[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: LAT; Newsweek; EDM (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

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The World; Ukraine no longer silent about famine; Survivors of the
'death by hunger' and others are speaking out about a topic long
smothered by Soviet-era denial. 

Megan K. Stack 

Times Staff Writer

3 June 2008

A-6

KIEV, UKRAINE

Hryhory Haraschenko tells the stories feverishly, in a voice that brooks
no interruption, gesticulating wildly with veined hands. He hauls out
his stash of carefully bundled newspaper clippings, witness' tales and
pencil-drawn maps. He speaks like a man possessed, and in a sense he is
-- haunted by memories and by decades of forced silence.

At 89, Haraschenko is among a dwindling number of Ukrainians who
survived the Soviet-era famine of the early 1930s. Like other survivors
and some historians, he regards the starvation -- known here as the
Holodomor, or "death by hunger" -- as an act of genocide engineered to
wipe out the Ukrainians.

He wants it discussed, and he wants it recognized by the world.

"Russia is afraid we'll accuse Moscow of creating this genocide and
eliminating Ukrainian villages," he says. "They try to say that Russians
were killed in this famine, but don't listen to them."

After decades spent buried in Soviet silence and smothered in official
denials, the Stalin-era famine has emerged as a passionate, painful
topic that festers at the heart of tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
This spring, presidents, talk show hosts and a Nobel laureate have
trumpeted their opinions on whether the starvation of millions of
peasants qualifies as genocide.

The push for international recognition of the famine as genocide is
being led by a new generation of Western-leaning Ukrainians, most
visibly President Viktor Yushchenko. Keen to shed light on the
suffering, they also believe that a declaration of genocide would
bolster Ukraine's independence from Russia, helping it regain its sense
of itself as a separate country, bonded by national tragedy.

"At school we had only the history of the Soviet Union, and in fact this
was Russian history," said Stanislav Kulchytsky, a Ukrainian historian
and famine scholar. "Ukraine has now gotten to know its own history.
We're learning our victories and our tragedies. The picture of the past
makes a person nationally oriented."

The battle to forge Ukraine's post-Soviet identity and allegiances has
been fought on every level: in national politics, NATO debates, business
deals and pipeline maneuvers. It has been fought internationally and
internally, among different factions of a nation historically split
between allegiances to Russia and the West.

But no struggle has proved so bitter, or touched so many nerves, as the
one over Ukrainian history, culture and language. In today's Ukraine --
the country's name means "borderland" -- the smallest gestures are
freighted with meaning. Some Ukrainians mind, deeply, visitors who refer
to "the Ukraine" -- a term the Ukrainians say implies their nation is
merely Russia's frontier.

"He will speak Ukrainian," snapped an aide to a pro-Western lawmaker
when asked whether his boss might speak Russian during an interview. "He
is a Ukrainian and so he will speak Ukrainian."

Ukraine has carried out an aggressive campaign to replace the Russian
language, even changing the spelling of the capital, Kiev, to the
Ukrainian version -- Kyiv. Meanwhile, teachers have begun to recast
anti-Russian figures as varied as 18th century Cossacks and World War II
anti-Soviet fighters as historically positive, or even as heroes.

Infuriating to Russia

This trend has infuriated Moscow, where the sense of Ukraine as a piece
of Russia remains strong, and many are suffused with newfound nostalgia
for the USSR. Vladimir Putin, who became Russia's prime minister after
his presidential tenure ended last month, has complained of Ukraine's
recent historical reinterpretations.

"These unfriendly moves sadden the atmosphere of relations between our
two countries," Putin, as president, wrote in a letter to his Ukrainian
counterpart. "They could seriously impact bilateral cooperation in
various ways."

The famine may be the rawest nerve of all.

This is what Haraschenko remembers: Coming home from Young Pioneer camp
and helping to harvest the grain, only to watch the all the kernels be
carted off toward Russia. The day the soldiers came through his house
and confiscated every last bit of flour and milk. The hunger that grew
relentlessly until the widow who lived next door killed her 4-year-old
daughter and cooked the corpse to survive.

