Guest blogger Andrey Semenov is a Russia native and specialist in international trade and energy, concentrating on Europe and Russia. A graduate of the University of Connecticut and Yale University, he is deeply familiar with the political and economic dynamics of the region, having focused on it during his master’s degree studies at Yale. He has researched the EU-Russia gas trade, language policies in Ukraine and the Balkans, shortcomings of the European Monetary Union, and NAFTA implications for Mexico, among other things. He last wrote about Russian gas policy in this space.
By Andrey Semenov
On a hot August morning of 1399 two great armies collided on the fields around the Vorksla River, on the territory of modern day Ukraine. Little is known in the West about this battle, but it decided the future of people that lived in this part of Eastern Europe. As Tatar forces inflicted a devastating defeat on the feudal armies of Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania, a country with the most inclusive political system in Europe at the time, a civilizational choice was made. From then on, Ukraine would be the battlefield between the despotic Muscovy, nomadic Tatar fiefdoms, and the West. It remains such to this very day, as riots and protests in Kiev and Crimea show.
Many people in the West are puzzled at how the situation in Ukraine is unraveling today. After protestors won, why is there dissatisfaction in the Southeastern parts of the country? If the post-Yanukovitch government is the creation of the people, then why are there so many discontents? Is Putin’s propaganda the only reason for the cleavage in the Ukrainian society that has grown tremendously over the past month?
The country Ukraine, which is being torn by ethnic, economic, and political tensions, is composed of the same territories as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A “national republic” i.e. within USSR, it was an ambiguous term. Territories were taken away and added back to it according to the whim of the Soviet totalitarian state. From the patchwork that was created by the Soviets, many problems take root.
Let's take a look at each region separately. Western Ukraine, adorned with bucolic landscapes of Carpathian Mountains, has much stronger ties with the West than the rest of Ukraine. Economically, it is a poor agricultural region, with sizable seasonal emigration to the neighboring countries. We now think of it as the cradle of modern Ukrainian nationalism, but it was in fact annexed from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR by Stalin only in 1939.
Earlier this part of the country was under the dominance of Austria-Hungarian
Polls suggest residents of the central areas of Ukraine, including Kiev, undoubtedly identify themselves as Ukrainian, with the majority considering Ukrainian their native language. Memories of centuries of Russian dominance of these areas (by the Russian Empire and then the USSR) propel them towards democratic Europe.
The situation is markedly different in the Southeast of the country. With 40-80% of population declaring Russian as their native language, these territories have a centuries-long history as part of other political entities. Things are more or less clear with Crimea, which was only transferred from Russia to Ukraine by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 without any referendum or consultations with the people. (While Khrushchev has Crimean roots and wore a traditional Ukrainian embroidered folk shirt called "vyshivanka" under his jacket to official meetings, he was a Russian and the annexation probably had little significance to Soviet officials who couldn't have imagined the USSR falling apart.)
Many Crimea residents identify themselves as Russians and are very reluctant to learn Ukrainian, a language foreign to them, which they now have to study because of a whim of an autocratic leader 60 years ago who decided to “gift” their land. Therefore it is not at all surprising that the locals resent lack of adequate representation in Kiev, capital of the Ukrainian nation-state, albeit with minorities, not a state of equals, like Belgium for example is. Muslim Crimean Tatars, another minority in Crimea complicates the ethnic landscape in an already tense region.
The situation is a bit more convoluted in the East of the country. Home to large Soviet-era steel mills and coal mines, it is the main source of cash for the crumbling Ukrainian economy. Squabbling over land in this region goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when parts of it belonged not to Ukraine or Russia, but to an autonomous region in the Russian Empire – Don Cossack Host. Industry has never been the strong suite of the Cossacks, a caste of hereditary warriors that were obliged to perform military service in return for land grants and extensive autonomy. When they decided to develop rich coal and ore deposits in the area, they leased those lands to Belgian and French industrial giants. The Belgians brought in Russian workers. Cossacks of course picked the “wrong” side in the Russian Civil War and were virtually eliminated as a cohesive ethnic group by Lenin & Co. Their autonomy ceased to exist and territory came up for grabs, part being annexed into communist Russia, part into communist Ukraine.
Another change in ethnic make-up came when Stalin’s policy of Russification kicked in and the Ukrainian population was further diluted by large numbers of ethnic Russians arrived from Russia proper. Their descendants live there to this day.
Contrary to what Putin is trying to claim in recklessly violating Ukrainian borders, Russians in the Southeast are not an oppressed minority; but they certainly do not share the same aspirations of building an ethnically unitary state, with one language, with one Ukrainian identity, that is being imposed on them by the nationalistic Western Ukraine that gained unprecedented political momentum in Kiev after the success of the Maidan protests.
When such a motley group of ethnicities and territories with completely different historical and cultural matrices is to be ruled by one government, there is only one approach – tolerance. Wide autonomies, a federalist structure, are needed instead of the unitary state that has been for decades trying to aggressively impose its uniquely ethnic Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian historical narrative on the population. If Ukrainian government wants to keep loyalty of its minority citizens, it must answer their needs, and do it loudly, actively, and without hesitation.
Defeat of an alliance of hundreds of Russian and Lithuanian nobles, seeking to create a Western counterweight to Muscovite Russia, at Battle of Vorksla more than 600 years ago, failed to bring about sweeping and painless integration of vast lands of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Western Russia into the Western orbit. Western-minded part of the remnants of the Medieval Russian state of Kievan Rus fell on the battlefield, and a much more autocratic and theocratic Muscovy would write Russian historical narrative from then on. A historical chance is presented today to reverse the civilizational choice and tie Ukraine to Europe. Many Ukrainian citizens, ethnic Russians, in Donetsk or Crimea, do have European strivings, but they cannot embrace them if the government leading them into Europe pushes nationalistic agenda. The government needs to recognize and truly include them into the political process, as there is an eager neighbor to the East, seeking his own political and territorial benefits in Ukraine’s instability.
