Yitzhak M Brudny & Evgeny Finkel. East European Politics and Societies. Volume 25, Issue 4, September 2011.
Collective identity is a catchy and popular concept, invoked by scholars to describe a wide range of phenomena from the fate of Empires, regional autonomy movements, social movements to international relations and foreign policy. However, could it be useful, as a variable, in explaining such crucial contemporary political process as democratization? We argue it can and will try to demonstrate the impact of national identity in explaining Russian and Ukrainian diverging post-communist paths.
In August 1991, after the failed coup attempt, there were high hopes that Russia and Ukraine, like the countries of Central Europe, would be able to establish Western-style democracy and a functioning market economy. By the beginning of the 21st century, it became clear this hope would not be achieved in Russia. Even though the Russian regime preferred to call itself “managed” and more recently a “sovereign democracy,” it was clear to all objective observers that the country increasingly exhibited the primary features of a competitive authoritarian regime, namely, an overbearing executive branch, the absence of an independent judiciary, weak rule of law, elections heavily skewed in favor of the incumbent presidents and parties, an absence of free media (especially television), widespread corruption, feeble enforcement of property rights, and the heavy concentration of wealth in the hands of few individuals with close links to the government.
The Ukrainian case turned out to be far more complex. During the presidencies of Kravchuk (1991-1994) and, especially, Kuchma (1994-2004), Ukraine represented a hybrid regime similar in many respects to that of Yeltsin and early Putin’s Russia. Yet Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (December 2004), triggered by an attempt of the ruling administration to crudely falsify election results, certainly signaled a rejection, by a significant part of Ukrainian society and its political elite, of the Russian path of creeping authoritarianism and the desire for Ukraine to adopt the Central European path of development. By 2010, after several free and fair post-Orange Revolution parliamentary and presidential elections, one can argue that Ukraine is moving, although not without serious problems and setbacks, toward a Central European rather than Russian model of government.
There is a burgeoning literature that looks at the differences between Russia and Ukraine by concentrating on parties, formal state institutions, privatization policies, and economic choices. At the same time, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the dimension of national identity in explaining the different outcomes. This article argues that national identities do matter in explaining democratic versus authoritarian outcomes. To be more precise, we argue that the presence or absence of nondemocratic hegemonic national identity can play a major role in the choice of a democratic versus an authoritarian path of development.
Thus, post-communist Russia’s slide toward authoritarianism was to an important degree an outcome of an existing hegemonic nondemocratic national identity that limited the identity choices available to political actors. In post-communist Ukraine, on the other hand, no hegemonic nondemocratic national identity emerged. Instead, several competing notions of national identity existed with no side strong enough to monopolize power and to impose its views and visions of national identity on the society as a whole. This situation resulted in an intense public discussion on the issue followed by the adoption of much more democratic, inclusive, and tolerant notions of Ukrainian identity by a considerable part of the political elite and the general public. This choice was a crucial catalyst for the democratic breakthrough in 2004. In other words, our argument stresses the path-dependent nature of post-Soviet politics of identity choices and their consequences for democracy.
We will elaborate this argument in the following fashion. First, we will define the notion of national identity. Second, we will argue that the institutional design of Soviet federalism played an important role in shaping national identity in the Soviet republics. Third, we will show that the imperial notion of Russian national identity was at the core of the political identity of the majority of Russians, in general, and of members of the Russian nationalist movement, in particular. On the other hand, anti-Russian and, as a consequence, anti-imperial and pro-Western sentiments were the constituting motifs of the Ukrainian national movement. Fourth, we will argue that the core beliefs that constituted the late communist era Russian liberal identity—an uncritical admiration of Western democracy and the market economy and a belief in the primacy of economic reforms—led Russian liberals to dismiss the importance of the pivotal question of national identity and focus exclusively on devising strategies for Russia’s economic transformation. We will also show that in Ukraine, unlike Russia, the core beliefs that constituted the late communist and post-communist era liberal identity concentrated mainly on democratic political values and national self-identification and much less on economic issues.
There are three main theoretical implications resulting from this line of argument. First, choices of national identity profoundly affect the prospects of democracy in the newly democratizing states. Second, institutions do shape identities and can even make them hegemonic. Finally, elites’ preference for (or opposition to) liberal democracy is not simply a consequence of their understanding of their own self-interest in gaining and preserving political and economic power but is also dependent to a significant extent on their choices of political identity.
Institutions, Elites, and Identities
In the literature on nationalism, the concept of national identity is frequently used but very rarely defined. Yet in the field of democratization studies, collective identity, in general, and national identity, in particular, are missing variables. Instead, rational choice institutionalist, elite, and societal explanations predominate.
