What kind of political system are they building?

Ukraine’s official social policy has always been personified. Be that as it may, Ukraine’s social policy proves to have shown a degree of continuity during the presidencies of Kravchuk, Kuchma, and Yushchenko — perhaps best described as continuity for the sake of compromises reached in terms of European prospects. Considering personal traits, convictions, and mistakes, all the abovementioned ranking bureaucrats have supported the concept of the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people (in fact, Dmytro Tabachnyk defended his doctorate in 1995, focusing on Stalin’s purges, and in 2003, as deputy prime minister, convincingly reiterated his assumption). They kept guiding Ukraine in the direction of EU and NATO, subsequently to be formally reaffirmed by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine. It was for this purpose that the whole national memory, education and culture concept was worked out, aimed at transforming the Ukrainian SSR, with its largely Russified population, into a European nation-state that would be aware of its culture and history dating back a thousand years.

Needless to say, all these efforts were made with an eye to Ukraine’s contemporary realities and mentality — in other words, this process was slow and nonconfrontational. Both the left- and right-wing extremists were not content with this rate of progress, but this national policy yielded fruits, no matter what nay-sayers claim, just as it is obvious that this policy found its most fecund ground during Leonid Kuchma’s second presidential term.

But then there emerged yet another Superman-like player on the international arena, after Boris Yeltsin stepped down to let his almost democratic albeit amorphous Russia, fraught with countless domestic problems, be taken over by Vladimir Putin’s well-organized team resolved to reinstate Russia as a superpower. Ukraine then suffered the Melnychenko tapes scandal, whereupon its EU and NATO membership chances started looking slim. This reminds one of the good old Latin adage, Cui prodest — Who will benefit from all this? One can have an intelligent guess about the puppeteers in the Gongadze tragic market show. Prior to the 2004 election campaign, the ruling elite, scared by the possibility of failure, decided to discard [what Kuchma had formulated as] a “multivectoral policy” of compromise and clearly set their course on Russia’s post-Soviet waters, even at the risk of splitting Ukraine in two.

But then a miracle occurred, the totally unexpected Maidan phenomenon, with the masses bringing to power those whom they hoped would bring a lawful and decent way of life. Many believed that Ukraine would finally become a European democracy in early 2005. While the ­ca­pitals in the West couldn’t conceal their happiness, the Kremlin was foaming at the mouth with frustration.

It is not my task to analyze the plot of the tragicomedy of Yushchenko’s presidency. One point, however: the national policy in the social field was actually no different from that waged under presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma, being implemented against the controversial background set up by Moscow spin doctors in the spring of 2004, so that things taken in one’s stride previously were now sources of confrontation. Soviet [WW II] veterans, who had reacted calmly to the 1994 UPA exhibit at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kyiv flatly turned down any contacts with all those “Banderite collaborators” in 2005.

Likewise, members of the Donetsk City Council, who under the Education Minister Vasyl Kremen had kept opening grade schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction, with their parents’ knowledge and consent, started shouting about “forceful Ukrainization” (topics previously raised by the Communist and the Progressive Socialist Parties of Ukraine).

With Yushchenko’s presidency ending in February-March 2010, many heaved a sigh of relief, expecting to return to the relatively calm Kuchma period, yet life quickly dispersed their enthusiastic expectations.

The legally questionable Kharkiv fuel supply accords, climaxing in Ukraine ending in the Kremlin’s tight embrace, the Moscow Patriarch’s visit, the newly appointed Minister of Education and Science, Dmytro Tabachnyk, the reinstatement of the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine, and the establishing of a presidential republic, boil down to the building of a new country in place of today’s Ukraine.

After the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed a vote of no-confidence for Volodymyr Semynozhenko, Ukraine, for the first time in independent history, is still without a deputy prime minister in charge of the social sphere, lea­ving Education [and Science] Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk and Minister of Culture Mykhailo Kulyniak to hold the court. Whereas the cultural policy mode remains mostly inert, changes in the education domain offer much food for thought for those discussing a catastrophe in the social sphere and the current Ukrainian government’s occupation regime aimed against the remaining Ukrainian-speaking/thinking residents of this country.

