LATEST UPDATE: JUNE 1998

Ukraine’s first years following independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 have been far from easy. The country has experienced a serious decline in industrial production, as well as the inevitable conflicts involved in establishing democratic institutions. The difficulties have been accompanied by an aggravation of social problems, a decline in the standard of living, a rise in unemployment and growing poverty.

As far as the Jewish population is concerned, it has benefitted from an official desire to erase all traces of the Russian (Soviet) ‘occupation’, including antisemitism (depicted as a Russian import), and from the increasing anti-Russianism that replaces ‘Jews’ with ‘Russians’ as the principal Ukrainian objects of hostility. The Jewish community has maintained good relations with the Ukrainian authorities, and antisemitism has by all accounts become a much more marginal (albeit often virulent) phenomenon. The major factors behind the probable continued existence of antisemitism in the country, however, are serious economic instability, the political immaturity of the population at large and the weakness of the state and governing institutions.

Demographic data

Total population (1 January 1998): 50.48 million (Financial Times)

Jewish population 1996: estimates range from c. 180,000 to c. 510,000, depending on how ‘Jews’ are defined (mainly in Kiev, Lviv and Kharkiv); in any case, due to large numbers emigrating, the Jewish population has decreased dramatically since independence in 1991 (the 1989 Census reported 486,300 Jews)

Ethnic groups (1989 Census): Ukrainians (72.6 per cent), Russians (21.9 per cent), Jews (0.9 per cent), Belarusians (0.8 per cent), Moldovans (0.6 per cent), Poles and Bulgars (0.4 per cent each), others (2.8 per cent), including Tatars (largely in Crimea), Hungarians (mainly in Subcarpathia), Roma (mainly in the western and southern regions), Romanians and Greeks

Religion: Orthodox (76 per cent), Roman Catholic (14 per cent), Jewish (1 per cent), other (8 per cent), including Baptist, Mennonite, Protestant and Muslim

Political data

Head of state: President Leonid Kuchma (elected 1994)

Head of government: Prime Minister Valery Pustovoytenko (NDP), from July 1997, replacing Pavlo Lazarenko, who was appointed by Kuchma in May 1996.   

Government: following parliamentary elections in March 1998, the Kommunistychna Partiya Ukrainy (KPU, Communist Party of Ukraine) became the largest faction in the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council).   

Other major parties: Narodno-Demokratychna Partiya (NDP, Popular Democratic Party), Narodnyy Rukh Ukrainy (Rukh, People’s Movement of Ukraine), Vseukrainske Obyednannya ‘Hromada’ (All-Ukrainian Association ‘Hromada’), Sotsialistychna Partiya Ukrainy (SPU, Socialist Party of Ukraine), Selyanska Partiya Ukrainy (SePU, Peasants’ Party of Ukraine), Sotsial-Demokratychna Partiya Ukrainy (Obyednana) (SDPU (o), United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine), Partiya Zelenykh Ukrainy (PZU, Green Party of Ukraine), Prohresyvna Sotsialistychna Partiya (PSP, Progressive Socialist Party), Ahrarna Partiya Ukrainy (APU, Agrarian Party of Ukraine)   

Parliamentary elections March 1998 (half the seats elected in single-seat constituencies by simple majority (SM); half apportioned by proportional representation (PR) to parties receiving more than 4 per cent of the vote):  

Two ultra-nationalist electoral blocs stood candidates in the election. The Natsionalnyy Front (National Front) was composed of three long-established conservative nationalist parties, including the UKRP; the Vyborchyy Blok ‘Menshe Sliv’ (Less Talk) was composed of the SNPU and DSU, whose attempts to join the National Front bloc failed, they claimed, because they were mischaracterized as neo-fascist parties. The National Front’s five candidates received 2.72 per cent of the vote, and Less Talk’s five candidates received 0.17 per cent, both failing to reach the 4 per cent required to be allocated seats from the party list. However, two of the National Front bloc’s parties - the Konhres Ukrainskykh Natsionalistiv (Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) and the Ukrainska Respublikanska Partiya (Ukraininan Republican Party) - won single-seat constituencies (4 seats and 1 seat, respectively), as did the SNPU (1 seat).    

