"The Fourteenth Worst Place" Mykola Riabchuk

We can easily recognise that the essential divide in the country is not between the proverbial East and West, or ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones. It is primarily between the past and the future, Soviet and anti‑Soviet, patron‑clientelistic and civic.

1.
“Damned Europeans,” exclaims my colleague as we cross a Maidan that is covered with ashes and flowers. “They would have still been hesitating over whether to interfere if those bastards hadn’t killed so many people!”
I’m not going to defend “Europeans”, since I have been criticising them myself for three months, chiding their reluctance to take a tougher stance against the clique that captured my country. I did this, however, in Western languages and in the Western media, but I still feel very uncomfortable to do it at home. Not that I apply different standards or submit to self‑censorship. I just care about the context.

I do care about the long tradition that exists of demonising the West as the main Other – a primordial enemy conspiring against Orthodox Slavs, a neo‑colonial master despising and subjugating East European Untermenschen. The Russian Empire has excelled in this demonising. It transformed the religious divide into a civilisational split and then into a geopolitical cleavage. It still employs a powerful propaganda machine to scare its subjects with dreadful stories about NATO’s aggressiveness and the EU’s moral decay.

My fellow Ukrainians have been exposed to this brainwashing for centuries, and many of them have internalised those myths – to various degrees. The West itself contributed to those stereotypes – not only throughout the bumpy history of West / East relations but also through quite a contemporary attitude of superiority, patronising or sheer neglect. For many of us, a brief encounter with Western consulate officers or border guards might be sufficient to leave all our “Westernism” behind for good.

But I believe that the opposite feeling – a resentment and grievances against all the world that ignores or underestimates us, and owes us something for the very fact that we are so nice and unique – is self‑humiliating and ultimately self‑destructive.

At the end of the 19th century, when the chances for the Ukrainian project were slimmer than now, and the Russian Empire was nearly as aggressive and Ukrainophobic as it is today, a great Ukrainian writer wrote to his friend: “Suffice to cry and complain that they beat us! There are too many people in the world who claim the same. The world cannot, however, help all those who are beaten. It helps only those who fight back.”

2.
The recent Ukrainian revolution and the ensuing invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine raised, once again, the complex and contested question about Western engagement in global affairs – its scope, depth, timing, selective character and justification. In the most general terms, the question is about both interests and values, both geopolitics and morality. The persistent controversy stems from the fact that there has always been an unavoidable trade‑off between the two aspects. One cannot promote liberal democratic values with a complete disregard for the geopolitical reality. Nor can anybody, besides the rogue states, pursue national interests with a complete disregard for morality.

The trade‑off is difficult: the West can bomb Belgrade to stop genocide in Kosovo but cannot bomb Moscow to stop genocide in Chechnya. The United States can use its military to expel Iraq forces from Kuwait, but can hardly do the same to expel Chinese forces from Tibet or Russian forces from Crimea. Realpolitik reigns supreme, and the thin line between reasonable calculation and cynical betrayal is often blurred and questioned and manipulated.

One can easily place oneself in a situation of such a tough moral choice if only one imagines how many people in the globe are starving to death when we consume some expensive food in a restaurant, or how many people are lacking basic medicine when we purchase luxury cars and other symbols of our vanity. Typically we avoid such questions, instead finding various excuses for our avoidance and non‑engagement. “We cannot help everybody”, “I have already donated to charity”, “There are too many crooks and lazy‑bones everywhere, and I don’t know where my contribution goes”, “I need some minimum comfort, I actually deserve it” – these are just a few arguments we indulge ourselves with, suggesting – quite reasonably – that we are average people, not holy men like Buddha, or Christ, or St Francis.

Any action requires some calculation of the potential costs and benefits. If the costs look relatively low (Desert Storm) and the benefits high (millions of barrels of oil), the choice is easy: values and interests largely coincide. If the costs are apparently high and the benefits questionable, the most likely outcome is inaction: nobody is going to die for the city of Gdańsk or for the “far‑away country of which we know nothing” (to quote Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 reference to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia).

The ostensibly clear‑cut calculation has, however, two very weak points. First, inaction, which is often reasonable and justifiable in military terms, does not (or should not) necessarily stand for inaction by other means – political, diplomatic, and economic. The inability of Western democracies to protect Chechen people as they do Kosovars does not mean that the entire story should be forgotten, the crimes forgiven, and the butcher of the Caucasus – unlike poor Milošević – awarded with the French National Order of the Legion of Honour and featured as the Person of the Year in a leading international magazine. Inability to protect Georgia also does not mean that it should be business as usual with the Putinist Russia, and French Mistral military ships should be sold to the rogue state as if nothing happened.