We define national identity as a particular form of collective identity, which socio-logists define as “a set of attitudes, commitments, and rules for behavior—that those who assume the identity can be expected to subscribe to.” The nation is a political form of group solidarity based on jointly held beliefs that the group’s origins, territory, language, history, culture, and political or religious creed make it distinct from any other social groups. Thus, national identity is a set of attitudes, beliefs, and commitments regarding qualifications for membership, the location of territorial boundaries, and the content of political, social, economic, and cultural arrangements that are best suited for the given nation. National identity could be supportive of a civic or ethnic conception of citizenship, imperial or nonimperial territorial boundaries, democratic or authoritarian forms of government, Western or non-Western culture, and a market or nonmarket economy. At the same time, one should add that, like nations, national identities are invented, and are subject to change and contestation. In the process of state and nation building, some notions of national identity can achieve hegemonic status; namely, they become deep-seated, unquestioned (although not irreversible) beliefs, which constitute “the natural order of things for the overwhelming majority of the population whose political behavior is relevant to outcomes in the state.”
Following Abdelal and his collaborators, the article will concentrate on two dimensions of identity—content and contestation. Content is defined as the core values, beliefs, modes of political and social behavior, and policy preferences, prescribed by a particular identity. Contestation refers to the status of the national identity, its acceptance by the society and the elites, existence of competing understandings of identity’s content, and attempts to reformulate the dominant ones. Identity is always subject to in-group contestation, but in some cases the contestation level is extremely low. In such cases, an identity (or, more precisely, its content) becomes hegemonic.
This brings us to the question of the role of institutions and elites in the formation of national identity. As our next section shows, the institutional design and institutional practices of the Soviet state played a decisive role in molding Russian and Ukrainian national identity, both on the elite and mass levels. However, in transitional societies marked by institutional fluidity, elites have substantially more freedom both to design institutions and to shape national identities than in a nontransitional setting. In such situations, the elites may attempt to do away with the existing hegemonic concepts of identity, which might be detrimental to their political projects. In a context where hegemonic identity does not exist, elites can make a strategic choice of one of the available identities capable of providing normative support for their policy objectives. Yet in both cases the choices of new identity available to political actors in the post-communist period are not unlimited since, as Smith points out, “pre-existing senses of identity, interests, and ideas . . . set very substantial boundaries to the senses of peoplehood leaders can advance successfully.” At the same time, as the definition of the concept suggests, adoption of an identity imposes on its bearers a set of political commitments. In short, the adoption of a national identity is both a constrained choice and a choice that defines the goals political actors pursue.
The Institutional Legacy of Soviet Federalism
Speaking about the USSR, Brubaker notes that “no other state has gone so far in sponsoring, codifying, institutionalizing, even (in some cases) inventing nationhood and nationality on the sub-state level, while at the same time doing nothing to institutionalize them on the level of the state as a whole.” This practice was a consequence of the ethno-territorial principle of Soviet federalism. In part, it was a concession to the nationalist forces on Russia’s periphery that the Bolsheviks needed to co-opt during the bloody civil war and was also derived from Stalin’s definition of nationality, according to which nation was “a historically constituted, stable community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture.” The most crucial element among these defining components of the nation was territory. This led to a unique Soviet conception, later to be imitated in Tito’s Yugoslavia and Mao’s China, according to which each territory was said to have a “core” or “titular” nation (korennaya natsiya). The territory served as the national home of and for the particular core nation, irrespective of its actual percentage of the population of the given territory. Union republics (with the exception of the Russian Republic, hereafter RSFSR) had all the symbolic attributes of independent states: constitutions, flags, anthems, state languages, communist parties, councils of ministers (including ministries of foreign affairs), parliaments, radio and television channels broadcasting in national languages, unions of writers, moviemakers, painters and composers, national libraries, museums of national history, and Academies of Sciences. Ukraine, alongside Belorussia, even had a seat at the United Nations General Assembly.
In Ukraine, these policies and a “quasi-state” status allowed for the creation and development of a nationally conscious political and bureaucratic elite, as well as the preservation and cultivation of a Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia. The roots of this process can be traced back to the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s. However, contrary to the Russian situation described below, no hegemonic notion of Ukrainian identity emerged by the end of the communist era. This was a consequence of the specific nature of Ukrainian nation building. In the 1920s and 1930s, the time most crucial for the formation of contemporary Ukrainian national identity, the Soviet government did not have a monopoly on the shaping of a Ukrainian national identity since a significant section of the Ukrainian population lived in what is known today as “Western Ukraine,” then part of the independent Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian states. It was in the Habsburg Empire and interwar Poland where West Ukrainian national identity was shaped and political and paramilitary organizations dedicated to imposing that identity on all Ukrainians were established.
