INDEPENDENCE FEVER : Today’s Vote in the Ukraine Could Mean the Genesis of a Nation--and the Undoing of the Soviet Union

A chill clings to Lvov’s cobblestone streets, dispelling the milky warmth cast by the late-afternoon sun. Men hurry home, pushing carts piled high with sacks of potatoes. Women pickle the last of the summer vegetables and spoon homemade raspberry jam into jars. * But autumn has brought a new ritual to this picturesque western Ukrainian city 80 miles from the Polish border. In the town square, where V. I. Lenin’s statue was recently torn down by an angry crowd, independence fever has broken out. * “The only thing we want is an independent Ukraine, and we will live on bread and water until Russian chauvinism is driven out of here,” a sun-browned farmer with a gray stubble of beard vows to a group of about 50 men and women who have come to argue politics at this Ukrainian Hyde Park. * A young woman in a pink jacket objects. “Ukrainian people don’t hate the Russians,” she says. “Let Yeltsin do what he wants, and we will do our own thing here. We need to raise people from their knees and give them a sense of dignity. That is the first step toward being independent.” * Jeers from the mostly male crowd greet the woman’s words. “Go back to Moscow, agent provocateur ,” hisses the first man, baring steel teeth. * As the sun sets, the argument spills into homes and onto TV, stirring both fear and hope throughout the Ukraine, after Russia the most populous and wealthiest of the 12 Soviet republics. Today, the debate will reach its peak as voters pick a president and decide whether the Ukraine should follow the Baltics’ lead and become independent. * Over the past 800 years, the Ukraine has been ruled by Tatars, Mongols, Lithuanians, Poles, Austro-Hungarians, Russian czars, Nazis and most recently by the Soviet Union--but rarely by Ukrainians. Six years ago, the centuries-old bonds of suppression began to loosen under perestroika , and in 1989 the creation of a democratic movement called Rukh harnessed the republic’s anger at the central government’s mishandling of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. The failed coup by Moscow hard-liners last August only accelerated to full throttle the drive for freedom.

A yes vote on the independence referendum today would provide a mandate to transform this republic of 52 million people and 233,000 square miles into the fourth-largest country in Europe, with about the size, population and resources of France. But the rebirth of the Ukrainian nation has significance far beyond its own borders. With 178 long-range nuclear missiles stationed on Ukrainian soil, independence would also turn the new nation into the world’s third-largest nuclear power, after the United States and the Soviet Union.

Polls indicate that up to 80% of Ukrainians may vote for independence. If they do, and if the Ukraine succeeds in breaking away from the Soviet Union, it will spell disaster for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s hopes of cobbling together a new union. Unlike the tiny and dispensable Baltics, the Ukraine is a pivotal player, without which any Soviet federation is doomed. Together, Russia and the Ukraine constitute 70% of the Soviet Union’s population and account for 70% of its national income. Ukrainian enterprises are responsible for 16.7% of Soviet industry; its rich, black earth produces 17.1% of Soviet agriculture. Plants belonging to the military-industrial complex dot the eastern Ukraine, while the Soviet navy’s Black Sea fleet anchors near Odessa to the south. The republic’s potential was not lost on Lenin, who once said, “Losing the Ukraine would be like losing our head.”

WHETHER THE UKRAINE CAN SUCceed as an independent nation depends in large part on how well it can reconcile the differences within its own borders. The disparities between the eastern and western regions of the Ukraine are vast and split the republic across geographical, ethnic, cultural, religious and economic lines. “Eastern and western Ukraine are two legs of one person, and if you cut off one leg, you create a cripple,” says Ivan Hel, the pro-independence deputy chairman of the Lvov oblast, or administrative district.

If the sprawling eastern provinces provide the industrial brawn of the Ukraine, Lvov, in the west, is its brash, beating heart. It was in Lvov that Ukrainian nationalists unfurled the previously banned blue and yellow flag of Ukrainian independence three years ago in defiance of Moscow. It was in Lvov that believers of the long-outlawed Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church risked prison sentences to worship in forests and fields.

The western Ukraine did not come under Soviet rule until 1939, and its people are more spirited, dress more colorfully and trade more with Poland than do their eastern counterparts. Their architecture was inspired more by Hapsburg princes than Stalinist commissars. The forced Russianization that robbed many eastern Ukrainians of their language and culture was strongly resisted in the west, whereUkrainian schools now flourish. When Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Yalta in 1945 to divide up postwar Europe, it was only a zigzag of the pen that placed Lvov in the Soviet Union instead of in Poland.

