Lev Usyskin. Ukraine

Ukraine - a mini-empire
Apology for Ukraine. Collection of articles / Ed.-comp. I. Bulkina. M.: Modest Kolerov and "Three Squares", 2002. 224 p.

Lev Usyskin

Publication date: January 22, 2003

When you pick up the collection “ Apology for Ukraine ,” you inevitably think: what do we really need Ukraine for? It is no longer part of our fatherland - and it will not become so in the foreseeable future: every reasonable person understands that the Ukrainian state has come into being, regardless of the true initial intentions of its population.

So what is Ukraine for us? Of course, to some extent it is a mirror. There is a lot in common, and some of this commonality has taken on more radical, sometimes grotesque forms in Ukraine - and therefore is more convenient for observation.

Besides this, Ukraine is a rather difficult task, a problem, a rebus. A very large, geographically, climatically and economically extremely heterogeneous country - more heterogeneous than France - a country consisting of two equal pieces of two great Eastern European empires and itself, in fact, a mini-empire. This country is populated by people, a significant proportion of whom do not clearly identify not only their own ethnicity, but also the language they have spoken since childhood. At the same time, Ukraine is a multinational state: Romanians and Hungarians, Greeks and Poles, Slovaks and Bulgarians, Tatars and Karaites have lived compactly on its territory since ancient times... What unites all these people in a world where there are no Habsburgs, no Romanovs , no Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee ? What distinguishes their country from neighboring countries? Do they need an original state language, and if so, will it take its rightful place naturally, without violence? These are all their internal Ukrainian problems, but it is still interesting and instructive for us to observe how these problems are solved, or discussed, or even simply appear through seemingly neutral topics of other discussions and reasoning. It’s interesting at least in a methodological sense - and such interest, in fact, is similar to the interest of a design engineer in the creation of a fellow professional: yes, it’s someone else’s work, but there’s always something to learn...

As it should be, the collection opens with a preface; in fact, the preface of the editor-compiler of this collection, Inna Bulkina , overtakes the reader with her excerpts even before the first page - in the margins of the dust jacket. The excerpts are short, but sufficient to feel the breath of the Kiev surzhik - all these “in Ukraine” , “if you take the trouble to read, you will notice that with such an internal look” ... The specified style is lethally provincial and uninspired ponderous - persists throughout all seven pages of "From the Compiler". The entire dry remainder of Bulkin’s preface consists of a single phrase: the task of this collection is to present a real, and not a mythological, interlocutor “from the other side.” This implies, of course, the Ukrainian side. Since we are now terribly far from Ukraine, there is nothing else to do but to trust in terms of representativeness the compiler - who, however, did not bother to provide us with at least some information about the authors of the articles in the collection... and what is there: even to indicate when which articles written and in what language!

Now let's turn to the articles; fortunately, they are noticeably more interesting and brighter than the preface. The first (author - writer Yuri Andrukhovich ), entitled "Introduction to Geography", by and large does not contain any apology for Ukraine. In general, in these lovely travel notes a-la Brodsky’s trip to Istanbul, Ukraine appears only in the following remarks: “The sense of form, or rather the absence of it, is the name of our misfortunes. We do not know how and do not want to make a work of art out of life. Our poverty is not here an excuse and not an explanation, rather a consequence. <...> Our monuments resemble evil and bloodthirsty idols, and our elected rulers resemble criminal scoundrels. Our houses, gardens, squares (not to mention factories, train stations, airports) are seriously affected. the sin of formlessness." From Russia it is easy to notice that what has been said is not entirely exclusive to Ukraine...

Igor Klekh in the “t-map of Galicia” writes, of course, about his native Lviv. He writes with the love of an emigrant in the ashes - and this love infects the reader. However, which normal person doesn’t love Lvov, you ask? The comparison between Lvov and St. Petersburg is curious - both cities were built on swamps. It is a pity that the writer did not develop this theme of the Ukrainian “window to Europe” - however, perhaps rightly so: it is worth a separate article in any case.

The next issue is Natalka Belotserkivets “Krivenka Kachechka, or Once again about the “tragedy of Central-Eastern Europe.” The author talks about provincialism as such and, by the way, recalls, using the example of Ireland, that national self-identification is possible without one’s own national language.

Alexander Gritsenko (“The World, Europe and We”) talks, of course, about a united Europe and Ukraine’s place in it. “In the modern world, with its globalization tendencies, everything influences everything, and practically no national culture <...> has managed to avoid numerous external influences, and only hardened traditionalists continue to call such influences “foreign.” For some reason, I , I recall one mathematician I know, no stranger to humanitarian issues, who said almost the same thing, it seems, somewhat more meaningfully and radically: “every national culture includes any other national culture as a correct subset.”

