Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

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Communist and Post-Communist Studies

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Russian and Ukrainian elites: A comparative study of different identities and alternative transitions

Taras Kuzio Department of Political Science, ‘National University’ Mohyla Academy and Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Relations, Johns Hopkins University, United States article info abstract

Article history: The deterioration in Russian-Ukrainian relations heightened in 2014 but did not begin then Available online 23 October 2018 and has deeper roots. Both Russian presidents have had troubled relations with all five Ukrainian presidents irrespective if they were described as ‘nationalist’ or ‘pro-Russian.’ Keywords: This article is the first to explain why the roots of the crisis go deeper and it does this by Russian-Ukrainian relations investigating three areas. The first is the different sources of elites in 1991 when inde- pendent captured Soviet institutions and undertook top-down state building while Nationalism inherited far less and set course with bottom up state-building. The second is Elites National identity divergent Russian and Ukrainian national identities. The third is the resultant different Transition transitions with Russia reverting to great power imperial nationalism and Ukraine Reform quadruple and post-colonial transitions. © 2018 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Much of the writing about the Ukraine-Russian crisis in their relations since 2014 wrongly assumes this is a new phe- nomenon. In reality, there has been tension between both countries throughout the period since the USSR disintegrated in 1991. Ukrainian-Russian tension existed under both Presidents Borys Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian ‘nationalistic’ and pro-Russian presidents. Viktor Yushchenko and were not the only problematical Ukrainian presidents for Russian leaders. Yeltsin and Putin also had difficult relations with moderate pro-Russian President Leonid Kuchma and Russophile and Sovietophile President Viktor Yanukovych. The sources of this enduring tension lie in three areas which are the subject of this article. The first is the different sources of Ukrainian and Russian elites. Ukraine did not inherit all of the institutions required for an independent state and therefore state building was mainly bottom up (Kuzio, 1998). The Russian SFSR did not possess republican institutions in the USSR (except for a very short period in 1990e1991) and Russian and Soviet identities were highly integrated. This made the USSR very different to federal Yugoslavia which had permitted Serbian republican institutions and a Serbian identity which was separate to Yugoslav. After August 1991, Russia co-opted Soviet institutions in Moscow and the Russian SFSR did not declare independence from the USSR. Russia's ‘Independence Day’ (Russia Day) is on the annual anniversary of the 12 June 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty. As the Soviet successor state, Russian state building was therefore top down which had important ramifications after 2000 when a former KGB officer was elected as Russian president.

E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2018.10.001 0967-067X/© 2018 The Regents of the University of California. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 338 T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

The second is divergent Ukrainian and Russian national identities arising from Soviet legacies and post-Soviet nation- building policies. Ukraine's identity was post-colonial and its civic nationalism was that commonly associated with national liberation movements. The Soviet regime was the ‘Other’ for all Ukrainian leaders, with the exception of Yanukovych whose regional identity was grounded in Soviet values. Ukrainian presidents, school textbooks, historiography and media portrayed Russian and Soviet rule over Ukraine in negative terms. President Kuchma did as much to promote a non-Soviet, Ukrainian national identity as his successor Yushchenko; it was Kuchma, for example, who initiated the international campaign for countries to recognise the 1933 Holodomor as a ‘genocide.’ With Russian and Soviet identity integrated, Russia's national identity was inevitably different, and the USSR was a country of admiration and its disintegration in Putin's eyes was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the 20th century. Russian imperial-great power identity, which has been dominant, looks to the USSR as a source of pride and international recognition as a great power. Both countries divergence is most visibly seen in their attitudes to Joseph Stalin with Ukraine undertaking de-Sovietisation and de-Stalinisation and Russia re-Sovietising and promoting a cult of Joseph Stalin (Kuzio, 2017). Yeltsin combined civic and imperial-great power nationalism in the 1990s. Under Putin, Russia wholeheartedly adopted an imperial-great power nationalism that increased tensions in Ukrainian-Russian relations which exploded into crisis in 2014 (Brudny and Finkel, 2011). This Russian national identity also influences the so-called ‘liberal opposition;’ Aleksei Navalny (2018), for example, supports the annexation of the Crimea and his 2018 election program ignored Russia's annexation of the Crimea and its hybrid war against Ukraine in the Donbas. Prior to World War II, British and French politicians were also liberal at home and imperialists abroad. The sources of Putin's failures in 2014 to achieve his three strategic objectives in NovoRossiya ([New Russia] eight oblasts in eastern and southern Ukraine), the Donbas and fragmenting Ukraine lie in the divergent paths of their national identities. Russia's understanding of Ukraine's future lying within the Russkij Mir (Russian World) was long at odds with Ukrainian identity (Wawrzonek, 2011). Although not understood in Moscow, no Ukrainian president would agree to become a Ukrainian version of Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and if they succumbed, as did Yanukovych in December 2013 when he accepted a Russian ‘loan’ (in reality bribe) of $15 billion, it would be difficult for them to remain in power. Ukrainian and Russian civil societies were very different making Russia's soft power unsuccessful (Szostek, 2014; Stewart and Dollbaum, 2017). Although in the main ignored in Western studies of the crisis, radically divergent sources of Russian and Ukrainian national identities are the root of the Ukraine-Russian conflict (Kuzio, 2018). The third is an outcome of divergent transition paths for Ukraine and Russia since 1991. Ukraine undertook a ‘quadruple transition’ of state and civic nation building, democratisation, and marketisation (Kuzio, 2001). Economic reforms were launched in 1994 and continued when reformist governments were in power. Freedom House ranked Ukraine ‘Partly Free’ and ‘Free’ since 1991, with the biggest slide to authoritarianism during Yanukovych's presidency. Russia has progressively declined into authoritarianism since Putin was first elected in 2000. Alexander Motyl (2016) believes that after sixteen years in power, Putin's Russia has evolved into a fascist political system.

