Next Step : As Ukraine Goes, So Goes Soviet Pact : * The Continent's second-largest nation is just days away from breaking off with its Russian neighbor. Such a move may spell doom for an economic union.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Nov. 26, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KIEV, Soviet Union — In American terms, it would be like tearing the Midwest from the map of the United States and proclaiming it an independent country.

Gone would be the industrial muscle of Chicago and Detroit, along with the choicest part of the nation’s granary. The ICBMs at Grand Forks would slip from Washington’s control. To travel to St. Louis or a thousand other destinations, U.S. citizens would need passports.

Such wrenching changes, magnified by 1,000 years of history, loom now in the eastern reaches of Europe. The Ukraine, the Continent’s second-largest nation, is days away from formally breaking off from the largest, Russia, its Slavic kinsmen, overseer in the failed Soviet experiment and subjugator for centuries.

Independence--in Ukrainian nezalezhnist --was fanned by the cesium-poisoned winds of Chernobyl five years ago and hastened by the right-wing attempt at seizing power in Moscow last summer.

The Parliament, sensing “mortal danger” to the Ukraine in August, overwhelmingly adopted a declaration of independence to bring to fruition a “thousand-year-old tradition of building statehood.”

On Sunday, the Ukrainian electorate is being asked to approve the Supreme Rada’s declaration, as well as to choose a president for this land, which is larger than France and as populous as Britain.

The nationalist ideas for which Russian czars exiled patriotic poets and Communist commissars ordered “bourgeois separatists” shot have become the freely spoken convictions of people on the street.

“We should be free--the Ukraine has enough resources to be independent,” Vlodya Ganik, 36, a stonemason, paused to tell a passerby one recent morning in Kiev. “Why should Moscow run our affairs?” he asked.

Pulling on his protective goggles, he went back to work--reducing a huge statue of Soviet founder V. I. Lenin on Kiev’s October Revolution Square to rubble.

Nezalezhnist-- approval by voters is considered certain--is a development to preoccupy geopoliticians, the White House and Soviet leaders like Mikhail S. Gorbachev who want to salvage a semblance of the former union.

Much is yet unknown about what Ukrainian independence will mean in practice, but if the leaders in Kiev elect to treat other Soviet republics no differently than foreign nations, few doubt it will doom hopes of forging a new Soviet alliance.

Last month, in an appeal to the Supreme Rada, Gorbachev, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and the leaders of seven other Soviet republics said that the success of a Soviet “economic community” hangs in the balance.

“Let us be frank, we cannot imagine a union without the Ukraine,” they said.

But many Ukrainians object that commitment to the economic or political union promoted by Gorbachev would make independence an empty formality. The Ukraine would have a flag and anthem but decisions would be made to the north, in Russia.

And that has largely been the Ukraine’s lot since a Cossack hetman, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, concluded a treaty with the czar of Muscovy in 1654.

Moscow is obsessed with developments here because the Ukraine’s bolting from the Soviet fold would be of an entirely different order than the independence of the Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. For this land of 51.4 million people is an agricultural and industrial dynamo, a driving economic force.

By itself, it accounts for half of the Soviet Union’s corn production, a quarter of the potatoes and grain, a fifth of the meat and butter, more than a third of the pig iron, electric engines and TV sets, up to half of the steel. The Soviet space shuttle, the Buran, and the Soviet navy’s aircraft carriers could rightfully carry the label “Made in Ukraine.”

For months, advocates and foes of membership in an economic union have done battle, using their calculations on what would happen if collective ties are broken with Russia and the other republics. The verdicts vary from apocalyptic to utopian, because nearly three-quarters of centrally managed socialism have made the Ukraine a perplexing amalgam of bounty--and food lines.

The cliche labeled the republic, a boundless black-earth steppe, the Soviet “bread basket,” but this year bureaucrats had to go abroad and purchase $50 million worth of feed grain for livestock. An afternoon stroll down Karl Marx street in Simferopol, administrative center of the Crimea, is an encounter with lines, this one for coarse brown soap, that one for juice.

“The Ukraine is a classic colony where raw materials are exported and labor is exploited,” charges Ukrainian legislator Volodymyr Shvaikia, an economist. He claims that a staggering 113 billion rubles, roughly $68 billion at the commercial exchange rate, is sucked out of the republic each year by a national economic network rigged in Moscow’s favor.

Were the Ukraine to take on the world alone, nationalists assert, it would hold a handful of trumps.

