A New Sketchy History of Independent Ukraine
When I heard that my former longtime friend Adrian Karatnycky was completing a history of contemporary Ukraine, I was thrilled and eagerly awaited getting my hands on the book.
Like me, Karatnycky is a longtime observer of Ukraine. He was born in the US, I was born in the UK; and like me he has largely dedicated his life to the Ukrainian cause, whether as a journalist, publicist, human rights activist or working for international organizations.
Democratically minded, he has also opposed ultra-nationalism, bigotry and fake news. But he has also often acted as an advisor behind the scenes to different Ukrainian presidential administrations, officials and businesspeople, as he himself acknowledges, which means he has had to tread carefully and stay on good terms with as many diverse types as possible.
I am the author of what he describes in his book as “an authoritative in-depth study of the movement towards independence and the early years of the state under Presidents Kravchuk and Kuchma.” This was my book “The Ukrainian Resurgence,” published in London and Toronto in 1999. So naturally, I hoped that his work would continue the story and take us up to the present with the same detail and balance.
Does it do that? Well, partly yes, partly no.
Let’s put it this way. It’s a book I really want to see on my bookshelf as part of my collection on modern Ukraine. As a narrative overview of the history of Ukraine over the last 30 years since the country’s independence, it is a welcome addition to my library.
But it is far from thorough and complete, and barely conceals its bias, so we must wait for others to make up for what is missing.
And why? First, the book is quite superficial and selective, and important questions remain unanswered. Apart from the endemic corruption and disdain for a society based on the rule of law, why has the political culture in Ukraine remained infantile, why are there still no modern political parties, and why the manipulation of the media for political ends that has become such common practice. I don’t see Savik Shuster, notorious for his long-running weekly political talk show “spectacles” mentioned at all.
And then there are other questions that are not addressed.
What efforts have the various political leaders made to promote national identity and cohesion? Yes, there’s a bit here on Viktor Yushchenko in this regard, but why the slow pace of decolonization and decommunization? Why was so little attention paid to deepening knowledge of the nation’s past and promoting the idea of an inclusive democratic political nation? Were the processes of nation-building and modern democratic state-building ever synchronized? And, importantly, given the ever-present threat from Russia, why was so little done to build up the state’s defense capacity?
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the author’s blatant lack of objectivity regarding former President Petro Poroshenko. For Karatnycky, Poroshenko seems to be the best thing that happened to Ukraine in the first three-plus decades of its independence.
The result is a total whitewash. There’s no mention of how the ambitious businessman Poroshenko was ushered into the political arena in the late 1990s by the pro-Russian schemer Viktor Medvechuk who was then serving President Leonid Kuchma. Nor does he dwell on Poroshenko’s role in the highly corrupt entourage of President Viktor Yanukovych as minister of trade and economic development.
We are not told how Poroshenko emerged as the main candidate for president after the Revolution of Dignity. About the secret meeting in March 2014 in Vienna with the fugitive gas magnate Dmytro Firtash, at which they, together with the leading candidate at the time, the former world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, and the former head of Yanukovych’s administration and Firtash’s business partner Serhiy Lyovochkin, decided to join forces to block Yulia Tymoshenko, with Poroshenko running as the presidential candidate and Klitschko being offered the important consolation prize of the mayor of Kyiv.
And then what occurred under Poroshenko’s presidency: the cynicism, deception and continuing corruption beneath the semblance of patriotism and aspiring to Western standards that resulted in a staggering 73 percent of the voters rejecting him in 2019.
Karatnycky simplifies what occurred before Zelensky even emerged as a candidate – he does not mention that Poroshenko was trailing in the polls to Yulia Tymoshenko. Nor does he dwell on the cynical way in which, very late in the day, the oligarch president badly miscalculated by promoting “Faith, Language, and the Army” as “his slogan and central campaign message.”
Poroshenko’s resort to bulldozing patriotic tactics backfired. Clearly, the Ukrainian voters wanted to see the back of a controversial president whom Karatnycky hails as “the most reformist” Ukrainian leader in the nation’s modern history. What they wanted was change and a break with the ossified corrupt system perpetuating itself with minimal adjustments on the surface.
Where the bias comes from becomes clear from the tribute that Karatnycky pays in the foreword to Poroshenko’s most important political advisor, Ihor Hryniv, “whose clear thinking and sharp analytical skills based on sociological data were of great importance for my understanding of Ukrainian politics and society.”
Understandably, Karatnycky found it difficult to write about Zelensky, whose candidacy he, together with Hryniv, the writer Oksana Zabuzhko and others, did his best at the time to dismiss as a “virtual” candidate created in effect by the oligarch and media baron Ihor Kolomoisky as a political novice totally unsuitable for the presidency. However, Karatnycky later had to eat humble pie when Zelensky was recognized at home and abroad as an exceptional war leader, and compared even to Churchill.
Zelensky, Karatnycky, would have us believe, has been “transformed” by the war and is “a leader who has now fully embraced a distinct Ukrainian national identity.” But there’s very little about the first year and a half of the war and how this change came about.
Karatnycky glosses over Zelensky’s efforts to clip the wings of the oligarchs and curtail the influence of prominent pro-Russian politicians. Kolomoisky, for example, has been behind bars since September 2023, as has pro-Russian-politician Nestor Shufrych. And Medvechuk, given free rein it seems under his “patriotic” colleague Poroshenko, was arrested even before that and later exchanged with Moscow for Ukrainian captives.
In short, given the fact that Karatnycky, as he indicates, has long had good connections with the top people in Ukraine, his omissions and distortions in “Battleground Ukraine” are regrettable, if not inexcusable.
Finally, there are some glaring factual mistakes. Karatnycky names Chernihiv in the north of Ukraine as “the birthplace of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol).” Hohol was at school in nearby Nizhyn, but as every fan of his knows from his Dikanka tales and references to Sorochyntsi and Myrhorod, he was born near Poltava, in the central-eastern part of the county.
But as I said, better the book we have now than no book at all on this subject. And perhaps it will encourage other historians and writers to do better.
Source: Bohdan Nahaylo