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May 2015
On March 24 last year, I was in my Toronto kitchen preparing school lunches for my kids when I learned from my Twitter feed that I had been put on the Kremlin’s list of Westerners who were banned from Russia. This was part of Russia’s retaliation for the sanctions the United States and its allies had slapped on Vladimir Putin’s associates after his military intervention in Ukraine.
Four days earlier, nine people from the U.S. had been similarly blacklisted, including John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Harry Reid, then the majority leader of the Senate, and three other senators: John McCain, a long-time critic of Putin, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Dan Coats of Indiana, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany. "While I'm disappointed that I won't be able to go on vacation with my family in Siberia this summer,” Coats wisecracked, “I am honored to be on this list."
I, however, was genuinely sad. I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation’s literature and history in college. I loved living in Moscow in the mid-nineties as bureau chief for The Financial Times and have made a point of returning regularly over the subsequent fifteen years.
I’m also a proud member of the Ukrainian-Canadian community. My maternal grandparents fled western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact in 1939. They never dared to go back, but they stayed in close touch with their brothers and sisters and their families, who remained behind. For the rest of my grandparents’ lives, they saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine, which had last existed, briefly, during and after the chaos of the 1917 Russian Revolution. That dream persisted into the next generation, and in some cases the generation after that.
My late mother moved back to her parents’ homeland in the 1990s when Ukraine and Russia, along with the thirteen other former Soviet republics, became independent states. Drawing on her experience as a lawyer in Canada, she served as executive officer of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation, an NGO she helped to found.
My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany before the family immigrated to western Canada. They were able to get visas thanks to my grandfather’s older sister, who had immigrated between the wars. Her generation, and an earlier wave of Ukrainian settlers, had been actively recruited by successive Canadian governments keen to populate the vast prairies of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Today, Canada’s Ukrainian community, which is 1.25 million-strong, is significantly larger as a percentage of total population than the one in the United States, which is why it is also a far more significant political force. And that in turn probably accounts for the fact that while there were no Ukrainian-Americans on the Kremlin’s blacklist, four of the thirteen Canadians singled out were of Ukrainian extraction: in addition to myself, my fellow Member of Parliament James Bezan, Senator Raynell Andreychuk, and Paul Grod, who has no national elective role, but is head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
I made the Russian list of the unwelcome as a three-fer: an activist Ukrainian-Canadian, a politician (I was elected to Parliament in 2013 to represent Toronto Centre), and a journalist with a long paper trail that frequently displeased the Kremlin, since I covered Moscow’s brutal war in Chechnya in the 1990s and also wrote a book about the rise of the Russian oligarchs. I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president. When, in 2011, he decided to take the presidency back from his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, I wrote a column in The New York Times arguing that Putin’s Russia was on its way to becoming a full-fledged dictatorship that would eventually be vulnerable to a popular uprising.
Until March of last year, none of this prevented my getting a Russian visa. I was, on several occasions, invited to moderate panels at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin’s version of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Then, in 2013, Medvedev agreed to let me interview him in an off-the-record briefing for media leaders at the real Davos annual meeting.
That turned out to be the last year when Russia, despite its leadership’s increasingly despotic and xenophobic tendencies, was still, along with the major Western democracies and Japan, a member in good standing of the G-8. Russia in those days was also part of the elite global group Goldman Sachs had dubbed the BRICs—the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China—the emerging market powerhouses that were expected to drive the world economy forward. Putin was counting on the $50 billion extravaganza of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to further solidify Russia’s position at the high table of the international community.
President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from Ukraine in the face of the Maidan uprising, which took place on the eve of the closing day of those Winter Games, astonished and enraged Putin. In his pique, as Putin proudly recalled in a March 2015 Russian government television film, he responded by ordering the takeover of Crimea after an all-night meeting. That occurred at dawn on the morning of February 23, 2014, the finale of the Sochi Olympics. The war of aggression, occupation, and annexation that followed turned out to be the grim beginning of a new era, and what might be the start of a new cold war, or worse.
Putin’s Big Lie
The crisis that burst into the news a year-and-a-half ago has often been explained as Putin’s exploitation of divisions between the mainly Russian-speaking majority of Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions of the country, and the mainly Ukrainian-speaking majority in the west and center. Russian is roughly as different from Ukrainian as Spanish is from Italian.
