Borderland

‘What’s the meaning of all this silence, lads?’ said Bulba, finally, awaking from his reverie. ‘Just like a couple of monks! Come along, pull yourselves together! To the devil with thinking! Put your pipes in your mouths and light them up, then spur on your horses and let us fly forward so that no bird can catch us!’

– Gogol, 1835

IN A CONSTRUCTION shed in an industrial suburb of Kiev stands the skeleton of the world’s biggest aeroplane. Spanning 260 feet wing-tip to wing-tip, 250 nose to tail, it covers more ground than a football pitch. Its sister-plane was the star of the 1989 Paris Air Show, but funds for this second model ran out long ago, and it will almost certainly never leave the ground. Inside the cockpit, engineers have mocked up control panels in wood, and pasted up posters of birch-forests in place of a windscreen. The plane’s name is the Antonov AN-225 Mriya – in Ukrainian, the ‘Dream’.

The Mriya may never fly. But what about that even bigger dream, Ukraine herself? Ukrainians won independence on 24 August 1991 by default. Many had dreamed of independence, but none had expected it; none had prepared for it. Like the Mriya, the country was a drawing-board dream sprung to life. Suddenly, Ukrainians had a state, but they had no idea if it could keep to the air, and if it did, where they wanted to fly it.

Ukraine’s situation was not unique. The collapse of the Union came as a shock to all the Soviet nationalities, including the Russians themselves. Each newly independent republic had to reshape itself top to bottom. Where Ukraine was worse off than others was in the vague but vital matter of national identity. Elsewhere, the past provided inspiration. The Baits had the interwar years to look back on; the Central Asians had Islam and the nineteenth-century khanates; the Russians, more problematically, a mighty 400 hundred-year-old empire. All Ukrainians could come up with was the Rada débâcle of 1918, the violent, failed heritage of the Cossacks, and even further back, the misty, disputed splendours of Kievan Rus. Split between rival powers for centuries, talking about history at all only emphasised disunity. Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Balts all knew they were rejoining Europe; Ukrainians were not sure where they belonged or even where they wanted to belong. In academic jargon, they were faced with two tasks – ‘state-building’ and ‘nation-building’ – at the same time. The first – the creation of the institutional paraphernalia of statehood – they shared with all the other ex-Soviet nationalities. The second – the creation of a workable idea of what it meant to be a ‘Ukrainian’ – was theirs alone.

Independence was the result of an unspoken deal between Ukrainian nationalists and the republican Communist Party. In exchange for support for independence, which they lacked the strength to achieve on their own, the nationalists gave the communists control over the new government. In effect, there was no real change of power. In elections held on 1 December 1991 Leonid Kravchuk, former communist number two, became Ukrainian president, setting up his administration in red-carpeted Party headquarters. Vyacheslav Chornovil, the fiery ex-dissident who led the rump of Rukh, won only 23 percent of the vote, mostly from Galicia. Communist-appointed ministers carried on in the same old posts behind the same old desks, and the Rada turned, without fresh elections, into the new national parliament.

Having spent their lives taking orders from Moscow, few of these people had a clue how to run an independent state. Speaking of his colleagues in the foreign ministry, the first British ambassador to Kiev, Simon Hemans, told me, ‘When I arrived in Ukraine it was a brand-new country and didn’t know quite how to be one. I was a brand-new ambassador and didn’t know quite how to be one either. We learned together.’ For many, it was far too late to learn new tricks: despairing Western agency officials dubbed Ukraine’s first post-independence finance minister ‘cement-head’. Though Ukraine had its liberals and reformers, they were – and still are – few and far between, the result of decades of brain-drain to Moscow. None has ever had the influence of a Balcerowicz in Poland or a Gaidar or Chubais in Russia.

The result was three years of stasis. Caught between Russian-speaking east and nationalist west, whatever direction Kravchuk took Ukraine in he was sure to antagonise one side or the other. ‘We thought – we’ll go independent and everything will change,’ a Rukh deputy told me. ‘The communists thought – we’ll go independent and everything will stay the same.’ A grey-faced bureaucrat who delivered platitudinous speeches in a robotic monotone, Kravchuk’s instinctive response was to do nothing at all. Ukraine acquired a new flag and a new national anthem, but no new policies. Initially, Ukrainians interpreted their president’s immobility as shrewd caution. Kravchuk’s nickname was ‘the sly fox’; he didn’t need to carry an umbrella, wags said, because he could dodge between the raindrops. Nationalists, keen to idolise the man they credited with leading Ukraine to freedom, excused him on the grounds that ‘nation-building’ had to come before ‘state-building’. It was expecting too much, they argued, for Ukraine to launch reforms before it had even digested independence.

