NOT IN YOUR LIFETIME!

All of my Moscow friends have lost their minds. Or is it just me? No, they’re not sporting orange or blue-and-white scarves, nor are they attempting to besiege the Russian government or the Ukrainian embassy. Instead, for the past several days they have been waiting with unconcealed delight and excitement for only one thing: when, oh, when will Ukraine finally break up into a “Western Galician” and “our Russian” Ukraine?

I no longer even try to counter their statements. Now that a revolution is underway in Kyiv, this colossal outburst of vital energy, I hate to waste time telling them for the umpteenth time that this cannot happen in principle. This issue has not been exhausted despite constant repetition: so when will it finally break up? Good news from parliamentary speaker Boris Gryzlov: “Ukraine is on the brink of disintegration or bloodshed.” Some credo for a mediator and peacekeeper! No, I must be the one who is crazy. In a November 29 survey, Echo of Moscow radio asked its listeners whether the breakup of Ukraine was in the interests of Russia. Fifty-two percent of respondents answered yes.

Granted, Ukraine is similar to Russia, but this doesn’t mean anything. Moreover, it is misleading to unsuspecting or indifferent people. The elections are dominating the minds of political scientists in Moscow. Yet most of them are uttering nonsense. For some reason they fail to see that they are hitting wide of the mark. Ukrainian political culture is a unique conceptual system that significantly differs from the Russian one. Only an abnormally small number of specialists have understood this, while the rest are incredibly distant from the people, the Ukrainian people, that is. Still, it was not for nothing that a number of “Odesites” used American greenbacks to reshape Russia’s television space to the liking of the Donetsk strongmen. Books on terrorism contain entire chapters on ways to paralyze the life of a big city. The best method, second only to an A-bomb, or poison in the water supply, is to pollute its television space with the products of a political spin doctor’s sick mind. A sip from such a “source” is bound to turn you into the proverbial bearded goat.

The bottom line of most television broadcasts here is that Ukraine is on the verge of a breakup.

Yet at present there are no objective reasons for the disintegration of Ukraine or even its federalization. Granted, Ukraine’s regions are very diverse. They differ along social, historical, linguistic, religious, geocultural, economic, industrial, ethnic, and subethnic lines. Moreover, there are two civilizational borders on Ukrainian territory, which run along the River Zbruch and the Crimean Mountains. In geocultural terms, we may speak about three Ukraines: western (Zakarpattia, Halychyna, Bukovyna, Volyn, Pidliashia, Priashivshchyna), eastern (also known as central: Podillia, Polissia, most of Slobozhanshchyna, and the Sub- Dnipro region that includes Kyiv, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts), and southern (also known as eastern or southeastern: Donbas, Novorosiya, and the Crimea).

Despite these rifts, during the past decade Ukrainian society reached an unspoken consensus on all these issues. People understood that despite their unbelievable diversity, these regions and their inhabitants have more things in common than not.

Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Donbas, Kyiv, Odesa, and Severodonetsk have a common ethnicity, statehood, informational and conceptual space, mythology, habitat, and social problems. They also share a special political culture based on certain “minimalist” stereotypes of Ukraine’s behavior: that of an observer tucked away in his proverbial “house out of the way” rather than a player in the international political game. From this standpoint natives of Donetsk are closer to Lvivites than to their eastern neighbors, the Don and Kuban Cossacks, many of whom are of Ukrainian descent for that matter. Now all Ukrainians have been united by their revolutionary enthusiasm, even if it is pulling them in various directions.

Strange as it may sound, language also unites them, but not Ukrainian or even Russian. They are united by their Russo-Ukrainian bilingualism. In this sense Ukrainians are closely tied to one another and separated from the outside world. For some, Ukrainian is their “first mother tongue” and Russian their “second mother tongue,” and vice versa for others. The main thing is that both of them are their native languages.

The current split in Ukraine in terms of support for Yushchenko or Yanukovych is largely due to the fact that Yushchenko was barred from the information space of the eastern oblasts, while his image was demonized by such labels as “nationalist,” “enemy of the Russian language,” “enemy of Orthodoxy,” “enemy of Donetsk industry,” “American spy,” and so on and so forth. Naturally, this division warms the hearts of many Russians, while some Ukrainians doubt that all of them have this organ.

If he wishes, the future president (as long as it’s not Yanukovych) will be able to eliminate the consequences of the current electoral split by means of intelligent words and political deeds, using one of the nationwide television channels for a month or two as his mouthpiece.

By all accounts, separatist and federalist ideas don’t hold water in Ukraine, either at the level of regional elites or public sentiment. The chief masterminds of the federalization of Ukraine are Russian politicians and spin doctors. Notably, some of them do not hide the ultimate goal of federalization-to undermine Ukraine’s statehood. No federation is necessary to embrace all the regional and subethnic aspects of Ukraine. All of this can be done within the framework of the existing unitary system of government. Ukraine is still reeling from its “birth trauma”-a genetically conditioned crisis of authority. A federal system would turn it into an uncontrolled social jumble.