The Western neglect of the basic principles creates the second weak point. It not only relativises and compromises the system of values upon which the West has been built but also creates an illusion of some tactical gains, which in fact disguise profound strategic losses. Today’s low costs may become high tomorrow, while today’s benefits may eventually be nullified. If the West had learnt any lessons from their appeasement of the German dictator in the 1930s, they would have predicted more perspicaciously that after the Russian blitzkrieg in Georgia Ukraine would be next – as actually not so few authors forecast back in 2008.

The reluctance to see Putin’s crypto‑fascist regime as it is – by both nature and name – would result not only in a partition of Ukraine and creation of a cordon sanitaire from Donbas to Transnistria. In four to six years it is likely to bring about another cordon sani-taire – from St Petersburg to Kaliningrad, with a full repetition of the Crimean special operation in Latvia and Estonia, and something akin to the Danzig affair in Lithuania. An invasion that can be curbed today in Ukraine by some political and economic means – however enormous and extraordinary, would tomorrow unambiguously require military engagement at least from NATO.

Misers pay twice, as the common wisdom suggests. Ukrainians recall this today with two other wisdoms painfully learnt – about the God who helps those who help themselves, and about the world that supports not those who are beaten, but those who fight back.

3.
Ukrainians may have invested too many hopes in what they call “Europe”, with the result that their eventual disappointment in the reality of minor, parochial, cynical and often ignorant people might be bitter and painful. Not that they ever expected any immediate gains from the Association Agreement with the EU – its meaning was mostly symbolic. It stood merely for a chance to peacefully get rid of the kleptocratic regime that ripped off the country, and to move gradually towards the rule of law and “normal life in a normal country”.

The Ukrainian revolution can best be understood as a revolution of values. It was a revolution of the middle class, of the “bourgeoisie” against the post‑Soviet system of oligarchic quasi‑feudalism. Nearly two thirds of protesters, surveys reveal, were people with higher education – professionals, businesspeople, and the creative class. Their average age was 30‑plus, they spoke both Ukrainian and Russian, and represented all regions and ethnic groups, even though those from the west and Ukrainians predictably prevailed.

It was another attempt to complete the unfinished business of the 1989 anti‑communist revolutions that succeeded spectacularly in East‑Central Europe but brought rather mixed results in the Balkans and in the post‑Soviet space. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Ukrainian independence was hijacked by the former nomenclature who never dreamed about any national independence, let alone fought for it.

It took a decade of stagnation, frustration and dramatic atomisation of the society before the new growth in the civic mood and activity began. The 2004 Orange Revolution was the second Ukrainian attempt to break radically with the Soviet past and move toward what they call “Europe” – rule of law, institutional accountability, liberal democratic political practices and procedures. They failed again – partly because of the small‑minded leaders who invested all their energy in infighting rather than in profound institutional reforms, but partly also because of themselves. Ukrainian civil society proved to be strong enough to defend its vote and endorse the new leaders, but not yet to make them work.

The third attempt, which began peacefully as “Euromaidan”, turned violent very fast, resembling rather the Romanian uprising against Ceaușescu than the velvet revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia or, perhaps, Kyiv in 2004. The fall of dictatorship and inception of the interim government marked rather the beginning than the end of a very protracted and painstaking process of transformation, or actually reboot, of the entire system. The budget is stolen, the economy ruined, and the institutions, primarily the judiciary, are completely corrupt, dysfunctional, and mistrusted.

To make things worse, the brazen Russian takeover of Crimea and the quite real threat of military invasion in other regions mean that the Ukrainian government has to deal more with the routine issues of daily survival than with large‑scale systemic reforms. Ukraine has never been in such a critical situation throughout its 23 years of independence. But it has also never had so many committed people and such an impressively mobilised society to make the radical break with (post‑) Sovietism possible.

4.
It is very difficult at the moment to make any short‑term predictions, but the long‑term tendency is rather clear. Ukraine’s westward drift is rather inevitable for a great many reasons. One of them is geopolitical, if not thoroughly existential. Ukraine as a project, as a political nation, has no raison d’être in Russia or within some Russia‑led union. All the Russian identity hinges on the perverse assumption that Ukrainians are not a nation, just a regional brand of Russians, a rural cousin, rather amiable but pretty dull and therefore requiring permanent patronising and occasional punches. Ukrainians have always had little choice but either to be dissolved in a greater Russian super‑ethnos or decouple themselves from Russia and move as far away as possible.

