Also in Donetsk, during a demonstration, a young RUCH activist was brave enough to remove from inside his jacket the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag and hold it aloft. People gaped, astonished, bewildered. “Let them get used to it,” he said to me knowingly.
Simplifying greatly, one can say that there are two Ukraines: the western and the eastern. The western (the former Galicia, territories that belonged to Poland before the war) is more “Ukrainian” than the eastern. Its inhabitants speak Ukrainian, feel themselves to be one hundred percent Ukrainian, and are proud of this. It is here that the soul of the nation survived, its personality, its culture.
Things look different in the eastern Ukraine, which covers a territory larger than the western. Thirteen million native Russians live here and at least as many half Russians; here Russification was more intense and brutal; here Stalin murdered almost the entire intelligentsia. In 1932 and 1933, he had several million Ukrainian peasants starved to death and ordered tens of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals shot. Only those who fled abroad were saved. Ukrainian culture was better preserved in Toronto and Vancouver than in Donetsk or Kharkov.
The differences between the western Ukraine (called the Ukrainian Piedmont) and the eastern were still in evidence at the time of my visit too, during the months of the struggle for independence. The monthly Friendship of Nations (number 4, 1990), published in Moscow, states: “In Kiev, which has a population of three million, forty thousand will come to a proindependence demonstration, and in Lvov [the capital of the western Ukraine], which has a population of one million, three hundred thousand will come. In Donetsk, which is larger than Lvov, five thousand will come.”
• • •
I RETURN to Ordzonikidze Street, to the Writers’ Union palace. It is difficult to get in to see Ivan Drach. Dozens of people besiege his office. They have arrived here from all over the Ukraine; they want to tell him about their troubles; they are seeking advice and assistance. I can see that there is no chance of a conversation. Late that evening I call him at home from my hotel. “Let’s try tomorrow,” he says in a weary voice.
Drach is an excellent poet, with a significant body of work, but now he has no time for writing. “One must put poetry aside,” he says, “and save the Ukraine, save its culture.” Russification is so advanced that in a few years’ time there will be no one left who can read new Ukrainian literature. Besides, one must first restore the existing literature to its reader. The average Ukrainian doesn’t even know the names of that literature’s greatest twentieth-century writers — Mikol Chvilovy and Vladimir Vinnichenko. These were names that the regime wanted to condemn to oblivion. And how many inhabitants of the Ukraine have had access to the poems of Vasili Stusa, Aleksei Ticheg, Yurii Litvin — Ukrainian poets murdered in recent years by the KGB?
Books in Ukrainian constitute only twenty percent of those published here. Most of the rest are in Russian. As far back as 1863, Moscow prohibited the publication of any books whatsoever in Ukrainian, with the exception of works of belles lettres.
ONE OF MY many trips to Kiev took place in January 1990. The people I met were extremely moved by what they were talking about. And they were all talking about one thing — the fact that on January 21, on the anniversary of the proclamation of the short-lived Ukrainian independence of 1918, hundreds of thousands had joined hands and formed a chain stretching more than five hundred kilometers between Kiev, Lvov, and Ivano-Frankovsk. Today, in light of what later happened in August 1991, in light of the structural collapse of a vast expanse of the world (and, for many people, of the whole world), a gesture such as the creation of a chain of human hands, even one five hundred kilometers long, can seem trivial, but to those I spoke with it was a shock, a miracle, a revolution. For several reasons. For one, this was the first time a large campaign had been carried out, not on the orders of the Central Committee, but owing to the initiative of a young, independent organization — RUCH. Yes, it turned out that the so-called “leading role of the Party” had become a fiction, that the leading role would now in fact be taken over by grass-roots organizations which the society itself had called into being, and that the society would listen only to them. Second, it became clear that Ukrainians had kept alive the memory of their first independence, a memory that bolshevism had tried to erase for seventy years. This chain, then, had enormous psychological significance. It tightened round the neck of the greatest nightmare of Sovietism, which is the feeling of having no alternatives, of hopelessness.
From that moment, history speeds up in the Ukraine. Still in January, Pope John Paul II ratifies the structure of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. (The story of the relations between the four Christian communities in the Ukraine — the Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church — is a separate chapter in contemporary Ukrainian history, a chapter full of tensions, emotions, and pain.) In March, elections are held throughout the Republic to fill seats on councils at all levels. In three districts (again, this is in the western Ukraine), the democratic opposition comes to power. (How my favorite Ukrainian writer, Vinnichenko, the creator of the idea of a democratic Ukraine, would have rejoiced!) Finally, June 16 arrives — the Parliament passes a declaration of the sovereignty of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The declaration proclaims the primacy of the laws of the Republic over those of the USSR and also the right of the Republic to possess its own army and to mint its own currency. The declaration states that the Ukraine will be a neutral and nonatomic state. (This has great importance, since enormous stocks of the weapons of mass destruction are located in the territories of the Republic.) Yet for all its historical significance and eloquence, the declaration of June 16 is at that moment still more a statement of intent than a document describing facts.
Therefore the battle continues. Student and miner strikes erupt in the fall. Students occupy the center of Kiev and demand the resignations of the Republic’s Soviet leaders. In the course of that same year, around twenty political parties come into being, with increasing influence wielded by, among others, the Ukrainian Republican Party and the Ukrainian Green Party. (Chernobyl lies a mere eighty kilometers north of Kiev.)
August 19, 1991, arrives.
The coup d’état attempt in Moscow. In the Ukraine everything is calm; the Ukraine waits. But several days later the Supreme Council of the Ukraine convenes in Kiev and on August 24 proclaims the “creation of the independent Ukrainian state — Ukraine.” The proclamation adds that “the territory of the Ukraine is indivisible and inviolable.” In the rush of these events, which at the time are rolling across the world with the speed and strength of a powerful avalanche, the fact that Europe has suddenly grown by one large state (large by the standards of the European continent) does not make a tremendous impression. Our Western imagination (this principle was once described by Walter Lippmann) lags behind events, needs time to plumb their meaning and grasp their dimension.