“Ukraine should be able to do better,” he said. “Even though the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic had more Lenin statues than Russia, Ukrainians do not believe state power is sacred, as they do in Russia. There the Kremlin is the center of the state that people serve. Here those on top of the political ladder are just the hired hands of the people.”
This difference in how leaders are perceived, in his view, accounted for the relative restiveness of Ukrainians. “One of the reasons for our revolutions, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Euromaidan revolt of 2013,” Yaremenko explained to us, “is that the authorities here upset people by thinking they can do anything with no accountability. Yanukovych managed to make a lot of people angry. Here the rich are upset about things that Russian oligarchs tend to tolerate. Yanukovych, like Putin, thought that he was the only one with any rights.”
Yaremenko added that during the Euromaidan even his usually apolitical mother was angry at how the authorities dealt with protesters and spent nights preparing Molotov cocktails for them in her apartment in central Kiev. These days, however, such revolutionary fervor has given way to apathy. Just as what happened following the Orange Revolution, politicians at the top are now squabbling with one another, leaving the people’s priorities unattended.
Two opportunities for fundamental change in ten years wasted! It all sounded hopeless. We asked Yaremenko what could be done.
“Snap elections,” he replied. “Change at the top could come though frequent snap elections. In one election, you can’t replace all the politicians from the past,” but frequent elections, called without warning, would prevent the “ossification of power” and keep everyone on their toes.
What did he think of Ukraine’s giant neighbor to the north?
“Relations with Russia will only get worse,” he said matter-of-factly. “But more than just diplomacy will come to an end. The sense of Slavic brotherhood we once shared will disappear, too. Before, of course, Moscow called the shots, and Ukraine grudgingly accepted it, and still considered the Russians ‘brothers.’” No longer.
If Ukraine ever did join the European Union, Yaremenko insisted, it would present no threat to Russia, even if it became a member of NATO. (A Kremlin strategist might beg to differ. After all, having elements of the world’s most powerful military alliance just five hundred miles from Moscow would change Russia’s strategic situation in an unprecedented way.)
The real threat, said Yaremenko, came from the example an enlightened, democratic government in Kiev would set for Russians living under the Putin model of a semiauthoritarian corporate state unfriendly to the West. For the occupants of the Kremlin, it is a matter of life and death that their former communist neighbor never present Russian citizens with an alternate, more attractive model of governance. If Ukraine successfully manages to join Europe, it may well end up sounding the death knell for Putinism—the political mythology that casts Putin as successor to all the imperial autocrats peopling Russian history, including Nicholas I and Stalin.
“Moscow,” Yaremenko added, “has more to lose with its Byzantine fantasy. If Russia doesn’t develop, it will lead to China, the new global superpower, swallowing whole the Far East and Siberia. A vastly weakened Russia will then also lose the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region to their growing Muslim populations. Kaliningrad may again become German.”
Fresh from Kaliningrad, we smiled. “There is no evidence of that.”
“Either way,” Yaremenko continued, “if Russia loses some of its eleven time zones, it would then no longer be able to position itself as the ‘Great Russia.’ The remaining lands might have no choice but to attach themselves to Ukraine. Moscow might return to its historical origins as a remote northern principality, shorn of territories to its south or east of the Urals.”
Ukraine supplanting Russia, Kiev replacing Moscow as the nexus of power for the East Slavic peoples? This, however improbable, was something to think about.
These days, Kiev functions as a hub of exile for some in the Russian opposition, who carry on their business in Ukraine without the surveillance and constraints that would bedevil them at home. One such opposition member is forty-two-year-old Ilya Ponomarev, formerly a State Duma deputy of the social democratic party Spravedlivaya Rossiya (Just Russia) and a member of the Left Front. The son of longtime Communist Party functionaries, Ponomarev hails from the Novosibirsk Oblast—arguably the most advanced part of Siberia, owing to the world-class scientific community it has in Akademgorodok, a town specifically dedicated to advanced research. A charismatic communist with a spotty reputation in opposition circles, he alone among the State Duma’s 450 deputies voted against the annexation of Crimea in March 2014. After this, he sojourned in the United States for two years, and then moved to Kiev, where he was enjoying a lifestyle free of the responsibilities with which his former position in the Duma saddled him.
We met Ponomarev in a café by our hotel, taking seats before picture windows offering unobstructed views of the ever-busy Khreshchatyk. His neat beard and red cardigan added maturity to his youthful looks. As a Duma deputy in Moscow he earned the nickname “butcher of the internet” among his critics—in 2012 Ponomarev controversially voted for strengthening state control of the web to prevent the dissemination of “content that may harm children’s development.”[20] That law gave way to the following year’s ban on “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations around minors”—colloquially known as the “gay propaganda” law,[21] the Kremlin’s socially conservative project meant to endear it to the Orthodox Church. This time Ponomarev abstained from the vote, but the damage to his reputation had been done.
However, in Kiev Ponomarev insisted that with access to information comes democracy. Despite being, as it were, a declared enemy of the Russia-wide popular annexation of Crimea, he was at ease. He objected, he said, because the annexation would bring animosity, even bloodshed (he was right, as the war in eastern Ukraine had demonstrated), and eventually dislodge Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence (as indeed it has). It would give the West a reason to ceaselessly criticize Russia and, moreover, justify plans to expand NATO further eastward.
“Before Crimea,” Ponomarev stated grandly, “our country was an example to the world. Now Russia acts just like the United States—aggressively interfering in other countries’ affairs when they disagree with those countries’ politics.” In his criticism of the United States he differed dramatically from views espoused by most in Ukraine and the majority of the Russian opposition.
In philosophical terms, he argued that Russia’s “problem is one of an ideological construct—an undiversified, large-scale vertical economy.” Unlike Yaremenko, however, Ponomarev told us that geography is not Russia’s handicap.
“Isn’t Russia too big to function coherently?” we asked.
“Obviously,” Ponomarev replied with a laugh, “Russia has two afflictions: plokhiye dorogi i duraki”—bad roads and morons. He was reprising an apocryphal saying (often attributed to Nicholas I and Russian writer Nikolai Gogol) that is routinely used to lament Russia’s poor highways and infamously capricious bureaucrats. “But even though its regions are not well connected to each other, it does not change the reality that a country can be both big and prosperous.”
He went on. Russia’s borders would disintegrate not because of the country’s size, but because the vertikal vlasti, or “power vertical”—the highly centralized system of government Putin managed to institute—robs the country of its potential. Disintegration would originate not with those opposing Putin, but from Putin himself, because he does not allow politicians to develop.
5
Ilya Ponomarev, “Segodnya V Dume Rassmatrivaetsya Zakon Ob Internete. Pravda O Zakone” [Today Duma Considers the Law Concerning the Internet. The Truth About the Law] (blog), LiveJournal, July 11, 2012, https://ilya-ponomarev.livejournal.com/512193.html.