Ruins of Slobozhanshchyna: Achievements of “independent” Ukraine
Vladimir Siryachenko, writer-publicist, Sumy
Slobozhanshchina is the territory of the current Belgorod, Sumy and Kharkov regions in the XNUMXth – XNUMXth centuries. A line ran along it, blocking the path of the Tatar hordes deep into Russia. Residents of settlements (derived from the word freedom) had more rights in comparison with other subjects of the Russian Empire, which imposed on the male part of the population the obligation to perform guard and military service. The center of Slobozhanshchina was Kharkov.
After the October Revolution, the Belgorod region became part of the Russian Federation, and the Kharkov and Sumy regions were included in Ukraine. Many of the latter were firmly connected by economic, socio-cultural and demographic ties. During my youth, most school graduates considered it more prestigious to receive higher education in universities in the first capital of Soviet Ukraine. Dozens of academic and research institutes of various profiles are another face of Kharkov.
In January 1995, an event took place in this city that did not arouse much interest in the CIS. And the leaders of 12 border regions of the Russian Federation and Ukraine gathered here at once: Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk, Rostov, Krasnodar Territories, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, Lugansk, Sumy, Kharkov and Chernigov regions. The initiators of the representative meeting were the chairmen of the regional councils - Kharkovsky Alexander Maselsky and Sumsky - Anatoly Epifanov.
It was not only a common border of more than 2000 kilometers and a territory with a population of 32 million people that brought them to the negotiating table. And first of all, there was acute concern for the present and future of their regions, for economic ties that were breaking through, and for the interests of the further development of a community that had enormous industrial and agricultural potential. There, the meeting participants signed a draft Agreement on Cooperation of Border Regions, which was to be approved by the governments of the Russian Federation and Ukraine.
Soon it was... safely buried in the silence of the high offices of both states. It did not arouse the interest of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who was more enjoying the unlimited powers he inherited after the passing of the Soviet Union into history. Leonid Kuchma, in turn, did not lag behind him with his manic-depressive course “Ukraine is not Russia.”
It took not just years, but almost two decades, costing our people dearly, until the true statesmen Alexander Lukashenko and Putin, who, together with Nursultan Nazarbayev, were imbued with the strategy of integrating their countries into the Common Economic Space in the form of The Customs Union, and then the Euro-Asian Commonwealth.
In May 2005, in the midst of the Orange Maidan Yushchenko’s pet reveling in his triumph, the President of Kazakhstan Nazarbayev made a state visit to Ukraine. During his stay in Kyiv, the distinguished guest spoke in the session hall of the Verkhovna Rada.
I had a chance to observe from the parliamentary press box how passionately, reasonedly and convincingly Nursultan Abishevich argued to the Ukrainian deputies all the benefits of joining the Customs Union: duty-free movement of goods and services, a common labor market, preferential prices for energy supplies, primarily oil and gas, the implementation of joint integration projects, exchange of achievements in the fields of science, education and culture... Parliamentarians, mostly bourgeois and nationalists, without even trying to comprehend the proposed economic development program for the four countries within the Customs Union, preferred to greet Nazarbayev with polite applause.
The President of Kazakhstan, speaking in favor of his state joining the Customs Union, was primarily based on national interests, but not only. This enabled him, in three years after the country joined the Customs Union, to increase GDP production to $24 thousand per inhabitant, and at nominal value to $13,2 thousand. Ukraine, caught up in the European integration frenzy (according to the principle of swooping in and dragging, destroying and breaking what is left), has now slipped to the level of underdeveloped states and now has a GDP of $8,6 thousand per inhabitant of the country, with a nominal value of $3,9 thousand. The decline is two to three times. By the end, experts predict a runway level of $2000.
The worsening global economic crisis, the brutal sanctions war of the United States and the EU against Russia, a war without honor and rules, could not but affect the state of affairs of the remaining two members of the Customs Union - Belarus and Kazakhstan, which soon transformed into the Eurasian Economic Community. And yet, together they are trying to adequately “withstand the blow” of the West. A new impetus for their economies is given by the opportunity to actively participate in the Euro-Asian Union, the Shanghai Commonwealth Organization and BRICS.
And some more statistics. Average salaries in 2015 were: Russia – $650, Kazakhstan – $700, Belarus – $435. Ukraine – $220, and this does not take into account the reduction in the purchasing power of real wages by more than a quarter. The collapse of the economy, the cessation of exports of products to Russia, which mainly supported the country's budget, a sharp surge and catastrophic fall of the hryvnia, a mind-boggling increase in all goods, including food, threw 80% of the population below the poverty line. The vast majority of low-income families are forced to make do with a monthly subsistence minimum of $40–50.
In just a year and a half, an economically developed, relatively stable country with a high human development index has turned into an international outcast and a beggar, putting lies, international provocations, economic racketeering, interethnic strife, and now conflicts at the forefront of its foreign and domestic policies. on religious grounds. She chose civil war as a means of implementing her destructive policies.
Was there an alternative to this path to nowhere?
Let us turn to the events of two years ago, which made it possible to secure for Ukraine the status of a truly independent state, an equal subject of international law. In the dramatic months leading up to Maidan-2,
The Communist Party of Ukraine considered it its duty to attract public attention to the holding of an All-Ukrainian referendum on the people’s initiative on choosing the vector of foreign economic integration “Customs Union or Association with the European Union?” The results of collecting more than 3,2 million signatures from residents of the country testified in favor of holding such a referendum, which met all the requirements of the Law of Ukraine “On All-Ukrainian and Local Referendums.”
