Up to the old Soviet games

The most sad is that such attitude reflects the voters' moods. According to a Sotsis-Gallup poll, 45% of citizens regret the Soviet Union's disintegration. But this is hardly simply a desire to make the Vorkuta concentration camp part of a great common fatherland. It is simply the result of the efforts of certain incumbent leaders of independent Ukraine, thanks to whom much of the population has gained poverty instead of the welfare they expected. In the last three years the population's well-being in Ukraine has dropped from the 45th to the 95th place in the world. What do we do, if we, in Churchill's words, have too few statesmen and too many politicians thinking not about the nation's future, only of the next elections.

Nonetheless a revived Union as such will not improve the economic situation. Say, Oleksandr Moroz declared one day: "Today it is necessary to speak not so much of a political union of states, but of what the people in them want. In Russia after the creation of the Union actually there were no positive shifts."

Even the Communists hardly believe in the possibility of reviving the Union. "The Belarus option won't do, because political parties have already gained strength," People's Deputy Yevhen Marchuk is convinced.

On March 17 about fifty Kiev pensioners got the chance to nostalgically sing the Soviet Union anthem. On that day seven years ago during an all-Union referendum the majority of voters voted to preserve the USSR.

It would have been strange had the Ukrainian Leftists not used this anniversary on the eve of elections as an occasion to put forward their program. Thus by the walls of the Arsenal Factory, where Bolsheviks in 1918 revolted against Ukraine, traditional slogans for reunification with fraternal peoples resounded. However, the small number of USSR revivalists compromised the claim by the Communist Party of Ukraine that the Union's revival is supported by the majority of Ukraine's population. Moreover, the absence of CPU leaders at the meeting showed that celebrating of the referendum's seventh anniversary was for the CPU no more than a pre-election formality.

By the Way
State Duma Deputy Speaker Svetlana Goriacheva believes that the chamber will ratify the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine. She stated at a press conference on March 16, "If we ratify this agreement, Ukraine will be much closer to Russia than to NATO. If not, everything will be otherwise." She was not convinced by the opponents to ratification, who consider approval of the document equivalent to the Belovezhskaia Pushcha Accords annulling the treaty that created the USSR. "This argument is groundless. Russia has already signed similar agreements with 11 CIS states. Only Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia remain," she stressed.

Photo by Viktor Marushchenko, The Day
In Kyiv the Communists called on the aged