World eye ' MOSCOW UZGHOROD, Transcarpathia — If you ever wondered where to find the belly- |; button of Europe the answer is right here. This mountainous Ukrainian region sits astride the geographical center of the conti- nent. at the eract point where Rumania, Hungary. Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union meet. With a turbulent and bewilderingly complex past at Eastern Europe's crossroads, Transcarpathia 1s moving uncertainly into the present storm of change, groping for ways to adjust and turn its position to advantage. History has not been kind to the region. The majority nationality of Transcarpathia — some 78 per cent Ukrainian — are a survivor population from ancient Kievan Rus. which fell to Mongol invaders almost 800 years ago. Some of the dialects still spoken here in the high Carpathians are held by philologists to be very close to the language of that original Russian state. Yet since the fall of Kiev, Transcarpathia has been dominated by others: in recent centuries it was part of the Austro- Hungarian empire. After 1918 most of it was incorporated into Czechoslovakia. In 1938, as part of the Munich Agreement, Transcarpathia was annexed by Hungary. Then, in 1945. it was attached to the Ukrain- ian Republic of the USSR. Like most Soviet regions, Transcarpathia is just coming out of a wave of intense multi-candidate elections for republican, regional and district government councils. The future of the region, the fate of the Communist Party, and the meaning of the events swirling around them were questions at the heart of the election debates. Arriving in the region March 18, the day the final round of voting ended, I decided the best thing to do was talk to some of the winners at different levels and record some of their thoughts about these things. “We would like to build on our geogra- phical location and turn Transcarpathia into an economic free zone for trade between the Soviet Union and “Eastern Europe,” says Stepan Turenyetsa, the Communist Party’s first secretary of the region. “Many of the major highways and railroads going to Eastern and Western Europe pass through here. So do three pipe- lines. electrical transmission lines and many other important connections. But it turns out that we get very little from all of this. “What we'd like is to remove border obstacles and open broad industrial and commercial cooperation with adjoining regions in Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Hungary. After all, we have a long history with those people. Fourteen per cent of our population is ethnically Hungarian, three per cent Rumanian. The Czechoslovak border is one kilometre from the centre of Uzghorod. Most of our people can speak the Slovak language and have relatives on the other side. “Of course, we've always had forms of co-operation with our neighbors — except with Romania, that was quite difficult — but we’re thinking the time has come to raise it to a whole new level. We have no language barriers with them. We can develop our position as an economic bridge. We can be an important vehicle for the development of relations. But we want to have something of our own to. We have to develop our own economy, not just be a transfer-point.” Turenyetsa has just been re-elected to the regional sovict, bucking the trend through- 6 « Pacific Tribune, April 9, 1990 Votes and politics in western Ukraine ‘The priority of the party at this stage should be to promote the development of pluralism rather than to promote itself. It can find its own place in the new conditions, and make the transition to a democratic political party...’ KAHQMAATbI HA MOCT Voting booth in Russian Federation elections (above); cartoon from Soviet Eyes ot Glasnost collection (top). Sign reads ‘Candidates for office.” out much of the Ukraine which saw Com- munist Party first secretaries almost everywhere go down to flaming defeat. He raninarural — presumably safe — consti- tuency, but faced an unexpectedly tough challenge from the local school principal, a non-party activist in Rukh, the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Turenyetsa won in the final round with two-thirds of the vote, but has been left more than a little thought- ful by the speed with which things are changing. “We're preparing here for a multi-party system,” he says.” Unlike most regions of the USSR, this is not a totally new expe- rience for us. During the 1920s and 1930s, this region was part of Czechoslovakia and our party organization was integrated with the Czechoslovak Communist Party. We fought multi-candidate elections in those days, and there never was a time when Transcarpathia didn’t return at least one Communist deputy to the parliament in Prague. We’re reaching back to that expe- rience now, trying to re-learn it. “The overwhelming majority of candi- dates elected here in the recent local and republican elections have been Communist Party members. But that doesn’t tell you everything: about 25 per cent of the new