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Clan Based Politics in Ukraine and the Implications for Democratization
Institute on East Central Europe
March, 1997
Five years into a difficult "triple" transition process, a select group of Soviet-era politicians from Dnepropretrovsk dominate Ukraine's federal government. Because Ukraine confronts the challenge of transition on three levels -- instituting a market-based economy, creating democratic structures, and forging national and state identities -- the ability of the Dnepropetrovsk "clan" to monopolize that complex process with over 200 positions in the Kiev government opposes any democratization attempt. 1 More problematic perhaps is the direct competition between Dnepropetrovsk elites and rival clans. In particular, the Donbas elites access the center and industrial might. The competition between the two elites does not indicate the evolution of differing views of the polity or the growing pains associated with democratization -- neither is a domestic champion of democratization. Rather, the competition prolongs the subtle and overt attempts to monopolize economic and political power for mutually reinforcing purposes that is left over from communist politics. Efforts to garner power during unstable periods do not surprise political scientists. Most scholars of democratization address the obstacles to democratic consolidation. Viewing them as byproducts of pact-making or as temporary delays to a larger ineluctable process. 2 Yet, the dominance of Ukrainian regional elites is not just a reflection of the uncertainty of new democratic institutions. It puts the democratization process in serious jeopardy. This situation merits closer inspection of transition theories, in particular, the understanding of elite dynamics during the transition and the interplay between economic liberalization and democratization.
Investigating theories on the transition process will help identify where and how setbacks to democratizing originate. We need to reevaluate how international and domestic policy-making, conditioned by theoretical models, enable the formation of political monopolies, such as the "Dnepropetrovsk mafia" and its rivals. Their power struggles constrict the necessary contestation among multiple interests of civil society and different elites that should characterize transitions. Moreover, for the longer term, the variety of post-socialist processes in Ukraine -- characterized by cut-throat elite competition over scarce resources in the context of a disappearing civil society (in part due to the historic failure of liberalism in Russian/Soviet political culture), 3 combined with ideological pressures from Western powers and lending institutions -- all raise the prospects of internal struggle and state collapse when most state and national structures are weak and unformed. Ukraine in particular exhibits this tendency because democratization and democratic consolidation are back-burner considerations. State-building and state consolidation, because Ukrainian statehood still lacks a clear or generally accepted basis of national identity, remains an a priori need. There is a real possibility that if these processes take root, they will be preserved in state structures, propped up by international lending institutions and the dominant international ideology -- that free markets equal free politics.
First, this essay examines who the elites under investigation are, how they rose to power, and their subsequent competition. Second, it briefly reviews how current transition theories, primarily focusing on the Central and Eastern European (CEE) cases of Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia, use rational choice and path dependent models to explain the domination of one or a few competing clans in post-socialist politics via economic reform processes. It then presents an alternative hypothesis that is an amalgam of the two but ultimately relies on a cultural and historical framework to explain how political actors rely on a tool kit of "habits, skills and styles" to construct strategies of action. 4 The alternative model is persuasive due to the important structural differences between CEE and former Soviet Union (FSU), often overlooked by classic transition models. Those distinctions account for different transitions and hence different democratization processes. I concludes by highlighting the significance of both intense elite competition and its anti-democratic side-effects for democratization in general.
The Elites from Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk
These elites hail from two of the most economically powerful cities in the Russian and Soviet empires, now within Ukraine. As former party functionaries, they have made the transition relatively easily, without making an affirmative commitment to free-market reforms or democratization. Neither group has a vested interest in seeing democratic reforms through for their own sake. However, they are gifted at working the system, due to muddled legal structures and the privatizing economy.
The eastern oblasts of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk have historically been home to both economic and political power because they house the major energy sectors. The oil, gas, and coal industries in the provinces of Dnepropetrovsk and Donbas account for over half of Ukraine's national income. However, Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk each represent different types of economic strength: Donetsk is known as the kochegorka (the all-union stoke-room) for its coal reserves while Dnepropetrovsk was a closed Soviet military-industrial city specializing in missile production. The two varieties of economic might translated into two forms of political influence in Moscow and Kiev during the second half of the Soviet era. The secretiveness of the military-industrial complexes in Dnepropetrovsk produced skilled leaders able to maneuver at the highest levels of power, among them Leonid Brezhnev, who "encouraged the development of clannish ties and nepotism [in] ... non-Russian republics," 5 and his protege, Vladimir Shcherbitskii, the iron-fisted Communist Party chief in Ukraine from 1972 to 1989. On the other hand, labor-intensive industries in Donbas fostered the creation of unions which would yield significant political force.
Eastern Ukraine was a relatively coherent political and economic force during the break-up of the Soviet Union, since it tied economic demands to political calls for Ukraine's independence. For example, a 1989 coal miners' strike in Donbas presaged the dissolution of the Soviet center by framing economic grievances in comparative terms. The miners complained that Moscow was deliberately draining the region while favoring the Kuznets coal basin in Russia. The miners temporarily subordinated their desire for greater autonomy in Eastern Ukraine to growing calls for national sovereignty. Over 80 percent of the Donbas (predominantly ethnically Russian and culturally Russophile) supported the 1991 national independence referendum, perhaps because they knew they enjoyed a comparatively higher standard of living than in the neighboring oblasts in Russia and other regions in Ukraine. Since independence, the miners have been the only labor group to win higher wages. Furthermore, since the eastern coal miners have not linked their demands with any other worker's or social movement, labor has not been an inclusive political or social movement nor has it catalyzed the development of civil society. 6
However, the miners were not satisfied for long, and after independence continued strikes threatened Eastern Ukrainian secession, the most visible attack on the legitimacy of Ukraine's statehood. Miners and elites alike in Donetsk grew increasingly aware that their traditional position of privilege (relative to other regions) would not buffer them from the certain hardships of post-communism. Since the Soviet economic blueprint closely aligned social and industrial entities, particularly in the East, any privatization plan would separate housing, hospitals, and schools from the factories or mines which formerly supported them. 7 While the economic restructuring processes promised further negative costs for all of Eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk elites struck a bargain to stave off the effects. Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, rewarded them for not pursuing political integration with Russia by granting them significant autonomy to run the region without much interference from Kiev. 8 Unaware of the deal, Donbas coal-miners went on strike in June 1993, linking economic demands with separatism. To crush the movement and its implicit threat to his own authority, Kravchuk had Donetsk elites subdue the miners and co-opt the strike committees. The Donetsk elites painted the unrest not as separatism, but as resistance to the early economic reforms of then-Prime Minister Kuchma. While the strikes did force early parliamentary and presidential elections and have helped delay coal-sector reforms, the elites benefited the most. In return for their loyalty, Donetsk elites were allowed to continue dealing directly with Russia and to continue reaping the benefits.
