Ukraine is fast approaching the 30th anniversary of the independence it secured, or rather reaffirmed, when the seemingly almighty Soviet Union fell apart in at the end of 1991.
It’s time not only to celebrate, but also to reflect on what these three decades have brought and taught us, on the achievements, but also the mistakes, shortcomings, and lessons learned.
There should be plenty of time for this in the weeks ahead. So, here are some preliminary, thoughts from me – a product of the Ukrainian diaspora, not from the larger communities in Canada and the USA, but Britain.
The offspring of wartime refugees whose parents, along with about 30,000 other Ukrainians, were given asylum in Britain after World War II, I was able, along with my post-war generation to make the most of the tolerance, superb education, and openings that the British system provided.
Our parents brought us up to be grateful and loyal to Britain, but to remember that our families had ended up there not of their own free will, but because of political intolerance, war, and the evil empire that the Soviet Union represented for us, long before U.S. President Ronald Reagan coined that phrase.
From the outset, I was involved in what seemed at the time a noble, but utopian, struggle for Ukraine’s freedom.
During my earliest years of activism, when we were still waiting for 1984, given such special meaning by the British anti-totalitarian writer George Orwell, to arrive, the Soviet Union seemed as if it were there to stay forever. As for Ukraine becoming independent, it was a mere, well-intended, pipe dream.
The courageous Ukrainian political prisoners of that time, such as Viacheslav Chornovil, Valentyn Moroz, Levko Lukianenko, Vasyl Stus, and hundreds of others, certainly inspired us in the West. But, we realized they were heroic Don Quixotes selflessly setting an example in a “mission impossible.”
Nevertheless, we fought the good fight, as we believed it to be. In my case, in my student and early professional life in the 1970s and 80s, through publications like Index on Censorship, Amnesty International, where in 1978-82, I was responsible for the defense of Soviet political prisoners. Then as a regular contributor to the best of the British press.
The big break when, in that symbolically poignant 1984, I was invited to work for Radio Liberty in Munich. First as a prolific analyst in its Research Department writing in English, and then also in the highly responsible position as Director of its Ukrainian Service in the critical years, 1989-91, when the earth was moving under our feet and the Soviet communist empire coming apart.
So, suddenly, and without us even understanding at first that it was happening, 1984 came and remarkably brought change for the better, not the worse, as many of us feared.
In March 1985, the relatively younger Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader and promptly sought to impose his own different style from his conservative predecessors. Interestingly, already in June of that year, he traveled to Ukraine, inviting party members to take more responsibility for local affairs.
But in Kyiv the local party leadership under Volodymyr Shcherbytsky refused to budge and maintained its reactionary line.
Stus and several other Ukrainian political prisoners were to die in Soviet labor camps later in 1985. This suggested more of the same rather than any significant changes in policy, in the sense of relaxation of controls, which Gorbachev’s proclaimed policies of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring) implied.
But after the Kremlin’s mismanagement of the humiliating and alarming nuclear disaster in the Ukrainian town of Chornobyl in April 1986, the genie of democratization was finally released.
Regardless of the controlled reform and improvement of the existing system that Gorbachev wanted, there was to be no turning back. By the end of 1991, that is within a mere five years, with Shcherbytsky removed and Ukraine’s national democratic forces consolidated in Rukh on the offensive, it was game over and the Soviet Union collapsed from within.
We, in the diaspora, were ecstatic and probably, like Ukraine’s domestic champions of independence, glossed over the immense challenges that independence brought.
They were not only internal ones connected with de-colonization, and the transition from a Soviet republic to a modern, democratic state, the transformation of its political culture, economy, and geopolitical self-identification. They also related to how Ukraine was perceived externally and the degree to which its independent status would be welcomed, and the country allowed to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures.
For my generation, it was difficult to cut through the enduring Russo-centric view of the USSR. To avoid, when speaking about Ukraine, the non-Russian nations of the Soviet empire generally, and calling for the release of political prisoners and the removal of the Soviet system, being labeled “nationalists” or “reactionaries.”
Yes, the Soviet Union was not liked. But it was feared and at the same time accepted. In the spirit of the Cold War that followed from the infamous Yalta Conference on February 1945 when Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to divide Europe into spheres of influence, a permanent geopolitical reality.
