Ukraine vs. Homo Sovieticus

JB note: I doubt if the below article will make its author the winner of a popularity contest among Ukrainian-Americans -- or Ukrainians, for that matter.

GLOBAL VIEW
Ukraine vs. Homo Sovieticus - Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal
The revolution in Kiev was televised. Will it now be squandered?

Feb. 24, 2014 7:28 p.m. ET

How hard can it be to change $60 into a foreign currency? On a visit to Ukraine last fall I found out.

This was in Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Churchill, Stalin and FDR met in 1945 to sort out the future of Europe. The two ATMs I tried, both with the familiar Cirrus logo, wouldn't dispense cash. So I walked into a bank and went to the teller, who was reading.

Izvinite, excuse me, I said in my phrase-book Russian, since Yalta is a Russian-speaking town. He kept reading. Vybachte I offered in Ukrainian, no doubt badly pronounced. He ignored me. Excuse me, this time in English. Apparently I didn't exist. I left.

A few blocks away I spotted an old building with a currency-exchange sign. Inside, about a dozen women sat at their desks behind inch-thick windows. I was the only customer. I went to the first window, took three $20 bills from my wallet, and showed them to the woman behind the glass. Wordlessly, she pointed at the woman at the next desk. That woman pointed at another.

At the third desk, the woman said, "Passport!" I handed it over, along with the money. She vanished into a back room. A while later she reappeared with four separate documents, all of which I was required to sign before I could get my 500 Ukrainian hryvnia. I got a lousy exchange rate, but it seemed pointless to argue.

Yes, this is just a personal anecdote from which nobody should draw firm conclusions. And yes, every society has its share of Bartlebys who would prefer not to.

Yet the hard question that hovers over Ukraine now that President Viktor Yanukovych has been abruptly deposed is just how representative those homo Sovieticus scrivener types I encountered that day in Yalta are of the country as a whole. A lot, I suspect.

Keep this in mind: However courageous and determined the protesters who occupied Kiev's Maidan Square these past few months, the president they brought down had been freely elected just four years ago, in a vote international observers described as an "impressive display of democracy."

Keep in mind, too, that however brutal and venal Mr. Yanukovych proved to be, he isn't exactly outside the norm of Ukrainian politics.

"It was further part of the conspiracy," alleged then-U.S. Attorney and future FBI Director Robert Mueller in a May 2000 indictment, "that [former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo] Lazarenko received money by companies owned by Ukrianian [sic] business woman Yulia Tymoshenko . . . in exchange for which Lazarenko exercised his official authority in favor of Tymoshenko's companies, and that Lazarenko failed to disclose to the people and government of Ukraine that he was receiving significant amounts of money from these companies."

Mr. Lazarenko wound up spending six years in a U.S. prison for stealing more than $100 million. Ms. Tymoshenko was never charged with a crime in the case and denies all wrongdoing; she went on to become a prime minister in her own right before being imprisoned by Mr. Yanukovych on separate, trumped-up charges. Now she's free and offering herself as a tribune of the people, and she may yet return to power. If she does, her political comeback will be a kind of mirror image of Mr. Yanukovych's, who was elected after he had tried to steal the previous election.

Whatever else one might say about the uprising in Kiev, then, a revolt against naked tyranny it was not. More like a revolt against self. How does a nation become self-governing when so much of "self" is so rotten? Run-of-the-mill analyses that Ukraine is a "young democracy" with corrupt elites, an ethnic divide and a bullying neighbor don't suffice. Ukraine is what it is because Ukrainians are what they are. The former doesn't change until the latter does.

Over the weekend I traded emails with young Ukrainian friends active in the uprising. It was encouraging. "Bringing back to power people who already were accused of corruption would be a betrayal to those 88 people who died," one wrote me. "Maidan is not ready to compromise for what we were fighting [for]: freedom, responsibility for action, and honesty." Another friend wrote: "What I can say for sure [is that] Ukrainians started to identify themselves as a nation. And we don't want 'new' politicians [to] continue acting in the same way: corruption, nepotism, impunity."

These are the sorts of voices we'd all like to believe are the authentic ones—the winning ones. Then again, that's what people said about Ukraine during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, or about Lebanon's Cedar Revolution in 2005, or about the Arab Spring in 2011. The revolution will be televised—and then it will be squandered.

I hope I'm wrong. I want to keep faith with my brave and idealistic friends who risked their necks at the barricades. Then I think of the bank teller, indifferent to the presence of another human being the way a mule is indifferent to a fly, and I wonder. The homo Sovieticus Ukrainians should fear the most may not be Vladimir Putin after all.