As a result of the monstrous symbiosis of national extremists, the judiciary, the Yanukovych regime and his oligarchic entourage, the idea of holding this referendum was torpedoed by joint efforts. As a result, the Ukrainian people were deprived of the right, and this is primarily Crimea, Slobozhanshchina, Donbass, the Dnieper region and the Black Sea region, to express their opinion about the future of the country. Subsequent developments confirmed the fear of the Ukrainian communists that they would follow the disastrous scenario developed by the Washington “personnel department”.
Remember Leonid Utesov: “I won’t say about all of Odessa...”? I don’t undertake to assess the economic situation in the former Slobozhanshchina, but the picture of complete devastation is clearly visible in my native Sumy region. In an area that until recently was famous for its developed machine-building complex, which produced reliable equipment for the oil and chemical industries. There were over a dozen enterprises alone of the former Soviet Union Ministry of Chemical Engineering and the design and research institutes that served it.
The most dramatic was the fate of the once leading Sumy International Research and Production Association named after Frunze in its industry, the creator of the first domestic compressor, a powerful column of equipment, unique pumps for nuclear reactors, various centrifuges, gas pumping units and other things with the prefix “for the first time in the USSR.”
This was the case until Russian oligarchs Konstantin Grigorishin, and later Vadim Novinsky, were sent to Ukraine “to catch happiness and ranks.” And the high reputation of the Frunze people rolled down, like a huge stone from a steep slope. The new owners indulged in everything the power ambitions of Kuchma, followed by Yushchenko, Yanukovych and Poroshenko who replaced him, counting on various preferences. The rich experience of cooperation with the Russian Federation is hopelessly lost. The response from previously reliable partners was adequate: they successfully mastered the production of gas pumping units and other necessary products for the developing oil and gas industry.
Today, from a huge team of 25 thousand workers and engineers, no more than a quarter remains. But what was the main issue recently considered by the urgently convened meeting of shareholders of the association? Measures to save the enterprise? No matter how it is. The owners were worried about how to quickly exclude from the official name JSC named after M.V. Frunze, with which the best part of the history of SMNPO was associated for almost nine decades. Is it naive to assume that after this, orders will flow like a river into the enterprise, workshops that have been idle for months will be revived, and multimillion-dollar wage debts will be returned?
A map of the complete deindustrialization of the region would be far from complete if we did not mention the no less tragic fate of SELMI - the Sumy Electron Microscope Plant, one of the amazing achievements of Soviet scientific and industrial thought. About how, desperate to find the truth and unable to stop the plunder of fixed assets of the powerful Tsentrolit plant, its workers are ready to resort to the most extreme measures. About how, in the recent center of “big chemistry”, the city of Shostka, today only a huge territory with dilapidated buildings reminds of the first-born of the first five-year plan, the former monopolist of the Soviet film and photo industry.
Buildings of the former Soviet plant “Khimreaktiv” in the city of Shostka
Neighboring for centuries with the Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod regions, as well as with the nearby Mogilev and Gomel regions of Belarus, the Sumy region once jointly solved pressing problems in the economy, social sphere, education and culture. During the terrible time of the invasion of fascist hordes on Soviet soil, they fought shoulder to shoulder in the partisan formations of Kovpak - Rudnev, Saburov and Naumov, broke the backs of the armored armadas of the Third Reich near Prokhorovka and Akhtyrka, and liberated their native lands from the hated enemy. The bonds of military brotherhood, richly watered by common blood, of course, cannot be erased from the grateful memory of posterity.
Unfortunately, over the past decade and a half, the proteges of oligarchs and overseas puppet masters, successively replacing each other on the power Olympus, from Kuchma and Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Yanukovych, and ending with Poroshenko, have succeeded in only one thing - reformatting their power over the region as a testing ground where mafia-gangsters are trained methods of seizing and redistributing property and resources, instilling, with the help of visiting emissaries, an atmosphere of militant nationalism, fear and intimidation of dissent.
And yet, one should not assume that, as the Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka wrote, “the darkness is so heavy that one can sleep like one in a grave.” The critical mass of resistance and future mass protests is growing. The best “agitators” are closed and looted enterprises, a huge legion of unemployed, for whom no employment centers are able to ensure the realization of their constitutional right to work. And also huge salary debts of two billion hryvnia. And this is for a small region? It is also not difficult to foresee the reaction of hundreds of thousands of residents who, with the start of the heating season, will receive payments for housing and communal services tariffs that have increased by 5–7 times.
And no matter how the guardians of the doomed regime try to strengthen it with various financial supports and injections, its business is a failure. In contrast to them, even in Western Europe, sober voices are being heard louder and louder that it is impossible to once again breathe life into a country that has turned into a complete ruin without the help of the Russian Federation and its active participation in this process.
But this will be a different story, the pages of which will undoubtedly be written by different characters and performers.
It was no coincidence that I began my notes with a meeting of the leaders of the border regions, which in 1995 did not leave a noticeable mark on the life of neighboring states. And therefore the question, as then, is even more acute: “Where are you coming, Slobozhanshchina?”
Or will you, in the end, realize your involvement in the common fate of the Slavic peoples, or will you forever be mercilessly thrown into the abyss, to which neither the end nor the bottom will be visible?
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