Today, as there are new distressing signs of appeasement from democratic states towards the latest embodiment of the evil and aggressive empire, we have seen under different labels the Russian tsars, Lenin, Stalin, and their Soviet successors, and now Putin, we are again witnessing some of the familiar misguided, fuzzy, and ultimately worrying behavior on the part not only of Berlin, Paris, but even it seems, a more enlightened and “engaged” Washington.
Let’s go back 30 or so years. Prominent Western leaders, instead of welcoming the break-up of the Soviet empire, which not only represented a totalitarian monster, but also a mortal threat to democracy and the Western world, paradoxically were reluctant to see it brought down.
In June 1990, the Iron Lady, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, visited the Soviet Union and met with Gorbachev. She also came to Kyiv and addressed the Soviet Ukrainian parliament. At the time when Gorbachev was desperately trying to prevent the politically bankrupt and discredited USSR from imploding, Thatcher was confidently proclaiming that he was a leader the West could and should “do business with.”
Today, Thatcher’s role in this regard has been assumed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In the 1980s Thatcher had opposed Reagan’s attempts to block the construction of oil pipelines from Soviet Siberia to Western Germany. Merkel continues to brush off criticism of the negative strategic implications of the German-Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
And less we forget, almost 30 years to the day, on Aug. 1, 1991, President George H.W. Bush made his notorious “Chicken Kyiv” speech before the Soviet Ukrainian parliament. He too badly miscalculated and tried to hold back the forces of history by encouraging Ukrainians, and other non-Russian nations, to come to terms with Gorbachev and refrain from pushing for “suicidal” independence.
These Western leaders preferred doing business with the devil they knew, rather than the national democratic forces which the ongoing disintegration of the Soviet system, first in eastern Europe – what after all we the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 about? – and then the Soviet Union itself.
Instead of seeing the murderous face of the Soviet monstrosity which had claimed so many millions of lives in the previous seven decades, they preferred to see a Medusa’s head spawned by the dying creature representing “difficulties” and “complications.”
Yes, there were many issues to address when the Soviet system collapsed. The fate of the immense nuclear arsenal and military forces left on Ukraine’s territory, for example, which they were led to believe, with a very active Russian chorus expressing skepticism about Ukraine’s claim to independence, were dangers of paramount concern.
But independent Ukraine, whether naively or not – for the discussions on this subject continue – was clearly not an aggressive, anti-western, potentially rogue state. It sought to join the family of democratic European nations and gave up its nuclear and military potential, in good faith, in return for security guarantees which later proved declaratory and ineffective.
A temporarily dazed and weakened Russia, purportedly embracing for a short while democracy, was intent on maintaining its nuclear arsenal and military might, and this was not questioned.
In 2014, Russia attacked Ukraine in a cynical and underhand way occupying Crimea and a section of eastern Ukraine. Its victim, left outside of NATO and with the security provisions, it had received at the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 overlooked, was left to face the resurgent aggressor alone.
So, there are lessons to be learned not only by Ukraine, but also its friends and supporters.
Given the hostility and aggression that Ukraine continues to face from Russia, and its front-line situation in defense of Europe and democratic values, security remains the top concern for Kyiv.
Yes, Ukraine must do much more to bring its house in order by reducing corruption, dismantling the oligarchic system, and making its legal and law and enforcement systems credible and efficient.
But unless Ukraine’s population is assured that the country’s security is spoken for, that there is a way forward, and that it will not be left at the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s whims, the incentive for persevering with prescribed essential shock therapies is weakened.
Instead of once again, as 30 years ago, lecturing Kyiv how it should deal with reforms, Ukraine’s leading friends and allies could do more to reassure and encourage it through a healthy recipe of practical support and conditionality.
They should make it clear that the country’s efforts, however, flawed and incomplete so far, to be accepted as a European and protected democratic state have not been in vain and are duly recognized. That Ukraine can rely on its supporters more confidently than 20 to 30 years ago when fine words were not translated into actions.
That sense of security and of the goal of integration into trans-Atlantic structures actually being attainable would do much to create more auspicious domestic conditions enabling democratic transformation to be accelerated.
Bohdan Nahaylo is a British-Ukrainian journalist and veteran Ukraine watcher based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was formerly a senior United Nations official and policy adviser, and director of Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian Service.