While the linguistic factor is real, it is often oversimplified in several respects: Russian-speakers are by no means all pro-Putin or secessionist; Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers are geographically commingled; and virtually everyone in Ukraine has at least a passive understanding of both languages. To make matters more complicated, Russian is the first language of many ethnic Ukrainians, who are 78 percent of the population (but even that category is blurry, because many people in Ukraine have both Ukrainian and Russian roots). President Petro Poroshenko is an example—he always understood Ukrainian, but learned to speak it only in 1996, after being elected to Parliament; and Russian remains the domestic language of the Poroshenko family. The same is true in the home of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s prime minister. The best literary account of the Maidan uprising to date was written in Russian: “Ukraine Diaries,” by Andrey Kurkov, the Russian-born, ethnic Russian novelist, who lives in Kyiv.
In this last respect, my own family is, once again, quite typical. My maternal grandmother, born into a family of Orthodox clerics in central Ukraine, grew up speaking Russian and Ukrainian. Ukrainian was the main language of the family refuge she eventually found in Canada, but she and my grandfather spoke Ukrainian and Russian as well as Polish interchangeably and with equal fluency. When they told stories, it was natural for them to quote each character in his or her original language. I do the same thing today with Ukrainian and English, my mother having raised me to speak both languages, as I in turn have done with my three children.
For individual Ukrainians, though less often for the country as whole, this linguistic kinship has sometimes been an advantage. Nikolai Gogol, known to Ukrainians as Mykola Hohol, was the son of prosperous Ukrainian gentleman farmer. His first works were in Ukrainian, and he often wrote about Ukraine. But he entered the international literary canon as a Russian writer, a feat he is unlikely to have accomplished had “Dead Souls” been written in his native language. Many ethnic Ukrainians were likewise successful in the Soviet nomenklatura, where these so-called “younger brothers” of the ruling Russians had a trusted and privileged place, comparable to the role of Scots in the British Empire.
But familiarity can also breed contempt. Russia’s perceived kinship with Ukrainians often slipped into an attempt to eradicate them. These have ranged from Tsar Alexander II’s 1876 “Ems Ukaz,” which banned the use of Ukrainian in print, on the stage or in public lectures and the 1863 Valuev ukaz that asserted that “the Ukrainian language has never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist,” to Stalin’s genocidal famine in the 1930s.
In short, being a Russian-speaker in Ukraine does not automatically imply a yearning for subordination to the Kremlin any more than speaking English in Ireland or Scotland means support for a political union with England. As Kurkov writes in his “Diaries”: “I am a Russian myself, after all, an ethnically Russian citizen of Ukraine. But I am not 'a Russian,' because I have nothing in common with Russia and its politics. I do not have Russian citizenship and I do not want it.”
That said, it’s true that people on both sides of the political divide have tried to declare their allegiances through the vehicle of language. Immediately after the overthrow and self-exile of Yanukovych, radical nationalists in Parliament passed a law making Ukrainian the sole national language—a self-destructive political gesture and a gratuitous insult to a large body of the population. However, the contentious language bill was never signed into law by the acting president.
Many civic-minded citizens also resisted such polarizing moves. As though to make amends for Parliament’s action, within 72 hours the people of Lviv, the capital of the Ukrainian-speaking west, held a Russian-speaking day, in which the whole city made a symbolic point of shifting to the country’s other language.
Less than two weeks after the language measure was enacted it was rescinded, though not before Putin had the chance to make considerable hay out of it.
The blurring of linguistic and ethnic identities reflects the geographic and historic ties between Ukraine and Russia. But that affinity has also bred, among many in Russia, a deep-seated antipathy to the very idea of a truly independent and sovereign Ukrainian state.
Russians see Ukraine as the cradle of their civilization. Even the name came from there: the vast empire of the czars evolved from Kyivan Rus, a loose federation of Slavic tribes in the Middle Ages.
The ties that bind are also contemporary and personal. Two Soviet leaders—Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev—not only spent their early years in Ukraine but spoke Russian with a distinct Ukrainian accent. This historic connectedness is one reason why their post-Soviet successor, Vladimir Putin, has been able to build such wide popular support in Russia for championing—and, as he is now trying to do, recreating—“Novorossiya” (New Russia) in Ukraine.
In selling his revanchist policy to the Russian public, Putin has depicted Ukrainians who cherish their independence and want to join Europe and embrace the Western democratic values it represents as, at best, pawns and dupes of NATO—or, at worst, neo-Nazis. As a result, many Russians have themselves been duped into viewing Washington, London, and Berlin as puppet-masters attempting to destroy Russia.