But Kravchuk’s mystique soon wore thin. By the end of 1993 Ukraine was reeling under higher inflation than any country anywhere not actually at war. Shops were empty, wages had gone unpaid for months, public services and most factories had collapsed. In new presidential elections in the summer of 1994, brought forward in the face of miners’ strikes, Kravchuk was duly booted out in favour of Leonid Kuchma, an ex-missile factory director with a shaky grasp of Ukrainian but a snazzy line in green checked suits, a brisk platform manner – ‘I only take questions from real men, and you’re not one, so I’m not answering!’ he told one (male) reporter – and a reputation for getting things done. As usual, voting patterns split dramatically between west and east. Kuchma won less than 4 per cent of the vote in Galicia, over 80 per cent in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Since Kuchma’s election, domestic politics have increasingly become, as in Russia, a matter of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring between shady regional-industrial clans. In the summer of 1996 a bomb exploded under prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s car. Lazarenko (since sacked) blamed the assassination attempt on ‘criminals’ angry at his closure of loss-making coal-mines; more likely it was the work of groups disgruntled by the handout of a multi-billion-dollar gas distribution duopoly to allies from his own and the president’s home-town of Dnipropetrovsk. A few months later Yevhen Shcherban, parliamentary deputy for Donetsk and another of Ukraine’s richest men, was shot dead in Donetsk airport. Nobody has yet been charged with either crime.

Corruption in high places is taken for granted. Eyebrows were scarcely raised when an ex-prime minister, Yuhym Zvyahilsky, fled abroad in November 1994, accused of having pocketed tens of millions of dollars of public money via illegal oil exports. Three years later he reappeared as a Rada deputy, safe from prosecution thanks to a vote for parliamentary immunity. The foreign trade minister shows off snaps of skiing holidays that he could not possibly afford on his salary to fellow-passengers on transatlantic flights; Kravchuk is rumoured to own property in Switzerland. ‘We used to look at Kravchuk’s Mercedes,’ a friend who had been at university with the president’s son told me, ‘and we worked out that he would have had to work non-stop for 136 years to pay for it.’ Investigative journalism on such issues is scarce, since most national media are controlled by the government. The two nationwide television channels are state-owned and overseen by a presidential appointee; critical news programmes are short-lived. What pluralism there is in the media reflects rivalry between government factions. Scandal only comes to light when they fall out. Other authoritarian hangovers include the bizarre propiska system, whereby Ukrainians need official permission to move house, and a gruesome enthusiasm for capital punishment: in 1996 no fewer than 167 criminals were executed, by firing squad, in Ukrainian gaols.

Ukraine’s democracy is not perfect; perhaps it is naive to think it could be. But violence and corruption – both worse than in most of Central Europe, but less widespread than in Russia – are only half the story. On the plus side, democracy looks secure. The presidential and parliamentary elections held so far have all been free and – bar some ineffectual manipulation of state-owned television – fair. Parliament is due for re-election in 1998, Kuchma in 1999. A new constitution strikes a sensible balance of power between the two, and will make cancellation of either election hard. Best of all, political infighting has never turned into tanks on the streets – a great point of pride for Ukrainians, who like to contrast their opaque but clubby way of getting things settled with dramatic convulsions in Moscow. ‘It’s all very Slav – just like getting past some concierge,’ says Hemans. ‘First you have a shouting match, then you give her five dollars, then you come to an agreement and tell her what a help she’s been.’ And of course – though Ukrainians will never admit it – it is all far, far better than anything they have had before.