The figures they brandish show that the republic already tops such an economic power as Germany in output of steel. If Moscow’s “mass plundering” is brought to an end, asserts presidential candidate Levko Lukyanenko, residents of Kiev and Krivoy Rog will be living like Londoners in five years.

But the Ukraine is bound in a web of interdependence with other republics, especially Russia and, although rich by Soviet standards, it is far from self-sufficient. Its Achilles’ heel is its lack of petroleum; it pumps only 1% of Soviet oil, whereas Russia totals 91%.

Were the Ukraine to pay world prices for its gasoline, heating oil and other petroleum needs, it would need to come up with $5.5 billion to cover its yearly tab, according to Olexander Savchenko, vice president of the Ukrainian National Bank.

The intermeshing that is the byproduct of central planning is a persuasive reason for considering Ukrainian membership in a Soviet common market. From a shipyard at Kherson, a port on the Dnieper, to Lvov’s Elektron color television plant, 2,000 large-scale industrial enterprises depend heavily on suppliers in other republics.

Not to keep the Ukraine’s economy integrated with that of its former partners would mean the loss of 3 million jobs by December, Prime Minister Vitold Fokin contends. He has initialed the treaty founding the economic community on the Ukraine’s behalf, but Kiev’s final decision awaits the voters’ verdict in the independence referendum Sunday and on which of the seven candidates for president wins.

The front-runner, Supreme Rada Chairman Leonid Kravchuk, once lobbied hard for the treaty, but the position of the former Communist Party secretary has veered toward that of more radcial nationalists. Last week, Kravchuk, 57, suddenly blasted Gorbachev’s campaign to found an economic community as “dead” and said it was “fiction” to claim he intends to enter a political union if elected.

His rivals accuse the wily, silver-haired Kravchuk of being a political chameleon without principles, but there is no doubt that he is confident about his homeland’s economic potential, in or outside an association with other republics. “There is a notion that the Ukraine cannot get along ia,” he said this month. “But one can also say the opposite--Russia cannot get along without the Ukraine.”

On October Revolution square, where Ganik the stonemason and dozens of his comrades have been chipping away what was one of the largest statues of Lenin in the Soviet Union, the Kiev cityscape is now dominated by a sign in the blue and yellow colors of the short-lived independent Ukrainian state that Lenin crushed.

Nezalezhnist, it says, “is the past of justice, humanity and historical brotherhood.”

The world has grown used to the collapse of centralized rule from Moscow, but in no republic is the process so historically meaningful as the Ukraine. Coming to an end now is not just 74 years of often inhumane Communist rule, but centuries of domination by the “Big Brother” to the north.

For generations of Russians, the Ukraine was nothing more than “Little Russia,” while Kiev, which a millennium ago was the seat of the first great Slavic state in the east, Kievan Rus, became merely “the mother of Russian cities.” The Ukraine, in their eyes, was only an appendage of Russia.

From the Romanov czars to Gorbachev and Nobel literature laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the notion of a tribal, almost geneticbond with the Ukrainians has been a cardinal principal of the Russian consciousness. It has served as justification for dismissing Ukrainian hopes for a separate state.

Pyotr Struve, an early Russian democratic thinker of note, saw no place for Ukrainians outside Russia; he asserted in 1912 that to allow special consideration for “little Russia’s” language and culture would trigger “the total demolition not only of the historically developed structure of Russian statehood, but of Russian society as well.”

A few weeks ago, Gorbachev, a Russian who traces some of his ancestors to the Ukraine, called the bond between the peoples eternal.

“There can be no (new Soviet) Union without the Ukraine, I feel, and no Ukraine without the Union,” he said. “These Slavic states, Russia and the Ukraine, were the axis along which for centuries events turned and a huge multinational state developed. This is the way it will remain. I am convinced of it.”

For Ukrainians, talk of a brotherly “union” with Russia is only a rhetorical veil for de facto domination by the far bigger neighbor.

The czars, for example, attempted to exterminate the Ukrainian language by secret decrees in the 19th Century. More recently, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin engineered famines that led to the deaths of an estimated 10 million people--one Ukrainian in three--and reduced survivors to cannibalism.

Now, as Yeltsin’s powers expand to fill the vacuum left by the imploding Soviet state, Ukrainians are watching warily. Rukh, the grass-roots pro-independence group, has discerned “once more the ‘Big Brother’ syndrome” in some of the Russian president’s acts. Last week, Kravchuk warned all non-Russians in the former Soviet Union to be on their guard.

