JOHN MARONE, KYIV
GRAIN, GAS AND INDEPENDENCE
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has made international recognition of the Holodomor his personal crusade. Good for him. The famine of 1932-1933 claimed some six to eight million Ukrainian lives - as much as a quarter of the population - and it wasn’t a natural catastrophe.
Thanks to the work of scholars such as James Mace, it’s become increasingly accepted that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered grain confiscations in the Ukrainian countryside to stamp out grass-roots resistance to Moscow. Yushchenko wants the Holodomor recognized as genocide, thus putting Ukraine’s tragedy on the same level as the Jewish Holocaust.
This has created an international stir, especially, as one would expect, in Moscow.
But arguments over history, however controversial, can never change the past. And in the case of Ukraine, they appear to be diverting attention from Moscow’s latest attempt to break the backbone of Ukraine’s independence.
In the early 1930s, Stalin starved Ukrainians into submission by robbing them of their wheat. Now, Moscow under President Vladimir Putin is achieving a similar goal using gas.
At first glance, the analogy seems deceptive, out of proportion: Surely, the use of Red Army units to requisition grain upon threat of firing squad or exile to the arctic is a far cry from forcing Ukraine to pay for the gas it imports, isn’t it?
In effect, No. First of all, Ukraine doesn’t need Russian gas. It produces about a third of its own needs domestically and used to import the rest from Central Asia. Unfortunately, Russia has used its geographically intermediate position and superior bargaining power to buy up all the Central Asian gas that Ukraine used to get and use it to threaten Ukraine with shut-offs.
The latest threat is that Russian gas giant Gazprom will cut supplies by 25 percent on March 3 if Ukraine doesn’t do what it’s told.
Gazprom says the government of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko must pay off all back gas debts and sign a deal that Putin brokered with President Viktor Yushchenko on February 12.
Without getting into the details of why Ukraine should be late in paying its gas bills, suffice it to say that Russian-Ukrainian gas trade has been conveniently opaque for years. However payments problems became particularly acute under the previous government of Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, whose presidential bid was unsuccessfully supported by the Kremlin during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.
Regarding the February 12 deal with Yushchenko, the details have yet to be publicized, but what is known points to further encroachment by Gazprom on Ukraine’s energy market.
Under the current arrangement, Gazprom imports gas of unknown origin (either Central Asian or more expensive Russian gas) through two intermediaries in which Ukraine has a limited stake. The price paid at the border has nearly quadrupled within the past two years, while Ukraine’s once powerful state oil and gas company Naftogaz Ukrayiny is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Gazprom has made no secret of its goal of directly controlling sales on Ukraine’s domestic market (instead of just getting paid for what it brings to the border) and eventually ‘managing’ Ukraine’s strategic gas pipeline system to Europe.
Moscow’s control over the sale and transportation of gas in Ukraine would be the equivalent of controlling the country’s economy.
Now, as in the early 1930s, we are watching a history of subjugation repeated, amidst a smokescreen of denial from Moscow.
Stalin built up the false image of the Kulak, or greedy peasant, to justify his war against the Ukrainian countryside. A master of lies, Stalin accused his victims of the crimes that he himself was perpetrating.
Putin tells us that Ukraine is stealing gas, but he fails to explain why Ukraine could not simply buy Central Asian gas and pay Russia for the use of its pipes – just as Ukraine transports Russian gas to Europe for a fee.
Of course none of this would be possible for the Kremlin without assistance from corrupt Ukrainians. Seventy-five years ago, these were communist revolutionaries. Now they are capitalists. Whatever they call themselves, their primary motivation has clearly been self-interest if not simple greed.
Survivals of the Holodomor tell of villagers turning in their neighbors to the commissars in order to take part in the confiscation of homesteads.
Today, the state is being raped by bureaucrats who head paper companies.
The general rule of Stalin was divide and conquer. Ukrainian Communist officials were played off against one another, with each trying to appease Moscow better than his competitor.
Today, we see President Yushchenko coming back from Moscow with a gas deal that is questioned by Prime Minister Tymoshenko upon her return from the Russian capital shortly thereafter.
It’s no secret that Yushchenko sees Tymoshenko as his main competitor for the presidency in 2009.
Tymoshenko has consistently called for cleaning up Ukraine’s corrupt gas sector. But in this she has come up against Yushchenko, who brokered the introduction of the current two gas intermediaries: RosUkrEnergo and UkrGazEnergo in 2006.
In contradiction to the February 12 agreement, Tymoshenko has called for the cancellation of all intermediaries in order to secure revenues from domestic gas sales for the government.
Tymoshenko appears as the defender of Ukrainian interests; while the otherwise pro-Western Yushchenko looks like he’s trying to win the confidence of Moscow.
In this, Yushchenko is in line with Europe, which is also eager to humor its eastern fuel supplier.
German, Italian and French politicians may not like the Kremlin’s increasing bluster and authoritarianism, but their country’s energy companies aren’t about to let politics get in the way of profits.
Just as Stalin was able to convince select Western journalists that Ukraine’s famine was being exaggerated, so has Putin’s propaganda machine been successful in portraying Kyiv as the bad guy in the gas disputes.
That’s why, with the exception of Poland and the Baltics, who have the experience of Kremlin policy fresh in their memories, Europe is widely supportive of gas pipeline projects that detour Ukraine, such as NordStream and South Stream.
As it did more than once last century, Europe has drawn a geographical line of democratic interests that it is willing to defend, and Ukraine didn’t make it in.
Ukraine is now a sovereign nation, not just another Soviet republic. Nevertheless, independence is not measured in flags and anthems.
Ukraine’s real independence is contingent on integration with Europe, whose values Russia has shown itself unwilling to accept.
Stalin correctly surmised that breaking the will of the Ukrainian peasants he would stamp out the country’s cultural rebirth of the 1920s.
Like Putin today, he knew that if he didn’t secure the subordination of Ukraine quickly the country would move ever more quickly toward greater self-autonomy.
The Russia of today feels no less threatened by the West than during Stalin’s time. The Kremlin sees its security in controlling as much territory as possible, which it has traditionally accomplished by force.
Ukrainians don’t face the starvation of their parents and grandparents, or even the cold radiators threatened by Gazprom. But they are threatened by the loss of their independence. The Holodomor is history, but Moscow’s desire to control Ukraine is not.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
February 29, 2008
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