While the election was deemed by international observers to be generally fair, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) expressed serious enough concerns over the conduct of the campaign to ‘raise questions about the neutrality of the state apparatus’ (Financial Times, 1 April 1998).   

Next presidential election: October 1999   

Next parliamentary election: 2002

Economic data (Nations in Transition)  

GDP per capita 1997: US$994  
GDP growth 1997: -3.2 per cent  
Inflation 1997: 15.9 per cent  
Unemployment 1997: 2.3 per cent

Jews have inhabited the territory known as Ukraine for almost 1,000 years. Intolerance towards the Jewish population in this area is traceable to the establishment of the early Russian church. During the period of Polish-Lithuanian rule Jews, used by the nobility as lessees of their estates and collectors of taxes levied on the peasantry, were regarded by the impoverished masses as allies of their oppressors.

In 1648, thousands of Jews were massacred in an uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnitski against the Polish-Russian overlords. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the territory had become part of the tsarist Russian empire, attacks on Jews by groups of peasants known as Haidamaki were more limited in scope than the 1648 massacre but were in some respects more vicious. The perpetrators of these massacres were regarded by Ukrainians as national heroes and this gave rise to a popular tradition of antisemitism in which the Jews were identified with aliens and the hated Muscovite government.

In the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, Jews were widely regarded as allies of the Bolsheviks. Thousands of Jews were murdered in pogroms by anti-Bolshevik forces.

On the eve of the Second World War the Jewish population totalled over 1.5 million. Some Ukrainian nationalist forces welcomed the Nazi invaders of the Soviet Union as liberators and joined them, forming the Galician SS divisions. Many Ukrainians actively participated in the rounding-up and murder of Ukrainian Jews. Ukrainian Jewry was decimated in the Holocaust.

The publication in Kiev in 1963 of Iudaizm bez prikras (Judaism without Embellishment) by Trofim Kichko, an anti-Zionist work containing Nazi-style anti-Jewish caricatures, was met by a worldwide storm of protest leading to its withdrawal from circulation by the Soviet authorities.

In reaction to the Jewish emigration from the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine, that began in the late 1960s, Ukrainian journalists and propagandists contributed to the officially sponsored anti-Zionist campaign, with its antisemitic excesses.

Since the collapse of Soviet Communism Ukraine has been a democratic state in which the rights of the Jewish minority have been fully respected. As in other post-Soviet states, the shift towards democracy has been accompanied by a marginal ultra-nationalistic movement.

In September 1997 the parliament approved a new election law that stipulated that only Ukrainian citizens with command of the Ukrainian language would be entitled to stand as electoral candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary elections of March 1998. However, the stipulation was removed from the legislation in October after President Kuchma refused to sign the law.

In the autonomous republic of Crimea, Ukrainian and Tatar minorities complain of discrimination by the Russian majority and demand that the Ukrainian and Tatar languages be given equal treatment to Russian. The Ukrainian community in Crimea has criticized the national government for tolerating radical anti-Ukrainian and Russian nationalist groups on the peninsula.   

In October 1997 the Crimean legislature voted overwhelmingly to name Russian as Crimea’s official language and to move the region on to Moscow time (rather than Kiev time). Both pieces of legislation were vetoed by President Kuchma.   

In February and March 1998 Crimean Tatars staged demonstrations over the rejection by the Ukrainian parliament of President Kuchma’s proposal that Tatars who had renounced their former citizenship but were not yet again Ukrainian citizens should be allowed to participate in Crimean elections. According to the OSCE about half of the 165,000 Tatars in Crimea are without Ukrainian citizenship and therefore ineligible to vote. Many of them had been deported from Ukraine under Stalin’s regime in 1944 - when the Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea was abolished - and returned to Crimea from Central Asia after independence in 1991.   

Racism 
Harassment of racial minorities is commonplace. Police officials reportedly detain dark-skinned individuals arbitrarily, and there are increasing numbers of reports of racially motivated violence against persons of African or Asian origin. In addition, Roma face considerable societal discrimination. Opinion polls have shown that, among all minority groups, they face the highest level of intolerance.   