This subterfuge is, arguably, Putin’s single most dramatic resort to the Soviet tactic of the Big Lie. Through his virtual monopoly of the Russian media, Putin has airbrushed away the truth of what happened a quarter of a century ago: the dissolution of the USSR was the result not of Western manipulation but of the failings of the Soviet state, combined with the initiatives of Soviet reformist leaders who had widespread backing from their citizens. Moreover, far from conspiring to tear the USSR apart, Western leaders in the late 1980s and early nineties used their influence to try to keep it together.
It all started with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, when he came to power in 1985, was determined to revitalize a sclerotic economy and political system with “perestroika” (literally, rebuilding), “glasnost” (openness), and a degree of democratization.
These policies, Gorbachev believed, would save the USSR. Instead, they triggered a chain reaction that led to its collapse. By softening the mailed-fist style of governing that traditionally accrued to his job, Gorbachev empowered other reformers—notably his protégé-turned-rival Boris Yeltsin—who wanted not to rebuild the USSR but to dismantle it.
Their actions radiated from Moscow to the capitals of the other Soviet republics—most dramatically Kyiv (then known to most of the world by its Russian name, Kiev). Ukrainian democratic reformers and dissidents seized the chance to advance their own agenda—political liberalization and Ukrainian statehood—so that their country could be free forever from the dictates of the Kremlin.
However, they were also pragmatists. Recognizing that after centuries of rule from Moscow, Ukraine’s national consciousness was weak while its Communist Party was strong, they cut a tacit deal with the Ukrainian political leadership: in exchange for the Communists’ support for independence, the democratic opposition would postpone its demands for political and economic reform.
By 1991, the centrifugal forces in the Soviet Union were coming to a head. Putin, in his rewrite of history, would have the world believe that the United States was cheering and covertly supporting secessionism. On the contrary, President George H.W. Bush was concerned that the breakup of the Soviet Union would be dangerously destabilizing. He had put his chips on Gorbachev and reform Communism and was skeptical about Yeltsin. In July of that year, Bush traveled first to Moscow to shore up Gorbachev, then to Ukraine, where, on August 1, he delivered a speech to the Ukrainian Parliament exhorting his audience to give Gorbachev a chance at keeping a reforming Soviet Union together: "Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred."
I was living in Kyiv at the time, working as a stringer for the FT, The Economist and The Washington Post. Listening to Bush in the parliamentary press gallery, I felt he had misread the growing consensus in Ukraine. That became even clearer immediately afterward when I interviewed Ukrainian MPs, all of whom expressed outrage and scorn at Bush for, as they saw it, taking Gorbachev’s side. The address, which New York Times columnist William Safire memorably dubbed the “Chicken Kiev speech,” backfired in the United States as well, antagonizing Americans of Ukrainian descent and other East European diasporas, which may have hurt Bush’s chances of reelection, costing him support in several key states.
But Bush was no apologist for Communism. His speech was heavily influenced by Condoleezza Rice, not a notable soft touch, and it echoed the United Kingdom’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who, a year earlier, had said she could no more imagine opening a British embassy in Kyiv than in San Francisco.
The magnitude of the West’s miscalculation, and Gorbachev’s, became clear less than a month later. On August 19, a feckless attempt by Russian hardliners to overthrow Gorbachev triggered a stampede to the exits by the non-Russian republics, especially in the Baltic States and Ukraine. On August 24, in Kyiv, the MPs Bush had lectured three weeks earlier voted for independence.
Three months after that, I sat in my Kyiv studio apartment—on a cobblestone street where the Russian-language writer Mikhail Bulgakov once lived—listening to Gorbachev’s televised plea to the Ukrainian people not to secede. He invoked his maternal grandmother who (like mine) was Ukrainian; he rhapsodized about his happy childhood in the Kuban in southern Russia, where the local dialect is closer to Ukrainian than to Russian. He quoted—in passable Ukrainian—a verse from Taras Shevchenko, a serf freed in the 19th century who became Ukraine’s national poet. Gorbachev was fighting back tears as he spoke.
That was November 30, 1991. The next day, 92 percent of Ukrainians who participated in a national referendum voted for independence. A majority in every region of the country including Crimea (where 56 percent voted to separate) supported breaking away.
Two weeks later, Ukraine’s President Leonid Kravchuk met Yeltsin, who by then was the elected president of the Russian Federation. The two of them, along with the president of Belarus, signed an accord that formally dissolved the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, who’d set in motion a process that he could not control, had lost his job and his country. Down came the red stars on the spires, up went the Russian tricolor in place of the hammer-and-sickle. Yeltsin took his place in the Kremlin office and residence that Putin occupies today.