1. Different sources of elites

In the second half of the 1980s, the drive to Ukrainian independence was a product of an alliance between national communists, cultural intelligentsia and civic nationalists in Rukh (abbreviated from Ukrainian Popular Movement for Restructuring). Russia and Ukraine became independent states with very different Soviet legacies and the policies adopted by their elites led to divergent trajectories. The nationalist right was always weak and has remained unpopular in independent Ukraine whereas it has been popular in different forms in Russia. In Ukraine, extreme right nationalist political parties have never been able to win seats in elections and their presidential candidates never had the possibility of winning many votes (let alone enter the second round). Only on one occasion has a nationalist party entered parliament in 2012 when the Svoboda (Freedom) party won ten percent. This was because the stars were aligned; Ukrainians voted for Svoboda as a protest vote against Yanukovych. In 2014, during the heat of war, nationalist parties failed to enter the Ukrainian parliament. Since 2014, there has been a growth of patriotism, not ethnic nationalism, with opinion polls showing high negative Ukrainian attitudes to Russian leaders, but not towards the Russian people (Razumkov, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Using the term ‘nationalist’ is a misnomer as Russians have never sought to build a state independent of Tsarist Russia or the USSR (Motyl, 1990; Rowley, 2000). There is no Russian equivalent of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who built a post-imperial Turkey and distanced it from the Ottoman Empire. David G. Rowley (2000, p.23) writes it is ‘inaccurate and misleading’ to use the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationalist’ vis-a`-vis Russia and it is more appropriate to use imperialism and imperialist. ‘That Russians expressed their national consciousness through the discourse of imperialism rather than the discourse of nationalism has far-reaching implications for both Russian history and nationalism theory’ (Rowley, 2000, p.23). In the USSR, only a handful of Russian dissidents (such as Andrei Amalrik and Vladimir Bukovsky) were nationalists; that is, they sought independence from the USSR for the Russian SFSR. What were defined as ‘Russian nationalists’ in 1991 were hard-line T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347 339 imperial-great power unionists. Russians are therefore similar to the English in not being ‘nationalists’ (that is, separatists); there is no English equivalent of the Scottish National Party. In the Russian Federation, what have been defined as ‘nationalists’ have included a wide array of ideologies united around great power politics. National Bolsheviks, Eurasianists (such as Alexander Dugin), neo-Nazi's (such as Russian National Unity [RNE]), and pro-Soviet groups share common platforms. Marlene Laruelle (2016) discusses brown (fascist), white (Tsarist) and red (Soviet) ideological platforms involved in Putin's NovoRossiya project. The latter two are absent from Ukraine and the former has always been electorally weak. Putin emerged from an institution (KGB) where Russian and Soviet nationalisms were always strong and Ukrainiano- phobia high. This was especially the case from the 1960s under three conservative Soviet leaders (Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko) during a period when Putin was being socialised into the ‘Chekist’ (the name of the first Soviet secret police) culture. Putin joined the KGB three years after it had launched the biggest crackdown since the Stalin era in Ukraine, which was described by a Ukrainian self-publication samvydav (or samizdat in Russian) as a ‘pohrom’ of Ukrainian culture, media and political life, and the removal of national communist leader Petro Shelest. Anne Applebaum (2017, pp.149, 155, 159) discusses the origins of ‘Chekist’ Ukrainophobia in the early 1930s when the Holodomor was launched, and mass arrest of national communists, educators and cultural elites took place amid a frenzied search for ‘Petlurite1 counter-revolutionaries’ allied to external enemies of the Soviet Union. Stalin and Putin both talked of their fear of ‘losing’ Ukraine and paranoia about Ukrainian nationalism ‘was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD2 to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leader. Perhaps, it even helped mould the thinking of post-Soviet elites, long after the USSR ceased to exist’ (Applebaum, 2017, p.161). Putin has hijacked the nationalist agenda moving to the right on two occasions in 2005e2007, after the Rose and Orange Revolutions (Hutchings and Tolz, 2015, pp.176, 257e258), and in 2011e2012, in response to EU enlargement into Eurasia and street protests in Russia. Nevertheless, Putin's nationalism has been downplayed by some Western scholars who prefer to see it as instrumental aimed at winning votes rather than a reflection of ideological convictions. From the vantage point of Ukraine, Putin's nationalism was real enough, became more chauvinistic long before the 2014 crisis, and was particularly focused upon maintaining Ukraine within Russia's sphere of influence. Key markers in the evolution of great power-imperial nationalism for Putin and Russian elites are as follows:

1 Conspiratorial views of color revolutions in 2003e2004 and 2013e2014 as ‘anti-Russian’ in nature and organised by Western intelligence agencies and in the latter by the EU. Putin was humiliated by two Ukrainian revolutions which prevented Yanukovych coming to power in the first or removed him from power in the latter. 2 The creation of the Russkij Mir in 2007 which builds on Tsarist and Soviet mythology of the perpetual ‘fraternal’ nature of friendship between the three eastern Slavic ‘brothers’. As Kyiv is the ‘mother’ that gave birth to the three eastern Slavs they are united by a common Russian ‘Orthodox’ civilisation. A Russkij Mir and Eurasian Economic Union without Ukraine is inconceivable to Putin - just as the USSR was inconceivavble without Soviet Ukraine. A monument to Grand Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) was unveiled in Moscow in November 2016 (Moscow did not exist when he ruled Kyiv Rus). Michal Wawrzonek (2014) wrote about the incompatible visions of Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches prior to the 2014 crisis which made support for the Russkij Mir unpopular among Ukrainian elites. Since the 2014 crisis the ‘civilisation choice’ offered by the Russkij Mir has even less elite support in Ukraine, as seen in the drive for autocephalous status for Ukrainian Orthodox. 3 Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people’, Putin repeatedly states, reviving Tsarist chauvinism that denies Ukrainians are a nation and claiming their ‘artificial’ state is a Western puppet. Ukraine as an ‘artificial’ state is a staple of all Russian nationalists, including Putin. 4 Ukrainophobia did not appear in 2013e2014 in response to the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity and crisis but has a long pedigree in the USSR and post-Soviet era (Kuzio, 2016). Soviet ideological tirades against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ targeted Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonian dissidents and national communists and their diasporas. Soviet ideological tirades did not target Russians in such a manner as they were not separatists, and therefore never a threat to Soviet territorial integrity. Much of the panoply used by Putin in 2013e2014 (fake news, information war against ‘Ukrainian fascists,’ pretend Ukrainian nationalists supporting Yushchenko) were used by Russian political technologists in the 2004 Ukrainian elections e before Russia Today, Facebook and Twitter existed. 5 Russian nationalism has never been reconciled to Ukraine's sovereignty over its eastern and southern regions (so-called NovoRossiya). This was raised by Russian political technologists in the 2004 elections and by Putin in his April 2008 speech to the NATO summit in Bucharest (Putin, 2008). Prior to Putin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Russian nationalist dissidents had opposed Ukraine's sovereignty over its eastern and southern regions. Therefore, the Ukrainian-Russian territorial conflict was always much bigger than the Crimea.

