Borderland (30 page)

On the way out, the PR man took me to look at an architect’s model of the plant. This was how Chernobyl was supposed to be – neat and tidy, with two modern air-cooled reactors and no scorched buildings or crumbling sarcophagus. Turning to go, he knocked over a miniature chimney. ‘Where did this go? Oh well, who cares.’

Chernobyl’s corrosive effect on public opinion took some time to make itself felt. Kiev saw no big anti-nuclear demonstrations until the autumn of 1988, more than two years after the disaster. The popular independence movement got under way a year after that, well behind its counterparts in the Baltics and the Caucasus. Why was the opposition so slow to get off the ground?

Through the long Cold War years, Ukrainians had been in an anomalous position, simultaneously extra-privileged and extra-repressed. Like the Scots of the British empire, they acted as trusted junior partners in the Union, subordinate to Russia of course, but senior to Armenians, Uzbeks and the rest. All the post-Stalin leaders save Gorbachev had close personal ties to the republic: Khrushchev and Brezhnev were both Russians from eastern Ukraine, Andropov built his career as head of the Ukrainian KGB, and Chernenko was born of Ukrainian kulak parents in Siberia. Politburos were packed with Russians and Ukrainians, and the usual practice in the republics was to appoint a native as first Party secretary, while a Russian or Ukrainian wielded real power as number two. Ukraine, like Belarus, even had its own seat at the United Nations – though it always voted with Russia.

But Ukraine’s ‘younger brother’ status exacted costs as well as privileges. If rewards for loyalty were higher for Ukrainians than for other non-Russians, penalties for dissent were harsher too. After the war, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians sent to the camps during the Soviet occupation of Galicia were joined by another half-million partisan supporters, collectivisation-resistant peasants and
religiozni,
making Ukrainians the most prominent nationality in the 1950s Gulag.
¹²
. Later, they made up the largest single group of political prisoners in what remained of the camps after Khrushchev’s amnesty. Under pressure from renewed Russification – publication of Ukrainian-language books and journals plummeted in the 1970s, and Russian immigration increased – most Ukrainians found it easiest to conform. ‘You could teach a Jew to speak Ukrainian in no time, a Russian in two or three years,’ ran an old Soviet joke. ‘An ambitious Ukrainian – it would take for ever.’ The Ukrainian Communist Party grew from 165,000 members in 1945 to a high of 3.3 million in 1989,
¹³
earning itself a model reputation under arch-conservative Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, an old Dnipropetrovsk crony of Brezhnev’s.

But despite all the incentives to go along with the Soviet system, Ukrainian nationalism never quite died. The first postwar generation of activists were the ‘sixtiers’, a group of young writers who, like the nineteenth-century ‘awakeners’ before them, used the language issue as a cloak for wider discontents. Under the slogans ‘Speak Ukrainian’ and ‘Defend the Ukrainian Language’, they petitioned for an end to Party meddling in literature, and for freedom to debate and experiment. Russified Ukrainians were scolded, Shevchenko-style, for cowardice and opportunism.

The summer after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, a hundred or so of the most vocal ‘sixtiers’ were arrested and put on trial on charges of ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’. The verdicts were foregone conclusions, but to the regime’s amazement, the public refused to let the writers go quietly. In Kiev the literary critic Ivan Dzyuba stood up in the middle of the Ukraina cinema and appealed to the audience to protest. In Lviv, supporters and relatives demanded to be let into the courthouse, and defied firehoses to shout ‘Glory’ and throw bouquets as the prisoners were escorted into police vans. Petitions for information and explanations included the signatures of Supreme Soviet deputies, Writers’ and Composers’ Union members and the famous aircraft designer Oleg Antoiiov. The young Komsomol journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil was so outraged by the trial’s blatant bias that he sent a 200-page document to the public prosecutor and the heads of the Supreme Court and KGB, listing all their own infringements of the constitution and criminal code. Interrogation techniques, he pointed out, had not changed since Stalin’s time:

In due course Chornovil was sentenced to three years of hard labour in a closed trial of his own, but not before his
Petition
had been smuggled out of the country for publication in the West.

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 legalised 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.