The 1991 finish is a start now
Historical changes compress time and open eyes. Six months proved to be an instant. We have whizzed from December 2013 to a distant and not quite clear tomorrow. The leap from a quiet time of humility to a cruel period of disobedience could escape an overload. We feel this individually. Some have their ears slightly blocked, others feel nausea, and still others have their wings grown on the back, as if they had flown high up on a child’s swing. What is going on provokes a polemic which resembles the one that took place two decades ago. A friend of mine, recently a student, asked me the other day: “Was it also like this in 1991?” He meant criminal mayhem, a galloping inflation, and unpredictability of further events. I answered “no” because there was no threat of war at the time. But then I saw that I was mistaken. There were also clashes in Sumgait, Vilnius, and Tbilisi. Ukraine avoided bloodshed in the 1990s for one reason only: like in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, the change of the leading elites occurred in this country within the framework of the previous ideology. In general, those times were the blossom of materialism in spite of the fall of the CPSU. Everybody showed interest in economics, market relations, and private business, which they saw as a way out of the communist deadlock. Rallies for the abrogation of Article 6 of the Constitution (on the leading role of the CPSU) had lapsed into history, as had the state that laid down this norm. Therefore, most of the former Soviet republics preserved the ideology and morality of Leninism, communist parties, the nomenklatura, and many other things from the sad past legacy. The collapse of the USSR, for which Kremlin walls are still wailing, did not result in a radical transformation of life. It is not a revolution that tore down the old imperial edifice which the communists had adjusted to their own needs. It collapsed by itself, for it was gnawed by the worms of bureaucracy and decayed by orthodox mold. That collapse resembled the bankruptcy of a big corporation, when panic-stricken crisis managers delegate some of their powers to the subsidiaries and carry out re-branding, i.e., pursue a certain marketing strategy that allows the owner to change everything in his interests.
The Soviet Union collapsed in a juridical sense, but it remained, deep inside, as a modified system of the rule of Moscow on the territories that used to belong to it. Maybe, it could not have been otherwise – not only because of Putin in the Kremlin and the aggressive policy of Russia which is drawing everybody, by hook or by crook, into the golden age of its era, which many peoples consider black days in their national history.
In the remote 1990s, the ruling elites enthusiastically exposed Stalin and revealed invalidity of state monopoly in the economy, but they hindered in all the possible ways the awakening of the sense of national identity, civic feelings and human dignity. Infringements guaranteed steadfastness of the system. The latter found it beneficial to support the faithful instead of atheists, encourage any ways of earning money, and even create a semblance of democracy – only to increase the number of individuals dependant on the authorities.
Nowhere in the post-Soviet space, except for the Baltic republics, did man stand – as creator and keeper of the state – on a par with the governmental machine. On the contrary, the level of paternalistic sentiments grew, as did the number, legal and illegal incomes of governmental officials.
In Ukraine, this triggered the 2013 revolution, when people from various strata of society came out to assault the communist-style system of distribution – we take from all and give to ours. Twenty three years after the collapse of the USSR, the foundation and the load-bearing walls of the totalitarian structure began to ruin. It is the world outlook that caused the dismantlement. It is not the parties or economic demands that stirred up mass-scale and, what is more, intellectual protests on the streets. The revolution occurred in the minds of each of us. For this reason, it is impossible to slow down, defeat, or limit the change of foundations. For this reason, this revolution inspires terror in its creators, slaves, and satraps.
New ideals cannot match old delusions as much as watching stars through an electronic telescope cannot match the belief that a flat Earth rests on three whales. Nor does burial suggest that the deceased will be digging the grave. For some reason, we haven’t been aware of this before. I myself very recently advocated political pluralism that presupposes a multitude of opinions. But now my eye catches the absurdity and inner dissonance of the once customary things. The fact that communists are in parliament and their ideology is not banned is nonsense paid for with enormous victims in the past and national treason at present. An oligarchic clan that has established a party for one region and plunged the latter into the 19th century is a similar absurdity which, for some reason, stirred up no protests just a few months ago, not to mention the end of the last century.
No, we could not possibly have changed the country in 1991. It was not sufficient to substitute the Ukrainian trident for the Soviet emblem and to make aging CPSU functionaries give way to young Komsomol self-seekers. We are gaining independence today in blood, dirt, lies, and, at the same time, in a surprising spiritual affinity which I have never seen in our contemporary history. A personality and a civil society grow, like beautiful flowers, on a substratum of delusions and mistakes. We have understood that slavery will not vanish if the elements break down the prison door. It stays on in the habits of people, in the world of materialism, where constraints are natural and material, as are fences, window bars, censorship, and “strong government.” You can’t possibly explain this to old women with icons in hand, separatists, and many politicians – as Giordano Bruno failed to explain to the Inquisition court that the Sun is not the only one in the Universe, as Academician Andrei Sakharov failed to explain to Party congress delegated the causes of the Soviet Army’s atrocities in Afghanistan, as we fail to explain to the Russians and some of our compatriots that the Bandera gunmen myth was cooked up in the Kremlin.
This is in fact the main paradox of a people dispersed in space and time. Not all are on the same axis. There still are politicians who wander across the electoral fields, talking “about wages and pensions,” coal miners keep silent, as they were in a caved-in mine, while their destiny is being decided by bankrupt politicians and outright rogues. The situation in the candidates’ teams in unclear, and election campaign speeches are mixed with battlefield reports. Yet the vector of all events in this country is no longer being shaped in the same place by the same people with a great deal of financial clout. Those who have come to the fore are society and citizens who are called by all kinds of names, such as Bandera followers and an invisible Right Sector – a terrible force that can reach the Kremlin from Mezhyhiria. If it can “appropriate” a revolution, let it do so! Time and persuasion can do everything.
