The Fate of Crimea, the Future of Ukraine, Part II

Patrick Potyondy 

Welcome to History Talk, the history podcast for everyone produced by Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. This is Patrick Potyondy, your co-host. This interview is part two of our double feature on events involving Crimea, Russia, and Ukraine.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

So in the first part, we discussed the history and fate of Crimea. Now we turn our gaze on Ukraine to discuss more recent political developments and efforts being made by Ohio State researchers to build democracy in the region.

 

Trevor Brown 

Thanks for having me on. My name is Trevor Brown. I'm the director of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. And I have, for the last 20 years, served in various roles in running a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development called the Parliamentary Development Project.

 

Rudy Hightower 

Hello, my name is Rudy Hightower. I'm a retired Naval Intelligence Officer and also a PhD candidate at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. And for the last four and a half years, I've worked with Trevor and the Parliamentary Development Project in Ukraine, and have spent a lot of time actually traveling to Ukraine, Crimea, Serbia, and the entire Black Sea and Balkans region.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Well, thank you for joining us today.

 

Trevor Brown 

It's a pleasure.

 

Rudy Hightower 

You're welcome.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Could you describe, to start us off, the general political patterns in Ukraine after independence in 1991? And what was the political structure in Ukraine leading up to 2014? And how has it evolved since 1991? And, Trevor, if you want to start us off here.

 

Trevor Brown 

How long do we have? That's a big question, but a very good question, because obviously the roots of events today reach back some years. So when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it was ostensibly...it inherited both the political structure and political dynamics of the former Soviet Union. So in its first election cycle, there were really two blocks politically, maybe three. The biggest were the sort of the hangover of the former Soviet Union. So at the time, Communist Party ultimately splintered into a variety of left-leaning parties, agrarian socialists, etc. In opposition to that group were a loosely connected group of, on the one hand, reformers, those who wanted more liberalism, democracy, freedom, combined with nationalists, those primarily from the western parts of Ukraine, although not exclusively, who rallied together to form a kind of an opposition block to those on the left. So in the first election cycles, both for then a president and for parliamentary elections, it was those two blocks kind of competing against each other, with the leftists having the most solid block. Over time, the leftists diminished. That block shrunk and fractured, and initially, it was within that kind of left/right cleavage. But ultimately, and I think this is a pattern that you see throughout the former Soviet Union, the hangover of the former Soviet Union is that commitment to socialism and communism as the primary means of political organization. But then these countries go through a phase where it's kind of an undefined political spectrum, as groups are trying to figure out what are ideological platforms that work to advocate for their interests and so forth. And for a while, there was a fairly sizable unaffiliated block of political folks who didn't really attach to one political platform or another. And in the wake of that kind of diffuse political situation, and this is a pattern you see primarily in Russia and some of the other former Soviet countries as well, you get the emergence of parties of personality. So, Putin has a party that's not really built around a platform, it's built around him. And ultimately, starting in the late 1990s, you saw a similar phenomenon in Ukraine, as the then-president, his name was Leonid Kuchma, who was the second President of Ukraine, basically built a party around him. And part of that is structured around access to resources that politicians are able to deliver when you're the president of a former Soviet country, namely in the form of privatization of key assets. He was able to hand out the sort of the keys to the castle and those people became his supporters. So the most recent president, who's since been ousted, Yanukovych, had a similar party around him named the Party of Regions, which didn't really have a kind of key set of platforms or anything like that other than a commitment to the current regime. Now in opposition, you saw you still have those who are more oriented towards a nationalist vision of Ukraine, although they're fairly small. And similarly, there are those who are more traditional, kind of liberal reformers that would like to see the expansion of democracy. But you've also seen, on the opposition side, because we've now been through multiple political cycles, the emergence of competing kind of personality-based parties. So most recently, the news has reported the release of Yulia Tymoshenko from jail. She's a former prime minister of Ukraine and a very successful political candidate, who similarly built a party around her as a personality, formerly called the Yulia Tymoshenko block, now referred to often as "Beaut" and has gone under a variety of different names. But ultimately, what it is, is a party around her, and so move moving forward, there's not yet a clean ideological spectrum in the way that we're accustomed to, either in the United States or in Europe. Instead, those interests are still forming, and they're largely personality based.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

Thank you. That's a great bring to the present day, and we actually had a question about Yanukovych and why did the Yanukovych government collapse? Was this a coup that overthrew a democratically elected president, however unpopular, or a popular revolt that reflected the will of the majority of the population? And we'd like Rudy to start with this one.