In the beginning he helped to bury the other students' bodies, but soon
the villagers got used to the sight of death, he said, and left the
remains to litter the streets. By the time it was over, at least 3.5
million Ukrainians were dead, and the survivors were ordered by Soviet
officials to keep their memories to themselves.

"The agents went through the houses and said, 'There was no famine.
Forget it. Don't say a word,' " Haraschenko said. "If you talked about
it, if you even said the word 'famine,' you went to Siberia."

That's a far cry from today. During a luncheon toast here this spring,
Yushchenko asked President Bush to recognize the famine as an act of
genocide. "We will be immeasurably grateful," he said.

Bush stopped short. But he visited the famine memorial, a stark, stone
angel set at the base of St. Michael's gold-domed cathedral and backed
by signs reading "Victims of the criminal deeds of the Bolshevik regime"
and "the Ukrainian holocaust."

Last year, Yushchenko pushed a bill that would make denying either the
Holodomor or the Holocaust a crime punishable by prison time. Some
Ukrainians, leery of damaging already strained ties with Moscow, have
criticized the president for going too far.

"It makes me feel like we are living in 1937, as if we could be talking
and I say the Holodomor existed, and you say you have doubts, then I
have to write a complaint and take it to the police department so you
face charges," said Oleksandr Moroz, head of the opposition Socialist
Party. "This is idiotic. We'll make our fellow citizens the enemies of
one another."

But the rhetoric out of Ukraine has already infuriated Russia. Nobody is
denying that millions of Ukrainians died when Stalin's regime stripped
the peasants of their crops during forced collectivization. But
officials in Moscow note that massive numbers of non-Ukrainian Soviet
peasants, including millions in Russia, Kazakhstan and other parts of
the Soviet Union, also starved to death under Stalin's rule. They
bitterly reject the notion that Ukrainians were targeted.

"There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic
lines," the Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said in
an April resolution. "Its victims were millions of citizens of the
Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living
largely in agricultural areas of the country.

"This tragedy does not have, and cannot have, any internationally
recognized indications of genocide and should not be used as a tool for
modern political speculation."

Even Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled for his
searing literary portraits of Soviet injustices, came out of retirement
in April to rail against the Ukrainians. "This provocateur's cry of
'genocide' began to germinate decades later," he wrote in a piece
published by Izvestia newspaper. "First secretly, in the moldy minds of
chauvinists maliciously set against [Russia], and now elevated to
government circles of today's Ukraine."

Looming tensions

The argument has intensified against the backdrop of looming tensions
between the two neighboring countries, which are tightly bound by
ancient ties of religion and history. Ukrainian opinion is divided over
whether the country should work to join the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, and many people here regard the question as an existential
choice between Russia and the West.

"It's some kind of ultimate choice, strategic or even civilizational
choice, to be part of the West," said Oleksandr Sushko, director of
Kiev's Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Russia is very
concerned now in our history, the names of our streets, who's considered
a hero or not, the famine, what's written in our textbooks. This is the
state of our relations. They are still living in their mental frame of a
former empire."

Tucked away in a modest apartment with his wife and cat, Haraschenko
knows exactly what he wants for his country. He has never forgotten the
lifestyle he witnessed as a young soldier in countries such as Austria
and Czechoslovakia. Those memories have lingered all these years,
fueling a nationalistic desire to see Ukraine detached from Russia's
shadow and united with Europe.

"Here, to this day, we haven't achieved 1% of what they had already
achieved at that time," he said. "I compare it to the current situation
in Ukraine and I can say that they were further along."

But mostly, he wants to recount his memories of the famine.

"We all kept silent," he said. "And now there are just a few left who
can tell these stories."

 

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The East Looks West; The Kremlin may act triumphant, but Russia is
losing its hold on the youth of former Soviet states. 

