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Map of Europe |
Citizenship in Ukraine:
Western Perspective
Institute on East Central Europe
Columbia University
March, 1996
In this paper, I offer an analysis of the way in which the ethnic situation inherited by Ukraine from the Soviet imperial regime affects the development of citizenship discourse. My focus is on the Russian ethnic element, as it has held the position of the hegemonic actor and set the rules of institutional arrangement. My argument is three-pronged. First, I argue that Russians, the group privileged in terms of political, economic and ideological power under the Soviet imperial regime, managed to retain their strategic position and effectively marginalized other ethnic groups in an independent Ukraine. Second, the citizenship policies and actions of political elites in Kyiv are informed not by the Ukrainian nationalist agenda, inherently strange to the ex-Soviet nomenklatura, but above all by the philosophy of new statism, i.e., the logic of preserving and consolidating their power (or raison d'état). The claims to dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship advanced by regional elites in the Donbas and the Crimea are motivated by their desire to renegotiate the power-sharing arrangement with the center and obtain the greatest possible control over local resources. Third, future Ukrainian citizenship, as well as its inner meaning and cultural face, will be defined largely by an intermediate identity, an inter-identity. This hybrid identity emerged as the result of the Soviet imperial policies geared at creating a new type of person -- the so-called Soviet person.
At the beginning of Ukrainian independence was the word, or, to be more exact, the Soviet quasi-etatist rhetoric that contributed to the empire's own undoing. The official Soviet policy of consistent suppression of the Ukrainian language, culture and religion was paradoxically paired with an etatist rhetoric regarding non-Russian peoples of the empire -- in which the USSR was presented as a free union of self-determining states or Soviet Socialist Republics, Ukraine being one of them. This rhetoric was a fact of historic importance for the future of Ukrainian independence. For the first time in centuries, Ukraine was referred to in the Russian imperial discourse as a state, replete with its state symbols, national colors, and hymn, as well as its state bureaucracy, capital, parliament and council of ministers. It also held other trappings of statehood, such as its own ministry of foreign affairs and a seat in the UN.
These metaphors of statehood created a frame of reference within which it became possible for the entire population of Ukraine (including most importantly, the local de-nationalized nomenklatura) to think of Ukraine not as Little Russia, an imperial province, but as a nation-state. Quite along the lines of Benedict Anderson's argument of imagined communities, it was under the Soviet regime that the 110 ethnic groups inhabiting the Ukrainian SSR were for the first time encouraged to imagine Ukraine as a state, and themselves as a potential political community. 1 In this officially-promoted, however unintentionally, process of imagining, there emerged one new element important for this analysis. Because Moscow succeeded in Russifying all spheres of official communication in Ukraine, the idea of an independent Ukrainian state came to be verbalized in Russian. Contrary to the original nationalist project, demands for Ukraine's independence from Russia were now also articulated in Russian, something that only four decades before would have been inconceivable. This change created a foundation to today contest something that only yesterday went without saying -- namely, that an independent Ukraine should as a matter of course be a Ukrainian Kulturstaat, a polity dominated by the culture of its "titular majority." The particular direction that the discourse on Ukrainian citizenship would take in the years following the 1991 referendum was greatly pre-determined by the political language of the imperial period. The phony Soviet symbols, though never meant in earnest, proved to be but a vote away from reality. 2
The symbolic legacy of the empire accounts for only part of the context in which the debate on citizenship is currently developing. It is also important to take into account the givens of the demographic situation. The last Soviet census (1989) reported 11.3 million Russians living in Ukraine. They comprise 22.1 percent of the population and are con- sidered the second major ethnic group in Ukraine, following the 37.4 million Ukrainians (72.7 percent). These figures, quoted in almost every analysis of the ethno-nationalist conflict in Ukraine, 3 are more misleading than revealing. Based on a state-ascribed ethnicity that either discarded or suppressed individual self-identification, they ignore the cultural changes that occurred in the population as a result of Soviet policies. Every Soviet citizen was to be identified by an officially-ascribed ethnicity or nationality that signified how a person was viewed by the state (and perhaps by other members of the society). 4
The discrepancy between the officially-ascribed and one's self-defined national identity is often so great as to render political and sociological conclusions that ignore this fact quite meaningless. The first such conclusion is usually that Russians in Ukraine are a minority or a diaspora and should be treated as such. "Russians... were practically overnight made into a diaspora (sic) and stood to lose much from [the disintegration of the USSR]." 5 The "Ukrainian majority vs. Russian minority/diaspora" approach is perhaps the most widespread in studies of the ethno-nationalist conflict in Ukraine. 6 The occasional and solidly-substantiated objections noting that the term "minority" is inadequate in reference to the status of Russians in the successor-states of the USSR remain on the margins of the scholarly and political discourse concerning contemporary Ukraine. A number of observers insist on a historical approach to the problem, tracing the changes in the status of Russians caused by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Payin argues that under the old imperial regime, Russians could not be regarded as a minority in any sense of the word within the context of every given Soviet republic. Russians "... used to live in a state where they formed the ethnic majority and they regarded the republics of their residence merely as provinces of a single power." He concedes that under the ancien régime Russians were a politically dominant ethnic group, an "imperial minority." Yet "since the collapse of the USSR, Russians in the republics have been gradually turning from an imperial minority to an ordinary one." 7
A seemingly similar view of Russians in post-Soviet republics is articulated by P. Kolstoe. Much like Payin, he argues that Russians "... in the Soviet republics must be regarded as a privileged group compared to their offspring, who no longer enjoy the same feeling of security... the new generation of diaspora Russians will have fewer cultural opportunities, lower social status and, in some places, even a more precarious legal position than their parents." 8 Although these authors are aware of the fact that the conditions in which Russians find themselves vary widely from country to country, they both make a sweeping generalization about their status in all of the former Soviet republics, essentially arguing that this is a case of a minority (formerly an "imperial minority," according to Payin) or of a new diaspora (Kolstoe). This approach appears quite justifiable in relation to some post-Soviet states, such as Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Moldova or Tajikistan. It is hardly defensible in the case of Ukraine. The "Russians-as-a-new-minority approach" fails to account, at least in the Ukrainian case, for a host of political outcomes that set Ukraine clearly apart from other newly-independent states. For example, how is it possible that in Estonia and Latvia (with considerably larger Russian minorities: 30.3 percent and 34.0 percent respectively, as opposed to 22.1 percent in Ukraine) the titular majority has so far succeeded in setting their own terms of nation-building, based on their national and cultural priorities? Meanwhile, in Ukraine, where this task should have been even easier judging by the numeric parameters of the 1989 Soviet census, the nationalist parties have been successfully excluded from the decision-making process. Unlike Estonia and Latvia, in independent Ukraine nationalist parties are not setting the rules of constitutional arrangement. They are in opposition to the ruling elite, which is composed of the former nomenklatura, also called "the party of power."
