STRATIFICATION OF UKRAINIAN SOCIETY ON ELITIST GROUNDS
In periods of social upheaval, every nation faces a stern test in quality: is it a chaotic collection of confused individuals or a structured society capable of not only surviving in the hardest conditions but also, above all, of dynamically evolving to a higher stage? When history gives a challenge, it is the social pyramid that tumbles first, as did the Soviet pyramid — with its senile bearers of the honor, conscience, and intellect of the epoch. Under new conditions when the world has entered the information age, the communist model of society so beloved by the eastern Slavs has become an anachronism. Life requires more competitive models of societal organization.
Ukraine has already got used to the democratic trappings of the new life: democratic elections of the President, Verkhovna Rada People’s Deputies, and big city mayors. It has turned out that the word party can also be used in the plural: the Ministry of Justice is going soon to hand in the one hundredth jubilee certificate to a party. The “new” Ukrainians have arrived. Our vocabulary has been enriched with the buzzword of oligarch. And this is not at all an Ancient Greek abstract notion: last year our oligarchs showed their clout by tipping the balance in the presidential elections.
Yet, there is no full-fledged new social structure in Ukraine. What is going on is only the turbulent and very painful stratification of the post- Soviet social organism accompanied by destruction of the traditional types of relations both among individuals and social strata. This process of the formation of a new social hierarchy must above all crystallize a new elite. An elite, as a certain stratum of people capable of not only seeing the problems of society but also finding the ways to solve them. However, in the modern democratic epoch, the ideas produced by the elite can only be fulfilled if they receive a go-ahead from the whole society or, to be more exact, its active part, ingratiatingly called electorate during elections.
However, the quality of a society is assessed on the basis of its elite. Without its elite, society is simply the bearer of ethnographic material; with the elite, it is a historical nation.
The state-elite problem has turned out be virtually a key one for our young independent Ukraine. Our elite was not formed, as is usually the case, in the process of a long independence struggle: the collapse of the USSR was caused, first of all, by economic and general evolutionary factors. And the Iron Curtain was not lowered in order to break the big communist preserve into smaller communist “villages,” although the writers-turned-amateur-politicians, who organized Rukh, interpreted the process exactly this way. Suffice it to substitute “we, the Soviet people” for “we, the Ukrainian people” in their fiery speeches, and everything will become so painfully familiar. They must have preserved the totalitarian communal mentality, and the model they tried to foist on the Ukrainian people is the same as was in the times of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev — a closed society. And the narrowed Ukrainian-language intellectual space created an illusion that they would manage to realize themselves precisely here.
They failed. Moreover, the idea of democracy, humanity’s greatest attainment, was discredited. Hence our society has gone off the main road. Those wretched politicians do not seem to have understood that the world has taken an evolutionary step toward implementing the idea of an open society. The historical vector aiming from a closed to an open society is in fact the axis on which the Ukrainian elite’s actions are being projected today. To build another closed society, even if Ukrainianized from top to bottom, means to waste our time. Of course, every society has always had and always will have people for whom the most attractive ideal is American Indian reservations or African bushman communities: tired of the dynamics of history, they could feast their eyes on and even try to follow their old ways there. But they are destined to die out. And it is not they who will respond the current challenge of history.
One can no longer cover one’s own farm with one’s own sky; today we are under the common European, if not global, sky. And the new Ukrainian elite is being formed in an entirely different geopolitical dimension. Plainly speaking, now it must meet world standards: no references to some special features of our innate mentality or difficulties of the transition period are taken into account. Coming out into the world arena, we must orient ourselves toward world standards in order not to be lost and pushed into the background. Difficult? There are alternatives, of course. The reservation for example. But the example of American Iroquois, frozen in their ethnic genesis, somehow leaves one cold.
The elitist condition of man in any society begins with the sense of personal dignity and pride in his state. And this condition can only be achieved in two ways: first, the ability to see the problems of one’s people, which, incidentally, presupposes a sufficient level of knowledge, and, secondly, doing something concrete to solve these problems in practice.
A true elite performs all these functions without the precondition that society should adequately reward it for its work — this is the cardinal difference between the elite and the bureaucratic establishment. Also different is the elite from former social estates and strata whose rights and duties were fixed by law. This is a thing of the past. Now the civilized world has been living for two centuries under the aegis of the Code Napoleon, which equalized the rights of all estates. Under contemporary conditions, no single estate can impose its own system of values on all of society. This also refers to the intelligentsia which, for some reason, is often identified with the elite. The intelligentsia has become, of course, ineffectual in politics or an integral component of social existence — suffice it to recall the names of Andrei Sakharov in Russia, Vytautas Landsbergis in Lithuania, Zviad Gamsakhurdia in Georgia, and Vyacheslav Chornovil in this country.
