Democratic Revolution in Ukraine

From Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution

Taras Kuzio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415441414
• eBook ISBN: 9781317996477
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2000 a beheaded journalist was found in a remote forest near Kyiv. The corpse led to a scandal when it was revealed that it was that of a journalist critical of the authorities. The President was heard on tapes, made covertly in his office, ordering violence to be undertaken against the journalist. The scandal led to the creation of a wide protest movement that culminated in the victory of democratic opposition parties in 2002. The democratic opposition, led by its presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, fought a bitter and fraudulent election campaign in 2004 during which he was poisoned. Widespread election fraud led to Europe's largest protest movement since the Cold War which became known as the Orange Revolution, known after the campaign colour of the democratic opposition.

This book is the first to provide a collection of studies surveying different aspects of the rise of the Ukraine's democratic opposition from marginalization, to protest against presidential abuse of office and culminating in the Orange Revolution. It integrates the Kuchmagate crisis of 2000-2001 with that of the Orange Revolution four years later providing a rich, detailed and original study of the origins of the Orange Revolution.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

Ethnic Tensions and State Strategies: Understanding the Survival of the Ukrainian State

PAUL D’ANIERI

At the height of the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, politicians in several eastern oblasts rekindled the threat that parts of eastern Ukraine would move toward secession. The Kharkiv regional administration took steps towards ‘autonomy’, while a meeting in Donetsk attended by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian ambassador Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov discussed outright secession.¹ The election returns that year – in the fair as well as in the rigged iterations of the vote – confirmed that Ukraine remained profoundly divided regionally.² In only one oblast (Kherson) did the winner in the region garner less than 60 per cent of the vote. The general pattern was one of polarization. The division was evident again in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Following those elections, language policy again became an issue, in coalition negotiations between the ‘Our Ukraine’ bloc, based in the west, and the Party of Regions based the east.

Fears of secessionism and ethnic conflict are not new in Ukraine. In early 1994, the Central Intelligence Agency leaked a report asserting that the fragmentation of Ukraine was a likely result of a mixture of ethnic conflicts and economic collapse.³ Attempts in the mid-1990s by leaders in Crimea to move that region towards sovereignty, on top of an earlier movement in the Donbas, led many to fear that Ukraine might collapse into civil war on the Yugoslav model.⁴ In a thorough analysis of nationality issues in post-Soviet Ukraine, Andrew Wilson concluded that confrontation between Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine is ‘more or less guaranteed’, though he did not argue that secession or violence is inevitable.⁵

But serious conflict has not occurred, and despite the renewed claims in 2004, it looks unlikely. Indeed, the speed with which the effort to stir up secessionism collapsed in 2004, when grievance in eastern Ukraine was high and people were already on the streets in Kyiv, shows that such efforts face important barriers. This constitutes a puzzle: why does Ukraine, which is divided regionally, ethnically and linguistically, and has elites willing to make secessionist claims, not see more ethno-political conflict? This article aims to develop a theoretically informed understanding of Ukraine’s survival as a state, and to ask what lessons this case might provide for others.⁶ The point is not to criticize those who predicted Ukraine’s collapse: indeed, the author believes that the threat of ethno-political conflict was indeed significant. The danger was real, but Ukraine avoided it. The puzzle of how this was managed is magnified by the fact that in almost every other realm, the Ukrainian state has appeared both weak and inept.⁷

While it is customary to explain cases where something happened rather than those where something did not happen, much can be learned from this ‘non-event’. Ukraine is a country that seemed headed for a large-scale calamity and yet avoided it. Since an increasing number of states are confronting ethno-political issues, and since others have not been so fortunate, we might ask whether there was something about the Ukrainian case that can be applied to others. Looking for new solutions to ethno-political disputes is particularly significant when one of the most widely recommended solutions – consociational democracy – has ended in calamity in Yugoslavia and has failed to ameliorate ethnic and regional divisions in Canada and Belgium. While peace in Ukraine may have been maintained by factors that cannot be replicated in other situations, it may also be that some policies of the government or other actors actually helped steer the situation away from violence. If such policies can be identified, we might learn something about how to ameliorate other situations where ethno-political violence seems inevitable. Our goals are first to explain why conflict was avoided in Ukraine, and second to identify the lessons of the experience.