The status of Russians in Ukraine and their potential role in citizenship discourse should be evaluated according to the following important aspects. Russians as a minority can be defined: 1) as a racial and/or ethnic group different from the numerically dominant one, 9 2) as a racial and/or ethnic group different from the politically dominant titular (Ukrainian) majority; 3) as a language group, smaller than the Ukrainian one; 4) as a cultural group; 5) as a religious group. One possible explanation of the strikingly disproportionate influence of Russians in Ukraine (at least if one accepts the validity of the Soviet census data) is the fact that ethnic Ukrainians are far from being a monolithic group. They are deeply divided along social, religious, cultural, linguistic, and ideological lines, including all of the main issues of nationhood. There is no consensus among them on the intrinsic value of their independent statehood. Ukrainians, unlike Russians, do not have a single national church with which they can identify -- there are at least five major religious cleavages within them. 10
Language is yet another line of deep division within the mythical "Ukrainian majority." The self-reported claim that 81.1 percent of Ukrainians consider Ukrainian to be their "mother tongue" is greatly exaggerated in favor of Ukrainian. 11 "One school of thought," note Kuzio and Wilson, "holds that [the figure of 11.4 million Russians in Ukraine] is a considerable underestimate, because many Ukrainians are in fact acculturated to a Russian identity and/or Russian-speaking. Thus Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians only accounted for 64.7% of the Ukrainian SSR population in 1989 and were a minority in southern (40%) and eastern Ukraine (44%). Together with Russian-speakers from other minorities... the Russian minority in Ukraine is close to 40% of the population." 12 In reality, the proportion of the population that actually uses Ukrainian the way a mother tongue is used by a titular majority in a full-fledged Kulturstaat like France, Israel, Russia, Poland or Germany, is much smaller. In fact, literary Ukrainian is spoken as a mother tongue by a minority of population. Firstly, people who consider Ukrainian to be their native language often use Russian in everyday communication. 13 According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the number of Ukrainians who primarily use Russian as their "language of convenience" varies from 23 percent in western regions to 81.5 percent (!) in the most populous eastern Ukraine. 14 Secondly, more than 4 million Ukrainians do not speak Ukrainian either as a mother tongue or a language of convenience. 15 Thirdly, the remaining group normally identified as Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians can be treated as such with a great reservation.
From the point of view of the literary standard, the Ukrainian heard in Kyiv, Odessa or Kharkiv (if, of course, one is lucky enough to actually hear it) is heavily contaminated by Russian and is nowhere near the Russian spoken in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Vladivostok, or the French spoken in Paris, Marseilles or Lyons. On the territory of their primary distribution, Russian, French, German or English exhibit geographic dialectal variability, quite normal for any modern language. In that sense, the literary standard is primarily constituted within the dichotomy norm vs. social/regional/professional dialect. In other words, the literary standard for Russian, German, French, English, etc., is endogenously constituted. For Ukrainian, however, its literary norm is constituted against another language, namely Russian -- therefore it is exogenous. The influence of Russian on every level of the Ukrainian language system: phonetic, prosodic, morphological, syntactic and stylistic, to say nothing of lexical (by far the weakest of all lines of defense), is so pervasive that the effort to speak an educated literary norm consists of keeping constant vigilance against the invasion of Russian sounds, suffixes, words, expressions, and so on. This fact drastically increases the transaction costs of speaking literary Ukrainian as opposed to its easier but heavily Russified versions. As a consequence, Ukrainian, understood primarily as the literary standard of Ukrainian, is spoken by a minority of Ukraine's population. This minority includes the rural and urban populations in the regions of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil, and to a much lesser extent those of Lutsk, Rivne, Chernivtsi and Uzhhorod. In addition, literary Ukrainian is also spoken by a narrow strata of nationally-conscious intelligentsia. The predominant majority speaks a heavily contaminated form of Ukrainian, also known as "surzhyk," or "hodgepodge."
The picture is further complicated by the fact that ethno-nationalist conflict in Ukraine involves not two but at least three principal identity groups, each with its rather distinct self-perception, language, ideology, culture, religion, and ethnic features. These groups are: Russian, Ukrainian, and an intermediate identity (or inter-identity). Inter-identity is a product of intense and continuous contacts between Ukrainian and Russian populations over centuries and, above all, of the centralizing Soviet policies aimed at the creation of a new communist person. Inter-identity defies accepted parameters of cultural, linguistic and ethnic attribution, being located as it were on the border, in the area of overlap between Russian and Ukrainian identities. These three types are at variance with the Soviet census classifications.
Inter-identity presents perhaps the greatest challenge for analysis. How to describe a person who, case 1: is Ukrainian by ethnic origin, speaks Russian as his mother tongue, and feels more at home with Russian culture than with his "native" Ukrainian one? How to categorize an ethnic Ukrainian who, case 2: speaks either Ukrainian or Russian and considers himself a Soviet person (sovetskiy chelovek)? How to define a Ukrainian who, case 3: speaks a patois that, from the point of view of the literary norm, is neither Russian nor Ukrainian, or is both of them at the same time, and who is much more comfortable in Russian/Soviet culture, as it is more familiar to him? The first sub-type is usually termed Russophone Ukrainian. The second sub-type is clearly a carrier of Soviet identity, primarily a political/ideological identity and only indirectly an ethnic/cultural one (insofar as Soviet and Russian are viewed as synonyms and by the same token Soviet and Ukrainian -- as opposites). The third sub-type has been perhaps the greatest problem for sociologists, linguists and other experts in Ukrainian studies alike.
