Ukraine Voters to Choose Between East and West : Elections: President’s main rival blames fiscal woes on Soviet breakup. He urges renewed ties with Russia.

A furious voice rang out from the packed auditorium, interrupting the speaker. “Whose fault is it that the Soviet Union collapsed?”

Leonid Kuchma, President Leonid Kravchuk’s main challenger to lead this nuclear-armed nation, peered into the crowd.

“I was against that uncivilized divorce,” said the former rocket builder and ex-premier, referring to the breakup of the 15 Soviet republics three years ago. “It cut through economic ties like through living flesh.”

The audience of managers and engineers from Yuzhmash, the world’s biggest rocket factory, hummed in agreement with its former director.

Once the pride of the Soviet military industry for its nuclear missiles, space launchers and satellites, Yuzhmash is reeling from the empire’s collapse. Its workers, once coddled, glorified and highly paid, have seen their standard of living plummet.

Kuchma’s energetic campaign has turned this Sunday’s election into a plebiscite on the overriding issue of Ukraine’s identity: Should this nation of 52 million people face East or West? Should it cast its lot with Russia or follow its independent, more prosperous and reform-minded European neighbors, such as Poland?

The candidate’s unequivocal answer struck a responsive chord at his old factory.

“Ukraine cannot survive without Russia,” Kuchma declared for the third time this day. “The breakdown of our economic ties is the main cause of Ukraine’s economic woes.”

While he did not mention his opponent’s name, it was clear whom Kuchma blames for the country’s economic free fall: Kravchuk, who joined Russia’s Boris N. Yeltsin and Belarus’ Stanislav Shushkevich at a woodsy retreat Dec. 8, 1991, to sign the agreement that declared independence from a dying Soviet Union.

Since then, Kravchuk has played a coy game with the loose, Russian-dominated Soviet successor--the Commonwealth of Independent States--resisting full integration. This stand makes him popular in Ukraine’s nationalistic western regions.

But here in the eastern, Russian-speaking industrial belt, Kuchma’s call for economic reunion with the former Soviet republics, and especially Russia, draws loud applause. Regional polls show him with a big lead on Kravchuk among voters who have made up their minds.

Victoria Tulina, a homemaker turned part-time train-ticket scalper after Yuzhmash laid off her engineer husband, is a Kuchma supporter.

“We need to renew our economic ties to Russia,” she said as she waited for clients outside Dnipropetrovsk’s rail station.

With six other candidates in the race, and Kravchuk running neck and neck with Kuchma in many regions, Kuchma’s chances are far from certain.

His platform combines vaguely defined economic reforms with closer ties to Russia.

But he could lose some pro-Russia votes to Oleksandr Moroz, the socialist candidate and new speaker of the Parliament. He could also forfeit economic reform votes to the more radically market-minded Volodymyr Lanoviy. And both kinds of votes could go to Valery Babych, a young financier.

Still, in a race where neither front-runner can escape blame for Ukraine’s economic morass, and both avoid details of how they plan to fix it, the “Russia issue” has become central.

In the vernacular, Ukraine means both country and border, fitting for a land that spent centuries split by the frontier between East and West. For almost 350 years, eastern Ukrainian lands were ruled by the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, both of which colonized the region with Russian settlers and “Russianized” local Ukrainians.

The result is a region that is Russian-speaking and deeply suspicious of the West.

“Eastern Ukraine is the last bastion of homo sovieticus, “ said Ian Brzezinski, an American adviser to the Ukrainian Parliament. “Their main concern is their personal well-being.”

Indeed, it was the promise of a better life that persuaded the majority of Easterners to support Ukrainian independence in a December, 1991, referendum.

The failure of that promise today, when production has plunged 40% and hidden unemployment is estimated at 44%, makes life in Russia look better by every measure.

Western Ukraine, in contrast, was a part of Poland, then Austro-Hungary, where treatment of national minorities was hardly exemplary but was liberal enough to let Ukrainian culture and language develop.

Since the 19th Century, the region has been a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism, which held that independent Ukraine is firmly rooted in Europe. Western Ukrainians are more likely to compare their lives to those of Poles rather than Russians.

Except for a brief period in 1919, the two regions were united for the first time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1939, when totalitarian Soviet ideology flattened out the differences between them, at least on the surface.

But in independent post-Soviet Ukraine, those parallel but separate histories are finding modern expression in the two different world views now battling for dominance in Kiev.

While Kuchma personifies the eastern view, he vigorously denies accusations, oft-heard in Ukraine’s overwhelmingly pro-Kravchuk media, that he is planning to sell out Ukraine to the Russians.

“I want to build a politically independent and economically strong Ukraine,” he repeats, insisting that the only way to achieve this is by renewing the ties severed by the Soviet Union’s collapse.

At the other end of the spectrum is the nationalist democratic opposition led by the Rukh party. Its leaders argue that the closer economic ties sought by Kuchma will give Russia political leverage to force Ukraine to give up more and more sovereignty.

Ukraine already feels economic pressure from Moscow, which periodically shuts off gas supplies to force payment. There are serious political conflicts too: Pro-Russian separatist feelings run high in Crimea. The two nations’ navies are wrangling over how to divide the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.

In the election’s first round, Rukh supporters are likely to vote for former Parliament Speaker Ivan Pliushch or former Education Minister Petro Talanchuk, who stand firmly for independence.

But if no candidate gets a majority Sunday and the election goes to a two-man runoff, Kravchuk could probably count on Rukh party supporters.

“By his actions, Kravchuk is pro-Western, and especially pro-American,” said Brzezinski, referring to the president’s efforts to bring Ukraine close to NATO and the European Union. “But he lacks the boldness to articulate a clear vision placing Ukraine firmly in Europe.”

Instead, as befits the man who his people say can “run between the raindrops,” Kravchuk has tried to steer his officially neutral country on a nonaligned path that veers between the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States and the West.