Donetsk leaders want influence in Kiev not only to maintain industrial subsidies, a method patented by Russian elites, but also to thwart the social and political costs of privatization. 9 They also needed local autonomy to sign agreements with neighboring Russian oblasts 10 and with large, powerful Russian Financial-Industrial Groups (FIGs). 11 While Donetsk elites rejected up-front attempts to integrate politically with Russia, these agreements represent a de facto step towards economic integration across state lines and could herald internal disintegration. Russia's former Vice Premier Sergei Shakhrai did not attempt to disguise how enterprise debt to Russia might fulfill economic aspects of Moscow's foreign policy objectives in the "near abroad." "As many debtors to the Russian Federation have no funds for settling energy debts, we must exercise a tough and concentrated policy of acquiring land-and-enterprises as payment, i.e., creating the economic basis for integration." 12
The result of insolvent Ukrainian enterprises using property as collateral to pay debts to Russian FIGs postpones the inevitable and necessary industrial restructuring process and covers up the profound need for deeper reforms. Donetsk elites have been using these deals to run their domains as personal fiefdoms. For the Ukrainian energy sector -- a ticket to Ukrainian economic self-sufficiency -- the individual cases of "debt refinancing" do not bode well in the context of Ukraine's overall energy debt to Russia. Since Ukraine provides only a third of domestic energy needs through its own resources, it has historically relied on Russia for 90 percent of its oil imports. 13
The competition between Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk worsened because of the increasingly competitive energy market and the 1994 presidential election of another Dnepropetrovsk politician, Leonid Kuchma. Because Kuchma and Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko attributed Ukraine's slow market transition to Kravchuk's inability to enforce reformist decrees and legislation on the regional level, they saw limiting regional autonomy as the first order of business. In order to reverse the effects of regional deals during his predecessor's tenure, Kuchma needed loyal advisers and a united government to implement a more stringent economic plan requiring a powerful political center. By bringing in a team of "like thinkers and professionals," Kuchma has allowed Lazarenko to pursue the stated goal of counteracting the "perceived corruption, cosiness and ineffectiveness of the Kravchuk era." 14 With the passage of the Constitution in July 1996, they acquired the legal means to impose the center's will on Donetsk, including the projected closing of at least 50 coal mines in the Donetsk oblast (a quarter of those in the region) and integrating it into the national energy market. This is also a stipulation of an $80 million World Bank project to reform the coal sector.
Kuchma's need for support from his home-town cronies to the exclusion of other interests for the sake of economic and political reform paradoxically permits the continuation of Soviet era policies of favoritism. By dominating Kiev, the Dnepropetrovsk group has succeeded in securing major deals for their own constituencies. Since Lazarenko's appointment this summer, Dnepropetrovsk has witnessed the completion of a languishing subway project and the opening of a new terminal at the regional airport to receive direct flights from Western Europe. Earlier in 1996, Energy Minister Lazarenko secured a critical gas importing deal for United Energy Systems-Ukraine (UESU), a Dnepropetrovsk company headed by a friend and political supporter, Julia Timoshenko. 15 That deal made UESU the "most powerful gas importer in Ukraine and one of only two firms nationwide selling gas to industries," according to Oleh Schmidt, an editor at Infobank, a Ukrainian news agency. With "spectacular profits" and a contract to sell 25 billion cubic metres (a third of consumption), UESU has made inroads in the Donetsk gas market and cut into the business of a Donetsk firm, Intergaz. 16 The rise of Dnepropretrovsk influences in the energy market raised the ire of Donetsk politicians, who raised the stakes during the most recent miners' strikes in the summer of 1996. Volodymyr Scherban, the provincial governor of Donetsk, fought over the strikes with Lazarenko, who then linked the Donetsk protest to a July assassination attempt on his life. While Scherban denied any connection to that crime, his brother was assassinated in early November.
What began as President Kuchma's apparent effort to constrain excessive regional autonomy in Donetsk to reform the economy and re-start Ukraine's democratization resulted in the ascendance of the Dnepropetrovsk elites. Their unconstrained power and authority, as evidenced by Lazarenko's schemes, has produced similar corruption in the regions that Kuchma was attempting to limit. Moreover, given the assassination intrigues, it could trigger more widespread conflict than the current struggle for dominance with Donetsk counterparts -- once again threatening the very integrity of the Ukrainian state. This unintended outcome, precisely what Kuchma was attempting to avert, is the key puzzle under investigation. How do theories in the transition literature attempt to explain the emergence of the Dnepropetrovsk elites and their subsequent competition with their Donetsk counterparts?
Possible Hypotheses for Ascendance and Competition
The transition literature would seem to support rational choice and path dependent models in accounting for the ascendance of the Dnepropetrovsk elites and their struggle with Donetsk elites. Both models represent theoretical prisms and assumptions that remain unsatisfactory in the context of the post-Soviet conditions of democratization. A third, alternative model unites the strengths of rational choice and path dependence but adds critical aspects of a cultural argument to understand better how individuals on all levels of post-Soviet society perceive choices for behavior, permitting or enabling the elites in question to function much as they have done in the past.
Rational Choice
The classic political science text on transitions by Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, would interpret the Ukrainian case as emblematic of elite competition. In their attempts to secure state resources, post-communist elites are bound to struggle for dominance, since elemental needs -- economic and political power -- motivate and explain their behavior. A key oversight in this approach is ideology: in whatever form, it is seen as irrelevant in determining political actors' motivations, calculations, and hence behavior. Due to the uncertainty of the transition period, one expects rational elites to be more ruthless in their pursuit of economic resources (i.e., the ones being privatized) to use as political leverage. The rational actor model dictates that as elites try to redistribute economic power from the previous system in their interests to ensure continued dominance, ideological considerations are irrelevant.
The transition literature discusses elite competition by examining hardliner/softliner competition in terms of their position regarding state change. The elites' belief systems are generally thought to be extraneous, and here O'Donnell and Schmitter only analyze the core of the majority of hardliners. In their view, the majority of hardliners eschew ideology and hence are engaged because they are "preoccupied with their own survival in office and retaining their share of the spoils." Without the core of ideologues in the hardliner camp, the task of transition would be a simple rational actor exchange, or "determining the cost of buying them out at the right moment." 17 Softliners similarly lack any ideological commitment and are interested only in what any political program can get them. They support liberalization because it will legitimate the current regime and moderate opposition, allowing them to hold onto the spoils. Unfortunately, there exists a group of committed anti-democrats among the hardliners who "have a mission to eliminate all traces" of the "`cancers' and `disorders' of democracy." 18 In order to move towards democratization, the two non-ideological groups of elites must enlist a burgeoning middle class -- by appealing to its material interests -- to create a wedge and force the ideological hardliners to begin making concessions. 19 Ideology, while defined in opposition, remains a constant in this construct because O'Donnell and Schmitter make no effort to investigate how ideology might evolve through the interaction of the opposing factions.
