 An insight into the great events in Ukraine over the last five weeks may be gleaned from an incident in the long life of Francois Marie Arouet, known to history as the philosopher Voltaire. In 1725, he became embroiled with a minor aristocrat in the sort of quarrel of words at which he excelled. It caused him to be sent, in the winter of 1726, to the Bastille, the notorious Paris prison that would become the French Revolution's first target, in 1789.
Freed after several weeks, Voltaire went to England, which he found in the spring of her existence: a nation increasingly governed by a House of Commons, where religious dissenters were tolerated, iconoclastic pamphleteers such as himself unmolested, and the people largely free to mind their own business. Yet this was 50 years before the American Declaration of Independence and 106 years before the first great British Reform Act, in 1832.
We tend to think of those events _ as well as the ending of slavery in the United States, in 1865, and female suffrage in both countries, in the early 20th Century _ as sudden developments. "Tip over patriarchy," as the feminist bumper sticker puts it _ as if the advance of liberty were a matter of overturning an outdated cabriolet and dumping its aristocratic passengers onto the ground.
In point of fact, the development of free institutions in Britain, and the countries descended from her, took centuries of perhaps unintended preparation, before the spasms history celebrates. In 1726, England still hanged pickpockets and imprisoned debtors. But the astute Voltaire smelled liberty in the air. It was already thriving, as the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier would put it, as "a habit of the heart."
Put another way, civil society had been advancing, and the spasms we build monuments to were the moments when political institutions were compelled to catch up. That is exactly what I think has happened in Ukraine. I have had the privilege of reporting from Ukraine during nine trips there _ one during the Soviet period, and eight since 2000.
On the first trip _ a product of detente _ I went on a cultural exchange with a group of Boston-area high-school hockey players who were to compete against Soviet boys their age. While our team won its first game, the second game was a 16-1 loss to members of the Soviet national team. Our boys loved it. By and by we figured out that our two KGB minders were there to mind each other as much as us. Each privately expressed a fear of the other, who was assumed to be a loyal communist.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, Russian was the universal language. When we heard Ukrainian being very softly spoken by two people on a bus, our attempt to converse was met with turgid stares. But after we had gotten off the bus and walked a ways, we discovered we had been pursued: With tears in their eyes the bus riders explained that it wasn't safe to be overheard speaking Ukrainian in Kiev. Yet they were. They were speaking the Ukrainian language, albeit in whispers, on a public bus, in defiance of the dangers, at a time (1973), when there was no hope that their persecution would end in their lifetimes.
At one game I had my introduction to Soviet Jewry. During the first period of the game I noticed a man staring at me. Just another KGB operative, I figured. But when the period ended the man followed me toward the locker room, grabbing at my sleeve with his thumb and forefinger. "I am a joodge," he said in very poor English.
"That's very nice," I replied in small talk. "We have judges in the U.S.A." But when he used the word Hebrew, I knew what he meant. He asked if I could help him get a Hebrew-Russian dictionary. I would write to him, but never heard if he received my letter or only a knock on the door.
These acts (including the KGB agents' confessions of their respective treacherous thoughts) gave insights into how Ukrainian civil society was surviving in small habits of the heart. By the time I returned in 2000, nine years after independence, the cultural habits of centuries had returned, seemingly intact. Families that had been divided by years of Siberian or Karelian exile, or by emigration to the West, were reunited _ held together in most cases, it seems to me, by the strength of their women.
Religion, which the Soviets had done their utmost to suppress, returned with a flowering of observance in several restored Christian, Jewish and Muslim confessions. Concomitantly, there has been a flowering of start-up private institutions, such as hospitals, universities, newspapers and advocacy groups. All of this has transpired under the noses of the now famously discredited post-independence oligarchs, who have been running the government for their own enrichment.
Ukrainians have been living like free Englishmen for only 14 years, though much longer in their hearts. It did not surprise me a bit that they were ready for their democratic "spasm" when the oligarchs overreached. I'll be there again next week. It is a privilege to tell their story. |