A short examination of theories of ethno-political violence outlined by Ted Robert Gurr⁸ helps us to apply broader research on ethno-political conflict to the case of Ukraine. By showing that most of the major causes of ethno-political conflict were present in Ukraine, it becomes clear that predictions of violence were not overblown, and that there is something to be learned from Ukraine’s avoidance of conflict. The argument is that Ukraine was able to take its biggest vulnerabilities – the large size of the Russian minority and the Russophone Ukrainian population and its geographic concentration – and turn them to its advantage. Because of these factors, these groups could have a good deal of political influence without basing the political system on group, rather than individual, rights. While these factors increased the opportunity to make such claims, they also reduced the incentive. How deliberate those practices were is debatable, and Ukraine also had some good luck. None the less, Ukraine succeeded with a policy of liberalization and representation that provides a distinct alternative to the more common model of consociationalism. A brief analysis of voting outcomes in Ukraine’s parliamentary and presidential elections demonstrates that the ethnic Russian and Russophone Ukrainians have had no lack of empowerment in Ukraine. The conclusion focuses upon the lessons of this case, both for theories of ethno-political conflict and for practical efforts to contain ethno-political conflict.

Were Expectations of Ethnic Strife in Ukraine Well Founded?

This essay is based on the assumption that Ukraine’s ability to avoid ethnic violence and secession was not inevitable. In order to assess the potential for ethno-political conflict in Ukraine, we turn to the literature on ethnic conflict and secession. To what extent were conditions in Ukraine consistent with those that have led to ethno-political conflict elsewhere? In a major work Ted Robert Gurr sought to develop a coherent picture from a huge number of cases. This may not be the last word on the subject, nor would I infer that his work is mistaken if his hypotheses imply that conflict is likely but it did not occur in this case, since this case does not constitute a thorough test of his hypotheses. I seek only to establish whether Ukraine’s ability to overcome ethno-political tension is in fact an outcome worthy of explanation.

Attempts to explain mass protest and revolution are largely divided between those that focus on the level of grievance and those that focus on the ability to pursue such change in the face of opposition from the state. Approaches such as Gurr’s relative deprivation theory and work by Tilly and Tarrow on resource mobilization fall into the former group. In the latter group lie explanations based on ‘political opportunity structure’ and the state’s capacity for repression. In his most recent work Gurr recognizes that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but simply emphasize different aspects of the problem. Therefore he addresses the prospects for both factors increasing or decreasing the chances for ethnic differences to turn conflictual. Gurr elaborates factors that in a wide variety of cases tend to correlate with ethnic violence (or tend to prevent it). Applied to Ukraine, most of these factors lead to the conclusion that Ukraine was indeed ripe for ethno-political conflict.

The Effects of Geography

Among the most significant factors in making a group likely to seek autonomy or secession is the regional concentration of the minority. When a group is regionally concentrated, group cohesion tends to be higher.⁹ This clearly is the case in Ukraine, where even if ethnic Russians are in a minority, they are heavily concentrated in the two areas where secession was most seriously discussed: the Donbas and Crimea. If one considers language, rather than officially defined ethnicity, the populations of the Donbas and Crimea are over 90 per cent Russian-speaking. Moreover, the presence of compatriots in a nearby country increases a minority’s ability to mobilize, ‘by providing material, political and moral support’.¹⁰ Those raising the question of secession were supported not only by compatriots within Russia, but in many cases by important elements of the Russian government itself. Throughout the early 1990s, Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, stressed that prior Russian commitments to the existing Ukrainian-Russian border were premised upon Ukraine remaining in the Soviet Union (and later the Commonwealth of Independent States).¹¹ The importance of geography in Ukraine’s politics is emphasized by studies showing that regional cleavages, partly coinciding with linguistic and ethnic cleavages, explain attitudes among Ukrainian citizens better than either of those two factors.¹²

The Effects of State Building

Gurr argues (and others concur) that new states are most likely to repress minorities, and hence are prime grounds for ethnic conflict. State building, he argues, requires ‘assimilating minority groups and restricting their historical autonomy’:

Virtually all new and post-revolutionary states in the world system have been committed to consolidating and expanding their power, following the precedents established by the successful states of the industrial North. This objective dictates, among other things, that states subordinate the special interests and relative autonomy of hundreds of ethnic groups to their own conception of national identity and interest.¹³

