The Ukrainian Option

...But by 1921, these hopes had been quashed and the Ukraine partitioned , the bulk of it incorporated into what was to become the USSR . Ukrainian nationalism has mani fested itself variously through mor e than sixty years of Soviet rule...

...The "pour encourager les autres...

...I'm sorry...

...Laken together, these periodicals in - -dicate that an active underground Catholic Church functions in the Ukraine complete with priests, nuns , and clandestine religious communities...

...A document of the Ukrainian Patriotic Movemen t made this change in orientation ex-plicit: "The spiritual and cultural climate here in the Ukraine and in th e USSR has become a horror for all civilized people...

...Characteristically, despite its strategic and economic importance t o the USSR, the Ukraine and Ukrainians remain something of an enigma in the West...

...But the principal aim of the forced famine was to break the back of the Ukrainian peasantry, which, as the deeply religious and highly conser vative bearer of the Ukrainian lan guage, was the traditional bedrock o f the national movement...

...In June of this year a new undergroun d religious journal reached the West...

...but by trampling on the ambitions of the new Ukrainian elite, [the Kremlin] succeeded in making that elite `more Ukrainian than Soviet' . . . ." In 1972, Moscow's fear of Ukrainian separatism led to an extensive purge of Ukrainian party and cultural leaders . First to go was Ukrainian party first secretary Petro Shelest, and he was soon joined 'Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in the 7iventieth -Century Ukraine...

...But Ukrainian quiescence was short-lived...

...When Solidarity Adrian Karatnycky is director of research at the AFL-CIO Free nude Union Institute...

...The noted Polish democratic activist Adam Michnik has echoed this theme...

...last year, no attention was paid to him in his Ukrainian capacity...

...They predicted Russia would never rise again after the war...

...We support those among you who have decided o n the difficult road of struggle for fre e trade unions...

...Were a nuclear ac-cident to occur in, say, Northern Ireland, it would be inconceivable fo r the press to disregard the implication s for nationalism and separatism...

...58 percent were collective farmers...

...In 1979, for example, tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Lvov took part in an anti-Soviet demonstratio n at the funeral of a popular Ukrain-ian composer, Volodymyr Ivasyuk, murdered under suspicious cir-cumstances . Another significant form of Ukrain ian discontent has been worker opposi tion...

...Their history—marked by persis -tent struggles for self-determination — has been obscured by centuries of foreign rule...

...According to Krawchen ko, in 1939 only 29 percent of Ukrain -ians were of the working class and 13 percent were white collar workers...

...The question we all asked ourselve s was why: why attack these villages deep : inside the part of Angola nominally controlled by Jose Eduardo Dos San-tos and his Cuban allies...

...Today the Ukrainians are the largest nation in the world without a state...

...The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a new Ukrainian demo-cratic dissident movement . Artists, writers, and scholars joined in testin g the limits of official tolerance to in -dependent thought...

...No, I can't talk any more about this...

...By the 1970s 47 percent were industrial workers, 16 percent white collars, an d 37 percent collective farmers...

...But we coped...

...Most recently, with the collapse of Tsarist rule, an in -dependent Ukrainian state was pro -claimed in Kiev on January 22, 1918 . When the Bolsheviks went to BrestLitovsk, Lenin declared: "The Russian worker, having no confidence even fo r a single moment in the Russian o r Ukrainian bourgeoisie, now defend s the right of Ukrainians to separate an d does not impose . on them his friend ship...

...I was there, I saw it . Both were killed in more or less the same way...

...press...

...En-titled the Chronicle of the Ukrainian -Church in the Catacombs, the first issue -documents the trial of Catholic right s activist Vasyl Kobryn...

...q Voice of America and Radio Libert y broadcast a substantial roster of pro-grams in Ukrainian into the Ukrainian SSR...

...These phenomena alarmed Stalin an d by 1930 the first show trials of Ukrain ian artists and intellectuals began...

...Discontented Ukrainian officials publicly began calling the ex-tensive recentralization of economic power in the early Brezhnev years "a very grave mistake . . . [that] should not have been allowed in a socialis t economy...

...In the postwar period , a substantial number of Ukrainian na -tionalists waged an armed struggle against Communist rule until 1950, in by thousands of other high-ranking party, government, press, educational , and cultural workers . I ntra-party tensions based on na-tionalism are a "contradiction" built into the Soviet system . Party leaders in -evitably are drawn toward relying on national sentiment as a means of con-solidating their local power...

...Mindful of the need for improved relations with its non-Russian neighbors, Solidarity's leader s also declared their commitment to th e defense of the rights of the Jewish , Lithuanian, and Ukrainian minoritie s in Poland...

...Their desire for a greater role in decision -making likewise brings them into con - of urbanized Ukrainians that emerged in the 1970s was far less likely to be satisfied with its standards . One result has been an upturn in mass unrest and independent trade union activism by Ukrainian workers...

...Some were lined up and shot . Others who were very old were simply clubbed to death, or kicked to death with boots or bayoneted...

...The U.S...

