And in the Ukraine

In mid November, with world attention focused on the Baltic and on bad blood between the Armenians and the Azerbaidzhanis, some ten thousand young people demonstrated in Kiev against nuclear power in the Ukraine, whose plants account for 50 per cent of the Soviet Union’s energy. The demonstration, a few miles from the disaster area of Chernobyl, was finally broken up with fifty arrests but almost entirely escaped notice by the Western press. Yet Ukrainian nationalism, which in a real sense was the point of the demonstration, is more threatening to the Soviet regime than any separatist movement in Latvia or Estonia.

Oles Shevchenko, one of the demonstration’s organizers, had earlier spent seven years in the Gulag; in November I interviewed him in Kiev while a half-dozen watchful KGB men waited outside in the snow. Shevchenko said all these disturbances in the outlying republics are alike in that essentially what these people want is freedom. And it will come, he insisted. One of the first prisoners of the notorious Perm 36 camp to be released under glasnost, Shevchenko is convinced that the Soviet system has a limited life expectancy and that, if not exactly in its death throes, it is losing its hold. His Ukrainian Helsinki Watch organization calls for nothing short of the Soviet Union’s transformation into a “federation of free and independent nations.” Gorbachev, Shevchenko believes, has “no definitive opinions on anything,” which is just as well. His present actions, the grandiloquent calls for glasnost and perestroika, are compelled by grim economic necessity, and the economic pressure is still on. In the Ukraine, November’s antinuclear demonstration was only the first step, Shevchenko promised. One day “the Ukraine will be master in its own house.”

RG

About the Author

Richard Grenier

In mid November, with world attention focused on the Baltic and on bad blood between the Armenians and the Azerbaidzhanis, some ten thousand young people demonstrated in Kiev against nuclear power in the Ukraine, whose plants account for 50 per cent of the Soviet Union’s energy. The demonstration, a few miles from the disaster area of Chernobyl, was finally broken up with fifty arrests but almost entirely escaped notice by the Western press. Yet Ukrainian nationalism, which in a real sense was the point of the demonstration, is more threatening to the Soviet regime than any separatist movement in Latvia or Estonia.

Oles Shevchenko, one of the demonstration’s organizers, had earlier spent seven years in the Gulag; in November I interviewed him in Kiev while a half-dozen watchful KGB men waited outside in the snow. Shevchenko said all these disturbances in the outlying republics are alike in that essentially what these people want is freedom. And it will come, he insisted. One of the first prisoners of the notorious Perm 36 camp to be released under glasnost, Shevchenko is convinced that the Soviet system has a limited life expectancy and that, if not exactly in its death throes, it is losing its hold. His Ukrainian Helsinki Watch organization calls for nothing short of the Soviet Union’s transformation into a “federation of free and independent nations.” Gorbachev, Shevchenko believes, has “no definitive opinions on anything,” which is just as well. His present actions, the grandiloquent calls for glasnost and perestroika, are compelled by grim economic necessity, and the economic pressure is still on. In the Ukraine, November’s antinuclear demonstration was only the first step, Shevchenko promised. One day “the Ukraine will be master in its own house.”