1 Symon Petliura was the commander of the armed forces of Ukrainian republics in 1918e1921. 2 OGPU and NKVD were secret police organizations and predecessors of the KGB. 340 T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

Election poster produced by Russian political technologists working for Yanukovych in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections. From left to right it says: “I Sort, II Sort, III Sort. Ukrainians open your eyes!” The III Sort incorporates eight oblasts that Putin raised in 2008 and six years later described as NovoRossiya, wrongly including Kharkiv which was never part of this Tsarist gubernia (Kuzio, 2005).

6 Anti-Western xenophobia has a long history in Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church and also existed in the USSR. Putin's xenophobia was evident over a decade earlier than the crisis in his February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference (Putin, 2007). Anti-Western xenophobia does not exist among Ukrainian elites. Ukrainian nationalists are lukewarm but not hostile to the EU and support Ukraine's membership of NATO. Eastern Ukrainian President Kuchma supported NATO enlargement, which was important in facilitating two rounds of enlargement in 1999 and 2004 and he was the first Ukrainian leader to raise the question of Ukraine joining NATO. 7 From 2010 Putin expanded his opposition to Western influence in Eurasia by opposing EU enlargement through the Eastern Partnership. The CIS Customs Union was to be Putin's alternative to the EU's Eastern Partnership. In January 2015, Ukraine led by a re-elected Yanukovych was to have joined the Eurasian Economic Union, as the CIS Customs Union was renamed (Ambrosio, 2017).

A second important difference between Ukraine and Russia was the strength of national communism in the former and its absence in the latter. In this respect, Ukraine is also different to Belarus which similarly does not have a strong national communist tradition. National Bolshevism (a merging of Stalinism and imperial-great power nationalism) has existed in Russia since the late 1930s. Eurasianism and national bolshevism are similar ideologies. National communism has no tradition in Russia where a small pro-Western liberal constituency is dwarfed by a far larger tradition of anti-Western xenophobia. The absence of Russian SFSR republican institutions and the fusion of Soviet and Russian identities meant that national communists had no institutional framework through which they could defend Russian sovereignty vis-a-vis the Soviet centre and ultimately no need to do so as Soviet was the same as Russian. In Belarus, the dominance of a Soviet identity (which was only strong in Ukraine in the Donbas and Crimea) also limited the influence of national communism. Nationalism in Russia has moved from the margins to the centre of policy twice during Putin's lifetime, the first occasion was in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1970s and the second from 2000. Charles Clover (2016, p.287) writes that the ‘emer- gence of a virulent nationalist opposition movement took the mainstream hostage’ in the 2000s. T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347 341

The Eurasianist fantasies of defeated White emigr es led them to become enamoured with Stalin's National Bolshevism which began to look very much like the political programme of Eurasianism (Clover, 2016, p.65). White Russian exiles supporting Eurasianism praised Stalin, just as many Russian emigr es today have a fondness for Putin, and came to drink ‘from the same well’ (Clover, 2016, p.66). Ukrainian nationalist emigr es viewed the Soviet regime as their mortal enemy and four nationalist leaders were assassinated by the Soviet secret services: Symon Petlura (1926, Paris), Yeven Konovalets (1938, Rotterdam), Lev Rebet (1957, Munich), and Stepan Bandera (1959, Munich). Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz (2015) write that Eurasianism is a substitute for de-colonisation because it claims Russia has succeeded in managing ethnic diversity more successfully than Western empires. Even more so, ‘Eurasianism treats Russia not as a colonial power, but as a community which is itself under threat of being colonized by the West’ (Hutchings and Tolz, 2015, p.162). Eurasianism has never had followers among Ukrainian elites, even in regions such as the Donbas and Crimea where there were high levels of Soviet identity. Eurasianism is imbued with anti-Western xenophobia that claims Russian values are superior to European, rejects Western political models, embraces the Mongol-Tatar-Eurasian heritage and provides a new post-Soviet world outlook and identity for Russia's siloviki (security forces). Dugin ‘would plant the seed of European extreme-right theory in the fertile ground of Russia's military nomenklatura, shorn of its status and privilege, and there it began to germinate’ (Clover, 2016, p.205). The siloviki, fired up by Eurasianism and anti-Western xenophobia, were incensed by NATO's bombing of Serbia and that Russia was not being respected as a great power, believing that the West was fomenting colour revolutions in its neighbourhood. As seen in the scandal surrounding the Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal in Britain, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) truly believe they are still at war with the West and that the Cold War did not end in 1991. Dugin has evolved from a Nazi sympathiser in the USSR, member of the Black Hundred Pamyat in the late 1980s, through a variety of nationalist political projects, such as the International Eurasianist Movement, in the 1990s and 2000s to become an influential figure among contemporary Russian elites. Dugin's fan club is in ‘some of the darker recesses of post-Yeltsin Russia’ (Clover, 2016, p.260). His ally Aleksandr Prokhanov, editor of the fascist and anti-Semitic newspapers Zavtra and Den, was the author of the ‘Word to the People’ manifesto of the hard-line August 1991 putsch and State Emergency Committee. He also backed the 1993 red-brown ‘pastiche of contradictions’ parliamentary uprising against Yeltsyn (Clover, 2016, p.209). National communism in Ukraine was a powerful political force from the Russian civil war through to the disintegration of the USSR. The strength of Ukrainian identity and left-wing Ukrainian political parties during the Russian civil war forced Soviet leaders to permit Ukrainians to possess their own republic and agree to a programme of indigenization during the 1920s. Indigenization promoted Ukrainianization which Stalin curtailed in the early 1930s because of the fear that it was bolstering Ukrainian nationalism. During nearly seven decades of the Soviet Union, national communism emerged in Soviet Ukraine during three periods of liberalization in the 1920s, 1960s and second half of the 1980s. During each period the de- mands of national communists condemned Soviet crimes against humanity, including the Holodomor and purges of Ukraine's cultural elites. Such a broad range of demands for the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of elites and millions of peasants murdered by the Soviet regime were never raised by elites in the Russian SFSR.

