On major differences between the ethnic self-awareness of the former Great and Little Russians
Disputes on the history of Holodomor, a famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, and what was behind it reach the highest tension when they come to opinion clashes on Joseph Stalin. Two or more generations of Ukrainians (I mean mainly the Eastern Orthodox population in central and south Ukraine) remember the horrors of Stalinist collectivisation and Holodomor. Many Russian peasants, especially religious ones, also considered Stalin an atrocious killer. Still, they forgave him many sins, especially after the victory in World War Two. As for Professor Anatoly Butenko, war veteran and my teacher and superior at the Economic Research Institute of the World Socialist System, who survived the 1932 famine in a village near Poltava, his views on Stalin were as harsh as the one held by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko now.
Brothers or what?
All Holodomor propaganda campaigns inspired by President Yushchenko pursue political aims and make cynical use of martyrdom. But then, they did not appear out of the blue but are based on the national memory of the tragic years 1932-33. First, Yushchenko was born in a village near Sumy and shares peasant hatred of Stalin as the instigator of the famine. Second, all those campaigns are based on the most painful memories of the Ukrainian collective consciousness, dominated by peasants' perceptions. Besides, the Russian political class has gradually begun to realise that Ukrainians are not Russians' "younger brothers" but a Slav nation on its own, with its own philosophy of life. This is a positive realisation.
Soviet and new Russian politicians owed all their blunders in relations with Ukraine to the Soviet treatment of the Ukrainian problem-a treatment imbued with Soviet mythology and utter ignorance. Boris Yeltsin thought he was ousting Ukraine from the Soviet Union for a time, that independent Ukraine would "crawl back on its knees" as soon as he drove Mikhail Gorbachev out of the Kremlin (that was how Galina Starovoitova described Yeltsin's Ukrainian policy to the Moscow News Public Council, of which I was a member, back in November 1991).
Likewise, in the critical situation of Ukrainian presidential elections in late 2004, Vladimir Putin's administration proceeded from the false assumption that Galicia and other West Ukrainian lands were the main threat to Russian interests. The Russian political class turned a blind eye to an essential factor in 1991 and 2004 alike. That factor was the dream of independence from Russia, and of full-fledged Ukrainian statehood, rooted equally deep in Western and Eastern Ukraine, with its Orthodox Christianity-even 350 years after the day Bohdan Khmelnitsky brought Eastern Ukraine under the Muscovite Tsar's sceptre. The Russian rule achieved less in three centuries than what the German rule managed to do in 50 years. Former Great and Little Russias, as Russia and Ukraine used to be known, failed to form a well-knit nation while former Prussians, Saxons and Bavarians became a united German nation quite soon. That difference gives ample food for thought.
As things stand, present-day Russians and Ukrainians are brothers in some ways, and are nothing of the sort in others. Galician and other Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians have chosen the so-called Western vector with heart and soul. They are leaving the Russian sphere, especially the young generation. Russia is bringing Ukraine's separation closer with inadequate assumptions that the 1932-33 famine requires more studies and discussions.
The Core of Ukrainian Independence Drive: Parting Ways with Russia
Ethnic Ukrainians ruled the Soviet Union for more than 25 years, up to 1991-starting with Leonid Brezhnev and finishing with Mikhail Gorbachev. Even despite that, Ukrainians considered the Moscow rule alien just as they did during the reign of Catherine the Great. So, if Russian politicians really want to retain influence on independent Ukraine, which they established of their own free will, they should peruse the history of the people presently known as Ukrainians, and reckon with the dignity of the people whom we Russians still consider part of a united nation split by the collapse of the USSR. After all, Russia's strength is not in natural gas but in the wisdom and political experience of the Russian ruling class.
