IF HARRODS had a dictatorial chic department, Victor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, could have ordered the interior design of his ransacked mansion from its catalogue: "Saddam" gold taps, "Mobutu" leopardskin print, "Ceaucescu" chandeliers and "Gaddafi" bathrooms. Its architecture dizzily combines Disneyesque fantasia, Spanish hacienda, Swiss chalet, Scottish baronial castle and Stalinist dacha.
But the ranch’s most ironic "feature" is the mock-Roman ruin — a colonnade of ersatz pillars symbolises his tyranny, corruption, arrogance and isolation, for Yanukovych’s rise and fall have been as Neronian as these imperial vestiges.
Yet what other dictator has built not just the traditional Sardanapalian palace but his own Ozymandian ruin?
Apart from this preposterous decor, Ukraine, which has demonstrated how quickly it can degenerate into bloodletting, is today a powder keg involving not just its own internal contradictions but the potential to unleash civil war — and world conflict.
At its heart is the noble wish of Ukrainians, some speaking Russian, some Ukrainian, Orthodox and Catholic, to live in a just democracy more like that of western Europe than the autocracies of Russia or Kazakhstan. That is complicated by a real split between its Russophile, Orthodox, industrialised east (such as Kharkov, where statues of Vladimir Lenin embellish squares); and its mitteleuropean, Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic west (such as Lvov).
But its global significance lies in its tangled relationship with Moscow: Ukraine has an essential role in Russia’s vision of itself just as Russia is omnipresent in Ukraine’s own traumatised consciousness.
Very recently, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia stood higher in prestige than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis: dazzling in the panoply of Olympic splendour, gilded with oil riches, triumphant in Georgia and Chechnya, in command of the Syrian crisis, with Ukraine cowed under its creature, the bovine bungling convict former Yanukovych, whom Putin never trusted or liked. Kiev has changed everything.
Russia has avenged this blow. Besides, it was far too early to claim the revolution as a democratic success. Ukraine was still at the exhilarated early stage experienced by all revolutions, its gains at the mercy of Russia’s reaction based on ancient ties.
Russian Orthodoxy started in Ukraine, where in 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity — Byzantine Orthodoxy. Vladimir and his Rurikid dynasty created Kievan Rus, an empire from the Baltic to the Black seas.
After its downfall and the invasion of Mongol hordes, Ukraine was dominated by the Catholic Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the Muslim Mongol successor state, the Khanate of Crimean Tartars.
In Moscow, Rurikid Grand Princes and Romanov Tsars, built the Russian empire, longing to regather Ukraine.
Alexei, the second Romanov Tsar, won Kiev from the Poles in 1654.
Alexei and his son, Peter the Great, fought vicious wars in Ukraine in which Ukrainians, swinging then as now between East and West, were crushed between both.
During the 1770-80s, Catherine the Great’s brilliant partner, Prince Potemkin, conquered southern Ukraine and Crimea — "your jewel in the Black Sea" — founding the naval base, Sebastopol, and cosmopolitan port, Odessa.
But western Ukraine, long ruled by Austria and Poland, was won only by Joseph Stalin’s pact with Adolf Hitler in 1940.
Crimea remained proudly Russian until capriciously awarded to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
In the middle of the 20th century, Ukraine became Europe’s "bloodlands" — historian Timothy Snyder’s word — for the two most murderous of regimes, trauma that explains Ukraine’s underlying darkness.
When Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivisation in 1930-32, Stalin, writing in panic — "We’re losing Ukraine" — allowed 10-million peasants to starve or be killed.
During the Second World War, Ukrainians might have backed the Nazis if Hitler had given them independence instead of treating them as subhumans and slaughtering Ukrainian Jews.
Stalin hated Ukraine: "If there weren’t 40-million Ukrainians, I’d deport them too."
Stalin, Lenin’s nationalities expert, created the borders of Soviet republics to build the facade of a union of republics, but when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up, Ukraine had not really been independent for a millennium.
Today’s Kremlin regards Ukraine as a temporary anomaly, a Russian territory, not a real country.