Refugees and immigration  
Ukraine is not a country of immigration. The only relatively significant group of refugees in the past  years have been those from Afghanistan. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 3,000 Afghanis in Ukraine at the end of 1997 (up on 2,500 at the end of 1996). The UNHCR also reports that, throughout that year, 950 of the 1,680 Afghani applicants were granted asylum, while 610 were refused. A small number of applicants from Angola (40) and Azerbaydzhan (40) were also granted asylum in Ukraine.

After having annulled UNA’s registration as a legal political party in 1995, the ministry of justice re-registered it after it split from its paramilitary wing, the Ukrainska Samo-Oborna (UNSO, Ukrainian Self-Defence), which was founded after Ukraine’s independence in 1991 with much support from the beleaguered post-independence Ukrainian military.     

In February 1997 Dmytro Korchynsky, deputy leader of UNA, told a news conference in Kiev that his organization had taken measures to rid itself of extremists in order to qualify for registration as a parliamentary-type party. Some 3.6 per cent of the party’s activists had left as a result of the ‘purges’, he said, declaring that one of the tests had been to ‘take an oath on the Ukrainian constitution and spit at a portrait of Hitler’.    

In November 1997, at its second extraordinary congress, UNA decided it would take part in the parliamentary elections of 1998. It confirmed a list of fifty candidates. The first five on the list were deputy leader Dmytro Korchinsky, Deputy Oleh Vitovych, UNA executive committee head Deputy Yuriy Tyma, Deputy Yaroslav Illyasevych and head of the Motherland Association, Vilen Mratyrosyan. The UNA declared that it would ‘fight for the national ideal in its pure form’. Days later, however, Korchinsky announced that he was abandoning politics and devoting his time to ‘the arts and revolution’.

The UNA, as well as the UNSO, maintains contact with extremist organizations abroad, particularly in Russia, Belarus, Poland and Azerbaydzhan.

Roman Koval, the leader of the Derzhavna Samostiynist Ukrainy (DSU, State Independence of Ukraine), which was founded in Lviv in April 1990, stated in 1995 that the party was changing its image and intended to campaign for parliamentary seats. The DSU calls for an end to the ‘alien dominance’ of government departments, the army and business, proclaims the superiority of the Ukrainian nation and its hostility to Russians, Jews and Americans. The party stood candidates in the March 1998 parliamentary elections as part of the Less Talk bloc. By the end of 1997 DSU apparently had some 2,000 members.
 
The Organizatsiya Ukrainskikh Natsionalistiv v Ukraine (OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Ukraine), led by its founder Ivan Kandyba, regards Freemasonry, Zionism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism and communism as enemies of Ukraine. In its ‘Appeal to the Ukrainian nation’, drawn up at the third OUN conference in January 1996, the traditional oppressors of Ukraine were said to be Poles, Russians and, in particular, Jews. The OUN regularly draws attention to the presence of Jews in government bodies, the army, business, education and cultural bodies. It maintains that the UN Declaration of Human Rights was devised by Jews to destroy the nationhood of individual states. It publishes a monthly entitled Neskorena natsiya.   

According to its regulations membership is restricted to Ukrainians or persons who are half-Ukrainian and half-Slav in origin but who adhere to Ukrainian nationalist ideology. A percentage of other nationalities may join the party in proportion to their representation in the state structure. Such members may not hold office except at regional level.

Members of the Sotsial-Natsionalna Partiya Ukrainy (SNPU, Social-National Party of Ukraine), based in western Ukraine, must be ‘pure’ Ukrainians: the party’s definition of a nation is a group of people unified not only by language, culture, history and economics, but also by psychology, mentality and biology. Young SNPU members wearing black shirts with fascist insignia regularly organize meetings and rallies in Lviv. The SNPU leadership claims that 80 per cent of the party's members are students. On 7 November 1997, the anniversary of the October Revolution, the SNPU staged a march in Lviv that, according to a Russian television report, ‘resembled Nazi rallies in the Germany of the 1930s’. The SNPU took part in the March 1998 parliamentary elections as part of the Less Talk bloc; in response to the party being rejected by the National Front electoral bloc, one of the its leaders, Oleh Tyahnybok, insisted that SNPU members ‘are nationalists’ and not fascists, and threatened to sue the KPU leader Petro Symonenko for calling them fascists.  