 

Rudy Hightower 

Well, that's a very, very difficult question to ask, because it has both yes or no quick answers. So was it a coup? Yes. Was it a coup? No. The actual president did not have to leave. However, his fear for his safety is one of the narratives. But he didn't have to leave the actual country. But what had happened up to that point, after the peaceful part of the Euromaidan, and just as an aside, I just happened to be at Euromaiden in December, and took some nice selfie pictures. So if you go to the John Glenn school website, you can see some of the pictures of the protest, the barricade, and those kind of things. And when I was walking amongst the protesters, they kept saying over and over that they just want to have a normal life. So they wanted to get rid of corruption, they wanted to change the government. But you have to realize that the actual Euromaidan protests first started, because of the people's distaste for the president turning away from the European agreement. However, about two weeks into the protests, the whole protests changed, because they actually wanted more than just better European integration, they wanted to move into a better system, have, like I said, those normal lives. They wanted to reform their government, change the judiciary, get rid of corruption, and pretty much have a much broader scope. And that was in December, and then it rolled into the violence in January, which increased into the absolute tragedies that you saw on February 18th and 20th, where up to 70 people were actually murdered in the streets. And that led the people in the Euromaidan to expand their protests and actually march upon the government buildings. So the president at the time was like, "Okay, well, I'm fearing for my safety, I'm going to actually leave." However, there were constant negotiations going back and forth between high-level diplomats in the West, the Ukrainian government, and even opposition, where they were actually sitting down and they hammered out some agreements that had step-by-step methods of transferring power, not completely advocating victory, Yanukovych's power. But they were the opposition was able to get some of the conditions that they wanted. The Prime Minister of Ukraine resigned, there were other things that were put in place. But before the opposition and the government's agreement could really be affected, there was the big violence and all the deaths, and that just generated such a response from the people that they thought they had to do something. But conversely, the president thought that, okay, he and his family were in physical danger, so they actually left to an eastern region, and then subsequently left the country. So was it a coup? Yes, Viktor Yanukovych was democratically elected. But like I said, he didn't necessarily have to leave. But if he made that decision, that he didn't want to be dragged through the streets like Benito Mussolini, or he thought that that may have been a possibility, then you may say that, "Okay, he was justified in actually leaving." So the tricky thing, and then like I said, long answer, which is a non-answer, because I can't really answer the question. But was it a coup? It's being used by both sides, both the Russian narrative and the narrative of the West, to support the new government that's in there now, or in Russia's case, the illegitimacy of the new government that's in power in Ukraine.

 

Trevor Brown 

What one part of your question was, does this really reflect the will of the people of Ukraine? And a kind of historical reality over the last 20 years is that Ukraine is split. And so there's always some question about whether elections actually reflect the true preferences of people, but by most standards, OECD has been monitoring elections in Ukraine for several of the last cycles. And pretty much since the 2004 Orange Revolution, where there were clear electoral violations, there's been a sense that the election practice has gotten better, and certainly irregularities but it does reflect the will of the people. And Yanukovych won, but he won with a very slim majority. And so I think he won 51-47 or something like that, which I think is an accurate reflection of a divided country. And it's divided along lots of lines, the kind of narrative in the news is East/West. But that's a false dichotomy. There are lots of cleavage points in Ukraine. And in this case, I think the two presidents that were competing or the two candidates competing for the presidency, at the time, it was Yulia Tymoshenko and him, split the vote. And I think that's a fair representation of people's allegiances to one candidate or the other. I think the most recent events in Kiev reflect though a general dissatisfaction with not so much the president but, as Rudy said, with the system of governance that exists in Ukraine. The promise of democracy and the free market has not really been realized yet in Ukraine. I think it's a very elite-driven system. Many politicians or many oligarchs or economic interests seek out representation in Parliament, for example, because it gives them immunity. And so they can engage in acts that are outside the boundaries of the law, and yet are free from prosecution. So that's not really the system one would want if one were an average citizen, thinking that these people are not necessarily representing my interests, they're representing their own. What we saw in the streets in Kiev was a reflection of a general dissatisfaction with the current system. And in some ways, I think what we saw in Crimea was a general dissatisfaction with the system, the narrative, and I think if you ask the average person on the street, the first thing they'd say is, "I want to rejoin Mother Russia, I want to go back to the Soviet Union." But in part what that is, is a statement, if you dig a little deeper and ask some more questions, is I don't like the way things are being handled here in Crimea. And I think my circumstances and the circumstances of Crimea will be improved if Crimea joins Russia.