The O'Donnell/Schmitter rational actor model of elite behavior is unsatisfactory in understanding the Ukrainian case because it does not allow for two crucial differences in the realities of post-Soviet politics. First, ideology, though difficult to interpret at times, is far from irrelevant in the considerations of political actors during the transition. Second, their reliance on the middle class as an intervening variable to direct the competition in one way or another oversimplifies the complexity and importance of economic factors in the dynamics of state change. Because the transition has lacked a well-developed (if any) bourgeoise, the critical variable in the attempt to develop a distinctly Ukrainian economic reform package has been international influences, which are discounted by O'Donnell and Schmitter: "It seems to us fruitless to search for some international factor or context which can reliably compel authoritarian rulers to experiment with liberalization." 20 They do not investigate international dynamics because they assume that most transitions will be pacted based on earlier, internal pressure to democratize. They fail to perceive that the struggle for democratization and liberalization continues, even after the "collapse" of the authoritarian regime. In the post-Soviet cases the freedom to operate without a domestic powerful middle class has facilitated elastic ideologies and unexpected compromises.
Path Dependence
The transition literature emphasizes how the type of transition can account for the subsequent regime and hence the distribution of economic resources and political positions. Path dependence should explain how the breakdown of the Soviet system and the process of democratization in the FSU/Ukraine enabled those elites to take advantage of economic reforms to monopolize political power and economic goodies. Daniel Friedheim asserts that "a transition is a founding moment the legacy of which helps to shape the new democratic regime for years." 21 Since most scholars accept the O'Donnell and Schmitter claim that negotiated transitions promote the greatest stability of the subsequent democratic regime, they view the continued presence of former elites endowed with political and economic power as a normal aspect of the transition.
Friedheim sees the ability of "former members of nomenklatura," like the elites of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk, "to exploit their positions and insider connections and become well-endowed capitalists" as a direct consequence of a negotiated transition. 22 Friedheim also considers how purges of the former state apparatus after the pacts reduces the influence of former elites. He contrasts the negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary, where new democrats have been less demanding of their predecessors, with the more widespread purges in the Czechoslovak and (East) German governments after the collapse of socialism. Poland and Hungary neglected to purge the former nomenklatura due to, in the first case, Solidarity's earlier underestimation of its political strength and, in the second, an evolving process of power-sharing between the Hungarian opposition and communist party since the 1956 uprising. German and Czech elites, on the other hand, were purged without fear of backlash because they failed to find equally powerful factions in civil society with whom to negotiate. Friedheim hopes to show how Robert Dahl's theory of evolutionary polyarchy can justify the implicit tradeoff of a pacted transition. Although pacts may create short-term setbacks to an equal distribution of economic resources, they can guarantee longer-term stability since they reflect stronger civil societies and avoid the backlash engendered by purges or a velvet divorce.
There are two shortcomings to relying on the path dependence model alone:
Institutions and regimes which fell apart very differently produced similar results. Former elites dominate both in negotiated, organized transitions like Poland and Hungary and Ukraine and Russia, where the transition was messier and more ambiguous. In negotiated transitions one anticipates difficulty with economic reforms because a clear set of payoffs is written into the bargain. However, in Russia and Ukraine, the continued presence of old elites appears to be a by-product of privatization processes and system-wide ambivalence to economic reform. In fact, path dependency can be used in the former Soviet case to explain the dominance of old political and economic elites. Borocz and Rona-Tas argue that precisely because of Russia's gradual and ambiguous political transformation, its old political elites will be best situated to transform political privilege into economic might.
How can opposite kinds of transition produce similar outcomes? This contradiction raises serious questions affecting policy choices. If corruption is bound to happen, regardless of the type of transition, why accept a minimum level for greater political stability? Corruption is normally considered a by-product of disintegrating political systems -- an indicator of instability, not stability. The evidence of former elites playing significant and lucrative roles in post-communist governments in Russia/Ukraine and Poland/ Hungary does not and cannot mean that all four are building stable democracies. If corruption were any indication of stability, this would be a difficult conclusion, given the field's prevalence towards grouping democratizing countries into success and failure categories. The factors accounting for greater stability in Poland and Hungary can be traced further back than their transitions, which are less than a decade old. As Anna Seleny argues, the transition periods in both countries broke from prior political traditions, which have been more enduring and indicative of the subsequent regime than the transition period.
Path dependency does not address the specifics of "how" former elites operate in the new system to benefit from it. The path dependent and the rational actor models both assume that paying off the former elites will take care of them. Neither addresses what the elites actually do to take advantage of the available resources, or what long-term effects their actions will have on the tender democracy. Other scholars of the CEE transition have expanded on path dependent assumptions to develop different concepts describing how and why nomenklatura and other former elites from communism have continued to succeed economically and politically. Both approaches expand on path dependency to explain "outcomes where strategic actors are searching from routines and attempting to restructure the rules of the game" and these approaches are incorporated into the hybrid model below. 23
A Hybrid Model of Culture, Structure, and `Rationality'
An understanding of the dynamics of elite dominance and competition in Ukraine must operate on three analytical levels. The macro-structural level will encompass both the collapse of the Soviet system and the influence of international ideology and lending institutions on market reforms. An institutional or organizational level looks at how privatization policies and institutions created through economic reforms shaped choices or presented opportunities to former elites. Both approaches must be combined with an examination of the cognitive level of individuals whose "tool kit of habits, skills and styles" construct their "strategies of action," in order to see why elites make the choices they do and how and why society permits them to do this.
A macrostructural approach must investigate why the Soviet system collapsed as it did. Path dependence would help illuminate why it collapsed along center-periphery lines. Rational choice, which highlights the strategic choices of individuals, becomes more plausible when it includes ideology's role in affecting elite and mass behavior.
Rachel Walker looks at how an increasingly elastic Soviet ideology began to signify anything but its propaganda meaning -- the primacy of a strong center. This allowed members of society to function "rationally" as local concerns gradually figured first in their minds, replacing former fears of the omnipotent center that were upheld by superficial ideology. Their short-term profit-maximizing interests had become paramount in their strategies of action by 1989. Walker argues that the "massive ambiguities" in Soviet Marxism-Leninism forced most Soviets to "read and writ[e] between the lines." This led not only to unorthodox interpretations of the founding belief system of the regime, but also to the creation of a shadow economy. Walker explains:
The party satrapies of the First Secretaries at the Republican level and below with the CPSU have sufficient local power and sufficient autonomy from the central leadership that they are able to interpret the `Party line' at a local level to the advantage of their own interests.... Similarly the bezpartiiny (non-party members) who constitute the vast majority of the Soviet population, at whatever level of the system they may be, have carved themselves out a private sphere of sorts in which they engage in a variety of illicit but frequently useful and creative activities. 24
This behavior reflects less rational forethought than spontaneity born from necessity. The very indeterminability of Soviet ideology eliminated the possibility of rational action because, while the boundaries of accepted behavior grew increasingly elastic, the costs of non-conformity remained high. Soviet culture, as Swidler argues, like "all real cultures," contained "diverse, often conflicting symbols, rituals, stories and guides to action." 25 Because of the problematics of an empty ideology, "people do not, indeed cannot build up a sequence of actions piece by piece, striving with each act to maximize a given outcome." 26
In response to society's accidental or non-rational strategies of action, Walker points out that Soviet elites from Khrushchev to Gorbachev implemented a long lined of "failed reforms" in ex-post facto attempts to legitimize society's spontaneous interpretations of Marxism-Leninism. These failed central initiatives attested to the fact that "the various parts of the system [were] slipping further and further from the [center's] grasp." 27 Ultimately, the failed reforms resulted in the collapse of a powerless political center and most Muscovites' refusal to accept a restoration of it. 28
The procedures developed to circumvent the system created a subculture of habits, maneuvers, and values that enabled actors first to survive and then to thrive in direct opposition to stated ideology. Swidler argues that culture is not something which "shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed," but is a "general way of organizing action." Since culture "provides the tools with which persons construct lines of action," instead of end values, in changing circumstances, the strategies of action "will be more persistent than the ends people seek to attain." 29 Therefore, the political rationality exhibited by the Soviets -- how to survive in periods of ambiguous ideology -- would not necessarily differ after systemic changes like regime transitions.
