"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT"
An International Newsletter
In-Depth Ukrainian News, Analysis, and Commentary

"The Art of Ukrainian History, Culture, Arts, Business, Religion,
Sports, Government, and Politics, in Ukraine and Around the World"

"THE ACTION UKRAINE REPORT" - Number 440
morganw@patriot.net, ArtUkraine.com@starpower.net
Washington, D.C. and Kyiv, Ukraine, SATURDAY, March 12, 2005

-----INDEX OF ARTICLES-----
"Major International News Headlines and Articles"

1. THE "ORANGE REVOLUTION"
Analysis and Implications of the 2004 Presidential Election in Ukraine
Lecture by Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Third Annual Stasiuk-Cambridge Lecture on Contemporary Ukraine
Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, 25 February 2005
Published by The Ukraine List (UKL) #340
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Wednesday, 9 March 2005

2. CUN INITIATING DECLARATION OF MAY 8 AS EUROPEAN LIBERATION DAY
Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2005

3. MEDVEDCHUK CRITICIZES IDEA OF CANCELING MAY 9 MILITARY PARADE
Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2005

4. BALTIC STATES AGONISE OVER PUTIN'S INVITATION
Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Luke Harding in Berlin
The Guardian, London, UK, Monday, March 7, 2005

5. RUSSIA RETALIATES AFTER BALTIC SNUB OVER WWII ANNIVERSARY
Associated Press, Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 9, 2005

6. BUSH TO MEET RUSSIAN PRESIDENT ON 60TH VE-DAY IN MOSCOW
Itar-Tass, Moscow, Russia, Monday, March 7, 2005

7. NOT GENOCIDE BEHIND KATYN MASSACRE: RUSSIAN PROSECUTOR
RIA Novosti, Moscow, Russia, Fri, March 11, 2005

8. YUSHCHENKO SUGGESTS CHARITY FUND PRYIATELI BATURYNA
To Restore Palace of Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovskyi, Baturyn, Ukraine
Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2005

9. THE "SIXTIERS" LOOKING INTO THE PAST AND FUTURE
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Pavlo Tychyna, Vasyl Stus, and Borys
Antonenko-Davydovych in the life of Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska
New 'Book of Memories' to be published soon
Interview with literary critic Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska
Interview by Larysa Ivshyna, Klara Gudzyk, Ihor Siundukov,
Nadiya Tysiachna, The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #7
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 1, 2005
=================================================================
1. THE "ORANGE REVOLUTION"
Analysis and Implications of the 2004 Presidential Election in
Ukraine

Lecture by Dominique Arel, Chair of Ukrainian Studies
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Third Annual Stasiuk-Cambridge Lecture on Contemporary Ukraine
Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, 25 February 2005
Published by The Ukraine List (UKL) #340
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Wednesday, 9 March 2005

The Orange Revolution was the most momentous political event in Eastern
Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it rests on a paradox. The
Revolution was about the creation of a political nation, about changing the
nature of the political regime in Ukraine, and redirecting the arrows of
political development towards an "open society" which, in the current
political vocabulary, is synonymous with one word: Europe. And yet, the
Orange Revolution owes its existence to a strong national movement in
Ukraine. National as in nationalism.

The "minority faith," to use the title of a well-known book by a British
professor, did not lead "nowhere," to use the title of a rather infamous
article by a former American diplomat. The national faith actually became
an electoral majority, although in unexpected ways, and its success in
achieving the hardest of feats, organized and sustained collective action,
cracked the old regime down the middle. We have come a long way since Hans
Kohn, for whom nationalism in the East was all emotion and irrationality,
and a threat to an open society. The Orange Revolution took place in what
for Kohn was the deep East, since his East began at the French-German
border. And yet, if Ukraine is now on the road to an open society, it is
largely thanks to the strength of its nationalism.

The complicating factor is that Ukrainian society is suffering a severe
crisis of legitimacy. The non-Orange part of the electorate-44 percent, in
the final round of elections on December 26-refuses to accept that the
popular uprising on Kyiv's Central Square (the Maidan) was legitimate. The
Orange electorate-just a touch over the majority threshold, at 52%-refuses
to accept non-Orange grievances as legitimate. This could be dismissed as
the normal dynamics of a winner/loser electoral outcome, except for the
fact that the Orange and non-Orange constituencies are strikingly polarized
geographically.

Ukraine had been geographically polarized once, during the last round of
presidential election that brought Leonid Kuchma to power in 1994. The fact
of the matter is, Ukraine is far more polarized now than it was in 1994. At
the same time, and this is not a contradiction, as I will explain later,
the huge level of rejection of Viktor Yushchenko in Eastern Ukraine is
virtually identical to that of Leonid Kravchuk in 1994, at a time when
there was no Orange Revolution. I would venture to say that there is
something deeper at work, namely, the fear of exclusion. In this respect,
the fact that the new Cabinet of Ministers virtually excludes Eastern
Ukraine, a first since the creation of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, is
quite significant.

The Orange Revolution began on 22 November 2004, when it became clear
that the old regime had stolen the election. Falsifying an electoral outcome
in a competitive context is an art, but there was nothing artful in how
Donetsk, the power base of then Prime Minister Yanukovych, falsified the
results. Donetsk reported an overwhelming majority for Yanukovych (96
percent) which, as such, was not entirely implausible, since similar
near-unanimous support for Yushchenko could be found in the Galician
provinces of Western Ukraine. Where Donetsk overreached was in reporting
an enormous turnout of 97 percent, 10 percent higher than any other oblast
outside of the Donbas, 16 percent higher than the national average, and 19
percent higher than the turnout obtained in the same Donetsk oblast just
three weeks earlier.

What a statistician would cautiously call implausible, the Maidan and, in
quick succession, Western governments called impossible. At least
three-quarters of a million votes had been fabricated in Donbas (Donetsk
and neighboring Luhansk) and that alone called into question the official
small lead (2.9 percent) enjoyed by Yanukovych in the national results.
Sure enough, there were also allegations of thousands of violations
throughout eastern and southern Ukraine. In a large country, the impact of
these violations in local precincts on the aggregate national result is
difficult to assess. Evidence based on taped phone conversations soon
surfaced that the Presidential Administration had intercepted results sent
by territorial electoral commissions and altered them before they were
eventually received by the Central Electoral Commission. Establishing the
authenticity of taped conversations, however, takes time.

What jolted Western governments and the OSCE in refusing to recognize
the result of this second round, and most likely served as the initial
impetus for people to fill the Maidan, was the obvious and gross violation
in Donetsk. One Russian in Donetsk, who was observing the election in
Yanukovych country for a European organization, was shocked less by the
violations per se, than the fact that they were committed so openly and
brazenly. This arrogance-let's call it the hubris of
incompetence-ultimately doomed the regime.

But for that to happen, you needed sustained social pressure. And it is
exactly at that point that absolutely everybody, beginning with Yushchenko,
was in the dark. And this is why all these stories about the Orange
Revolution being the result of Western intervention, while containing a
grain of truth, ultimately miss the point by a wide margin. The backbone of
Orange, the PORA student movement, was indeed impressively organized,
and no doubt greatly benefited from the training it received from Serbian
and Georgian colleagues, as well as from American foundations. Sustaining
a Tent City in downtown Kyiv costs money, and a fair amount of it, but it is
far more likely that these resources came from a group of wealthy
Yushchenko allies, who, incidentally, now form the core of Tymoshenko's
Cabinet, than from the ubiquitous Uncle Sam. There was a lot of money
circulating in Ukraine, and not all in the camp of the Yanukovych-aligned
oligarchs.

Yet what everybody expected was for a relatively small following to disrupt
business as usual in the center, much like the small demonstrations of
Ukraine Without Kuchma four years earlier, during the Gongadze crisis, with
pressure placed on Western powers not to recognize the election. What
happened instead was a mass outpouring on the streets and swelling numbers,
instead of diminishing ones. One can dispute how many exactly there were in
the streets, but one had only to look at the Maidan to think Berlin, Prague
and Bucharest 1989. Or Belgrade 2000, and Tbilisi 2002. As the saying goes
in my native language, a picture is worth a thousand words.

In the perspective of rational choice analysts, the "tipping point" had
been reached, the point after which the benefits of engaging in collective
action surpass the costs. That, no one could foresee. It wasn't supposed to
happen in Ukraine. All the seminars in Ukrainian studies I had attended in
the past few years, including one I hosted a month before the second round,
had concurred on one thing: civil society in Ukraine is too weak to stand
up to the rise of a post-Soviet authoritarian regime. Prague 1989 in Kyiv?
Not in your wildest dreams. And yet it happened. The Revolution was first
and foremost a revelation: that Ukrainian society had in fact profoundly
changed since independence.

