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Russian and Ukrainian Elites: a Comparative Study of Different Identities and Alternative Transitions

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Russian and Ukrainian Elites: a Comparative Study of Different Identities and Alternative Transitions Communist and Post-Communist Studies 51 (2018) 337e347 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Communist and Post-Communist Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/postcomstud Russian and Ukrainian elites: A comparative study of different identities and alternative transitions Taras Kuzio Department of Political Science, ‘National University’ Kyiv 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- Vladimir Putin pendent Russia captured Soviet institutions and undertook top-down state building while Nationalism Ukraine 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 Petro Poroshenko 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 Donbas 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)
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