The Ukrainska Konservativna Respublikanska Partiya (UKRP, Ukrainian Conservative Republican Party), led by Stepan Khmara, has shrunk in membership and can now count only some 500 members. The party is a mixture of left and right radicalism. Khmara accuses the government of anti-Ukrainian reforms and of impoverishing the nation. He claims that Russian and western ‘pro-Zionist imperialism’ threatens national security.  The UKRP was part of the National Front bloc in the March 1998 parliamentary elections.

After a period of being practically invisible, the Organizatsiya Ukrainskikh Idealistiv (OUI, Organization of Ukrainian Idealists) re-emerged in 1996, holding rallies and demonstrations mainly in western Ukraine and particularly in Lviv. Their slogans mark them out as russophobes and antisemites. The group’s small-circulation publication Idealist is regularly cited as a purveyor of antisemitic articles.   On 30 June 1997, several thousand supporters of UNA, UNSO and the SNPU trampled on the Russian, Romanian and Polish flags at a rally in Lviv on the first anniversary of the adoption of the new Ukrainian constitution.

On the night of 19-20 February 1997, considerable damage was done by a fire that broke out in the Israeli cultural centre in Kharkiv. The authorities began an investigation into the incident, which may or may not be a case of arson - but no arrests have been made.

On 22 December 1997 over 100 Uman citizens demanded that the Ukrainian parliament refuse entry into the country to representatives of the so-called ‘World Jewish Movement of Hasids’, claiming that they ‘are turning our city into a Jewish dwelling place’. They objected to the fact that the Ukrainian government was financing the pilgrimage of Hasidic Jews to Uman, where their movement’s founder once lived, and that the police were giving them protection during their visit. Ukrainian Supreme Council Deputy Sergey Smirnov said that the Hasids are ‘adherents of radical Zionism and are fighting for Jewish power throughout the world’.

In March 1998 Dmitri Dvorkis, the Jewish mayor of the town of Vinnytsya since 1992, wrote to President Kuchma urging him to intervene to prevent the use of antisemitic propaganda against him and other Jewish candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Leaflets had previously been distributed in Vinnytsya calling on voters not to allow ‘Judeo-masons’ to come to power.

In the same month antisemitic slogans and swastikas were found daubed on the walls of a recently opened boys’ boarding school in Dnipropetrovsk.

Several days before the March 1998 parliamentary elections, the synagogue in the town of Drohobych in western Ukraine was set on fire. The synagogue had been vandalized in 1995, in 1996 and twice in 1997.

Pavlo Chemeris, writing in five successive issues of the newspaper Za vilnu Ukrainu (nos 68-72, 1997), said that a process of ‘scholarly’ reconsideration of the Holocaust had been underway in the West since the 1970s, and in Ukraine since the country’s declaration of independence in 1991. The ‘revisionist school’, he said, now embraced dozens of works, one of which - the Russian translation of Jürgen Graf's Myth of the Holocaust - he reprinted in its entirety.

Chemeris also published an article entitled ‘The Jewish Armageddon’ (Neskorena natsiya, April 1997) in which he wrote: ‘The same powers that had planned and then completed the “Proletarian Revolution” . . . created after the Second World War a speculative myth about a mass “holocaust” in order to hide the real destruction of millions of people in the Armageddon of the Gulag.’ 

Articles with antisemitic content continue to appear in a number of local ultra-nationalist newspapers, especially in western Ukraine and Kiev.

