21
" Once again, Ukraine became a source of emigration. Many left for a few months or even years to make the kind of money they could not make at home. They headed mainly to Russia, with its oil and gas wealth, and the countries of east-central Europe and the European Union. Others left forever. Ukrainian Jews led the way. Many of them had not been allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the 1980s, becoming “refuseniks” whom the Soviet authorities denied exit visas and turned into second-class citizens by firing them from the universities and barring them from government jobs. Now they could leave and did so in astonishing numbers. Between 1989 and 2006, more than 1.5 million Soviet Jews left their countries of residence, including a good many Jews of Ukraine. Whereas the Ukrainian population as a whole fell by roughly 5 percent between 1989 and 2001, the Jewish population fell by a staggering 78 percent, decreasing from 487,300 to 105,500. Among those who left were the families of the cofounders of Paypal (Max Levchin) and WhatsApp (Jan Koum). But not only Jews wanted to leave. Many of the emigrants were Ukrainians, Russians, and members of other ethnic groups. Ukraine also became a transit point for illegal immigrants from the rest of the commonwealth and countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
23
" During the first years of independence, the government was reluctant to give up ownership and thus control over Soviet-era industrial and agricultural enterprises that required more and more state subsidies. Once it finally decided to do so, it faced opposition in parliament, largely from the “red directors” who managed the large enterprises. In 1995, parliament exempted 6,300 state-owned enterprises from privatization. By that time, fewer than one-third of industrial enterprises had been transferred to private ownership. The first stage of privatization was carried out with vouchers issued to the entire population of the country. It benefited largely the “red directors,” who now had assets but few incentives to change anything. But privatization without new approaches and restructuring could not revive the Ukrainian economy. By 1999, when close to 85 percent of all enterprises were privately owned, they accounted for less than 65 percent of all industrial output. Half the industrial enterprises in the country were in deficit. Most of the large enterprises remained in the hands of Soviet-era managers and people close to the government. They maintained monopolies, restrained competition, and deepened the economic crisis. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
24
" Ukraine needed new owners and a new class of managers to revive its economy. The country got both in a group of young, ambitious, and ruthless businessmen who had no roots in the old planned economy of Soviet times and had made their way up from the economic chaos of the perestroika years and mafia wars of the 1990s. Known in Ukraine, as in Russia, as oligarchs, they emerged as the main beneficiaries of the second stage of privatization, which amounted to the sale of government assets at a fraction of their actual value. The oligarchs made their fortunes by being innovative and opportunistic, but also by ingratiating, bribing, and shooting their way into the offices of the “red directors.” With the military-industrial complex in steep decline, the Ukrainian metallurgical industry became the richest prize in the 1990s and early 2000s. At that time, more than half the country’s industrial output came from four eastern oblasts—Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk—that were rich in iron ore and coal and produced Ukraine’s primary export product: steel. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
25
" The new “men of steel” included the leader of the Donetsk group, Rinat Akhmetov, who in the early 1990s took over leadership of a company called Lux, known to the Ukrainian authorities for its criminal origins and connections. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, two local businessmen divided major metallurgical assets: Viktor Pinchuk, who married into President Kuchma’s family, and Igor Kolomoisky, who established one of the first major private banks in Ukraine. Others also shared the loot of post-Soviet Ukrainian privatization. Still, the corrupt and often criminal nature of the privatization process aside, the “oligarchization” of the Ukrainian economy coincided with the end of economic decline. Ukraine began the new millennium with a rapid economic recovery, and, for better or worse, the oligarchs were important figures in that new success story. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
27
" The Battle of Konotop, fought near the present-day Russo-Ukrainian border in June 1659, ended in a spectacular victory for Vyhovsky. The Muscovite army, approximately 70,000 strong, was defeated, up to 15,000 soldiers were killed, and the flower of the Muscovite cavalry was annihilated. The Tatars moved on, pillaging the southern borderlands of Muscovy. Rumors filled Moscow that the tsar was about to leave the capital. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
29
" In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
30
" HISTORY HAS BEEN used and abused more than once in the Ukraine Crisis, informing and inspiring its participants but also justifying violations of international law, human rights, and the right to life itself. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict, while arising unexpectedly and taking many of those involved by surprise, has deep historical roots and is replete with historical references and allusions. Leaving aside the propagandistic use of historical arguments, at least three parallel processes rooted in the past are now going on in Ukraine: Russia’s attempts to reestablish political, economic, and military control in the former imperial space acquired by Moscow since the mid-seventeenth century; the formation of modern national identities, which concerns both Russians and Ukrainians (the latter often divided along regional lines); and the struggle over historical and cultural fault lines that allow the participants in the conflict to imagine it as a contest between East and West, Europe and the Russian World. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
32
" Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it—theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
34
" Gorbachev believed that support for independence in Ukraine would never reach 70 percent. Yeltsin was not so sure. In late August 1991, soon after the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence, he instructed his press secretary to make a statement that if Ukraine and other republics declared independence, Russia would have the right to open the question of its borders with those republics. Yeltsin’s press secretary indicated the Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine, including the Donbas coal region, as possible areas of contention. The threat was partition if Ukraine insisted on independence. Yeltsin then sent a high-powered delegation led by his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, to force Ukraine to reverse its stance. But the Ukrainians stood their ground, and Rutskoi returned to Moscow empty-handed. Blackmail had failed, and Yeltsin had neither the political will nor the resources to deliver on his threat. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
36
" On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
38
" The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature. Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea. Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
39
" According to data provided by the respected Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, with Russians constituting 17 percent of the Ukrainian population, only 5 percent of those polled considered themselves exclusively Russian: the rest identified as both Russian and Ukrainian. Even those who considered themselves exclusively Russian often opposed Russian interference in Ukrainian affairs, refusing to associate themselves with Putin’s regime. “Ukraine is my Homeland. Russian is my native language. And I would like to be saved by Pushkin. And delivered from sorrow and unrest, also by Pushkin. Pushkin, not Putin,” wrote one of Kyiv’s ethnic Russians in her Facebook account. The ideology of the “Russian World,” which combines Russian nationalism with Russian Orthodoxy and which Moscow and Russian-backed insurgents have promoted as an alternative to the pro-European choice of the Maidan protesters, has helped strengthen the Ukrainian-Jewish pro-European alliance developing in Ukraine since 1991. “I have said for a long time that an alliance between Ukrainians and Jews is a pledge of our common future,” posted a pro-Maidan activist on his Facebook account. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
40
" As the Mongols approached Kyiv in November 1240, their huge army made a dreadful impression on the defenders. “And nothing could be heard above the squeaking of his carts, the bawling of his [Batu’s] innumerable camels, and the neighing of his herds of horses, and the Land of Rus’ was full of enemies,” wrote the chronicler. When the Kyivans refused to surrender, Batu brought in catapults to destroy the city walls, built of stones and logs in the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The citizens rushed to the Dormition Cathedral, the first stone church built by Volodymyr to celebrate his baptism. But the weight of the people and their belongings proved too heavy for the walls, which collapsed, burying the refugees. St. Sophia Cathedral survived but, like other city churches, was robbed of its precious icons and vessels. The victors pillaged the city; the few survivors remained in terror in the ruins of the once magnificent capital whose rulers had aspired to rival Constantinople. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, an ambassador of Pope Innocent IV who passed through Kyiv in February 1246 on his way to the Mongol khan, left the following description of the consequences of the Mongol attack on the Kyiv Land: “When we were journeying through that land, we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. "
― Serhii Plokhy , The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