Western Ukraine was fully incorporated into the USSR only in the aftermath of World War II. Clearly, Soviet rule and institutions had an impact on the region, but the political and social legacy of pre-communist times, the hardships of Soviet rule, and the legacy of the years-long armed struggle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) against the Soviets assisted in preserving the main features of the original Western Ukrainian identity, such as the desire for independence, the use of Ukrainian language, and strong anti-communist feelings. As in the Baltic States and Central Europe, forty years of communist dominance proved to be too short a period to alter the preexisting identity patterns. Furthermore, in the post-World War II period, the Kyiv-based members of the intellectual and social elites increasingly adopted this Western Ukrainian identity as Ukrainian national identity. However, outside Western Ukraine and Kyiv, a significant number of Ukrainians did not identify themselves with this form of Ukrainian identity. The most developed areas, the industrial East and South Ukraine, which dominated the republic’s political and economical life during the Soviet era, had belonged to the Russian Empire for centuries and to a large extent were Russified. Here, what might be called an Eastern Ukrainian identity was developed. This identity did not assign great importance to Ukrainian language, ethnicity, anti-Russian sentiments, or national independence. Thus, according to a 2003 survey, Ukrainian was the preferred language of only 15.5 percent and 7.7 percent of the respondents in Southern and Eastern Ukraine, respectively, but of 95 percent in the West. Attitudes toward unification with Russia also exposed a deep divide between regional identities: in Eastern and Southern Ukraine unification enjoyed the support of 50 percent and 35 percent, respectively, while in Western Ukraine only 7 percent of the respondents supported the proposition. However, one should not confuse the Eastern Ukrainian identity with a Russian one. As we will demonstrate in the following sections, this East-West contestation over the content of the national identity is the defining feature of contemporary Ukraine’s politics.
The shaping of Russian national identity had a very different trajectory. As Tolz points out, since the eighteenth century Russians began to view the Russian Empire as a Russian nation-state. By 1917, this conception of Russia had been for at least a century a hegemonic one. The Soviet policy of the institutionalized ethnicity as it was applied to ethnic Russians only reinforced this view. To counteract the centrifugal forces of institutionalized ethnicity, Soviet nationality policy assigned to ethnic Russians the role of what might be called the imperial glue of the Soviet state, making it, as Suny rightly points out, a Russocentric empire. Even though Russians were the largest ethnic group, they could not claim any of the union republics as their own national home. Contrary to all other union republics, the RSFSR was not the republic of and for Russians even though ethnic Russians constituted approximately 82 percent of the republican population. It was a mixed federation of fifty-seven territorial and thirty-one ethno-territorial units (sixteen autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, and ten autonomous districts) of various non-Russian ethnic groups. Moreover, contrary to the other union republics, the RSFSR did not have its own anthem, communist party, ministry of foreign affairs, or television channel. Although it had its own writers union (only since 1957), it was not permitted to create its own national library or academy of sciences. While Russian nationalists, and later Yeltsin, claimed that this institutional structure was clearly designated to discriminate against Russia, the opposite was in fact true. It was an institutional device created to encourage ethnic Russians to view the entire Soviet Union as their own nation-state. The policy was to deliberately blur Russian and Soviet identity and promulgate the belief that (to paraphrase the words of the very popular Soviet-era song) “their address was not the RSFSR but the whole Soviet Union.”
In summary, the Soviet policy of ethno-territorial nation building created a situation in which “everybody was a Soviet citizen but no one was a Soviet national.” On one hand, it yielded the institutional preconditions for imperial breakdown by developing nations and national political and administrative elites in the non-Russian union republics. At the same time, by blurring the Russian and Soviet identities, it reinforced the imperial character of Russian national identity that essentially blended Russian and Soviet into one. In fact, one can argue that the institutional design and policy of the Soviet state over decades reinforced the hegemonic nature of this imperial identity as far as ethnic Russians were concerned.
Nationalism and Identity Politics
One of the distinctive features of nationalist movements, in general, is their excessive preoccupation with the issue of national identity. As we saw in the previous section, the Soviet state defined nations in ethnic terms and went to great lengths to institutionalize these definitions. While accepting this ethnic definition, Russian nationalists, like most ethnic Russians, accepted the imperial hegemonic conception of the territorial boundaries of the Russian nation as well. Russian nationalists also actively opposed the introduction of democracy, a market economy and Western social and cultural models in Russia on the grounds that these institutions were alien to Russia. During the Gorbachev era, this perception led Russian nationalists to support the conservative forces within the Soviet political elite who opposed the democratization process and were ready to defend the empire through the use of force. In the post-1991 period, Russian nationalists clung to the old imperial conception of Russian national identity. This conception denied any legitimacy to the political and economic principles of Western liberal democracy. As a prominent Russian nationalist intellectual stated in 2001, the “Western form of democracy breeds in Russia only conditions of clannishness and corruption.” The failed task of preserving the empire was replaced with the goal of its restoration. Russia’s borders were declared as artificial and illegitimate legacies of the Soviet era. In language strikingly resembling the rhetoric of Slobodan Milošević, Russian nationalists referred to the reunification of the entire Russian nation (in which they include Belarusians and Ukrainians) and its historic lands in the Greater Russian state.