Independent Ukraine’s big success story is the ethnic issue. In the winter of 1993, when hyperinflation was at its worst, a leaked CIA report predicted growing ethnic tension between nationalists in the west and Russians in the Donbass and Crimea. Ukraine, the spooks said, might turn into another Yugoslavia. They were wrong. Automatically given full citizenship on independence, Russian-speakers always felt more at home in Ukraine than their cousins elsewhere in the ‘near-abroad’. They were never forced to take language tests to get the vote, and Ukrainianisation of the education system has been piecemeal and largely voluntary. The new constitution of 1996 confirmed Ukrainian as the sole ‘state language’, but also guaranteed continued funding for Russian-language schools. Ethnic Russians have their fair say and more in national politics. A Donbass miners’ strike brought forward the elections that threw out Kravchuk, and it was the weight of eastern votes that replaced him with Kuchma. The current presidential administration is packed with men from Russian-speaking Dnipropetrovsk. Roman Waschuk, a Ukrainian-Canadian diplomat, actually fears backlash more from the Ukrainian than the Russian side. The emerging market economy, he thinks, is concentrating wealth in Kiev and the eastern industrial cities, leaving the old west-Ukrainian intelligentsia out in the cold: ‘There is an increasing crankiness in the Ukrainian cultural milieu. They think – why doesn’t the state help us? Well – the government isn’t able to help them. And the guys in the Jeep Cherokees aren’t really that interested in nineteenth-century Ukrainian poetry . . .’

Disillusioned Shevchenko-lovers apart, Ukraine’s fuzzy sense of national identity has paradoxically turned into something of an advantage. Lviv may be unmistakably Ukrainian and Donetsk unmistakably Russian, but the vast swathe of country in between is neither quite one nor the other. The population is thoroughly mixed – not only in the Bosnian sense that two different peoples have lived there side by side for a long time, but also in the sense that there is no longer any sharp cultural dividing line between them. The typical twenty-something Kievan speaks a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian at work and to his children, Russian to his parents, and Ukrainian to his grandmother down at the dacha at weekends. All share Orthodoxy, a potent force in pulling Russians and Ukrainians together ever since Khmelnytsky signed up to Russian protection at Pereyaslav.

Another potential liability with an unexpected upside is the sheer bloodiness of Ukraine’s recent history. Wracked by a century of suffering and upheaval, Ukrainians long for peace and stability. Lvivites may cultivate angry Russophobia, but the man on the Khreshchatyk omnibus’s instinct is to stay out of politics at all costs. After all, for several generations any Ukrainian who made himself conspicuous had a good chance of being shot. ‘My house is outside the village,’ runs a proverb; ‘I don’t know anything.’ If one word sums up the national character, it is ‘stolid’. Get into a lift with a Russian, and you will be deep into debate on the theory of capitalism or the existence of God before you reach the top floor. Chat up a Ukrainian, and he will tell you about his mother-in-law’s stomach problems and the prospects for next year’s tomato crop. All through the hyperinflationary winters of 1993–5, when lights went out and flats froze, Kiev remained eerily quiet. There were grumbles but no big demonstrations, still less riots. ‘Eto sytuatsiya,’ people said with a shrug – ‘It’s the way things are.’ Visiting journalists, ghoulishly anticipating Weimar-style disintegration, went home disappointed.

If Ukraine’s success story is the ethnic issue, its disaster story is the economy. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine was supposed to be the republic with the best chance of doing well economically. It produced a third of the Union’s steel, nearly half its iron ore, over half its sugar. It lacked Russia’s oil wells and gold mines, but its workers were well educated and its ‘black earth’ fabled for fertility. A World Bank report said it had the potential to become one of ‘the richest countries in the world’.

By the time I arrived in Ukraine in the winter of 1993, whoever wrote those words must have been wishing them unsaid. The ‘bread-basket of Europe’ had turned into an economic basket-case. Financed by the printing presses, the budget deficit stood at 40 per cent of gross domestic product. Prices were doubling every month, and one enterprising factory was using the national currency, the aptly named coupon, for the manufacture of lavatory paper. Save for the lucky few with dollars, the country’s savings had been wiped out. Living in Kiev was like watching a textbook lesson on the evils of inflation come to life. All day long, as I sat with my feet propped inside the oven for warmth, old men in once-respectable overcoats dug through the rubbish-bins outside my kitchen window. Sometimes I ran down and shamefacedly persuaded one of them to take some grubby notes: a handful was worth less than a dollar, the lower denominations fractions of a cent. In the outdoor markets, women stood in the snow for hours, holding out a glassful of sunflower seeds, a single garlic bulb or a pathetic handful of plastic bags – all they had to sell. Even with money enough, supplying oneself with basic necessities required wartime determination and ingenuity. Each week, wild rumours swept the city: matches were about to go into shortage – sugar, flour, postage stamps – and everyone raced to stock up. Step on to a trolley-bus with a loaf of bread under your arm, and people crowded round to ask where you had bought it, then leapt out and dashed for the bakery themselves. Flash a dollar note in public and everyone stiffened, as if you had produced a suitcase full of gold or a loaded gun.