With a mass, but peaceful uprising in downtown Kyiv, the nerve center of
the government, the old regime elites, rather than Western governments,
were the ones who came under massive pressure. With so many people in the
streets, and the obvious falsification in Donetsk, the decision by the West
not to recognize results was far easier to make, even though France and
Germany, ever mindful of their oil interests in Orange-challenged Russia,
could have lived without the problem. From that point on, with the tipping
point passed in terms of street demonstrations, and with Ukraine shunned by
the West, the fate of the Orange Revolution rested on the cohesion of the
old regime elite. As the Yale political scientist Keith Darden argues in
The Blackmail State, the old regime (which I am using here as a shorthand,
but which in fact was not that old, but rather the peculiar creation of
a post-Soviet environment) was all about the subversion of state
institutions (security, fiscal, regional, educational) to the benefit of
one particular leader and his coterie.

In one sense, the rise of Our Ukraine, Yushchenko's political vehicle, is
the story of individual officials who served the Kuchma regime and were
either forced out, or became disillusioned, and then banded together to
challenge the regime, beginning with Yushchenko himself, followed by Yulia
Tymoshenko, current Vice-Premier Anatolii Kinakh, and the list is
relatively long. The Orange Revolution, on the other hand, is the story of
high-powered elites who defected from the Kuchma regime while still in
control of their institutions. Prior to the first round, only Volodymyr
Lytvyn, a former Kuchma Chief of Staff who was supposed to have become
his henchman as parliamentary Speaker, was on the verge of defecting, a
predilection that was sealed on November 27, when parliament voted not to
recognize the second round.

Under street pressure, the defections snowballed. University rectors
challenged the regime and allowed their students to demonstrate. Regional
councils proclaimed they would not acknowledge the results. Diplomats
posted abroad denounced the falsification. Media magnates, the so-called
"oligarchs," began to loosen the administration's control of their news
broadcasts. Crucially, the security forces refused to follow orders to use
force. The Western media reported that such an order had been given, when
the Revolution was a week-old, and that the SBU made it clear that it would
confront Army or Interior Ministry troops if it had to. Whether an order
was actually given remains to be investigated, yet, by all indications, the
regime knew, by the second week, that it could no longer count on the
support of its security service. The last straw was the decision of the
Supreme Court invalidating the second round and ordering a third one, in
defiance of the expressed preference of President Kuchma.

Before Orange, Ukraine watchers knew that whether Ukraine would turn the
corner would be contingent on whether a critical mass of elites would
defect from the old regime. What would trigger this spiral of defections
was impossible to predict. Which is another way of saying that Orange was
impossible to predict. What is Orange? The Orange Revolution is not about
policy issues that are normally front and center in electoral contests, but
about a process. It is neither about a joyful acceptance of the neo-liberal
economic model, nor about American geostrategic interests, but rather about
the systemic abuse of executive power in Ukraine, and the disingenuousness
of proclaiming a strategic course of European integration, while regressing
on all political, economic, and legal indicators of Europeanness. The
Orange Revolution is about the creation of a civil society in real time,
before our eyes, in the sense that, for the first time in Ukrainian
history, an organized society acted as a counter-weight to the state.
Twelve days of massive demonstrations, between November 22 and
December 3 (the day the Court ruled), cannot be fabricated.

But where did this civil society come from? We still know little about the
social foundations of Orange, and no doubt sociological and anthropological
studies will do much to inform our understanding in the years ahead. But
two factors appear to have played a critical role: the generational and the
national. Orange began with PORA, a group of students who were children or
teenagers at the time of independence, and ended with the nomination of
what appears to be the youngest Cabinet since the Bolshevik Revolution,
with an average age of 44. To be sure, people of all ages were on Maidan,
and the grandmothers, the babulias, were out there in full force.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that the driving force, both at ground
level and at central command, was a generation that had not been in a
position of authority during the Soviet era. That generation, we can
surmise, is anything but a homo sovieticus in how it views the state. This
is most disturbing to neighboring autocrats, beginning with Russia, in
their assessment of the export potential of the Orange Revolution. Given a
similar opportunity, why would the young, post-Soviet, generation in Russia
behave any differently?

The mitigating factor, however, is nationalism. Nationalism is a term of
opprobrium to many, and is very often used selectively. Yet it has value as
a concept of comparative political analysis. Let me be very clear as to
what I mean here. Nationalism is a claim of political sovereignty based on
a claim of cultural distinctiveness. The French model of the nation is
generally presented as contradicting this assertion but, in the last
analysis, the French defined the French as whoever spoke French and nothing
else. They were, and remain, quite intolerant on the issue of linguistic
diversity. In Ukraine, nationalism is a factor because one constituency is
far more cohesive than another in its vision of the nature of Ukrainian
cultural distinctiveness. That constituency is strongest in Western
Ukraine, territories that were not part of a Russian Imperial or Soviet
state until the Second World War (with one regional semi-exception).
Western Ukrainians did not fill the square on their own, but there is
little doubt that they, Galicians in particular, were overrepresented, in
the backbone of Maidan. Remove them from the equation and you have a
serious organizational problem.

But leave them alone on the square and you have an even bigger problem.
The Orange Revolution is not a Galician coup. It is rather about Western
Ukrainians and Central Ukrainians coming together for the first time for
real, rather than symbolically, as happened in 1919. In electoral
arithmetic, there is no question, as I will show in a moment, that
Yushchenko's breakthrough was specifically in Central Ukraine. On Maidan,
although we don't yet have access to systematic data, one has to assume
that the bulk of non-Western Ukrainian demonstrators were from areas of
Central Ukraine. At the elite level, again the composition of the new
Ukrainian Cabinet is instructive. Of the 23 ministers, only four are from
the East, but only four are from the West. Nearly two-thirds are from
Central Ukraine. The Donbas media has frequently raised the specter of
Galicia taking over Ukraine, but a single minister is actually from
Galicia. It is Central Ukraine that now dominates Ukrainian politics.

Why is this important? The civil society revealed by the Orange Revolution
has taken root precisely in the areas where Ukrainian national
consciousness is more cohesive. Historically, of course, nationalism can
graft itself on any political ideology. In interwar Western Ukraine,
Ukrainian nationalism had appropriated for itself an authoritarian model of
society that was rampant in Central Europe. In the early years of
independence, mainstream nationalists appeared to be more interested in the
trappings of statehood, than about substantive reforms. But the Kuchmagate
scandal, four years ago, revealed that the only constituency capable of
presenting an organized resistance to the subversion of democracy, even if
unsuccessful at the time, were the nationalists. The fringe elements
notwithstanding, the nationalists, in that defining moment, revealed
themselves to be democrats, in fact, the only democrats.

The question we have to ask ourselves is why is it that people mobilized,
then and now, in some regions (West and Center), and not others (East and
South)? My answer has to do with how people relate to their national
identity. Ukrainians in Central and Western Ukraine have a more cohesive
view of their identity, and this greater sense of solidarity is a
facilitating factor in their ability to undertake collective action.
Nationalism acts a vehicle for the realization of a project, and that
project has become that of an open society, as we know it in Europe. It is
high time for us to leave the experience of "integral" nationalism in the
closet, in the historical closet-once again, fringe outbursts
notwithstanding. Nationalism produced the Orange Revolution which, as I
said at the outset, took the form of a popular uprising for an open society.

But Orange conquered only half of the country, and this half is highly
concentrated geographically. What are the facts about this polarization?
Ukraine is divided into twenty-seven territories: twenty-four provinces or
oblasts, one autonomous republic (Crimea), and two cities with a special
territorial status (Kyiv, the capital, and the naval port of Sevastopol,
whose facilities are leased to the Russian Fleet). In the final round of
December 26, Yanukovych won in ten territories, comprising just under half
of the national electorate (48 percent). Yushchenko won in seventeen
territories, comprising just over the other half (52 percent). In the
territories that he carried, Yanukovych received 75 percent of the vote. In
the territories carried by Yushchenko, his score was 80 percent. In only
one of all twenty-seven territories was the vote relatively close: the
Southern oblast of Kherson, where Yanukovych beat Yushchenko 51 percent
to 43 percent. In all other twenty-six territories, the margin of victory by
one or the other candidate was enormous. After Kherson, the closest race
in the whole country was in Kirovohrad, a Central Ukrainian oblast which
straddles the Center and the South (partly located in an area that was
historically known as Novorossia), where Yushchenko defeated Yanukovych
by 31 percentage points, 63 percent to 32 percent, which in any country
would be considered a landslide.

Another way to look at it is to divide Ukraine into regions. There is an
interesting debate in the literature as to how best to delineate Ukraine's
regions, but for the sake of continuity here, let me resort to a dividing
principle that I have been using for a decade, focused on five regions,
with Kyiv in brackets. In this grouping, the Yanukovych zone is divided
into an industrial East and a semi-industrial, semi-agricultural South,
while the predominantly agricultural Yushchenko zone is divided into three
regions according to their distinct periods of incorporations into a
Moscow-dominated state: the Left Bank (1640s), the Right Bank (1790s), and
the West (1940s). The Kyiv metropolis, as an industrial magnet, is a huge
exception in this agricultural landscape. On December 26, Yanukovych
carried 79 percent of the East and 70 percent of the South, while
Yushchenko carried 72 percent of the Left Bank, 78 percent of Kyiv, 78
percent of the Right Bank, and 89 percent of the West.

