America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

KIEV. I arrived in the Ukraine from the Baltics thinking I was returning to the Slavic core of the incredible shrinking Soviet Union. Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians might be going their own way, but I'd long assumed that once the epidemic of secessionism had run its course, the Ukrainians would remain citizens of a huge country with its capital in Moscow. Such is the conventional wisdom almost everywhere, certainly in my hometown of Washington.

But that's not the way the future looks from here. From Communists to formerly persecuted members of the nationalist Rukh (Movement) to founders of the new Party of Democratic Renaissance, from Ukrainian chauvinists to representatives of the ethnic Russians, who make up 20% of the population, the people I've met in Kiev seem every bit as determined as those in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to break with Moscow. If they succeed, their country would be one of the largest in Europe. However, their rhetoric is quieter and their strategy less confrontational than the Balts'.

A crucial step toward political sovereignty is liberation of the economy from the all-but-worthless ruble. The Balts have arranged to print their own money in the West, but they have not dared put it into circulation since that might provoke a full-scale crackdown by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the Ukraine is about to start distributing specially stamped rubles that can be spent only inside the republic, where goods are cheaper and more plentiful than elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian ruble will thus be, de facto, a separate currency. In addition, the parliament is moving to privatize property, and the Ukrainian foreign ministry is setting up its own consulates abroad.

Leonid Kravchuk, the chairman of the parliament, leads a bloc of Communists who have broken with hard-liners in the party to form a coalition with moderates in the democratic opposition. He is negotiating with Moscow for a "renewed union" more like a common market than the federation Mikhail Gorbachev advocates. Kravchuk may quit the party to run in the republic's first presidential election this fall.

Virtually everyone I've talked to here complains that the U.S. has been slow to recognize, and support, what is happening to the U.S.S.R. "We understand that George Bush wants to save Gorbachev," says Vladimir Grinyov, an ethnic Russian and ex-Communist, who is both Kravchuk's deputy and his rival. "But to concentrate on Moscow is harmful to the devolution of power and the spread of democracy."

The Ukrainians take it as a good sign that Bush received Boris Yeltsin in Washington last week. Bohdan Horyn, a former political prisoner who is now a Rukh member of parliament, welcomes what he sees as the Administration's new "double-track policy" aimed both at Moscow and at the republics. "The West," he says, "must not help the center at the expense of those of us who are trying to leave the empire."

Horyn and others across the political spectrum hope Bush will visit Kiev after the superpower summit in Moscow later this year. Kravchuk is due in the U.S. in the fall to address the United Nations. All the Ukrainians I spoke to, even anticommunists, want him to get his own invitation to the White House. What matters in Kiev is not his party affiliation but his position as the leader of a large and important European nation. That should matter to Bush as well.