Andriy Sernetsky, chief engineer for the 275-year-old Lvov Beer Factory, has lived all of his 63 years in Lvov. Many in his hometown remember a time when they could own their own shops and farm their own land. A tall, angular man with an easy manner and warm smile, Sernetsky brims with entrepreneurial ideas as he sits in his office quaffing one of his own foamy, golden beers. As a businessman, he believes that the Ukraine must be independent.

Sernetsky supervises a staff of 1,100 who produce 18.5 million gallons of beer a year. He would like to expand beer production, wean people from vodka and introduce fruit-flavored drinks. He is touring factories in Central and Western Europe to learn modern brewing technology. Because all his raw materials--barley, rye and sugar--come from the fertile fields outside Lvov, the factory hasn’t been hurt by the trade paralysis that has stopped the flow of goods throughout the Soviet Union. Now he’d like to attract a foreign partner and start doing business in hard currency, but that must wait until the Ukrainian Parliament passes a privatization law, launches a national currency and sets up trade rules.

“We’ve waited a long time for real freedom, and we’re still waiting,” Sernetsky says, “but I’m convinced that independence will be good not only for our factory but for all our people.”

Five hundred miles to the east, in the industrial city of Kharkov, Viktor Salnikov, a member of Kharkov’s regional council, reaches a different conclusion. “Our historical and economic ties with Russia are very strong,” says Salnikov, 55, a formal man in a pin-striped suit and steel-rimmed glasses. It is Saturday afternoon, and Salnikov is driving his white Lada, a Soviet subcompact, through his district. He pauses to reflect and says about the Ukrainians and Russians: “We are one people, with a single culture, tradition and history. If we break those ties, workers will lose their jobs and there will be chaos.”

Such chaos is already rampant in the eastern regions of the Ukraine, where disintegration of the central Soviet economy and trade standoffs with Russia have played havoc with local economies. Last August, after the Ukraine declared its independence--contingent on today’s referendum--its Parliament decided to stop exporting up to 80% of the republic’s raw materials. The Ukraine says it gets only oil, natural gas, cotton and building supplies from the other republics and could fetch higher prices for its grain and coal abroad.

In retaliation, Russia cut its exports to the Ukraine, leading to kilometer-long gas lines in some cities and work slowdowns throughout the central Donbass coal-mining region. In Donetsk, just 40 miles from the Russian border, coal miners like Sasha Briachenko say their lives have gotten worse under perestroika. While some military-industrial factories may eventually privatize and convert to civilian production, other enterprises, such as the mine where Briachenko and 2,000 others labor, may have to modernize and lay off workers to survive in a competitive market economy.

“This independence doesn’t suit me,” Briachenko says. “I’m concerned about food in the stores, about what will happen to my son.”

While slabs of red meat and crusty loaves of bread fill the shops in western Ukrainian cities, in eastern cities such as Donetsk and Kharkov, the selections are smaller, the food lines longer and the industrial landscape more bleak. Historically, the east has suffered more: It has languished in the steely but often inefficient grip of communism since 1920. It endured the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933, when 4 million to 7 million Ukrainians starved to death under Stalin’s forced agricultural collectivization. Decades of oppression have worn down the people’s spirit, erasing memories of a market economy that still haunt those in the west.

The population makeup is different, too. Like Sernetsky, most in the west are ethnic Ukrainians. By contrast, the east is home to most of the republic’s 11 million ethnic Russians, many of whom fear new laws that would make Ukrainian the official language of government and education.

Salnikov, a professor of Russian and Ukrainian literature at Kharkov University who is married to an ethnic Ukrainian, says he appreciates his wife’s culture. However, he says, “my constituents are afraid that Ukrainian nationalism will turn into Ukrainian jingoism. Already, there are reductions in the teaching of Russian language and literature, which is among the most outstanding in the world.”

A true communist believer, Salnikov is troubled by the signs of collapse around him. Recently, for instance, some employees of the Kharkov tractor factory spent a week waiting for parts from Georgia. In a Kharkov suburb, 6,000 unfinished high-rise housing units stand abandoned. Work was halted last spring when wood ran out, leaving about 130,000 Kharkov residents on a waiting list for new housing.