“The republics need to be cautious that after having gotten rid of one empire, they are not confronted by a new one, with a republic serving as its center,” he said.

In its rapid march to independence, the Ukraine must also be alert to the demands of its biggest minority--more than 11 million ethnic Russians. Presidential candidates have devoted much campaign time to reassuring all minorities, who make about a quarter of the Ukraine’s population, that independence will not mean discrimination.

“We want to build a republic where Russians will live better than in Moscow and Jews better than in Jerusalem,” Kravchuk’s main rival, the radical nationalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, said on a stumping visit to Odessa.

From the hills of the Carpathian Mountains near the border with Czechoslovakia, a telegram recently arrived in Kiev that showed how much the balance of power within the Soviet Union has shifted. A regiment of the Soviet army wired the Supreme Rada that it was “prepared to serve under the state flag of the Ukraine.”

The prospect of a Ukrainian army, navy and air force, perhaps in command of the 176 Soviet multi-warhead ICBMs now on the republic’s territory, set alarm bells ringing in both Moscow and Washington. The White House quickly expressed its displeasure, questioning how the Ukraine could afford a military of its own. In Moscow, Kiev is openly resented as the main foe of maintaining a unified Soviet command.

“Difficulties arise due exclusively to the stance of the Ukraine,” the Soviet Defense Minister, Air Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, has complained.

Anatoly Zlenko, the Ukrainian foreign minister, has declared that his republic will be a “non-nuclear power,” but the Supreme Rada has refused to permit Soviet soldiers here to simply pack up their nuclear weapons and move them to Yeltsin’s Russia.

Instead, the Parliament asserts the Ukraine’s right “to monitor the non-use” of the ICBMs and other nuclear weapons deployed here until agreement is reached to scrap them. If fears intensify that Yeltsin is a latter-day reincarnation of the czars, pressure will mount to keep them.

As to the White House’s objections, in an office in central Kiev still curiously decorated with a portrait of Lenin, Savchenko of the Ukrainian National Bank has worked out the cost-benefit ratio of an independent army. His conclusion is that it would be a money-saver.

“We fully supply the Soviet army stationed on our territory, more than 1 million people, and send to Moscow every year besides around 30 billion rubles to support the armed forces outside the Ukraine,” the tousle-haired economist says. About 14% of the Ukraine’s gross national product is gobbled up in the process.

Kravchuk last week evoked creation of a Ukrainian army of 100,000 or so soldiers, with a multiple key system for the ICBMs to maintain central command over Soviet nuclear arms but giving the Ukraine’s leader a right to veto use of the weapons based here. At the very least, that would be a force one-tenth the size of the war machine that has been based here by Soviet marshals.

For the moment, a republican army is still largely an abstract concept, with final approval not yet voted by the Supreme Rada. The defense minister, Maj. Gen. Kontantin Morozov, does not even have an official car, and when he set off last week for Germany, Kievans joked that he must have hitched a ride on a tank.

When President Bush visited Kiev in early August, he cautioned Ukrainians against the “suicidal course of isolation.” But then came the conservative Communist attempt at toppling Gorbachev, and the meltdown of the Soviet state.

In September, Kravchuk called at the White House and told Bush that the United States must accept Ukrainian independence, since the “central government” no longer exists.

The final significance of Sunday’s vote, and foreign recognition of a Ukrainian state, is still in the future. But as the Supreme Rada declared in August, a 1,000-year-old process is coming to a close, answering the aspirations of Ukrainians past and present.

“The Ukraine will rise,” the greatest of this people’s poets, Taras Shevchenko, wrote more than a century ago. “And the children of slaves shall pray in freedom.”

“We do not want to be run by anybody,” Natalia, a blue-eyed student, said in a Kiev cafe one morning last week. “They take away what we produce and send it Lord knows where.”

Special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev contributed to this report.

The Ukraine: What It Means to Soviets

The republic, known as the Soviet breadbasket, is also a major industrial center. Some general economic indicators for 1990:

Portions of various goods sold in inter-republic trade but produced in the Ukraine:

Macaroni (pasta) - 86%

Sugar - 83%

Salt - 80%

Cooking Oil - 55%

Confectioneries - 52%

Canned Vegetables - 46%

Margarine - 29%

Flour - 20%