One can reasonably question whether this imperial conception of Russian national identity was popular in the post-communist period or resonated among the political elite. As we will show below, public opinion surveys consistently show the strength of illiberal, imperial, and xenophobic notions of Russian identity that bear a striking resemblance to nationalist notions of Russia’s identity. Moreover, these ideas were embraced, partly or wholesale, by the members of the ruling elite and its main political organization, the United Russia party. In the case of the ruling elite, the embrace of nationalist notions of identity became particularly noticeable in the rhetoric of Putin and his subordinates who blamed the adoption of the Western liberal principles for the political chaos of the 1990s, openly expressed regret over the dissolution of the USSR, and accused the West of attempts to undermine Russian national interests by expanding the NATO alliance to the territory of the former Soviet Union or fomenting “colored” revolutions in the region.
Moreover, the ruling elite’s periodic search for a nonliberal ideological doctrine with mass popular appeal led to an open attempt to recruit leading Russian nationalist intellectuals to promote its cause. Such was the internet-based “Russian Project” (Russkiy proekt) of Putin’s United Russia that functioned during the 2007-2008 election cycle. The project creator, United Russia youth wing leader Ivan Demidov, openly stated that “United Russia is ready to revive the terms of nationalism, nation, and [ethnic] Russian.” To make such a statement credible, Demidov did not hesitate to invite leading Russian nationalist intellectuals to contribute programmatic articles to the project, thus granting semiofficial legitimacy to their ideas. While the project was folded after the completion of the 2007-2008 election cycle, it was a clear indication of the ruling elite’s willingness to consider Russian nationalist intellectuals as its political allies in the ideological battle against proponents of liberal democracy.
In Ukraine, as in Russia, nationalist forces were also preoccupied with issues of national identity. However, this preoccupation was of an entirely different nature. At the heart of post-communist Ukrainian politics is a clash between two competing visions of national identity—one Western Ukrainian, centered on Ukrainian language and culture and European in its self-perception and orientation, and the other Eastern Ukrainian, Russian speaking and Russia (culturally and politically) oriented. The strongholds of the Eastern Ukrainian identity are the most populous and industrial Eastern and Southern areas of Ukraine. In other words, the conflict is between Western and Eastern conceptions of Ukrainian identity and the political agencies that promote them. However, this dichotomist (and widely accepted) view of Ukrainian society disregards the existence of a large group of bilingual or Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians, concentrated mostly in the central regions of Ukraine. Caught in between two divergent conceptions, this group failed to articulate its own vision of national identity and initially allied itself mostly with the Eastern Ukrainian camp. However, since the beginning of the millennium, and especially the Orange Revolution, the preferences of this group clearly have shifted toward the West, incorporating many essential components of the Western Ukrainian national identity, though not all of them.
Unlike Russian nationalism, Western Ukrainian nationalism, confronted by competing identity content and unable to achieve dominance, was forced to evolve from its ethnic, authoritarian, exclusionist and xenophobic roots to become much more liberal, democratic, inclusive, and civic in its nature. Except for some marginal and anti-Semitic radical groups, proponents of the Western Ukrainian version of Ukrainian identity were mainly concerned with the defense of the Ukrainian language, culture, statehood, and the existence of the Ukrainian nation when faced with what was perceived as an irredentist Russian threat. In addition, like many other nationalist discourses, Ukrainian nationalism emphasized the unprecedented suffering of the Ukrainian people. The famine of 1932-1933, the Holodomor, is regarded by nationalists as the most tragic event of Ukrainian history. During the Soviet era, the Holodomor was one of the historical “blank spots,” and its mere existence was for decades a top secret. Since the late 1980s, the contrasting visions of this tragic event sharply divided Ukrainian society between those who sought democratization on one hand and the adherents of communist rule on the other. The Ukrainian national-democrats argued that the famine was a deliberate Moscow-orchestrated genocidal action against the Ukrainian people while their opponents denounced the claim that the disaster was ethnically motivated. The Holodomor swiftly became a powerful weapon in the hands of those who fought for Ukrainian independence.
Although the Holodomor is one of the most important components of the nationalist vision of Ukrainian identity, it nonetheless failed to achieve a similar status in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. Another event that significantly influences the nationalist ideology and plays an important part in contemporary Ukrainian identity is the disastrous accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Both the Holodomor and the Chernobyl disaster are perceived by the national-democrats as Moscow-inflicted tragedies, treating Ukraine as a colonial territory, the population and resources of which may be exploited and even physically destroyed by the ruthless imperial center.
The Ukrainian cultural and ecological societies that appeared during the perestroika period turned out to be the stronghold of pro-democratic activity. Like their counterparts in Central European countries, in their bid to uncover the historical truth and to alert the world to the disastrous ecological situation in the country, these groups severely undermined the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, thus promoting political reforms and further independence.
Striving to protect the Ukrainian people, language, and culture and Ukraine’s natural environment from Russia, many Ukrainian political activists followed the slogan coined in the 1920s by the writer Khivl’yovyi that urged Ukrainians to move “away from Moscow” while embracing the “psychological Europe.” An additional consequence of this “negative self-identification” was a total rejection of what was identified as a Russian, Asiatic, and barbaric way of life and autocratic political values. For Western Ukrainian national identity, points out Kuzio, Russia plays the role of “Ukraine’s constituting ‘other.’” Unlike in Russia, the main champions of the Ukrainian national cause during the Gorbachev era—the Ukrainian Helsinki Union, the Lion Society, the Ukrainian Language Society, and the Rukh movement—were composed mainly of a Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia from Galicia and Kyiv, and like their counterparts in the Baltic, they adopted a liberal-democratic, pro-Western, and anti-communist ideology.