 

Rudy Hightower 

This kind of segues into our next question, how do you think Ukraine should rebuild its political structure in the wake of the recent events? And what role should the United States and the European Union play? And, Trevor, if you'd like to pick up here?

 

Trevor Brown 

Sure. Well, I should say I'm biased in the sense that I've been, as I mentioned, at the very beginning of this, I've been a contractor, essentially, of the federal government trying to promote democratic development in Ukraine since the early 1990s, through the project I mentioned. And so part of what I think the U.S. government should do is continue to engage in the efforts that it put a lot of emphasis on throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Since the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005, the United States has begun to back away a little bit from its investment and its commitment to democratic development and economic growth. But fundamentally, what Ukraine needs to do, in my judgment, is it needs to deliver a system of governance that gives the average citizens and elites a sense that it's a fair playing field, and that the goods that are created through the political process are distributed equally or fairly throughout the nation. And so that means improving the conduct of elections, continuing to do that, continuing to work with political parties to form that link between citizen interests and the political process. It means working with the major political institutions, that's the Parliament, the Prime Minister's Office, the President's Office, they have a dual executive system. Those are the major policymaking branches to ensure that the laws get passed and policies get promulgated that impact people's day-to-day lives in a way that improves conditions there. There are also some important steps that need to be taken on the economic side. Ukraine is really not that different than its life under the Soviet Union in many ways. Since property rights are insecure, there's a sense that investments could be expropriated by the state at any moment. The goods are handed out to a very small elite that are connected around those in power, which is very similar to the Politburo and the communist system of the former Soviet Union. There's little foreign investment. Agriculture remains collectivized, there are lots of opportunities to reform Ukraine economically that will make it a more dynamic economy. The challenge is those steps will be very painful. So for example, the average Ukrainian citizen pays about 10% of the actual energy that they consume. So prices for basic commodities, like foodstuffs and fuel, heating oil, etc. The average citizen is paying a very, very small amount of those costs. All of it is heavily subsidized. And what that means is there's over-consumption and the state is providing the bulk of people's means of subsistence. For Ukraine really to transition and open up and create a more free and open economy, you're going to have to extract the role of the state. That's going to be painful, because it's going to mean people are going to have to pay a bit more for the products that they consume. And similarly, those elites that have been sucking at the trough will have less in the way of kind of protected industrial growth. And so those are areas where the United States and the European Union can play a role in both promoting positive steps there, but also helping to ease some of that pain in providing terms of the loans that you've just seen the IMF has given $18 billion in financial support to Ukraine, coming through with a more tempered austerity plan for Ukraine and the transition because the risk is, if you quickly make these moves, you are going to make those that are in the streets, so to speak, particularly aggrieved, because they'll feel like, "Wait, I'm seeing these elites continue to benefit and now I'm having to pay more for the kinds of services that I consume. This isn't what I signed up for." Trying to walk that tightrope is going to be a challenge for the West.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

And also, as we understand, your connection to the public affairs school, and you're mentioning this project that you guys are helping with this democracy building in Ukraine. We wonder, and specifically, could you describe and explain your work from the last few years with the Glenn school and Rudy, if you'd like to jump in here?

