How we lost our way in broad daylight
We often see people talking incessantly in the enormous print and electronic media space. But we don’t get the sense that anyone is listening to each other, or wanting to learn something new or to formulate a common approach. Everybody is waiting for their turn to have their say.
This is undoubtedly one of the peculiarities of society’s current psychological condition. People are agitated and resemble a disturbed beehive. But in order to rally them together and make them do productive work, we need authoritative figures and a willingness to hear and accept imperatives. In spite of the “post- revolutionary” apathy, many people are still wondering why this happened. What point are we at now? Are we straggling behind or advancing?
Kindhearted foreigners who visit Ukraine try to console us: Look, there’s nothing to fear, it’s a normal democratic process. But is this really true? Are we really building a democratic society? Who can explain the paradox that elections are getting better and better, “cleaner,” and “more transparent,” while parliament is getting worse and worse?
To answer this question, we should turn to the past. I think that the “way out” is in the same place as the “way in.” Democracy is for the long haul. Ukraine is now in the throes of not simply a political crisis. This crisis is of a systemic nature and contains more psychological, moral, and ethically-related issues than one might presume. This “Pandora’s box” has been taking shape for a very long time, and it was opened in the early 1990s, when global upheavals also embraced the entire post-Soviet space.
The tremors differed from place to place. We all remember that the Baltic republics took an unequivocal attitude to the events that were mostly occurring in Moscow. They promptly broke camp, so to speak, and rushed as quickly as possible to Europe with which they had long associated themselves and without which they thought they could not exist. They had a goal and they achieved it — not in the least because they had brilliant and determined national leaders.
But there were also rather progressive communists (a kind of oxymoron), who had power. I am not going to go into what was happening in Central Asia, although many of those countries’ future leaders were also card-carrying communists. For example, the younger generation may not know that the late Turkmenbashi was also first secretary of the party’s republican party committee. Things were proceeding differently in Ukraine. this is my personal and perhaps biased opinion, but there are ample grounds for it because I belong to the generation of journalists who began working during perestroika. I sometimes joke that all complaints about the current problems in Ukraine should be addressed to the Central Committee’s personnel department.
But on a more serious note, I would say that we are still in the post- Soviet paradigm. Society has a complete set of normal-life standards — from the information society and “personal membership in the European Union” to profound federalism that resembles Chechen teips (clans — Ed.). When perestroika came, Ukraine was being run by one of the most conservative party organizations, where on Moscow’s instructions any dissent was stifled far more harshly than in the Soviet capital. Ukraine did not have (and I do not think it could have) an authoritative Communist Party leader at the time.
Volodymyr Shcherbytsky was undoubtedly a great personality in spite of his contradictory nature, complexity, and perhaps orthodox outlook. But he was a great personality in his own time and could not possibly have turned into a Ukrainian Brazauskas (former president of Lithuania — Ed.) and also because he resigned when Gorbachev was still in office. Practically all of Shcherbytsky’s fellow party bosses had had Ukraine “beaten out of them.” So could they really have headed a national republic, sharing power with “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists?” This is why James Mace wrote in The Day: “...and independence gained the Ukrainian SSR.” Suffice it to recall the late First Secretary Ivashko’s visit to Moscow in the heat of the ground- breaking events, or Hurenko, who, for all his ostensible toughness, was unable to offer his party anything new or radical.
Our drama of growing and scaling the heights stems from the fact that it was in Ukraine where the “CPSU democratic platform” failed to win. The progressive (in fact social democratic) potential was being squandered. Some “bore a grudge against history” and quit politics altogether, while others joined a large number of newly-emerging parties. The Communist Party was left to the mercies of rather mediocre functionaries.
In its turn, the national democratic movement, which was mostly nourished by the ideas of the liberation struggle dating back to the 17th-18th centuries and later, failed to produce from their ranks or support any pragmatic leaders capable of combining national liberation ideas with democratic principles and fitting in with latter-day realities. Moreover, it was unable to overcome the friend-or-foe stereotype in the 1999 presidential elections. And while under Leonid Kravchuk the bar was still rather high -because the second and third echelons were filled with people from scientific, industrial, and many other circles, who hoped to make a sizable contribution to transformations, and Kravchuk himself was prepared to offer a partnership to the leader of Rukh, Viacheslav Chornovil (who rejected it) - the old apparat instinct continued to screen out all bright, new individuals. Negative selection began, which gradually led this country to the phenomenon of the “Lilliputians’ plot.”
Some will ask: what does this story of a “Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary seniority” have to do with today? It has everything to do with our times, and not just because those who came to power in the early 1990s are still in place and the rules of conduct in power remain the same. The question is the quality of these people, what they have managed to offer Ukraine during this time, and what figures they put forward, and why. How was privatization conducted in Ukraine, and how is the economy coming out of the “shadows?” Why is de-Sovietization facing so many difficulties, even though it is our number-one task because Russia has proudly absorbed all things Soviet and has no intentions of abandoning them? The symbol of this was the circumstance that Boris Yeltsin was buried to the melody of the Soviet anthem, which he himself he had rejected.