“The people are confused,” Salnikov says. “Nobody knows what will happen. But they know we can’t live like this anymore.”

A MILLENNIUM AGO THERE WERE NO RUSSIANS OR UKRAINIANS; there were only Slavs, and they lived in the thriving medieval state of Rus, ruled by Kievan princes. Volodymyr, grand prince of Kiev, brought Christianity to the empire in 988, when Moscow and St. Petersburg were still muddy villages.

In the 13th Century, the Kievan Rus collapsed under conquest by Mongol tribes, and its people slowly evolved into Russians and Ukrainians. With the ascendance of Imperial Russia, the region was relegated to the outskirts of the empire, and its residents came to be known by the term Ukrainian --which means “border people.” But Ukrainians never forgot the days when the Slav state revolved around Kiev, and the contrast between that ancient glory and the recent centuries of subjugation has forged a brooding nationalism among Ukrainians, one filled with feelings of both kinship and resentment toward their onetime Rus brethren.

The Ukraine, which at the time did not include the western provinces, seized a brief opportunity for independence when czarist Russia was overthrown in 1917, but it was brought under Soviet rule in 1920 after bloody fighting. The communists imposed Russianization and brutally suppressed Ukrainian language and culture. They sealed the Ukraine’s borders and starved its farmers and landowners--known by the derisive term kulak-- into compliance with the Soviet plan to collectivize agriculture.

Arthur Koestler, who wrote the searing indictment of totalitarianism, “Darkness at Noon,” traveled by train through the Ukraine during the Great Famine and saw stations lined with begging peasants and “starving children that looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles.”

The terror continued even after the famine subsided. By the late 1930s, an entire generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia had been executed or sent to Siberia as Stalin destroyed the intellectual underpinnings of any nationalist movement that could threaten his power. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Ukrainian culture and literature again flowered briefly before a second generation of writers, dissidents and poets was shipped off to Leonid I. Brezhnev’s prisons.

The decades of systematic persecution have taken their toll. “People say, ‘Why doesn’t the Ukraine know how to govern itself?”’ says Sonya Hlutkowsky, a Ukrainian-American who lives in Lvov and works for the Ukrainian Catholic Church. “It’s because they took all our best and brightest.”

Even today, Ukrainians fear that Moscow is secretly trying to subvert their plans for independence. They cite anti-Ukrainian articles in the Russian press, including one by Alexander Solzhenitsyn urging that the Ukraine unite with Russia and Belarus, formerly Byelorussia, to form a super-Slav nation.

Russia’s balking at Ukrainian independence is partly economic. But keeping the Ukraine in the Soviet fold would also provide Moscow with a counterweight to the growing population of and influence wielded by the Central Asian republics.

“European Slav people are really one culture,” says Valentin Medvedev, an ethnic Russian from Kharkov who heads up Rus, a group in the eastern Ukraine that wants to rejoin Russia. “We are together or we perish.”

IN A DILAPIDATED BUILDING IN DOWNTOWN KIEV SITS THE HEADquarters of Rukh, a coalition of 12 political parties seeking an independent, democratic Ukraine. Founded as a grass-roots movement in 1989, Rukh--the Ukrainian Popular Movement for Restructuring--has blossomed into a mighty political force, harnessing a broad spectrum of support, from students to disillusioned communists.

Rukh might not exist were it not for the Chernobyl disaster. Outrage over the explosion at the nuclear power plant cut across political and social barriers and galvanized Ukrainians, persuading them that they must wrest control of their destiny from Moscow. Thirty-six hours passed before Soviet authorities evacuated anyone or warned Ukrainians of the true danger. Meanwhile, the population was exposed to dangerous radioactivity, at levels that made children particularly susceptible to thyroid cancer. Recently, after a fire in one of the reactors, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to shut down Chernobyl by 1993.

Rukh also has played on Ukrainian suspicions that Russia continues to regard them as unruly younger brothers in need of a firm hand. During the putsch, some Rukh aides prepared for the worst. “I was busy making petrol bombs,” says one 24-year-old follower. “We didn’t know if there would be tanks in the streets.”

