Ukraine's tug of war

In Ukraine, the pull of Europe works in curious ways. When I first moved to Kiev in 2012, the metro was plastered with adverts offering to “euro-renovate” my Khrushchev-era flat, install “euro-windows” or even treat my nails to a “euro-manicure.” There is even a Ukrainian Wikipedia entry for “euro-renovation” (yevroremont), which defines it as “renovation to European standards.” The prefix acquired new significance in November 2013, when it gave its name to the “Euromaidan” protests that broke out in Kiev’s Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti), prompted by then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign a trade deal with the European Union.

In Ukraine, long caught between east and west, something had stirred. I returned to Kiev early on in the protests, equipped with working Ukrainian and a bag of warm clothes. Nobody suspected what lay ahead: three months of protests culminated in a crackdown in which at least a hundred protesters died and many more were injured. The following month, Russia annexed Crimea. But out on the square, in the maze of army surplus tents and hulking field kitchens, a carnival-like atmosphere reigned. One group invited me to join them by a homemade stove with a vertical metal pipe as a chimney, which they christened their “steam train to Europe.” It was a winter of great possibility; naivety, others would say.

Two years on, those hopes seem far away. Russia has no intention of relinquishing Crimea, which it annexed in March 2014. An uneasy ceasefire holds with the separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region. Membership of the EU is not on the cards—and never was. Meanwhile, Brussels has worries of its own. In a sense, Ukraine has never been closer to Europe, and yet so far.

Ukraine’s relationship with Europe is the thread running through The Gates of Europe, a new history of the country by Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard. The tumultuous events which began in late 2013 took the west by surprise, revealing how little it knows about this country of 45m people. As Rory Finnin, head of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, noted a few months before the protests, Ukraine is Europe’s “terra malecognita.” Since then, the conflict in the Donbass and the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014 have made obscure cities in eastern Ukraine household names. Even so, knowledge of Ukraine’s past remains patchy, and much writing about it lacks a long-term perspective.

Plokhy’s history is intended as a corrective. The book spans over 1,000 years, and yet, as he confesses in the introduction, the questions he asks are “unapologetically presentist.” He reaches deep into the past to shed light on today’s Ukraine, including its relationship with Russia and Europe. Plokhy’s reasoning is straightforward: a better understanding of the historical situation can influence how we react to events as they unfold in Ukraine. The result is a refreshing, lucidly-written history that is timely for anyone interested not just in Europe’s past, but also its future. And the stakes are high: as one analyst pointed out recently, many western readers unintentionally buy in to Russia’s narrative about Ukraine simply “by osmosis.”

Watching from London, Paris or Berlin, it is easy to underestimate the importance of Europe for Ukraine (although by no means all Ukrainians are in favour of EU or Nato membership, though the proportion has risen). Ukrainian intellectuals have long been obsessed with the idea of Ukraine as part of Europe, as Plokhy points out. This has been as much an existential question as a geopolitical one—Ukraine’s “claim to independence has always had a European orientation,” he writes.

The metaphor of the gate in Plokhy’s title is chosen carefully. Ukraine has long been a conduit between Europe and Eurasia. Over the years, it has also helped to stop invasions from both east and west, as well as serving as a buffer zone. Russia does not want the EU and Nato right on its doorstep and, for the most part, the reverse is true, too. Rather than have Ukraine choose between east or west, upsetting the post-Cold War modus vivendi with Russia, some western leaders have preferred that it remain neutral.

Ukraine’s location and the way it has been partitioned over the years has had a lasting influence on its society. Its territory spans two old religious frontiers: the Christian-Muslim one (the Muslim presence is now largely restricted to the Crimean Tatars) and that between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. Over the centuries, the lands forming independent Ukraine since 1991 were split between competing empires and subsequently nation states. In the 19th century, they were ruled from imperial Moscow and Vienna. When the Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918, western Ukraine was split between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, only being incorporated into the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

That southwestern corner of Ukraine, which I visited last spring, retains the dusty feel of Mitteleuropa. Tucked away behind the bluish Carpathian Mountains, I found streets with bilingual Hungarian-Ukrainian street signs, coffeehouses serving strudel and Jewish challah, Ruthenian poets, monuments to Hungarian revolutionaries, paprika fields, roving street children and a Roma funeral procession. In sagging minibuses, I sat with uniformed soldiers back from the Donbass who told me their great-grandfathers had served in the Austrian, Romanian or Czechoslovak armies. It was the Europe of the great Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth made flesh.

In the tug of war between east and west, Ukraine’s two biggest neighbours—Russia and Poland—have pulled it in opposite directions. For centuries, Poland has tugged it westwards. To quote the late scholar of Byzantine history, Ihor Ševenko,  “this west was, for the most part, clad in the Polish kontusz,” a slit-sleeved robe historically worn by Polish noblemen. Admittedly, this did not necessarily involve support for Ukrainian autonomy; parts of western Ukraine were ruled from Warsaw as recently as 1939. Yet in 1991, Poland (along with Canada) became the first country to recognise Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. Since then, Warsaw has promoted Ukraine’s westward course, for many years acting as its advocate in Brussels.