In the context of post-socialist democratic transitions, Swidler's finding could be posed rhetorically: why assume that after years of operating to circumvent stated ideology, members of post-socialist societies will suddenly coordinate their behavior to conform to the new ideology of democracy and free markets? Seleny argues that while "strategies that `worked' in socialist settings may prove less `rational' in reconfigured post-socialist settings ... the reconfigurations are themselves conditioned by strategic choices whose rationality is rooted in the past." 30 The task for democratization then is twofold: "in post-socialist systems with deeply entrenched patterns of circumventing formal institutions through informal means, democratic consolidation depends as much on broader contextual conditions as on the development of any specific set of institutions." 31
Have the Ukrainians, by developing institutions of economic reform, affected the contextual conditions to alter the dominant strategies for political actions? Has the cultural mode of circumventing the stated ideology been greatly altered or have new modes of operating arisen? If those conditions have not been altered fundamentally, we may not be surprised that former elites still dominate the process. Their skill-set still applies, and their successes help shape the evolving culture. Further, since the contextual circumstances are in such flux, we would also expect to see culture both sustaining old strategies of action as well as constructing new ones. By attempting to detect both potentially contradictory or counter-intuitive processes simultaneously, we as scholars should not have our theoretical framework upset or delegitimized by seemingly strange or unexpected outcomes -- the inevitable products of a culture sustaining and renewing itself. This process has been and is occurring in Ukraine.
In the tortured evolution of Ukraine's economic reform package, a key battle has centered on how the idea of the Ukrainian state would be reflected in its development of post-communist economics. Implicit was the question of how much Western economics need be incorporated in Ukraine's economic package. Those in a position to shape the economic system would also be able to shape the underlying ideology of the new state. Early approaches to economic reform indicate how the Eastern Ukrainian elites triumphed by ensuring that the new economic institutions would not overly threaten their privileged economic stature.
The first model of reform, a patriotic model presented by Western national-democrats, attempted to make Ukraine economically independent, but ultimately threatened the privileged positions of the Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk elites -- Soviet era bureaucrats and enterprise directors -- because it insisted on dismantling monopolies and opening trade barriers. However, this model ignored the effects of 72 years of central economic planning and the very real institutions left over from the Soviet framework. International economists at first disregarded the reality that 70 percent of Ukraine's industrial output was taken to other republics for final assembly. Despite the plan's inaccuracy and implicit threat to former elites, its normative spirit was adopted in subsequent plans by those whose interests were most at stake in the plan's substance. Less interested in the normative value of an independent Ukraine, the communist-era elites wanted to emphasize their distance from Moscow. Using their opponents' sacred idea of a separate Ukraine was expedient and was a continuation of the ingrained cultural political behavior -- to reject the Soviet center. Lacking a sufficient power base in parliament, the national-democrats accepted the communists' deal: while the plan would not be presented to parliament (and hence the people) for debate, its normative spirit would underline the need to reduce Moscow's influence in subsequent plans. The bargain was essential to any prospect of Ukrainian statehood. 32 The final and current model of economic reform reflects a forced compromise between pro-market, liberal reformers backed by the International Monetary Fund and those defending stabilization -- the Dnepropetrovsk elites who represent high-tech industry, the military-industrial complex, and state-controlled banks, none of whom would have survived under the IMF-type plan. 33 The ability of the former communist elites to steer the economic program in their favor -- against both international advisors and national democrats -- indicates the continued relevance of their skills to dominating the transition process by insuring that the institutional mechanisms were manipulated in their favor.
Jadwiga Staniszkis' term "political capitalism" explains what these old elites actually did to amass great economic wealth: they used their political office to "manipulate rules and regulations to drive down the price of state property artificially" and then purchase it at discounted prices; the initial political vacuum and shortages of capital posed no competition to challenge such practices. 34 Another version of political capitalism emphasizes local networks, particularly family ties, as the dominant method old elites use to maintain economic influence despite an obsolete party structure. 35 While still in office, high ranking party members help family members or friends start successful enterprises. Once out of the party they become brokers in fields, where their "insider knowledge and personal social network endowments" translate into financial advantage. In the chaos of institutional change, informal ties become much more important. Lazarenko's allocation of the oil deal to a close friend in the tight energy sector is an example of this approach. By using all three levels of analysis, this explanation moves beyond rational actor and path dependent models' reliance on the official positions of former elites alone. Due to the incomplete and ambiguous nature of the transition, these elites can capitalize on skills acquired in the previous system.
The rational actor and path dependent models do not explain how elites capitalize on these skills because they ignore important aspects of the previous system, such as ideology, which shape choices and patterns of action. Path dependence, due to a misinterpretation of the reasons for collapse of the previous authoritarian regime, erroneously assumes that the method of transition determines the nature and evolution of the subsequent system. It cannot provide for unintended outcomes. Only a culture-based model unites macro-structural, institutional, and cognitive levels to explain adequately what processes have occurred prior to, during, and since the collapse of the Soviet system, to draw out the transition phase and enable elites to monopolize the process.
Structural Distinctions
The major reasons why traditional approaches to understanding transition dynamics fail to explain the cultural elements relate to the important structural differences between the transition experiences in Ukraine and the former USSR and those found in Central and Eastern Europe.
The difficulty in identifying the point of transition in the FSU. Unlike the Central and Eastern European transitions, which were marked by symbolic events, most notably the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many in the former Soviet space and in the West are uncertain about when the previous "authoritarian" system ended. Without a clear starting-point, one is hard pressed to discuss the nature of the transition, much less to explore the dynamics of consolidation.
The ambiguity surrounding the extent and nature of the political entity undergoing democratization. Not only did the component parts of the federal Soviet system become independent states, but many sub-component parts are also contemplating or pursuing the same option. The residue of the Soviet system (in this respect, its unusual nationality policy), needs to be liberalized and undergo transition as well. In Ukraine this means simultaneous nation-formation, state-building, state-consolidation, and democratization.
