict world things. Ukrainian romanticism is rid of tragic, sullen overtones.
“The Ukrainian contribution to Russian history is also moderating and human in many respects. Suffice it to remember Khrushchev and his liberation efforts in 20th-century Russian history, when he violated every Kremlin rule and said damn it all and released all prison camp inmates, although he was anything but a soft-hearted individual. Or take the Politburo member Petro Shelest who cut a very controversial, interesting, and attractive figure.
“Ukrainians as ranking executive officials, however, ranked among the cruelest bureaucrats. The civil war in Ukraine was severe. The Ukrainian KGB treated the dissidents and opposition in a considerably harsher manner than their Moscow counterparts. I moved to Moscow partially because I feared the Ukrainian KGB. Their Russian colleagues seemed safer to deal with.
“By the way, Nadezhda Mandelstam asks at the beginning of her Hope Abandoned why such a strong and cruel people has never created a state of its own.
“I believe that Ukraine’s current tragedy is the profound provincialism of its elite that can only be compared to that of some regional elites in Russia. We are partially responsible for this.
“A catalog of antipathies toward Russia, presented by Den under the guise of sympathies, is not so much about Russia as about an ideal and nonexistent Ukraine. They are telling us that we have the wrong kind of Russia. Looking at them, we ask what has happened to Ukraine to make it the way it is? What have we done to you? Of course, we are partially responsible for Ukraine’s political, social, and cultural decline; for their interpretation of what is national as ethnically limited, something you find only in the fascist circles in Russia. Fortunately, our interpretation of Russian culture is different.
“I was pained to hear Yurii Shcherbak’s remark, ‘We used to travel to Moscow as a mecca of freedom.’ It was really so. People came not only from Kyiv, but also from Warsaw. Adam often recalls the experience. Well, we lost this leadership after the 1970s. When analyzing the 1990s in Russia, we often forget to ask ourselves how we looked to the neighbors. Russia of the 1990s, engulfed by chaos and civil war!
“Volodymyr Panchenko refers to Kapnist who lived between Hadiach and Sorochyntsi. Here is a good example of imperial scope: domesticated space, domesticated universality. People who live in a European culture and at the same time are nourished by local roots, with all this existing in such humane proportion.
“Russian culture tends to be nihilistic. Here one finds the nihilism of the bureaucracy that ignores all living, human beings, and anti-state nihilism, although in the form of an almost painless inoculative injection. It lent Ukrainian culture that scope and openness which it has since lost. Now one of Europe’s biggest countries has a provincial kind of culture. This is a contradiction that does not make Ukraine a European country.
“I think it’s worth relying on the inner resources of Russian and Ukrainian culture. Our Renaissance is still ahead with mutually beneficial exchanges, cooperation, and true dialog of cultures. Our shortcomings, which are strangling each of us separately, will turn into advantages in dialog, and will help us cooperate.
“So far the main advantage of Ukrainian culture — its spirit of moderation and the elevated emotions of ethnicity — serves as its worst shortcoming, namely provincialism and, politically speaking, aggressive ethnocratic nationalism, which is destroying Ukrainian culture. Ukraine has been hacking away at one of its legs for more than a year, trying to ruin its Russian foundation, humiliating Russian-speaking citizens, and forcing them to use the Galician patois. This is ruining the Ukrainian language that has always been a combination of various influences; it is stopping its progress. There is a branch of Ukrainian culture within Ukraine, and it has of late been destroyed by the ruling ethnocratic minority.
“There is a branch of Ukrainian culture in Russia. I even think that our nihilism is rampant these days without the restraining and mitigating Ukrainian influence. We have turned into a markedly nihilistic society, and this has been noted by many. Some say that this is a normal response to violence on the state level, yet they don’t seem to notice that this response largely exceeds the violence which causes it. We have become excessively aggressive and it will be hard for us to return to the universality of Russian culture.
“However, this problem has nothing to do with the imperial trauma. Conversely, it has to do precisely with our withdrawal from the imperial breadth. Russia doesn’t need an imperial state to restore the scope of imperial culture. Hopefully we’re in for a new epoch of Enlightenment, including in the issues of Ukrainian culture. Partially it took place within the boundaries of Soviet culture, but it was restricted. I remember Ukrainian dissidents say bitterly, ‘You have books by Bunin, that inveterate enemy of Soviet power, in every bookstore, whereas in our country Hrushevsky, who was its friend, even if an independent one, is banned. You can’t even mention his name in a positive context.’ It is true that the Soviet system planted that bomb and it exploded.
