Postmaidan Ukraine: Middle Class in the Shadow of Reforms

HISTORIA STUDIA WARMIŃSKIE 56 (2019) ISSN 0137-6624 DOI: 10.31648/sw.4315 Olena Aleksandrova1 Department of Philosophy Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University Roman Dodonov2 Department of Philosophy Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University Nataliia Vinnikova3 Department of Philosophy Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University Postmaidan Ukraine: Middle Class in the Shadow of Reforms Słowa kluczowe: społeczeństwo; struktura społeczna; klasy; klasa średnia; ekonomia; poli- tyka; reforma. Keywords: society; social structure; classes; middle class; economy; politics; reforms. Introduction The Revolution of Dignity at the end of 2013 – beginning 2014 embar- ked on a new stage in the history of Ukraine, which was indicated from one side by signing and ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, the Government’s approval of the Action Plan for its imple- mentation, a number of important reforms, and, on the other hand anne- xation of the Crimea and the occupation of a part of Donbas by the Rus- sian Federation. The death of more than 13 thousand members of the armed forces and civilians during the conflict, the loss of industrially de- 1 Olena Aleksandrova, Department of Philosophy, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Marshala Tymoszenko St. 13-b, 04212, Kyiv, Ukraine, [email protected], https://orcid.org/0000- 0003-0030-1367. 2 Roman Dodonov, Department of Philosophy, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Marshala Tymoszenko St. 13-b, 04212, Kyiv, Ukraine, [email protected], https://orcid.org/0000-0003- 1598-499X. 3 Nataliia Vinnikova, Department of Philosophy, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Mar- shala Tymoszenko St. 13-b, 04212, Kyiv, Ukraine, [email protected], https://orcid. org/0000-0002-5162-4150. 440 Olena Aleksandrova, Roman Dodonov, Nataliia Vinnikova Historia veloped regions, the emergence of 1.5 million internally displaced persons – all this negatively affected the country’s social and economic development in the postmaidan period, including the status of the national middle class. It is a widely accepted thesis that the middle class is a key to social and political stability of society. The effectiveness of democratic transfor- mations depends on its quantity and quality; it is the middle class that is a social base for many of the reforms that are taking place in modern Ukraine. After all, representatives of the middle class in their value advantages are oriented towards a market economy, competition and pri- vate ownership. The socio-demographic structure of the Ukrainian middle class in general is consistent with the perceptions of the middle class in developed countries – according to age and educational indicators. Its core is 12–15% of the population. Moreover, there are layers on the periphery of the middle class, the representatives of which do not correspond to all, but only to one or several criteria for enrollment in the middle stratum. We call these people a potential middle class, it constitutes almost 35% of the population. 31% of respondents referred themselves to the lower class, a bit more than 1% to the higher one. Among the middle class, the five largest groups are distinguished: specialists (36% of the whole middle class), skil- led workers (15%), entrepreneurs (11%), managers (10%), pensioners (9%) (Razumkov Center, 2016, p. 34). The specificity of the middle class in Ukraine consists in the fact that it has inherited from the Soviet social structure relatively high dependen- ce of its representatives on the state. Among them there is too miniscule part of the owners – entrepreneurs, farmers and tenants. The overwhel- ming majority is made up by workers and persons who are dependent on the society or their families (pensioners, pupils, students). It makes the middle class of Ukraine extremely sensitive to the economic and political situation, vulnerable to crises and dependent on the situation in the labor market (availability of jobs and labor price). All these factors “activated” after the events of 2013/14, which led to certain changes in the national middle class. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to identify the leading tenden- cies of the middle class transformation in postmaidan Ukraine and to identify the factors that affect them. Postmaidan Ukraine: Middle Class in the Shadow of Reforms 441 Studia Warmińskie 56 (2019) Presentation of basic material of the research The following Ukrainian scientists are conducting research on gene- sis specifics of the middle class in modern Ukrainian society: O. Aleksan- drova, S. Brodska, V. Burega, S. Oksamytna, О. Kutsenko, V. Savchuk, О. Symonchuk, Е. Libanova, S. Makeiev and others. The characteristic features of the social-class structure in a transformation society are analyzed by the following scholars of the CIS countries: Е. Avraamova, А. Avtonomov, L. Beliaeva, Z. Holenkova, M. Horshkov, S. Horiunova, H. Dylyhenskyi, T. Zaslavska, А. Zdravomyslov, V. Inozemtsev, Yu. Leva- da, N. Tykhonova, О. Shkaratan. The factors of development and the cau- ses of decline of the classical middle class