Borderland

by Anna Reid

  With Shcherbytsky’s appointment in 1972 came a second, more successful crackdown. Hundreds more writers, teachers, artists and scientists were arrested, and dealt far harsher sentences than the ‘sixtiers’. At the same time Shcherbytsky purged the Ukrainian Communist Party, expelling 37,000 Party members, and sacking half the Ukrainian Politburo. In 1977 he rounded up almost the entire membership of the Ukrainian Helsinki human-rights group, founded with help from Russian dissidents the previous year. ‘I was certain,’ the Tatar-rights campaigner General Hryhorenko recalled in his memoirs, ‘that the authorities would react with particular sensitivity to the creation of a Ukrainian group, since such a group could not avoid touching on the question of nationality, the most sensitive of all issues for the Soviet Union.’15 He was right. Twenty-two Ukrainian Helsinki Group members were despatched to the Gulag, to serve terms of between three and fifteen years. Two were sent into internal exile, and five, including Hryhorenko himself, were forced to emigrate. Put to work as slave labourers in camp factories and farms, deprived of proper clothing, washing facilities or medical care, and kept in a continuous state of semi-starvation, the prisoners’ lives narrowed to bare survival. ‘The con’s diary in prison is simple,’ wrote one inmate. ‘Bread-breakfast-dinner-supper, day after day, month after month, year after year.’16 Suicide, self-mutilation, random beatings and long spells in freezing punishment cells were all common. The Soviet Union did not release its political prisoners until 1987. For many, like the poet Vasyl Stus, who died with three other Ukrainian Helsinki Group members in a Mordovan camp in 1985, amnesty came too late.

  By the time Gorbachev launched perestroika, Ukrainian nationalism looked like a thing of the past. The movement’s best-known leaders were exiled, in prison, or dead. Save for the hard-core North American diaspora, protest at home and abroad had fizzled out. ‘By and large,’ the historian Orest Subtelny wrote wistfully in 1988, ‘it seems that most Soviet Ukrainians accept the Soviet regime as their legitimate government and identify with it. Because of the government’s monopoly on information and intensive propaganda, they are, at best, only vaguely aware of the hardships that Ukrainians have suffered at Soviet hands in the “ancient” past . . . Many Soviet Ukrainians take pride in the power and prestige of the USSR of which they are an important part.’17

  Subtelny’s analysis was perfectly correct. The number of active Ukrainophiles was negligible, and had been so for the last thirty years – a few thousand out of a population of 52 million. Advocates of outright independence could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Open national feeling was restricted to a small intelligentsia clique; ordinary Ukrainians remained stolidly uninvolved. ‘The simple citizen,’ one activist complained, ‘resembles a hypnotised rabbit.’18 To any reasonable observer, independence looked like a Quixotic dream. Yet within three years of Subtelny’s putting pen to paper Ukraine had, to universal amazement, become a fully independent, democratic state.

  Did the Soviet Union collapse under pressure from national independence movements, or did the independence movements fill a vacuum left by Soviet collapse? It is a chicken-and-egg question: the phenomena fed off one another. But the two factors – popular opposition at the periphery, political weakness at the centre – had different relative weights in different republics. The Baltics, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan all possessed Popular Fronts so strong that it was obvious they could not be kept in the Union without use of force. But in the case of Ukraine, where the independence movement was real and persistent, but only ever involved a minority of the population, it was never clear that this was so. For separatism to succeed, the centre had to fail. This it did in August 1991, when an attempted coup in Moscow left the Ukrainian Communist Party’s conservative bosses with the choice between the Soviet Union and military dictatorship, or democracy and the Ukrainian nationalists. When it became clear that the coup had misfired, they accepted the inevitable, and went with the nationalists. Until that moment, there was no point at which one could confidently declare ‘From now on, Ukrainian independence is inevitable’.

  None of it would have happened without Galicia. For a hundred years Galicia had been the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. It was where the remnants of the partisan army had fought on after the war, where Uniate priests still held secret masses in woods and barns, and where Ukrainian was most widely spoken. It had no Russian population to speak of, and since the war, no Poles either. It produced many of Ukraine’s Cold War dissidents, and later, most of the leaders of Rukh, the opposition coalition that led the popular independence movement. Galicia was never strong enough to take Ukraine to independence on its own: the region was too small and sparsely populated for that. But without it – if, say, it had stayed under Polish rule after the war – Ukraine might never have become independent at all.