It is important to note that all three of these sub-types usually gravitate toward Russians in their self-identification and are likely to ally with them on the issue of citizenship. The pivotal element in the third sub-type of inter-identity is its language traits, i.e., the patois, or surzhyk, that it speaks. It is a peculiar crossbreeding between Ukrainian grammar and Russian lexis that is variously proportioned. This by-product of highly intensive Ukrainian-Russian language contacts over the centuries is spoken by millions of Ukrainian citizens. Surzhyk defies accepted norms of a literary standard and is treated as a kind of linguistic bastard, banished from written use, and employed beyond the sphere of oral communication, in literature, exclusively for parody. Surzhyk has exhibited a remarkable tenacity over the decades, much to the annoyance of purists both Ukrainian and Russian. 16 It is surzhyk, not codified literary Ukrainian, that came to represent the Ukrainian language and culture in Russian popular mentality, not least because surzhyk is much easier for Russian-speakers to understand than literary Ukrainian.
A major correction in the commonly-applied "Ukrainian majority vs. Russian minority" analytical framework is called for by the fact that about a third of the "passport Ukrainians" (or 12.46 million people) are Russian-speaking. 17 By these very moderate estimates, there are at least 25.86 million. Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine, including 11.4 million ethnic Russians, 12.46 million Russophone Ukrainians, and more then 2 million other smaller minorities like Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Romanians, who are usually non-Ukrainian speakers. This leaves about 26.14 million people. Thus, even in purely numeric terms the assertion that Russians in Ukraine are a minority in regard to the alleged "Ukrainian majority" is highly problematic and will be so until a more or less accurate estimate of the surzhyk pool of speakers and inter-identity in general is made.
The question "Are Russians a minority in terms of political power?" -- in other words, are Russians politically dominated by Ukrainians? can be answered in two steps. Firstly, were Russians a politically-dominant group under the ancien régime? Secondly, has there been a change of ruling elite in Ukraine since the proclamation of independence, and how has such a change affected the status of Russians in Ukraine? The answer to the first part of the question is provided by E. Payin: "Despite the existence of certain features of statehood in the union republics, their leaders, the secretaries of the republican communist parties, were in fact appointed by the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. In the last Politburo itself, eight out of its ten members were Russians; on the CPSU Central Committee, Russians accounted for more than 75 percent of the members, and the Communist Party as a whole, according to 1990 data, was 59.8 percent Russian. Besides, the post of second secretary of a republican central committee was traditionally occupied by a Russian. Russians usually headed republican state security committees, ministries of the interior, and military garrisons stationed in the republics." 18 A similar view of Russians' politically-hegemonic role under the ancien régime is expressed by other observers. 19
The Soviet statistics of the ethnic make-up of the imperial hierarchy in the union republics quoted by Kolstoe, Kuzio, and Wilson are often misleading. Kolstoe maintains that "The most important dividing line in Soviet society, namely between the haves and the have-nots, was not related to ethnic criteria, but determined by membership or non-membership in the ruling elite, the nomenklatura, which cut across ethnic boundaries." 20 However, he fails to take into account that it was impossible for a non-Russian to get admission to the ruling elite without first giving up his language and his culture. More than that, it was expected of such non-Russian aspirants to higher offices to engage in persecution of local "bourgeois nationalists."
The high representation rate of "titular nationality" among the Soviet nomenklatura may very well be evidence of their de-nationalization (Sovietization), of the regime's confidence in their ideological reliability, and in their effectiveness as tools of imperial policies. In the late 1970s, a period of particularly brutal repression of the Ukrainian dissident movement, of all Union republics, only in Ukraine was the chief of the KGB an "ethnic Ukrainian." 21 However, this fact is no evidence of Moscow's special benevolence or predisposition toward Ukrainian elites, as D. Laitin seems to argue. 22 Quite to the contrary, it is an indication of complete denationalization of these Ukrainian communist nomenklatura. The indigenization of elites in national republics was a crucial stage in the transformation of the Soviet "formal empire" to the "informal empire" (Doyle), or what Breuilly labeled the "public colonial state." Under the "formal empire," imperial bureaucrats were sent down from the center, in this case from Russia, to govern the indigenous population of ethnic peripheries. At the stage of the "public colonial state," the agents of mediation between the indigenous population and the central authorities were recruited locally. 23 "The development of loyal non-Russian elites depended on some degree of identity change within local non-Russian societies," notes Beissinger. "Elites coopted from subordinate nationalities, to one degree or another, shed aspects of their ethnicity in the process of upward mobility, even coming to identify with the culture and language of the dominant group." 24
Has the nomenklatura elite in Ukraine been replaced in the wake of Soviet imperial collapse? Khazanov maintains that "... in countries like Romania, Russia, not to mention the other CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] countries, the old nomenklatura as a class, or, if one prefers, as a stratum, remains in power. It only incorporated some new members and changed the legitimation of its power." 25 An essentially identical view is expressed by other observers. 26 The 1994 presidential and parliamentary elections did not bring about a change of ruling elite, but a change within the same social class, between its two groupings. The group of high communist apparatchiks headed by Leonid Kravchuk lost the election to the group of Soviet managerial technocrats led by Leonid Kuchma. In both presidential administrations, the former nomenklatura never lost its grip on power, just as representatives of the anti-totalitarian, anti-communist movement were never allowed to exert any influence (beyond the symbolic) on the decision-making process. 27
How has all this affected the discourse on citizenship? In Ukraine, the issue of citizenship has been debated not on its own merits, but within a triple political opposition of options: sole Ukrainian vs. dual Ukrainian-Russian vs. common Soviet or Commonwealth of Independent States. The third and less-pronounced dimension of the debate was added by neo-communist parties that advocated (in either an open or somewhat veiled form) a return to empire, and with it to common citizenship of the reinstated USSR -- or at least of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In view of these realities, the debate on citizenship in Ukraine has in effect been the debate over dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship.