...Thus when Ukrainian Communist party first secretary Volodymyr Shcherbitsky visited th e U.S...

...These anonymous and embittered dissident s declared their desire "to secede from the USSR, and lead our nation out o f Communist imprisonment . " While the Patriotic Movement had only a handful of members, Ukrainian dissent has not been confined to smal l groups...

...This dissident realpolitik should not be surprising...

...Ironically, this is the same error that is regularly repeated i n the U.S...

...Worker unrest has manifested itself in Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Sevastopol, Priluki, Kerch, and Dnepropetrovsk, ranging from city-wide work stoppages t o strikes of small work brigades involv-ing a handful of workers . Such strikes focus predominantly on "quality o f life" issues such as housing, work con-ditions, and wages . Yet some also con -tain elements of resentment agains t Russian rule...

...An extensive underground samvydav (self-published) literature emerged . Yet even this largely cultural expression of national identit y proved too much for the Soviet author-ities...

...It is Europe's invisible nation...

...During World War II the Ukraine — its population caught in a vise betwee n two totalitarian empires—lost nearl y six million people, four million of them civilians, including nearly one millio n Ukrainian Jews...

...Martin'sPress,$27.50 . flict with the "center...

...Orders were, "Destroy everything, burn dow n the houses, kill the cattle, neutralize the population...

...Patroniz-ing tribute is paid to Ukrainians i n ritual declarations of "Captive Nations Week" and in commemorations o f Ukrainian independence...

...Soviet rule has seen a profound transformation in the social structure of Ukrainians...

...with an important source for in formation about party, state, and dissident developments in the Ukraine...

...As Richard Pipes has observed, "With fifty million people, 86 percent of them (as of 1970 ) Ukrainian-speaking, the Ukraine is potentially a major European state...

...Nothing was left after that...

...In the period of martial law suc h mainstream underground groupings a s "Fighting Solidarity" and 13'godnik Mazowsze (the official Warsaw-base d newspaper of the Solidarity under-ground) have published extensive infor-mation on the Ukrainian opposition and on Ukrainian history and culture . Indeed, publications in Ukrainian are appearing with increasing regularity i n the Polish underground—with the Ukraine as their intended ultimate destination...

...The USSR has become a military-police state wit h wide-ranging imperialist inten-tions . . . . For more than sixty years the so-called government in the Ukraine has been implementing this policy o f national genocide...

...Miguel Garcia Enamorado, from the Cuban province of Gran Ma, explained that any village more than ten kilo -meters outside a town was automatical -ly considered to favor UNITA and was therefore subject to punitive measures, Adrian Karatnycky THE UKRAINIAN OPTION Forty million people waiting to be used . gathered at its historic Congress i n Gdansk in September 1980, it issued a famous call to "the nations of th e Soviet Union" in which it asserted : "We are profoundly aware of the com-munity of our fates...

...In a revealing episode, Mikhail Gorbachev engaged in an im-promptu street conversation wit h Ukrainians in Kiev : Listen [Gorbachev said], we coped after the Imperialist war, after the civil war, when th e country was in ruins...

...Despite domination, in turn, by Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles , Germans, and Russians, the Ukrain-ians have developed and maintained a distinct culture, language, and national identity...

...The tenacity o f resistance to collectivization demon strated a significant historical dif ference between Ukrainians and Rus sians: in the Ukraine, communal land ownership had been virtually nonexistent in the pre-Revolutionary era...

...In its own way, the Soviet leadership also recognizes the decisive role of the Ukrainians, who historically have been well represented in leading party posts . Official lip service is paid to the Ukrai -nian SSR as an "autonomous republic" with its own government . Moscow's sensitivity to Ukrainian national sen-timents was played out last June befor e an audience of millions of Soviet televi -sion viewers...

...It is very difficult for me to remember these things...

...As their reward, more tha n half a million Ukrainians were de-ported to Siberia after the war...

...We coped...

...government, likewise, ac-knowledges the potential significanc e of the Ukrainian factor...

...Meanwhile, Stalin's forced collectiviza tion of 1932-33 claimed from four-to seven million victims...

...As historian Bohdan Krawchenko has written in an excellen t new work,' "Centralization wa s designed to unify the Soviet Union under Russian hegemony...

...Both my mother and father were killed by th e Cubans...

...But the second generation THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1986...

...But we rose again . . . . For all the people who are striving for good, Russia—er, the Soviet Union, I mean—that is what we call it now, and what it is in fact—for them it is a bulwark . What is noteworthy is that Gorbachev not only recognized he had mad e a slip of the tongue before a Ukrainian public, but that he compounded th e slip by clumsily suggesting that Russi a and the Soviet Union were indeed synonymous...

...Polish opposition leader Jacek Kuron has written that "without an in -dependent Ukraine there can be no in -dependent Poland...

...A generation of the Ukraine's most talented writers and artists soo n found itself behind bars or in the gulag . Resistance to Moscow also mani-fested itself within the Ukrainian Com-munist elite...

...Forgive me...