  Ukraine’s first big anti-communist demonstrations took place in Lviv. In June and July 1988 a characteristic medley of independent organisations – the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, the Committee in Defence of the Uniate Church, the Ukrainian Language Society and a student group – organised a series of illegal mass meetings, attended by between 20,000 and 50,000 people, underneath the Ivan Franko statue in front of the university. Newly-released dissidents made speeches calling for an end to Party privileges, closure of the KGB and release of remaining political prisoners. Though there were demands for more republican autonomy, there was no talk as yet of independence: some demonstrators even waved Gorbachev banners in the belief that perestroika was being obstructed by local communists. The meetings were broken up by interior ministry troops, and several of the organisers arrested. Kiev followed Lviv’s lead in November, when 10,000 marchers stood in the rain listening to speeches mixing protests against nuclear power with appeals for a Popular Front. When plainclothes KGB men switched off the sound system the crowd refused to budge, chanting ‘Mikrofon, mikrofon.’

  With Shcherbytsky’s forced retirement in September 1989, the demonstrations turned into a political movement. The same month, a range of nonconformist organisations – the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, the Ukrainian Language Society, the Helsinki Union, Green World and the historical campaign group Memorial – formed a loose coalition titled the ‘Ukrainian Popular Movement in Support of Perestroika’ or ‘Movement’ – Rukh in Ukrainian – for short. Predictably, most of the delegates at Rukh’s inaugural congress came from the intelligentsia and from central and western Ukraine: there were few representatives from the farms, the factories, or the Russian-speaking east and south. Though the camp veteran Levko Lukyanenko told the hall to ‘abolish this empire as the greatest evil of present-day life’19 (the only speech not reported by Literaturna Ukraina, the country’s most outspoken paper), the bulk of delegates were far more cautious, voting a programme that called for ‘a sovereign Ukrainian state’ within a ‘new Union treaty’.20

  While Rukh met in Kiev and students scuffled with riot police in Lviv, the Orthodox Church, hitherto the moribund province of KGB stooges and pious grannies, burst into uproar. Led by the SS Peter and Paul Church in Lviv, parishes all over the country started declaring themselves members of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, last heard of in 1930. At the same time, a campaign got under way for legalisation of the Uniates, liquidated after the war. Refused a meeting with Supreme Soviet officials in Moscow, six priests went on hunger strike, and on 17 September, the fiftieth anniversary of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, 150,000 Uniates held candlelight vigils in memory of the victims of the Soviet annexation of western Ukraine. By December around 600 parishes and 200 priests had applied for registration as Uniates, finally winning official recognition following Gorbachev’s meeting with Pope John Paul II. The following summer, the reborn Autocephalous Orthodox Church held its first Council for sixty years, with a service in Santa Sofia. Metropolitan Mstyslav, head of the diaspora church in America, had been refused a visa to attend, but was elected Patriarch in absentia. In October Gorbachev capitulated and the Autocephalous Orthodox were legal
ised too. In just over a year, Ukraine had progressed from one official church to three. Unchristian battles promptly broke out over ecclesiastical property. Rival congregations marched on the churchyards, and it was quite common for priests to be stoned.

  Meanwhile, in March 1990, Gorbachev initiated the final, fatal phase of perestroika, allowing semi-democratic elections to the republican Supreme Soviets, among them Kiev’s Verhovna Rada. Fighting on a platform of ‘real political and economic sovereignty’ – though not outright independence – Rukh and its allies won 108 out of 450 seats. Predictably, they did much better in Galicia and central Ukraine than in the Donbass and the south: a human chain, high point of the campaign, had stretched from Lviv to Kiev, but no further east. Despite being in a minority, Rukh’s presence revolutionised Rada proceedings, hitherto a rubber-stamp for Party orders. ‘The democrats represent only a third,’ wrote an observer, ‘but they are always at the microphones and dominate the hall as if they constituted a majority.’21