On a fall day at Rukh central, lean young staffers hunch over telephones and tap out on computers dispatches to Western news organizations. In tiny rooms, bleary-eyed men and women confer late into the night on last-minute strategies for Rukh’s presidential candidate, Vyacheslav Chornovil, the 53-year-old leader of the Lvov regional government. Chornovil and Ukrainian Parliament Chairman Leonid M. Kravchuk are the front-runners among the 39 candidates.

While Kravchuk has experience and polish, the walrus-mustachioed Chornovil has credentials as a political prisoner and longtime opponent of the regime. “To want freedom is the same as wanting to breathe,” Chornovil says. “I tell the people, ‘Do not be frightened; it will be much better for your children to live here than in the Soviet empire.’ ”

Chornovil envisions an 18-month transitional government and maintains that “we would be much more willing to talk to Russia’s democrats than is the current (Ukrainian) government.” He supports the control and eventual destruction of nuclear weapons. Until then, he favors a double-key system giving both Moscow and Kiev joint nuclear control. In addition, he favors privatization of industry and land, the formation of a Ukrainian army that could reach 420,000 troops by 1995, separate customs posts and convertible currency--with money already being printed in Canada. Parliament has already granted preliminary approval to most of those points.

But Chornovil opposes any kind of union treaty that would subordinate the Ukraine. “The Ukraine should enter into a common defense with Europe. We can develop better economic contacts with France than with Yakutsk or Khirgizia.”

The contrast couldn’t be more stark between Rukh’s buzzing chaos and Kravchuk’s well-appointed, decorous government headquarters near Parliament, where well-fed apparatchiks glide silently along burnished-wood halls and guards strenuously examine visitors’ credentials.

The 57-year-old son of a peasant, Kravchuk, the Ukraine’s former Communist Party ideology chief, is a master at divining political winds. He has emerged unscathed from recent upheavals, despite criticism from democrats about his failure to condemn the August coup until it was over. Since then Kravchuk has distanced himself from his communist past and is running on a platform almost identical to that of Chornovil. Both candidates have also reached out to the 480,000 Jews who remain in the Ukraine, mindful that their nation for centuries has been a hub of both Eastern European Jewry and anti-Semitism.

Kravchuk makes no apology for his conversion to earnest democrat; only fools, he says, refuse to change with the times. But Kravchuk’s government has not severed all ties to Moscow. In November, the Ukraine joined the 11 other republics in signing the economic treaty that is pivotal to Gorbachev’s plan to stitch together a new Soviet Union. Some believe that Kravchuk is only trying to buy time. Others, such as Roman Szporluk, a pro- fessor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University, say vague treaties signed in Moscow have little impact in Kiev today.

Shrewdly, Kravchuk also has sought the role of international statesman, traveling to Moscow and to Washington, where he asked the White House to recognize Ukrainian sovereignty and provide aid. The United States balked, worried that such a move would further accelerate the disintegration of the Soviet center. U.S. officials have made it clear that they want the republic to turn over all nuclear weapons to Moscow, fearing the Ukraine could use them to further nationalist goals or to blackmail the West into providing aid.

Some analysts warn that, with nearly half-a-million troops--and nuclear weapons--Ukrainian infighting could dwarf the civil war in Yugoslavia. Already, a new law provides criminal penalties for interfering with the Ukraine’s sovereignty. Earlier this fall, Kravchuk threatened to dissolve the local government of the Crimea unless ethnic Russians there stopped agitating to rejoin Russia. In addition to the restive groups in the east and south, about 150,000 Muslim Tatars in the Crimea are demanding their own sovereign state.

At a recent speech before the Ukrainian Academy of Science, Kravchuk, who sports well-coiffed silver hair and oozes the charm of a political boss from central casting, reaffirmed that the Ukraine will not give up any of its land. He also stressed the need for a stock market and low taxes to encourage foreign investment. “Only if we transfer to a market economy can we have prosperity. But . . . we must transform gradually. . . . Privatization will take five, six years. In the past I couldn’t do everything I wanted,” he says. “Now, I’ll push for full independence.”