As a rule, the national elite is born and crystallized in the face-off with the imperial center; later, in the process of struggling for national independence, the elite confirms its high status and even acquires a certain charisma, the aureole of glory. Without this charisma, the elite is predestined to kowtow to society and say hypocritically that the people are wise, and so on. Doing so, it defiles all high social ideas to please the masses or, to be more exact, the electorate.
Our elite was conceived in different conditions. Oddly enough, after the collapse of the USSR this role was emphatically claimed by those who rose from the literary clan, once so closely knit by the ideas of communism. That they abdicated those ideas does not yet mean they have changed their mentality. But now, having become completely bankrupt, these amateur politicians have begun to create myths about the decisive role they played for Ukraine to win the status of an independent state. They would do better to spend their time trying to master at least some tiny pieces of the great wealth of modern historical and social science, in order with their help to analyze our past rather than stir up the people with what they cook up. Mykhailo Drahomanov repeatedly said, quite to the point, that our greatest calamity is ignorance.
What kind of charisma — just good manners, let alone elitism — can we talk about if a few years ago, during the visit of the Moscow Patriarch, one of the Rukh leaders, a well-known writer, was egging on the crowd under the hotel window, which chanted inspiringly: “Down with the Moscow pope”? In civilized language, this is called a manifestation of an elementary lack of culture.
And this is by no means the only example. The point is that the incident was telecast far beyond Ukraine, and it is very doubtful that this was a striking manifestation of national awareness, taking into account the image of Ukraine and the Ukrainian elite.
As for image, it is the elite that creates the image of a nation on the international stage, among other nations, the more so in our times of information technologies. This is why the first sign of the modern Ukrainian elite is whether an individual can represent Ukraine decently. One should not try to persuade the world community that we are so hard up but industrious, that we have been oppressed for ages by big brother, but we still cannot take a step without looking around at him, that we have such a high intellectual potential but we are still unable to make high- quality (i.e., competitive) books and television programs: nobody cares about that.
The point is not whether or not we have our own Ukrainian elite. We do. Suffice it to recall at least some names: Lina Kostenko in literature, our former chief banker and now Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, or Kyiv Dynamo coach Valery Lobanovsky. What unites them all is their being able, owing to their high professionalism, to introduce Ukraine, each in his own social sub- space, into the world elite of states. And these are only the brightest and best known personalities. We can consider in a way that the Ukrainian elite was represented in the last elections by Yevhen Marchuk and to some extent Yuri Kostenko (the latter greatly suffered by belonging to Rukh which discredited itself in the public eye). It is these candidates who received the most votes of those who made their choice on the basis of at least some analysis, who voted their brains.
But the chief problem facing our elite is skepticism and often even the overt plebeian contempt for it and its ideas by the broad masses or, to be more exact, their overexcited leaders. It must be for this reason that representatives of the elite try hopelessly to overcome public skepticism and raise society’s level of social awareness. For it is up to man himself, not the elite, to raise his own level. The task of the elite is to set high standards for its society, as well as represent the Ukrainian people in the multinational world society. And the elite is not responsible for this to the broad masses, for the latter are barely able to adequately appreciate its actions.
The problem of the Ukrainian elite is further complicated by the absence of full-fledged Ukrainian- mentality cities (with very few exceptions in Western Ukraine). Only the countryside is fully Ukrainian. But it cannot beget a modern highly-skilled and energetic national elite due to its specific mentality mostly oriented toward folklore tradition.
Also complicated is the question of how the national elite feels its integrity. Today, individual representatives of this higher quality social stratum communicate very little among themselves, let alone do they engage in any common and coordinated actions. There is simply an urgent need of some kind of social organization. Now the elite is instinctively searching for its center of crystallization. It is good that this role is now being played by The Day. But there will be Verkhovna Rada elections tomorrow. The part of the electorate which makes its choice being guided by their brains, and not heart, should come to these elections as an organized force. It can serve as a basis for forming at last a fundamentally new type of a modern party. And this also places tremendous responsibility on those who represented this part of the electorate in the last elections.
Without a modern organized elite, the Ukrainian people will run the risk of falling out of the modern process of civilization. This is why, if we want our colors also to sparkle brightly in the rainbow-like light of the new world space, we must begin with answering the question of whether I can decently represent Ukraine today. This will be the exact answer to the problems of today’s Ukrainian elite, as well as to the quality of the Ukrainian people.