Russia, meanwhile, has pulled Ukraine east. Both nations consider themselves the heirs of Kievan Rus’, the prince-ruled polity that was brought to an end by the Mongol conquest of 1240. (Ukrainians at least have the advantage of being able to look for their roots without leaving their capital, Plokhy jokes.) Despite, or perhaps because of, these shared origins, Ukraine’s history can be read as an attempt to differentiate itself from Russia culturally, linguistically and politically. Plokhy singles out the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky that began in the spring of 1648 as “the starting point in the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine as separate nations.” Yet even within the Soviet Union, there were short-lived bouts of “national communism,” when Moscow temporarily gave Ukrainian language and culture the space to develop, before closing in all the more brutally.

The book’s epilogue returns to the challenge posed by Russia. Plokhy warns of a new model of Russian identity promoted by the Kremlin today, which equates the Russian language with Russian nationality. This conception poses an existential challenge to Ukraine, he argues. Yet to divide Ukraine into a pro-European west and a pro-Russian east is misleading. Plokhy dismisses attempts to draw a hard-and-fast line down the middle of the country. Rather, Ukraine is “a patchwork of linguistic, cultural, economic, and political transition lines.” One example is language: maps showing a country divided between Ukrainian speakers in the west and Russian speakers in the east mask a more complex reality. Many Ukrainians slip easily between Ukrainian and Russian, and some use a combined form known as surzhyk. I once shared a train compartment with an elderly woman who spoke patiently in Ukrainian, while her  five-year-old grandson replied in Russian. In Kiev, I often start a conversation in one language and finish it in the other. Another example is religion: the frontier between eastern and western Christianity is hazy, and is complicated by the existence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the product of the 1596 Union of Brest, which combines elements of both religious traditions.

Ironically, this may have helped Ukraine survive. As Plokhy points out, the linguistic, religious and cultural lines criss-crossing the country have created a dense fabric that helps to hold it together. Having several powerful regional centres has aided democracy, too. For instance, the rivalry between the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk is such that it is hard for one to prevail over the other. Some commentators suggest that this counterbalancing prevented Ukraine from sliding into authoritarianism in the 1990s, unlike its more homogenous neighbour Belarus.

Rejecting the idea of a “clash of civilisations” inside Ukraine, Plokhy argues that these shifting borders have given its people a valuable versatility. The country’s history, he writes, has been characterised by “the ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them.” In the current context, the question is whether Ukraine’s tradition of internal coexistence will prevail over the turbulence in its east, with Russia keen to divide the country along linguistic, regional and ethnic lines.

Ukraine’s relationship with Europe, meanwhile, has been a story of missed chances. In the 1990s, Ukraine’s central European neighbours were offered the carrot of EU membership, while it was left to flounder in a geopolitical no-man’s land. After the Orange Revolution of 2004-05, when protesters camped out on Independence Square to protest a rigged election, the then President, Viktor Yushchenko, tried to bring Ukraine closer to Europe. But the pro-western leadership was soon split by infighting, as Yushchenko fell out with Yulia Tymoshenko, the Prime Minister at the time. Besides, Plokhy suggests, Yushchenko’s idea of Europe was out of date. His nationalist symbolism had more to do with the Europe of the early 20th century than that of the 21st. By naming Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist leader during the Second World War, a “Hero of Ukraine” in 2010, Yushchenko not only annoyed Ukraine’s Polish neighbours, but also alienated many of his own countrymen. Continuing controversy surrounding Bandera shows how central the memory of the Second World War, in which “Ukrainians found themselves on more than one side of the conflict,” remains to the country’s politics.

Plokhy describes the Euromaidan protests as “an unusual case of mass mobilisation inspired by issues of foreign policy.” Although the initial spark was Yanukovych’s abandonment of a trade deal with Brussels, the EU was in fact only part of the story, as anyone visiting Independence Square quickly grasped. Over time, blue and yellow Ukrainian flags easily outnumbered those of the EU. International, national and ethical interests were intertwined in what many Ukrainians now refer to as the “Revolution of Dignity.” “Europe” became an umbrella term for values that Ukrainians wanted to see take root in their country, notably the rule of law. One man I met on the Maidan had returned to Ukraine for the protests after a decade working in Germany. “I know that there are both good and bad things about the EU,” he said, “but there is always respect for the law.”

Brussels, however,  has not offered Ukraine the prospect of EU membership, not least for fear of irritating Russia. Meanwhile, in November, European leaders agreed to speed up Turkey’s accession negotiations in return for help with refugees from the Middle East. Once again, their thoughts are elsewhere.

Even if full membership of the EU is not likely any time soon, there are tangible ways in which the Europeans could show their support for ordinary Ukrainians. One is by making it easier for them to visit the EU, by allowing them to travel there without visas. By the spring of 2015, preparations for this had got quite far. But with renewed concerns about the porousness of the EU’s external borders, especially in the wake of the Paris attacks, it looks as if Ukrainians will need visas for a while yet. It is hard, therefore, for Europhiles in Ukraine not to feel let down. When they hear European leaders’ declarations of concern, most now just roll their eyes.

It may be the case, as Plokhy writes, that “Europe is an important part of the Ukrainian story, as Ukraine is part of the European story.” But for the time being, the “gates of Europe” remain shut.