regional soviets are associated with Rukh. So, the situation is changing and we have to respond creatively, in new ways. “The problem for us, in fact the problem everywhere, is to transform the party from an administrative to a political machine. That may sound simple, but actually it’s quite tricky. The problem is managing the ‘transition, going from one system to another without any disasters in between. At the Uzghorod agro-industrial enter- prise, Lyanka, another recent election winner is the general manager, Khachetur Petrosyan, 43, a transplanted Armenian who speaks fluent Ukrainian and has a rep- utation for straight-talking. He’s a party member who was elected on the first round to the Uzghorod district soviet. “The anti-apparatchik vote in our region was perhaps less pronounced than in other places,” he says, “but it was significant nevertheless. The people nailed specific bureaucrats. You can’t necessarily interpret this as a defeat for the party: after all, 10 out of 11 deputies elected from our region to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet are party members. But a lot depends on what the party does now. “The priority of the party at this stage should be to promote the development of pluralism rather than to promote itself. The party can find its own place in the new conditions, and I’m sure it can make the transition to a democratic political party — at least in this region — without great difficulty. “The political process is characterized right now by highly emotional mood- swings. After decades of not being able to express themselves, a lot of people are let- ting off steam. Some of the things they say obviously can’t be taken seriously. “Many of the new deputies coming into office after the elections are extremely radi- cal. That disturbs some people, but not me. I have faith in peoples’ ability to learn and grow. I think it’s a breath of fresh air.” People in Transcarpathia don’t seem too surprised by the events that have been unfolding on their Eastern European door- step. Unlike most Soviets, they were inti- mately aware of realities in Rumania. With a large Hungarian population, which has always had close contacts across the border, the processes in that country have also been quite familiar. Czechoslovakia is extremely close to them, and party leader Turenyetsa is one on those who expresses a very keen interest in how things are going to turn out there. “We can learn a lot from the beating the Czechoslovak Communist Party is taking right now,” he says. “They lost touch with the people, depended on administrative methods rather than political ones. [ think they'll overcome their crisis in time — we know that party very well, it has extremely deep historical roots — but they have a lot of changing to do in a hurry”. The economic experiment in Poland is disquieting to most. “There’s one road we don’t want to take,” says Igor Elyashevitch, general director of the Zakarpatye shoe enterprise, who has just been elected as one of Transcarpathia’s 11 representatives to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet. “The lesson here is that you should retain controls on prices as well as some degree of economic planning. The living standards of working people have to be a basic commitment of government. I think that we here should be able to avoid the kind of catastrophe they are experiencing in Poland, with a little bit of principle and common sense.” Since he took the directorship of the Zakarpatye shoe factory just over two years ago, Elyashevitch has created the kind of example the whole region would like to follow. By linking with Hungarian and Czechoslovak shoe producers across the border, sharing technology, resources and markets, he has turned a money-losing operation into the region’s most profitable. The enterprise pulled down 27 million rubles in profit last year, money that is mostly going to build new housing for its workers and new buses for Uzhgorod’s transit network. While most Soviet workers these days cannot pass Ronald Reagan’s famous elec- toral acid test — **Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” — workers on the Zakarpatye shop floor amazingly answer that they are much better off. It was Elyashevitch’s work collective that nomi- nated him for the Supreme Soviet and then went out and got him elected. One other party secretary who made it into the regional soviet was Georgi Keme- nyash, 45, head of the Communist Party in Svalyava, a small industrial district in the mountains. He says: “I faced tough opposi- tion. Let’s face it, these are difficult times for our party. We have a lot to answer for, and we can’t run away from that. “T went out and told people: ‘look, there aren’t going to be any magic solutions here. We don’t need any wild leaps or extreme measures. What we need is reasonable pro- gress. We should search for optimal, rational forms of organization. If we all work harder, and work together, things will get better.’ They voted for me.”