2. Different national identities

European, North and South American countries had undertaken state and nation building as well as transition to democratization and marketization at different periods of time. In southern Europe and Latin America, the transitions to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s took place long after they had become independent states and built nations. In some cases, such as Spain, national politics were re-organized during the democratic transition to accommodate a multi-national country. In the UK, devolution to Scotland and Wales came with a more flexible understanding of British identity. Ukraine's priorities in the first half of the 1990s during Leonid Kravchuk's presidency were state and nation building with little attention devoted to economic reforms which only began after Kuchma was elected in 1994. A comparison of Ukrainian and Russian state and nation building policies shows different approaches. From 1991, Ukraine had to build most of the institutions required for an independent state, whereas Russia inherited them from the USSR. Russia did not just inherit buildings, equipment and personnel, it also inherited mentalities, working cultures and views of the world. Since 2000, this has become noticeable in the domination of politics, government and the economy by the siloviki and a country that is a militocracy (Kryshtanovskaya and White, 2003). With a militocracy comes the anti-Western xenophobia and Russian imperial-great power nationalism of the Soviet era KGB and military. Although Ukraine has been at war since 2014, the siloviki do not have influence in Ukrainian politics and government and Ukraine will never become a militocracy. Since 1991, Ukraine and Russia have undertaken different nation-building policies and these already had led to a diver- gence in their national identities prior to the 2014 crisis. Ukraine was always a strong supporter of the territorial integrity of post-communist states. Russia was always a revisionist power seeking to reduce the sovereignty of neighbouring states, promoting hybrid warfare in Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in the 1990s, backing Crimean separatism in the mid-1990s and in 2014 its annexation and hybrid warfare in the Donbas. Both houses of the Russian parliament supported territorial claims to the Crimea and Sevastopol throughout the 1990s under Yeltsyn. Each resident in Ukraine on 1 January 1992 was automatically granted citizenship and Ukraine proceeded to build an inclusive civic state. The Crimean question was resolved peacefully by 1998 when its autonomous status was recognised in the Ukrainian and Crimean constitutions. Four out of five Ukrainian presidents (the one exception being Yanukovych) supported similar policies of civic nation-building, affirmative action for the Ukrainian language and promotion of a non-Soviet and 342 T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