On Bankova St., Hanna Herman is one of few current political figures who consistently declares her Ukrainian background and mentality by speaking Ukrainian on a daily basis, by making every statement in this language. There is the Civic Council on Social Policy, under President Yanuko­vych’s direct command.

Among its members are noted Ukrainian public fi-gures and intellectuals: Borys Oliinyk, Ivan Drach, Dmytro Stus, and Bohdan Stupka, yet this membership abounds in the names of people who have always supported anti-West, pro-Russia positions, including the academic Petro Tolochko (he marched out of the audience in a sign of protest against President Yanu­kovych’s edict on festivities commemorating St. Sophia’s 1,000th anniversary in 2011, what with the Russian-minded celebrated historians protesting new wall-painting discoveries at St. Sophia’s, because they insist on the traditional assumption that St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Novgorod is older than the one in Kyiv).

Reports have it that this council mostly deals with public television and radio channels, and that this body hasn’t made any noticeable moves in the education realm, just as it hasn’t responded to the language bill submitted to the Verkhovna Rada by Yefremov, Hryne­vetsky, and Symonenko — which bill has caused such concern in the Ukrainian-speaking public quarters.

Anatolii Tolstoukhov, one of the current Cabinet members, is known to have a number of important Ukrainian cultural and scholarly projects, particularly in the book-publishing sphere, while never stepping an inch outside his party’s line. Given the current absence of the deputy to the Minister of Culture in the social sphere, this Cabinet member might look as a good ad hoc coordinator.

There are also lots of dark horses prancing round the social field, among them non-residents, including Moscow’s distribution companies determined to put to an end the Ukrainian dubbing of films at all costs, mostly for business rather than political reasons, along with analysts from all kinds of foundations, among them Russkiy mir [Russian world], who keep telling those in power in Ukraine, on and off the record, how best to incorporate this country into the Russian world.

I will try to briefly analyze the situation in Ukraine’s social sphere, leaving aside health care and social protection, considering that both rate a separate story.

National memory is by no means a kind of policy invented during Yushchenko’s presidency; this is standard practice in each country whose government is determined to cultivate patriotism, encouraging the younger genera­tion to remember past heroes. Russia is a case study in such aggressive memory policy, with its Presidential Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests — actually tasked with suppressing the free-thinking and truth-seeking historians attempting to cross the Kremlin line.

In his sincere attempt to instill in Ukrainians a sense of modern European-like national identity, Yushchenko could be reproached for relying, for reasons best known to himself, on the apparent myth of Trypillia, rather than historical figures like Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, even Ivan Mazepa and Symon Petliura (let alone noted men of letters, creative figures, scholars, among them many alleged to have originated from Russia, according to Russian historians).

Yushchenko belatedly awarded Stepan Bandera and Crimean Tatar human rights champion Petro Hryhorenko the prestigious title “Hero of Ukraine.” This only led to another split in Ukrainian society and dealt a heavy blow to Ukraine-Poland relations, the consequences of which remain to be analyzed (considering Poland’s late President Lech Kaczynski’s sharp-worded public response, despite his being Yushchenko’s friend and independent Ukraine’s trusted ally). Contrary to well-substantiated expectations, the formal placement of millions of 1932-33 Holodomor victims’ names in the National Memory Center didn’t affect the national conso­lidation process, due to the differing views on the Holodomor concept: as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people or just another atrocity on the part of the Soviet communist regime.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory was established using Poland’s example, the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance), that specializes in detecting and investigating crimes committed against Polish nationals by 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Then [Ukraine’s former] KGB [currently under SBU control] archives were declassified and declared accessible to researchers, journalists, and general public. However, no bill on the UINM status was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada, so UINM was never handed over SBU archives. Today, with Ihor Yukhnovsky replaced by Valerii Soldatenko, a historian specializing in (and brainwashed by) the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, UINM, cleansed of all “nationalistic” influence, doesn’t exist as a research center.