The geographical polarization is stark, and it is starker than it was ten
years ago. In the presidential election of July 1994, former Prime Minister
Leonid Kuchma unexpectedly edged incumbent Leonid Kravchuk by six
percentage points, 51 percent to 45 percent. The election was not about
democracy, as it took place in a relatively fair and free fashion, and the
legitimacy of Kuchma's victory was not contested. A comparison of the
regional breakdown of the vote with the 2004 election is instructive. The
support for Kuchma and Kravchuk, compared to Yanukovych and Yushchenko,
was virtually the same in 1994 and 2004 for the East, South, and West: 75
percent for the winner in the East and South, 90 percent for the winner in
the West. Nearly all the changes took place at the Center-Left and Right
Bank, and in the capital. The Left Bank declared itself two to one in favor
of Kuchma (66 percent to 31 percent), and that was the biggest puzzle at
the time. It now voted for Yushchenko three to one (72 percent to 24
percent). The Right Bank evolved from a relatively close contest (54
percent to 42 percent in favor of Kravchuk) into a sweep, four to one (78
percent to 19 percent) for Yushchenko. Critics of the polarization model
argued back then that the Right Bank acted as a buffer between the
polarized East and West. But there is no such buffer anymore, except for
tiny Kherson.

Between 1994 and 2004, one social stratum significantly altered its
electoral orientation: the peasantry. Until recently, the peasantry was
nationally-oriented only in Western Ukraine, that is, in areas that did no
experience the social cataclysms of collectivization and famine in the
1930s. In the agricultural heartland of Central Ukraine, the peasantry
tended to vote Socialist or Communist. It was 1917-1918 all over again,
although for different reasons: the national movement conquered the West,
the capital and some urban areas of the Center, but could not penetrate the
countryside. Yushchenko's greatest achievement was his capacity to rally
rural Ukraine under his banner. It began with the parliamentary elections
of 2002 and became hegemonic with the final round of the 2004 presidential
saga.

What we don't know yet is how exactly the peasantry became Orange. Once
again, serious field research is required. There are two possible story
lines. The first is the activation of a social class that had essentially
been broken in the 1930s. In the past decade, the peasantry may have
developed a political consciousness which makes it critical of the
authorities and receptive to the Orange message. The peasantry may not have
been stomping the ground on Maidan in November-December, but it is its
determination to vote for change that sealed the fate of the Old Regime.
For the first time in Ukrainian history, the peasantry may have become a
politically active component of the emerging political nation.

The second possible explanation focuses on elites. Perhaps the peasantry,
as a legacy of the 1930s, and as a reflection of its economic dependence,
is still, on the whole, largely obedient to local authorities, but what
changed in the past decade is how local authorities orient themselves. With
all the talk about how "administrative resources," that is, the improper
use of local administrative offices to promote the candidate of the regime,
distorted the results of the first round of election in October 2004-a
round that already produced a geographically polarized result, with the
polarization increasing in each round-no one could satisfactorily explain
to me why adminresursy would allegedly work in Eastern and Southern
Ukraine, but not elsewhere. Particularly under conditions where all local
administrations were under massive pressure from the center to produce
results favoring Yanukovych, and where Yushchenko was shut out from the
main TV channels that are broadcast nationally, i.e. in all regions. Why
couldn't the blackmail state blackmail everybody, especially in remote
rural areas?

In a seminal article, the American political scientist Lucan Way argued
that the project of autocratic restoration, seemingly successful in Russia,
faced a structural problem in Ukraine, namely the division of its elites
along the national question. In spite of the blackmail state, before
Orange, Ukraine had a parliament more autonomous than in Russia and an
electoral process far more contested than in Russia. For Way, Ukraine had
developed into a case of "democracy by default," a democracy whose rules
were constantly assaulted by the executive branch, but which was strong
enough to prevent the regime from safely controlling the results of an
election in its favor. Back in October 2004, no one could predict the
Orange Revolution, but no one either, including the regime itself, could
predict exactly how the election would play out. (The doomsayers of the
Ukrainian intelligentsia were predicting a dark apocalypse, and they were
proven spectacularly wrong). This was the real story, pre-Orange: despite
the Herculean efforts by the Kuchma regime to subvert the election, they
could not prevent a challenger from making a credible bid to win. That
degree of pluralism in the system, annihilated in Belarus, considerably
enfeebled in Russia, but intriguingly potent in Moldova and Ukraine, Way
ascribed to the existence of a structural division at the elite level over
nationalism. The neo-Soviet state was unable to fully re-centralize, to
reestablish what Russians and Ukrainians call the "vertikal" of state
power, because of an incentive for elites to coalesce around two poles, an
incentive that instilled a degree of pluralism in the system, "by default."

Why were elites in rural Ukraine able to withstand the infamous
adminresursy pressures from the center? Is it because they sensed a
profound change of allegiance among their constituents? Or is there
something else at work that make them receptive to the Orange discourse?
This is where I would like to introduce the variable of language. Ukraine
is a bilingual country-not as a matter of state policy, but in terms of
sociological observations-whose inhabitants have a complex relationship
with language. Ukrainians make distinctions between the language they
identify with, the language they actually prefer to speak when given the
opportunity, and the language they would like their children to learn in
school. What we know is that there is a remarkable correlation between
language of preference and support for Yanukovych or Yushchenko in regions.

In Central and Western Ukraine, the proportion of people using Ukrainian as
their language of preference is within the range of 75-80 percent, and
their support for Yushchenko is within the same range. In Eastern and
Southern Ukraine, 75 to 80 percent of the people prefer to speak Russian,
and the support for Yanukovych is similarly within that range. The Orange
Revolution caught fire in Ukrainian-speaking areas, where "speaking"
refers to empirical behaviour, rather than symbolic attachment. Using the
empirical criteria, the peasantry in Central Ukraine, the group that
brought Yushchenko to victory, is 99 percent Ukrainian-speaking. Which
brings us back to our question. What makes the peasantry and/or the rural
elite recipient to an Orange message? Could it have to do with the fact
their world is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking?

Between the second and third rounds of election, the national media opened
up, as observers noted that the coverage of the two campaigns became
balanced, and Yanukovych, suddenly on leave from his post of Prime
Minister, lost the support of the much-vaunted administrative resources.
Remarkably enough, three weeks of Orange fever had no discernable effect
in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The fabricated turnout of Donetsk was
readjusted, to be sure, plunging from 97 percent to 84 percent, still seven
percent higher than the national average, but this time with plausibility.

Support for Yanukovych remained the same in these predominantly urban areas
and whatever little change there was occurred, once again, in rural areas.
In Central Ukraine, however, the Yanukovych vote, already quite low,
collapsed. Once the turnout falsification in Donetsk was accounted for, the
main difference between the second and third round was the Orange zone
becoming even more Orange, furthering the polarization.

What should we make of this polarization? One approach in Ukrainian studies
is to dismiss it as illegitimate, that is to say, to consider, on the one
hand, the vote for Yushchenko in the third round as reflecting the true
preferences of his electors, while, on the other hand, refusing to consider
the vote for Yanukovych as reflecting the true preferences of his own
electors. In other words, the Yushchenko vote is valid, but the Yanukovych
vote is questionable. But what exactly is the point of sending planeloads
of foreign observers (more than 12,000, apparently), deploying them
predominantly in the Yanukovych zone, having the international monitoring
organizations they were working with, and even the indigenous Committee of
Voters, declare the process fair and free, yet still somehow cling to the
notion that the Yanukovych vote was illegitimately inflated? By any
reasonable standards, no systematic pattern of falsification, enough to
significantly impact on the national vote, was uncovered in the third
round. Nevertheless, once turnout was controlled for, the preference for
Yanukovych in the East and South remained identical to what it had been
on November 21.

A variation of the argument, one that appears to animate Prime Minister
Tymoshenko and probably President Yushchenko, goes like this: While the
voting count in the third round was legitimate, the conditions that led
people to vote the way they did were not. Civil society has not taken root
in Eastern and Southern Ukraine and people are far more vulnerable to being
manipulated by their elites. The Yanukovych vote is illegitimate because it
is the product of a closed society. Opening up the system will alter
significantly popular preferences in the East and this will take care of
the polarization. Since the drive for an open society originates from
Central and Western Ukraine, systemic reform must be imposed from outside
Eastern Ukraine. The corollary of this premise is the formation of a
Cabinet not dominated by Eastern Ukrainians, which never happened before.