By Owen Matthews; With Anna Nemtsova In Tbilisi 

9 June 2008

June 9, 2008; ; U.S. Edition

It's been more than a century since a member of the Mebagishvili family
of Tbilisi, Georgia, grew up not speaking Russian. Like educated clans
all over the Russian Empire, the Mebagishvilis considered the language
of Pushkin and Tolstoy essential for anyone who wanted to get ahead-or
to be considered fully civilized. But 20-year-old Helen Mebagishvili, a
philosophy and social-science student at Tbilisi's Ilia Chavchavadze
State University, has chosen English, not Russian, as her first foreign
language. She's learning another one, too: French. "I do not feel any
attachment toward Russia," she says as she fills the shelves of a new
university library with Penguin editions of Mark Twain, James Joyce and
Charles Dickens. "Once, Russia introduced European ideas to Georgia-but
now we have direct access to European ideas without Russia."

All across the former Soviet Union, thousands of students are making the
same choice-embracing English rather than Russian, and Western education
standards. "Our students want to integrate into the European Community
rather than keep up with their Russian," says Anatoly Bourban, a
professor at one of Ukraine's leading universities, Kiev's Mahyla
Academy, where courses are taught in Ukrainian and English only.
Azerbaijan's leading private university, Khazar University in Baku,
teaches mostly in English and offers U.S.-style M.B.A. courses. So do
the Georgian American University and Black Sea University in Tblisi, as
well as the American University of Central Asia, based in Kyrgyzstan's
capital, Bishkek. Several of these also offer Western syllabi and
standardized tests-in part so their students can pursue their studies
abroad. Prof. Charles Fairbanks from the Washington-based Hudson
Institute teaches a course on great books at Ilia Chavchavadze State
University. "Now only one third of my students can read Russian," he
says. "The majority communicate and read fluently in English."

The implications of this shift extend far beyond the classroom. The
language and culture in which people educate their young say a lot about
the world they expect their kids to grow up in. For many members of the
elite in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states-and to a lesser extent
Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan-the cultural center of gravity is
no longer Moscow. "Russia has lost the soft-power war," says the
U.S.-educated president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. His government
is funding scholarships for 1,000 local students to attend top Western
universities and has recruited 300 American and European professors to
teach part time at major Georgian universities. Even Georgian university
exam papers are graded in the United Kingdom, although that's more to
prevent corruption in admissions standards.

Many in the West (and in Moscow) see a Russia that's resurgent, pumped
up by oil money and flexing its muscles around the world. But, as
Saakashvili points out, Russian bravado masks a deeper weakness. Moscow
has asserted itself mostly by picking fights with its neighbors-with
Ukraine over gas prices, with Estonia over the removal of a Soviet war
memorial and with Georgia over two breakaway enclaves supported by
Moscow. Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who came up with the term "soft
power" to describe the influence of a civilization and culture, says
those "bullying attitudes [are] destroying trust and undercutting
[Russia's] soft power in other countries." Ukrainian youth might still
listen to Russian pop music, but a January poll showed that 64 percent
of Ukrainians would vote to join the EU.

Many Russians see themselves as victims of a culture war being waged by
the West and the anti-Moscow leaders of former Soviet states. "We are
being kicked out for political reasons. No matter what we try to do,
neighboring states have anti-Russian agendas," says Alexander Khomenko,
head of the cultural programs department at Roszarubezhcenter, a body
set up by the Russian Foreign Ministry to promote the study of Russian
abroad. Last year the Kremlin also founded Russki Mir, a
grant-dispensing organization that gives away $22 million a year to
champion the Russian language. By the end of this year, the group hopes
to open as many as 15 Russian-language centers in ex-Soviet and Western
countries.

For kids like Mebagishvili and her fellow student Tomuna Gamkredze,
though, geopolitics are less important than their career prospects. "I
would very much want to learn to speak Russian one day," says Gamkredze,
17, as she helps her friend stack the library shelves. "[But] our
generation needs English. It is the universal language." For the first
time in generations, at least, she has the choice.

Eurasia Daily Monitor

June 4, 2008

WILL TYMOSHENKO OBEY NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL?

