TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070191/0701007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.6 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 45

AMERICA ABROAD

The Quiet Secession Of a Large Country


By Strobe Talbott


    KIEV. I arrived in the Ukraine from the Baltics thinking
I was returning to the Slavic core of the incredible shrinking
Soviet Union. Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians might be going
their own way, but I'd long assumed that once the epidemic of
secessionism had run its course, the Ukrainians would remain
citizens of a huge country with its capital in Moscow. Such is
the conventional wisdom almost everywhere, certainly in my
hometown of Washington.

    But that's not the way the future looks from here. From
Communists to formerly persecuted members of the nationalist
Rukh (Movement) to founders of the new Party of Democratic
Renaissance, from Ukrainian chauvinists to representatives of
the ethnic Russians, who make up 20% of the population, the
people I've met in Kiev seem every bit as determined as those
in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to break with Moscow. If they
succeed, their country would be one of the largest in Europe.
However, their rhetoric is quieter and their strategy less
confrontational than the Balts'.

    A crucial step toward political sovereignty is liberation
of the economy from the all-but-worthless ruble. The Balts have
arranged to print their own money in the West, but they have not
dared put it into circulation since that might provoke a
full-scale crackdown by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Ukraine is
about to start distributing specially stamped rubles that can
be spent only inside the republic, where goods are cheaper and
more plentiful than elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian
ruble will thus be, de facto, a separate currency. In addition,
the parliament is moving to privatize property, and the
Ukrainian foreign ministry is setting up its own consulates
abroad.

    Leonid Kravchuk, the chairman of the parliament, leads a
bloc of Communists who have broken with hard-liners in the
party to form a coalition with moderates in the democratic
opposition. He is negotiating with Moscow for a "renewed union"
more like a common market than the federation Mikhail Gorbachev
advocates. Kravchuk may quit the party to run in the republic's
first presidential election this fall.

    Virtually everyone I've talked to here complains that the
U.S. has been slow to recognize, and support, what is happening
to the U.S.S.R. "We understand that George Bush wants to save
Gorbachev," says Vladimir Grinyov, an ethnic Russian and
ex-Communist, who is both Kravchuk's deputy and his rival. "But
to concentrate on Moscow is harmful to the devolution of power
and the spread of democracy."

    The Ukrainians take it as a good sign that Bush received
Boris Yeltsin in Washington last week. Bohdan Horyn, a former
political prisoner who is now a Rukh member of parliament,
welcomes what he sees as the Administration's new "double-track
policy" aimed both at Moscow and at the republics. "The West,"
he says, "must not help the center at the expense of those of
us who are trying to leave the empire."

    Horyn and others across the political spectrum hope Bush
will visit Kiev after the superpower summit in Moscow later
this year. Kravchuk is due in the U.S. in the fall to address
the United Nations. All the Ukrainians I spoke to, even
anticommunists, want him to get his own invitation to the White
House. What matters in Kiev is not his party affiliation but his
position as the leader of a large and important European nation.
That should matter to Bush as well.