Ukraine: Not so hopeless after all

I’m happy to report that my prayers for Ukraine have been answered — not by any creative types, but by an oligarch who has shrewdly leveraged the combined power of his ample purse and his straightforward prose.

The oligarch is Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, whose mining companies employ 280,000 people in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists had seized control in about a dozen cities and proclaimed themselves the independent “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Although polls had indicated that a strong majority of eastern Ukrainians prefer to remain in Ukraine, few of them seemed prepared to say so in the face of armed pro-Russian militants, not to mention an aggressive Russian TV propaganda campaign and 40,000 Russian troops massed just across the border. With each passing day, the separatists’ grip on power in eastern Ukraine seemed to be tightening irretrievably.

‘This means poverty’

That’s when Akhmetov seized his Dorothea Brooke moment. Last Wednesday he issued a videotaped statement rejecting separatism and, more important, explaining why everyone else in east Ukraine should do likewise. If the Donetsk People’s Republic were to succeed in breaking away from Ukraine, Akhmetov said, “Nobody in the world will recognize it. The structure of our economy is coal, industry, metallurgy, energy, machine works, chemicals, and agriculture, and all the enterprises tied to these sectors. We will come under huge sanctions, we will not sell our products, cannot produce. This means the stopping of factories, this means unemployment, this means poverty.”

Next thing you knew, thousands of Akhmetov’s miners and steelworkers were signing up for patrols, fanning out of their factories and establishing control of the streets in at least five cities, including the regional capital, Donetsk. These workers wore only their protective clothing and hard hats, according to the New York Times, but in the face of their overwhelming numbers, “the pro-Russian protesters melted away, along with signs of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic and its representatives.” Meanwhile, backhoes and dump trucks from the steelworkers’ factory in Mariupol dismantled the barricades that separatists had erected.

Suddenly, the Times reported, “The crowds of pro-Russian protesters who had jeered and cursed Ukrainian soldiers last week were nowhere to be seen.” In the central square of Mariupol Thursday afternoon, “a pro-Russian rally drew a few dozen protesters, who were watched over by a group of steelworkers.”

Andrew Jackson said it

The Ukraine crisis has hardly evaporated, of course. Journalists currently in eastern Ukraine are much like the blind man describing an elephant, and their reports should be taken with a grain of salt. Akhmetov didn’t splash water on the Wicked Witch of the West: He wasn’t emboldened to speak up until Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seemingly withdrew his support for the separatists last week. And in any case, Akhmetov’s blue-collar patrols are unlikely to be deployed in some pro-Russian cities, like Slovyansk, where Akhmetov’s companies operate no factories or mines.

But it’s not too soon to discern a few lessons from last week’s surprising turn of events:

• What seems inevitable often isn’t.
• A single individual, armed with courage and ingenuity, can sometimes trump a dictator armed with guns and a propaganda machine. Or, as Andrew Jackson put it, “One man with courage makes a majority.”
• When it comes to galvanizing mass opinion, economic self-interest can trump nationalistic fervor.
• Oligarchs may no longer be the villains they used to be just a few years ago.

The term used to refer to greedy megalomaniacs. But after making a $3 billion fortune, Boris Berezovsky jeopardized much of it by speaking out against Putin; he ultimately fled to London, where he was poisoned in 2013, presumably by Putin’s agents. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed for 11 years for his political opposition to Putin, has emerged as a philosophical crusader against Russia’s greatest political problem — not Putin per se, but the pervasively authoritarian Russian mindset. Last December, when the Kiev protests seemed about to tip into violence, the billionaire confection magnate Petro Poroshenko climbed aboard a bulldozer that was threatening to plow through the crowd, grabbed a megaphone, and successfully urged everyone to calm down; now he's the favorite to win Ukraine's presidential election nect week. And now we have Akhmetov, who has put his own empire at risk by sticking his neck out on a political issue.

Akhmetov’s 15 minutes of global fame will doubtless expire soon. But George Eliot’s tribute to Dorothea Brooke applies to him too: "Her full nature. . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts." Let us now praise gutsy oligarchs. Hey, they seem to be reminding us — it’s only money.