The government of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will have to
revise its decision to banish the U.S. company Vanco from the oil and
gas fields in the Ukrainian part of the Black Sea. The Ukrainian
Prosecutor-General's Office (GPU) has ordered the government to restore
Vanco's license to develop the fields, and the National Security and
Defense Council called on the cabinet to repeal its order annulling the
production-sharing agreement with Vanco. Tymoshenko insists, however,
that the deal with Vanco was not transparent.

On April 25 the Environment Ministry revoked the license to develop the
Black Sea oil and gas fields that was issued in December 2007 to Vanco
Prykerchenska, a subsidiary of the U.S. company Vanco Energy. Tymoshenko
accused President Viktor Yushchenko of lobbying for Vanco, but
Yushchenko denied the accusation and called on Tymoshenko to review her
decision on Vanco. She disobeyed, however, saying that the conditions of
a production sharing deal concluded in October 2007 did not suit the
government. She also expressed strong doubts about the ownership
structure of Vanco Prykerchenska, a subsidiary of Vanco, which received
the license to work in the Black Sea. Vanco threatened to sue Ukraine in
international courts (see EDM, May 21).

The GPU appealed on May 17 against the Environment Ministry's revocation
of Vanco Prykerchenska's license. This means that the Ministry has to
repeal its decision. This, however, has not happened to date. On the
contrary, on May 21 the Tymoshenko government unilaterally terminated
the production sharing deal with Vanco. Tymoshenko said that her
government would defeat "any kamikaze who sues" in international courts.
First Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchynov denounced the "attempts
to protect Vanco using the GPU." He also said, "I hope that the United
States will investigate the corrupt scheme which was used to force a
U.S. company to appear in the role of mediator, covering shadowy
economic interests."

Turchynov's strong words failed to impress U.S. Ambassador William
Taylor, who on the same day expressed his disappointment over the
government's decision. Taylor noted that the Ukrainian government should
respect contracts and suggested that it launch a dialogue with Vanco.

Tymoshenko, speaking on a talk show on Ukraina TV on May 29, insisted
that the deal with Vanco was not transparent. She said that two
Ukrainian business tycoons and certain officials, rather than Vanco
Energy, were behind Vanco Prykerchenska. "One of the companies behind
the Black Sea deal, I think, belongs to Rinat Akhmetov," said
Tymoshenko. "Another company belongs to Dmytro Firtash, the individual
who brought RosUkrEnergo to Ukraine. Another company, 25 per cent [of it
belongs to] unidentified Ukrainian officials at the very top. It is
generally impossible to detect who is the founder here."

Earlier Vanco Energy had said that it had three partners in Vanco
Prykerchenska: DTEK Shadowlight Investments linked to Russian
businessman Yevgeny Novitsky, and the Austrian-registered Integrum
Technologies. DTEK is controlled by Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest
businessman and one of the leaders of the Party of Regions (PRU), which
is in opposition to Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko apparently believes that
Firtash is behind Integrum Technologies. Firtash is the co-owner,
jointly with Gazprom, of RosUkrEnergo, a company from which Ukraine has
been buying Russian and Central Asian gas since 2006. Tymoshenko
unsuccessfully tried to banish RosUkrEnergo from the market early this
year.

Firtash and his Group DF issued a statement on June 2 saying that
Firtash had no links whatsoever to either Vanco Prykerchenska or
Integrum Technologies or any other company affiliated with Vanco. Group
DF Chief Executive Robert Shetler-Jones said that Tymoshenko should stop
making "groundless" statements about Firtash's connections to Vanco.

Tymoshenko also complained on May 29 that the National Security and
Defense Council (SNBO) threatened that she and Environment Minister
Heorhy Filipchuk would be held criminally liable for abolishing the deal
with Vanco. On May 30 the SNBO advised Yushchenko to order the
government to rescind the decision on Vanco.

SNBO Secretary Raisa Bohatyryova said that an expert group that was set
up by Yushchenko's decree of May 20 to check the Vanco deal established
that Vanco had won the tender in 2006 legally and that it was prepared
to fulfill its contractual obligations. Vanco Energy hailed the SNBO's
decision and said that it was ready for talks with Tymoshenko.