...Their surveys indicate that a higher proportion of Ukrainians tun e in to these broadcasts than Soviet Rus-sians to Russian-language broadcasts . ' Despite these important initiative s Ukrainian nationalism is still a very minor sideshow for most of the U.S . foreign policy establishment...

...This movement of Ukrainians from the farms and villages into factories an d cities carried with it a concomitant im-provement in education and livin g standards...

...An unlikely source of Ukrainian dis-sent has been the outlawed Ukrainia n Catholic Church...

...In the vast majority of these cases the Soviet response has bee n to act quickly to improve conditions and satisfy immediate demands . Only subsequently have strike leaders been rounded up, arrested, and incarcerated in psychiatric prisons...

...I was very sad and also angry with myself that I did nothing, said nothing . But I would have been killed as well . I was afraid...

...The independence of the Ukraine was one of the conditions o f the separate peace concluded by Ger many and Russia at Brest-Litovsk . Woodrow Wilson's commitment to na tional self-determination included a conception of Ukrainian independence...

...Paradoxically, while in the West th e Ukraine and Ukrainians remain a hid -den nation, in recent years the Eas t European democratic opposition has recognized their central role in the eventual decolonization of the Sovie t bloc...

...This was not always so...

...No effort is made, for exam-ple, to take advantage of the fact that the Ukrainian SSR is a putativel y autonomous member state of the United Nations...

...One recent underground document, moreover, demonstrates the close rela-tionship between such religious oppo-sition and nationalism: "The Church will be free to function when th e Ukraine becomes an independen t state...

...A Ukrainian form of national Com munism emerged in the 1920s, wit h party leaders seeking greate r autonomy, resisting the centralizin g tendencies of the Russian-dominate d central party apparatus, and promoting a blossoming of Ukrainian culture...

...Such tension s also surface in relations between th e USSR and its satellites . In the late 1970s, reeling from more than a decade of sustained repression, Ukrainian opposition acquired a de-cidedly more radical tone...

...No ef-fort was made by government leaders nor by the U.S...

...Nearly twenty strikes are known to have occurred in the Ukraine since the 1960s...

...With a population of nearly fifty million, a territory comparable in size to that o f France, and a history of dogge d resistance to foreign rule, it dimly ex-ists on the fringes of Western con-sciousness . As the Czech writer Milan Kundera has written: . . . over the past five decades forty millio n Ukrainians have been quietly vanishin g from the world without the world payin g heed . In the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the invisibility of the Ukrainians was further underscored . The New York Times, the Washingto n Post, and the three television networks chose to ignore the national dimension of the catastrophe...

...The above testimony makes me think that if Jonas Savimbi and UNITA los e their war, the village of the living dead may become the country of the living dead...

...Historically, most Ukrainians were of the Orthodox faith , the remaining one-fifth being Catholic . Stalin's efforts to eradicate Ukrainian national sentiment led, first, to the outlawing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its merging into the state -controlled Russian Church and, later, to the banning of the Ukrainian ("Uniate") Catholics, who adhere to Orthodox ritual while maintainin g loyalty to Rome . Although the Ukrainian Orthodox are today in an impossible position , there has been a perceptible upturn i n dissident Ukrainian Catholic activity . In 1982 an Initiative Group for the Defense of Believers and the Church was formed to document the suppres-sion of religion and to press for legalization of the Ukrainian Uniates . The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in the Ukraine began to appear in 1984 . It was joined by a second samvydav journal, the Ukrainian Catholic Herald...

...With the millennium of Chris-tianity in the Ukraine approaching in 1988, activity by dissident Ukrainia n Were a nuclear accident to occur in, say , Northern Ireland, it would be inconceivabl e for the press to disregard the implications for nationalism and separatism . the mistaken belief that it was only a matter of time before the Western dem -ocracies would be forced into an inevi -table war with Soviet totalitarianism . The longstanding resistance would no t have been possible without the support of large segments of the Ukrainia n population...

...Yet U.S . foreign policy does not exploit the con -tradictions of Soviet policy toward th e Ukraine...

...press to hold him ac -countable for the suppression o f Ukrainian human rights advocates nor for an intensified, decade-long clamp -down on Ukrainian culture...

...The answer came from an unexpected source, a Cuban who deserted to join UNITA...

...Its separation would not only deprive Russia of an important source of foo d and industrial products, but also cut it off from the Black Sea and the Balkans...

...A consulate will soon open in Kiev, providing th e U.S...

...First they were clubbed and then shot...

...The ver y same members of the House and Senate who routinely place pro forma statements about Ukrainian in -dependence into the Congressional 'In the case of Radio Liberty, however, th e staff of the Ukrainian service is half that of Radio Free Europe's Bulgarian Service, this for a potential audience that is five times larger than the Bulgarian . THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1986 Record did not see fit to raise the issu e of the Ukraine's colonial status wit h the Soviet Ukrainian leader...

...In the words of Russian writer Lev Kopelev, Stalin's "destruction of the peasantry " amounted to no less than "pulling ou t the living roots of national historica l existence...