The Ukrainian Weekly’s editor, Matthew Dubas, collected a scholarly analysis of the 25th anniversary of Ukraine’s renewed independence on August 24, 1991. Scholars were asked to provide their thoughts on the significance of the anniversary, the course Ukraine has taken during 25 years and what the current situation points to for the future.
The Verkhovna Rada’s declaration of Ukrainian independence on August 24, 1991, and the overwhelming support for this decision during the subsequent December referendum marked the end of the USSR and the creation of a new political landscape in East Central Europe, long dominated by the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. In place of the USSR, 15 new countries emerged, miraculously without mass violence. But this “miracle” represented a historical accident, which Vladimir Putin and the Russian political elite now seek to rectify.
The USSR’s long decline in the 1970s and 1980s and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of the Soviet economic and political structure produced an opening for the cultural and political elites in the empire’s second most important republic to compete for popular support by advocating policies promoting home rule and the expansion of the Ukrainian language and culture. The August 1991 coup in Moscow accelerated widespread disgust with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which Mr. Gorbachev headed, and solidified the power of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency of the Russian Federation over Mr. Gorbachev’s presidency of the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian cultural and political elites took advantage of this Gorbachev-Yeltsin conflict to press for and to win independence. They emphasized a complete divorce from the USSR and from the Russian Federation, not a reconstituted USSR-lite within the Commonwealth of Independent States, as many of Yeltsin’s political advisers preferred.
Independence for Ukraine arrived in late 1991, but it was a very unexpected and unplanned independence, an unintended consequence of Mr. Gorbachev’s failed efforts to liberalize (not democratize!) the Soviet system in order to make the USSR competitive with the West. Fueled by visions of the dazzling wealth of the European Union and by the Ukrainian political elite’s promises of a similar economic future, popular expectations and illusions skyrocketed. But Ukraine’s elites arrived at independence without a long-term and well-balanced strategy to introduce open markets, democratic institutions, or to integrate Ukraine into European structures.
Most importantly, there was no revolutionary break after 1991. Soviet Ukraine became independent Ukraine in name only. The new leaders did not immediately dismantle the Soviet political system in Ukraine, merely tinkered with it. This served the interests of Ukraine’s political elite, who (outside of Western Ukraine) continued to rule not as members of the Communist Party (which they loyally served until 1990), but as members of the party of power. The 1977 Soviet Ukrainian Constitution remained in place until the drafting of a new Constitution in 1996.
The new Constitution did not create a balance of power among the executive, legislative and judicial branches (as in the United States), but concentrated most political power in the presidency; the judicial branch remained emasculated. The party of power remained in place, creating the murky environment which spawned the new oligarchs, who converted their ill-gotten wealth into political as well as economic power. The post-Soviet elites squandered their opportunities to transform the Ukrainian economy along the lines of the Polish post-1990 model. If Poland and Ukraine possessed a similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1990, Poland’s is now three times larger than Ukraine’s. The subsequent level of corruption in Ukrainian society far surpassed that of what existed in the last decades of the USSR. According to the most recent report by Transparency International, perceived levels of public sector corruption are among the highest in the world.
Although the central authorities succeeded in dampening the pro-Russian separatist threat in the Crimea in 1992-1994, they did not address the new state’s long-standing social, national, and regional divisions. Instead, Leonid Kuchma in his 1994 presidential campaign and Viktor Yanukovych in his 2004 and 2010 campaigns enhanced regional divisions and stoked a Russophone sense of grievance with baseless conspiracy theories about forced Ukrainization. During his presidency (2010-2014), Mr. Yanukovych actively sought to overturn the gains which the Ukrainian language and culture won in the public sphere after independence. Paradoxically, President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and his active support for pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas unintentionally mobilized Ukraino-phone and the overwhelming majority of Russophone citizens in support of a Ukraine fully sovereign and territorially restored.
Ukraine’s political actors had many opportunities, but often chose short-term and self-serving policies since 1991. In light of their limited political horizons and limited opportunities, they did not move Ukraine forward to a higher standard of living, economically or politically, or consolidate Ukrainian independence.
Ukraine has remained independent for 25 years, far longer than the independent states which emerged after the First World War (and disappeared in the second). This is a major accomplishment. But the past trends do not necessarily foretell the future.
The people of Ukraine have always lived in a tough and brutally violent neighborhood in East Central Europe. With the Second World War, the USSR ended the Polish and German threats to Ukraine’s existence. With the collapse of the USSR, Mr. Yeltsin’s Russian Federation was weak and cautious in the 1990s, and reluctantly respected Ukraine’s borders. Under Mr. Putin’s stewardship in the 21st century, Russia is no longer the 98-pound weakling on the Eurasian continent. Mr. Putin and his inner circle are ready to exploit all Ukrainian and Western weaknesses to revive Russia’s control of the post-Soviet space and to resurrect its great power status.
The geo-political window of opportunity for Ukrainian independence, which opened 25 years ago, is now closing. It is critically important for the post-Euromaidan governments to redouble their efforts to consolidate the Ukrainian civic identity, rekindle its economy along Western models, limit corruption, secure its borders with Russia, and strengthen their alliances with the international community. Time is not on Ukraine’s side.
George O. Liber is Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of “Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954” (University of Toronto Press, 2016).