The Ukrainian Election (II)
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Former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych could secure a victory in Ukraine’s upcoming presidential run-off, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Sociology Institute. 55.9 per cent of respondents would support Yanukovych of the Party of Regions (PR) in next month’s ballot, while 40.7 per cent would vote for current prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. ~Angus-Reid
Well, I stand corrected. From what I had understood a few weeks ago, I concluded that Tymoshenko would have a better chance in the run-off, but she has evidently been unable to win over the supporters of the minor candidates and Yanukovych seems set to be elected the new Ukrainian president tomorrow. It does not matter to America one way or the other who prevails, but it is worth reviewing some of the wailing being done by pro-Orange Westerners to remember the misguided enthusiasm and ideological mania that dominated Western views of events in Ukraine a little over five years ago.
The most comical expression of unadulterated pro-Orange propaganda comes from Taras Kuzio. Even amid the ruins of the Orange coalition, Kuzio is still flacking for their completely discredited cause. So desperate is he to find some significance in the run-off between Tymoshenko and Yanukovych that he is simply repeating the 2004 propaganda lines that the election represents is a battle between the future and the past, West vs. East, Europe vs. Russia, etc. Kuzio concludes:
On Sunday Ukrainians are faced by a stark choice between democracy or counter-revolutionary revenge and Soviet nostalgia.
This isn’t true. The choice will be between a drab functionary and ex-Kuchma hack and a megalomaniac. On major policy decisions, the two candidates are drearily similar, and their agendas are no longer defined by the 2004 fantasies of full integration into the security, economic and political structures of Europe and dramatic political reform at home. Many Westerners are lamenting the death of the Orange Revolution, but the important thing to understand is that the goals of that revolution were always unrealistic and were bound to be disappointed. The Orange Revolution died as soon as its leaders took power. The illusions they were peddling could not withstand contact with political reality.
Each of the “color” revolutions celebrated by democratists in the past seven years has failed entirely or won power and subsequently presided over the ruin of its country. As with the Rose Revolution, the figurehead of the Orange Revolution became abusive of and corrupted by power, and in different ways both Saakashvili and Yushchenko have presided over the ruin of their respective countries. Yushchenko presided over the total paralysis of the Ukrainian political system, and, of course, Saakashvili ushered in the military defeat and partition of his country. The “Tulip” revolution installed an arguably worse authoritarian in the place of another. The “Cedar” revolution freed Lebanon from a Syrian presence only to preside over the extensive bombardment of Lebanon by Israel. None of these revolutions has led to much good for these countries, most of them have scarcely changed any of the problems that supposedly motivated them.
Adam Brickley’s “eulogy” is much more balanced and informed, but it still contains within it the echo of the absurd, ideologically-driven arguments of five years ago:
These [Yushckenko and Tymoshenko] were the two who were supposed to lead Ukraine to a glorious, democratic future — and none of us would have guessed that they could fall so far, so fast.
Actually, the skeptics of the revolution assumed that it was a sham, and we assumed that the leaders of this revolution simply represented one clique of interests against the clique represented by Kuchma and Yanukovych. We didn’t expect them to fall far or fast because we didn’t think they had very far to fall, and they proved us right. Five years ago enough people favored the clique that was not in power, and tomorrow they will switch back to the clique that was in control before. The trouble here is that people like Brickley talked about a “glorious, democratic future” for Ukraine five years ago and they were serious.
Something else that linked the failures of the Orange and Rose Revolutions was their overt trafficking in virulent anti-Russian nationalism. It was this nationalism and the goal of “reintegration” that propelled Saakashvili into the disastrous escalation that led to the August 2008 war. It was this kind of nationalism that also made Yushchenko reflexively hostile to everything Russia did and pushed him into alignment with Saakashvili’s government against Ukraine’s own interests. In the end, it was sympathy for Saakashvili’s own self-destructive path that weakened Yushchenko at home and damaged his coalition’s ability to govern. As the Angus-Reid report reminds us:
In September 2008, Ukraine’s governing coalition split in great part due to disagreements over a Georgia-Russia conflict. In the days following an incursion by Russian forces into South Ossetia, a Georgian breakaway province, Yushchenko asked the government to fiercely condemn Russia’s actions in Georgia, but Tymoshenko refused to take a strong stance against Russia. Yushchenko left the coalition as a result.