Although negative self-identification, that is, the desire not to be like authoritarian Russia, played an important role in the struggle for democracy and independence throughout Eastern and Central Europe, after the goal of independence was secured, additional components of national identity were needed. State building requires symbols, constituting myths and heroes. In Ukraine, the constituting myths used by the nationalist forces were the Cossack “warrior democracy,” the Austro-Hungarian legacy of Galicia, and the short-lived Ukrainian independent state in 1917-1920. Being unlike Russia in the late twentieth century meant, throughout post-communist Europe, Ukraine included, adopting democratic values and a pro-Western orientation. Nationalists, mostly from ex-Austro-Hungarian Galicia, adopted the “Return to Europe” slogan, as a counterweight to the supposedly Asiatic nature of Tsarist Russia and the USSR. The main goal of this ideology was to present Ukraine as an integral part of Central Europe, sharing common culture, history, and values with Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and even Austrians and Germans. To reinforce this claim, it was also argued that the geographical center of Europe is located on Ukraine’s territory. The argument of belonging to Europe went hand in hand with the emphasis on the revival of the Ukrainian language and culture, which were presented as expressing the democratic worldview of the Ukrainian people.
Economics vs. Politics in Reform Process
Many theories have been developed to account for the rise in popularity of nonliberal concepts of identity and the political movements based on such concepts in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that in the case of Russia, liberalism bears a significant share of the blame for the rise in popularity of illiberal conceptions of identity because of its failure to develop a conception of a liberal national identity of its own.
Like their nationalist rivals, the liberals’ political identity was shaped by their Soviet experience. As we argued above, the official policy of blurring Soviet and Russian identities was at the core of the hegemonic imperial Russian identity. Russian liberals never challenged this notion of Russian identity. This inability to see any contradiction between the principle of the Russocentric empire and democracy was one of the main weaknesses of liberalism in Russia and would play a significant role in its failure as a political force in the post-communist period.
The fundamental difference between nationalists and liberals on the national identity issue was that while the nationalists viewed the USSR as not Russian enough, the liberals viewed it as not Western enough. The liberals were not blind to the reality that almost 50 percent of the Soviet population was not ethnically Russian and that the non-Russian elites were increasingly resentful of Soviet nationality policies. However, liberals viewed the root of the Soviet nationality problem to be the communist political and economic regime, not the principle of the Russocentric empire itself, and argued that the destruction of this regime would finally resolve the nationality problem.
As Waisman argues, national identities “are relational, i.e., they are defined in relation to (and very often in explicit contrast with) external collectivities.” In fact, it is often easier to define identity negatively rather than positively. Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and, as we showed, Ukrainian liberals could define themselves in terms of not belonging to the Russian community, and through the cultivation of anti-Russian sentiments. Russian liberals, however, could not define themselves in anti-Russian terms. The only meaningful form of negative self-identification available to them was anti-communism.
This fundamental view shaped the strategy of Russian liberals during the period of Gorbachev’s reforms. Initially, the liberals strongly supported Gorbachev’s goal of reforming communism. As the reform process deepened, so rose the expectations of Russian liberals. From 1989 on, they were no longer content with reforming the regime but increasingly more loudly demanded its abolition.
Too weak to bring down communism by themselves, Russian liberals sought to create a wide anti-communist social movement fashioned on the model of Polish Solidarity and other successful anti-communist movements in Central Europe. This social movement was created in 1990 and bore the name Democratic Russia. The movement dodged the issue of national identity entirely, focusing instead on the questions of political and economic reform. Here the answer was very clear: Western-style democracy and market economy constituted the solution to Russia’s problems.
Anti-communism and markets were also the basis of the alliance between the Democratic Russia liberals and Boris Yeltsin, a populist politician, whose acceptance of the principles of liberal democracy and market capitalism had been instrumental and tied intrinsically to his own political fortunes. Bonded by a common hatred of communism, this alliance was instrumental in the destruction of the communist regime and subsequent dismantling of the USSR, even though the latter was neither Yeltsin’s nor the liberals’ explicit goal.
Their role in bringing down the communist regime marked the high point of popularity of the liberal movement in Russia. The two post-communist decades were marked by a precipitous decline of the Russian liberal movement as an influential force in Russian politics.