The 65th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War of 1941-45” became a major event for the new Ukrainian administration. May 9 was marked by military parades and with special pomp in Moscow, Kyiv, and Minsk. Ukraine and Russia’s education ministries formed a task force to draft a history textbook that would be acceptable to all parties concerned — at this stage meant only for schoolteachers, formally intended to give them the “guidelines,” offering a “coordinated” approach to the disputed period in each country’s national history.

In fact, it is not the currently passive UINM but Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science, headed by Tabachnyk, which is responsible for a number of initiatives meant to inculcate in younger Ukrainians’ minds a view on their national history which more or less tallies with that being cultivated in each such school in Russia. To this end, all “confrontational” issues are deleted from such textbooks, even ones dealing with eyewitness accounts of tsarist Russia’s colonial rule in Ukraine. The World War II, which actually started for Ukrainians on September 1, 1939, is once again referred to as the “Great Patriotic War [of the Soviet People against the Fascist Aggressor, 1941-45 – Ed.],” with the Foreign Litera­ture Course replaced by “World Literature” (considering that Russians are fellow citizens rather than foreign nationals for Tabachnyk). To emphasize this deja-vu experience, the Ukrainian school students are in for the good old Soviet paramilitary game Zarnitsa. The Petro Jacyk Ukrainian Language Competition was allowed to be held in Kyiv as a last-minute decision.

­­Moscow’s imperial-minded ideologues are upgrading their hit-in-the-head propaganda that, not so long ago, refused to recognize Ukrainians as nationals of their country. Now there is the concept of the peoples of Old Rus’, formulated as the “Russian World” [or the “World of Rus’” — depending on how one translates the word combination, considering the Slavic semantic complexities — Ed.], as a supranational Slavic community, made up of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, bound by common history, culture, and Orthodoxy. Moscow Patriarch Kirill appears to be an outspoken supporter of this concept of late.

The Russian-People-model reads that the Ukrainians and Belarusians must have their own language, culture, and history. The point is that Ukrainian national history is part and parcel of universal history, whereas this joint history textbook is supposed to make it part of Great Russia’s history, including the Soviet Union’s Victory in the Great Patriotic War, doing away with Nazi Germany and its accomplices (i.e., the Ukrainian Insurgent Army); also, preferably, without a word about General Vlasov and his army, who fought the Soviets. The Ukrainian language is perfectly OK for kitchen discussions about politics over food and drink, as lyrics for love songs, but Ukrainians must read Russian versions of Sir William Shakespeare, the Holy Bible, and Alexander Pushkin, considering that Russian is “more advanced” than Ukrainian. Whereas Ukrainian culture can be proud of its rich folk heritage, Reshytylivka vyshyvanka needlework, Opishnia pottery, Petrykivka ornaments, the “big-time” culture is alleged to keep being created on a common Orthodox basis, in the Russian language.

What about Halychyna? Some of the Russian World ideologues are prepared to let these “ungrateful lackeys of the West” go, with their three oblasts of Ukraine. Others propose to reinstate the status of St. George Hill in Lviv as a “bulwark of Orthodoxy” and return the “stray sheep” to the flock being led in the “right direction.”

None of those currently in power in Ukraine has formally accepted this concept. In fact, the final bill on the fundamentals of Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policies, adopted on Yanukovych’s initiative (without the NATO membership clause) contains a number of obsolete provisos dating back to the times when the Ukrainian was described as playing the consolidating role in the formation of the modern European nation-state. Today’s Minister of Education and Scince Dmytro Tabachnyk and his sycophants fit just nicely into the Russian World scenario.

Bereft of an official status, Ukrainian served the national identity cause, considering that, under the Soviets, Ukrainian was mostly used on a daily, family basis, with Russian serving as the official language.