Its use of gas, oil and loans to ensure that Ukraine remains in the Russian sphere is seen simply as recognition of cultural history and political reality.
If a civil war seems far-fetched in Ukraine, glance at its recent history.
In the civil war after the Russian Revolution of 1917-19, Ukraine suffered under 10 regimes with names such as The Hetmanate and The Directorate, fought over by armies of Bolsheviks, Whites, Russians, Poles, Cossacks, Ukrainian anarchists, monarchists, socialists, nationalists.
Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary considered making it into a monarchy under a Habsburg archduke before they lost the war and Lenin retook Ukraine.
Late in the Second World War, in another forgotten bloodletting, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fielded forces as large as 100,000 men, fought both Stalin’s Red Army and Hitler’s Nazis.
This forgotten war did not end with the fall of Hitler, but continued until 1949.
The danger now is that regions become "Syrianised" under different authorities.
Sebastopol, Potemkin’s naval city, a Russian asset, historically, militarily, emotionally, may well provide the motive.
Russia’s intervention or the annexure of Crimea may have been inevitable if civil war broke out, if Crimea demanded reunion with Russia or, as Russia says has happened, easterners demanded protection.
Today’s Kremlin depends on strength, order and oil — but the "loss" of Ukraine would hardly present an image of power.
Yanukovych’s regime was a distorted cousin of Putin’s autocratic Russia.
In the 19th century, when Paris started European revolutions, Prince Metternich said, "When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold."
Now Putin must be wondering whether, when Kiev catches cold, Moscow may catch the infection of street democracy.
Otto von Bismarck claimed the Balkans were not "worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier", yet, a generation later, world war started in the Balkans.
Is Ukraine worth the bones of a single British Guardsman or soldier from another country? That is the question that makes today’s Ukraine the centre of the world.
• Montefiore’s novel, One Night in Winter. is out this week in paperback. This article was first published in London’s Evening Standard.
People carry a giant Russian flag during a pro-Russian rally in Simferopol, Crimea. Picture: REUTERS
IF HARRODS had a dictatorial chic department, Victor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, could have ordered the interior design of his ransacked mansion from its catalogue: "Saddam" gold taps, "Mobutu" leopardskin print, "Ceaucescu" chandeliers and "Gaddafi" bathrooms. Its architecture dizzily combines Disneyesque fantasia, Spanish hacienda, Swiss chalet, Scottish baronial castle and Stalinist dacha.
But the ranch’s most ironic "feature" is the mock-Roman ruin — a colonnade of ersatz pillars symbolises his tyranny, corruption, arrogance and isolation, for Yanukovych’s rise and fall have been as Neronian as these imperial vestiges.
Yet what other dictator has built not just the traditional Sardanapalian palace but his own Ozymandian ruin?
Apart from this preposterous decor, Ukraine, which has demonstrated how quickly it can degenerate into bloodletting, is today a powder keg involving not just its own internal contradictions but the potential to unleash civil war — and world conflict.
At its heart is the noble wish of Ukrainians, some speaking Russian, some Ukrainian, Orthodox and Catholic, to live in a just democracy more like that of western Europe than the autocracies of Russia or Kazakhstan. That is complicated by a real split between its Russophile, Orthodox, industrialised east (such as Kharkov, where statues of Vladimir Lenin embellish squares); and its mitteleuropean, Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic west (such as Lvov).
But its global significance lies in its tangled relationship with Moscow: Ukraine has an essential role in Russia’s vision of itself just as Russia is omnipresent in Ukraine’s own traumatised consciousness.
Very recently, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia stood higher in prestige than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis: dazzling in the panoply of Olympic splendour, gilded with oil riches, triumphant in Georgia and Chechnya, in command of the Syrian crisis, with Ukraine cowed under its creature, the bovine bungling convict former Yanukovych, whom Putin never trusted or liked. Kiev has changed everything.
Russia has avenged this blow. Besides, it was far too early to claim the revolution as a democratic success. Ukraine was still at the exhilarated early stage experienced by all revolutions, its gains at the mercy of Russia’s reaction based on ancient ties.