Four of twenty-three ministers were born or lived a long portion of their
life in Eastern or Southern Ukraine, two of whom, including the Prime
Minister, from a coalition (the Tymoshenko Bloc) which received a grand
total of 4 percent of the vote in its homebase of Dnipropetrovsk in the
parliamentary elections of 2002. Politicians recognized by the Eastern
electorate as representing them are virtually absent from the Cabinet.

This approach certainly has merits, as one is struck by how asymmetrical
the Yanukovych and Yushchenko zones are in terms of their capacity for
social organization. If civil society revealed itself in Central Ukraine
during the Orange Revolution, it hardly exists in the East and South. It is
as if Ukraine is inhabited by two different worlds: one aiming to break
with the Soviet societal model, the other, even if undergoing profound
economic changes, still devoid of initiative vis-à-vis the state. What
makes its population so resistant to change? After all, we are talking
about a highly educated population, by world standards. What makes its
younger generation apparently less open to change than its counterpart in
Central and Western Ukraine?

I would suggest that we look beyond the assumption of people not yet
realizing what their true interests are and factor in the national
question. The geographical polarization in Ukraine is not ethnic. The
majority of the population in Eastern and Southern Ukraine has internalized
a Ukrainian identity, as promoted by Soviet nationality policy. This is why
the specter of separatism is nonsense, since it is hard to imagine why
people who self-identify as Ukrainians would want to separate from a
territory called Ukraine, and which they have essentially run for eighty
years. The one exception here is Crimea, where ethnic Russians still form
the majority, and where a secessionist movement had real potential in the
1990s. But Crimea remained passive throughout Orange and its turnout,
contrary to the Donbas, was lower than the national average.

Eastern Ukrainians call themselves Ukrainians, but not in the same way as
Western Ukrainians do. [As a shorthand here, "Eastern" will refer to
Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, while "Western" will refer to Central and
Western Ukrainians] Eastern Ukrainians tend not to think of identity in
exclusive terms. In the Soviet era, they felt simultaneously Ukrainian and
Soviet. With the disappearance of the Soviet identity, they feel adrift,
unsure of where to affix their Ukrainian identity. Western Ukrainians, by
contrast, think far more in exclusive terms. And the last decade may very
well have crystallized Ukrainian identity in Central Ukraine. What I am
emphasizing here is national identity cohesion, how people situate their
identity in the larger whole. Cohesion breeds self-confidence. And
self-confidence generates a whole different way of dealing with Russia,
something the Russian government, and Russians more generally, are not
accustomed to, and something Eastern Ukrainians are not comfortable with.

Eastern Ukrainians are not Russians, but in how they interpret their past
and future, they feel intimately connected to Russia. Western Ukrainians do
not feel that connection, or if they do, to a far lesser degree. The crux
of the matter is this. Western Ukrainians tend to believe that this
two-layered sense of identity in the East can be remodeled. This is what
could be called "nation-building" in the ethnic sense; in the language of
national activists: making "true" Ukrainians out of Eastern Ukrainians. But
it could very well be that there is something resilient in the Eastern
regional experience that make this project illusory. This is not a matter
of language per se, but of language situated in a given historical region.
Eastern Ukrainians look at the Orange Revolution through the prism of their
perceived regional experience, and the language they speak, Russian,
becomes a symbol of that self-perception. They reject Orange, not because
they are innately inimical to the project of an open society, but because
of a sense that this is a project that excludes them.

The Orange Revolution was about the birth of the Ukrainian political
nation, that is, of the capacity for a population to organize independently
of the state and, in times of crisis, to defy the state. Yet this political
nation is, as of yet, circumscribed to specific historical regions: the
West and the Center. Ukraine's biggest challenge, in the years ahead, is to
extend the political nation to the East and South, to make that population
feel that it belongs to Ukraine in an active sense, to put substance to
their citizenship (or civic identity). But inclusion in the political
nation can hardly come from a unilateral vision of how national identity
ought to be construed. If Russians in Russia have to understand that they
cannot unilaterally impose their vision of Ukrainian identity on
Ukrainians, Western Ukrainians [again, used as a shorthand for Western and
Central] cannot unilaterally impose their vision of Ukrainian identity on
Eastern Ukrainians. This is all about accommodating identity-based
differences. Perhaps we should start deciphering all these claims for
"federalism" in the East as a codeword for accommodation. What we need to
bear in mind is that Eastern Ukrainians may interpret the first signals of
post-Orange-with Yushchenko outlawing the very word "federalism" and the
Tymoshenko Cabinet including no one deemed by the East as representative
of the region-as a self-fulfilling prophecy: the heroes of the Orange
Revolution are bent on excluding them. -30-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail: darel@uottawa.ca
=================================================================
2. CUN INITIATING DECLARATION OF MAY 8 AS EUROPEAN LIBERATION DAY

Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 11, 2005

KYIV - The Lviv regional chapter of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists
(CUN) is initiating declaration of May 8 as the Day of Liberation of Europe.
The regional chapter of CUN announced this in a statement. "Moscow is
organizing pompous commemoration of its victory, the road to which was
strewn with the bodies of many nations and nationalities of Europe," the
statement states.

It further states that the military operations on the territory of western
Ukraine continued for a long time after the end of the Great Patriotic War.
"The Kremlin, after defeating the brown Reichstag, continued to fight
against the peoples of the 'Union of Indivisible Republics of the Free,'"
the statement says. According to CUN, May 9 is not a holiday for Ukrainians.

As Ukrainian News earlier reported, during a visit to Lviv in February,
President Viktor Yuschenko initiated reconciliation talks between fighters
of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent
Army and the fighters of the Soviet Army.

In early March, Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mykola
Tomenko called for cancellation of the military parade on May 9, the day of
commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has invited Yuschenko to participate in
events commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War in
Moscow on May 9. -30- [The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
=================================================================
3. MEDVEDCHUK CRITICIZES IDEA OF CANCELING MAY 9 MILITARY PARADE

Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2005

KYIV - The Social Democratic Party (united)'s leader Viktor Medvedchuk
has criticized the idea of canceling the military parade of May 9, when the
sixtieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War will be
commemorated. Medvedchuk issued the criticism in a statement, a text of
which Ukrainian News obtained.

"It was with deep concern that I learned of the information about attempts
by the current authorities not to allow widespread ... commemoration... This
involves, among other things, implementation of plans to abandon ye
organization of a parade of by the Armed Forces in Kyiv on May 9...." the
statement said. According to Medvedchuk, any actions aimed at devaluing
the Victory Day would be an insult to millions of Ukrainian citizens.

According to him, such actions are being perceived as a reduction of the
role of the Ukrainian people in the victory of Nazism, as a mockery of the
memory of those who died, and as a lack of respect for war veterans.
Medvedchuk expressed the conviction that a full-scale military parade should
take place on May 9.

"The Ukrainian government should pay a symbolic due to those who ensured
the great victory," Medvedchuk said. As Ukrainian News earlier reported,
Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mykola Tomenko is initiating
cancellation of the military parade on May 9, the day of celebration of the
sixtieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War. Instead of a military
parade, Tomenko is proposing a plan of measures that would permit each
veteran to feel care of the state.

Such measures may include free medical examination for all participants in
military operations, providing them with the necessary medicines, and
increasing the one-off assistance payable to war veterans. -30-
=================================================================
4. BALTIC STATES AGONISE OVER PUTIN'S INVITATION

Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Luke Harding in Berlin
The Guardian, London, UK, Monday, March 7, 2005

Russia and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are locked in
a diplomatic row over festivities to mark the end of the second world war.

The Kremlin has invited the presidents of the three states to Moscow on May
9 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. It has
also invited world leaders including Gerhard Schröder, who would be the
first German leader to attend such an anniversary in Moscow.

However, the Baltic leaders are coming under intense public pressure not to
attend an event that also marks the start of the region's forced
subjugation to Moscow.

The Red Army occupied the three countries during the second world war after
fierce fighting with nationalists. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and
thousands of volunteers from the Baltic states joined German units in an
attempt to fend off the Soviet advance.

The era remains deeply sensitive for the three countries, not least because
many residents enthusiastically collaborated in the Nazi massacres of Jews.

Moscow argues that its occupation liberated the Baltics from Nazi tyranny.
The Baltic countries did not break free from Moscow's embrace until the
break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

For many in the three states, which have all joined the EU and Nato, the
thought of their leaders bowing and scraping in the Kremlin is too much to
bear. Wary of a domestic backlash, the presidents of Latvia and Estonia are
considering a boycott of the celebrations.

The Estonian president, Arnold Ruutel, consulted MPs last week and said his
decision must "preserve Baltic unity". He said he might send his prime
minister, Juhan Parts, in his place in what would be seen as a snub to
Moscow.

The Lithuanian leader, Valdas Adamkus, has said he will not answer Moscow's
invitation until it is "strategically convenient" for the country.

A poll in Lithuania last week showed 34% of people thought he should refuse
the visit. Opposition politicians are campaigning against the trip.

