Brotherly Love

Monday, Mar. 25, 2002
Back in 1968, as Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring, Moscow justified the intervention by the need to render help to the brotherly Czechoslovak people. For their part, the Czechs and Slovaks commented: "The difference between brothers and friends is that we can choose our friends." I recalled that joke recently in Ukraine, as Olexi Stepura, a young freelance journalist, was venting his spleen about too tight a brotherly embrace on the part of Russia. "They fail to understand that we're not them," he said. "We're a separate nation that has its own language, culture and history."

He hit the bull's eye. A Russian takes it for granted that the three key Slavic nations of the former U.S.S.R. — Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians — are alll one family, as they stem from the same Kievan Rus roots. A Russian genuinely thinks he is making his most generous compliment to a Ukrainian when he recognizes him as one of his own.

Ironically, it is just this attitude that irks the Ukrainians the most. They take it as a denial of their self-reliance, a disdainful mistrust of their ability to find their own legs, a condescending reminder of just who was the senior brother in the family for the last 300 hundred years — and as a potential threat of being dragged back into the family they have been so eager to leave. Hence, a certain overreaction to any reunification entreaties, which are seen as encroachment on newly won independence, and a somewhat exalted emphasis on Ukrainian as the state language.

Far be it for me to share Stepura's apprehensions of Russia handling Ukraine one day as it now does Chechnya. Even if only because Ukraine is a large country with a 50 million population and Russia is capable of waging one war at a time — and only on its own territory, as one Moscow wit put it. However, the Ukrainians do have a point in that the Russian political élite have never given up their imperial mentality. They still seek dominance over Ukraine, rather than just pursuing the legitimate interests of Russia as a neighboring country concerned with the fate of an 11-million strong Russian minority in Ukraine, among other things.

The language issue is always painful and complicated. An independent nation is entitled to the national language as the tongue of official documents and education, and the citizens are expected to handle that language. Though Spanish-language billboards and signs in, say, Florida do not seem to hurt the English speakers at all. The Russians in Ukraine mostly do not enjoy such courtesy. Still, Moscow's histrionics about the Russian minority in Ukraine being denied the Russian language are quite far-fetched. But there is another angle to it.

Ostannya Barrikada (The Last Barricade) is a small cozy joint, popular among the Kiev's youngsters. The name is supposed to symbolize the stubborn fight for the Ukrainian language, as if they indeed have to defend it at the barricades. The menu, available only in Ukrainian, explains that the Fountain of Bakhchisarai cocktail, specialty of the house, is so named after a famous poem "by THEIR poet Pushkin, written about OUR Crimea." The implication is clear: the Russians will never get the coveted Crimea back, while WE are not reading THEIR poets in THEIR language.

Well, the people who would not read Pushkin do not rob him of his glory. But they do rob themselves. Not that I often agree with Karl Marx, but one of his dictums I have cherished since childhood is: "You're as many times a human being as the number of languages you speak." And much as I love the Ukrainian language with its charming lilt, I still recall that it does not belong to the six languages formally recognized by the U.N. as vehicles of global communication. The Russian language does. The youngsters who enjoy the national spirit of the Ostannya Barrikada risk locking themselves in a parochial cultural isolation. Nor, as paradoxical as it sounds, can cultural independence really be attained in this age of globalization if you fence yourself off from major world cultures.