Ukraine stood a good chance of reaching new heights during the 1999 presidential elections. But no one knows how to analyze the dramatic nature of that period or formulate relevant conclusions. The leaders of the Baltic states probably clearly understood that only for a short period of time would Russia be too busy with its own problems to pay any attention to its former “provinces,” seeing as it did not have enough resources or possibilities to do so. But as soon as Russia accumulated these resources (it is a colossal country) it would get down to its usual business of gathering its lost lands. Therefore, those Ukrainians who did not understand this and opposed NATO and EU membership caused colossal damage to our national interests. (Speaking of “failing to understand”: former US vice-president Al Gore’s superb film on global warming quotes Spencer to the effect that it is difficult to expect understanding from those who get money for not understanding.
Sixteen years have rushed by very quickly, tempestuously, and stupidly. It’s too bad that society was not the focus of attention. History is far more important to us than the current political moment because people should know where we came from, why we have such and such problems, who our role model should be, who our public opinion leaders are, and what standards we need for a normal life. The point is that they have been watching TV or listening to the radio for some time and naively waiting for what the elite will say.
There were several attempts at a breakthrough in Ukrainian journalism, but the depreciation of values, which affected all of society, also affected our journalism. What had been building for years now looks like a riot of incurable ulcers. In order to return at least to the original heights, to say nothing of setting a new bar, it will now take a Herculean effort on the part of all the living and educated forces that have been preserved and developed in society.
Fortunately, these years have seen the slow and difficult growth of Ukrainian business — not only the one that stole all that it could but also the one that was creating in pangs of torment. These people also feel uncomfortable in this old political “coat,” which, if worn by communists, increasingly shows a post-Stalinist cut. In the 1990s many communists looked more like social democrats, and only those who lived like rentiers and clipped coupons of the impoverished populace are still spinning all sorts of tales to be able to continue their comfortable existence in power.
This also poses a problem because Ukraine’s first president (the Central Committee’s ideologist) dared to ban the Communist Party, while the “red manager” Leonid Kuchma chose to let it out again into the arena. He did this exclusively for his own narrow purposes in order to play, like Moscow before him, the red revenge card. Today it is obvious to everyone what role the communists are playing in the country’s political life.
It is very important for modern history to analyze what Ukrainian intellectuals and journalists were doing at the time. What key social problems were they raising? What vicious myths were they concocting about especially moral politicians? Who was consistently telling the truth about the Holodomor in those days, not today, when this has become the watchword of Our Ukraine? After all, one cannot talk about this tragedy in an empty and tongue- twisting language. One should only turn to this horrible drama in order to understand the complexity of our contemporary social problems, improve textbooks and humanitarian programs, allocate funds for making good and positive films, and revive a new energy in a nation that has been debilitated by such terrible problems. Tackling a problem does not mean talking about it incessantly. It means making an effort to make the nation more optimistic.
It is obvious that in the past two years the quality of Ukrainian journalism has considerably improved, and it may eventually shed its “shamanistic” nature. But in Russia political journalism is being severely restricted. (Here would be a good place to make a joke like Gleb Pavlovsky: “Putin is fulfilling the program of Fedor Dostoevsky, who once declared, ‘The Russian man is too broad, I would slim him down a little.’ So Putin came and did some slimming down.”) Nevertheless, scientific research, culture, and cinema (including documentaries) are having a tremendous impact on society. I am convinced that Russia (at least some Russian politicians) was very well aware of what model it was choosing for itself and what model it was “slipping” to Ukraine (as the unforgettable Gorbachev once said).
It is absurd to take offense, because this is competition. It does not mean that Russia has a lot fewer problems, but its problems are not so evident against the backdrop of the somewhat authoritarian style of carrying out reforms or nationwide projects. In Ukraine where, owing to the persistent advice and methods of our neighbors, we prematurely and unjustifiably adopted the model of a parliamentary republic, our current and thus far “controlled” chaos is a vivid example to the ordinary Russian of why democracy is harmful. I am still firmly convinced that this is an entirely different and undesirable kind of democracy.
I hope that democracy is still in our future, if we show enough patience and unflagging desire to understand our mistakes and gather those few wise people whose advice we have contrived to ignore for years. Naturally, it is journalists who should collect and point out these mistakes, and pay maximum attention to them rather than to clowns and charlatans. Otherwise, the channels of free speech, which fortunately still exist in Ukraine but do not play their inherent role, will go on doing destructive work in our minds. They resemble a room, where the water pipes have been connected to the sewer. It is time to install “filters” of culture, ethics, and common sense.
