Transition impossible? Ukraine between violence and power

Abstract

This article discusses authority culture in Ukraine. ‘Russian power’, i.e. a particular configuration of power relationship that has been prevailing in the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet empires, is used as a point of reference. Two features of Russian power explain its closeness to violence: mostly negative associations (such as force, money and corruption) and a high power distance. It is argued that a potential movement from violence to power understood as human ability to act in concert exists in Ukraine. Members of Ukraine’s sub-elites have a chance to become a driving force of this process. Under certain conditions they could take a lead in transitioning to less violent models of power in politics and elsewhere. The data were drawn from three mass surveys conducted in Russia (N = 2939 and N = 11,096) and in Ukraine (N = 2040) from July 2016 to January 2017.

Keywords:

• Violence
• power distance
• Ukraine
• Russia
• path-dependence

Acknowledgements

The author expresses his gratitude to two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Political Power for the prompt and constructive feedback that they provided on the early version of the manuscript. Dr. Melanie Greene’s (MUN) help in improving the style is also greatly appreciated.

Notes

1. The search in the eHRAF databank was carried out on 30 January 2017.

2. Arendt’s understanding of her Jewishness helps make this line of arguing even more subtle. For her, being a Jew has less to do with a particular ethnic origin than with the capacity to resist oppression through collective action (Allen 1999, pp. 109–122).

3. This example is inspired by conversations with Pavel Kuznetsov, the first Russian national to swim across the English Channel.

4. There are opposing views as to whether violence is associated with power as an end-in-itself. Arendt (1969, pp. 4 and 51) argues that power is an end-in-itself whereas ‘the very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category’. Haugaard (2015, p. 150) shares this opinion. Alternatively, it can be argued that in the case of violence, the powerholder perceives power as a terminal value. Violence can be converted in any other valuable resource (money, academic credentials etc.) whereas the opposite conversion is not always possible. As a result, the powerholder wants to stay in power as long as possible, which does not make much sense if means-end considerations prevailed.

5. A 2017 survey using an on-line panel in Russia (the next Section provides more details about parameters of this survey) included both versions of the instrument. The calculation of values of the PDI for various social and professional groups produced rather divergent results. For instance, high power distance Russian macro-regions according to the 1980 version turned out to be among the group of low power distance macro-regions if the 2013 instrument is used. No explanation for such discrepancies was offered by the authors of the 2013 instrument.

6. The 2017 survey included an instrument for measuring power distance at the individual level (Erez and Earley 1987). However, the value of Cronbach’s Alpha did not exceed 0.5, which prevented further uses of this instrument in the analysis. This outcome is consistent with results reported in Conduit (2001).

7. Left-Bank Ukraine is a name for a part of today’s Ukraine on the left (east) bank of the Dnieper River, Right-Bank Ukraine is correspondingly located on the right (west) bank.

8. The sample does not cover some districts in the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in the East that Ukraine’s government did not control at that time. The data for Crimea, the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia in March 2014, was collected via the on-line survey described previously.

9. The search was conducted on 4 February 2017 using Google.Ru as a search engine and a combination of keywords vlast’ and uvazhenie. Five out of 10 top matches included ‘respect to power’.

10. In 2014, the country’s GDP contracted by 6.6% to the previous year, in 2015 – by 9.8%, as per data of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine available at https://www.ukrstat.gov.ua/.

11. Using the mean exchange rate for 2016 as of 31 October 2016 (25.3482 UAH per 1 US$); data from https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-UAH-exchange-rate-history.html, accessed October 31, 2016.