Alexander Motyl applies this argument specifically to the post-communist states, as does Rogers Brubaker, who contends that ‘the question is not therefore whether the new states will be nationalizing but how they will be nationalizing, and how nationalizing they will be’.¹⁴ Ukraine has undertaken nationalizing policies, but the moderation of these policies, as described below, may be one key to its success.¹⁵

State Strength

Gurr finds that while ‘strong’ states are more likely to face protest, ‘weak’ states are more likely to face actual violence. In a manner similar to Samuel Huntington, Gurr theorizes that, while strong states may engender more protest, they are able to contain dissatisfaction at that level.¹⁶ Weak states, in contrast, can neither satisfy minorities’ demands nor crush them; therefore, ethnic conflicts are more likely to endure and to turn violent.¹⁷ Gurr provides statistics to support these propositions, finding that state building tended to shift communal action away from protest towards open rebellion. Ukraine is a new state, and made state building a primary focus of policy in the first six years of its existence. In this way, Gurr’s findings on state building support the notion that Ukraine was vulnerable to violence.

The Effects of Democratization

Gurr finds that, while ‘institutionalized democracies’ tend to resolve ethno-political conflicts through implementation of universalistic norms of rights and accommodation of minorities’ desires for ‘separate collective status’, newly democratizing states have a much less rosy outlook. Again recalling Huntington, Gurr states that ‘the Soviet and Eastern European regimes relaxed coercive restraints on nationalism and inter-group hostilities at a time when the institutionalized means for their expression and accommodation did not yet exist, or were fragile and distrusted’.¹⁸ He concludes that, in democratizing autocracies, ‘democratization is likely to facilitate both protest and communal rebellion. The serious risk is that the rejection of accommodation by one or all contenders will lead to civil war and the reimposition of coercive rule’. This description too seems to fit Ukraine well. The collapse of Soviet rule gave voice to both Ukrainian and Russian nationalism, and Ukraine’s new institutions seem too weak to satisfy either group, or to foil an attempt at secession should one be made. It is fortunate for the state that separatist claims have generally received minimal support, because the state has never appeared strong enough to fend off a serious separatist movement.

Only one of Gurr’s factors would lead one not to expect ethno-political violence in Ukraine: international support for Ukraine’s government and for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The US and the West more broadly have put a high priority on Ukraine’s continued stability and independence. However, during the key period 1993–95, Western support for Ukraine was still materializing, and while Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have supported the maintenance of Ukraine’s borders, many other Russian politicians have continually questioned them (focusing in particular on the status of Crimea).¹⁹ Russian encouragement of ethnic and regional tension in Ukraine was especially noticeable in advance of the 2004 presidential election.²⁰ Clearly this factor cannot have been decisive. Of the other factors Gurr discusses, none leads to clear predictions in the Ukrainian case.

Theory aside, there was much specific to this case to make ethno-political conflict a genuine fear. Historically, the connection of both Crimea and eastern Ukraine to Russia created a feeling among many that the borders of post-1991 Ukraine were arbitrary and illegitimate, while others see these as the only legitimate borders.

The erection of trade barriers between Ukraine and Russia in the early post-Soviet years had particularly harsh effects in the regions of Ukraine geographically closest to Russia, which hence had the highest concentration of ethnic Russians, namely the Donbas.²¹ Thus there was an economic dimension of deprivation that overlapped the ethnic dimension. The prominence in early post-Soviet Ukraine of Ukrainian nationalists, most notably ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Ethnic Tensions and State Strategies: Understanding the Survival of the Ukrainian State
• 2. Oligarchs, Tapes and Oranges: ‘Kuchmagate’ to the Orange Revolution
• 3. State Institutions, Political Context and Parliamentary Election Legislation in Ukraine, 2000 – 2006
• 4. Revolutionary Bargain: The Unmaking of Ukraine’s Autocracy through Pacting
• 5. Patriotism, Order and Articulations of the Nation in Kyiv High Schools Before and After the Orange Revolution
• 6. Rock, Pop and Politics in Ukraine’s 2004 Presidential Campaign and Orange Revolution
• 7. Anti-Orange Discourses in Ukraine’s Internet: Before the Orange Split
• 8. Gender and the Orange Revolution
• Index