AS DEPUTIES POURED OUT OF the Ukrainian Parliament one day in October, the protesters sprang into action. But instead of chanting “Down with communist scum” or any of the usual epithets one hears these days in Kiev, this crowd was singing hymns. Carrying seven-foot-high crosses and religious icons framed with fresh flowers, the crowd, led by Catholic parish priests, warbled sweetly. When the song ended, babushkas in colorful scarves lifted banners that condemned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for human-rights abuses and the Ukrainian Parliament for refusing to give the Catholics a church in Kiev, where they claim 120,000 worshipers. Instead, Parliament had ceded them a bell tower that could hold 30 people.

Now that Ukrainians finally have freedom to worship, a religious war is threatening to erupt. The battle revolves not around souls but a more earthly matter--real estate that was seized by the communists.

The 5 million Ukrainian Catholics live mainly in the western Ukraine and answer to the Pope. The 35 million Ukrainian Orthodox, mostly from the eastern regions, answer to their spiritual leader, Filaret, the Metropolitan of Kiev. A third and smaller sect, the Ukrainian Autocephalous, doesn’t answer to Rome, Moscow or Filaret.

Although the churches all support independence, their religious differences are thought likely to threaten the stability of any new government.

In Lvov, frantic Ukrainian Orthodox priests locked themselves in their churches earlier this year to prevent their takeover by Catholics. In Kiev, Autocephalous believers staged a weeklong hunger strike under the gilded onion domes of St. Sophia’s Cathedral to reclaim their Byzantine church, which was turned into a museum under Stalin. Museum personnel responded with their own hunger strike.

All sides hurl insults at one another. “Human rights are being violated in the west, where Ukrainian Catholics want to take churches forcibly from the Russian Orthodox,” Filaret maintains.

“We made an appeal in 1988 to the Moscow Patriarch to end the fighting, but they are not willing,” counters 76-year-old Ukrainian Catholic Cardinal Myroslav Lubachivsky.

The animosity dates back to 1596, when the western Ukrainians, in an attempt to escape domination by the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy, broke away from Moscow and aligned with the Pope. While no churches escaped persecution under communism, the Orthodox were able to negotiate a separate peace with the state. But in 1946, Stalin forced the Catholics to merge with the Russian Orthodox Church and gave many of their churches to the Orthodox. Instead, the Catholics went underground and evolved into nationalists.

Last March, the stage was set for controversy when Moscow permitted Lubachivsky to return to Lvov after 45 years of exile--17 of them as a parish priest in Cleveland, Ohio.

“Who would have guessed one year ago that we would have been able to gather here today?” the cardinal tells a weeping crowd one Sunday in the western Ukrainian town of Zolochiv, where he has come to bless the cornerstone of a new church. “Do not stop praying. Be faithful to your faith and your church and your nation.”

When Lubachivsky travels, his car is often stopped by villagers who have waited for hours in the rain and cold. “We are happy in our souls,” says Marusia Kornitska, 12, her eyes filling with tears as she glimpses the spiritual leader about whom her parents and grandparents formerly spoke only in hushed whispers.

SITTING IN HIS OFFICE ONE sunny morning, Ivan Hel, deputy chairman of the Lvov oblast, points to a potted plant with jutting thorns that perches on the windowsill. In its dry soil is stuck a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag. “This,” Hel says passionately, “is the thorny fate of the Ukrainian people. The Russians burglarized our history and culture and have taken the passports of our existence. The danger is continuing, even among the so-called Russian democrats.”

Hel catches himself and continues in a calmer voice. “If we make wise economic and political decisions, then whether it wants to or not, Moscow will be forced to agree to it. This is our best hope for the future.”

As Ukrainians cast their ballots, they take the first step toward that future, a future in which the Ukraine must display the statesmanship to deal with superpowers, the savvy to revive its economy and the persuasiveness to unite east and west.

“It’s like a child learning to walk and falling down all the time,” says Harvard’s Szporluk. “But if that child takes one or two steps, it’s an extraordinary accomplishment. What we are seeing here is conceivably the making of a nation.”

But nuclear weapons leave no room for error, and the world worries about what a fledgling state would do with such adult toys.

For today, however, it seems that the melancholy voice of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko may triumph in his homeland. Born a serf in 1814, Shevchenko became a powerful spokesman for Ukrainian nationhood and died in exile in 1861. In “My Legacy,” written in 1845, he urged all Ukrainians to think of him as they overthrew Russian tyranny:

“And remember me,” Shevchenko wrote to the Ukrainian people almost 150 years ago, “With warm good words / In the new free family.”