Ukrainian historiography. There was little difference in the policies undertaken by Presidents Kuchma and Yushchenko to- wards these three questions. The Russian Federation views itself as the successor to the Tsarist Empire and USSR and Russian elites are unwilling to listen to criticism of Tsarist and Soviet policies towards Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples. This includes an un- willingness to permit critical investigation of ‘blank spots’ in Russian history; this briefly took place in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s but was curtailed under Putin. Ukraine's post-Soviet historiography is viewed by Russian elites as ‘anti-Russian’ and ‘nationalistic.’ Indeed, there is little that Russians and Ukrainian elites can agree upon, as seen in President Dmitri Medvedev's August 2009 open letter to President Yushchenko. Medvedev writes that a ‘Russian threat’ to Ukrainian security ‘does not and cannot exist’ e a quite ironic comment in the light of Russia's military aggression in 2014. President Medvedev wrote: ‘Russian-Ukrainian relations are tested by your administration's review of our general historical framework, glorifi- cation of Nazi collaborators, the exaltation of the role of radical nationalists, and attempts to press the international community in supporting nationalist interpretations of the 1932e1933 famine in the USSR as a ‘genocide against the Ukrainian people.’ There is continued repression of the Russian language in public life, science, education, culture, media, and judicial proceedings' (Kuzio, 2015a, pp. 438e439). A major contrast between Russian and Ukrainian elites in the sphere of nation-building can be found in their attitudes towards Stalin and Stalinist crimes. Medvedev was wrong to blame Yushchenko for politicising the Holodomor by viewing this Stalinist crime as ‘genocide’. This issue has had elite support among all Ukrainian presidents, with the exception of Yanukovych (Kuzio, 2017). De-Stalinization and raising the awareness of the Holodomor began in the Ukrainian diaspora in 1983 on its 50th anniversary, spread to Soviet Ukraine in the second half of the 1980s and received state support from nearly all Ukrainian governments after 1991. Three decades later, 77 percent of Ukrainians believe the Holodomor was a ‘genocide’ against the Ukrainian people (Rating, 2017). Whereas Ukrainians focus on Stalinist crimes in the 1930s and 1940s, the Russian Federation ignores Stalinist crimes and focuses on Stalin who industrialised the USSR and the Generalissimo who won the Great Patriotic War and created a nuclear superpower that the West feared. With far more print media in the Russian language than in Ukrainian and 80 percent of the books sold in Ukraine in the Russian language, Medvedev's unfounded allegations of pressure on the Russian language had nothing to do with reality and all to do with Russian chauvinistic opposition to affirmative action for Ukrainian. Fournier (2002) found that opposition to the growth of the Ukrainian language was correlated less to so-called threats to the Russian language than to the refusal to accept the designation of Russians and the Russian language with ‘minority’ status at the same time as the elevation of Ukrainian as the state language. Russians in the USSR and today, resented being told ‘they were members of the former great power nationality who must make sacrifices on behalf of the formerly oppressed nations’ (Martin, 2001, p.351). Russian and Ukrainian elites do not deliver similar nationality policies to their respective national minorities. Ukraine provided a range of liberal nationality policies for ethnic Russians, Russian speakers and other national minorities which received praise from the OSCE and Council of Europe. These were codified in the Crimean Autonomous Republic. Only 4.8 percent of Ukrainians believe Russian military aggression against their country is due to the violation of the rights of Russian speakersdthe reason Putin gave for Russian intervention in the Crimea (he has always denied Russia's involvement in the Donbas) (Trajectory of the Conflict, 2017). Russia denies the existence of its second largest national minority e Ukrainians e and does not provide them with any federal unit and with no language, educational or cultural facilities. Western studies on Russian national minorities and nationalities policies echo this by ignoring Ukrainians (Prina, 2016). Since 2014, military conflict has served to accelerate Ukraine and Russia's divergence (Motyl, 2015). Four de- communization laws adopted in April 2015 will deepen the gulf between Ukrainian and Russian elites. These laws (1) banned totalitarian (equating Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union) symbols; (2) opened Ukraine's Secret Service archives making them the most accessible in the former USSR outside the three Baltic states; (3) rehabilitated a wide range of ‘fighters’ (they are not dubbed ‘heroes’) for Ukrainian independence; and (4) changed annual celebrations from the Great Patriotic War on May 9 to the end of World War II a day earlier. Criticism of the laws are unfounded, Volodymyr Vyatrovych (2015), head of the Institute of National Memory, believes. The underlying criticism of the four laws rests on similar grounds to that espoused by Russian leaders; namely, it is wrong to place a moral equivalence between Soviet and Nazi crimes. David Marples does not agree in equating Nazi and Soviet crimes against Humanity (Marples and Kuzio, 2018) and together with James Sherr organised an open letter criticizing the de-communisation laws. In 1914e1948, fifteen million Ukrainians died due to ‘excess deaths’ of which 6.5 million were a product of Nazi and 7.5 million Soviet crimes against humanity (Motyl, 2015). Since the Euromaidan Revolution, 1, 500 monuments of Vladimir Lenin have been pulled down primarily in the east and south, city names have been changed (for example, Dnipropetrovsk to Dnipro) and streets with Soviet names were given new names. The Sovietization of Russian politics and de-Sovietization of Ukrainian politics are promoted by ruling elites with very different origins and ideas about national identities and attitudes to the Soviet past (Kryshtanovskaya and White, 2009; Kuzio, 2017). Russia's military aggression has accelerated existing changes in Ukrainian national identity. The proportion of Ukrainians who identify as ethnic Russians has declined from 22 percent in the 1989 Soviet census, 17 percent in Ukraine's 2001 census to only six percent today. Most vividly, Russia's aggression came as a major shock not to western Ukrainians, who never believed Soviet myths of Russian-Ukrainian ‘fraternal brotherhood,’ but Russian speakers in the east and south who viewed Russia's actions as a betrayal (Razumkov, 2016c). The conflict and war forced many Russian speakers to choose which side of the fence T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347 343 they were on and has increased patriotism among Ukraine's Russian speakers. Sixty percent of Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbas are Russian speakers. Eastern and southern Ukraine have suffered the highest military casualties and of these oblasts Dnipro has the largest number (Memory Book, 2018). The civilian and military casualties of Russia's military aggression have been primarily Russian speakers. Russia's nation-building strategies were never comfortable in being confined to the borders of the Russian Federation. In the 1990s, civic nation building within the Russian Federation was one of a number of options considered by Russian elites, but it was always the weakest (Hosking, 1998; Tolz, 2001). Both Yeltsin and Putin believed Russia's recognition as a great power would require it to dominate the former USSR as its sphere of influence. In the 1996 elections, Yeltsin supported a union with Belarus and Putin expanded the range of unionist projects within the CIS. Ukraine under all of its presidents (including Yanukovych until November 2013) held a consensus to maintain the CIS at a distance, Ukraine never ratified the CIS statute (thereby de jure it was never a member), and always opposed integration into CIS political and security structures.

