Rand Corp. senior analyst evaluates problematic Ukraine-Russia relationship (04/13/97)

Rand Corp. senior analyst evaluates problematic Ukraine-Russia relationship

by R.L. Chomiak
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - Here's a trivia question for your next cocktail party conversation: Which of the new independent states - the successor states of the former Soviet Union - has never proclaimed its independence?

The answer: Why, Russia, of course.

Russia?

Yes, Russia did declare its sovereignty in June 1990 (Ukraine did it a month later). But after the failed Moscow putsch in August 1991, when the republics of the "unshakable" union began to declare their independence one after the other, Russia, or the Russian Federation, never bothered.

This piece of incidental intelligence comes from Dr. Roman Solchanyk, senior analyst at the Rand Corp., a former Radio Liberty analyst and once a frequent contributor to The Weekly, who spoke in Washington on April 7.

Dr. Solchanyk, who now resides in the Santa Monica area, was invited to address the Ukraine Political-Economic Working Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Richard Murphy, executive director of the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee, of which the working group is a part, chaired the session.

"You could say," Dr. Solchanyk suggested, "that Russia 'was' the USSR," so there was no need for it to assert that it was independent." He also suggested that Russia continues in its search for self-definition, and the existence of independent Ukraine - something that most of the Russian political and cultural elite still has trouble accepting - is having an impact on this process for self-definition.

He also contended that it may be a paradox, but "Russians know very little about Ukraine."

In Poland, he noted, there are 10 universities offering courses in Ukrainian studies, and not one in Russia, yet historically, Polish-Ukrainian relations were not that much different from Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Both Poland and Russia ruled over Ukraine, with Poland controlling more Ukrainian territory longer than did Russia.

He also quoted from a recent work by American historian Richard Pipes, who unearthed Vladimir Lenin's directive, written as he was gathering the pieces of imperial Russia into the Soviet Union. In it, Lenin was ordering the ransacking of Kharkiv (then capital of Soviet Ukraine) and saying that Ukraine "is alien to us; we don't know it."

Russians still don't seem to know it, Dr. Solchanyk maintained. Some of President Boris Yeltsin's top advisers admit to being perplexed by what is happening in Ukraine, he said.

But during the discussion period, Anders Aslund, the Swedish economist who advises the governments of Ukraine and Russia, seemed to disagree with this.

Recently, he related, he had lunch in Moscow with Anatolii Chubais, who is in charge of Russia's economic reform, and half of the lunch was spent discussing Ukraine. Mr. Aslund noted that, while there are no Ukrainian studies programs in Russia, there are no Baltic ones either. But there are at least 20 Russian media correspondents working in Ukraine, he said, adding that the elite, who see their reports, pay attention to Ukraine.

Dr. Solchanyk, in turn, came up with a quote from Mikhail Yuriev, a 39-year-old deputy speaker of the Russian Duma, and member of the Western-oriented liberal Yabloko party headed by Lviv native Grigorii Yavlinsky. In an interview, Mr. Yuriev had said that Ukrainians and Belarusians are not separate peoples, that they are "Russkiye."

"The Ukrainian language is 100 percent more poetic than Russian," the deputy speaker maintained, "but it's a dialect of Russian, like the Siberian or Moscow dialects."

Dr. Solchanyk said he confronted Mr. Yavlinsky with this view of his young party colleague, and Mr. Yavlinsky dismissed it with a shrug, "He's a businessman" - meaning, what do you expect?

Another anomaly in Russia, said Dr. Solchanyk, is that there are two separate parliamentary committees on foreign affairs: one for the "Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Compatriots Abroad," and the other for the rest of the world. Dr. Solchanyk said that recently, when he addressed a group of American members of Congress, he noted half in jest that the member whose district includes Brighton Beach in Brooklyn should be aware that the Duma committee dealing with "compatriots abroad" may be looking into the welfare of the thousands who live there, as it does for those in Ukraine or the Baltic countries.

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