The weakness of Russian liberalism in the post-communist period is primarily rooted in Russian liberals’ belief that a successful transition to a Western-style market economy was the most important goal of the liberal movement. However, liberalism that views the establishment of the liberal economic order as a panacea for all political and social ills of communism is unlikely to succeed because, as Kolankiewicz points out, “it is difficult enough to mobilize society on the promise of greater inequality let alone admit that it will be inherently unjust and will consign one-third of its citizens to social redundancy.” Moreover, as Smith suggests, successful political elites use an identity narrative (“ethically constitutive story” in his terms) as a means of gaining the trust of their constituencies and to generate among them the sense that following them would yield benefits of one type or another. The narrative about identity, unlike promises of economic prosperity, is harder to discredit since it is difficult to verify its accuracy in empirical terms. Furthermore, “these sorts of narratives can provide leaders with the best possible insurance policy against losing support amidst the inevitable ups and downs of material fortunes.” This leads Smith to the conclusion that “we should expect most political leaders to choose to give a suitable ethically constitutive story some place in their people-forming political projects, everywhere and always; and sometimes primary place.” Finally, appeals to promarket components of national identity may serve as “ideological reinforcement mechanism” to economical reforms. As Appel shows, in the Czech Republic an emphasis on the “return to Europe” was consciously articulated during the period of economic transition and contributed to the ultimate success of market reforms.
Russian liberals, however, failed to develop such a narrative about national identity as the “insurance policy against bad times” despite the fact that such a narrative could have been constructed. In effect, they did the opposite. By focusing their narrative on the power of the market economy to raise living standards, the liberals invited people to judge them in terms of their ability to deliver economic prosperity. When economic reform brought a sharp deterioration in the living conditions of the majority of Russians, liberals justified its continuation on the grounds that the reform would ultimately succeed in creating living conditions better than those that had existed under the communist regime. “We need radical economic reform in order to live like in [Western] Europe,” declared an electoral slogan of the Union of Right Forces. When the reform failed to deliver the promised prosperity for the majority of Russians, the liberals lost the very ground of popular support they counted on. The result was a resounding defeat of liberal political parties and their subsequent relegation to political oblivion.
Only early in the twenty-first century did liberals finally begin to pay attention to national identity. Yet it rarely went beyond academic-style discussions among intellectuals in such elite forums as Liberal Mission Foundation (which still devoted most of its attention to economic issues). Most prominent liberal politicians avoided the identity issue and when they dealt with it the result was the famous declaration by Chubais about Russia’s future as a “liberal empire.” In other words, they still could not think beyond the notion of imperial identity without giving a thought whether a liberal democracy and empire could in fact go together.
Liberalism and empire did historically go together. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was still quite possible to be both imperialist and liberal. In fact, some of the key liberal thinkers of that time, such as J. S. Mill and Tocqueville, viewed the imperial enterprise with much sympathy and approval. However, already in the early twentieth century ideas of democracy and empire were perceived as contradictory, with the latter often presented as an alternative to the former. Furthermore, in the post-communist Russian context, a desire to restore an empire did not contain any democratic component and was ardently championed by political forces ideologically opposed to the fundamental principles of liberal democracy.
The most important consequence of the liberals’ failure to develop a credible notion of Russian identity was the unchallenged spread of illiberal, imperial, anti-market, and xenophobic notions of Russian identity. In fact, by the mid-1990s one could see a reemergence of the old imperial hegemonic identity, in which the anti-Western, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic components were much more salient than before. Thus public opinion polls, conducted by the VTsIOM and Levada Centre polling organizations in 2000-2008, indicate wide support for xenophobic attitudes as expressed in sweeping approval of such statements as “Russia is the exclusive domain of ethnic Russians” (up from 46 percent in 1998 to 52 percent in 2006), “Russia always evoked hostile feelings from foreign states and today none of them wish Russia well” (66 percent in 2000), and “Western accusations of the violation of democratic rights and freedoms are made in order to discredit Russia” (68 percent in 2007).
The polls also suggest a serious concern regarding the legitimacy of the process that led to Russia’s independence and a clear nostalgia for the empire. Thus, 67 percent of the respondents regard the dissolution of the USSR as illegitimate and only 29 percent of Russians are satisfied with the current borders of the Russian Federation. Finally, on issues of identity, Russians do not see their country as part of the liberal-democratic West but rather as a Eurasian state with its own unique historical path, something strongly emphasized by Russian nationalist ideologues and, more recently, by official ideologues of “sovereign democracy” (12 percent and 76 percent, respectively, in 2003).
Ukraine’s experience was very different from that of Russia. Although the vast majority of the population supported the independence of Ukraine in the December 1991 referendum, the motivations were different in the East and West of the country. In the Western ooblasts, support for independence was virtually unanimous: 97.5 percent of the votes in the Lviv region and 98.7 percent in Ternopil. Here the main motivation was to create an independent Ukrainian state for the Ukrainian nation, not ruled by the Russians or their local proxies.
In the East and South, on the other hand, the support for independence was mostly economically motivated and instrumental. Even though 83.9 percent of the voters in the Donetsk region supported independence, the people in these areas had no special sympathy for Western Ukrainian nationalism and its goals and symbols. In the East, the common belief was that the economic strength of Ukraine would bring affluence, deliberately blocked by Moscow, which for decades had exploited Ukrainian industry and agriculture to subsidize the less developed parts of the USSR. As Wanner puts it, what these people wanted was independence from the Soviet system and its faltering economy, but not independence from Russia. The poll, conducted in 1993, revealed that 44 percent of Ukrainian citizens were unwilling to suffer economic difficulties in order to maintain Ukraine’s independence (more than a half of this 44 percent came from the Donetsk region alone). On the other hand, 19 percent of Ukrainians, mostly from the Western part of the country, were willing to suffer as long as needed.
