Ukrainians that Ukraine Could Have Done Without

By Volodymyr Kish

As you are all no doubt aware from my columns over the past few years, I am of the strong opinion that current President Viktor Yanukovych has been a disaster for both the present and future of Ukraine and ranks high among the unfortunately long list of leaders and prominent historical figures that Ukraine could have done without.  Sadly, as I recently realized in thinking the matter over, he has had good company.  Ukraine has never lacked in individuals that, in times of great adversity, succumbed to their egos and baser motivations, and made things even worse for their fellow countrymen.

The following is my list, in chronological order starting with the most recent, of prominent figures in Ukrainian history who rank high in betraying their country’s destiny.

1. Viktor Yanukovych will surely figure prominently in Ukraine’s history as having done exemplary work in turning Ukraine into a kleptocracy and setting a new standard for the abuse of power.

2. Viktor Yushchenko will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the greatest disappointments in Ukrainian history.  Having been given the power and trust of the Ukrainian people during the dramatic and heroic Orange Revolution, Viktor proceeded to squander the opportunity to build a truly democratic, Western country, and incomprehensibly, then actively helped his former corrupt enemies to regain power.

3. Leonid Kuchma, though undoubtedly a smart and capable bureaucrat who successfully managed to stabilize Ukraine’s economy during turbulent times, nonetheless succeeded in privatizing most of Ukraine’s state assets into the hands of a small elite of fellow cronies, who then used their wealth to establish an oligarchic state.  This corrupt system exists to this day, greatly hampering Ukraine’s evolution into a modern European country.

4. Nikita Khrushchev, who though ethnically Russian, spent most of his early life in Ukraine working as a labourer in the Donbas.  He rose rapidly in the ranks of the Communist Party and in 1937, Stalin appointed him as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine.  He ruled Ukraine during and after the Second World War, ruthlessly incorporating Western Ukraine into the Soviet fold.  Millions of Ukrainians died needlessly under his rule, either due to his wartime military actions or his suppression of Ukrainian nationalism in the post-war period.

5. Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky was leader of a coup sponsored by the Germans in 1918 that toppled Petliura’s short-lived Ukrainian National Republic that sought to create a Free Ukrainian State in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Despite being of noble and historic kozak blood, he proved to be no more than a German collaborator with tsarist and Russian sympathies, interested only in re-instituting a historically obsolete feudal state in Ukraine.

6. Nestor Makhno was a self-professed ideological anarchist who proved to be a particularly capable revolutionary military leader.  At the peak of his power, he controlled most of south-eastern Ukraine in the turmoil after the Bolshevik Revolution.  Had he sided with the nationalist Petliura forces, Ukraine’s history would undoubtedly have turned out differently.  Unfortunately, his misguided anarchistic ideology moved him to reject all other political ideologies and fight everyone he disagreed with, with predictable results.  Colourful and charismatic as he may have been, he proved to be a destructive force in the history of Ukraine’s national aspirations.

7. Ivan Skoropadsky was a Kozak who split from Ivan Mazepa when Mazepa decided to fight with Charles XII of Sweden against Peter I.  When Mazepa was defeated at the Battle of Poltava, Tsar Peter I appointed Ivan Skorpadsky as Hetman of the “loyal” kozak forces.  As Peter’s loyal henchman in Ukraine, Skoropadsky became the country’s largest aristocratic landowner. Two centuries later, a descendant of his brother became Hetman of Ukraine again under equally dubious circumstances.

8. The Czartoryski Family were originally a prominent Ukrainian (Volhynian) noble clan who during the 16^th Century converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism and became Polonized, rising to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful families within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ruling over vast feudal estates in Western Ukraine.  Although not the first nor the last of their kind, they were prime examples of Ukrainians turning on their own and profiting by exploiting their own kind.