President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia has agreed to travel but
infuriated Moscow with the prediction that, "on May 9, Russian people will
place a Caspian roach on a newspaper, drink vodka, sing folk songs, and
recall how they heroically conquered the Baltics".

In Germany, opposition politicians have suggested it would be better for Mr
Schröder to avoid a parade by the Red Army, which, they say, brought about
the division of Germany.

Tatyana Zhdanok, an MEP from Latvia's Russian-speaking community, said
the president had no desire to attend the Moscow events but had capitulated
under EU pressure.

"It would be better for her to stay at home if she does not want honestly
to join the celebrations," said Ms Zhdanok. "She will only use the
anniversary as a platform to claim the Red Army occupied Latvia rather than
liberating it."

In an attempt to sweeten the May 9 visit, Russia is offering to finalise
border agreements and sign a declaration on shared objectives with the
Baltic leaders the next day.

But the president, Vladimir Putin, warned: "We are extending a hand of
friendship. Whether it will be taken, shaken or not does not depend on us."
==================================================================
5. RUSSIA RETALIATES AFTER BALTIC SNUB OVER WWII ANNIVERSARY

Associated Press, Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 9, 2005

MOSCOW - Russia's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Estonia
and Lithuania were no longer welcome at May ceremonies in Moscow
marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II after the leaders
of the two former Soviet Baltic states declined to attend.

"The invitations are of a personal nature," the Foreign Ministry said in a
curt, one-line statement.

Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus announced Monday that he had
decided to stay away from the event. Estonian President Arnold Ruutel
also said he would not attend the ceremonies but would send his foreign
minister.

Amid lingering bitterness over the post-war Soviet occupation of the
Baltics, people in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are split over whether the
leaders should go to the ceremony. Russia has never acknowledged its role
as a driving force behind the five-decade Soviet occupation of the Baltics.

Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga said in January that she planned to
attend the events in Moscow, saying she wanted to "extend the hand of
friendship" to Russia. But she also pointed out that while much of Europe
was celebrating the end of an occupation, the defeat of Nazi Germany
signaled the beginning of a half-century of Soviet occupation for much of
Eastern Europe.

Soviet forces occupied the Baltic states in 1940 but were driven out by the
Germans a year later. The Red Army retook the Baltics in 1944, and the
three countries were reincorporated into the Soviet Union. They regained
independence amid the 1991 Soviet collapse. -30-
=================================================================
6. BUSH TO MEET RUSSIAN PRESIDENT ON 60TH VE-DAY IN MOSCOW

Itar-Tass, Moscow, Russia, Monday, March 7, 2005

NEW YORK -U.S. President George W. Bush has stressed he has good
and confidential relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The U.S. leader confirmed that his next meeting with Putin will take place
in Moscow at celebrations on the occasion of the 60th VE-Day anniversary.
Bush said this in an interview published by the New York Post.

Bush said it is important that the Russian president said at their
Bratislava talks that Russia is a democracy and there is no way back for
it. Russia is a country of real importance, the U.S. president said. Bush
said he will meet the Russian leader in May during his foreign tour on the
occasion of the 60th VE-Day anniversary.

The text of the Bush interview is published in the Sunday issue of the New
York Post. -30- [The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
==================================================================
7. NOT GENOCIDE BEHIND KATYN MASSACRE: RUSSIAN PROSECUTOR

RIA Novosti, Moscow, Russia, Friday, March 11, 2005

MOSCOW - The Russian top military prosecutor's experts deny genocide
underlying the Katyn massacre, says Alexander Savenkov, Military
Prosecutor General and federal Deputy Prosecutor General.

"We verified the genocide assumption, on Polish initiative, during
preliminary investigation. There are no grounds to assume it. That is my
firm conviction," he said to a news conference. "The investigated case
did not imply genocide of the Polish nation."

The investigators ascertained the number of involved camp inmates. It
slightly exceeded 14,540, of these, 10,700 in Russia and 3,800 in Ukraine.
1,803 inmates died. 22 of the victims have been identified for today. Mr.
Savenkov could not say anything about the others' fate.

The Katyn investigation finished, September 21, 2004. The cases of
established culprits were dismissed with their death. More than 900
witnesses were tracked down and questioned. Eighteen expert checks
studied more than a thousand objects. More than 200 bodies were exhumed.

All surviving persons employed in involved government bodies at the time
of the tragedy were questioned.

The investigating team notified Dr. Leon Keres, Poland's deputy top
prosecutor and Director of the National Memory Institute, about the finds
and conclusions.

The file contains 183 volumes, 116 of these containing top secret
information. The other 67 volumes are open to the public, and Russia is
ready to offer them to Poland any time, reassured the prosecutor.

The resolution to dismiss the cases also belongs to classified information,
he added to explain why he did not mention any culprits' names.

As a protocol signed by Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Poland in 1995
envisages, each of the signatory countries independently investigates
crimes perpetrated in its territory. Belarus and Ukraine shared their
information with Russia to be used as the Military Prosecutor General's
office was summing up its investigation.

After Poland capitulated, early in World War II, more than 14,000 Polish
commissioned officers found themselves interned in the USSR, autumn
1939. Nazi aggressors eventually seized the Soviet Union's west. Information
about the officers shot by NKVD men in the Katyn wood, 14 kilometers west
of Smolensk, was circulated since 1943. A Soviet investigation team of
1944 blamed the massacre on Germans. -30-
=================================================================
8. YUSHCHENKO SUGGESTS CHARITY FUND PRYIATELI BATURYNA
To Restore Palace of Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovskyi, Baturyn, Ukraine

Ukrainian News Agency, Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2005

KYIV - President Viktor Yuschenko suggests businessmen create a charity fund
called Pryiateli Baturyna (Friends of Baturyn). He voiced his proposal at
the Palace of hetman Kyrylo Rozumovskyi in the town of Baturyn, Chernihiv
region. "Right now I propose to create the Pryiateli Baturyna charity fund,"
the President said and further proposed to select members of the fund's
supervisory board.

"I propose to make contributions in national and foreign currency as much as
anyone can," he added. "Now it is clear why this palace [of Rozumovskyi]
have seen no restoration for a hundred years. It was politically
unprofitable," he noted. Yuschenko examined the palace and toured
businessmen around some parts of the building himself.

After that, they visited the grave of famous beekeeper Petro Prokopovych.
As Ukrainian News earlier reported, Yuschenko left for Chernihiv region to
visit the town of Baturyn. Yuschenko planned to take a tour around that
historical town and discuss the ways of reviving it and turning it into a
tourism center with the local leadership and patrons of arts. -30-
=================================================================
9. THE "SIXTIERS" LOOKING INTO THE PAST AND FUTURE
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Pavlo Tychyna, Vasyl Stus, and Borys
Antonenko-Davydovych in the life of Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska

New 'Book of Memories' to be published soon

Interview with literary critic Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska
Interview by Larysa Ivshyna, Klara Gudzyk, Ihor Siundukov,
Nadiya Tysiachna, The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English, #7
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, March 1, 2005

The representatives of the 1960s generation of Ukrainian writers, the
so-called "sixtiers" (shestydesiatnyky) are not simply concerned with the
problems that confronted them at the time; these writers have also entered
mainstream life in Ukraine. Many of them will obviously withdraw from active
work in the face of ongoing social changes, and the public will never learn
about their views on the past and present. And that would be a shame. The
Day recently invited the literary critic Mykhailyna KOTSIUBYNSKA for an
interview. "People who know my life's "legend" often ask how hard my life
was in the Soviet past and how it feels to breathe today," she said, adding:
"Looking back on my life, I must say that my days were not painted in somber
hues; quite the contrary.

I was destined to witness and take part in the rise of an independent
Ukraine, experience feelings of euphoria over the Golden Age of the late 80s
and early 90s, and disappointment in our immaturity and the unviable new
elites, as well as a constant sense of unrealized accomplishment of the
'eternally embryonic Ukraine,' as Vasyl Stus put it. So I welcomed the
events on Independence Square with an open heart, since it made us
reconsider the established views of our people, whom we disparagingly
referred to as the populace."

Mykhailyna Khomivna Kotsiubynska is the niece of the Ukrainian literary
great Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Since early childhood she had a unique
opportunity to socialize with personalities that had shaped the culture of
whole generations. Her family home was frequented by the prominent writers
Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Volodymyr Sosiura, Mykhailo Stelmakh, film
director Mark Donskoy, Ginzburg the sculptor, the singer Zoya Haiday, the
artists Vasyl Kasiyan and Mykola Burachek, and many others. In the 1960s she
participated in a protest against the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals
during the screening of Serhiy Paradzhanov's film "Shadows of Forgotten
Ancestors" at Kyiv's Ukrayina movie theater. She used her typewriter to make
the first samizdat copy of Ivan Dziuba's book Internationalism or
Russification? She spoke out in defense of numerous Ukrainian dissidents.
Yevhen Sverstiuk, Alla Horska, Ivan Dziuba, Vasyl Stus, and Borys
Antonenko-Davydovych were her associates, friends, and teachers.

Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska is a literary critic and the compiler of Doroha
boliu [The Road of Pain], Vasyl Stus's first collection of poetry to be
published in Ukraine, and the six volumes (nine books) of his literary
heritage. She is the editor of four volumes of correspondence with Mykhailo
Kotsiubynsky, as well as numerous books that were published as part of the
"Modern Ukrainian Literature" series. She is the author of the books Obrazne
slovo v literaturnomu tvori [Figurative Speech in Literary Works], Etiudy
pro poetyku Shevchenka [Studies on Shevchenko's Poeticism], and the
two-volume Moyi obriyi [My Horizons]. The latter has been nominated for the
2005 Shevchenko Prize.

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF KOTSIUBYNSKY

[Q] "Would you tell us about your spiritual relationship with your uncle,
the Ukrainian literary giant Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky?"

"I recently completed and submitted to the publisher what I think is a very
interesting manuscript entitled Nad mamynymy shchodennykamy [Mother's
Diaries]. My mother left six notebooks of diaries spanning the years 1928 to
1963. Reading them was like seeing myself growing up through her eyes. I
lived in an atmosphere marked by the omnipresence of Kotsiubynsky. I
pictured my uncle as 'tall, a little stoop-shouldered, spruced up, and
worthy of himself.' This is Tychyna's description of him, which I like very
much. I was born in Vinnytsia, in the same house and room where he was born.

It is an old house, some two hundred years old. Fortunately, it has been
reinforced, so it will hold together for a lot longer. My parents founded
the writer's museum. We had two tiny rooms, and the rest of the house was
used for the exhibition. 'As I was leaving the room, I spotted Mykhailyna in
the room where the tour had just gotten underway. I was about to lead her
away, but then changed my mind. She was listening attentively,' my mother
wrote in her memoirs. I grew up in an organic environment that was
inseparable from the personality of the classic Ukrainian writer, his work,
and the people involved in it. I know that even our critics would carp at us
because we didn't separate the museum property from ours. Indeed, the
museums in Vinnytsia and Chernihiv were my parents' life. I have already
mentioned the following revealing incident on several occasions.

In 1941, when the Germans were approaching Chernihiv, my father was told to
evacuate his wife and daughter and pack only a few suitcases. But he refused
to leave without his museum. Somehow he got his way and obtained a freight
car onto which he loaded almost all the exhibits, even the bust sculpted by
Ginzburg, for which Kotsiubynsky had posed. The manuscripts were packed in a
separate metal-plated trunk. On August 23 this freight car was standing at
the Chernihiv rail terminal. By that time almost everything around us had
been razed to the ground; in September the Germans would enter the city.
There was continuous bombardment. I remember during the night debris was
hitting the roof with such force that it felt as if there was no place where
you could hide from it. My parents sat me on the trunk with the manuscripts
and covered me with their bodies on both sides. The manuscripts and I were
the most precious things.

"Until recently, I owned an antique turquoise brooch, which I received as a
present from Ms. Aplaksina. Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky loved this woman. He
brought her this gift from Naples. I donated this jewel to the Chernihiv
museum, where it belongs."

[Q] "Did your uncle's name help you?"

"It both helped and hindered me. During the difficult period when I was
hounded from every place - expelled from the party and the Literature
Institute, and banned from publishing my literary criticism (this lasted for
nearly twenty years) - if it hadn't been for my last name, I may have shared
the tragic lot of Ivan Svitlychny or Vasyl Stus. At the same time it was an
impediment. I couldn't even get a job as a proofreader at a technical
magazine. After I was expelled from the Literature Institute in 1968, I was
unemployed for almost a year with a five-year-old daughter on my hands.

Then I had a stroke of luck. I'm not 100 percent sure that this happened
exactly as I was told. I was friends with a Communist from Canada named
Maria Skrypnyk, who was known for her English translations of Taras
Shevchenko's poetry. She had graduated from a party school in Kyiv. Hearing
about my plight, she approached the secretary of the Communist Party of
Canada William Kashtan, with whom she was on friendly terms. They appealed
to our party leadership, saying that all this fuss about the niece of the
classic Ukrainian writer was harming the Soviet Union's image. Strings were
pulled to get me a job at the Vyshcha Shkola publishing house. Of course,
they kept tabs on me there, but at least I could earn a living and had the
respect of my colleagues.

"I have always felt a great responsibility for my last name. This is
inherent in me. I cannot be somebody I am not. Even though I was hounded and
deprived of material wellbeing, to live in keeping with my moral categorical
imperative was the only possible way."

"I OWE A GREAT DEAL TO PAVLO TYCHYNA"

[Q] "Who else determined your future direction in life?"

"I grew up in the company of extremely interesting people whose priority was
spiritual values. My father was friends with the Russian writer Vladimir
Botsianovsky, the director of the Pushkin Museum Matviy Kalaushin, and
Ginzburg the sculptor, who used to socialize with Kotsiubynsky on the Isle
of Capri. Volodymyr Sosiura, Maksym Rylsky, and Pavlo Tychyna were visitors
to our home. The latter played a special role in my spiritual development.
On one of my birthdays he sent my parents a telegram: "Mykhailyna knows what
she's about, and is growing big and strong!" I was first introduced to his
poetry by my mother, who was a descendant of Crimean Armenians. She
graduated from the Bestuzhev Courses of Higher Learning in St. Petersburg,
which at the time was the best educational institution for women.

Mother was highly educated: she spoke several foreign languages, loved
poetry, mostly Russian or Western European poets in Russian translation.
Meanwhile, she learned and explored the Ukrainian language and culture
primarily through the works of Kotsiubynsky and Tychyna. Enamored of the
poetry of Pavlo Hryhorovych Tychyna, she would sing me lullabies based on
his "Pastels," in particular his poem "Nich" [Night]. Tychyna wrote:

Cover me, cover me,
For I am the night, old and weak
And mother rephrased it:
Cover me, cover me,
I am a tiny little one,
My path is rosy in my dreams forever

"A portrait of the young Tychyna hung above my crib: a young, somewhat
ascetic, inspired face with delicate features.

"When I grew up, Tychyna insisted that I enroll in the Ukrainian Philology
Department of Kyiv University.

"I have written that for me the poems of the early, brilliant Tychyna
symbolized spiritual freedom, music, and art. I never bothered to find out
why his "clarinets" were "sunny." I perceived them as holistic, organic
images. So the public's ambiguous, to put it mildly, attitude toward the
poet always hurt me, even though there was a certain reason for it. I
remember when I was in the tenth grade, my classmates made fun of some of
his poems. I started crying: 'But you don't know "The Sunny Clarinets"! To
appreciate Tychyna, you have to pull away from the ground and look into the
sky!' And I ran out of the classroom. From then on they never said anything
bad in my presence. I called my memoirs about Pavlo Tychyna With Love and
Pain.

"I have already mentioned my mother, Kateryna Yakivna. One of the chapters
in Nad mamynymy shchodennykamy is called "Pouring Myself into the Child." I
will recount one episode. When she was pregnant with me, my mother went to
Moscow and Leningrad to visit some literary and memorial museums.
Overwhelmed by her impressions of the Tolstoy Museum in Khamovniki and
Pushkin's last apartment on Moika Canal, she wrote in her diary: 'I'm going
to tell everything to Mishenka, so that when he grows up he will come to
love this as I do.' And she did succeed in pouring all of herself, and her
interests and everything that she held sacred into me."

UKRAINIAN EPISTOLARITY OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

[Q] "What is the current state of the Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky museums in
Vinnytsia and Chernihiv? Do they get many visitors?"

"The family home in Vinnytsia is precious in that Kotsiubynsky was born
there. It is a little pearl of historical memory in the heart of Vinnytsia.
The one in Chernihiv is a leading museum with a wealth of valuable archives
and manuscripts; it is a hub of research and publishing. I suggest you go to
Chernihiv in the summer or fall to see the beautiful garden that is an
extension of the exposition. My father was a gifted gardener. He built a
greenhouse, which is still standing, to cultivate plants that his brother
loved so much and wrote about, for example, agaves. So the garden is a kind
of green exhibit. Recalling the Isle of Capri, Kotsiubynsky wrote: 'I become
anxious whenever I see an agave, its gray crown of hard leaves toothed on
the sides and pointed at the end, like a hewn stake.

They adorn the terraces, crowning the hidden strength of the earth.' Beside
the gorgeous mallows is a tablet with a few words from Gorky's memoirs:
'Mikhail Mikhailovich [Kotsiubynsky] loved flowers very much. With his vast
botanical knowledge, he spoke about them like a poet. Once, when he spotted
pale pink mallows near the whitewashed wall of a fisherman's house, he
stopped, took off his hat, bowed, and spoke to the flowers: "Bless you! How
are you faring in a foreign land?"

