RUSSIA'S IMPERIAL FUTURE HINGES ON UPCOMING VOTE IN UKRAINE

WASHINGTON -- Next week, the world will have the answer to a fascinating geopolitical question: whether the pivotal post-Soviet state of Ukraine will choose to return eastward, toward Russia, or to move westward, toward Europe.

This is far from a random choice, for around it flow political torrents that will decide whether Vladimir Putin's Russia can again be a formalized, or informalized, empire -- or whether it will be forced by Ukraine's action to turn itself toward Europe, and toward becoming more European than Asian.

Seldom has a moment in recent history been more potentially decisive -- and seldom has such a moment been less attended to in America, now obsessively sidetracked by Fallujah, Mosul and Ramadi.

The moment of truth comes on Sunday, when 50 million citizens of Ukraine, who have had the historical bad luck of being so far from God and so close to Moscow, vote for a new president. The results should be known early next week.

After 14 years of the corrupt, sinister, old-Leninist hand of Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainians have a clear choice.

They can vote for Viktor Yuschenko, the reformist candidate who stands for joining the European Union, the World Trade Organization and NATO as soon as possible, for strengthening Ukrainian nationalism, and for the interests of Western Ukrainian Christians and the Ukrainian diaspora in the West.

His people talk about a "Chestnut Revolution" in honor of the chestnut trees that line the famous Kreshchatik Street in Kiev -- mirroring the idea of the "Velvet Revolution" that freed the Czech Republic from its Soviet era.

Or they can vote for Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate of the Eastern Ukraine, where many Ukrainians speak a language called Surzhik, a bastardized combination of Ukrainian and Russian. Here, the huge Soviet-era enterprises like Donetz steel still dominate the economic state, and Moscow still dominates the mind-set.

Yanukovych, the current prime minister, has shown his colors, and they are all shades of red. Russian intervention in the campaign has been intense, public and utterly clear. President Putin traveled pointedly to Kiev, reviewed troops with "his" Viktor, and set up Potemkin groups to support Moscow's candidate, like the now-famous and mysterious "Russian Club."

The Russians have also used this fall's elections in Ukraine, and the far more problematic ones in totalitarian Belarus, to challenge the kind of institutional European election-watching that had given some hope to these elections. These attempts to cut back on European influence, particularly in the sensitive areas of elections, show the extent to which President Putin is trying to isolate the remnants of the Soviet empire from the West.

For his part, Yanukovych vowed to introduce Russian as a co-language with Ukrainian, to offer dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship to his fellow citizens, and to give Moscow special rights to the oil pipeline in the south near Odessa.

When I was in Kiev earlier this fall to report on this important election, I was struck by one overwhelming factor in this new geopolitical equation: President Putin's dreams of a renewed Russian empire cannot be fulfilled without the Ukraine. It's the pivotal piece in that puzzle of nations, the linchpin between East and West -- and it could be the revolt of the borderlands against the metropole, should Yuschenko win.

In an odd sense, the way Ukraine goes today is the way Russia will go. For centuries, Moscow has dominated Kiev. This week, the decision-making capacity has reverted to Kiev.

It would seem that the pro-Western Yuschenko is in place to win. This election is, in fact, a run-off; in the first elections on Oct. 31, the two candidates were so close that it was always assumed there would have to be a run-off. In the October elections, Yuschenko came out ahead -- but only by 39.9 percent of the vote to his opponent's 39.3 percent.

Meanwhile, the strange dialectic of the development of the East continues.

Ukraine is doing well economically, with an average growth over the last few years of 9 percent and a predicted growth this year of 13.4 percent -- but there is no civic society, no economic or social justice, no true sense of nation.

Russia, comparatively, is doing poorly, dependent wholly upon oil and gas income, losing population at a staggering rate, nursing its ethnic problems -- but still dreaming of lost empire. Long gone are the days of the 1990s with the dream of a "common European home" from Europe to the Urals. Today, the Kremlin puts forth curious ideas such as there being "two Europes," one in Brussels and a "Euro-East" in Moscow, of which Ukraine must be a cultural, political and military part.

How this can all work out is difficult to see, regardless of what happens this week. Meanwhile, in Brussels recently, a spokesman for the European Union, while acknowledging that Ukraine might eventually become formally part of Europe, was hesitant. "We tell the Ukrainians, 'You will be getting everything the E.U. can offer -- except institutions. You will get trade, support for entry into the WTO, a political dialogue and common programs -- but at this point, we don't see you being in our institutions.'"

In the next breath, an economist argued to me, as did so many of the progressive Ukrainians, that the economic sense of the world is such that eventually Ukraine will have to enter the world organizations because of its sensitive commodities, such as steel, chemicals and agricultural products.

For now, the only clear fact is that, while so many in power in Washington are dreaming of empire, other parts of the world are busily working out their dreams. We might pay attention.