From Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński, first published in Poland in 1993:
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It is not surprising that the Ukrainian Language Society was among those groups attacked and oppressed. The revolution in the Ukraine, like everywhere else, was waged at least partly over language. Half of the fifty-two million inhabitants of the Ukraine either do not speak Ukrainian, or they speak it poorly. Three hundred and fifty years of Russification have inevitably produced such a result. The ban against printing book in Ukrainian was in force for decades. As early as 1876, Alexander II ordered that instruction in Ukrainian schools take place only in Russian. Several months ago I visited the third-largest city in the Ukraine — Donetsk. The battle to open at least one elementary school teaching Ukrainian was by then already in its second year. Teachers assembled children in the park and there instructed them in Ukrainian. Teaching Ukrainian? Why, that was counterrevolution, an imperialist conspiracy!
Also in Donetsk, during a demonstration, a young RUCH activist was brave enough to remove from inside his jacket the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag and hold it aloft. People gaped, astonished, bewildered. "Let them get used to it," he said to me knowingly.
Simplifying greatly, one can say that there are two Ukraines: the western and the eastern. The western (the former Galicia, territories that belonged to Poland before the war) is more "Ukrainian" than the eastern. Its inhabitants speak Ukrainian, feel themselves to be one hundred percent Ukrainian, and are proud of this. It is here that the soul of the nation survived, its personality, its culture.
Things look different in the eastern Ukraine, which covers a territory larger than the western. Thirteen million native Russians live here and at least as many half Russians; here Russification was more intense and brutal; here Stalin murdered almost the entire intelligentsia. In 1932 and 1933, he had several million Ukrainian peasants starved to death the ordered tens of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals shot. Only those who fled abroad were saved. Ukrainian culture was better preserved in Toronto and Vancouver than in Donetsk or Kharkov.
The differences between the western Ukraine (called the Ukrainian Piedmont) and the eastern were still in evidence at the time of my visit too, during the months of the struggle for independence. The monthly Friendship of Nations (number 4, 1990), published in Moscow, states: "In Kiev, which has a population of three million, forty thousand will come to a pro-independence demonstration, and in Lvov [the capital of the western Ukraine], which has a population of one million, three hundred thousand will come. In Donetsk, which is larger than Lvov, five thousand will come.
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August 19, 1991 arrives.
The coup d'état attempt in Moscow. In the Ukraine everything is calm; the Ukraine waits. But several days later the Supreme Council of the Ukraine convenes in Kiev and on August 24 proclaims the "creation of the independent Ukrainian state — Ukraine." The proclamation adds that "the territory of the Ukraine is indivisible and inviolable." In the rush of these events, which at the time are rolling across the world with the sped and strength of a powerful avalanche, the fact that Europe has suddenly grown by one large state (large by the standards of the European continent) does not make a tremendous impression. Our Western imagination (this principle was once described by Walter Lippmann) lags behind events, needs time to plumb their meaning and grasp their dimension.
But Russians grasp immediately what has happened. I am in Moscow watching a session of the Supreme Council of the USSR. The moment is dramatic because Lukianov is speaking — formerly the leader of this council and Gorbachev's right hand, now accused of being the ideological mastermind of the conspiracy against him. Complete silence reigns in this usually noisy hall.
Suddenly, Laptin, the deputy chairing the session, interrupts the proceedings and announces in a nervous voice: "Comrades, there have been developments in Kiev. A delegation of the Supreme Council of the USSR must fly there at once!" Rudzkoy, Yeltsin's deputy, and Sobchak, the mayor of Petersburg, depart at the head of the delegation. Both had played leading roles in the defeat of the neo-Stalinist putsch, both are Russians and thus they understand what Russia is without the Ukraine. "Without the Ukraine," the Polish historian J. Waswicz wrote back in the thirties, "Moscow is relegated to a northern wilderness."
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The future of Ukraine will develop in two directions: in terms of its relations with Russia, and in terms of its relations with Europe and the rest of the world. If these relationships unfold propitiously, Ukraine's chances are excellent. For it is a country of fertile soil and precious natural resources, blessed with a warm, hospitable climate. And it is a large nation of more than fifty million — strong, resilient, and ambitious.