For centuries Ukraine had anchored Russia’s identity. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians. But not to Ukrainians
, hardline Communists and the army had placed Mr Gorbachev under house arrest and mounted a coup. After three days of peaceful resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Soviet Republic, they backed down. That ruled out any return to a Soviet past. But Mr Gorbachev still clung to hopes for some sort of post-Soviet liberal successor as a way to hold at least some of the republics together. Mr Shushkevich’s call killed any such aspiration.
But if a world in which Ukraine, Russia and indeed Belarus were completely independent from the Soviet Union was attractive, one in which they were not tied to each other in some other way was very troubling to a Russian like Yeltsin. It was not just that Ukraine was the second-most-populous and economically powerful of the remaining republics, its industries tightly integrated with Russia’s.
The referendum had given it to him, with independence endorsed by majorities in every part of the country, both those in the formerly Austro-Hungarian west, with its Baroque churches and coffee shops, and in the Sovietised and industrialised east, where most of Ukraine’s 11m ethnic Russians lived. There were practical things he needed from Russia, and Russian interests he recognised; he wanted a good relationship with Yeltsin and so had come to the forest meeting.
More immediately, though the failed coup had made some such break-up more or less inevitable, disassembling a multi-ethnic empire of 250m people was still a subject of huge trepidation. As Solzhenitsyn had written in “Rebuilding Russia”, “The clock of communism has stopped chiming. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.
There was no such turnaround in Ukraine, where Mr Kravchuk lost the presidential election to Leonid Kuchma, a skilled Soviet-era industrial manager. Mr Kravchuk held the more nationalistic, Ukrainian-speaking west of the country; Mr Kuchma took the Russian-speaking and collectivist regions to the east. But unlike Mr Lukashenko, Mr Kuchma was not a reactionary, and he was to prove canny in wooing Ukrainians who had at first distrusted him.
He was right. Yeltsin’s unburdened moment among the trees had been that of a man who did not want to, and did not have to, rule an empire. He consciously rejected not just the Soviet Union’s ideology and central planning, but also the tools of statecraft that had held it together—repression and lies. To him, the market economy was a condition for freedom, not a substitute for it. His successor, Vladimir Putin, also embraced capitalism.
The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets. Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it. Perhaps most fundamental was his sense that, as a Ukrainian president, he could not thus divide the Ukrainian nation. He stayed his hand and allowed a second vote.
Time for some Slavic unity. When Mr Putin flew to Kyiv for a two-day visit in July 2013, his entourage contained both his chief economic adviser and the patriarch of Russia’s Orthodox Church, whose jurisdiction covered both countries. The trip coincided with the 1,025th anniversary of the conversion to Christianity of Prince Vladimir of the Kyivan Rus, and subsequently of the people as a whole, in 988: the “Baptism of Rus”.
This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.
Mr Putin now talks of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “The collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.” But he has hardly restored its empire. Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up.
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