in Western society, as well as the methodological foundations of its study can be found in the works of the following Western scholars: T. Batler, M. Savage, L. Corey, K. Eder, M. Gordon, P. Hutber, I. Kraus, D. Lockwood, G. Marshall, C. Mills, K. Slomczynski, E. Wraght. The mechanism of social classes formation is presented in the works of O. Kutsenko (Kutsenko, 2006). In general terms, the process of beco- ming the middle class as a social one subordinates to the laws of self-organization of social systems – which is partly described by N. Luhmann (Luhmann, 2012) and E. Giddens (Giddens, 2009), among which the basic ones are: – striving for distinguishing (or making identities, oppositions, hie- rarchies and alternatives, which is possible due to the action mechanisms of reflection and self-description); – striving for designating (or symbolical legitimizing the distinctions made through nominations, expectations and the system of rules); – striving for reproducing and restoring differences on the basis of continuous reflexive monitoring of social actions “self” and “others”; – production of cooperative effects of actions on the distinction, desi- gnation, reproduction and restoration, leading to the formation of social relations and the structuring of the society. Consequently, the most important mechanisms of classes formation are: 1) awareness of the individuals of their “social self”; 2) striving for realizing their activity and structural potential; 3) available and at the same time mobile structural limitations of actions (Kutsenko, 2002). If the presence of the middle class as an element of the social structure in Ukraine is beyond doubt, then the process of its formation as an in- tegral social community is far from being complete. Firstly, the current middle class is a kind of “crossroads” of mobility, when the most intense movements in the society occur either within the 442 Olena Aleksandrova, Roman Dodonov, Nataliia Vinnikova Historia middle stratum or between them and other sectors of society. Hence there are the difficulties with attempts to clearly capture the boundaries of the middle class, since they are mobile and changing. Secondly, in these conditions, the groups and layers that make up the middle class are rather heterogeneous both in social origin and in the place in the system of social labor division. The formation of the Ukrainian middle class is taking place not so much due to the influx of new people, but due to the adaptive abilities of its representatives. Therefore, today in Ukraine, the middle class, on the one hand, is very mobile, and on the other hand, it is a conglomerate of such socio-professional groups whose interests are difficult to reconcile under the current conditions, to bring to a “common denominator’. In addition, the factors of rather high territo- rial and settlement differentiation are imposed on various occupational interests. Almost half (46%) of the middle class are specialists and managers – in other words the intellectuals. At the same time, only a part of the former Soviet intelligentsia succeeded in adapting successfully to new social realities by entering the post-Soviet middle class. Adaptation of the former nomenclature (managers) was significantly more successful: former managers more often found themselves in post-Soviet management, and in busi- ness. Only 28% of Ukrainian specialists can be classified as middle class, while among managers this figure is 39% (Razumkov Center, 2016, 45). There is one more important condition in this context. In Ukraine, for many people, especially in the upper strata of the middle class, the path to success was not due to the accumulation of knowledge, professiona- lism, which in the civilized world is recognized as the main resource of the middle class, but due to the proximity to “large” money, contacts. The impossibility of realizing by the majority of representatives of the middle class their social requests blocks the formation of a stable social model of behavior. In the middle class there are no obvious signs of forming group identity in terms of the growth of self-organization level. The main problem of self-identification is the gap between the real state of things and striving of most Ukrainians to belong to the middle class. And the main threat of self-organization of the middle class is the low level of needs in legal and legitimate channels of defending their own interests, everyone relies on his own resources and inner circle. It is also necessary to agree with the authors’ research (Razumkov Center, 2016, p. 53) that the representatives of the Ukrainian middle class are building their social class identity based on three foundations: first, partial identification with the wealthy strata of the Soviet era (when the symbol of well-being was the posses- Postmaidan Ukraine: Middle Class in the Shadow of Reforms 443 Studia Warmińskie 56 (2019) sion of “flat-car-dacha”); secondly, comparing oneself with the normative model of the Western middle class on the basis of education, qualifica- tions, but not welfare, and thirdly – separating oneself from the “higher class” (“oligarchs”) and removing from the lower one.

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