Ukrainian citizenship is based on the so-called zero option, which is in essence a variation of the jus soli principle. It defines the conception of Ukrainian citizenship expansively and in liberal terms:
Citizens of Ukraine are those individuals who: 1) were resident in Ukraine at the moment this Law was enacted, irrespective of their origin, social and property status, race and ethnicity, sex, education, language, political views, religious convictions, occupation, and who are not citizens of other states and who do not object to acquiring the citizenship of Ukraine. 2) are currently abroad working as government employees or are in military service or studying, provided that they were born in Ukraine or proved that they were its permanent residents and are not citizens of other states and expressed their desire to become citizens of Ukraine no later than a year after the enactment of this Law (Article 2). 28
Much like in Western democracies, the law on citizenship in Ukraine is based on a combination of both jus soli and jus sanguinis principles, where the former, i.e., common- ality of territory, is clearly the central tenet of the legal conception of Ukrainian citizenship. This principle makes it possible to extend citizenship of Ukraine automatically to all those registered as residents at the time of the law's adoption. Thus, unlike in Western countries where large immigrant populations find themselves excluded from the polity on the grounds of various restrictive principles of citizenship acquisition, Ukraine's zero option avoids such exclusion. The inclusive nature of the law is further enhanced by the absence of any qualifying requirements that are often applied on such occasions in other countries (duration of residence in the country, the fact of one's or one's parents' birth on its territory, knowledge of its language, of its constitution, of its structure of government, etc.). In this respect, Ukraine differs from Estonia or Latvia, whose conceptions of citizenship are based on several conditions which inevitably result in exclusion of large segments of the population. 29
The inclusive and democratic nature of the Ukrainian law on citizenship is particularly salient in comparison to the jus sanguinis-citizenship legislation in countries like Estonia, Latvia, Germany or Sweden. However, it is not necessarily proof of some inherently democratic nature of the Ukrainian state and of the tolerant predisposition of the Ukrainian titular "majority" -- though there is a tradition of such a lofty interpretation of this piece of legislation. 30 Given the virtual absence of any sustained liberal democratic tradition in Ukraine, the ostensible liberalism and democratic nature of Ukraine's citizenship law can also be read as an indication of political weakness of the "Ukrainian majority," of its inability, in stark contrast with proportionally smaller titulars (61.5 percent in Estonia and 52 percent in Latvia, compared to Ukraine's 72.1 percent), to set their own terms of institutional arrangement and politically maginalize the Russian imperial minority -- or at least make its inclusion into the polity contingent on a number of important provisions. This less romantic interpretation seems particularly plausible within my general argument that Russians remain a strategically dominant group in contemporary Ukraine, and also takes into account the fact that, unlike the Russian "minority," the Ukrainian "majority" is still often "deprived" of such rights as education in its native language, particularly in the Crimea and eastern parts of the country. This is not to say, however, that these Ukrainians always demand that such a right be granted.
The value each ethnic group attaches to citizenship cannot be drawn from the flawed Soviet census data. What can be discerned with a reasonable degree of reliability is information concerning a general, ethnically-undifferentiated picture of which proportion of the total population favors which choice. Quite in agreement with the logic of my analytical framework, the largest group of the population, 46 percent, is in favor of dual citizenship (DC). Together with those who favour the restoration of the USSR and with it of Soviet citizenship -- about nine percent of the population -- they make a clear majority of 55 percent. Only 35 percent of the general population chooses single Ukrainian citizenship. 31
Because the current polling techniques are based on the old Soviet conceptualization of ethnicity, they cannot be used to judge how the real, rather than fictitious, ethnic choices are distributed throughout the Ukrainian population. A fortunate exception to the rule is the comprehensive survey conducted by I. Bremmer. Although it is also based on the "Ukrainian majority vs. Russian minority" doxa, it is focused separately on three areas of Ukraine -- Lviv, Kyiv and Simferopil. Lviv and Simferopil are polar instances in which transitional identity states (between Ukrainians and Russians) are minimal. In Lviv, 98 percent of Ukrainians and 89 percent of Russians want to be citizens of Ukraine. By contrast, in Simferopil the respective figures are 79 percent of Ukrainians and only 27 percent of Russians. In Lviv, 0 percent of Ukrainians and 5 percent of Russians do not want to be citizens of Ukraine. However in Simferopil the percentage of those who reject Ukrainian citizenship is 15 percent for Ukrainians and 59 percent for Russians. 32
According to rational choice theory, actors opt for choices and outcomes that tend to maximize their interests conceived on the basis of "some rational plan of life." Though such plans vary greatly, it is not unreasonable to assume that, given an opportunity to choose, a rational individual would most likely prefer "more primary social goods rather than less." 33 An abstract individual who acts in such a manner would most likely prefer to be a dual national rather than a single one. Thus endorsement of DC appears to be a more rational choice than its rejection, not least because it increases the likelihood of "more primary social goods" while its rejection decreases it. In the specific Ukrainian setting, the deep and deteriorating social and economic crisis, Russia's relatively better economic performance, as well as the general population's rapidly-sinking access to resources, rights and recognition -- all these factors make the endorsement of DC not only more rational but almost guaranteed as a means of making the best of both countries. 34 Rawls allows a major correction in the realization of such rationally-informed behavior: "Of course, it may turn out, that... some of [the individuals in question] for religious or other reasons may not, in fact, want more of these [primary social] goods." 35 This is exactly the case with those Ukrainians, Russians and other ethnic and inter-ethnic groups acting in such a seemingly irrational manner, rejecting DC in favour of sole Ukrainian citizenship and thus radically curtailing their range of survival options in a precarious socio-economic situation.
What are the motivations that drive grassroots actors to advance or support claims of institutionalized Ukrainian-Russian DC? These motivations are connected with access to rights, recognition, and resources that the institution of citizenship ensures for any member of the demos. They include: 1) the right to own, inherit and bequeath property in both states; 2) the right to participate in the process of privatization of state property and receive privatization vouchers in both states; 3) the desire to have unimpeded access to one's country of origin (without having to apply for entrance visas and go through other irksome bureaucratic procedures); 4) the possibility to avoid taxation, particularly in the absence of bilateral agreements regulating taxation; 5) the perceived recognition and respect of Russian citizenship and by the same token the perceived lack thereof in Ukrainian citizenship; 6) the psychological satisfaction over the tie maintained with one's country of origin, where one might have family members, friends, etc.