The break-up of the governing coalition made it that much more difficult for Ukraine to respond to the devastating effects of the financial crisis, and the disagreement over how to respond to the war deepened the rift between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko. All of this was a result of pursuing a maniacal hostility to Russia. His rivals understood that this hostility was and would continue to be damaging to Ukrainian interests. In the end, the same virulent nationalism that helped put Yushchenko in power was what drove him to make some of the decisions that ultimately wrecked his coalition.
No matter who wins tomorrow, Ukraine will have a president that is at least somewhat more reasonable and more interested in governing according to actual Ukrainian interests rather than pursuing hostility to Ukraine’s largest neighbor and trading partner. This will not fix dysfunctional government, corruption or Ukraine’s dire financial problems, but it will be a small improvement over the disastrous presidency that is now coming to an end.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
I’m not sure I see any real distinction here between what these countries and these have done and what happened elsewhere in post-Communist or post-Soviet eastern Europe. The pattern is rather analogous to what happens when colonial powers depart or repressive monarchies are removed.
Yes, the succession is at least initially organized around an aspirational vision with ideals and institutions that the society as a whole realistically is incapable of supporting. The first group of leaders after a highly repressive regime is removed, no matter how well intentioned, is rapidly overwhelmed by the reality of the degraded condition of the people as a whole and the decrepit condition of its institutions, and the mountain of unsettled scores (both immediate and historical) and other unmet needs and violently suppressed urges that have built up and festered in the populace. Yes, that means a rapid collapse of a decrepit civil order and and in most societies outbreaks of retributive violence. The leadership of the aspirational movement is soon irrelevant in public opinion. A relatively harsh strongman soon gains power, often a person who started in the aspirational movement but who is typical of the population as a whole in suppressed urges, investment in historical scores, victim of repression, etc. This leader or leadership recognizes the relative priority of the targets of this thirst for retribution in public opinion, agrees with the retribution, and channels it according to priority in public opinion, giving it a sequential nature and greater thoroughness. In many ways these figures tend be more repressive than their predecessors, especially in peaceable civil life, but they never repress, indeed even encourage, popular rage and popular retributive violence at particular targets. Examples abound, from the French Revolution to post-Tito Yugoslavia to Mao.
At times such a leader attacks and thereby unleishes a superior and better justified pent-up urge for retribution by his opponents and is himself destroyed. The Hitler-led German attack on the Slavic peoples would be the prime example. As horrible as the outcome was, it does seem to have settled the historic scores between Germanic and Slavic and Baltic peoples that were historically largely generated by Swedes and Germans.
Yushchenko and Saakashvili reflect this nasty early post-authoritarian dynamic rather well, as I see it. The anti-Soviet/anti-Russian element to their rule- the deliberate effort at purging of remnants of Soviet and much of the Czars’ presence and power- is in my opinion a feature and priority, in no way a bug. The full outbreak of long-suppressed interethnic violence and wars is also no accident. Much as the warfare in and of Georgia in the summer of 2008 gets read as an American-versus-Russian affair on this blog, for the peoples of the Caucasus involved in them these are, I believe, the incidents of regional historical ethnic score settling. That the tiny South Ossetians finally got to give ethnic Georgians a bloody nose for their high-handed behavior over generations, even though a Russian fist was used to inflict the blow, seems to me how that war mattered in local scorekeeping.
Yes, more moderate leaders usually come to power as violence simmers down rebuilding of the economy and institutions becomes possible and desired. My problem with portraying Ukraine in this election as doing this is that it might be premature. Yushchenko had his secret police break up all militant ethnic Russian separatist groups, from presumable terrorist cells to small fringe parties with overt separatist or secessionist agendas. The Ukrainian secret police under Yushchenko also managed to get the Russian Black Sea fleet to abandon Sevastopol for Novorossiysk. Beyond the obvious fealties to Moscow, a Yanukovych government presumably means an end to this active suppression of ethnic Russian separatism in Ukraine and policies of thwarting Moscow’s various forms of support for it. There will possibly be toleration of it, perhaps even a blind eye turned to it. An ostensibly moderate Yanukovych government could amount to an opening for ethnic Russian backlash. And when the non-Russian regions in turn react strongly negatively to that, quite possibly secessionism.
