Which leads one to think about the potential of combined forces: What if the former Soviet republics were able to field a single team? That could be if the Soviet Union was still around.
Earlier this month, the West marked the fall of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the end of the USSR. But imagine if that fall stopped in East Germany, or even Poland for that matter. If the communists had managed to fluster the winds of change at the western Soviet border, then the world would be a very different place today, not only in geopolitical terms.
In the athletic world, Vitali Klitschko would be known as “the Russian boxer” and Andriy Shevchenko would be scoring goals in a CCCP jersey all the way to a World Cup finals. In Vancouver of this year, the Soviets would dominate the Winter Olympics as a combined mega-team drawn from dozens of countries. Instead, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc., will all be competing separately for the medals that could instead be won for the glory of a single Soviet Union.
This “what if” didn’t happen because the Berlin Wall fell. The Germans, French and Americans can pat themselves on the back all they want, but that event only marked the breakdown of Soviet domination over the satellites of the Warsaw Pact in central Europe.
The real blow to Moscow’s imperial dream came with the independence of the Soviet Union’s fifteen constituent republics. It was Ukraine, the lynchpin to Moscow’s imperial ambitions that drove the final nail into the USSR coffin.
For the last eighteen years, Ukraine has marked Independence on the anniversary of August 24, 1991, when the country’s Soviet parliament declared it. That was really the day of independence for the Soviet nomenklatura elite and apparatchiks. The date of genuine independence – the date that should be celebrated in Ukraine and by the world with the same fanfare that accompanied the 20th anniversary of the reclamation of Berlin by the Germans – is December 1, 1991. That was the day over 90 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence in a national referendum. It was people power choosing democracy at the ballot box. Not as sexy as tearing down a wall, but just as significant.
More than two years passed between the fall of the Berlin Wall fell and Ukraine’s Independence Referendum. During those tense two years, the Kremlin’s endgame was unclear. Were there genuine reformers in Moscow? Or were they the clever chess-playing strategists who abided by Lenin’s “two steps forward, one step back” approach to world revolution? Even worse, what if a new Stalin was waiting in the wings to oust Gorbachev from power?
The impact of the December 1 Ukrainian referendum was immediate. One week after the Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted for independence, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus announced the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union and created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Belovezhskaya Pushcha (Belarus) on December 8.
Ukraine’s independence paved the way to the rejection of Soviet nuclear arms from its territory (Kazakhstan did the same) and making the world truly a safer place.
So Ukraine will have to wait another four years to field a World Cup team like it did in Germany in 2006. Then, the entire country was waving the blue and yellow and cheering for a team that made them proud to be Ukrainian. That single sporting event provided the country with more national unity than any Ukrainian politician or businessman could hope for. This was the same kind of unity that Ukrainians showed on December 1, 1991 when they chose Independence over empire.
Freelance writer and translator Stephen Bandera is a former editor of the Kyiv Post.