Kolstoe suggests that Russians who reject single Ukrainian citizenship are motivated by their unwillingness to accept the idea that they owe their allegiance and loyalty to the new polity, in addition to the formal responsibilities of paying taxes, respecting laws, serving in the armed forces, etc. 36 In addition to the desire to exit a polity that has failed to live up to its social-eudaemonic promise, the claims to DC might also be explained by reasons of perception. The rejection of a new Ukrainian citizenship that is clearly implicit in the quest for DC can be a repudiation of this new political identity being imposed by the newly-independent state. For many Russians, the very existence of a separate Ukrainian nationality is questionable. 37 "The fact that Russian mass consciousness does not consider the idea of Ukraine to be quite serious has a great deal to do with the question of statehood." 38 Ukrainian citizenship as a foundation for the idea of a Ukraine independent from Russia becomes an object of renunciation, dismissal, or even spurn, open or hidden, conscious or reflexive. In a quite similar manner, before independence other elements of the idea of Ukraine such as language, culture, and custom were either rejected or treated with condescension, again as something not quite serious. Claims for DC are a form of rejection of the idea of Ukraine, and could be a symptom of what is sometimes called Russia's "Ukrainian complex," a specific self-definition of Russia and Russian statehood through Ukraine, and Ukrainian statelessness as a sine qua non of the former. 39 Indicative of this peculiar Russian/Soviet self-vision is the comment of Len Karpinskiy, editor-in-chief of the liberal Moskovskiye Novosti Weekly, who opined that "Without Ukraine not only can there be no great Russia, but there cannot be any kind of Russia." 40 For those in Ukraine who share this idea, whether they happen to be ethnic Russians, Russophone Ukrainians, or individuals who, in public opinion polls, still identify themselves as Soviet people, acceptance of a separate Ukrainian citizenship might be regarded as something of a betrayal -- of their mother-country (the Soviet Union or Russia), of their own identity (Russian or Soviet) and of their own past. In the situation in which a definitive rejection of Ukrainian citizenship is not really a feasible option, the demand to institutionalize DC is a way to reconcile Russia's "Ukrainian complex" with the new post-imperial realities.
DC has become a watershed between political elites. On one side of the divide there is the central elite, which in no uncertain terms rejects institutionalization of DC, and on the opposite side of the divide are regional political elites of eastern parts of the country and the Crimea who advance the demands of institutional Ukrainian-Russian DC. In principle, there is hardly a difference between the Kyiv regional elites and those of the Donbas and the Crimea in terms of their social origin, previous life experiences, ideological backgrounds and cultural leanings. According to their identity characteristics (language, culture, convictions, world perception, values, and religious beliefs), members of these elites show affinity with either the Russian or the inter-identity.
At first glance, there is something of a defeated expectation in effect here. The 1994 electoral victory of left-wing, neo-Communist and Socialist parties traditionally reflecting the interests of Russian and pro-Russian electorates of eastern and southern regions of the country augured well for those who demanded the institutionalization of DC. This favorable situation was even further improved by the election to the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, a typical representative of a Russophone Soviet managerial elite in Ukraine who was widely expected to side with those who voted him into office on the issue of DC. However, the first pronouncements of the newly-elected leaders offered no indications that they intended to meet these popular expectations. On the contrary, in an unlikely reversal of fortune, the "party of power" chose to act in line with what could be expected from nationally-conscious Ukrainians.
During his visit to New York in October 1995, in answer to my question about his government's official stand on DC, President Kuchma said: "We have no position on this issue, because there can be only one Ukrainian citizenship, [but] there can be made exceptions to the rule..." Even though the law on citizenship in Ukraine was amended in order to allow DC on the basis of corresponding bilateral agreements with a second country, 41 the Kuchma government has so far steadfastly refused to translate that amendment into life. Such a position on the issue may seem surprising, but has its inner logic, the logic of power, sometimes also referred to as the reason of state. Once power had been won, it would have been patently absurd for those holding it to relinquish it by institutionalizing DC and reducing to nonsense their claim to the exclusive and undivided loyalty of all Ukrainian citizenry. Allowing almost every second citizen to hold at the same time allegiance to a neighboring nation 42 whose policy is widely perceived as destructive for Ukraine and as threatening its national interests 43 would have been tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty and state independence. No wonder that President Kuchma's influential political advisors, otherwise known for their consistently pro-Eurasian (pro-Russian, in the newspeak of the Ukrainian ruling elite) views, qualified Moscow's insistence on DC for ethnic Russians in Ukraine as "camouflaged attempts to foster the fifth column." 44
Thus, in policies concerning the institutionalization of DC, the central elite has increasingly revealed a curious political duality, a conflict between its past social and political credentials and its present interests of survival as a ruling class, its imperatives of self-preservation and the further accumulation of power. This duality can be described as a clash between its Russian/Soviet identity and the political choices that are in agreement with the Ukrainian nationalist agenda. "In adapting the western concept of citizenship the leaders of the newly independent states set themselves four tasks: to use the status to build a sense of national cohesion, to create a stable political system, to infuse a sense of political morality; and to develop programmes of political education as a precondition for the achievement of these three goals." 45
Obviously, DC is at odds with at least the task of promoting a sense of national cohesion. Central political elites in Kyiv cannot be unaware of the pernicious effect that institutionalization of DC is bound to have on their own political agenda. Institutional DC permanently validates a divided loyalty. Once introduced, DC would put those areas densely populated by people of Russian and intermediate identities into the sphere of a legally-recognized influence of, and territorial claims by, the Russian government. The situation of Ukraine's neighbors makes the problem of citizenship more sensitive, as it places the issue of undivided loyalty of Ukrainian residents to their state in the focus of political concerns harbored by the ruling elite over several issues. These include: territorial claims (first by Russia 46 then by Romania 47 ), the conflict in Moldovan Transdnistria with its 600,000 ethnic Ukrainian minority, the partition of the Black Sea Fleet between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, and the separatist movement in the Crimea. "With the collapse of the transnational regime of the Warsaw Pact," notes C. Offe, "each of [the East European] states with ethnic minorities has reason to fear that the neighboring patron state will come to the 'protection' of its minority and even attempt to annex the territory inhabited by the minority." 48
The clash between Kyiv and regional elites in Donbas and the Crimea over DC is not in essence a struggle for minority rights, nor against forced Ukrainization of ethnic Russians or other forms of ethnic discrimination, domination and oppression, contrary to the way in which regional leaders and some influential Russian politicians in Moscow would like to present it. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine are not at any greater economic, political or social disadvantage than the rest of the population. This fact is corroborated both by their own self-reported status and by other observers sympathetic to them. Russia's ambassador to Ukraine, Leonid Smoliakov, was reported as having told journalists that "he was not aware of any cases of forced Ukrainianizations in Ukraine, including the Crimea." 49 In the UN report on human development in Ukraine for 1995, according to the standard of living, which takes into account data on "household incomes, wages, and access to housing," the densely-Russian eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk rank "highest," Zaporizhzhia ranks "high." Only the Crimea ranks "low," but so do the densely-Ukrainian regions of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi. 50
The conflict between the two elites over DC is in essence a struggle for power in which the regional elites in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea are trying to win greater power from Kyiv and to resist the latter's attempts at centralization. For regional elites in the Donbas and the Crimea, the claim to DC is a useful device of electoral mobilization. Judging by the survey data quoted earlier, the promise of DC in an electoral platform would certainly have considerable appeal among voters across ethnic demarcation lines. For regional and local elites propagating its introduction, it is above all a political strategy aimed at very pragmatic goals. It is a maneuver to win the electoral support of ethnic Russians and those groups allying with them at both regional and national levels on the issue of citizenship, by whipping up and exploiting ethnic and cultural identities. This move would help the elites in the Donbas and other eastern and southern regions to renegotiate more substantial power for themselves. 51 DC typically goes together with such demands as official status for the Russian language, a federated structure for the Ukrainian state, and closer ties with Russia.