Determining the players. It is more difficult to determine the types of players in the former USSR than in Central and Eastern Europe during the transition process. In the latter, most were identified years before the breaking point, whereas this issue remains contested in the former Soviet Union. There, determining the players is a struggle hidden in ethnicity and nation-state dilemmas. Who will create new rules of the game? Even after four years of state-sponsored attempts to create civil society, Soviet civil society was weak in 1991. It did not evolve in the same delineated, equal terms of "us/them," as in Poland and Hungary, that facilitated pact-making and a negotiated transition. 36
The aim and subject of post-socialist politics. Since democratization has received a mandate from a stronger civil society, CEE elites can focus on implementing the values of democratization in state-level institutions and mechanisms. Freed from Moscow's control as early as 1989, these elites do not contend with the fundamental nature of their nation-state; instead, they focus on internally contained democratization. 37 However, in the former Soviet Union, post-socialist politics revolves around defining the former center-periphery relationship in a new construct; whether that involves democratic reforms is a secondary issue. Reforms are occurring because policymakers understand the international terms of the game -- financial aid from the IMF or the United States can be the strongest incentive to pass a constitution or hold elections, so these pro-forma compliances reflect more a desire to survive than to be democratic. 38
Ukraine's transition is irrevocably connected to Russia's. When a few thousand Muscovites took to the streets to demand the capitulation of the putchists on August 19-21, 1991, many observers viewed this as another radical break in the tumultuous history of Russia and its neighbors. Bringing history full circle, it was seen as a democratic answer to the first radical break, the October Socialist Revolution of 1917. In fact, it may have been Ukraine's elite action that signaled the impending death of the Soviet Union. Responding to the failure of the coup staged by Politburo hardliners to reverse Gorbachev's reforms, Ukrainian parliamentarians declared independence on August 24. They did not know how a new government might be reconstituted or how it would view nationalities; this was a risky, bold attempt to capitalize on Moscow's inward focus. Because the Moscow demonstrators did prevent the military from backing the coup's leaders and restoring the old Soviet system, it soon became clear that Moscow was -- for the time being -- more interested in Russian independence than in quelling other republics. Kiev's gamble paid off.
These three related but separate events, the coup and resistance in Moscow, Ukraine's declaration of independence, and the dissolution of USSR do not fit standard transition theories. They are neither examples of the pact-making that characterized Poland's decade-long transition 39 nor of mass-led revolts demanding the end of an authoritarian system ("via revolucionaria."). 40 O'Donnell and Schmitter claim that transition is an either/or phenomenon, but Ukraine's transition is much more complex. 41 It could not accurately be called a radical break; several analysts point to the ambiguous nature of the former Soviet states' transitions, despite seemingly dramatic events. 42
One reason for this ambiguity relates to the second distinguishing structural characteristic of the former Soviet Union: its internal nationality policies. The USSR was a single state composed of fifteen nationalities which were awarded pseudo-state and national institutions; today there are fifteen independent nation-states. The relationship between Soviet nationality policies and the contemporary nation-state dilemmas in the post-Soviet space is the subject of a large body of literature, outside the focus of investigation here. 43 However, two points are critical to understanding post-Soviet democratization in Ukraine.
First, Russia, despite being the favored or dominant national group in the Soviet system, lacked the nation-based communist institutions that other republics had. 44 The prior denial of national level institutions has led insider politicians and outsider `sovietologists' to equate Russia with the Soviet Union. This has occurred in a de facto sense, e.g.,the Russian parliament uses Soviet buildings; Yeltsin's administration inhabits the Kremlin; and the Russian Federation uses all the former Soviet embassies abroad. In an analytical sense, Western observers have compressed the Soviet experience into a Russian one or vice versa; additionally, they have tended to investigate processes only in Russia "proper," ignoring the other fourteen republics. 45
Second, on the other hand, a deliberate denial of institutional identity for Russia due to Lenin's fear of resurgent bourgeois and tsarist Russian nationalism, was the deliberate construction of oppressed, nationality-based communist bodies. 46 As the second largest republic, Ukraine posed the only real competition to Russia for dominance in the system. Both ethnicities can trace their historical and cultural origins to Kiev, their languages share many similarities, and both territories have similar natural resource capacities. Perhaps because of its inherent threat, Ukraine exemplified the implementation of these warped nationality policies. The Ukrainian SSR was endowed with republic-level institutions despite its lack of historical experience as an independent state. 47
This situation resulted in a reversal of the classic political ideal of the nation-state, according to which national identity emerges after or concurrently with the construction of state institutions. 48 As Marx turned Hegel on his head, so too did Lenin and Stalin challenge the Western European experience of modern state-cum-nation emergence. Nationalities which experienced wide-ranging discrimination such as the Ukrainians -- from the elimination of the use of Ukrainian language to the deliberate attempt to wipe out large segments of the Ukrainian peasantry and intelligentsia under Stalin 49 -- enjoyed false autonomy through powerless institutions. Russians, the one nationality denied institutional representation on a national level, had privileged access to the only institutions with real power and authority, the federal bodies of the center.
The Soviet nationality system pitted the players against one another because the founding elites deliberately created rules of politics based on access to the center -- but hid the rules by deceiving the non-Russians into thinking they could play an approximation of the game through falsely-inflated institutions based on ethnicity. The Ukrainian elites, aware of their second-rate power, capitalized on the moment -- shifting the power base from Moscow to Kiev three days after the failed coup. The declaration of independence, Ukraine's first step towards transition was not an elite articulation of mass-level desire for a national state, 50 but rather a pragmatic attempt to fill empty institutions with real power. The communists who announced Ukrainian independence no longer wanted to answer to the Russian center; nor did they negotiate with the coup leaders or with the leader-designate of the former center, Boris Yeltsin. They were not interested in sharing power or transferring power; they simply acted on their own for short-term political objectives. Ukraine's independence indicated that a new set of multiple political centers could replace the former, outdated Soviet system of power nominally concentrated in one center.
The upside-down and backwards implementation of national authority and representation explains much of the subtle confusion and violent struggle that intertwine with democratization in the former USSR. Serious contestation over creating new insti-tutions and engaging newly formed constituencies is the natural starting point for an inquiry into democratization patterns in the former satellite countries. However, in the former USSR, the priority of post-socialist politics is determining who is a candidate for the new game based on players' ethnicity and political capacity. Determining those ground rules had nearly been worked out by the time of the Central and Eastern European transition.
The exponential growth of ethnic tensions in the former USSR is not just an obstacle to building democracy. What is distruptive for democratic development is that the battles are occurring only on an elite level -- whereas in the Central and Eastern European cases, this conflict may be constructive since it involves society. Moreover, this is not without costs or side-effects: playing out that process will affect the way institutions are shaped and what substantive effect they will take once the boundaries are demarcated.
