Out of Russia: Sweet wrappers litter black earth

KIEV - The Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov lived at 13, St Andrew's Hill. It is a delightful cobbled street that winds up to the ruins of Kiev's first cathedral, the Church of the One-Tenth. (It collapsed some 750 years ago when too many people clambered on the roof to escape the Mongols.)

Bulgakov's brick house is sturdier. It is still standing, converted into a museum and honoured with a plaque on the wall. If you ignore hawkers selling wooden boxes inlaid with grains of rice, embroidered shawls, clay bells and other hideous handicrafts, you can almost imagine how the city, at least this prosperous portion of it, might have looked when Bulgakov was here and Kiev was last the capital of a country.

It was not a happy time. Bulgakov is perhaps not the best guide in these matters. After all, as any Ukrainian nationalist will tell you, he was a Russian and never even bothered, unlike other Russians such as Gogol, to write in Ukrainian. 'He didn't like Ukrainians,' I was told sternly. 'He was a typical Russian.' Russian yes, typical no. His novel The White Guard captures the tumult, madness and confusion of revolution. Its main characters are the Turbins, a Russian family who live at 13, St Alexei's Hill (a thin disguise for Bulgakov's own house). The time is 1918, Ukraine's last ill-fated stab at statehood. The book begins: 'Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second.'

Great and terrible, too, has been 1993, the second year of Ukrainian independence. It is hard to exaggerate the scale or difficulty of the endeavour, though, on a gloriously sunny day on St Andrew's Hill, where outdoor cafes serve chilled beer to local hoods, Ukrainian emigres from Canada and the jeunesse doree of Kiev's infant capitalism, it is hard to see how anything could be better. Walk to the top of the hill, though, and look at the crumbling concrete towers and smoke-belching chimneys, and optimism fades.

Nor is it merely the 70-year legacy of Lenin that Ukraine must now uproot, a task made no easier by the fact that the people chosen - or rather self-selected - to do it are themselves products and servants of the old order. More difficult is another task: how to reverse the deeper legacy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the 17th- century ruler who tethered Ukraine to Russia to blunt what seemed a greater threat from Poland. It was not a wise choice. It remains to be seen whether President Leonid Kravchuk and others in charge will be able to do anything else.

Urkaine has the second biggest army in Europe and an option on some 1,800 nuclear warheads. It possesses some of the richest farmland on the continent, the 'black earth' that, if ever exploited properly, would probably demolish the European Community, or at least shatter the cosy alliance between farmers and governments that lies at its foundation. For the time being, though, bureaucrats in Brussels can sleep soundly. Ukraine's economy - industry and agriculture - is a disaster. Inflation is running between 20 per cent and 30 per cent a month. The currency, the karbovanets or coupon, is among the world's sickliest, trading at 5,000-odd against the pound. Even the Russian rouble, which has lost more than 75 per cent of its value in a year, looks robust by comparison. For many, the word coupon is too grand a name. They prefer fantiki (sweet wrappers). Another useful bit of local slang is 'watermelon'. It means billion, a now common denomination in Ukraine.

Add to this mess a jittery insecurity caused by too many years under Moscow's thumb. Ukrainian nationalism can be very prickly. In the past two weeks Kiev has had visits from the US Defense Secretary, Les Aspin, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, but officials complain constantly that the West is interested only in Moscow. 'They regard new states only through Russia,' complained Yuri Sergeyev, head of the information department of the Foreign Ministry. 'You are all far too Russian-centric.'

What worries Kiev, is not that foreigners look to Moscow but that a large number of its own people do too. Some 20 per cent of the population is Russian. This includes miners in the Donbass, who have been on strike for more than a week and have come close to toppling the government, and the bulk of the population of the Crimea, which is demanding autonomy from Kiev.

It is a litany of woes that, according to the Prime Minister, Leonid Kuchma, could lead to dictatorship within a month. Bulgakov might well feel at home: 'Great and terrible was the year. . .'