“I wouldn’t insist on the Moscow elite being in many ways superior to the Ukrainian one. There are traumas in all cultures.
“The reason for the Ukrainian elite lagging behind, to a degree, is that Ukraine didn’t succeed in developing its own rational methods within the Russian empire and later, as part of the Soviet Union. Entire spheres of the Ukrainian language have not been developed in the direction of natural sciences and humanities. So when it was declared that Ukrainian would from now on embrace every sphere, its capabilities turned out to be limited. Such attempts often make them look like ignoramuses in the company of well-educated people, who nevertheless feel on an equal footing with them. They are bound to talk nonsense. Yet the point is not that they are ignoramuses and we are big-time intellectuals. It is just that Russian is more advanced as an international language, but let’s face it, this is no tribute to the current elite.
“The Ukrainian language is underdeveloped, but this isn’t a serious problem. It could have been developed, but this would have required a lot of time and a language policy other than the one pursued by Kyiv in the past years. This kind of language policy is dangerous not for Russia but for Ukraine. It is turning this country into a rail terminal where you hear a patois that destroys both the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and which destroys culture.
“In Russia, Soviet culture suffered a shattering defeat, as did Great Russian culture. The institutions of Western culture that filled the vacuum have little attraction for our neighbors because they have enough of their own to spare. It is thus the catastrophic solitude of Ukrainian culture that is deepening, considering that this culture is in double isolation. The first one was created by its own political, governmental, and affiliated cultural elites, owing to the struggle against Russian culture, a struggle imposed on Ukraine. The second one caused by Russia that doesn’t understand the traumas and suffering of Ukrainian culture and forgets that not all of us are Sorbonne graduates. And the way we say ‘our Tolstoy,’ ‘our Dostoevsky,’ ‘our Pushkin’! As though we were closer to Pushkin than any of the Ukrainian cultural figures! We will have ‘our Pushkin’ only when we will have reached his level. On the level of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Gogol, at these summits of culture, there are no state or ethnic partitions.
“Our traumas aren’t imperial. They mean the loss of communication and dialog within a single great culture that grew in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, but never reached maturity. It had no time to grow offshoots, for each, be it Ukrainian or Russian, to turn into a separate independent branch of world caliber. Sooner or later we’ll have to get back and do this homework because we simply skipped our classes 20 to 30 to 50 years ago.”
Yuriy KUBLANOVSKY, poet:
“I love Ukraine for the same reason I love Russia. I was 16, getting prepared for the entrance exams at the art history faculty of Moscow State University, when I first opened one of the volumes of History of Russian Art with an entry on St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv. I studied the temple’s layout and frescos… I have never regarded Ukrainian culture as that of a different people. All of it is close and dear to me. We were a single people when we adopted the Byzantine Orthodox faith; today we remain people of the same faith and culture. I don’t know what test tubes they used to grow the homunculi that regard the ‘Muscovites’ as enemies.
“Characteristically, during his last public appearance the great writer Solzhenitsyn (there was Ukrainian blood in his veins) was outraged by the Ukrainian nationalists playing the Holodomor card. Either because of stubbornness or impudence (maybe both), the Ukrainian people was portrayed as a victim of Russian rather than communist genocide.
“I repeat that I love Ukraine as an equal component of my own cultural world, so the current situation is perhaps the most dramatic event after the collapse of the Soviet system.”
Yevgeniy YASIN, research supervisor, Higher School of Economics State University:
“Why do I love Ukraine? First, because Odesa is there. Second, because I like the Ukrainian language; it sounds so nice and melodious, the wonderful Ukrainian songs, and so on. Third, I’m very glad to know that there is already democracy in Ukraine. I hope they will preserve it. There are favorable circumstances, including those considered by some Russians to be Ukraine’s big shortcoming. I mean that there is western and eastern Ukraine. This is precisely what keeps the balance of forces required to support the democratic system.”
Compiled by Yelena NOVOSIOLOVA and Yelena YAKOVLEVA