In the Crimea, the introduction of a Crimean citizenship serves to assert the sovereignty of Simferopil against the claims by Kyiv to exclusive sovereignty over the entire territory of Ukraine as a unitary state. The clash over the citizenship provision of the Crimean Constitution adopted by the Supreme Soviet in Simferopil in May 1992 and declared null and void by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament of Ukraine) in Kyiv, is an important dimension in the ongoing struggle between Kyiv and Simferopil over the status of the peninsula. The Crimean Constitution, in defiance of the Law on the Citizenship of Ukraine, provides for a separate citizenship of the Crimean Republic (Chapter 6, Article 17). 52 To complicate things even further, it also allows for dual citizenship (Article 18).
If allowed to stand, these citizenship provisions of the Crimean Constitution would become not only a dangerous precedent for other regions of the country by institutionalizing an interior dual Crimean-Ukrainian citizenship, but would also legalize a triple Crimean-Ukrainian-Russian citizenship or a Crimean-Ukrainian-Turkish one. It is common knowledge that the majority of the Crimeans want to be citizens of Russia. 53 Under this provision, the 300,000 Crimean Tartars would also be able to apply for Turkish citizenship (according to different estimates, millions of Crimean Tartars live in Turkey). This would most probably destroy the institution of Ukrainian citizenship, making it a legal impossibility and a political joke. It comes as no surprise that the citizenship provision is currently one of the major points of disagreement between Kyiv and Simferopil.
Ukraine is a unique case of a post-imperial polity in which the formerly dominant ethnic group (Russians) managed to retain its strategic position in networks of political, economic, and ideological power. This fact sets Ukraine clearly apart from such other post-Soviet states as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. At the same time, it puts Ukraine in one group with Belarus, perhaps the only other country where titular nationality is in a politically, economically and culturally marginal position. However, unlike in Belarus, the ruling elite in Ukraine has developed a new locally-grounded identity that differs sufficiently from the Great Russian one. This new identity is Russian by language and Ukrainian by raison d'état. It has informed Kyiv's consistently statist policy, which stands in dramatic contrast with Minsk's policy of rapprochement and reunification with Moscow.
At least in quantitative terms, Ukraine has no clearly-defined ethnic majority. As a result of Soviet centralizing policies, there emerged in Ukraine a new intermediate identity which is a principal element in citizenship discourse and in the process of state building alongside the Russians and Ukrainians. Due to the absence of a single Ukrainian national identity based on shared language, culture, or an overlapping consensus on the value of Ukrainian statehood, Ukrainians are not in a position to set their terms of institutional arrangement in Ukraine the same way that Russians do in Russia, Estonians in Estonia and Latvians in Latvia.
There is no contradiction between the contention that Russians are a strategically dominant group in Ukraine and the lack of desire on the part of the pro-Russian ruling elite in Kyiv to reunite with Moscow within one state, nor to create a union of the type that was outlined in spring 1996 by presidents Lukashenka of Belarus and Yeltsin of Russia. As long as there is no real threat to the political position of the central elite from the Ukrainian nationalist parties, there is no real reason for that elite to want to relinquish their control over Ukraine to Moscow. The pro-Eurasian orientation of the neo-nomenklatura is as much influenced by pragmatic reasons of safeguarding access to the vast Russian market and resources as it is a natural continuation of their inherently Russian-cum-Soviet identity.
As far as the central elite is concerned, its statist political imperatives have so far prevailed over its duty of loyalty to its grassroots electorate. This accounts for the seemingly paradoxical fact that the Russian/ex-Soviet "party of power" openly defied the claims of the large majority of its electorate to institutionalize dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship. These statist imperatives created an unexpected linkage between the central elite and the nationally-conscious Ukrainian element, and made both of them unlikely allies over the value of Ukrainian sovereignty and statehood. Thus, Ukrainian independence became a rallying point for nationally-conscious Ukrainians and for the largely de-nationalized neo-nomenklatura. This unlikely alliance with the Ukrainian West and the threat of progressive alienation from the Russian east and south of Ukraine makes the ruling party in Kyiv increasingly more attentive to the nationalist agenda of the Ukrainian parties. The result is a careful balancing act that Kyiv has been performing both under Kravchuk and Kuchma. On y soit mal qui mal y pense!
NOTES
Note 1: B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, New York: Verso, 1983). Back.
Note 2: In the December 1, 1991, referendum, 90.3 percent of those who participated (i.e., 84.2 percent of the total eligible electorate) voted in favor of independence -- 68 percent of ethnic Ukrainians, 55 percent of Russians and 46 percent of other minorities were in favor. See T. Kuzio and A. Wilson, Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 190. Back.
