The National Interest
Fall 2001

Ukraine, Unexpected

by Steven Erlanger

 

Given the waste of the last dozen years, it is hard to remember the excitement and pride that the Soviet collapse brought to Ukraine, even as Kravchuk tried to balance a surging nationalism with his long fealty to Moscow. For all Ukraine’s pride and resentment of Russian arrogance toward its "little brothers" in Ukraine and Belarus, however, independence was thrust upon both Kiev and Minsk, and no one was ready. Ukraine found itself with an airline, consisting of the Aeroflot planes that happened to be on its territory, and with an economy it neither comprehended nor controlled. In Kiev in those days, economists suggested that as much as 80 percent of the enterprises on Ukrainian soil were controlled directly from Moscow, part of the clumsy system of centralized planning that made widgets in one place and scroggets in another thousands of miles away, and then put them together in a third city where the workers had no idea how the object in question was designed or made, let alone marketed and sold.

Ukraine also found itself, like Moldova and Tajikistan, to be a strange Communist confection. It had to cope with a formerly Polish west and a formerly Russian Crimea, tacked on to Ukraine in a fit of celebratory foolishness by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian, was marking the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which, Moscow had decreed, was the beginning of an eternal Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood; Ukrainian nationalists, especially in the diaspora, had always regarded it as less a treaty than a contract directed against an external enemy, quickly broken, as usual, by the czar.

Its current territorial configuration makes the persistence of Ukrainian sovereignty itself, no matter how weakened it may become, something of a triumph. Interestingly enough, it has been helped in that regard to a large degree by the political nature of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin may have ended his presidency a bloated, drunken buffoon, but he colluded happily with Kravchuk to dismantle the Soviet Union and revive Ukraine as an independent country. Yeltsin bloviated about the rights of Russians abroad for political advantage, but he was not an imperialist, and Ukrainians (as well as the Balts) have much to thank him for—which is why, despite its general excellence and efforts to be fair to Russian arguments, Wilson's book has some bizarre mistakes and omissions. Certainly, the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine should have received fuller treatment, as should the earlier careers of both Kravchuk and Kuchma as servants of the old regime.

There is no stranger mistake, however, than in Wilson's description of the key meeting in the Belarusian forest that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin met there in December 1991 with Kravchuk and Belarus's first leader, Stanislav Shushkevich. After a long, drunken evening, they got down to business the next day. Wilson quotes Kravchuk as saying about Yeltsin: "Boris Mikhailovich, as it seemed to me, understood by independence something different." Yeltsin's patronymic is Nikolayevich, not Mikhailovich, as even Wilson's editors should have known. It is one thing to misspell the name of Vaclav Klaus, which Wilson does, but Yeltsin? The Russian White House was shelled in 1993, not "bombed." And Wilson, for all his honorable efforts to provide cultural context, manages to call Isaac Babel’s famous character, Benya Krik, the King of Odessa, "Beria Krik", an odd Stalinist slip of the keyboard.