"My father started the museum, the writer's daughter Iryna picked it up from
him, followed by his grandson Yuliy, and now his great-grandson Ihor is
doing a good job of managing the museum in Chernihiv. Unfortunately, the
locals do not have much appreciation for culture, and are not helping the
museum as they should. When I was awarded the Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky Prize,
I tried to explain that the museum is Chernihiv's mark on the cultural map
of the world. In the Soviet period, visits to the museum were a kind of
ideological ritual: they were trying to impute socialist realism to
Kotsiubynsky. Strangely enough, the museum is no longer included in tourist
itineraries. We have to change this. I n his lifetime, Kotsiubynsky's home
in Chernihiv was a major cultural hub.

"We are saying that we must integrate into the European cultural space.
Meanwhile, letters from Moscow, Petersburg, Krakow, Bucharest, Stockholm,
etc. were mailed to this out-of-the-way Chernihiv, beginning in 1891 until
1913, when Kotsiubynsky died. Letters from the writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko,
the scientist Volodymyr Hnatiuk, the composer Mykola Leontovych, the public
figure and philanthropist Yevhen Chykalenko have all been preserved. They
convey what we call culturalism, yet this was culturalism of a high,
dignified level. These people lived as one with Ukrainian culture, steering
clear of cultural Little-Russianism and provinciality.

"I have said that I am proud to have helped the writer's great-grandson Ihor
edit and publish four volumes of correspondence with Kotsiubynsky. I
consider it one of the best epistolary collections released in the past
decade."

{Q] "Do you write letters now? How can we preserve this aristocratic
tradition in our dynamic times?"

"I do write letters, but I don't have all that many living friends out
there, in Germany, Canada. And all of my relatives are close by. I recently
read that one contemporary writer admitted that his computer is his head and
hands. So I think that we should not underestimate electronic messages, as
they also carry emotions. On the other hand, Ukrainians have a unique,
classic epistolary heritage. The letters of Lesia Ukrayinka, Vasyl Stus, and
Kateryna Bilokur alone represent epistolarity of the highest order.

"When Vasyl Stus passed away, his son Dmytro and I set about publishing his
poetic heritage. Compiling a volume of his letters, I suddenly realized that
epistolarity is my calling. This is how I came to write the book Zafiksovane
i netlinne. Rozdumy pro epistoliarnu tvorchist [Written Down and
Imperishable. Reflections on Epistolarity] (2001)."

[Q] "From the contemporary standpoint, what is your assessment of the
organic need to have culture in our life and the significance of active
citizenship?"

"I'm not a big optimist, but I honestly see the beginnings of a civil
society in the social sentiments and changes that I have been observing for
the past half-year. I'm always impressed primarily with details, revealing
details. During the Orange Revolution, my daughter's mother-in-law, who is
very distant from politics, went to Independence Square every day to help in
any way she could, despite her broken arm. She was a changed person, with
her head held high and her shoulders squared. And there were many people
like her. When I woke up at six in the morning on those worrisome days in
November and December, I saw people walking into the darkness from nearby
buildings, dressed warmly and wearing the obligatory item of orange clothing
or decoration. They gathered in groups and headed for Independence Square.
They were no longer a crowd, but something loftier.

"I ended my lecture at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv with these
meaningful words by Vasyl Stus:

There is no fault in having a sin
That we inherited from the ape.
It is a sin not to fight for ourselves
And not to straighten our backs.

"To straighten one's back is the most effective credo I know. One day a
young woman, maybe a sophomore, came up to me and said, 'Mykhailyna
Khomivna, I would like to thank you. I was going through a difficult period
in my life and didn't know what to do next. But then I decided to straighten
my back.' I will never forget these words of gratitude."

"The high standards to which you refer were maintained through the
superhuman efforts of gifted individuals. In the Soviet period, there were
many excellent people and ideas despite the pervading censorship. There
are also individuals with tremendous spiritual experience who are not always
ready to resort to radical actions. The point at issue is lustration. It
seems that we learned this word a little too late."

"Lustration is quite an understandable notion, but dangerous at the same
time. Some side with Vaclav Havel, who approached lustration with a great
deal of caution. In a fit of righteous wrath it is very difficult to refrain
from settling scores and to take into account people's inner
transformations. I think this should be done on a case-by-case basis without
any universal laws, considering the sacramental question of "Who are the
judges?"

"We have witnessed a very sharp polarization and politicization of society.
And this is only natural. But this polarization has many hidden dangers. In
my articles I often quote Serhiy Averintsev: 'Not to howl with the wolves in
any of the rival packs,' i.e., we must maintain a civic stance and not turn
into a rival pack."

PARNASSUS

[Q] "Nadia and Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Symonenko, Alla Horska, Vasyl Stus,
Opanas Zalyvakha, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Ivan Dziuba - all of these people
were the chosen ones, so to speak. What brought them together?"

"In my case, my second life began in the 1960s. I never pursued a career in
the Komsomol, but remained an 'ideological virgin,' and I believed in the
ideals of the society in which I was raised. I consciously avoided some
aspects of this society and simply didn't know many things. And when I
communicated with these people, I saw a colossal field of knowledge opening
up before me, I simply went toward them. Of course, we were living in a
difficult period. But I was always surrounded by incredibly interesting and
sincere people whom I respected and loved. Even though Saint-Exupery's
saying, 'The only luxury is the luxury of human communication,' is overused,
it still has a lot of meaning for me. I have always had this luxury.

My meeting with Yevhen Sverstiuk was extremely important, even though
our experience and upbringing were different. I grew up in a happy,
intellectual, and bilingual environment, and absorbed Russian cultural
values from my mother. They are still dear to me. He grew up in a different
environment with other values. For example, his brother served in the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which was then a terra incognita for me.

"Everybody was different, but we were united by the thaw, the renaissance of
the 1960s. My students and I quite organically joined the Club of Creative
Youth. That is, we were similar at the mental level. Most importantly, we
were not afraid of exploring new frontiers and opening our minds to new
categorical imperatives."

[Q "What distinguished the Ukrainian movement of the 1960s from the
Russian one?"

"The Ukrainian movement of the 1960s had a definitive, dominant national
idea. Recently, one 'cosmopolitan' postgraduate student who was quizzing
me about that period, called this specialty "national agitation." Fine, call
it that way, but I must say that all extremes and excesses were alien to us:
national things were closely linked with things that were common to all
mankind."

[Q "Did you have the sense that Russian intellectuals understood the
Ukrainian question?"

"Of course, some of them sympathized with the Ukrainian question, but
somehow not fully. For example, they were utterly surprised that we spoke
Ukrainian with our children. This is reflected in Svitlana Kyrychenko's
memoirs entitled Liudy ne zi strakhu [People without Fear]. The wife of the
prisoner of conscience Yuriy Badzio stayed in close touch with the Moscow
circle of dissidents. But in that period there was generally more
understanding between the Ukrainian and Russian Shestydesiatnyky than there
is now. Obviously, much depends on the general atmosphere and the scale of
personalities. I won't mention the touching relations between Ukrainian and
Jewish dissidents of that period.

Our literature has no better memoirs about Vasyl Stus than those that were
written by Mikhail Heifetz, a Leningrad philologist who was in the same camp
as Stus and now lives in Jerusalem. Even back then he called his memoirs
"There Is Nothing Better in Ukrainian Literature." He recalls how Stus
taught him how to be a Jew. Their fellow prisoner, Aryiv Vudka, still knows
all the poems Stus wrote in that period by heart. They lived an intense
intellectual life despite their circumstances. It was no accident that Ivan
Svitlychny called the prison camp a Parnassus in his identically titled
poem:

Parnassus! Never mind
the shakedowns and questionings!
I have no faith in routine,
monotony, and the grind -
The triviality that pales before plant lice.
Vain anxiety is fading.
And I see God in the skies
And God's word on Earth

"MY RELATIONS WITH VASYL STUS WERE NOT SO MUCH
QUANTITATIVE AS QUALITATIVE"

[Q] "You have repeatedly mentioned Vasyl Stus. What image of the poet
lives on in your soul?"

"Vasyl was a postgraduate student at the Literature Institute and I was a
senior researcher. At first we weren't that close because a six-year age
difference is a lot when you're young. We became closer after he fell out of
grace, after the screening of Serhiy Paradzhanov's film "Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors" at Kyiv's Ukrayina cinema. Then Ivan Dziuba told us
about the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, and people stood up in
protest. Vasyl was shouting something desperate in support of Chornovil's
call for 'all those who oppose tyranny to rise.' When Stus sat down, I
hugged him and felt every cell in him trembling. 'Poor boy, how will you
live in this world?' I thought then. Two or three days later he was expelled
from his postgraduate course. He was ashen when he left the director's
office, saying: 'I told him everything I thought!' They wouldn't hire him to
work in the subway because he was too educated. Vasyl got a job as a stoker
at the stokehold of the Republican Institute of Gardening in Feofania
outside Kyiv. Svitlana Kyrychenko and I would bring him hot soup, because
already then he was suffering from stomach disorders.