That winter and next, the only thing that saved Kiev from starving was its remarkable ability to grow its own food. Most urban Ukrainians are only a generation or two away from the farm, and still have access to their own or relatives’ plots of land somewhere in the countryside. Come each spring, seed packets ousted Snickers bars from the oddments stalls in the metro ticket-halls, as Kievans trekked off to dig over their potato-beds and plant out tomatoes. Even people like my scholarly, relatively well-off interpreter Sergey spent their summers growing and bottling industrial quantities of fruit and vegetables, to tide them over the long winters when the shops emptied and prices in the private bazaars shot sky-high. The last time Kiev had emptied in this way was during the war, when 60 per cent of the population fled to the villages to escape Nazi food confiscations.

By the time Kuchma took office in the summer of 1994, it was obvious to the most bone-headed central planner that without drastic changes, Ukraine would turn back into a nation of peasant farmers. With Russia knocking at the door for unpaid oil and gas bills, it might even lose independence. In October the new president accordingly announced a comprehensive economic reform programme. He would liberalise prices and exchange rates, lift restrictions on trade, privatise state-owned firms and cut subsidies to loss-making farms and factories. In return, the International Monetary Fund promised a $1.5 billion loan, most of which was to go on paying Ukraine’s fuel debts to Russia.

Kuchma has done much of what he promised, but not all. His great achievement has been to end hyperinflation. In September 1996 the government was able to ditch the loathsome coupon in favour of the ‘hryvnya’, named after the currency issued by the Rada government of 1918, and by early 1997 price rises were down to around 2 per cent a month. Were it not for the subsidy-guzzling industrial and farming lobbies in parliament, the economy would be turning around faster. As it is, deficit targets have repeatedly been missed, forcing the IMF to hand out aid in grudging monthly dollops. Average wages have doubled to around fifty dollars a month, but overall production – black economy included – is still shrinking.

Privatisation is progressing in fits and starts. Though small businesses – shops, cafés, hairdressers and the like – are out of the government’s hands, most were handed over to existing cooperatives, who carry on running them as badly as before. Central Kiev has lots of shiny new supermarkets full of overpriced Twinings tea and Bahlsen biscuits, but in the suburbs and the provinces shops are as drab as ever, brusquely promising ‘Milk’ or ‘Fruit and Vegetables’ on the outside, and offering nothing but giant jars of murky brown pickles within. Few big firms have been privatised at all. Every six months or so, the government announces an impressive target of so many thousand companies to be publicly auctioned, in exchange for free privatisation vouchers, by the end of the year. Amid much fanfare, a few semi-bankrupt factories are indeed sold off. Parliament then votes to take ‘strategic’ firms – meaning anything from steel-mills to bakeries – off the list. The industrial ministries put absurdly high reserve prices on the remainder, and the government’s target is quietly shelved. Ukrainians are convinced that the whole process is nothing more than a public relations exercise: one in three have not bothered to pick up their privatisation vouchers.

Farming, potentially Ukraine’s economic mainstay, is as backward as ever. Over 80 per cent of agricultural land is state-owned, and so inefficiently farmed that it only produces half the country’s total agricultural output. The rest comes from small private plots, planted, hoed and harvested by hand. Go-ahead collective bosses – they do exist – find their efforts to develop new markets stymied by state-owned monopolies over storage, processing and distribution. ‘The worst,’ a depressed EU consultant told me, ‘are the local ministry people. They just want their cut, and give absolutely nothing in return.’ Like everywhere else in the ex-Soviet Union, land privatisation is political anathema. Aleksandr Moroz, the powerful speaker of parliament, calls it ‘an evil idea’. Collective workers themselves fear – with good reason – that it would simply mean their bosses scooping the farm.