3. Quadruple and imperial-great power transitions

In 1991, Ukraine began a quadruple transition of state and nation building, democratization, and marketization (from 1994). While Russia under Yeltsin undertook the latter two, state building was corrupted by the top down Soviet inheritance and nation building policies were confusing. From 2000, Russia's state capitalism and retreat from democracy towards authoritarianism has led to a radical divergence in the two countries economic policies and levels of democratization. Ukraine's democratization has been relatively consistent throughout its independence since 1991. Freedom House has ranked Ukraine as either ‘Partly Free’ under Kuchma and Yanukovych or ‘Free’ after the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions. Decent into semi-authoritarian hybrid regimes took place during Kuchma's second term and especially under Yanukovych. Nevertheless, during Kuchma's second term, Ukraine's elections, media pluralism and democracy were still relatively free. In the 2002 elections, Yushchenko's party Our Ukraine received a plurality of votes and the pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine (ZYU) came third. During Yanukovych's presidency, Ukraine shifted the greatest towards authoritarianism. Opposition leaders Yulia Tymoshenko and Yuri Lutsenko were arrested and imprisoned on trumped up charges, tactics more commonly seen in Russia and Belarus (Kudelia and Kuzio, 2015; Ambrosio, 2017). Regional diversity makes Ukraine into what Lucan Way describes as ‘pluralism by default.’ It has been impossible for Ukrainian presidents to create a ruling monopolistic party of power, such as United Russia, and most Ukrainian leaders have never attempted to do so. Lazarenko‘s Hromada party received only 4.68 percent in the 1998 elections and after he fled abroad collapsed, with most of its members joining Tymoshenko's Batkivshchina (Fatherland) party. Yanukovych's Party of Regions had more success in creating a vehicle for machine politics and it received first place plurality in the 2006, 2007 and 2012 elections (Kudelia and Kuzio, 2015). But, attempts to impose a Donbas3 political machine on the entire country failed and was one of the causes of the Euromaidan (Ambrosio, 2017). Ukraine is not only not Russia, as Kuchma famously wrote, but the Donbas could never be Ukraine. Ukraine did not begin its transition to a market economy until the election of Kuchma in July 1994. For the remainder of the 1990s, Ukraine undertook a very slow transition to a market economy during which a class of oligarchs emerged. From 2000 to 2008 a growing economy included three periods of reformist governments under Prime Ministers Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. This was followed by stagnation under Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov during which there was a wholesale theft of the state budget. From 2014-2016, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and since then Volodymyr Hroisman have led reformist governments which have introduced stabilisation of a country on the verge of default and long overdue reforms. Henry Hale (2015, p.457) and Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way write that democratic transitions in Latin America and central-eastern Europe were assisted by their denser ties, high linkages and high levels of leverage with the US, OAS (Organisation of American States) and European Union (EU). Because these three factors do not exist in the former USSR, democratization is more difficult and cycles of patronal politics more likely. Color revolutions do not constitute a break- through, ‘but instead a natural and even rather predictable product of patronal presidential systems’ (Hale, 2015, p.180). Color revolutions, ‘do not change the fundamental set of rules (formal or informal) that tend to govern which individuals have access to the most important state positions, how such access is obtained, and how binding state decisions are made’ (Hale, 2015, p.307). Similar to other North American scholars (Way, 2008, 2009; Wolchik and Bunce, 2009), Hale (2015) they downplay the importance of national identity in Russian and Ukrainian politics. Color revolutions and cycles of patronal politics are dis- cussed around elections with a focus upon low popularity and lame duck problems making it difficult to explain the Euro- maidan Revolution which took place outside an election cycle. But, it is impossible to fully explain the timing, durability and success of the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions without bringing national identities into our analysis. Competing nationalisms greatly impacted the Euromaidan Revolution (Kuzio, 2010, 2015b). On one side of the barricades was (externally) Russian imperial-great power nationalism and (internally) its Soviet and pan-Slavic adherents within the Donbas and the Crimea. On the other side of the barricades, a wide coalition of protestors faced them holding pro-European civic patriotic and anti-Russian and anti-Soviet nationalist identities. Russian speakers could be found on both sides of the barricades and within both groups of Ukrainian protestors.

3 Viktor Yanukovych was from the Donbas (comprising Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts). 344 T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