As for the argument on Holodomor between the Russian and Ukrainian political elites, I think both have been juggling facts. Yushchenko, for one, is wrong when he assumes that the last 50 years of Soviet power halved Ukraine's population. Likewise, his allegation that the Ukrainian famine was quite different from famines in Russia and other Soviet republics is sheer fact-juggling. Troops cordoned off starving villages not only in Ukraine but also in Russia's Volga area and the Stavropol Territory. Odessa, my native city, which was part of Russia after World War Two, remembered those cordons. Stories spread from person to person told of troops stationed in the outskirts to shoot point-black at emaciated peasants trying to get to the city for alms.
President Dmitry Medvedev certainly overdid it in his argument with President Yushchenko when he alleged: "As you see it, any Ukrainian saying that the famine of that time also killed Russians, Kazakhs and Belarusians is considered a criminal." Meanwhile, in his public addresses on Stalinist crimes, Yushchenko mentioned the famine in Kazakhstan in 1931, which killed two million Kazakhs, and the "instigated North Caucasus famine of 1932-33".
All Russian invectives against the Holodomor campaign in Ukraine are thoroughly indifferent to the past tragedy. Indicatively, Ukrainian leaders have never alleged that the 1932-33 famine was a Russian ethnic policy aimed at exterminating Ukrainians. President Yushchenko has repeated again and again that GULAG victims, including "hundreds of thousands of Russians and representatives of other fraternal peoples" should not be consigned to oblivion.
Now, for the most important point I want to clarify here: Yushchenko is appealing to the international community to denounce totalitarianism and the communist regime. He would have no chance to do so if the leadership of the new, allegedly non-communist Russia denounced all Bolshevik crimes- those committed by Lenin and Stalin alike-at the official level, for instance, with a State Duma resolution. Official denunciation of communist totalitarianism would show to the world that a new free Russia has parted ways with the Soviet past, and is not linked with Bolshevism either genetically or ideologically. Besides, we should realise that our Red patriots, who insist on the Russian roots of Bolshevism, undermine Russia's national interests. First, their allegation is a sheer lie and, second, why should we Russians assume responsibility for a political system established with the active participation of European Marxists and major support of the Old World, mainly Germany? If we were clever, we should lead the world in the denunciation of Red and Stalinist terror, and we should not be indignant about Ukrainians saying out loud the things we keep silent about.
The State and the Fate
Russians have made no progress in denouncing Stalin's crimes since the thunderbolt 1956 CPSU Central Committee resolution against "Stalin's personality cult". We have to acknowledge that no one had studied the Kuban famine and its aftermath, or published information about it until Ukraine started a campaign on its own famine. However, in his public address of July 2007 in memory of the Butovo Shooting Ground victims, President Putin said what Yushchenko is saying now-that the Bolshevik regime was exterminating the most talented and gifted Russians under Red and Stalinist terror alike.
The evaluation of Stalinist crimes by Putin and Yushchenko again reveals the difference between the ethnic self-awareness of the Russian and the Ukrainian presidents. As a Russian, Putin regards the state as the supreme value. So he mourns the martyrs of the Bolshevik regime mainly as gifted and educated people who could have served and glorified Russia if they were spared. What we see here might be termed "heroic national awareness".
Yushchenko, as a Ukrainian, cherishes peasants above everything else. To him, it is the basis of his nation's life and the promise of independent Ukrainian statehood. Hence comes the myth he circulates of Stalin starving Ukrainians in Holodomor lest they gain national independence. As things really were, it never occurred to Stalin that the USSR would collapse someday and his crimes would be exposed. Likewise, he never thought that communist Ukraine would ever become an independent country. Lenin and Stalin were Bolsheviks and so had no real sense of history. That was the crux of the matter.
Ukrainians are an agrarian nation. Their majority went through comparatively mild serfdom to Polish landowners to later experience life in Tsarist Russia, where serfdom was reduced to downright slavery. That is why theirs is the self-awareness of a nation fated to martyrdom. The sense of doom dominates Ukrainian perceptions. Ukrainian classic poet Taras Shevchenko was a peasant's son and a serf, and his verse focuses those perceptions.