Stagnation in the state sector would matter less if a new private sector were growing to replace it. In Poland, where privatisation is still not complete, small start-up firms got the economy growing soon after inflation had been brought to heel. In Ukraine, it is not happening. To blame is the sheer red tape involved in running a legal private business. A survey by the World Bank’s Kiev office lists the problems: Byzantine licensing requirements, a constantly changing tax code, complicated restrictions on exports and foreign exchange. One small knitwear manufacturer found it had to get fourteen different permits to legally export a sock.1

The regulations stay because they allow the extraction of bribes. In March 1996, according to another World Bank survey, registering a business cost $175, a fire certificate $40, an export licence $125, a phone line $900 in a smart district of Kiev, $200 or $300 in a suburb.² A Spaniard’s account of the shenanigans involved in exporting a shipload of sunflower seed, delivered over a seven-dollar beer at one of Kiev’s fast-multiplying ex-pat bars, is typical:

I got my first licence back in November, and lost it when the law changed. I got a second licence – and lost it; a third – and lost it again. Now I’m on my fourth. For all this I’ve had to get signatures from twenty-five different people. I’m paying one high-up guy’s son a salary, and next week somebody else’s kids are going on holiday to Spain, out of my pocket.

On top of officials, there is the mafia to be paid off. A basic requirement for anyone going into business in Ukraine is an ‘umbrella’ – an agreement with one or other local gang whereby they take a percentage of profits in exchange for ‘protection’. Even big Western firms are not immune. Coca-Cola posted men in fatigues in its reception area after armed men walked in demanding a ‘partnership agreement’; the American lawyers Baker & McKenzie had to pay $2,500 a month to a ‘security firm’.

The result, not surprisingly, is that Ukraine has attracted little foreign investment – far less than the Czech Republic or Hungary, both a fifth of its size. The only Western firms with the stomach for doing business in the country tend either to be big multinationals prepared for years of losses, or plucky little one-man bands. Both regularly get ripped off by their Ukrainian partners. The head of the first venture-capital fund into Ukraine says that ‘Companies keep three sets of books – one for the taxman, one for the Western investor and one for themselves’. Going to the court is futile: ‘You choose your lawyer not for his legal skills, but because he knows the judge.’

For all this, Ukraine really is potentially a rich country. Politicians may burble about the necessity for ‘gradualism’ or a mythical ‘Ukrainian way’, but there is no technical reason why it should not have gone about reform as swiftly as Poland or the Baltics. With the arguments on how to make the transition to a market economy long over, Ukraine should in theory be benefiting from others’ experience. ‘Whatever they need to learn from Europe,’ says Roman Szporluk, head of Ukrainian studies at Harvard, ‘they can learn from Warsaw and Cracow. But they have a kind of amnesia, a blank spot.’ If and when Ukraine does see the light, its economy could pick up fast. Western developing-markets funds would be only too happy to pump money into Ukrainian stocks if a proper stockmarket existed (the Kiev bourse only trades a handful of shares), and black-marketeers tell pollsters they would turn legal if the tax and licensing systems allowed them to do so without going bust.

Politically, none of it will be easy. Kuchma still has central-planning fundamentalists to face down in parliament, and ending subsidies to loss-making factories means throwing people out of work. Re-igniting public enthusiasm for reform will be well-nigh impossible: after years of broken promises, Ukrainians are sick of the word. On the other hand, they have already proved their stoicism in the face of hardship, and an end to subsidies would mean that the government could afford to pay for things such as pensions, heating and hospitals again. Kuchma faces re-election in 1999. If he gets his reform programme moving again quickly, he has a reasonable hope of seeing an improvement in living standards before then.

Sorting out its economy is something Ukraine can do for itself. What it cannot alter is its geography. With a bearish Russia to its east, and an expanding NATO and European Union to its west, Ukraine remains, as ever, a disputed borderland between rival powers. Ukrainians try to view their position as a blessing. They talk about being a ‘crossroads’, a ‘doorway’, a ‘lever’, a ‘bridge’. But bridges, in this part of the world, tend to get marched over or blown up. As long as Russia and the West simmer with mutual distrust, to maintain its independence Ukraine has to pull off a fine diplomatic balancing act between the two.