Russian Orthodoxy started in Ukraine, where in 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to Christianity — Byzantine Orthodoxy. Vladimir and his Rurikid dynasty created Kievan Rus, an empire from the Baltic to the Black seas.
After its downfall and the invasion of Mongol hordes, Ukraine was dominated by the Catholic Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the Muslim Mongol successor state, the Khanate of Crimean Tartars.
In Moscow, Rurikid Grand Princes and Romanov Tsars, built the Russian empire, longing to regather Ukraine.
Alexei, the second Romanov Tsar, won Kiev from the Poles in 1654.
Alexei and his son, Peter the Great, fought vicious wars in Ukraine in which Ukrainians, swinging then as now between East and West, were crushed between both.
During the 1770-80s, Catherine the Great’s brilliant partner, Prince Potemkin, conquered southern Ukraine and Crimea — "your jewel in the Black Sea" — founding the naval base, Sebastopol, and cosmopolitan port, Odessa.
But western Ukraine, long ruled by Austria and Poland, was won only by Joseph Stalin’s pact with Adolf Hitler in 1940.
Crimea remained proudly Russian until capriciously awarded to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
In the middle of the 20th century, Ukraine became Europe’s "bloodlands" — historian Timothy Snyder’s word — for the two most murderous of regimes, trauma that explains Ukraine’s underlying darkness.
When Ukrainian peasants resisted collectivisation in 1930-32, Stalin, writing in panic — "We’re losing Ukraine" — allowed 10-million peasants to starve or be killed.
During the Second World War, Ukrainians might have backed the Nazis if Hitler had given them independence instead of treating them as subhumans and slaughtering Ukrainian Jews.
Stalin hated Ukraine: "If there weren’t 40-million Ukrainians, I’d deport them too."
Stalin, Lenin’s nationalities expert, created the borders of Soviet republics to build the facade of a union of republics, but when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up, Ukraine had not really been independent for a millennium.
Today’s Kremlin regards Ukraine as a temporary anomaly, a Russian territory, not a real country.
Its use of gas, oil and loans to ensure that Ukraine remains in the Russian sphere is seen simply as recognition of cultural history and political reality.
If a civil war seems far-fetched in Ukraine, glance at its recent history.
In the civil war after the Russian Revolution of 1917-19, Ukraine suffered under 10 regimes with names such as The Hetmanate and The Directorate, fought over by armies of Bolsheviks, Whites, Russians, Poles, Cossacks, Ukrainian anarchists, monarchists, socialists, nationalists.
Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary considered making it into a monarchy under a Habsburg archduke before they lost the war and Lenin retook Ukraine.
Late in the Second World War, in another forgotten bloodletting, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fielded forces as large as 100,000 men, fought both Stalin’s Red Army and Hitler’s Nazis.
This forgotten war did not end with the fall of Hitler, but continued until 1949.
The danger now is that regions become "Syrianised" under different authorities.
Sebastopol, Potemkin’s naval city, a Russian asset, historically, militarily, emotionally, may well provide the motive.
Russia’s intervention or the annexure of Crimea may have been inevitable if civil war broke out, if Crimea demanded reunion with Russia or, as Russia says has happened, easterners demanded protection.
Today’s Kremlin depends on strength, order and oil — but the "loss" of Ukraine would hardly present an image of power.
Yanukovych’s regime was a distorted cousin of Putin’s autocratic Russia.
In the 19th century, when Paris started European revolutions, Prince Metternich said, "When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold."
Now Putin must be wondering whether, when Kiev catches cold, Moscow may catch the infection of street democracy.
Otto von Bismarck claimed the Balkans were not "worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier", yet, a generation later, world war started in the Balkans.
Is Ukraine worth the bones of a single British Guardsman or soldier from another country? That is the question that makes today’s Ukraine the centre of the world.
• Montefiore’s novel, One Night in Winter. is out this week in paperback. This article was first published in London’s Evening Standard.
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