The second reason is civilisational, connected to the urgent need for modernisation – a process that is rather impossible within a backward, authoritarian, and incredibly corrupt Russian political‑cum‑economic space, but quite feasible within the EU – as the experience of Ukraine’s western neighbours vividly confirms. The shift in values in Ukrainian society is both the result of modernisation processes and their driving force. The World Values Survey carried out regularly in many countries around the world reveals a significant shift in Ukraine in the past decade – from “survival values” to “self‑expression values”. Within the university‑educated population, this shift is especially impressive. It reflects a decline in the paternalistic consciousness of the Homo Sovieticus, who supports the status quo and is cautious of any changes because all of them, in his view, are for the worse. On the other hand, it reflects a growth in the middle class, who see changes positively and strive to influence or even initiate them.

And finally, there is a demographic factor that makes Ukraine’s westward drift largely predetermined. All the surveys indicate a very strong correlation between the respondents’ age and their pro‑Western orientations. The younger the people, the more westernised they are. And this correlation is clearly noticeable in all Ukrainian regions, all ethnic or ethnolinguistic groups.

If we frame the Ukrainian revolution as a value‑based and actually value‑driven process, we can easily recognise that the essential divide in the country is not between the proverbial East and West, or ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones. It is primarily between the past and the future, Soviet and anti‑Soviet, patron‑clientelistic and civic. There are clear correlations between this essential, value‑based divide and some other Ukrainian fault‑lines and identity markers. For obvious social and historical reasons, Sovietism has been much deeper‑rooted in the south‑east than in the west or even the centre; for similar reasons, Russians and Russophones have internalised Soviet values and imperial views more extensively than Ukrainians (or other ethnic groups), whose distinct identity was likely to immunise them against full and thorough self‑identification with Sovietism, largely associated with Russianness.

Correlation, however, means only likelihood – a higher‑than‑average probability, but not iron‑clad determinism. This means, inter alia, that in a national survey last year 20 per cent of the inhabitants of Donetsk supported the Association Agreement with the EU, whereas 20 per cent of the inhabitants of Kyiv supported a Russian‑led Customs Union. This also means that a third of Ukrainian Russians are strongly pro‑Western, whereas a third of Ukrainian Ukrainians are strongly Sovietophile. All these figures are interesting and important; they can probably influence some practical policies, their tempo and character, but they can have no impact on our commitment to basic values. Even if, let’s imagine, slave‑owners suddenly get a majority, they would hardly manage to force us to accept their immoral system. Nor would adherents of Sovietism and Russian imperialism ever accommodate us with the inhuman and humiliating legacies they represent.

If we frame the Ukrainian revolution as a belated part of the 1989 East European upheaval, we have to remember that all those revolutions were both anti‑authoritarian and anti‑colonial, democratic and supporting national liberation. This was a source of both their strength and their weakness. The broad agenda required a broad coalition. Committed democrats allied with nationalists, some of whom were rather liberal, but many not. The ideological split was inevitable, and all the broad coalitions, national fronts and national liberation movements fell apart as soon as the goal was achieved and the common enemy gone. This is a serious challenge for all revolutionaries, but even a dual challenge for the revolutionaries in Ukraine, where neither was the goal achieved nor did the enemy disappear.

The Russian invasion, however irrational at first glance, is fully in line with the internal logic of Putinism and all the policies of the Kremlin of the past decade. A modern European Ukraine might reasonably become a deadly blow to both Putinism as a peculiar form of authoritarian ideology and to Russian imperial identity as a peculiar set of premodern values and attitudes. Ukraine, in a sense, is like the egg in the folk tale in which the dragon’s eternal life dwells. Europe’s eternal life may also dwell there – if only some less parochial European politicians manage to comprehend it.

5.
In Michael Winterbottom’s 1995 film “Welcome to Sarajevo”, there is a graphic episode when the UN dignitaries visit the besieged city terrorised by artillery shelling and snipers’ shooting. “When are you going to act?” ask the frustrated journalists, “When are you going to at least rescue the children?”

“Well,” the top official responds, “we have some plans on the table. But believe me, there are at least 13 other places in the world where the situation is even worse than here.”

In a sense, he was right, and I was ready to buy this argument as long as Ukrainians were fighting Yanukovych’s regime – perhaps the most kleptocratic but certainly not the ugliest, bloodiest, and most dictatorial on the planet.
Today we encounter a much stronger and cynical and unscrupulous enemy, far more dangerous than anybody else in the world. And all the talk about 13 other places where the situation is even worse sounds to me as self‑indulgent and cynical as “deep concerns” expressed by the EU politicians on a daily basis. I have increasing suspicions that in all 13 places beyond Ukraine they say exactly the same.

Mykola Riabchuk – a Ukrainian author and essaist, as well as a founder of Krytyka magazine. His research and articles focus on topics of Ukrainian national identity, politics, and history through a postcolonial lens. From 2014, he is the chairman of the jury of The Angelus Central European Literature Award. The laureate of the 2022 Taras Shevchenko Prize, the most important Ukrainian award given for achievements in the field of culture.