For two years after independence, Ukraine’s relations with the West were mired in mutual misunderstanding. Ukrainians resented the blandishments poured on Yeltsin’s new democratic Russia, and had not forgotten Bush’s insulting ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech of August 1991, when he warned against ‘suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred’. The West, for its part, had difficulty taking Ukraine seriously at all. Russophile Sovietologists widely predicted, to Ukrainians’ fury, that the country was bound to rejoin Russia before long. It was a tradition – chippiness on the Ukrainian side, ignorant dismissiveness on the West’s – that dated back to the Paris peace talks of 1919, when Margolin deplored the crowds of ‘urbane and polished’ Russian and Polish exiles who undermined Allied support for the Ukrainian government in Galicia.

Relations worsened when the nuclear powers demanded that Ukraine sign up to the START-1 arms reduction treaty, committing it to surrendering the Soviet-inherited nuclear missiles stationed on its soil. Nationalists smelt a plot to neuter their fragile new state: ‘If nuclear weapons are such a bad thing,’ a Rukh activist asked me, ‘why don’t you give up yours too?’ Utterly failing to appreciate the strength of Western feeling on the issue, Kravchuk allowed his country to turn into a virtual pariah-state before capitulating, in a ‘Tripartite Agreement’ with Russia and America, in January 1994. Under the agreement, Ukraine promised to ship its warheads to Russia for dismantlement, in exchange for nuclear fuel for its power stations and a Russian commitment to respect ‘existing borders’.

With the Tripartite Agreement, Ukraine’s diplomatic standing improved dramatically. Seeing Moscow’s White House wrecked by shell-fire, Zhirinovsky triumphant in Russian parliamentary elections, and civil war raging in Yugoslavia, America belatedly realised that Ukraine was too important to be left out in the cold. Keeping Russia democratic meant keeping Ukraine independent, and keeping Ukraine independent meant doing something about its economy. In 1994 Ukraine became the fourth-biggest recipient of American aid after Israel, Egypt and Russia itself. The following spring the IMF backed Kuchma’s reform programme, and twisted Russia’s arm into rescheduling Ukraine’s fuel debts, by making a deal an unspoken condition of Russia receiving its own IMF loan. In October 1994 Kuchma was given the full-scale red-carpet treatment on a trip to Washington, and returned the compliment five months later when Clinton made a flattering three-day state visit to Kiev.

Despite campaign promises of closer relations with Russia, Kuchma met the West’s overtures with enthusiasm. In his first two and a half years in office he visited Brussels, Bonn, Paris, London, Tokyo, Ottawa, Warsaw and Budapest, many of them several times. He has asked for associate status in the Western European Union, the EU’s embryonic defence arm, and is even talking about one day applying for membership of the EU itself. Ukraine is still capable of dreadful diplomatic gaucheries: European relations remain soured by its perverse refusal to close down Chernobyl, and in July 1996 the government chose the day before a meeting on a new multimillion-dollar aid package to send police to occupy the World Bank’s Kiev offices. But, for the time being, Ukraine’s age-old tightrope-walk has acquired a definite westward tilt.

But much as Kuchma cosies up to Clinton and Kohl, Ukraine’s future chiefly hangs, as always, on what happens in Moscow. If the West has had a hard time coming to terms with Ukrainian independence, Russia has hardly begun. ‘Russians have still not accepted, deep in their hearts, that Ukraine is a legitimate phenomenon,’ says Szporluk. ‘Whether your name is Zhirinovsky, Yavlinsky or Gaidar, somewhere in your mind you think that Ukraine is a fake, a phoney.’ So far, Russian grouchiness at Ukrainian independence has not translated into action. The Yeltsin government has agreed to respect Ukraine’s borders, rescheduled – albeit under pressure from America – Ukraine’s fuel debts, and refrained from stirring up trouble in Crimea. Ordinary Russians put all foreign-policy issues at the bottom of their list of concerns in polls, well after crime and jobs.

