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| The Daily Telegraph (UK)
January 3, 2005 By Norman Stone
President Putin has caused a New Year rumpus with a demand that his Ukrainian neighbour should start paying world prices for Russian gas and oil. It means that the new country - 50 million people on the north coast of the Black Sea in a state that stretches from Poland almost to the Caucasus - will all of a sudden have to pay four times more than before for the most elementary commodity for subsistence, especially in that dreadful winter. Although the Russians have said they will let through enough for private households, their denizens may just not have a factory or a job to go to. The economy may be shut down. A strange affair, and there are shouts of "Russian imperialism" in some quarters. Is Russia trying to remake her old empire, this time by cracking the energy whip at her former colonies? If that is what Mr Putin is trying to do, he can be sure of support at home. Russia has seen not just the independence of former dependencies but also their drift towards western Europe - in some cases, even the United States. In the Baltic states, now members of the European Union, there are Russian minorities (and in the case of Latvia an only-just minority). There, the Russians are meant to learn Baltic languages that, with the best will in the world, Russians cannot take seriously as cultural vehicles (and the Euro Parliament is strangely silent as to the linguistic oppression that results, whereas there is jumping up and down about Kurdish in Turkey). The Baltic states are in the end pimples on the Russian back and, in their historic role as entry ports to Europe, better off, for themselves and for Russia, as nominally independent entities. But there is a far more important case in which a recovering Russia needs to assert herself before a head-shaking world. It is what we used to call "the Ukraine", a word that means in Russian "on the edges". Ukraine - the "the" was dropped when she became independent - is on the edges of Russia and the Catholic, Polish west, and was fought about in the course of old wars, when the Ukrainians themselves were on both sides. Now we have another version of those old wars. If Ukraine wishes to make deals with the West, then Russia has a trick up its sleeve: heating. In one of his nationalist rants, Solzhenitsyn puts a good question: what was the worst mistake made by the tsars in foreign policy? His answer is curious. In 1809, Russia, a reluctant ally of Napoleon, took south-eastern Poland from Austria. In 1814, she gave it back. Solzhenitsyn considered this a dreadful blunder because that territory became the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. It was there that the language and the culture developed, and the sense of independent nationalism that won in 1991. Old Solzhenitsyn dislikes this. Why should there be a Ukraine independent of Russia at all? Two-thirds of the Ukrainians lived in Russia and were very well integrated there: most of them Orthodox and, as far as educated ones were concerned, Russian-speaking, with an enormous amount of inter-marriage and intra-migration. Ukrainian writers, headed by Gogol and Bulgakov, contributed a huge amount to Russian literature and today's Russians are simply bemused when they find that these writers are now read in Ukrainian schools in Ukrainian, a language that they themselves would have regarded as peasant stuff. Of course, the true trouble, as regards the two-thirds of Ukraine that was once called "Little Russia", has nothing to do with Solzhenitsyn's romantic memories of 1809. Ukraine is independent now because of the terrible experience of life in the old Soviet Union. She lost maybe eight million of her peasants in the great famine of the early Thirties, a famine induced because Stalin wanted to sell grain at dirt-cheap prices to buy German machinery. Then there was the political persecution of Ukrainians who wanted religious and cultural liberty. In the end, for Russia as well as Ukraine, some sort of nationalism was the only escape from communism. Russian and Ukrainian nationalists both set up independent states, not even quarrelling very much as to the borders. When Yugoslavia fell apart, Croats and Serbs notoriously came to blows. To the surprise of many of us, there was not that sort of trouble between Russia and Ukraine - partly because at ground level there just is not that sort of animosity (outside the ex-Austrian west Ukraine) and partly because there was something of an economic partnership. Russia gave Ukraine cheap energy and in return the former Soviet factories and mines continued some form of their previous relationship. Such privatisation as occurred kept most things under some form of Russian control. Kiev in the 1990s was, of course, rather a poor and strangely run place, but by 2004, with Russian subsidies, it was beginning to work tolerably well. As oil prices rose in the past three years, Russia itself became tolerably prosperous and Moscow became something of a showcase, its character vastly different from 10 years earlier. Enter that weird piece of pantomime, "the Orange Revolution". There were Ukrainians - the western ones especially - who absolutely did not like the deals being done with Moscow. Why not launch a campaign for the country to join Europe, as Poland and Lithuania had done? Unfortunately, electoral results were very far from being in their favour and a coup was launched. The "stage army of the good", on which our Peter Simple used to write so memorably, has now become a sort of feministo-Euro-non-governmental-organisational-ecologisto-free-media panjandrum, complete with Euro MPs living in tents in the main square of Kiev listening to amplified rock music while pretending to ward off the charge of the Cossacks. The Ukrainian establishment was perfectly happy to go along with whichever force was the stronger: the old bosses with Moscow links or the new ones with European ones. In the event, the government was upset and the present one came in, with a desire for the benefits that European membership is supposed to bring. But there is the Russian-sympathising east of the country and there is the divided middle, with Kiev, and they have not been happy. The results of the Orange Revolution have been political division and economic insecurity - and deep anxiety for Russia. With Ukraine (in some form), she is another version of the United States; without Ukraine, she is a Canada. But there is one weapon in her armoury: she is a Canada with oil and gas.
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