By Alina Entelis
I traveled to the archives at Princeton University because I like fresh patches of snow. There’s a unique feeling you get from looking at untouched snow, knowing you will be the first to leave a mark upon the ground. Not that it was snowing in Princeton when I went there. Rather, my fresh patch of snow came in the form of the James A. Baker III personal papers, a collection kept in the Princeton archives that was only opened to the public last month.
Baker served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush in the years 1989-1992. This was a crucial period in Ukraine’s history, in which the former Soviet republic prepared for a referendum on its independence, established a new state and negotiated the removal of the nuclear weapons that it inherited from the Soviet Union.
For years Ukraine has been portrayed by commentators as the battleground between values of the East and the West. In every major milestone in this states’ history, Ukraine is described as having to choose between pursing closer ties with the West or remaining in the grip of Russia’s influence. When I set out to explore Baker’s collection of papers, I was following an intuition that these documents could assist in my quest to understand how this East/West narrative has evolved. One hypothesis I am considering is that there has been a deliberate attempt by successive U.S. governments to instill in Ukrainians a sense that they are representatives of Western values in Eastern Europe. By doing so, the U.S. might have attempted to turn Ukraine into a bulwark against Russian aspirations in the region. To prove my hypothesis, I scoured meeting records, correspondence, policy memos and speeches, looking for a smoking gun that can prove deliberate attempts by the US to affect Ukraine’s perceptions of itself as a bastion of western values.
The period between 1989-1991 was a chaotic time for the Soviet Union, with an evolving economic crisis and rising tensions within the Soviet republics, which began clamoring for independence. The picture that arises from the documents I examined is that the Bush administration did not predict the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, but that U.S. officials had a sense that there was indeed an unstable situation. Although the topic of the Soviet Union was on Baker’s agenda practically every day, I was disappointed time and again because Ukraine was not mentioned. In fact, the U.S. was very careful in its policies towards the Soviet republics and tried to maintain stability in the Soviet Union. As such, there were no explicit attempts by the US to try to promote a narrative of those republics as “belonging to the West.”
I was about to despair but decided to look at one more folder before calling it a day. I am happy I did that, as I was overjoyed to find there my golden document: A meeting agenda with president Bush on October 25, 1991, which discusses Ukraine’s proposal to form its own army, consisting of 450,000 soldiers. Ukraine’s suggestion is clearly against US interests, with the latter fearing that the large army will provoke an arms race in the former Soviet space. But the administration worried that it could not affect Ukraine’s decisions.
Yet Secretary Baker provides a different approach. According to Baker, the leaders of Ukraine want to be part of the “Western World” and hold the opinion of the United States in high esteem – therefore it is clear to him that America can affect decision-making in Ukraine.
This new discovery brought about several new hypotheses. If Baker is right in his assessment, it is possible that the United States didn’t have to instill in Ukrainians a feeling that they were closer to the West, because they already viewed themselves as more aligned with Western values than with Eastern values. It can also be the case that Baker is right about the views of Ukrainian leaders, but they might not accurately reflect the views of the Ukrainian people. Another possibility is that he is wrong in overestimating Ukraine’s identification with the West (which can perhaps be feigned by the former to secure material support from the U.S.).
Nonetheless this was a significant discovery that leads to several interesting lines of inquiry. I will need to look at this question from the perspective of Ukrainian leadership and Ukrainian citizens at the time to tie all these strands together.
The experience with the Baker papers offered me an illuminating behind-the-scenes glimpse of American decision-making in a crucial period in world history. Most of these papers bore the markings of Baker’s pen, as he often underlined passages and jotted comments in the margins of the page. I was rather taken aback by the candor evident in Baker’s scribbled comments (surely, he was aware that there is a possibility that one day these files will be available for all to see?). It was also exhilarating to know that this is a new collection which has been examined by few other researchers. Hopefully, the foot-print I have left in this fresh patch of snow will prove to be a fruitful first step.