Poor and demoralised, Russia currently lacks the will or resources for adventures abroad. Even re-integration of Belarus, which would be popular with the majority of Belarussians, but cost Russia billions of dollars at the exchange rate Belarus is demanding, has been put on hold in favour of Russia’s own reform programme. The big, unanswerable question is whether, as Russia regains wealth and self-confidence, it will try to rebuild its empire, or come to terms with its loss as Britain and France did fifty years ago. Most doyens of Western opinion are optimistic. Richard Pipes, the hawkish Harvard history professor who served on Reagan’s National Security Council and has spent a lifetime denouncing Russian polity through the ages, thinks the national psyche profoundly changed by the loss of the Cold War. ‘There’s a Turgenev story,’ he says. ‘A man is lying on the grass in the sun. A milkmaid comes along and gives him bread, milk. He thinks to himself – “Why do we need Constantinople?” Russia is the same about places like Crimea now.’3 Tim Colton, another Harvard academic and an expert on the Russian army, thinks progress will be bumpy, but broadly in the right direction: ‘Ukraine is a pretty secondary issue in Russia now. Governments will alternate between the common-sense approach and taking swipes just for the fun of it.’⁴

If the optimists are wrong, there are plenty of ways Russia could try to force Ukraine back into the fold. Nobody expects tanks to roll into Kiev as they did into Grozny, but Russia could stir up secessionism among ethnic Russians in Crimea and the Donbass, as it did in Moldova, Georgia and Tadzhikistan. Once an alternative westward pipeline through Belarus is completed, it could also cut off Ukraine’s oil and gas supplies – both moves to which Ukraine remains very vulnerable until it has sorted out its economy. Russia is already pressurising Ukraine to join more closely in CIS institutions, and squabbles over Sevastopol meant repeated postponement of a Friendship Treaty reconfirming mutual borders, finally signed in May 1997.

Ukrainians fear that the catalyst for renewed Russian aggression will be the eastward expansion of NATO. ‘They see themselves as non-aligned,’ says Hemans, ‘but worry that it’ll be hard to stay that way if the West is playing the expand-the-alignment game. They’re scared that when the Central Europeans are taken into NATO Russia will – not lash out, but loom all over them. And the West will allow it, because it doesn’t really care if Ukraine stays in the Russian half of Europe.’ Though Ukraine participates in joint exercises with NATO troops under America’s Partnership for Peace programme, and won consultation rights, similar to Russia’s, at the Madrid summit of July 1997, there is no serious talk as yet of Ukraine applying to join NATO itself. Any such move would be guaranteed to lash Russia into a bearish fury, and American public opinion is quite unprepared to extend security guarantees to the Ukrainian–Russian border. Even if Kuchma were to ask for inclusion, it is far from certain that he could take his country with him. Poised precariously between Russian-ness and European-ness, Ukrainians simply do not see themselves as part of the West in the same way that Poles, Czechs, Baits and Hungarians do. Senior politicians do talk in private about applying for NATO membership one day, but not until Russia’s own relations with the West are far friendlier.

What kind of place will Ukraine be in ten years’ time? At worst, it will be a fragile, poverty-stricken buffer-state in a new divide between an introverted West and an aggressive, unstable Russia. At best, it will be a rich, heavyweight democracy in a continent-wide partnership of friendly like-minded states. Given Russia’s positive progress so far, and Ukraine’s remarkable political and ethnic stability, the latter looks – cross fingers – rather likelier than the former. The West’s role should be to slap down any renewed Russian pretensions to empire, and keep on prodding Ukraine, with a mixture of sticks and carrots, towards economic reform.

Forecasting is a mug’s game. But without a doubt, Ukrainians now have their best chance ever of building a free and prosperous state of their own. If they succeed Ukraina will be a misnomer, for they will have ceased to inhabit a country ‘on the edge’, a borderland to other nations. In his novella Taras Bulba, Gogol has his Cossack hero ride off into the steppe with his two sons to fight the Poles:

The day was grey and overcast; against this grey the grass stood out a vivid green; the singing and chirping of the birds sounded somehow discordant. After riding some distance they looked behind them: the village appeared to have been swallowed up by the ground until all that could be seen were the two chimneys of their modest cottage and the tops of the trees . . . At last all that remained, sticking up against the sky, was the tall, solitary pole over the well, with a wagon-wheel fastened to the top; and then the flat plain across which they rode rose up like a hill to obscure all else from view.5

The steppe has long been put to the plough, and Bulba never existed. But Bulba’s dream of an independent Ukraine was real, and has come true. Gogol’s story ends in tragedy. One son is captured and broken on the wheel in Warsaw; the other turns traitor, and is killed by his own father. Bulba himself is burned at the stake. This time, the Ukrainians’ journey looks like having a happier ending. After a thousand years of one of the bloodiest histories in the world, they surely deserve it.