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By Root 1443 0

40 percent a month (in a period where critics assailed a 25 percent rate in Russia), and despite the Ukraine’s formidably educated workforce and natural and manufacturing resources, industrial production dropped by a third to a half (between 1991 and 1993) in what World Bank officials called a “hyper-depression.”16 In 1994, reformer Leonid D. Kuchma ousted Kravchuk and, to the consternation of ethnic Ukrainians in the west, seems to be cozying up to the Russians again. Nationalist Ukrainians have not forgotten how Stalin, after an initial period of “Ukrainization” when Ukrainian culture was celebrated and the language officially recognized by the Soviet Union, turned on the nationalists, murdering millions of them and exterminating intellectuals wholesale.

Hence, though Kuchma was Kravchuk’s prime minister (breaking with him eventually), he is now distrusted both in Western Europe (he has had second thoughts about signing the nuclear proliferation treaty and seems likely to elicit a powerful anti-Russian reaction) and in the western Ukraine—which was brought into the Soviet Ukrainian Republic only after World War II and has even less use for the government in Moscow than the part that underwent Stalinist antinationalist excesses. There he has earned the epithet of traitor; how easily the language of treason comes to the warriors of Jihad! On the other hand, some have estimated that nearly half of all Ukrainians now disapprove of Ukrainian independence, and Kuchma’s rapprochement with Moscow has strong support in the east, above all in the Crimea.

Once the home of Tatars, the Crimea underwent a Russian ethnic cleansing in 1944 when Stalin murdered or relocated its Turkic population to Tatarstan along the Volga River (which with nearly 5 million Tatars today is the largest of the Russian Republic’s semi-autonomous regions), leaving the Crimea entirely Russian. But after the breakup of the Communist empire, a quarter of a million Tatars returned to the Crimea where they reside today, three-quarters of them unemployed, complicating the Crimea’s uncertain status under Ukrainian sovereignty. The majority of Crimean Russians would probably favor reunion with Russia, but the Tatar minority, with historical claims to a Crimean homeland, favor neither Ukrainian nor Russian suzerainty. What has ensued has been an ever more inscrutable Eastern feudal (that is, Byzantine) politics. The current Crimean regional president Yuri Meshkov is followed everywhere by Kalishnikov-carrying guards (at least a half dozen politicians in the region have been gunned down), and though he leans to Moscow, probably does so because he has so few viable options.

On the other side of the Ukraine, where there are few Russians and where native Ukrainians face west, another conflict brews, this one with Romania. The Romanians and the Ukrainians have feuded over the region called Moldavia (including Bessarabia) for centuries. In World War II, after a brief interlude in 1940 (the Stalin-Hitler Pact) when it lost Transylvania to the Hungarians and Romanian Moldavia to the Soviets, the Nazi-supported Romanian regime wrested away both Bukovina in the north and Bessarabia in the east (where Romanian was spoken) once again joining all of Moldavia to Wallachia; it also took control of the purely Ukrainian trans-Dniester region including Odessa. After the war, the Ukraine was restored but Moldavia was established again as an independent Soviet Republic, a buffer between the Ukraine and Romania but also a sore point. Its independence in 1989 exacerbated tensions, especially after Ukrainians on the east bank of the Dniester shelled Romanian-speaking Moldavians on the west bank. The campaign for a trans-Dniester autonomous region continues, leaving both Romania and the Ukraine in a state of agitation. Although President Ion Iliescu of Romania insists, “Our priority is full integration into the Western and the world economy,” Romania seems even more focused on ethnic rivalries than its rival, the Ukraine.17 In the northwestern Transylvania region, a million and a half