Debate Over Unity Plan Rages in Kiev : Ukraine: Rich tradition, bitter memories of Russian rule color arguments about independence from Moscow.

President Bush on Thursday visited an ancient city in the midst of an identity crisis and an intensely emotional debate about its future.

The people of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine and the third-largest city in the Soviet Union, are sharply divided over whether they want independence for their historic homeland or whether it should help found a reconstituted Soviet Union.

The thousands who gathered to watch Bush’s motorcade drive down the city’s tree-lined streets waved nationalist flags and held banners with slogans such as “The World Is Imperfect Without an Independent Ukraine” and “The Ukraine Needs Freedom, Not Dollars.”

It was the very picture of a nation yearning for its independence.

Yet the polarization of views was quickly evident in the impromptu shouting matches that began as the crowd waited for Bush.

“The Ukraine must stay in the Soviet Union,” said Nadezhda, 32, an accountant who refused to give her last name. “Without the other republics, we will not get out of our deep economic crisis.”

But Ivan Ivanchuk, 41, countered, “We need our freedom. Seventy-two years of slavery is enough.”

Nationalists argue with passion that a nation whose culture and traditions go back for centuries must be free if it is to preserve its identity. They recall bitterly how first the Russian czars, and then the Communists, systematically suppressed their language and literature--often with bullets. The bloody purges and “terror famines” that claimed millions of lives in the Stalin era are as much in the minds of most Ukrainians as the Holocaust is for Jews.

And why, the nationalists ask, should not a region with the population, territory and natural wealth roughly that of France not be independent? If they were free from the grip of the Kremlin, the nationalists say, Ukrainians would surely not be suffering the acute shortages of food, clothing and housing that they face now.

Those on the other side of the controversy, however, also have economic and historical arguments against seceding from the Soviet Union. In a Europe heading rapidly toward integration, they argue, independence would amount to self-isolation and be a major blunder.

At one of the cafes that Bush’s limousine whizzed past, Alisa Starikova, a 19-year-old student, recalled that Russian civilization has its roots in Kievan Rus, the medieval state that brought the Slavs to Christianity in the 10th Century.

“It is unfortunate that many people are for the complete independence of the Ukraine, because it would be wrong to separate the Ukraine from Russia,” Starikova said. “We even have a saying, ‘Kiev is the mother of all Russian cities.’ ”

Nationalist lawmakers, who squirmed as Bush urged the republic’s Parliament not to take the course of “isolation,” referred, however, to Kievan Rus as evidence of Ukrainians’ long existence as a people and hence their right to independence.

“There was a Kievan Rus before there was a Moscow,” Vladimir Shlemko, a deputy from the pro-independence western Ukraine, said. “They took our name, and then they took our independence.”

Ukrainian nationalists have an endless list of tragedies that their people have suffered, first under the Russian czars and then under Soviet commissars. During the early decades of Soviet rule, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the forced collectivization of farms, in the “anti-nationalist” campaigns against the republic’s intelligentsia and in the political purges among the Communists themselves.

Most tragically perhaps, at least 6 million people are believed to have starved to death in a famine that resulted from the dictator Josef Stalin’s agricultural policies.

“All of this of course weighs on our people and makes them want complete independence,” said Vyacheslav Chornovil, chairman of the Lvov regional government. “People remember the purges and the famine and know that if we were independent, so many millions of us would not have died needlessly.”

The Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic Churches were banned under the Soviet rule, and priests were driven underground by the intense persecution. Thousands of churches were razed, and many of those left standing were converted to sports halls, museums or warehouses.

St. Sophia’s, the gorgeous 11th-Century cathedral with golden onion domes that Bush visited, was taken over from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by Stalin’s men for use as a museum, and Moscow has yet to return it, although many other churches across the country have recently been restored to believers.

Under Soviet and Russian rule, the Ukrainian language, culture and history were suppressed as subversive or seditious. Beloved poets were imprisoned, exiled to Siberia or even shot; their writings were banned. In school, Russian increasingly replaced Ukrainian as the language of instruction.

Over the years, Russification became so strong that many Ukrainians in Kiev today speak Russian better than Ukrainian.

Fechko Fediko, 29, an engineer, bitterly denounced the long Russian dominance of the Ukraine and the suppression of Ukrainian culture.

“The basis for our disagreement is our 70-year stay in the Soviet Union,” Fediko said, speaking in Russian. “If I spoke to you in Ukrainian, you wouldn’t understand a word I said because nobody studies Ukrainian.”