Note 3: See, for example, R. S. Clem, "Demographic Change among Russians and Ukrainians in the Soviet Union: Social, Economic and Political Implications" in Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter, Peter J. Potichnyj et al., eds. (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1992), 277-295; P. Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); A. Khazanov, After the USSR (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Kuzio and Wilson. Back.
Note 4: P. D'Anieri and O. Malanchuk, "National Identity and Ukrainian Foreign Policy," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Political Psychology, Washington, July 6-8, 1995, 3. Back.
Note 5: Ian Bremmer, "The Politics of Ethnicity: Russians in the New Ukraine" Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 2 (1994), 261. Back.
Note 6: See for example, Y. Bilinsky, "Political Relations between Russians and Ukrainians in the USSR: The 1970s and Beyond," in Ukraine and Russia..., 165-198; R. Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutionalist Account," Theory and Society XXIII, no. 1 (February 1994), 47-78; E. Golovakha, N. Panina and N. Churilov, "Russians in Ukraine," in The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics, V. Shlapentokh, M. Sendich and E. Payin, eds. (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 59-71; Khazanov; Kolstoe; A. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993); and Wilson, "The Donbas between Ukraine and Russia: The Use of History in Political Disputes," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995). Back.
Note 7: Payin, "Disintegration of the Empire" in The New Russian Diaspora, 22 and 24-25. Back.
Note 9: This approach toward Russians in the newly-independent states is articulated by Khazanov, 97. Back.
Note 10: These cleavages are: 1) between agnostics and Christians; 2) among Christians -- between organized denominational churches traditionally engaged in politics on the one side of the divide and devoutly apolitical Protestant sects that are rapidly spreading their influence (Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Evangelists, Baptists) on the other side; 3) among denominational churches: Ukrainian Catholics vs. Orthodox (both Ukrainian and Russian); 4) among the Orthodox -- between Ukrainians who belong to Russian Orthodox Church and Ukrainians who belong to one of the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches; 5) among Ukrainian Orthodox -- between the faithful of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and those of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate). Back.
Note 12: Kuzio and Wilson, 25. Back.
Note 13: "Mother tongue," admitted Arel and V. Khmelko, specifically in the Ukrainian setting, can "mean the language that one first learned as a child, or the language one speaks best at the present time. These two languages are not necessarily identical... Soviet census authorities... refrained from clarifying which interpretation were to prevail thus diminishing the reliability of the results" (Arel and V. Khmelko, "The Russian Factor and the Territorial Polarization in Ukraine," paper presented at the Conference "Peoples, Nations, Identities: The Russian-Ukrainian Encounter," Columbia University, September 21-23, 1995, 2). In fact, the symbolic coercion of Russifying policies in Ukraine skewed the relationship between mother tongue and the "language of convenience" so that for somebody whose mother tongue happened to be Ukrainian, its use in everyday communication, particularly at work and in public discourse, was highly "inconvenient." Thus, for example, Ukrainian was the language of instruction in 47.9 percent of all secondary, 32.9 percent of vocational schools, and as little as 15.2 percent of universities, while "ethnic Ukrainians" constituted 72.7 percent of population (Khazanov, 251). Back.
Note 14: Arel and Khmelko, 2. Back.
Note 16: It is only puzzling why surzhyk, as prevalent in Ukraine as Russian and much more than standard Ukrainian in Kyiv, Cherkassy, Poltava and other central, eastern and southern cities, has been so consistently ignored in Ukrainian studies. A fortunate exception to the rule is the study by Laada Bilaniuk, "Heteroglossia, Metalanguage and Power in Post-Soviet Ukraine," Nationalities Papers XX, no. 20 (1995), 1-27. Back.
Note 18: See Payin, 22-23 and Motyl, 67. Back.
Note 19: Particularly interesting is the admission made by Mikhail Gorbachev's trusted aide Anatoly Chernayev: "The [Soviet] union only lasted as long as it did mainly out of party discipline, by Moscow putting ethnic Russians in charge all over, putting them in the key positions in the military, in the K.G.B. and the Party" (D. Remnick. "Gorbachev's Last Hurrah," The New Yorker, March 11, 1996. Back.
Note 21: S. Bialer, Stalin's Successors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 223-24. Back.
22. "Consider the case of the Ukraine. Its elites enjoyed most-favoured-lord status..." notes D. Laitin on this occasion. See D. Laitin, "The National Uprisings in the Soviet Union," World Politics 44, no. 1 (October 1991), 159. Back.
Note 23: Both M. Doyle and J. Breuilly are quoted in M. Beissinger, "Elites and Ethnic Identities in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics" in The Post-Soviet Nations. Perspectives on the Demise of the USSR, A. Motyl, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 141-169. Back.
Note 24: See M. Beissinger, 151. The question of how profound and irreversible this identity change was among what originally used to be an ethnic Ukrainian population has so far been left unanswered. Can these identity changes be fitted within the regular process of redefinition that any ethno-cultural community (whether Russians, Americans or Canadians) is subjected to, or do they transcend the widest possible limits to which a given identity can be "stretched" without being destroyed? In other words, is this a case of redefinition of the old Ukrainian identity or are we dealing with the emergence of a new identity? Back.
Note 25: See Khazanov, 91. Back.
Note 26: See also V. Korotich, "The Ukraine Rising," Foreign Policy, no. 85 (Winter 1991-92); D. Lempert, "Changing Russian Political Culture in the 1990s: Parasites, Paradigms and Perestroika," Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 3 (1993); M. Riabchuk, "Between Civil Society and the New Etatism: Democracy in the Making and State Building in Ukraine," in Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies, M. Kennedy, ed. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994); V. Polokhalo, ed., The Political Analysis of Postcommunism: Understanding Postcommunist Societies (Kyiv: Political Thought, 1995). Back.
Note 27: "Mr. Kuchma and Mr. Kravchuk were both members of the old Communist elite. But while Mr. Kravchuk was a party bureaucrat and a secretary for ideology, Mr. Kuchma spent his life in industry, working as the missile factory's party organizer before rising to a director..." -- S. Erlanger, "Ukrainians Elect a New President," New York Times, July 12, 1994. The difference in positions the two leaders occupied under ancien régime hardly affects their policies toward the old/new nomenklatura. They represent two different groupings of the same ex-communist elite. Back.