The SNBO is chaired by Yushchenko, and its decisions are binding
according to the Ukrainian constitution. Tymoshenko is a member of the
SNBO, but her team on this body is outnumbered by Yushchenko's people.
Bohatyryova is a member of the PRU. It is believed that she belongs to
the "business wing" of the party, whose informal leader is none other
than Rinat Akhmetov. This wing is more prone to compromise with
Yushchenko than PRU leader and former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
Tymoshenko suspects that Yushchenko plans a new ruling coalition with
the PRU, in which there will be no place for her party (UNIAN, May 20,
21, June 2, 3; Interfax-Ukraine, Ukrainska Pravda, May 21; Ukraina, May
29; Channel 5, May 30; Reuters, June 2)

--Pavel Korduban

Eurasia Daily Monitor

UKRAINE RETURNING TO KUCHMA-ERA REPRESSION? 

By Taras Kuzio

Monday, June 2, 2008 

In a television interview on May 20 Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko
raised the stakes in her worsening relations with President Viktor
Yushchenko by bringing up the question of impeaching the president if a
continuing investigation into the Vanco contract (see EDM, May 21) finds
proof of corruption. Two days later the prosecutor's office filed
criminal charges against Davyd Zhvania, a key organizer of the Orange
Revolution, senior leader of the Peoples Self Defense wing of the Our
Ukraine-Self Defense bloc (NUNS) and chief financier of Self Defense
(NS).

Tymoshenko asked all members of the orange coalition to "place their
hands on the table and say that these hands had never stolen." The issue
of corruption within the orange coalition as a pretext for its undoing
is nothing new. In September 2005 the Tymoshenko government fell after
presidential secretariat head Oleksandr Zinchenko accused the
president's advisers, drawn from big business, of abuse of office.

The spring 2008 crisis resembles the crisis in September 2005 in three
respects.

First, the National Security and Defense Council (NRBO) was used on both
occasions as a surrogate (anti-Tymoshenko) government.

Second, in both instances the presidents' deep personal dislike of
Tymoshenko was unbridled in both words and actions.

Third, economic policy, privatization, social policies, corruption and
energy divided Tymoshenko and the president

The major difference between the two orange crises lies in the different
constitutions in place at the time. Currently, the president has no
right to remove the prime minister, and therefore the disintegration of
the government and coalition will be evolutionary, not revolutionary as
it was in 2005.

A more dangerous aspect to the Tymoshenko-Yushchenko rivalry rests over
the return to Kuchma-era repressive tactics with one small caveat. If in
the Kuchma era the regime launched a diversity of repressive policies
against the opposition, today the presidential apparatus is repressing
its own ostensible coalition partners.

Repressive policies have been launched along three fronts.

First, former Security Service chairman and NRBO secretary Yevhen
Marchuk was appointed presidential adviser on May 19. Marchuk is
suspected of being the brains behind the Mykola Melnychenko recordings
in Kuchma's office in 1999 and 2000 to force Kuchma into early
retirement. Marchuk was instrumental in coordinating parliamentary
opposition to then Deputy Prime Minister Tymoshenko's policies against
energy corruption in the 2000-2001 Yushchenko government that ultimately
brought the government down.

Second, criminal charges against the government and the Tymoshenko bloc
(BYuT) over its privatization plans are defended, because the
privatization is attacked for being politically motivated to compensate
Ukrainian citizens for money lost in Soviet savings and thereby win
political dividends for the BYuT. Such accusations heated up in an April
14 statement by deputy head of the presidential secretariat Ihor
Pushkin, followed by a very critical counter-attack two days later by
the BYuT.

In almost daily attacks, the head of the presidential secretariat Viktor
Baloha has retorted by accusing Tymoshenko of being a "cowardly
charlatan," Ukraine's "Eva Peron," and an "uncultured pigmy" and has
said that her constitutional proposals were "directed toward the
introduction in Ukraine of a regime similar in nature to that of
Hitler's Germany." A return to the use of such Soviet era rhetoric
against opponents resembles the language used in a February 2001
statement accusing the opposition, including Tymoshenko, of being
"fascists."

