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ABSTRACT
This article seeks to explain why Ukraine maintained a competitive electoral regime despite the dominance of authoritarian diaspora in the decades after the country became independent in 1991. The anti-democratic effect of the diaspora was significantly mitigated by the fact that it was not organized into a political party and split by longstanding regional divisions. Because of their disorganization and dispersion across the political spectrum, old Soviet elites possessed limited capacity to consolidate power. The result was “pluralism by default” in which democratic politics emerged out of authoritarian weakness. At the same time, variation in the (dis)organization of different authoritarian diaspora networks partially explains divergent levels of political competition between different Ukrainian governments in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Aliaev, “Партія влади”; Koropatnik, “Еволюція політичних партій”; Krasnov, “Феномен ‘партія влади’”; Mishliaev, “Партія влади.”
2 Crowley, “Hot Coal.”
3 Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, 181–2.
4 Howard, Weakness of Civil Society.
5 Lazarev, “Evolution and Transformation of the Soviet Elite”.
6 See Aliaev, “Партія влади” ; Koropatnik, “Еволюція політичних партій”; Krasnov, “Феномен “партія влади”; Mishliaev, “Партія влади.”
7 See Aliaev, “Партія влади,” 189–90; Koropatnik, “Еволюція політичних партій”; Krasnov, “Феномен ‘партія влади’,” 66; and Mishliaev, “Партія влади,” 123.
8 Mishliaev, “Партія влади,” 123.
9 Aliaev, “Партія влади,” 189. The term has subsequently taken on a broader meaning to refer to political parties or patronage networks with ties to state structures but not necessarily emerging from the authoritarian period (Reuter The Origins of Dominant Parties). In this article, I use the term in its original sense.
10 Belton, Putin's People.
11 Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy.
12 Geddes, “What Do we Know.”
13 Ibid.
14 Hale, Why Not Parties in Russia?
15 Ibid; Way, “Pluralism by Default.”
16 Lipset and Rokkan “Cleavage Structures.”
17 Way, “Pluralism by Default.”
18 Way, “Pluralism by Default”.
19 Way, “Pluralism by Default”, 8.
20 Wilson, The Ukrainians.
21 Darden, “Colonial Legacies.”
22 In November 1990, the party’s apparatus was reduced 30–45 percent at different levels – in part due to the decreased collection of party dues. Lytvyn, Ukraina, 182, 177.
23 “Ukrainian leader wants party dissolved,” Associated Press, 31 August 1991.
24 Holovaty, “Ukraine: A View from Within,” 111.
25 “Nationalists Send Party to Scrapyard As They Take Control,” The Times (London) 31 August 1991.
26 Kravchuk was able to convince his most serious rival from within the Nomenklatura – Alexander Tkachenko – to step out of the presidential race (Lytvyn, Ukraina, 236).
27 Interfax, FBIS, 6 December 1991, 77.
28 McAuley, Who’s Who in Russia, 159.
29 Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 30.
30 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 327.
31 Nezavisimost, 22 September 1993, 1; Hritsenko et al., Khto e khto v ukrains’kiy polititsi, 147.
32 Nezavisimost, 6 March 1993, 8.
33 Quote from Lytvyn, Ukraina, 67.
34 Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk”; Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 32.
35 World Bank World Development Indicators, 1990–1994.
36 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 262.
37 Kapto, Na perekrestkakh zhizni, 102, 99. Also Lytvyn, Ukraina, 222.
38 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 294.
39 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 75.
40 Wilson, The Ukrainians, 178–9; BBC News, 21 March 1992.
41 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 241.
42 Ibid.
43 Matviiuk, “Evgenii Marchuk”; Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk.”
44 Nezavisimost, 1 July 1992, 3.
45 Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk,” 62.
46 Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk,” 63; Kravchuk, Maemo te, shcho maemo, 198.
47 Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk”, 83–4.
48 Wolczuk, The Moulding of Ukraine, 122.
49 Lukanov, Tretyi Prezident, 61.
50 Ibid., 61.
51 D’Anieri, Economic Interdependence, 40.
52 Lukanov, Tretyi Prezident, 68, 62.
53 Ibid., 110.
54 Ibid., 86.
55 D’Anieri, Economic Interdependence, 117.
56 Lytvyn, Ukraina, 324.
57 Kravchuk, Maemo te, shcho maemo, 228.
58 Ibid., 228.
59 Bondarenko, “Evgenii Marchuk.”
60 Kravchuk, Maemo te, shcho maemo, 229. At the same time, there is some evidence of electoral fraud in western and central parts of Ukraine where Kravchuk had greater support Nezavisimost’ (29 June 1994: 1); FBIS-SOV 94-132: 57; FBIS-SOV (12 July 1994: 37)
61 Kravchuk, Maemo te, shcho maemo, 238–9.
62 For example, local officials in Odesa and other cities prevented Kravchuk supporters from monitoring the vote (Kuzio, “Kravchuk to Kuchma”, 132–3). See also FBIS-SOV (3 August 1994: 38).
63 Democratic Elections in Ukraine, Report on the 1994 Presidential Elections, 14.
64 Ishchenko, “Aleksandr Emets.”
65 Furthermore, Kuchma, in contrast to Kravchuk was not forced to alienate key sectors of the authoritarian diaspora in order to come to power. As a result, he maintained their support for longer.
66 Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 60.
67 Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 60–4.
68 Lukanov, Tretyi Prezident, 77, 78; Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 58, 97.
69 Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 98.
70 Ibid., 105.
71 Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 37; Popov and Mil’shtein, Oranzhevaia printsessa, 50.
72 Lukanov, Tretyi Prezident, 119.
73 Beginning in 1994, police chiefs of each province were required to pass an interview with the president (Harasymiw, Post-Communist Ukraine, 200).
74 Ibid.,185.
75 While initially pro-Russian, Ukrainian business leaders became open to independence views by the late 1990s – in large part out of a desire to avoid the incursion of much larger Russian business interests.
76 Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 83. Ukrainian nationalists supported increased Presidential powers due to pro-Russian Communist influence in the legislature.
77 Lukanov, Tretyi Prezident, 155–6.
78 Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 82.
79 Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 194.
80 Puglisi, “Clashing Agendas?” 837.
81 Aliaev, “"Партія влади," 190/
82 Popov and Mil’shtein, Oranzhevaia printsessa, 122.
83 Ibid., Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 82.
84 Ibid., 186–7.
85 Ishchenko, “Aleksandr Emets.”
86 In the 1980s, Yushchenko had been Deputy Director for Agricultural Credit at the Ukrainian Office of the Soviet State Bank. Yanukovych was the manager of a transport company in Donetsk.
87 Kulchytsky, Ukrayins’ka Revolutsiia 2004, 38.
88 Whitmore, State Building in Ukraine, 102; Bondarenko, Leonid Kuchma, 379–81.
89 See Way, “Pluralism by Default,” chapter 3.
90 Way, “Pluralism by Default,” chapter 3.
91 Simultaneously, it is also possible that Kuchma’s efforts to retain power were undermined by the fact that like Kravchuk but unlike Vladimir Putin in Russia, he lacked any ties to the security forces.
92 Fish, “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lucan Ahmad Way
Lucan Ahmad Way is professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of three books: Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015); Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky., Cambridge, 2010); and Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability in the Modern World (with Steven Levitsky, Princeton, forthcoming).