WHY RUSSIA HAS NEVER ACCEPTED UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE
It might have, had it chosen democracy
The Economist - DEC 18TH 2021
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[...]Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith. Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European. [...]
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Around eight in the evening of Sunday December 8th 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, pickedup a phone call on a top-security line. The caller was Stanislav Shushkevich, amodest physics professor whom Mr Gorbachev’s reforms had placed at the helm of the Soviet Republic of Belarus a few months before. Mr Shushkevich was phoning from a hunting lodge in the magnificent Belovezh forest to tell the greatreformer that he was out of a job: the Soviet Union was over.
In retrospect, its last gasp had come in August, when the kgb, hardline Communists and thearmy had placed Mr Gorbachev under house arrest and mounted a coup. After three days of peaceful resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Republic, they backed down. That ruled out any return to a Soviet past. But Mr Gorbachev still clung to hopes for some sort of post-Soviet liberal successor as a way to hold at least some of the republics together. Mr Shushkevich’s call killed any such aspiration.
One of its triggers was Russia’s economic collapse. As Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s top economic reformer, was later to write, it was an autumn of “grim foodlines…pristinely empty stores…women rushing around in search of some food, anyfood…an average salary of seven dollars a month”. To successfully enact the sweeping reforms Mr Gaidar was designing, Yeltsin needed a Russia which controlled its own currency. That meant leaving the ussr.
Mr Shuskevich,too, was motivated by the dreadful economy. He had invited Yeltsin to there treat in the forest in the hope that by wining and dining him he would ensure that Russian gas and electricity would keep flowing to Belarus. It would have been a hard winter without them. The venue he chose was a lodge called Viskuli,where Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev had entertained themselves shootingbison and other game (hence its hard-wired connection to Moscow).
Yeltsin suggested that Leonid Kravchuk, the president of the Ukrainian republic, join them. The previous Sunday, Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly to ratify the declaration of independence from the Soviet Union which had been passed in its parliament, the Rada, immediately after the August coup.
Yeltsin did not just want what Mr Kravchuk had achieved in Ukraine for economic reasons. Independence would, he felt, be crucial to consolidating his power and pursuing liberaldemocracy. And Ukraine—never, until the 19th century, a well-defined territory, and home to various ethnic enclaves and deep cultural divides—becoming an independent unitary state within its Soviet borders set a precedent for Russia to define itself the same way, and refuse independence to restive territories such as Chechnya. That was why the Russian republic was one of the first three polities in the world to recognise it as an independent state.
But if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin. It was not just that Ukraine was the second - most - populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s. Nor was it the question of what was to happen to the nuclear forces stationed there but still notionally under the command of Soviet authorities in Moscow. It went deeper.
In “Rebuilding Russia”, an essay published in the ussr’s most widely circulated newspaper the year before, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had asked “What exactly is Russia? Today, now? And—more importantly—tomorrow?…Where do Russians themselves see the boundaries of their land?” The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.
For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. As the centre of the storied medieval confederation known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, Kyiv was seen as the cradle of Russian and Belarusian culture and the font of their Orthodox faith. Being united with Ukraine was fundamental to Russia’s feeling of itself as European. In “Lost Kingdom” (2017) Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian, describes how “the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.”Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one ofempire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.
But not to Ukrainians. At the first dinner in Viskuli, with Yeltsin and Mr Kravchuk sitting opposite each other, a number of toasts were raised to friendship. The friendship Mr Kravchuk wanted, though, was of the cordial sort that comes with a decent alimony cheque, not the sort that goes with a fresh plighting of troths.
Mr Kravchuk was born in 1934 in the western Ukrainian province of Volhynia—then part of Poland, but ceded to the ussr as part of the infamous pact it made with Germany in 1939. A childhood surrounded by ethnic cleansing, repression and war had taught him, as he put it, “to walk between the raindrops”. It was a skill that made him an ideal party apparatchik and then saw him turn himself into a champion of Ukrainian independence—not for any high-minded ideological reasons, but because he wanted the chance to be in charge of his own country.
The referendum had given it to him, with independence endorsed by majorities in every part of the country, both those in the formerly Austro-Hungarian west, with its Baroque churches and coffee shops, and in the Sovietised and industrialised east, wheremost of Ukraine’s 11m ethnic Russians lived. There were practical things he needed from Russia, and Russian interests he recognised; he wanted a good relationship with Yeltsin and so had come to the forest meeting. But he was not interested in giving Russia an exit from the union that in any way compromised Ukrainian independence.
The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4 am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.
The Soviet Union had been formed, in 1922, through a joint declaration by four Soviet republics—the Transcaucasian republic and the three represented at Viskuli. With the Transcaucasian republic long since dismembered, the presidents dissolved by fiat what their forebears had bound together. In its place they put a Commonwealth of Independent States (cis)—Mr Kravchuk would not allow any use of the word “union”—with few clearly defined powers which any post-Soviet state would be welcome to join. There was to be no special relationship between the Slavic three.
That afternoon the three men signed the agreement, thereby proclaiming that “The ussr as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality has ceased to exist.” It then fell to the most junior of the three—who was also the least enthusiastic about what they had done—to inform Moscow of what had happened.
Mr Gorbachev was furious. The importance of Ukraine was not an abstract matter to him. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was the child of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father. He grew up singing Ukrainian songs and reading Gogol, who reimagined his native country’s folk magic as rich poetry after moving to St Petersburg. The SovietUnion had meant that Mr Gorbachev and others like him, whatever their parentage, could partake in both identities.
