ABSTRACT
For many Russians-from the conservative former vice president of the Russian Federation, Aleksandr V. Rutskoi, to President Boris N. Yeltsin's political advisor, the democratic reformer Sergei B. Stankevich-the very existence of Ukraine as an independent state is fundamentally illegitimate. l On the other hand, many Ukrainians----beginning with Ukraine's first popularly elected president, Leonid M. Kravchuk-see in their country's independence the only salvation from Soviet-imposed genocide.2 Despite its thousand-year history, the Ukrainian nation was nearly wiped out under Soviet rule. It is also an unspoken assumption among many Ukrainians that, as a nation, it is the Russians who profited from the genocide of Ukrainians, albeit indirectly. The Ukrainian government bears most of the responsibility for the economic, political, and diplomatic problems that in mid-1993, only two years after the Ukrainian parliament's Act of Independence of24 August 1991, have brought the country to-or, in the opinion of some, even over-the brink.3 But Russia's aggressive policy of economic and political destabilization and diplomatic isolation has helped in pushing Ukraine to the brink. As early as mid-January 1992, Vladj.,. mir Lukin, then chairman of the Russian parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Economic Relations, and later Russia's ambassador to the United States, formulated what might be
progress, which culminated in the splendid referendum on independence and the decisive presidential election of 1 December 1991, was bought at the price of plain genocide in the 1930s, for which, incidentally, the full bill has not yet been presented to the Russians. It was bought by large-scale linguistic and considerable identificational assimilation to the Russians after World War II, which, in turn, is a form of cultural genocide. There have also been numerous deportations of guerrilla fighters and their supporters from Western Ukraine under Stalin, and selected terror against Ukrainian dissidents under Brezhnev, his two interim successors, and even the early Gorbachev. Another political price was the humiliation by Moscow of basically loyal Ukrainian Communist leaders. Economically, Ukraine developed under the Soviets, but not always in the best direction for a rapid transformation to a market economy.