Therein lies a stunning double irony. First, Yeltsin—who plucked Putin from obscurity and hand-picked him as his successor—would not have been able to engineer Russia’s own emergence as an independent state had it not been for Ukraine’s eagerness to break free as well. Second, the world would almost certainly never have heard of Putin had it not been for the dissolution of the USSR, which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Little Reform, Big Corruption
Then came the hard part. Having broken up the Soviet Union, Moscow and Kyiv both faced three immediate, vast, and novel challenges: how to establish genuine statehood and independence for their brand new countries; create efficacious democracies with checks and balances and rule of law; and make the transition from the Communist command economy to capitalism. Accomplishing all three tasks at once was essential, but it proved impossible. As a result, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, Russia and Ukraine each failed in its own way.
Post-Soviet Russia’s wrong turn came in the form of the Faustian bargain its first group of leaders—the Yeltsin team of economists known as the young reformers—was willing to strike in order to achieve their overriding priority: wrenching Russia from central planning to a market economy. They accomplished a lot, laying the foundations for Russia’s economic rebound in the new millennium. But along the way they struck deals, most stunningly the vast handover of state assets to the oligarchs in exchange for their political support, which eventually transformed Russia into a kleptocracy and discredited the very idea of democracy with the Russian people.
Ukraine’s path to failure started with the 1991 compromise between democratic reformers and the Ukrainian Communist establishment. That tactical alliance proved to be both brilliant and doomed. Its value was immediate—Ukraine became, as long as Russia acquiesced, a sovereign state. The cost was revealed only gradually, but it was staggeringly high.
Like Russia’s Yeltsin, a former candidate-member of the Politburo, Ukraine’s new leadership was made up overwhelmingly of relics of the Soviet-era leadership: Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first president, had been the ideology secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; his successor, Leonid Kuchma, had been the director of a mega-factory in Dnipropetrovsk that built the SS-18 missiles, the ten-warhead behemoth of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Once the superpower they had thrived in disappeared, these men, and most of those around them, adopted Ukrainian patriotism, soon proving themselves to be enthusiastic, determined, and wily advocates of Ukrainian independence. Their conversion was intensely opportunistic—it allowed them to preserve, and even enhance, their political power and offered the added perk of huge personal wealth. But because many of the leaders of post-Soviet Ukraine had a genuine emotional connection to their country, they also took pride in building Ukrainian sovereignty, which put them at odds with some of their former colleagues in Russia, including, they would eventually discover, Vladimir Putin.
Unfortunately, their commitment to statehood was not matched by any coherent vision of economic reform, and they followed the usual post-Soviet project of enriching themselves and their comrades. The result, in addition to massive corruption, was gross mismanagement of the economy. Russia’s economic performance in the two decades following the collapse of communism was mixed at best; Ukraine’s was absolutely dire.
But when it came to democracy, the tables were reversed. Even though the pact between Ukrainian reformers and the Communist Party left the nomenklatura, as the Soviet leadership class was known, essentially intact, it turned out to be remarkably—and mercifully—inept at authoritarian governance. The Ukrainian Communist Party and the KGB, with their formal ties to Moscow severed, were unprepared to act effectively on their own. Instead of closing ranks to rule the country, the power elites broke into competing clans associated with the major cities and regions. The result was a newborn country that was accidentally pluralistic, allowing democracy to spring up through the cracks in the regime’s control. Proof of that came in 1994 when Kravchuk lost his reelection campaign. The very fact that he could be voted out of office was an early but important milestone for a fledgling democracy. It is one that Russia, with its more deeply rooted absolutist political system, has yet to reach.
That said, what followed was not exactly encouraging. Kravchuk’s successor, Leonid Kuchma, began to turn back the clock, harassing the opposition and the media. After serving the constitutionally maximum two five-year terms, Kuchma was able to rig the 2004 election in favor of his dauphin, Viktor Yanukovych, who was prime minister.
But Kuchma and Yanukovych overestimated their power to manipulate the electorate—and they underestimated civil society. In what became known as the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians camped out in the Maidan—the central square in Kyiv—and demanded a new election. They got it.
Then came a truly tragic irony. Yanukovych’s opponent and polar opposite was Viktor Yushchenko, a highly respected economist and former head of the central bank. He was the champion of Ukrainian democracy. Largely for that reason, he was hated and feared by many in Russia, notably in Putin’s inner circle. Yushchenko was poisoned on the eve of the ballot. The attempt on his life left him seriously ill and permanently scarred, yet he triumphed in the election. However, Yushchenko then did such a poor job in office that Yanukovych, who had failed to become president by cheating in 2004, ended up being elected fair and square in 2010.
Over the next four years of Yanukovych’s rule, the Ukrainian state became more corrupt and abusive of political rights than it had be...