Similarly to Russia, the collapse of the Ukrainian economy in the early 1990s sparked in the East and South of the country nostalgia for the USSR era of economic stability and relative prosperity. The liberals and the national-democrats were blamed for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mass poverty. For years, the pro-Russian Communist Party of Ukraine became the main political force in the East of the country. However, while in the East and South of Ukraine voting was more a matter of individual-level attributes and prevailing economic conditions than of issues of national identity or historical and cultural factors, in Western Ukraine economic issues played only a minor role in electoral preferences.
In the years following independence, much like their voters, the new governmental and intellectual elite of Ukraine, representing mostly nationalist forces, was interested in cultural and ideological issues much more than in economics, which remained the realm of the old communist nomenklatura. Moreover, unwilling to impose unpopular economic reforms, the first Ukrainian President, former Communist Party apparatchik Kravchuk, elected mainly by voters in the East and South, nevertheless swiftly adopted most of the nationalists’ rhetoric. The sharp turn away from Moscow and the values associated with it promised not only symbolic but also material benefits, and at this point the interests of the nationalist cultural and nomenklatura political elites converged. However, the trade-off was Kravchuk’s loss of electoral support in Eastern Ukraine. As a result, in the 1994 presidential election, Kravchuk secured the sympathies and the votes of the West, whereas his opponent, communist-era industrial manager Kuchma, who eventually won the election, attracted the voters in the East and South by focusing his campaign on economic reforms and promising to upgrade the status of the Russian language and to improve relations with Russia.
The logic that compelled Kravchuk to embrace West Ukrainian national identity drove Kuchma to follow the path of his predecessor. In other words, in order to preserve the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state, and therefore his personal legitimacy as Ukraine’s President, Kuchma found himself adopting and implementing many cultural, language, educational, and foreign policies advocated by his rivals from the nationalist camp and championed by his predecessor. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that in the 1999 presidential election Western Ukraine strongly supported Kuchma against the leader of the pro-Russian Ukrainian Communist Party, Petro Symonenko. The years of Kuchma’s presidency clearly showed that his adherence to democratic values was problematic at best, but his desire to appease both the economically motivated East and the nationalist West created internal contradictions in Ukraine’s ruling ideology and policy orientations.
Various studies of Colored Revolutions have concentrated on the vulnerability of the regime, the defection of a part of the ruling elite, the unpopularity and corruption of the incumbent, divisions among the regime’s coercive forces, the effective mobilization of civil society, the existence of independent media, and U.S. support for the opposition movements. However, these analyses mostly disregard the ideational background of the revolutions and the ideological motivations that brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets. We emphasize that in Ukraine such factors as the “split among the elites” and “return to Europe” were intertwined. A vision of national identity was among the major causes for the split among the elites. In our view, in Ukraine this split was a consequence of Kuchma’s policy to combine incompatible ideological and political orientations. During the 2004 presidential election, the Yanukovych camp concentrated on the pro-Russian and economic dimensions of this ideology and presented its candidate as a talented administrator who would bring economic stability and development along with a greater integration with Russia. Yushchenko, on the other hand, although not totally disregarding economical issues, put a much greater emphasis on democracy and the rule of law.
Ironically, in the long run, by promoting Ukrainian-language education and embracing (even if at the declaratory level) symbols promoted by the West, Kuchma strengthened the forces that stood against his successor at Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti during the Orange Revolution. Central Ukraine, which in 1994 preferred Kuchma to the presumably nationalist Kravchuk, switched its support to Yushchenko and the Orange parties in 2004 and in subsequent elections. While the West was consistent in its nationalist preferences since 1991, it was the Central oblasts that, gradually adopting the Western vision of Ukrainian identity, made the electoral victory of the Orange camp possible.
The 2010 presidential elections, in which the West and the Center lost to the East and South, exhibited a similar dynamic—in the close run-off between the “Orange Princess” Tymoshenko and Yanukovych, the former decisively won in the Western and Central regions, while the latter swept the East and the South. While Tymoshenko’s defeat can be attributed to numerous factors, such as the relatively low turnout in “her” regions, internal splits in the Orange camp, or a general disillusionment with her and Yushchenko’s and record in power, the regional differences remained intact.
At the same time, Yanukovych’s victory raises the question of the validity of the argument presented above. The authoritarian bend of the new Ukrainian government clearly manifested in judicial prosecution of its leading political opponents (such as Tymoshenko and Lutsenko), in restricting media freedom, and in attempts to tighten control over the judiciary and regional administration. The Ukrainian Constitutional Court decision to abolish the post-Orange constitutional amendments that restricted the power of the presidency could also substantially strengthen the authoritarian capacity of the regime. Kuzio expressed a view shared by many observers of Ukrainian politics by pointing out that under Yanukovych Ukraine is “undergoing a regression from the only tangible benefit to have emerged from ‘Orange’ rule, namely democratization, media freedom, and free elections.”