Third, proceedings to strip Davyd Zhvania of his Ukrainian citizenship.
Ukraine does not recognize dual citizenship, and Zhvania gave up his
Georgian citizenship when he became a citizen of Ukraine. He complained
of double standards, accusing First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko of
maintaining her American citizenship after she received a Ukrainian
passport in 2005 (she married Yushchenko in 1998). U.S. sources,
however, told Jamestown that the first Lady gave up her US citizenship
in autumn 2007, when the legal procedure was to give up foreign
citizenship before taking Ukrainian.

Further criminal charges may be fabricated against Yuriy Lutsenko.
Tymoshenko and Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, head of the NS, link
the charges to the presidential secretariat's plans for replacing the
orange with a grand coalition and to Lutsenko's demand, made a week
earlier, for Viktor Baloha's replacement. "I believe that this was
politically ordered by Mr. Baloha as a way of responding to objective
criticism of his work," Lutsenko said.

Lutsenko and the NS, which controls 18 of NUNS's 72 deputies, have long
been at odds with Baloha and his allies in NUNS. The pro-Baloha United
Center party accuses Lutsenko's NS of being a "pro-Tymoshenko fifth
column" inside NUNS and sees the BYuT as its main opponent, rather than
the Party of Regions. Lutsenko recently stated that the NS would never
again run jointly in an election with Our Ukraine.

Lutsenko is at odds with Baloha and Yushchenko over the May 25 Kyiv
mayoral and council election with Lutsenko, who heads the NUNS bloc in
the elections, supporting the Tymoshenko and Vitaliy Klichko blocs in
their opposition to Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky. Meanwhile, Baloha and
Yushchenko have switched their support to the mayor after NUNS refused
to agree to Yushchenko's demand that it form an alliance with
Chernovetsky. Yushchenko reportedly told NUNS of his hope that the Kyiv
elections would become "Tymoshenko's Stalingrad."

Another aspect to the Zhvania case relates to Yushchenko's poisoning in
September 2004. Zhvania was the only Orange Revolution leader, other
than Yushchenko, present at the dinner where the poison was allegedly
administered. Ukrainian media with links to the presidential secretariat
have recently published unsubstantiated rumors that Zhvania was a
suspect in the poisoning.

Repression instituted by the president through the NRBO and presidential
secretariat is seen as a return to tactics used in the Kuchma era. Our
Ukraine political analyst Ihor Zhdanov wrote, "In recent times the law
enforcement structures have been actively used as an instrument of
political struggle similar to that used under former President Leonid
Kuchma."

These developments illustrate Yushchenko's and Tymoshenko's divergent
views about how to relate to the Kuchma era. Tymoshenko was astounded
when the president appointed Kuchma a member of the council of advisers
of Kyiv University this month.

On the day her faction blocked the president's annual address to
parliament, Tymoshenko said, "Today's authorities, who came to high
positions after the Maidan [Independence Square, known for mass protests
during the Orange Revolution], are in no way better than those we
struggled against--the Kuchma authorities." Tymoshenko, whose government
has been blocked by a two-month parliamentary blockade by the Party of
Regions and daily interference by the president and Baloha, said that
reforms since the Orange Revolution have been simply "empty chatter."

The Tymoshenko-Yushchenko rivalry is becoming even more intense. A
presidential secretariat official said that, "Your Yulia has created
bedlam in the last three years, and it's about time we finished once and
for all with her." Comments such as this cast suspicion on whether
Yushchenko is now convinced that the only way he can win a second term
is by destroying Tymoshenko, as Kuchma attempted to do in 1991 and 1994
(www.pravda.com.ua May 1-15, www.byut.com.ua, April 14, 
www.president.gov.ua, May 19, www.nso.org.ua, May 12, www.5.ua, May 20)






 

 

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