Another article in the collection is about the path to Europe - “Ukraine and Europe in 2001” by Oksana Pakhlevskaya. Here the author has not the slightest doubt about what is good and what is bad : “the transformation of Poland into a “European country” <...> is dangerously pushing Ukraine towards Russia, and not only due to its obviously neo-imperial strategy. <.. .> Therefore, sooner or later Ukraine will be forced to make a final choice between Europe and Russia.." Or: “Ukraine will disappear <...> without a trace, without any regret on the part of the West, but to the considerable satisfaction of the Russian side.” It is characteristic that the bearer of such beliefs, of course, has very romantic ideas about the Ukrainian tradition: “in historiosophical terms, the “Ukrainian idea” - due to its individualistic-liberal and anti-imperial nature - initially represented a conscious and consistent civil challenge to the monolithic universalist system of Orthodox-Orthodox countries. Byzantine area". I understand these words in the sense that the Papuans of New Guinea are the most consistent anti-communists in the world - after all, not one of them has ever voted for the communists!

In general, the basis for such a position is, of course, infantile fears - you need an enemy to be afraid of him, and an enemy will definitely be found! It’s not enough time to look closely at this enemy: firstly, you can be petrified with horror, and secondly, what if he turns out to be not so clearly hostile? What to do then? Look for someone else? So it turns out: “among <...> forms of “Belarusization” let’s name, for example, the gradual and irreversible sale of Ukrainian enterprises and productive forces (?!-L.U.) to Russian structures... Or let’s say : if Russia were truly a democratic country that respects its obligations and signed agreements..." N-yes, and this was written in a country that steals Russian gas from main gas pipelines at the state level and refuses to pay compensation to the relatives of the passengers of a Russian plane shot down by well-aimed Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners!

The topic is continued by Mykola Ryabchuk with the article “From “Little Russia” to “Indo-Europe”: Ukrainian auto-stereotypes.” Here the author attacks the legacy of Russian colonialism. In his mind, there was once such a Ukraine within its current borders and with a homogeneous identity. Then the Russians conquered it, colonized and Russified a good half of the population. And now the independent people have to sort it all out. Quite a funny historiosophical nonsense - you just have to close your eyes and imagine Donetsk as a colony - whether Russian or Soviet - it doesn’t matter...

It’s funny that the bearers of the above views have their own bible, which is quoted every time - Milan Kundera’s article “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, a typical excerpt from which is given in the collection under review. The popularity of this empty and illiterate work in this environment is comparable to the popularity in certain reference groups of the works of de Custine - a neurotic who saw nothing and understood nothing in Russia. “To die for your country and for Europe” - such a thought cannot come to the mind of a Muscovite and a Leningrader, but this is exactly what they might think in Budapest or Warsaw,” writes Kundera, and those hundreds of thousands of Muscovites and Leningraders obviously do not occur to him who did not “think”, but in fact died for their country and for Europe ... However, this is not only intellectual swagger - Yaroslav Shimov wrote in one of his articles that Eastern European countries, which have not had national independence for centuries, are experiencing a complex “loss of the imperial substrate”: I really want to join something - be it the EU or the USA. And the horror of the Russian bear, “which is not like other people,” is very natural in this picture of the world!

Taras Shumeiko in the article “Ukrainian cultural hero: Ivan Sirko, Nestor Makhno, Taras Bulba” compares the mythology concerning the title characters. Mythology turns out to be extremely invariant - personally, in connection with all this, I am shocked by the greatness of Gogol’s genius: Nikolai Vasilyevich not only rolled up several centuries of Ukrainian history preceding him into a single “realistic” story with all its wonderful characters, but also, as it turns out, anticipated the future: every subsequent Ukrainian folk hero will emerge from the burka of old Taras - or whatever he was wearing...

The final part of the collection, “Project Ukraine,” is the least interesting. The first article in it - by Kost Bondarenko - is called “Project Ukraine” and is written in approximately the following spirit: “The ethnic German Catherine II at the same time embodied another project, which had matured somewhat earlier in the minds of German designers and was called “Russia” "Then the two projects competed with each other, especially when, thanks to the French Masonic lodges, they received a new lease of life." Or: “The Russia project actually began to fail even under Elizaveta Petrovna .” It hardly makes sense to comment on anything here...

Taras Vozniak's article "Project Ukraine": results of the decade" is a good overview of the state of affairs in Ukraine in the specified period with a small admixture of the same conspiracy fiction, while the third, final, Ukrainian draft of the collection - authored by Vladimir Zolotorev - is a seven-page essay in the style “How can we reorganize the Rabkrin.” Of course, everything said in it is as relevant for Ukraine as it is for Russia. In this way, the final article of the collection is reminiscent of Andrukhovich’s opening article—thereby creating a certain aesthetic isolation of the material.