While the Central and Eastern European democracies, enjoying relatively healthy civil societies, are clearly focusing political energy on developing state-based institutions and policies responsive to their constituencies, former Soviet polities have limited their work to reframing the center-periphery relationship in post-Soviet terms. This process is exclusively an elite activity. Since independence, Ukraine has witnessed two such battles. The first struggle has been to remove the East-West divide, an ethno-linguistic, religious, economic, and politico-historical divide. This ethnic-national debate posed the question of the Ukrainian state's future in black-white terms: either the historic soul of Ukraine, the Western, agricultural regions, would dominate Kiev or the resurgent Russian presence in the East would secede -- a coup de grace to all the unfulfilled previous attempts at statehood. Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, and his administration's preoccupation with state disintegration was conditioned by historical memories of inferiority, fears of repeated Russian aggression, and international dynamics. Ukraine has enjoyed only two brief periods of pseudo-statehood -- neither recent nor long enough to qualify the notion of an independent Ukraine as an existential and political imperative. The fear of Russian expansion is not unwarranted, given the Yeltsin administration's continued insistence that a critical military port in Ukraine is a Russian city, preventing resolution to the Black Sea Fleet dispute, and the growing intimacy between neighboring Belarus and Russia. Finally, the international component -- debates over NATO expansion -- helped cement the view of Ukraine's statehood as, if nothing else, an essential buffer zone to Russia's expansion in kind. 51 The fear of state disintegration along the center has diminished and has instead been replaced by the current battle between Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk.
Conclusion: Why the Differences are Common
While the transition in Ukraine appears to be very different from other Central and Eastern European cases, these dissimilarities beg a closer investigation of the "consolidated" democracies in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Why are the processes at work in the competition between regional elite clans relevant for all democratization movements, particularly in the former socialist bloc?
The two political clans of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk are products of trends apparent in democratization processes more generally: the monopolization of economic power and the diminishing sphere of politics. The logical extension of these trends could lead to the much more severe negative tendencies already exhibited in the former Yugoslav states. They remind us that democratization does not occur in a vacuum. To describe these scenarios in Ukraine is a straightforward exercise, 52 but few have put them in context of the changing domestic political situation (exemplified by the competition between regional clans), nor have they interpreted these dangers in light of democratization processes. If unchecked, these by-products of democratization will lay the groundwork for political and economic arrangements that are as corrupt as those of the previous totalitarian system, since in the process of building both state and nation, cultural values will be preserved in the state institutions, which are now protected by ideologies promoted by the West.
The competition among the Dnepropetrovsk and Donbas clans reveals two important pitfalls of democratization, the paradox of "too much" and "not-enough" democracy by Atul Kohli. The end result is that "democracies end up creating a new and narrow power elite, and marketization ends up privileging big, private capital." 53
The unequal distribution of economic resources. Every democratization process carries the threat that some economic resources from the previous system will be maintained in the hands of the few. Elites who have straddled both old and new systems can monopolize those economic reforms intended to disperse material power. As Kohli explains, "Given the scarcities in a poor economy, the competitive energies of the many individuals and groups seeking economic improvements tend to get focused on the state." 54 In particular, spontaneous privatization prolongs the agony of change. While spontaneous privatization was more relevant in the former USSR, where the lack of definite transition and the half measures of perestroika left the bulk of the economic reforms until after the breakup, the phenomenon is also present in Central and Eastern Europe. Despite their varied amounts of liberalized economic policies by 1989, Central and Eastern Europe have also contended with corruption and slow economic reforms. Hungary's State Property Agency decided by 1993 that it was imperative to "privatize privatization" after the extensive problems with "spontaneous privatization." 55 Polish economic reforms have likewise failed to be as smooth as is commonly believed. 56
The shrinking space of politics and diminishing levels of political participation. The twin evil of the hoarding of economic assets during reforms is that civil society, having basked in the sun of the transition, often retreats and allows the political process to be run, not by its own heroes of the velvet revolutions, but by those with the time, skills, and interest to manage the polity. Contrary to the Wa__sa and Havel phenomena of dissident-turned-politician, most elites in transition polities are those who retain the political tools for success from the previous system and ensuring that the "rules of the game" remain static to guarantee their continued performance. Polish politics witnessed the surprise replacement of Lech Wa__sa with the young post-communist Alexander Kwa_niewski. His victory was not a setback to democracy per se, because it indicates former elites' adaptation to democratic rules of the game. 57 Yet, it illustrates that once elites have secured prior power in current democratic mechanisms, elections are simply pro-forma. Without democracy's "credible enemies on the horizon," the "shared antipathy to authoritarian system [that secured its demise] fades." The result is "the centralization of power in the hands of the few because ultimately weak institutions and personalistic rule are mutually reinforcing processes." 58
The monopolization of economic and political power in turn promotes three other mutations of democratization:
Disruption of a delicate politico-ethnic balance: While volumes have been written regarding the rise of ethnic conflict in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR since 1989,
59
most accept the notion that historic ethnic emotions once contained by iron fists have exploded. In Ukraine, while the fear of armed conflict between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians has been replaced by the fear of mafia-inspired crime, the latter may provide a pretext to trigger broader ethnic tensions. The assassination intrigue involving Donetsk and Dnepropretrovsk elites suggested an uneven power balance in Kiev and highlighted increasing resentment among Western Ukrainians for being ignored by Kiev. The domination of the Dnepropretrovsk clan thus threatens competing groups with different conceptions of the nation, the state, and the proper methodology of democratic transition.
State disintegration. Whether it is the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia or the velvet divorce of Czechoslovakia, most view state distintegration as the inevitable result of irreconcilable ethnic groups. Once the ethnic balance is disrupted and competing visions of state and nation become or are perceived to be irreconcilable, state elites may decide to further limit competition for control of the center by creating new centers of power. Under intensely competing visions and forces, the five-year old Ukrainian state simply may not survive.
International security dilemmas. The war in the former Yugoslavia reveals how easily the negative side-effects of transformation periods can culminate in tangible costs (financial and military intervention) for an often ambivalent international community. It indicates how relevant the international context throughout the `transition' is. The Yugoslav war is rarely analyzed in the context of initial discord about future economic arrangements among component parts of the federation; if it were, transition scholars would need to look beyond ancient ethnic hatreds for the root causes. In the Ukrainian context, NATO expansion, the Ukrainian-Russian disagreement about the status of the Black Sea Fleet, and the growing intimacy between Belarus and Russia all point to the inextricability of Ukraine's security concerns and internal competition born from democratization processes. In Ukraine's case, the world community could not sit idly by.
The democratization literature skims over the possibility of these mutations because it focuses on the Central and Eastern European successes to demonstrate that market reforms disperse economic power, and build civil societies with new bourgeoisie. By interpreting the various revolutions of 1989 as moral, national liberation oppositions versus a Soviet-imposed corrupt government, much scholarship has sentimentalized this messy struggle into a David-Goliath battle. This dialectic endorses democratization uncon-ditionally and ignores its pitfalls.