  The literary scholar Solomea Pavlychko recorded the events of 1990 in a series of letters to a friend in Canada. Over and over, she contrasted Kiev’s defeatism with the reigning sense of optimism and excitement in western Ukraine. In Kiev, she wrote in May, ‘morale is low. Everyone criticises everything, yet at the same time people are apathetic . . . Some people are in despair, others are demoralised . . . Servility is alive and well.’22 But on holiday in Galicia, she was amazed to find villagers avidly following Rada debates on television, and blue-and-yellow banners flying in the local town. The gossip was all of independence and even the local drunks sank their vodka with the toast ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ ‘They believe in aid from the West,’ she wrote. ‘How naive!’23

  By autumn, Kiev was catching up. On 30 September, opening day of the Rada’s second session, the city was brought to a halt by its biggest anti-government demonstration yet:

  The meeting opened at three o’clock near the Central Stadium. It began despite the fact that all the roads into Kiev had been closed, with armoured cars at the approaches to the city on the pretext that the soldiers in these military vehicles had come to collect the harvest. Ten huge army trucks were positioned on Repin, my street, alone . . .

  At 5.00 p.m. a protest march departed from the stadium along Red Army and Khreshchatyk streets. At least 200,000 (and perhaps 500,000) people in enormously wide, tightly packed columns, singing and yelling slogans – ‘Freedom for Ukraine! Down with the CPU!’ – moved out on to Lenin Komsomol Square. The column came to a halt near the two monuments of Lenin and people began chanting ‘Down with the idol!’ Near one of the monuments a ring of defenders took up their positions, among them decorated veterans and, probably, KGB men in disguise. Foreign television correspondents paced about. Police stood in ranks around the second Lenin statue which, in April, had been decorated with a wreath of barbed wire . . .

  My feet felt battered and burned from the long hours of standing and walking; my head was buzzing from all the shouting and slogans. Yet we could barely drag ourselves away . . .24

  Two days later students from Kiev and Lviv universities went on hunger strike, camping out under tents on what had been October Revolution and was now renamed Independence Square. They demanded new parliamentary elections, no military service outside Ukraine, nationalisation of all Party property and the removal of Vitaly Masol, the republic’s prime minister. Passers-by, not all of them enthusiastic, watched proceedings from behind rope barriers. ‘Some scolded the layabouts,’ wrote Pavlychko, ‘others passed flowers across the rope, still others said that it wouldn’t make any difference, and why were they wrecking their health?’25 On 10 October the students were joined by eight opposition deputies, and on the 17th, after a protest march by workers from the Arsenal weapons factory, scene of a pro-Bolshevik uprising in 1918, the government caved in. There would be no more military service outside Ukraine, a commission would be created on the nationalisation of Party property, and Masol would go. When the terms were read out in the Rada, deputies applauded.

  With the marches and the hunger strikes, Kiev’s popular independence movement peaked. ‘Remember,’ a friend told me, ‘that a lot of these demonstrators came in buses from Lviv. We were proud of them, we would support them, definitely. But when they left, that was it.’ Rukh was splintering, leaving behind a slew of quarrelsome, disorganised factions. ‘The public,’ Pavlychko wrote despairingly in December, ‘doesn’t give a damn . . . it demands something to eat, but nothing very special, anything will do.’26 With her parents on New Year’s Eve, she decided that independence was still ten, twenty or even thirty years off. Her four-year-old daughter Bohdana might be the only one to live to see it.

  What the Pavlychkos did not realise was that while the opposition lost momentum, the communists themselves were edging towards a change of heart. The shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Vilnius and Riga in January revealed a split between pro-Moscow hardliners, led by First Party Secretary Stanyslav Hurenko, and an emerging bloc of ‘national communists’ under Leonid Kravchuk, a former Party ideology chief and chairman of the Rada. While the Rada condemned Moscow for its ‘inadmissible . . . use of military force’, the Party’s Central Committee accused the Lithuanians of extremism and provocation.27 In March Kravchuk joined forces with the opposition to vote in an ambiguously worded supplementary question to Gorbachev’s referendum on a new Union Treaty. Gorbachev asked voters whether they wanted to ‘preserve the USSR as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics’; Kravchuk asked if they wanted to be ‘part of a Union of Soviet Sovereign States’. In Galicia, Rukh-un local Soviets added a third question of their own: ‘Do you want Ukraine to become an independent state which independently decides its domestic and foreign policies?’ True to their mixed feelings towards the Soviet Union, Ukrainians gave all three questions large Yes votes: 71 per cent for Gorbachev’s USSR; 80 per cent for Kravchuk’s ‘Union of Sovereign States’, and 88 per cent in Galicia for outright independence. As usual there was a clear split between east and west, with 85 per cent support for Gorbachev in Donetsk, compared to 16 per cent in Lviv.28