"Every once in a while we went to the theater and the philharmonic. Stus
especially liked Beethoven and Bach. A concert of Robert Shaw's choir from
the US left the most vivid impressions. Once we went to see the satirical
comedy "Dion," an allusion to modern times. On our way home Stus recited
poetry. 'Would you like an autograph?' he asked me suddenly and handed me
a slip of paper. I placed it inside my notebook and forgot about it for many
years. When I was preparing his poetry for publication, I came across this
slip of paper. It contained seven miniature verses from 1971, which were
similar to his cycle "Veselyi tsvyntar" [The Merry Cemetery].

"Our relations were more qualitative than quantitative. Vasyl was friends
with his fellow students; he had a girlfriend, and then a wife, Valentyna
Popeliukh. But we also had mutual friends: Zina Genyk-Berezovska from
Prague, Danylo Shumuk, Alla Horska, the Horyn brothers, Nadia and Ivan
Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk. One of the brightest moments in our life was
the so-called Prypyat Republic. We took boats out on the Prypyat River and
lived there for several weeks in the summertime. I recall one warm summer
night. The camp was preparing for some sort of performance. We fried loads
of fish. Everybody was decked out: the women in their best swimsuits and the
men in swimming trunks with paper bowties around their necks. Suddenly the
kitchen pot orchestra struck up a tune. A boat appeared from behind an
island with two mermaids and Neptune covered in water lilies and wearing a
crown. So tall and majestic, it was our Vasyl Stus.

"I had to appear as a witness in Vasyl's trial. It was my first 'public
lecture' on Stus. I said all the best words that I had in my heart. 'Are you
listening? Then listen! Are you recording it? Go on, record it!' I said that
instead of trying people like him, we had to protect them. Then Stus used
his right to address questions to the witness and he asked me rhetorical
questions, such as 'Doesn't the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grant
every person the right to his own views?'

"Our correspondence meant a great deal to me. Incidentally, he never
received many of my letters, even though I tried to avoid broaching
political issues. In one three-page letter I described my impressions of a
symphony concert that I had attended. Vasyl never received that letter. This
annoyed me, and I recreated my letter from memory. But it didn't go through
either. In prison Stus was translating Goethe and asked me to send him the
metrical scheme of Alexandrine verse. When he didn't receive my reply again,
I re-sent the letter with the inscription: 'Dear comrade censor. This is a
scheme of ancient versification. I earnestly request you to let this letter
pass.' Can you imagine? It did come through!

"I have a memory for events. I remember bright and memorable episodes with
all their details, moods, and smells. In the summer of 1966 I was expelled
from the party. This saga lasted for eight months. I was very nervous at
first, but then let it pass. I even started to speak in aphorisms. It seemed
that after a few more visits to different institutions, I would have started
speaking in verse. At the regional party committee a man with 'a human face'
asked me, 'How do you feel now that you are parting with your party
membership card?' I answered him instantly, saying that I had joined the
party at a young age with a sincere belief in ideals. When life requires me
to choose between ideals and a card, I choose to keep the ideals and return
the card to you.

"As I was leaving that place, I bumped into Stus. We sat on a bench on
Volodymyr's Hill and he recited his translations of Garcia Lorca. I felt so
happy and free sitting beside him, even though I was completely aware of
what awaited us. In my memoirs I wrote that we met accidentally. But now I'm
thinking that perhaps it was no accident. After all, Stus knew everything."

[Q "When did you begin to collect Stus's poetic heritage? Is that when you
got the idea to publish it?"

"This is unbelievable, but today, many years after Vasyl's death, I feel a
metaphysical connection with him. At first there was this link through
correspondence that was so important to me. Stus died in 1985. Around 1989
his son Dmytro and I decided to publish all of his father's works. Vasyl's
widow gave me all the letters she had collected. In one of his letters to
her I discovered a page addressed to me. It read: 'Harmonize everything that
you have ever received and given away - a wonderful exercise for the spirit,
I think.' I was moved to tears. It was literally his voice from the other
world."

SPIRITUAL GURU OF THE SIXTIERS

[Q} "A certain period in your life was connected with the writer and
linguist Borys Antonenko-Davydovych. What can you say about him that
would make him interesting to people today?"

"As a writer, Borys Dmytrovych was known for his truthfulness and explicit
ideological ideas that may perhaps seem somewhat old-fashioned today. On
the other hand, his works are filled with existential substance. He
experienced and knew from first-hand everything that he wrote about. But, as
I've said before, he was his own best work. He was an exceptionally pure
person, who contributed greatly to our generation's spiritual development.
It was from Antonenko-Davydovych that we first heard about the events that
happened in the age of the Ukrainian National Republic - four universals
and Day of Unification on January 22. He was our spiritual guru.

"We became very close in the last years of his life. His wife was mentally
ill and his son had served three prison terms. The authorities were
obviously using the boy. For example, during their crackdowns on drugs the
police took his father's memoirs about his service in the Ukrainian Army,
the tumultuous postwar years, and the establishment of the new Ukrainian
literature. After his wife died and his son was in prison, I moved in with
Borys Dmytrovych, who wanted to marry me. And that's when the whole saga
began to unfold. People went out of their way to prevent us from registering
our marriage. Once we received a fake letter, allegedly from the Writers'
Union, which contained a newspaper clipping from Vechirniy Kyiv about a
swindler who had cheated an old man out of his apartment. There were lots of
libelous rumors, statements from his son, etc. Borys Dmytrovych wanted
justice and filed complaints with various courts. I had a whole file of
documents that I deposited in an archive. I might publish it someday. In the
end, I was forced to leave, and he was found mentally incompetent and placed
in the care of his daughter.

"The last time we met was a month before his death. My son-in-law called and
invited me over to celebrate Easter. Before that, Borys Dmytrovych was in
bad shape, and didn't always recognize me. But that day he sat at the table
with us, had a drink, sang songs, and recited poetry. A remission often
occurs shortly before death. I remember him reciting poems by the early
twentieth-century salon poet Konstantin Balmont, which ended with the words
'I'm calling on the dreamers; I'm not calling on you!' That's the last thing
I heard from Antonenko- Davydovych. He was the biggest optimist of us all.
'Mykhailyna, one day you will see blue-and-yellow banners rise above
Sophia's Square,' he kept telling me. I would only smile condescendingly in
response.

Ever since Ukraine gained its independence, at the first congress of the
Rukh People's Movement, at the founding conference of the Memorial
Association, at our literary soirees, and now on Independence Square, I
always see the gray head of Borys Antonenko and the thick golden hair of
Alla Horska in the crowd."

"HIT OF THE SEASON"

[Q] "Have you made much progress on collecting the creative heritage of
Vyacheslav Chornovil?"

"We have planned a multivolume edition. Two books have already been
published. Vyacheslav's sister Valentyna and I have prepared an absolute hit
of the season - two volumes of his correspondence. He sent many letters to
his family - his sister, parents, wife Atena. There are letters to his son
Taras, whom he tried to educate through letters, much like Stus did with his
son. There is a wonderful letter in which Vyacheslav Maksymovych thanks
Zynoviy Krasivsky, the famous dissident and Taras Chornovil's stepfather,
for taking care of his son. So, Taras did not grow up without a father's
guidance.

"There are letters to friends and allies. In particular, there is some very
interesting correspondence with the German Kristina Bremer, who worked
with Ukrainian prisoners of conscience at Amnesty International and also
corresponded with Stus and Sverstiuk. The book should be published some
time in the spring."

[Q] "Does your two-volume edition Moyi obriyi, which has been nominated
for the Shevchenko Prize, include your most recent literary
accomplishments?"

"The book Moyi obriyi is very dear to me because it is the first time that I
was able to collect my life's work. I have also included my older works,
which of course could not have escaped the seal of those times. Fortunately,
there are not many of these politically-colored works. A good friend of mine
looked at this publication and said: 'Well, now you can die in peace.' I
replied that I'm not going to do that just yet.

"I have prepared a new book for publication, entitled Z knyhy spomyniv [From
the Book of Memories], and it seems that I already have a publisher. It
includes memoirs that were published in the magazine Kur'ier Kryvbasu, the
study Nad mamynymy shchodennykamy, as well as published essayistic memoirs
about Vasyl Stus, Vira Vovk, Nadia Surovtseva, Alla Horska, and Borys
Antonenko-Davydovych, which have already appeared in print. I have an
extensive photo archive. For example, I have a priceless photo of my father
with Olha Kobylianska. So, I want one-third of the book to be illustrations.
God willing, I will please the readers and myself with the new book by the
end of the year." -30- [The Action Ukraine Report Monitoring Service]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Photos from the family archives of Mykhailyna KOTSIUBYNSKA
LINK: http://www.day.kiev.ua/133218/
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