The Russian mind was permeated by the messianic thirst for heroic service to the state. It was a silver lining to the dark cloud of serfdom, which eased the bitterness of its perception. Ukrainians did not share this consolation. Perhaps, serfdom was such a tragic burden for them because it was established there as late as 1770, during the reign of Catherine the Great, when it had long lost economic expediency and ideological justification. I daresay it was Empress Catherine who turned Ukrainians into the bearers of a unique hard lot in their own self-perception.
What Russians regard as a mere ideological campaign to separate Ukraine from Russia is, in fact, a logical effect of Ukrainian independence. To the Russian, with his sacred belief in a strong state, Catherine the Great is a strong and wise monarch who built hundreds of cities and established the Novorossia Province by conquest. To any Ukrainian conscious of his ethnicity, let alone a Ukrainian nationalist, she is the cruel conqueror who introduced slavery in his country. The Soviet time ousted those wrongs into the mental background. Ukraine's independence has brought them to the forefront, and the new national leadership will not miss the chance to gain advantage from them, which is inevitable. In fact, the new elite have no other way to cement the nation than gather it round the memory of a past tragedy-and the deliberately arranged famine of 1932-33 is just such a tragedy. Here in Russia we must become brave enough to see what the collapse of the USSR brought in its wake. The new Russian political elite-the Democrats and Communists alike-worked for it with zeal. Now, they are hoisted by their own petard. Ukrainian independence has created many problems for them.
We Russians are right when we point out to Yushchenko that Bolshevik functionaries and troops who confiscated Ukrainian peasants' grain to doom them to starvation were ethnic Ukrainians. Yet we cannot prohibit him to view Stalinist crimes through the prism of nationalism and draw public attention to the effect of Holodomor on the Ukrainian people's life and destinies.
To Get Soviet Blinders off Both Nations' Eyes
The crux of the matter is what the new Russian political class is blind to. New Russia is the legal successor to the multiethnic USSR, and so is duty-bound to treat Holodomor as a tragedy it shares. Still, it should realise that the new national states established on the basis of Soviet republics naturally shift the emphasis from common tragedies to their own. Nationalist speculation on the past wrongs gives no ground to deny those young states the right to regard Stalinist crimes through the prism of their own history.
Russia has not formed a circumspect policy toward the former Slav-populated Soviet republics to this day. I think that is because it still applies the Soviet yardstick to the conduct of their new elites. We Russians want Ukrainians and Belarusians to look at their own history through the Russian eyes-which is impossible. As former Soviet peoples look back at the Stalinist terror, they inevitably focus attention on their own victims and losses. Letts and Estonians place the emphasis on reprisals against their intellectuals. Ukrainians, a predominantly agricultural nation, bring Holodomor into the foreground. That is perfectly natural and understandable. They are not to blame when the majority of Russians recollect their compatriots martyred by Stalinism with deplorable indifference.
We Russians stubbornly refuse to see that to Ukrainians, their independence means, first of all, independence from Russia. Ever since its independence was proclaimed, Ukraine has been instinctively trying to absolve itself from concerns about the fate it shares with Russia, and cast off the memory of shared trials and tribulations. Self-sufficiency dominates its collective mind. It is working to cement its population with the memory of its own past tragedies. These efforts are not always successful. That is the hard formative logic of independent Ukraine, established largely on Boris Yeltsin's initiative.
Viewed in the historical perspective, Ukraine has not yet passed the point of no return in its separation from Russia. Provoked with the collapse of the USSR, its Western vector might recede into the background with economic upheavals that await Ukraine during the global crisis. As for Russia, it is the keeper of the hearth, so it bears tremendous responsibility for the preservation of the chance to reunite the former Russian world. That is why it is Russia's duty to be honest in everything that pertains to the history of that world and the tragedies it has been through.
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Alexander Tsipko, PhD, is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Viewed from the historical perspective, Ukraine has not yet passed the point of no return in its separation from Russia.
Alexander Tsipko