One should add that the attempts to remove achievements of the Orange Revolution went hand in hand with attempts to impose East Ukrainian identity as it was manifested in politics of memory. Thus, Ukranian World War II-era nationalist icon Stepan Bendara was stripped of his title “Hero of Ukraine,” granted to him posthumously by Yushchenko, and the Holodomor is no longer presented as genocide directed against Ukrainian people.
However, our analysis predicts that Yankovych’s attempts to turn Ukraine into a softer version of Putin’s Russia, combined with an equally significant attempt to impose a Eastern Ukrainian version of identity on the country as a whole, would encounter a much stiffer opposition than Putin ever faced. Moreover, we believe the fierce opposition from a significant section of the political and intellectual elite and especially from the majority of the population in Western Ukraine would ultimately either force Yanukovych to abandon his authoritarian agenda or bring another Orange-style uprising, which, as Riabchuk recently reminded us, was “society’s response to the regime’s attempt to tighten the screws, to curtail civil freedoms, and firmly establish Russian-style ‘managed democracy.’”
Conclusions
This paper argues that the existence of a non-democratic hegemonic identity as well as the availability of identity choices matters significantly during the post-communist period. Moreover, choices of identity content made (or not made) by post-communist elites were a major factor in Russia’s emergence as authoritarian state and Ukraine’s eventual democratic breakthrough in 2004. We have shown that in the post-communist era, identity politics has been shaped by the institutional legacies of Soviet nationality policies. The policies of institutionalized and territorialized ethnicity have created centrifugal tendencies that had to be contained by a countervailing institutional arrangement. This institutional device, manifested in the institutional design of the USSR, blurred Soviet and Russian identity and reinforced a pre-Soviet tendency by ethnic Russians to view the entire empire as their nation-state. At the same time, it preserved Ukrainian national identity and assisted in the creation and sustaining of a nationally minded political and cultural elite. In Russia, the result of these policies was the adoption of a hegemonic imperial identity with an assumption of a privileged status for ethnic Russians. Many Ukrainians, on the other hand, felt oppressed by the Soviet state and identified themselves in anti-Russian and, therefore, anti-imperial terms.
The hegemonic status of the imperial identity was the determining factor in the political identity of both Russian nationalists and liberals. The nationalists adopted an identity that was anti-democratic, anti-market, and xenophobic. At the time of the transition from communism, this identity was largely unpopular because it failed to provide a satisfactory answer as to how to reform the Soviet economic and political system. In the post-communist period, nationalists and communists advanced an illiberal conception of Russian identity, with a significant degree of electoral success, due to a large extent to the reemergence of the old hegemonic identity. On the other hand, negative non- and anti-Russian self-identification supported the development of pro-democratic attitudes and values as a constituting component of the Ukrainian national identity.
We have argued that the reason for the failure of the democratization process in Russia was to a large degree the result of a failure of the liberals to develop a liberal and democratic notion of Russian identity. The liberals’ rabid anti-communism and their preoccupation with devising political, and especially economic, alternatives to the Soviet model came at the expense of developing a credible alternative to the dominant non-democratic identity content. It seems probable that Russian society could have accepted the hardship associated with economic reform had the reforms been grounded in an appropriate conception of national identity. Such a conception, however, was never developed, forcing the liberals to justify the reforms solely on the grounds that they ultimately would enable Russians “to live like in Europe.” Since the reforms failed to deliver the European living standards for the majority of Russians, the reforms became highly unpopular, together with the liberals who ardently advocated them. In Ukraine, the pro-democratic forces paid only minor attention to economics and concentrated mostly on issues of national identity, trying to promote their ideological vision of the Ukrainian nation and state. Despite the economic hardships, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the painful economic reforms, the national-democrats could always rely on the support of significant part of the population, identifying itself with their cause. Contrary to Russian liberals, for Ukrainian national-democrats the desire to be like the “civilized” Europe meant not only the achieving of European standards of life but also the endorsement of European political values as an important component of Ukrainian national identity.
As we have shown, Russia and Eastern Ukraine represent a different model of post-communist national identity development. The presence of a hegemonic imperial identity combined with the inability of the liberal elite to develop an alternative liberal conception of Russian identity played a crucial role in Russia’s backsliding. In Ukraine, on the other hand, the absence of a hegemonic authoritarian identity combined with the determination of the Western-oriented elite to embrace a European path of development resulted in the country’s ability to resist an authoritarian path of development. Although this process is far from complete, its direction is probably irreversible. Either the Orange or the anti-Orange camp might win elections, but in the long run, the general direction of Ukrainian political development is likely to remain the same. After all, as Kuchma rightfully noted in his memoir, Ukraine is not Russia.