Note 28: See Holos Ukrainy, November 13, 1991. Back.
Note 29: "Out of the 536,250 residents of Estonia of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and other ethnic origin that amount to 35 percent of total population of the country, 117,000 (or 21.8 percent) will become Estonian citizens" -- A. Kirch, "From a Change of Evaluation to a Change of Paradigm: Estonia 1940-1993," in Changing Identities in Estonia. Sociological Facts and Commentaries (Tallinn: Estonian Science Foundation, 1994), 9. That means almost four out of every five non-Estonian residents of the country will be excluded from the polity as non-citizens. In Latvia, a country with a population of about 2.5 million, every third resident is excluded from citizenship (Novoye Russkoye Slovo, October 20, 1995). See also A. Stepan, "When Democracy and the National-State Are Competing Logics: Reflections on Estonia," Archives Européennes de sociologie Tome XXXV, numero 1 (1994), 134. Back.
Note 30: Mykola Riabchuk, for example, characterizes laws on languages, citizenship, and minorities as such that "follow the highest world standards of human rights," Riabchuk, 131. Back.
Note 31: The data are quoted in: Yu. Sayenko, "Do yednosti rozmayitostey. Sotsiokulturni oriyentatsiyi etnosiv," Polityka I Chas no. 2 (1995), 73-79. Back.
Note 32: For more relevant details of the Bremmer survey, see Bremmer. Back.
Note 33: J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 142. Back.
Note 34: Of course, economic performance of the country alone is not the only factor affecting popular attitudes toward citizenship. One should also take into account considerations of social peace and personal safety, the length of military service, crime, corruption, environmental situation, and even climate. Ukraine is not always in a losing position by these other criteria. Crime is not as rampant, military service is shorter, and Ukrainian draftees do not face the prospect of dying in Chechnia or Tajikistan. Back.
Note 37: R. Szporluk, "Belarus', Ukraine and the Russian Question: A Comment," Post-Soviet Affairs (1993), 366. Back.
Note 38: R. Solchanyk, "Russia, Ukraine and the Imperial Legacy," Post-Soviet Affairs (1993), 342. Back.
Note 39: Within this self-perception Russia and the Soviet Union are often completely identical, as are such concepts as "the Russian people" and "the Soviet people." Thus, Russia's "Ukrainian complex" equally pertains to those who still feel themselves to be Soviet people rather than Ukrainian or Russian. Back.
Note 40: "The Ukrainian problem has an infinitely more profound meaning for Russia than other national problems. It is a question not only of the political structure of Russia and its boundaries, but of its spiritual life," wrote prominent Russian intellectual Georgyi Fedotov (1886-1951). "The very existence of Russia depends on its [the problem of Ukraine's] resolution. Our task can be formulated as follows: not only to keep Ukraine in the body of Russia, but also to implant Ukrainian culture into Russian culture. We are witnessing a very rapid, and for us, an extremely dangerous process: the conception of a new Ukrainian national consciousness, essentially a new nation..." Quoted in Solchanyk, 341. Back.
Note 41: Zakon Ukrainy pro hromadianstvo, Part One ("General Principles"), Article 1. Holos Ukrainy, November 13, 1991. Back.
Note 42: As it follows from the same opinion poll (Sayenko), 46 percent of the Ukraine's population are in favor of DC. Back.
Note 43: See O.Vlasiuk et al., "Ludskyi vymir, realiyi I perspektyvy Ukrainy," Polityka I Chas no. 1 (1995), 34-45; D.Vydrin, "Ukraine and Russia" in Damage Limitation or Crisis? Russian and the Outside World, R. Blackwill and S.A. Karaganov, eds. (Washington and London: Brassey's, 1994). Back.
Note 44: D. Vydrin and D. Tabachnyk, Ukraine on the Threshold of the Twenty First Century: Political Aspect (Kyiv: Lybid, 1995), 67; Vydrin is the director of the International Institute for Global and Regional Security. Until recently he was a presidential advisor on interior policy issues. Tabachnyk is currently head of President Kuchma's administration. Back.
Note 45: D. Heater, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics and Education (London, New York: Longman, 1990), 131. Back.
Note 46: "Russian-Ukrainian relations plunged in August 1991," writes Vydrin, "when Yeltsyn's press-secretary declared that the Russian Federation had a right to territorial claims against Ukraine. Since then apprehensions about Russian designs on Ukrainian territory have been a powerful destabilizing force in relations between these two states" (123). Back.
Note 47: Romania is one of the few remaining neighboring states with which Ukraine has no friendship treaty that includes the obligatory mutual recognition of borders. The negotiations have been stalled by Bucharest's insistence that Kyiv recognize the historical unfairness of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact that resulted in the transfer of Eastern Bukovina and part of Bessarabia from Romania to the USSR. The Ukrainian government views these demands as thinly-veiled territorial claims. Romania also announced its intention to appeal to the European Court in the Hague over the legitimacy of the transfer to the USSR of the Zmiyiny Island in the Black Sea, which is now part of Ukraine. Back.
Note 48: See: C. Offe, "Strong Causes, Weak Cures," East European Constitutional Review 1, no. 1 (1992), 22. Back.
Note 49: R. Solchanyk, "The Politics of Language in Ukraine," RFE/RL Research Report, March 5, 1993, 1. Back.
Note 50: See Ukraine Human Development Report 1995 (Kyiv: United Nations Development Project), 45. Back.
Note 51: This argument generally conforms with the analysis made in the wake of the last presidential elections by some Western experts who discarded the assertion that political leaders in Donbas were against independent Ukrainian statehood: "Russified eastern Ukraine [Western diplomats] say, is less interested in joining Russia than in securing Russia's energy, raw materials and orders for manufactured goods." Erlanger, "Ukrainian Leader's Defeat Worries Kiev Bureaucrats," New York Times, July 13, 1994. Back.
Note 52: See "Konstitutsiya Respubliki Krym," Viedomosti Verkhovnoho Sovieta Respubliki Krym no. 7 (May-June 1992). Back.
Note 53: The fact that 87.8 percent of voters in the Crimea support the introduction of dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship may be interpreted as a manifestation of the desire to get the Russian citizenship. See also Bremmer. Back.
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