Far right participation in the Ukrainian Maidan protests: an attempt of systematic estimation

ABSTRACT

This is an attempt of a systematic estimation of the far right participation in Maidan protests based on a unique dataset of protest events in Ukraine during President Viktor Yanukovych's rule. The data presented contradict the thesis supported by most of the experts on Ukrainian far right that the far right did not play any crucial or even significant role in Maidan protests. The data indicate that the far right Svoboda party was the most active collective agent in Maidan protest events, while the Right Sector was the most active group in Maidan confrontation and violence. Protests with the participation of the far right were not isolated events on the margins of larger ‘peaceful and democratic’ protest. The data indicate the timing and location of the most intense far right activity, which has previously not received much attention. In general, it highlights the importance of the underestimated, but highly intense and large-scale, Maidan protests in Ukrainian regions beyond the events in Kiev city centre. Finally, it points to how far right participation in Maidan grew from the moderate opposition parties’ increasing cooperation with Svoboda.

KEYWORDS:

• Far right
• Ukraine
• Maidan
• protest event analysis
• political violence

Acknowledgements

The protest event data presented in the article were collected with support of the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Renaissance Foundation, Sociology and the Political Science departments in the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. I wish to thank specifically the core of the data collection team who worked during the very difficult year of 2014 – Oksana Dutchak, Yevhen Orlov, Valentyn Dehtiar, Andrii Gladun, Pavlo Rud, Larysa Mova, Kostiantyn Zadyraka and Natalia Onyshchenko. I am also grateful to Mischa Gabowitsch, Oleg Zhuravlev, Nicolai Petro, Jesse Driscoll, Oleksii Viedrov, Yurii Derhunov, Andrii Gladun for their comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. See Ortiz, Myers, Walls, and Diaz (2005) for an extensive discussion of various sources of media biases and their impact on protest event data.

2. In 2009–2011 we monitored 150–170 web media. National media were selected and regularly rotated on the basis of their Internet-audience size and the number of relevant messages they reported (estimated in special experiments), that is, trying to select those with the least selection bias. Over 80% of the sources are local oblast-level news; each oblast was covered by at least five and at most seven sources. Two of them at least once per year were rotated based on the number of relevant messages they reported in order to include the promising new local media and exclude those with the highest selection bias. Our sample also included several activist web-sites that were presenting not particular organizations' activities but attempting to cover some major social–political spectrum of protest activity, like leftist, rightist, environmentalist, feminist, etc.

3. As a general rule we exclude from the analysis all events coded as ‘dubious’; that is, where reports from different sources were too contradicting each other or where presence of social or political claims were doubtful, for example, in attacks of unknown people with unknown goals. Only 84 Maidan protest events were coded as dubious, slightly more than 2%.

4. We define Ukrainian macro-regions as follows: Centre: Zhytomyrska, Kievska, Chernihivska, Sumska, Vinnytska, Cherkaska, Kirovohradska, Poltavska oblasts; Crimea: Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol; Donbas: Donetska, Luhanska; East: Kharkivska, Dnipropetrovska, Zaporizka oblasts; Kiev: the city of Kiev; South: Odeska, Mykolaivska, Khersonska oblasts; West: Volynska, Rivnenska, Lvivska, Ternopilska, Ivano-Frankivska, Chernivetska, Zakarpatska oblasts.

5. We usually classify all protest events into three categories, based on their tactics: conventional, confrontational and violent. Violent tactics are protest actions causing (or threatening to cause) damage to people or property. Conventional protests refer to commonly accepted forms of protest that do not impose direct pressure on the protest targets, such as pickets, rallies, demonstrations, street performances, etc. By confrontational protests we mean actions involving direct pressure (‘direct action') to achieve the goals of a protest, such as blocking roads, strikes, hunger strikes, but not causing direct damage to people or property. List of specific actions assigned to each category can be accessed in Ukrainian Protest and Coercion Data codebook: http://cslr.org.ua/ukrainian-protest-and-coercion-data-opis-ta-metodologiya/metodologiya/.

6. Maidan stages are defined following the key events in Kiev. So, the first stage covers the first mostly peaceful and conventional Euromaidan tent camp from the start on 21 November until 29 November 2013. The second stage starts with the dispersal of the first camp in Kiev on 30 November. The third stage starts on 19 January 2014 with the beginning of mass violence on the streets of Kiev. And the final, fourth stage starts on 18 February after the truce between the protesters and law-enforcement was broken in Kiev and the state forces made an unsuccessful attempt to crack down Maidan leading to the ‘snipers massacre’ and overthrow of Yanukovych. The stages cover the following numbers of Maidan protest events: I stage – 422, II stage – 1,362, III stage – 1194, IV stage – 743.

7. On regional divergence of Ukrainian public opinion on the support for Maidan protests and the opposition parties during Maidan period, see Kiev International Institute of Sociology polls (2013, 2014b).

8. However, the tests of description bias were usually done on the major Western newspapers leaving a question about accurateness of event descriptions in local web-media in a non-Western country.

9. ‘United Opposition' was a united electoral list by Batkivshchyna, Front Zmin and several minor parties for 2012 parliamentary elections. The name was publicized during the protest participation as well and picked up by the media. Protests with the United Opposition participation (almost exclusively in 2012) were assigned to both Batkivshchyna and Front Zmin.

10. Svoboda was invited to join the United Opposition electoral bloc together with Batkivshchyna and Front Zmin, but declined.

11. Figure 8 may even underestimate the protest cooperation between the moderate opposition parties and Svoboda. For consistency with other figures in the article I did not include to Figure 8 the protest events where participants were described only generically as ‘opposition parties' or as the Resistance to Dictatorship Committee without mentioning specific parties. Although it is highly probable that such wordings described precisely the cases of moderate opposition and Svoboda cooperation and their inclusion into the figure would only strengthen the trend. The yearly distribution of such protest events: 2010 – 7, 2011 – 12, 2012 – 27, 2013 – 56.