After Ukraine proclaimed its independence, the language policy was mainly based on an unwritten compromise whereby Ukrainian was recognized as the official language, having being established in certain social spheres, primarily in state administration and education, also in certain business spheres (paperwork relating to production, sports, public life, etc.) that had remained Russian-dominated.

This compromising attitude proved effective. During the Kuchma presidency, Russian-language grade schools practically ceased to exist in the western and central regions of Ukraine that, back in 1987, had boasted the highest enrollment rate in these areas, barring Halychyna. Remarkably, this took place without a single complaint from a single Russian-speaking resident, simply because they all thought it only natural for the Ukrainian government to provide for their children a se­condary and post-secondary education with Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Even though they kept speaking Russian at home, they thought it normal for their children to use Ukrainian when doing homework and when attending their classes.

President Yushchenko failed to take a resolute stand in expanding the usage of Ukrainian in his country. I would personally describe his decision to dub/subtitle all Western movies in Ukrainian (no Russian productions!) as perhaps the only step he took in the right direction, to make Ukraine Ukrainian.

All attempts to break this compromise have until now been purely circumstantial, election campaign stunts. Kuchma came to power in 1994, under the motto of Russian being given an official status in Ukraine, but he changed his attitude once he became the president of Ukraine. Yanukovych’s presidential campaign had a clause about Russian becoming the second official language in Ukraine, but in March 2010, President Yanukovych declared on Chernecha Hill, launching a re­novated Taras Shevchenko Museum in Kaniv, that it was necessary to protect Ukrainian as the sole official language.

Those currently “upstairs” in Ukraine entertain varying interpretations of Ukrainian being the sole official language. Ukrainian MPs Yefremov, Hrynevetsky, and Symonenko submitted a bill to the Verkhovna Rada this September. This document largely repeats the one by Yevhen Kushnariov, prepared by Russia’s spin doctors, whereby the Russian language will obtain all the underpinning social functions as an official language, formally retaining a “regional” status. This Ukrainian-Russian bilingual situation is described as a positive achievement on the part of Ukraine.

Pressured by protesting factions, the Speaker of Parliament Volodymyr Lytvyn had to forward this and other language bills to the National Academy of Sciences for expert examination. The findings he received, signed by NAS President Borys Paton, read that the Yefremov-Hrynevetsky-Symonenko bill (also signed by six other MPs) apparently ran contrary to the Constitution of Ukraine, as well as international law.

In other words, the new Ukrainian administration keeps the language policy in suspense. One of Yushchenko’s final edicts enacted the Concept of the Official Language Policy. Even this document hasn’t been proclaimed null and void; it is still on the Ukrainian pre­sidential website.

A consistent de-Ukrainization campaign is being held by Tabachnyk and his Ministry of Education and Science. Tabachnyk has declared the expediency and valid reasons behind the revival of Russian-language schools on the central and western regions of Ukraine. The number of Ukrainian-language schools in the eastern and southern regions will be substantially lowered during the academic years of 2010-11. The Ministry of Culture of Ukraine has been tactfully trying to exempt movies from Ukrainian dubbing, mostly for business rather than cultural reasons — and I mean movies provided by Russian distributors.

All things considered, it is hard to tell what will happen next in terms of official language policy. On the one hand, there are Russian-minded members of the Ukrai­nian parliament, like Kolesnichenko (leader of the “Russian-Speaking Ukraine Movement,” member of the Party of Regions), who insist that the Yefremov-Hry­nevetsky-Symonenko bill be passed, thus lowering the status of the Ukrainian language to that of ghetto patois. On the other hand, there are no signals from Bankova St. [Presidential Administration’s address in Kyiv – Ed.] saying that Viktor Yanukovych (who took a crash course in Ukrainian as head of the Donetsk regional state admi­nistration) approves of this scenario. One thing is clear: this bill would have long been passed, given the proverbial whistle from Bankova St., even before the local election campaign, when such signals were really important for the Party of Regions’ nominees in the east and south of Ukraine. At present, such items are far down on Ukraine’s political agenda.