Eyes on the Ukraine.

EYES ON THE UKRAINE

IN ALL likelihood glasnost and perestroika will not change the fundamental structure and character of the Soviet Union; but together they have provided a certain opportunity for dissident voices to be heard. All sorts of groups and individuals have come forward with complaints and demands. Among the most impassioned of these voices have been those of the Soviet Union's non-Russian national minorities--Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Tatars, Kazakhs. To cite just one example, Vyacheslav Chornovil, a Ukrainian writer back from exile in Siberia, wrote an "Open Letter" to Mikhail Gorbachev referring to him as an "inhibited dissident." Chornovil asks for truly radical reforms, not only in the area of economics but in cultural policy toward non-Russian nationalities within the USSR and toward the Christian churches.

Christian Armenians and Moslem Azerbaijanis struggling for control over an Armenian enclave in the heart of Azerbaijan have been much in the news lately. But little has been said about one of the most interesting Soviet "constituent republics"--Chornovil's nation, Ukraine.

It is now generally agreed that during the Thirties, as a result of Stalin's cultural policies, literally millions of Ukrainians lost their lives, most of them from enforced starvation. Yet Ukrainians, numbering more than 44 million, still make up by far the largest non-Russian nationality in the Soviet Union. The Russians contend that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia; the Ukrainians contend that it is the other way around. It was in Galicia's Polesy marshes, during the last centuries of the pre-Christian era, that the Slavs first emerged as a distinct ethnic and linguistic group; and it was there, on the banks of the Dnieper river, under the reign of Vladimir I, that Christianity made its official entrance into the Slavic world. (The millennium of that event is being commemorated this year.)

By the tenth century the Slavs had established a flourishing and powerful agricultural nation with its capital at Kiev. This first Slavic state, the Kievan Rus, is regarded as the cradle of Greater Russia. However, it fell to the Mongol Golden Horde in the thirteenth century, and when liberation came, it started in the north, from the principality of Moscow. Only then did Moscow become the capital of Russia.

Under the czars no less than under the Communists today, the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nationality was hotly denied. Moscow frequently prohibited the Ukrainian language, which it considered a mere dialect of Russian, from being used in Ukrainian schools or in print. The western half of the country, referred to in Russia as the "Southern Borderland," was later liberated by the Poles and was for a time part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Much of the region therefore has about it a distinctly Western character, emphasized by the presence there today of forty thousand resident Poles. One feels that character most strongly in Kiev, despite its ancient Russian monasteries.

The Ukrainian people first emerged as a body with a distinct national consciousness under the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1918, with the aid of Austria, Poland, and Germany, an independent Ukrainian republic was established. But the new state was soon crushed by Communist Russia and absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Officially, the Russians recognized Ukraine as a nationally distinct, though constituent, republic. Even to this day, however, Moscow makes every effort to Russify the country, primarily with immigration (at least one-third of Kiev's population is now ethnically Russian), but also by making more prestigious and better-paying careers depend on a thorough command of Russian. As part of this campaign, the Soviets have also sought to suppress the Eastern Rite Catholic Church. Not only is the Church a symbol of Ukrainian culture as distinct from Russian culture but, unlike the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is controlled from abroad--from Rome--and as a result its hierarchy has proved considerably more difficult to penetrate and control.

DESPITE THE Russians' efforts, Ukrainian nationalism remains vital, surviving as a powerful national consciousness and characterized by a deep hostility toward the Moskaly, the "Muscovites," whom the Ukrainians consider brutal, primitive, aggressive, and humorless. I have not been in the Ukraine for a long time, but I have heard Ukrainian emigrants all over the world express these sentiments. Indeed, we should not forget that the guerrilla forces of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera (murdered in exile by the KGB in 1959) were still in arms well into the Fifties, when they fought a ferocious battle with Soviet forces in the Krivoi Rog region.

Stepan Bandera is dead, but he is survived by a durable tradition of Ukrainian patriotism. The next crack in the edifice of imperial Communist Russia could well be opened by his spiritual heirs.