Levitsky and Way (2010) and Hale (2015) books were written before the EU and Ukraine signed the Association Agreement and DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement) in 2014e2015 after the Euromaidan and therefore their analysis does not consider how European integration will impact upon Ukraine and diversify its foreign policy and trade away from Russia. The Eastern Partnership offers only enlargement-lite (Popescu and Wilson, 2009) and integration without mem- bership and therefore lacks the ‘membership carrot’ which was successful in overcoming difficulties experienced by slow reformers Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and other countries in central-eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the three elements of the EU's Eastern Partnership will inevitably impact Ukraine's cycles of patronal politics and widen its divergence from an increasingly authoritarian Russia. The opposition that came to power following the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity prioritised returning Ukraine to parliamentarism, a semi-presidential system where the executive is divided between the government, which is formed by a parliamentary coalition, and the president. Since the adoption of its first post-Soviet constitution in 1996, Ukraine has been under presidential constitutions for 13 years (1996e2004, 2010e2014) and under parliamentary (semi-presidential) con- stitutions when Orange (2004e2010) and Euromaidan revolutionaries (since 2014) have been in power. Ukraine will retain a parliamentary system for two reasons. First, President Yanukovych thoroughly discredited the presidential system. Second, parliamentary systems are associated with democratization and European integration among the 27 post-communist states. Post-communist states with presidential systems do not support European integration and, as defined by Freedom House, eight of them are ‘consolidated’ and one is a ‘semi-consolidated’ authoritarian regime. Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine e the three former Soviet republics undergoing European integration within the Eastern Partnership e are parliamentary systems and ‘semi-consolidated democracies’ (Nations in Transit, 2018). Ukraine's return to a parliamentary system was accompanied by presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014 and local elections the following year which elected a constitutional majority in support of European integration. Meanwhile, the pro- Russian camp that was elected is greatly reduced following the disintegration of the Party of Regions and failure of its suc- cessor, the Opposition Bloc, to win many parliamentary seats. The Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU), a Party of Regions satellite party, failed to cross the threshold to enter into parliament. With the adoption of four de-communization laws, the KPU could no longer participate in elections unless it removed Soviet symbols which it refused to do; it therefore it was banned and could not participate in the 2015 local elections. There are three additional factors that have led to a reduction of the influence of the pro-Russian camp among Ukrainian elites. The first is that 27 single mandate districts and sixteen percent of traditionally pro-Russian voters (who were scep- tically disposed towards Europe) are outside Kyiv's control in Russian occupied Crimea and the two Russian proxy enclaves in the Donbas - DNR (Donetsk Peoples Republic) and LNR (Luhansk Peoples Republic). The second is Russia's military aggression has led to three quarters of Ukrainians holding negative views of Russian leaders. The third is the unpopularity and unac- ceptability among Ukrainians and ruling elites of President Putin's strategic objective of a dysfunctional, ‘Bosnianized’ federal state ruled by a ‘Ukrainian Lukashenka.’ The 2014 crisis represented a clash of sovereignties with Russia at odds with the UN and international law in not viewing Ukraine and most former Soviet states as ‘sovereign’ entities. As the first among equals and seeking the primacy of its own interests, Russian elites are in ‘pursuit of suzerainty’ (Merry, 2016, p.30) whereby a great power exercises control over the external relations of its neghbors while giving internal autonomy to a local satrap. The client state recognises the external suzerain while receiving protection and aid, as in the Belarusian relationship with Russia. The fundamental cause of the 2014 crisis is that, ‘much of the Russian elite is incapable of thinking about Ukraine other than as a suzerain client’ (Merry, 2016, pp.37e38). Ukraine, in Russia's eyes, should be ‘a more reliable satrap’ in the manner of Belarus (Wilson, 2011, p.259). The above developments and the election of young reformers in Ukraine's pro-European parties was accompanied by another important development; that of the growing political maturity of Ukrainian civil society and journalists (Stewart and Dollbaum, 2017). Ukrainians during the Orange Revolution e as Russians continue to do e had faith that the ‘good Tsar’ (Yushchenko) would resolve their problems and deal with the problematic ‘boyars’ (oligarchs). After the revolution, civil society and protestors went home and relaxed. That did not happen after the Euromaidan. Ukrainian and Russian political cultures are fundamentally different over who has sovereignty in their political system. In Russia, it is the macho supreme leader or Tsar (Sperling, 2016). In Ukraine, this culture has evolved since the Orange and Euromaidan Revolutions and the people have twice shown they are the carriers of sovereignty. During the Euromaidan Revolution there were no longer illusions about the president singlehandedly resolving all of the country's problems. Instead, there was a general understanding of the need for civil society and journalists to remain engaged in the policy process, Ukraine's democratization and European integration. Since 2014, civil society has worked hand in hand with Western governments and international organizations to pressure and lobby for reforms, particularly in areas such as the rule of law and corruption where there are the greatest obstacles. For the first time, these domestic and external actors had supporters inside parliament among the new cohort of deputies who came from civil society. Ukraine's parliament elected in 2014 is completely different to that found in Russia where both houses are Putin's rubber stamps institutions. In 2014e2015, the EU and Ukraine completed the signing of the Association Agreement and DCFTA which were followed in 2016 by the introduction of a visa-free regime. The latter will have an important impact on Ukrainian society as even prior to the visa free regime large numbers of Ukrainians were working and travelling to the EU; 1.3 million Ukrainians are officially working and studying in Poland alone (Rozkrut, 2018). In comparison, because of the lack of a visa-free regime there are far fewer Russians and Belarusians working in and travelling to the EU. T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347 345

Since 2014, reforms in Ukraine in general, including those pertaining to parliament, have been taking place within the context of Russia's undeclared war of aggression which continues on a daily basis on the Donbas front line. Russia's aggression is both a stimulant to pursue democratization and European integration as well as an impediment. Countries at war and with conflict zones on their territory are not traditionally invited to join NATO and the EU, two organizations which Ukraine officially seeks membership in. Additionally, the war has generated over 300,000 veterans, who together with their families account for more than 15 percent of Ukrainian voters. This, and the public perception of foot dragging on fighting high level corruption, as reflected in the limited number of criminal convictions, is being capitalized upon by populists and nationalists. While Ukraine still has many reforms to undertake this should not blind us to real progress that has been made since the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. In no other period of Ukrainian history since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 have so many reforms been undertaken in a relatively short period of time. Euromaidan governments have transformed a bankrupt country they inherited into one where Europeanisation is driving profound structural changes. There are five factors to bear in mind when analyzing reforms in Ukraine. First, criticim of President Petro Poroshenko is undertaken based on the misnomer that Ukraine is a presidential republic, which is not the case. In Ukraine, the government is controlled by parliament e not as is often wrongly assumed by the president. Reforms are dependent upon President Poroshenko, parliament and government working together and each sharing responsibility for their progress. This is very different to the five years of incessant squabbling after the Orange Revolution. The US government has been the main Western financial supporter of parliamentary reform in Ukraine for nearly a quarter of a century under the Parliamentary Development Program (PDP) and since 2013, RADA (Responsible Accountable Democratic Assembly). The EU only began to support parliamentary reforms in spring 2016. In February 2016, the European Parliament's Needs Assessment Mission led by Pat Cox published a Roadmap of 52 rec- ommendations for reforming the Ukrainian parliament (European Parliament, 2016). The following month, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a Special Resolution to implement the recommendations in which ‘Ukraine's irreversible course towards European integration’ is recognised as ‘guided by the provisions of the Association Agreement’ (Ukrainian Parliament., 2016). Monnet Dialogues have been held near Paris and Kyiv with European and Ukrainian deputies to discuss and strategize the implementation of these 52 recommendations. Second, Ukraine has established a number of key institutions in the fight against corruption and consolidation of the rule of law. Corruption in government contracts and the energy sector, always high, has been dramatically reduced due to the introduction of a ProZorro on-line system for government contracts, ‘the world's most transparent platform for government spending’ (Manthorpe, 2018). The state gas company Naftohaz Ukrainy, which was traditionally used as a cash cow for presidents and eating up four percent of GDP in subsidies, is now the biggest contributor to the state budget. Savings from the closing of avenues of corruption are estimated to be as high as $6 billion per year (Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting, 2018). Third, de-centralization was launched four years ago and has been successful in transferring powers to local consolidated communities. Power has come with a major growth of local financial resources that are being used to improve the lives of local communities. During Putin's presidency, the Russian Federation has become highly centralized. Fourth, Ukraine has taken strides in gender equality. The proportion of women in the Ukrainian parliament doubled to twelve percent, only seven less than in the US Congress. Gender issues have moved from the margins to the mainstream of Ukrainian political life (Suslova, 2017). Since, 2014, gender equality and gender sensitivity and balance are for the first-time priority areas for pro-European parliamentary factions, many parliamentary committees and civil society organizations and think tanks. Coordination of gender policy in the government has been included within the remit of the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration. Changing public attitudes to women's participation in politics is reflected in an NDI (National Democratic Institute) poll where nearly half of Ukrainians believed there are insufficient numbers of women in parliament and at local government level (National Democratic Institute, 2016). Political parties which will introduce gender quotas in next year's elections will gain votes. 40 of the 52 women deputies are members of the inter-faction Equal Opportunities Caucus with another 13 members drawn from male deputies in the Batkivshchina (5), Poroshenko (5) and Popular Front (3) factions. The Equal Opportunities Caucus held Ukraine's first National Women's conference in November 2017. Fifth, Ukraine has dramatically improved its security forces. Today, it has the best army it has ever had which is primarily equipped with domestically produced weaponry (Wilk, 2017) and from 2018, with US military assistance. The government spends five percent of GDP on defense - which is higher than any of NATO's 29 members, except the US. The Interior Ministry's Militsiya (Militia) have been transformed into a Police force and its Internal Troops into a National Guard. Vox Ukraine's survey of reforms in Ukraine since 2014 also point to progress in cleaning up the banking sector, reforming the National Bank and improving the business environment (Vox Ukraine, 2017). Education and healthcare reform, the latter headed by American-Ukrainian Health Minister Ulana Suprun, has moved forward. Nevertheless, Vox Ukraine report that reforms are slow or still to take place in the judiciary, privatization, and creating a land market. During and after Putin's re-election in 2012 he fully embraced nationalism, ‘conservative values,’ imperialism and xenophobia in what had become a fossilised ‘Brezhnevite regime’ (Judah, 2103, p.179). During the 2014 crisis, Russia evolved from ‘full (consolidated) authoritarianism’ into what some scholars describe as fascism (Motyl, 2016; Inozemtsev, 2017). Marginal Russian nationalist and fascist rhetoric of the 1990s ‘became the standard jargon of state policy a mere decade and a half later’ (Clover, 2016: 315). 346 T. Kuzio / Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347