  To come to any sort of decision on independence, it was clear, Ukraine needed a mind-concentrating jolt from outside. On the 6 a.m. television news on Monday 19 August, Moscow delivered the goods: President Gorbachev had been taken ill, the announcer said, and a ‘State Committee for the State of Emergency’, headed by the defence and interior ministers and the chief of the KGB, had taken power. At 9 a.m. Kravchuk and Hurenko were visited by General Varrenikov, head of the Soviet Union’s ground forces and one of the five men who had taken Gorbachev prisoner in his Crimean dacha the evening before. If they failed to cooperate, Varrenikov told them, the state of emergency would be extended to Ukraine – the Ukrainian government, in other words, would be overthrown.

  The choice now facing the Ukrainian communists was as follows: to throw in their lot with the junta, risking resubordination to Moscow if the coup succeeded and complete loss of credibility if it failed; or to come out for Yeltsin and democracy, leading in all probability to the total collapse of the Soviet Union. Scared of both options, their response was prevarication. At 11 a.m. a delegation of opposition deputies asked Kravchuk to condemn the coup; Kravchuk refused. On Ukrainian television at 4 p.m. he stressed that the state of emergency did not extend to Ukraine, but avoided either condemning or condoning the coup, and asked the public to be ‘calm and patient’. On Russian television that evening he was even more equivocal, saying ‘what was bound to happen was bound to happen’. He also refused repeated opposition requests for an emergency meeting of the Rada.

  All next day, as crowds faced down the tanks round Moscow’s White House, the Ukrainians continued to stall. The Rada’s twenty-five-member Praesidium voted a panicky resolution defending Ukraine’s ‘sovereignty’, but again failed explicitly to condemn the coup. Despite Rukh calls for a general strike – not carried in the official press – the streets stayed quiet. While Muscovites rushed to the b
arricades, Kievans sat tight at home, their radios clamped to their ears. ‘We were scared,’ a friend told me, ‘but we were fatalist. We thought – if dictatorship’s going to come, it’s going to come, and it’s no use protesting.’

  But the worst was not to happen. Drunk and disorganised, the coup leaders had lost their nerve. On Wednesday, when it was clear the coup was failing, Kravchuk finally climbed off the fence, going on television to demand Gorbachev’s release. ‘The so-called Emergency Committee,’ he intoned, ‘no longer exists . . . and actually never existed. This was a deviation from the democratic process, from the constitution and the legal process.’ That evening Gorbachev flew back to a revolutionised Moscow, and the coup leaders were put under arrest.

  With Soviet power in tatters about their feet, Ukraine’s communists now either had to take Ukraine to independence themselves, or wait for the opposition to do it for them. On Saturday 24 August Kravchuk resigned all his Party posts, and the Rada met in emergency session. At midday the speaker read out the next item of business: Ukrainian independence. Pandemonium broke out, and the speaker announced a twenty-minute break. Nationalists raced up to the third floor, communists down to a cinema in the basement. Upstairs the atmosphere was ecstatic; downstairs, deputies were stunned and afraid. ‘I don’t see why we should be independent,’ one communist said, ‘we’ve done nothing wrong!’ As the hubbub died Hurenko stood up and said slowly, in Russian: ‘Today we will vote for Ukrainian independence, because if we don’t we’re in the shit.’29 When the deputies reassembled, all save one – from Donetsk – obeyed. ‘In view of the deadly threat posed to our country on the night of 18th–19th August,’ read the final declaration, ‘and continuing the thousand-year-old tradition of state-building in Ukraine . . . The Verhovna Rada solemnly proclaims the Independence of Ukraine . . . From now on only the Constitution and laws of Ukraine will be in force on its territory.’ A lifeboat for the Communists, a Mayflower to a new world for the nationalists, Ukraine thus floated to freedom.