December/January 2004-2005

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

The Ukrainian Divide

Keith A. Darden is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and author of The Blackmail State: Ukraine Under Kuchma. This article is reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu). Copyright 2004, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

With the legitimate victory for opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko in the third round of the Ukrainian presidential elections and (hopefully) a peaceful resolution of Ukraine's political crisis, there is a justified sense of euphoria among those who support the peaceful spread of democracy around the world. Yet the clouds of conflict still linger over Central Europe. With the final round of the Ukrainian election revealing an electorate even more divided than in the first round and a deep geopolitical political rift emerging between Russia and the West, many observers have concluded that an old fault line has reappeared in Europe -- a civilizational divide that runs straight down the Dnieper River through the heart of Ukraine. Contrary to the claims of many pundits, "civilizational" divisions had little to do with this election, which was essentially a referendum on a patently criminal government. But after the election, Russian President Vladimir Putin's ill-judged intervention and Western reaction have increasingly polarized Ukraine and nearly turned the country into a battleground between Russia and the West.

Merely a month ago, this fault line seemed a mere chimera -- just recycled old bits of 19th-century propaganda that flew in the face of the facts. Why? Because if a cultural divide separates Russia and the West, Ukraine -- overwhelmingly Orthodox, pro-Russian, and somewhat wary of the West -- falls squarely on one side of it. In 2002, the US State Department surveyed all regions of Ukraine: 85 percent of respondents held a favorable view of Russia, only 5 percent saw Russia as a threat to Ukraine's security. Most strikingly, 60 percent of respondents supported at least a confederal union with Russia and Belarus, and 39 percent thought that Ukraine and Russia should be united in a single state. In contrast, only 24 percent of the respondents expressed any confidence that the United States could deal responsibly with the world's problems -- this, before the invasion of Iraq. Anti-Russian sentiments are certainly pervasive in a few Western provinces, three of which are predominantly Greek Catholic (Uniate); but with less than 15 percent of the population, these provinces would hardly amount to much in a "clash of civilizations."

In short, if those who voted in this past election had seen it as a choice between Russia and the West, there would have been no contest. The pro-Russian candidate, Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich, would have won the election handily. Yanukovich would never have needed to mobilize the Ukrainian state's political muscle to work on his behalf, nor to systematically tar the opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko with biased media coverage, nor to run his car off the road with heavy machinery or poison his food. During the elections, Yanukovich supporters would not have needed to buy votes, to stuff ballots, to run busloads full of supporters through the "carousel" of repeated voting at multiple sites, to illegally expel opposition members of local electoral commissions or, finally, to force the Central Electoral Commission to alter the final count in his favor. Indeed, if this vote were a simple choice between Russia and the West, or a civilizational choice between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Christianity, Yushchenko would have needed to rig the election.

The election itself did not reflect such divides. While Yushchenko surely received the vast majority of the Uniate and nationalist vote in the West, the votes from pro-Russian voters more than doubled that support. Even though it was often a personal risk to vote for the opposition, the simple math reveals that a substantial number of voters who favor confederation with Russia supported Yushchenko. Polls suggest that the majority of Ukraine's Communist Party members voted for Yushchenko in the second round. So much for the civilizational divide.

Yet misreadings often prove contagious, and when the contagion spreads to those in power, those misreadings come to take on a life of their own. In the heated aftermath of this fraudulent election, with clumsy Russian intervention favoring the official candidate, the rhetoric of Yushchenko supporters at home and abroad has begun to displace reality. A referendum on Leonid Kuchma's corrupt government and his handpicked successor has been transformed into a bigger battle. In part, this is because Russia chose to make it one. Having put his reputation on the line by formally endorsing and campaigning with Yanukovich, Putin burned even more bridges by claiming victory even before the votes were counted. He left himself little room to maneuver or retreat, and his deliberate opposition to Yushchenko further polarized matters.

The response by the West, though appropriate, also reinforced the notion of a deep divide. Shortly after Putin's endorsement, US Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that the United States would not recognize the second round of the elections as legitimate. Marek Siwiec, the Polish representative of the European Parliament delegation, went so far as to claim that the vote was more akin to a North Korean than a European election. The result was complete polarization: The Russian elite argued that while the election may have been marred by cheating, both sides were guilty. Further, they suggested that Western-funded groups are agitating to overturn a legitimate victory in favor of their pro-Western nationalist stooge. Western observers, with greater reliance on fact, argue that the electoral process of the first two rounds was flawed and illegitimate, and that the international community cannot accept the result. Yet there is no denying that the West shows much greater interest in such flaws when it is unhappy with the outcome.

This international polarization has both fed and reshaped the political struggle within the country. In part because of Russia's actions, some of the opposition in the street took on a more strident anti-Russian tone, framing the struggle with Yanukovich as a struggle against Moscow -- using the traditional language of the far Western (formerly Austrian) provinces of the country, whose nationalism has never held much appeal in the rest of Ukraine. This, in turn, has fed into the worst fears of Yanukovich supporters in the Eastern oblasts, who have the strongest cultural and economic ties to Russia. They fear that the Western "occupation" of a Yushchenko government will mean the loss of their jobs, their language, and their personal ties to Russia. An election that clearly defied ethnic cleavages was rapidly rewritten in ethnic terms, with new battle lines drawn accordingly. As each faction within Ukraine -- egged on by supporters abroad -- radicalized its position, the result was that the third and final round was the most regionally polarized in the country's history.

And the international struggle for the country is all the more striking given how little there is to fight over, at least materially speaking. Ukraine is a poor, corrupt country with few natural resources. Yet like an acre of land at Verdun during World War II, the importance lies more in the symbolic cache of winning (or not losing) than in the prize itself. For the Kremlin, to "lose" Ukraine now is a potential source of great instability at home -- both because of the failure of its policies and because a democratic Ukraine will make people more likely to believe in the possibility of a democratic Russia. Similarly, Ukraine was the largest recipient of US aid in the region. Its descent into a criminal regime closely allied to Moscow would have undermined the billions of aid dollars devoted to the construction of "a Europe whole and free."

With the stakes so high for all parties, both within Ukraine and abroad, it is all the more remarkable that the crisis has, at least to date, been resolved so peacefully. For that, we surely have the peaceful orange "revolutionaries" to thank. Disciplined and sober, yet festive, and drawing on a new set of symbols that neither threatened nor demonized, they gave us a glimpse of a new type of politics, so fundamentally unlike the "red" and "white" revolutionaries of the region's near and distant past. Let us hope that it becomes the politics of the future.

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