Such an optimistic interpretation also avoids an acknowledgment of the role of international consensus and lending institutions. The same problems resulting from shock therapy and privatization, i.e., declining incomes, rising unemployment, and corruption, work to favor existing elites or return post-socialist reincarnations of former elites across the region. International lending institutions influence the process of establishing new economic mechanisms which elites, due to their culturally developed patterns of behavior, have learned to manipulate. This process results in an ironic development for democratization. As Atul Kohli argues succinctly,
the interests and ideology of these [post-socialist] elites lead them into various degrees of cooperation (collusion?) with external centres of economic power; and the new internationalized locus of state power, involving national and international decision-makers, presses for economic liberalization [sic]. In this sequence of change free market capitalism is no longer an economic system that evolves and influences society and politics: it is instead a goal, an end point of an ideology that the newly elected elites are supposed to impose on their societies. 60
Considering that these same elites learned to circumvent centrally imposed ideologies and that people similarly developed methods of resistance, how shocked can scholars be that political behavior in post-socialist societies does not correspond directly with today's stated ideology? How democratic is it to have national elites imposing an ideological vision of another international orthodoxy -- that "free markets will generate economic growth in the developing world" -- while they continue to control and centralize economic decision-making?
Footnotes
Note 1: Jane Perlez, "On Ukraine's Capitalist Path, Clique Mans Roadblocks," The New York Times, October 18, 1996, A17. Back.
Note 2: Several transition experts discuss a "two-step forward, one-step backward pattern" in the evolution of democracy. Samuel Huntington sees progress towards democratization and its setbacks as natural waves, "an almost irrestible global tide moving from one triumph to the next," based on the assumption that all political development ends with democracy. The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 25. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter refer to "the consensus of this period of history" that democratization and liberalization are desirable goals: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 16. They view setbacks, such as the problem of corporatism, as part of the "second transition of socialization," where the struggle for democracy leads to paradoxical outcomes. Corporatism can result in each sector "seek[ing] maximum returns for itself and pass[ing] off the costs to others (12-13). David Stark warns that such descriptive notions as the "transition to capitalism" or the "transition to a market economy" refer to "teleological constructs in which concepts are driven by hypothesized end-states," "Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in East-Central Europe," in Vedat Milor, ed., Changing Political Economies. Privatization in Post-Communist and Reforming Communist States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 117. David Lane refers to a consensus among social scientists since the 1970s regarding the high correlation between development and democracy. Not until the 1980s did it become apparent that economic and social development were compatible with authoritarian rule. "The Transformation of Russia: The Role of the Political Elite," Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 4 (1996), 535-89. Back.
Note 3: For an explication of how the liberal circles and political parties failed to coalesce during significant turning points of reform in Russian and Soviet history, see "Approaches to State-Society Dialogue: Reforming Periods in Russian and Soviet Political Culture, 1861-1991," author's unpublished college thesis, Bowdoin College Thesis in Government, May 1992. Back.
Note 4: Ann Swidler, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," American Sociological Review 51 (April 1996), 273-86. Back.
Note 5: Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: Back from the Brink, European Security Study No. 23 (London: The Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1995), 9. Back.
Note 6: See Sarah Birch and Ihor Zinko, "The Dilemma of Regionalism," Transition, November 1, 1996, 22-25, for why coal miners are the most privileged labor group. David Lane discusses why labor has played a "negligible role in making the transformation." Lane, 546. Back.
Note 7: Economic reform does not imply same hardships for Western Ukraine due to the predominant position of agriculture. Back.
Note 8: "Ukraine: Regional Rivalries," Oxford Analytica East Europe Daily Brief, September 16, 1996. Back.
Note 9: It also characterizes the Russian approach to economic reform. In order to keep unemployment down and maintain support for shock-therapy and the Yeltsin administration overall, Russian elites continue to use economic devices like subsidies and periodic payment of back wages as a means to cover up the need for serious structural reform. Back.
Note 10: These border arrangements are a type of "regional diplomacy" also common in border regions of Western Ukraine. Back.
Note 11: FIGs have provided ingenious opportunities for concentrating capital and generally have been formed in one of several ways. The "semi-offifical" FIG is engineered from above and unites a series of industrial enterprises linked by technological chains or by regional ties with the subsequent attachment of a bank as a sponsor (considered the weakest variant). The "empire" FIG model is one created by the initiative of a bank which had financial and industrial dimensions: healthy, prosperous banks bought up the shares of their clients or of promising enterprises. A third model, holding FIGs, where holding companies create banks or industrial giants (i.e., Gazprom, LUKoil and the Volga automotive plant) set up banks for their own needs. The empire model represents the most likely force in the Russian market. See Olga Kryshtanovskaya, "Post-Soviet Elites: Parlaying Power into Property," Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, February 21, 1996 (translated from Izvestia, January 10, 1996, 5). See also Natalia Dinello's article, Chapter 13 in this volume, for a more complete picture of the FIG phenomenon. Back.
Note 12: Quoted in Nezavismiya gazeta, May 12, 1994. Back.
Note 13: In the important gas industry, Ukraine is self-sufficient for 20 percent of its own gas and uses Turkmen gas for another 20 percent. Even given its traditional strength in the coal industry, Ukraine is not self sufficient because it needs new machinery and must overhaul the mining infrastructure in order to access reserves that could last up to 50 years. See Ustina Markus, "Energy Crisis Spurs Ukraine and Belarus to Seek Help Abroad," Transition, May 3, 1996, 14-18. Back.
Note 14: "Ukraine: Regional Rivalries," Oxford Analytica, East Europe Daily Brief, September 16, 1996. Back.
Note 16: James Rupert, "Regional Tensions Trip Up Ukraine's Quest of Stability," The Washington Post, October 27, 1996, A31. Back.
Note 17: O'Donnell and Schmitter, 16-17. Back.
Note 19: In Brazil, for example, the bourgeoisie "opted for limited democratization out of concern over the expansion and growing autonomy of state agencies which had accompanied economic growth during the previous authoritarian decade [1960s]," ibid, 20. Back.
Note 21: Daniel Friedheim, "Bringing Society Back into Democratic Transition Theory after 1989: Pact Making and Regime Collapse," East European Politics and Society 7, no. 3 ( Fall 1993); Stark, "Path Dependence and Privatization Strategies in Eastern Europe ," East European Politics and Society, 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992). Back.
Note 22: Friedheim, 486. Back.
Note 24: Rachel Walker, "Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind," British Journal of Political Science 19 (1989), 161-87. Back.
Note 28: Perhaps one reason that political science `failed' to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet system relates to its emphasis on rational actor theories which either ignored ideology altogether or assumed that people's actions were directed toward end goals and values conditioned by a monolithic Soviet culture, i.e., propaganda. Back.
Note 32: Volodymyr Zviglyanich, "The State and Economic Reform in Ukraine: Ideas, Models, Solutions," The Ukrainian Quarterly LII, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1996), 122-42. Back.
Note 33: It is worth noting that some economists, like James Millar, view the aspects of an IMF or World Bank plan more appropriate "for the improvement of, rather than the creation of, market systems." Quoted in ibid, 140. Back.
Note 34: Staniszkis, quoted in Jozsef Borocz and Akos Rona-Tas, "Small Leap Forward: Emergence of New Economic Elites," Theory and Society 24, no. 5 (October 1995), 761. Back.