A Russian/non-Russian breakup of Ukraine gets widely poo-pooed as no longer a significant possibility, but I’m not persuaded the fundamental problem is resolved. The scenario envisioned by the people who call separation unlikely has, as far as I can tell, been a fairly violent one with justifications on both sides largely emanating from the era of Soviet rule. These particular justifications and basis for mass violence have substantially diminished with Yushchenko’s often dirty work and airing out of specifics, e.g. the Holodomor, the German occupation and mass killings, the very harsh Soviet repression of Ukrainian nationalists, etc. The ghost of Soviet rule is not fully eradicated, of course, but what remains as the more solid basis to justify separatisms and nationalisms are differences and scores that date to the times of the Czars or even predate them. When the Patriarch of Moscow campaigns in Ukraine among Orthodox ethnic Russians, as he did this fall, the point made is not merely about Orthodox theology and regional ecumenism.
A relatively nonviolent split of Ukraine strikes me as a significant possibility. If it happens it might even turn out to be the most right option, among problematic ones, for an unwieldy and fractured country of 46 million people to do whose rationale for being a political unit is tenuous. The 15 million or so ethnic Russians in it being by far the the largest such population formally outside Russia proper. To what extent the region in which they live is part of the historical ethnic Russian homeland I haven’t been able to fully determine, but their cultural claim of belonging on it is far more substantive than any made on other parts of eastern Europe (Karelia, East Prussia, ‘Transnistria’, Belarus) or Asia (e.g. the northern Caucasus, Siberia generally) now under Russian rule/control.
How do you mean a “non-violent split”? On what criteria? Try splitting China or India, or Canada, for that matter. As far as I’m concerned, there is a bit of a language divide there as well. With part of the country going to Russia later on? No freaking way.
From my long-term position here as someone who for years and years has been working in Kiev, I can say I think Larison has it right.
BUT, to say that the Orange types presided over the “ruin” of their country doesn’t make much sense. Ukraine was ruined before they took over, and it will stay ruined now. It’s always been ruined, it’s been ruined for centuries, and chances are that it will stay ruined. Just the nature of the beast. To say that Yushchenko “ruined” the country is to give both the country and his powers too much credit.
HOWEVER, contra J, it’s not ruined enough that there’s going to be a Russian/Ukrainian separatist split. It just ain’t gonna happen. I’d be interested in knowing what, in particularly, J knows that I and all of my Ukrainian acquaintances do not know.
The fact is, only a couple fringe crazies are interested in any type of separatism. No one else talks about it— I’ve never heard it mentioned as a real possibiility. The Russians are glad to have the separatism thing to use as a lever against Ukraine if they need it, but now that they’ve got a person in the Kiev they can work with again (and Tymoshenko also would have been that person), they’re not interested in problems. They also know, as prehaps J doesn’t, that Crimea (with its radicalizable, Russian-resenting Tatar Muslim population) might be a bit of a poisoned chalice.
The new Kiev government will let the Russian navy stay in Sevastopol, the rifts will be smoothed over, “friendship of nations” will again be cemented between the two Glorious Slavic Peoples, Yanukovych will (if he needs to) severely repress Russian separatests will the Kremlin pretends not to look, jackasses like Luzhkov will continue to ineffectually run around calling for the return of parts of Ukraine, etc. etc. etc. — and things will go on in the same corrupt, dreary, third-rate way that they have around here since, oh, the Mongols sacked the joint in 1240.
Long story short is that seperatism = not an issue.
Thanks for the comments. Yes, you’re absolutely right that Ukraine was in awful shape before 2004. What I should have said is that Yushchenko presided over a period in which conditions there worsened considerably, and he has some direct responsibility for that. What I wanted to emphasize was that the outside enthusiasm for this and other “color” revolutions is completely disconnected from the results they have produced, and I also wanted to make the point that the would-be reformers have been quite bad for their respective countries. Georgia and Ukraine would still have had serious problems regardless of who had been in charge these past few years, but those problems would not have been compounded by the blunders the “reformers” have made.