People Live

I want to say something about Ukraine, and it is this: Ukraine is exactly like where you live.  Exactly.  And I don't care where you live.  You live in California?  Ukraine is exactly like California.  You live in Dublin?  Just like Ukraine.  Omaha, Chicago, Pretoria, Rome.  You get the idea.

What do I mean?  I mean that in Ukraine, just like everywhere else, people go about their daily lives with the bedrock, usually implicit conviction that those lives are the only normal lives in the world, and that the lives being lived in other places around the globe are the ones that are dangerous, spectacular, backward, or otherwise incomprehensible.

Think about that: wherever you live, whatever you're doing right now, there's a Ukrainian for whom your life is dazzlingly strange.  Keep thinking about that.

Why do I want to say this about Ukraine?  Well, I want to say it about everywhere, it's a topic that obsesses me as a writer and as a human.  But I bring up Ukraine here in part because it's close to my heart, and in part because George Weigel, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here in Washington, D.C., wrote, about a month ago, a rather uncharacteristically (for him) breathless article about the arrest, trial and sentencing of Ukraine's former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko to a prison term on some pretty patently trumped-up charges.  (You can read Weigel's article here).


Though any number of sources have tended, terribly incorrectly, to equate Ms. Tymoshenko's victimization in this particular case with a personal and professional saintliness on her part (she was at one time Ukraine's Energy Minister, in which capacity she was deeply implicated in the extremely, extremely fishy sale of gas transit rights to a Russian company, among other somewhat less drastic but no less exasperating transgressions), they are all correct in identifying the Tymoshenko affair as a preposterous one.

What they all miss, however, is the extent to which all this politico-legal flummery is viewed by Ukrainians as completely normal.  For Ukrainians (if I may be so foolhardy as to speak for them), Ms. Tymoshenko's fate is not the menacing herald of some resurrected totalitarian instinct.  It's just good old-fashioned stupidity; and furthermore, as such, it's barely news.  East or West, North or South, most of us have long since caught on that politicians are, in crucial ways (though perhaps not in every way), just dopes.  Complete boneheads.  Thus, Ukrainians quite rightly view President Viktor Yanukovich, (one of the men responsible for Ms. Tymoshenko's prosecution), as a typical political idiot, tone deaf to the likely consequences of his actions.  Though it may seem paradoxical to the West, it is precisely because Ukraine has put up with external domination for centuries that it tends not to perceive every knuckleheaded pronouncement from Kyiv as cause for hand-wringing.

And here we come, finally (I know, I know), to my particular response to Weigel.  As my wife puts it, the average Ukrainian's understanding of the cosmos hasn't changed much over the last, say, 1500 years.  As pagans, they reckoned that there were forces in the world greater than them, which forces had to be, somehow, survived.  When Christianity came, they reckoned that God was a force in the world greater than them, Who had to be, somehow, survived.  And so on through the centuries.  Droughts, Mongols, Russians, Jesus, the souls of the dead, etc.  Mysterious and dangerous, all, to varying degrees.

And so, in my experience, it remains with Ukrainians.  The world is to be shrugged at and kept a wary eye on.  Ukraine, Mr. Weigel, is neither Catholic, as you'd like it to be, nor Russian Orthodox, as Russia would like it to be, nor neo-Soviet, as you fear it could become.  It is pagan.  It is superstitious and a little goofy.  I know neither how to make this point strongly enough, nor how to make the fact of it more palatable to my Catholic friends and family: I have never, in my decade of involvement with the country, met a Ukrainian who knew or cared anything about religion.  Church weddings are for pretty pictures, and that is all. 

Because I understand this to be true, because I've come very deeply to understand and even (to a point) to identify with the Ukrainian world-view, I have a further complaint against Weigel, and it is this: to suggest, as he does, that "In keeping alive the idea of a free and independent Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church played a role similar to that of the Catholic Church in Soviet-occupied Poland", is to do precisely what he accuses Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church of doing, namely, claiming Ukraine for himself.  I am sorry, Mr. Weigel, but you, as a Catholic, do not get to take credit for Ukrainian independence.

As I mentioned above, there are a thousand nuances, caveats, and clarifications that should be added here, but to which the blog format is particularly unaccommodating.  I'm sorry that I can't paint a fuller, more accurate picture.  But even if I could, the take-home message would be the same, and it would be summarized brilliantly by Isaac Babel, the early 20th-Century Ukrainian short-story writer and novelist.  In response to the West's furor, it's trembling reportage, analysis, prognostication, outrage, and so on, I would offer a four-line dialogue from Babel's Diary of a Red Army Cavalryman, between an itinerant soldier from Odessa and a resident of the town in (then) Poland which the soldier's regiment has entered:

"Where are you from, young man," the man asks.
"From Odessa," the soldier answers.
"And what is it like in Odessa?"
"People live."