Russia fits the classification of a fascist regime because it has a ‘popular fully authoritarian political system’ with a personalistic dictator and a cult of the leader. Russia's ‘Tsarist’ political system has an absolute monarch (Putin) as a supreme leader who determines which policies he will adopt. Motyl (2016) lists ten characteristics of a fully authoritarian and fascist political system that exist in Russia:

1 Political institutions: dominant ruling party, rigged elections, rubber-stamp parliament and semi-independent judiciary. 2 Leader: personalistic dictator. 3 World view: state, nation, and leader exaltation. 4 Popular attitudes toward the regime: mass support. 5 Economy: state alliance with oligarchs in a market economy. 6 Opposition: wholly or nearly completely repressed. 7 Civil rights: routinely violated. 8 Coercive apparatus: incorporated within the ruling elite, that is, the siloviki in Russia's militocracy. 9 Propaganda apparatus: large resources. 10 Violence and coercion: targeted violence and widespread coercion.

Fascistic and nationalistic regimes need and thrive by seeking domestic and foreign enemies (Shevtsova, 2014). Putin has plunged Russia into three wars and caused the worst crisis in relations with the West since World War II. The internal enemies of Putin's Russia include a ‘treacherous’ internal opposition in the pay of Western intelligence agencies and Chechen sepa- ratists. Externally, the traditional bogeyman of a perfidious ‘Russophobe’ West, US and EU promotion of democracy, ‘fascist Ukraine’ and Islamic terrorism are the targets. Ukraine is particularly at the brunt of Russia's information war which has made Ukraine second to the US that Russians view as a ‘main threat’ to their country (Kuzio, 2016; Levada Center, 2018). 78% of Russians view the US as hostile towards Russia, 49% view Ukraine as hostle and 38% the UK (Levada Center, 2018).

4. Conclusions

This article has laid out a case that Russian and Ukrainian elites took different paths prior to 2014 and that the crisis has widened their divergence and made the process irreversible. Russian elites have and will continue to wrongly view Ukraine as another ‘Belarus’ because they do not understand Ukraine's internal dynamics. Putin and Russian elites viewed Ukraine wrongly in 2004 and 2014 and it is doubtful they have learnt from these lessons. This article has looked at three sets of criteria when comparing Ukrainian and Russian elites. The first is Russian and Ukrainian elites who took control of independent states in 1991e1992 came from very different Soviet backgrounds. They inherited republics where state building policies were constructed top down in Russia and bottom up in Ukraine. Since 2000, Putin has built a militocracy where the siloviki run Russia. The second analyzed divergent nation-building policies and na- tional identities undertaken by Russian and Ukrainian elites. Russia's imperial-great power nationalism that denies the ex- istence of a Ukrainian nation leaves the only option for Ukrainian elites to follow in the steps of Belarus (or integrate into Europe). If Ukrainian elites were unwilling to accept this option prior to the 2014 crisis it is even more the case that this will be not accepted by them after Russia's military aggression. The third compared two different post-Soviet transitions. Ukraine has undertaken a ‘quadruple transition’ that has experienced stops and starts in the reform process but has witnessed steady progress in the country's European integration since 2014. This was contrasted with economic and democratic regression in Russia under President Putin with what some scholars believe is the transformation of his political system from fully authoritarian into one resembling fascism. Putin's regime feeds off and requires internal and external enemies (Motyl, 2016; Inozemtsev, 2017). By making Ukraine one of Russia's ‘main enemies,’ Putin has ensured that the two countries will continue on their divergent paths thereby precluding reconciliation of their ruling elites and normalization of relations between both countries.

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