More immediately, though the failed coup had made some such break-up more or less inevitable, disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The fact that in that rubble, if rubble there was to be, there would be the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, spread between four separate countries (the three Slavic ones and Kazakhstan), frightened statesmen around the world. When, as the economy worsened, MrGorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”
The question was being answered on one of the lodge’s other phone lines. Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s first foreign minister, had had trouble getting through to Bush. A State Department receptionist—Mr Kozyrev did not have the White House number with him—told the man with a Russian accent demanding that she connect some one called Mr Yeltsin to the president that she was “not in the mood for prank calls”. Nor could Mr Kozyrev be called back in a way that might prove his bonafides: he had no idea of the lodge’s phone number. In the end, though, he got through, and was able to act as interpreter as Yeltsin explained to Bush that the world’s largest nuclear arsenal was now in the hands of something called the cis.
If Mr Gorbachev had been unclear how Bush would react, so was Bush himself. A voice memo he recorded the next day is a string of anxious questions: “I find myself on this Monday night, worrying about military action. Where was the [Soviet] army—they’ve been silent. What will happen? Can this get out of hand? Will Gorbachev resign? Will he try to fight back? Will Yeltsin have thought this out properly? It is tough—a very tough situation.” Similar doubt assailed the three presidents in the forest. When Yeltsin and his entourage set off back to Moscow, they joked about their plane being shot down. The laughter was not entirely free from anxiety.
Instead the shooting down of planes, along with the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, the seizure of Crimea, the reassertion that the legacy of Kyivian Rus meant the nations must be shackled together and the reversion of Belarus to dictatorship—that all came later, a sequence of events which led, 30 Decembers later, to 70,000 or more Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and, in aghastly sideshow, thousands of Middle Eastern refugees stuck in the Belovezh forest itself. The once seemingly settled question of post-Soviet relations between the three nations has once again become an overriding geopolitical concern.
Back then, though, as he stood among the snow-capped pine trees after leaving the meeting,Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing thisagreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path ofinternal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off thetraditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict withWestern civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts.The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convolutedinterdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought;maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure ofimagination.
In 1994, after three years of horrificeconomic contraction, two of the three men who had met at Viskuli fell frompower. In Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, who had previously run a largecollective piggery, won election over Mr Shushkevich. Mr Lukashenko told peoplehe would sort out the economic mess by taking them back to the security theyhad had before. Reforms stopped—as would, at a later stage of Mr Lukashenko’snow 27-year reign, competitive and fair elections. The flag, which had beenchanged to the red and white of the very short-lived Belarusian Republic of1918, was turned back to one like that of the Soviet era.
There was nosuch turnaround in Ukraine, where Mr Kravchuk lost the presidential election toLeonid Kuchma, a skilled Soviet-era industrial manager. Mr Kravchuk held themore nationalistic, Ukrainian-speaking west of the country; Mr Kuchma took theRussian-speaking and collectivist regions to the east. But unlike MrLukashenko, Mr Kuchma was not a reactionary, and he was to prove canny in wooingUkrainians who had at first distrusted him.
Yeltsin was notrequired to stand for election that year. But a year earlier he and hisreformists had faced down an insurgency by Communists and an assortment ofanti-Western, anti-democratic factions led by the speaker of the parliament.One of their grievances was the loss of Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Seareallocated from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian republic in 1954 butstill seen as part of Russia by most Russians. A holidaying place for both theSoviet elite and for millions of ordinary people, it had been at the heart ofthe imperial project since the days of Catherine the Great.
The insurgency of 1993 was bloody;Yeltsin ordered the parliament building shelled by tanks. The public stood byhim. A referendum held in the aftermath greatly increased the powers of thepresidency. His foreign supporters stood by him too, and the following year asecurity agreement saw America, Britain and Russia guarantee respect forUkraine’s integrity within its existing borders—which is to say, includingCrimea—in exchange for its giving up the nuclear weapons it had inherited fromthe Soviet Union. Ukraine was grateful; the West saw further evidence of atransition towards a liberal, democratic Russian state.
Some, though, thought this dangerouslyoptimistic; one such was Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-American diplomat andformer national security adviser. In March 1994 Brzezinski took his own shot atSolzhenitsyn’s question—the question he believed, rightly, to provoke “thegreatest passion from the majority of [Russian] politicians as well ascitizens, namely ‘What is Russia?’” Rather than give a definitive answer, hegave an alternative one: “Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but itcannot be both.”
He was right. Yeltsin’s unburdenedmoment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did nothave to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’sideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had heldit together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition forfreedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embracedcapitalism. But he saw no need for it to bring freedom with it, and had no problemwith a state run through repression and lies. He thus reversed Yeltsin’sdemocratic project and, though not at first territorially imperialist himself,took the country down the other side of Brzezinski’s fork. It is that whichputs Russia and its Slavic neighbours in such a parlous position today.
One of Brzezinski’s problems withYeltsin’s Russia was “that the emerging capitalist class in Russia isstrikingly parasitic”. By the time Mr Putin became president in 2000 Russia wasrun by an oligarchic elite which saw the state as a source of personalenrichment. But when pollsters asked people what they expected of theirincoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority.The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respectedabroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it, “A strong state is not ananomaly to fight against. Society desires the restoration of the guiding,organising role of the state.” When, shortly after his election, Mr Putinrestored the Soviet anthem, it was not as a symbol of reverting to centralplanning or rebuilding an empire. It was a signal that the strong state wasback. State power did not mean the rule of law or a climate of fairness. It didnot have, or need, an ideology. But it did have to take on some of the“geopolitical reality” that the meeting in Viskuli had stripped from the SovietUnion.
The strong state which provided aneffective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for MrKuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, letalone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So inUkraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into thatdistinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As MrKuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.