Note 35: Elemer Hankiss in ibid. Back.
Note 36: Katherine Verdery explicates the us/them dialectic in Central and Eastern Europe, where the Party "created a dichotomized universe, dividing the world into the `Good' and the `Bad,' communism and capitalism, proletarians and kulaks, party members and those who resisted the party's dictates." Civil society flipped it, but kept the moral aspect: "opposition and resistance were good and the regime was bad." After communism, this framework was applied to national identity where "moral community [is] defined by sameness rather than difference: others who are `like us.'" "Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-Socialist Romania," Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 192. Back.
Note 37: Ivo Banac explains how Gorbachev signaled the Soviet Union would not interfere in domestic Eastern European affairs as it had in 1956 and 1968. Banac, ed. "Introduction," Eastern Europe in Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1-12. Back.
Note 38: As Victor Stepanko put it in "Ukrainian Independence: First Results and Lessons," Ukrainian Revue 9, no. 2: "The fateful dilemma `democracy or independence' is secondary and even artificial in the face of the principal problem of survival." See David Lane for a description of the high level of influence wielded by Western lending institutions on parliamentary and other elites. Back.
Note 39: One can mark the beginning of the Polish transition with the creation of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law in 1980-1981 to the first "free" elections in 1989 when Solidarity won an overwhelming majority of the contested parliamentary seats. See Jan T. Gross, "Poland: From Civil Society to Political Nation," in Banac, ed., Eastern Europe, 56-72. Back.
Note 40: According to O'Donnell and Schmitter, the most successful transitions occur through the liberalization of an autocratic system resulting in either a "transfer of power" or a "surrender of power" facilitated by pacts to end up as Robert Dahl's polyarchy. The dramatic discontinuity provoked by the violence rendered by "implacable antagonists" can "drastically reduce" the prospects for democracy, 11. Back.
Note 41: Using the O'Donnell/Schmitter framework, one might be tempted to compare the short-lived street protests in Moscow as a popular response to the Soviet defeat in the "cold" war with the United States (the West writ large). However, this would be confusing cause and effect and thus misinterpreting the defeat. The demonstrations might have prompted the Soviet reformers to concede internal defeat. The protests were not a response to the defeat, they secured it. Rather, it was the defeat of the Soviet system by its own ideology and system -- which had begun to cease functioning during some earlier point, perhaps in the period of stagnation, the Brezhnev era. I interpret the demonstrations against the coup as a limited popular articulation of no-confidence in elite Kremlin politicking that attempted to oust Mikhail Gorbachev. Back.
Note 42: "The process of political transformation was much more gradual and hence more ambiguous in Russia than in [Poland and Hungary]: The Russian transition is dragging on and has not, as yet, created a clear political break." Borocz and Rona-Tas, "Small Leap," 761. Back.
Note 43: See, for example, Roman Szporluk, ed., National Identity and Ethnicity in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994); W. Raymond Duncan and G. Paul Holman, Jr., eds., Ethnic Nationalism and Regional Conflict: The Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); and Pal Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (London: Hurst & Co., 1995). Back.
Note 44: Edward Allworth points out the extent of the lack of Russian institutions in the Soviet system. He discusses Soviet efforts to neutralize tsarist symbols of Russian nationalism in "Ambiguities in Russian Group Identity and Leadership of the RSFSR," Allworth, ed., Ethnic Russia in the USSR (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 17-35. Back.
Note 45: Stephen Cohen, "`Transition' or Tragedy?" The Nation, December 30, 1996, 4-5. For the Western tendency to ignore non-Russian Soviet nationalities, see Alexander Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 46: In an attempt to correct the mistakes of tsarist era pogroms, for example, the Soviet state set up an autonomous oblast for Jews, (considered a separate ethnicity), a failed attempt to settle a very disperse and generally Russified group. See Yoram Gorlizki, "Jews," in Graham Smith, ed., The Nationality Question in the Soviet Union (London: Longman Press, 1990), 339-59. Back.
Note 47: There are different views on the legitimacy of previous Ukrainian statehood. Taras Kuzio argues that Ukraine "enjoyed two brief periods of independence in the modern era: a few years after the Cossack rebellion of 1648 and under a succession of weak governments [during the Soviet revolutionary period], 1917-1921" in "Ukraine: The Unfinished Revolution," European Security Study, no. 16 (London: Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, 1992), 7. Alexander Motyl, on the other hand, presents the case for Ukraine's pristine contemporary statehood, arguing that the Cossack experience cannot be interpreted as a modern state since, although they controlled significant portions of territory, Cossack leaders did not create institutions with express admini-strative purposes comparable to those of modern nation-states. See Motyl, Dilemmas of Inde-pendence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993). Back.
Note 48: Ernest Gellner argues that nations are products of the modern industrial society, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Liah Greenfeld discusses the signi-ficance of post-1789 revolutions for the development of the modern concept of nationality and nationalism in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 49: Arthur Takach, "In Search of Ukrainian National Identity; 1840-1921," Ethnic and Racial Studies 19, no. 3 (July 3, 1996), 640-59. Back.
Note 50: Stepanenko argues that "the national idea, as public opinion polls have shown, was not the principal one for the creation of the nation-state." It was not until December 1, 1991, that this position was endorsed by a public referendum. Back.
Note 51: Motyl, "Russia, Ukraine and the West: What are America's Intersts?" American Foreign Policy Interests, February 1996, 14-20. For more recent accounts, see Perlez, "Ukraine Walks Shaky Tightrope Between NATO and Russia," The New York Times, October 24, 1996, A6, and Alessandra Stanley, "Yeltsin and Ukrainian Find Few Solutions on Fleet Issues," The New York Times, October 25, 1996, A6. Back.
Note 52: For some of the more pessimistic predictions, see Paul Klebnikov, "Tinderbox," Forbes, September 9, 1996, 158-64, and Eugene Rumer, "Eurasia Letter: Will Ukraine Return to Russia?," Foreign Policy 96 (Fall 1994), 129-44. Back.
Note 53: Atul Kohli, "Democracy Amid Economic Orthodoxy: Trends in Developing Countries," Third World Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1993), 686, 678. Back.
Note 55: Friedheim, 487. Back.
Note 56: For extensive discussion of negative socio-economic aspects of the economic reform program in Poland, see Adam Przeworski, "Economic Reforms, Public Opinion, and Political Institutions: Poland in the Eastern European Perspective," in Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Jose Maria Maravall, and Przeworski, eds., Economic Reforms in New Democracies: A Social Democratic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 132-196. Back.
Note 57: John Ishiyama says that of the three sub-groups in the new communist parties, pragmatists, such as Kwa_niewski, are mostly to succeed. "Communist Parties in Transition," Comparative Politics 27, no. 2 (January 1995), 147-166. Back.
Note 59: See for example, Regina Cowen Karp, ed., Central and Eastern Europe: The Challenge of Transition (London: SIPRI and Oxford University Press, 1993). Back.
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