Separatism with its center in Severodonetsk was the response of Yanukovych and his devoted eastern elites to the seemingly illegal actions by the authorities in Ukraine’s western regions, such as the declaration of the exclusive right to the airspace above the so- called “Lviv area.” But these were emotions, not politics or law for that matter. Meanwhile, the Donetsk and Luhansk referendums cannot have any legal effect. Under Paragraph 72 of the Ukrainian Constitution, at least three million signatures in two- thirds of the nation’s regions with at least 100,000 signatures in each region are required to call a nationwide referendum. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed federalization is merely emotional euphoria, not law. This was the last argument put forward by the Donetsk strongmen. To change the unitary system of government into a federal one, they should start by rewriting the Constitution. Talk of a possible annexation of eastern Ukrainian lands to Russia is ridiculous, and not only because no one wants to serve as cannon fodder in Chechnya, but because at the very least Russia, on a par with the U.S. and UN, provided guarantees for Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine’s agreement to scrap its nuclear arsenal in the early 1990s.

However, there is a real problem that sparks existentialist fear within the population and especially the elite of Donbas, i.e., throughout most of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Donbas could function normally only within the USSR, where the obviously unprofitable nature of the economy was not so much visible as spread over the entire uncompetitive Soviet economy. The industrial complex in this region has been a heavy burden on Ukraine. However, the liberal, utilitarian approach to Donbas on Kyiv’s part (“only profitable enterprises can stay”) is the materialization of most of the fears that haunt the man in the street in Donbas. A free, autonomous Donbas is headed for economic, industrial, technological, and social collapse. Apparently, everyone realizes this, especially the residents of Donetsk. The problem of Donbas requires an integrated, conservative approach. For example, Polish coal is several times cheaper than coal from the Donbas. However, if consumers switched to cheaper coal, the entire coal industry of Ukraine would go bankrupt. Meanwhile, the price structure of cheap foreign coal does not envision funds needed for the region’s social reorientation and rehabilitation. Simply put, if Viktor Yushchenko wins, he must figure out the nature of the most “inorganic” of Ukraine’s regions and help it blend organically with the nation’s economy. This is a colossal task, especially given the current circumstances, but there is no other way.

Separatist trends occasionally surface among the intelligentsia, and this may happen in the west, east, north, or in the Crimea, but never in central Ukraine. The main hypothesis of Halychyna separatists, who are trying to actualize the identity of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, is that without the “larger Ukraine” we will build a “true” Ukrainian state sooner and will be admitted to the EU faster. The main hypothesis of southern separatists is that Odesa and Novorosiya can exist independently by utilizing its maritime capabilities. The main hypothesis of eastern separatists, who tried building on the ideology of the once existing republic of Donetsk and Kryvy Rih, is that while they provide most of the nation’s GDP they are treated as a second-rate region, and that’s why they would be better off on their own.

There is also Carpathian-Ruthenian separatism, which rests on the belief that the Transcarpathian Boiky and Hutsuls form a special sub-ethnic group (or even a separate ethnic group) of Carpathian Ruthenians, who feel a special spiritual and genetic kinship with Russians. This movement is limited, however, because of the small size of Zakarpattia oblast. Meanwhile, the significant percentage of votes cast for Yanukovych in Zakarpattia is not the result of this Carpathian-Ruthenian ideology but effective administrative resources.

Only looking from Moscow one can mistake Donetsk for Dnipropetrovsk, as Zhirinovsky has. Meanwhile, there is a strong feeling in Ukraine that it is no accident that all these territories were united in a single nation and that such contiguity has a very important and deeper meaning — much deeper than the arbitrary rule of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev, who laid the foundations of Ukraine’s current geography.

The best solution for Ukraine is not federalization, confederalization, or disintegration into two countries, but a “blossoming complexity”— the deepening of regional identities combined with the strengthening of all-Ukrainian national identity.

Meanwhile, the Russian question in the southern direction is about understanding what kind of Ukraine Russia wants to see: weak and amorphous or strong and politically united. This is a difficult question, of course, but an extremely urgent one.

Apropos of the favorite topic for the geopolitical discussions of my Ukrainian friends (not all of them, thank God!). Many of them think, “When will Russia finally break up?” When will the hateful Chinese cross the border and flood half of Siberia and the Far East with their mass of humanity? When will the Chechens, Tatars, Dagestanis, Ingushetians, and Kuban Cossacks so dear to Ukrainians and the other peoples of Great Eurasia build their own self-sufficient states on the outskirts of Great Muscovy? As they see it, the latter should be left with Moscow, Vladimir, Tula, Tver, Smolensk, Kaluga, and Yaroslavl oblasts or, in other words, the central coverage zone of the Beeline cellular operator, so that Russians would live in a country without intranet roaming zones, as is the case in Ukraine.

This is how explosive and mutually contentious Slavic friendship really is.