According to an annual audit of Ukrainian newspapers by the Kiev Centre for Political Research (data for 1996 released in June 1997), 20 per cent of all references to Jews in the Ukrainian press in 1996 were made in an antisemitic context. The Centre recorded 280 articles published in 1996 that contained antisemitic slurs or propagated anti-Jewish prejudice. The articles appeared in a dozen or so newspapers published mainly in the western part of Ukraine and in Kiev. The figure represents an approximate increase of 10 per cent over 1995. The audit revealed that the largest number of anti-Jewish articles were printed in the ultra-nationalist daily Za vilnu Ukrainu (For a Free Ukraine), which - with a reported circulation of 135,000 - published a total of 124 antisemitic articles in 1996. According to the Centre, Kiev’s leading evening newspaper, Vecherny Kyiv, published 47 articles containing antisemitic slurs in 1996. Some of the newspapers responsible for these articles received official warnings from the ministry of information.

Za vilnu Ukrainu, a Lviv-based newspaper - whose editor-in-chief is Pavlo Chemeris - maintained a pro-democracy orientation until 1992 when it took a sharp turn to the right and began publishing, among other things, antisemitic articles (one of the first was extracts from Mein Kampf).

According to a study conducted by the Kiev-based Institute of Jewish Studies, antisemitic articles in Ukrainian newspapers in 1997 declined by 25 per cent as against the previous three years. The Institute, which stressed that its conclusion was no more than approximate, said that this trend was a result of ‘purposeful actions’ taken by Jewish organizations, namely in meeting with the editors of Za vilnu Ukrainu (For a Free Ukraine) - whose total of antisemitic articles fell to 41 in 1997 - and Vecherny Kyiv (38). The other articles cited by the Institute were published in OUN’s monthly, published in Lviv, Neskorena natsiya (Invincible Nation) (29), the OUI’s small-circulation Idealist (20), and ‘others’ (15). The Institute found that an increasing number of 1997 articles drew on world ‘classics’ of antisemitism like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf and ‘imports’ of Russian pre-revolutionary material. It also found that, as in previous years, the overwhelming majority of antisemitic publications in Ukraine in 1997 were devoted to issues such as alleged former and present-day Jewish power, Jews’ genetic aggressiveness, their domination of the media, and their responsibility for the Stalinist repressions in Ukraine of earlier decades, russification and Ukraine’s present economic difficulties.

Article 66 of the Criminal Code was amended in 1991 to provide penalties for acts of discrimination against citizens based on race, national origin or religious beliefs. A law on the print media and another on television and radio also prohibit the incitement of inter-ethnic hatred.   

Religious organizations are required by law to register with the authorities, and the activities of non-native religious groups  (defined as other than Orthodox, Greek Catholic or Jewish) are legally restricted to some degree. In August 1997 two foreign Mormon missionaries had their visas curtailed by local officials in Odessa who claimed that they did not have permission to operate in the city; the missionaries reportedly plan to challenge the law in court.   

In January 1998 President Kuchma signed into law the creation of the constitutionally mandated office of the human rights ombudsman, and the first holder of the office was elected in April. However, the law does not provide the ombudsman with any significant enforcement powers or penalties for obstruction of his or her enquiries.  

At the end of July 1997 a press conference devoted to combatting antisemitism was held in Kiev’s Brodsky synagogue. Among those who took part were Ukrainian and foreign journalists, including Vyacheslav Pikhovshek, the presenter of the popular television programme The Fifth Corner.

In Kiev on 21-4 March 1998 over 200 people participated in an international symposium entitled ‘The state of national minorities and the evolution of democratization in Central and Eastern European countries’. The meeting - organized by the Paris-based European Centre for Research and Action on Racism and Antisemitism, the European Jewish Congress and the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, and held under the aegis of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and UNESCO - was an attempt to draw the attention of Ukrainian officials to the problems of antisemitism, racism and xenophobia. Government officials and Jewish leaders at the symposium said Ukraine needed to revive its economy as a first step towards dealing with cases of abuse of minority rights.

On 29 June 1998 a court in Ivano-Frankivsk region ruled that a fence could be placed around the Jewish cemetery in Nadvornaya (in south-western Ukraine), where approximately 10,000 Jews are buried. The cemetery has repeatedly been desecrated. The decision was based on a protocol signed by Mikhail Vishivanyuk, the regional appointee of the president of Ukraine. Jewish activists described the ruling as ‘the first positive decision in Ukraine for the preservation of Jewish cemeteries’.

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Institute for Jewish Policy Research 
© JPR 2001