 

Rudy Hightower 

Sure. Leticia, as you know, Trevor and I co-teach a class here at OSU called, "Rebuilding Failed and Weak States." And we actually look at democratization in using three different cases, and Ukraine is one of the case studies that we actually formally used in our example of a peaceful regime transition, up until what's happened recently, and I'd have to agree with exactly what Trevor just said about what the main focus in democratization is, is that it needs to be an investment in the institutions, not in the power of personality. And what we actually teach in our class is a certain way of how governments, weak or failing governments, can rebuild themselves by investing in those institutions. And with the most important item probably being what Trevor just described, which is the delivery of public goods and making sure that the public goods are delivered. When it comes to Ukraine, especially as it is right now, one of the other main concepts, the monopoly on the use of force needs to happen in Ukraine and it needs to happen right away. Also, Ukraine needs to be able to protect its borders and show its people that it does have the security apparatus that can defend the actual nation. So when it comes to what we actually invest in with Ukraine, it's our investment and our time is going decades long, and in a multitude of different ways. Like I said, with our "Rebuilding Failed and Weak States" class here at OSU, we also, Trevor and I, had the good fortune to be able to take a study abroad trip to Ukraine, and we took 10 of the OSU students, and we actually took them to Kiev, where they did some research. And then we all took the overnight train from Kiev down to Simferopol in Crimea.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Oh, that's cool.

 

Rudy Hightower 

Right, and the students were able to actually work with some of the scholars and professors at one of the major universities there in Simferopol. And then I took an excursion with another five students, and we actually went to Sevastopol. So we actually saw the Black Sea Fleet up close and personal and the actual city and all of the surrounding areas right there in Sevastopol. And I'd like to say that one of the things that we did is we got on one of those Johnny Depp little Pirates of the Caribbean cruise ships, and we did a little tour of the harbor, or the tourists tour of the harbor. And we went right past the exact ships that were all in the news recently, the Black Sea Fleet ships but then also the Ukrainian Navy ships. And it was just amazing, because the students were pulling out their cameras and their cell phones and taking pictures of the Black Sea Fleet, which was pretty much hard to do as a Naval Intelligence Officer back in the Cold War days when I served.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Right.

 

Rudy Hightower 

So it was an incredible experience there. So like I said, we've had classes, we've done study abroad. The 20-year project with the Parliamentary Development Project, that was one of our investments, the long-term investments in Ukraine. And we also have family connections. I mean, my actual ex-wife is from Crimea. So my daughter's maternal grandparents live in one of the cities that were surrounded by some of the unmasked, or the masked unidentified gunman, right. So there's both family connection, personal connections. And then we also teach workshops, policy modeling and simulation workshops at a multitude of Ukrainian universities. So our experience and our connection with Ukraine is pretty extensive here at The Ohio State University.

 

Rudy Hightower 

Anything you'd like to add as a last word, Trevor?

 

Trevor Brown 

Events in Ukraine are obviously very, very complicated. And I think the portrayal in the news, as journalists are wanting to do and it's appropriate for them to do, is to try and make complex events accessible to people.

 

Patrick Potyondy 

Right.

 

Trevor Brown 

But in the midst of that, I think something has been lost. And I appreciate your inquiry here about Ukraine. I think the focus has largely been on the West, the United States vs. Russia, and Ukraine is an independent sovereign nation. And we are, given recent discussions, I think about to embark on something that seems much more like the end of World War One or World War Two, where Russia and the United States and the West are going to sit down and begin to talk about how to organize Ukraine, because the current proposal from the Russian side is to federalize Ukraine, which interestingly enough, I think is not such a bad idea. But I'm wary of two foreign powers coming in to decide how Ukraine will govern itself, particularly in its territorial organization. And so I think it's important for things like this to go on, so people have an understanding about what are the dynamics themselves in Ukraine, what is the history of Ukraine, what is its claim to nationhood? And rather than a couple of people sitting in a room and saying these regions will become autonomous, these ones will remain part of the kind of unitary system in Ukraine, and without having that understanding of what's going on the ground.

 

Rudy Hightower 

Well, we'd like to thank Trevor Brown and Rudy Hightower for joining us today on History Talk.

 

Rudy Hightower 

You're very welcome.

 

Trevor Brown 

Thanks, been a pleasure.

 

Rudy Hightower 

This has been part two of April's double feature from History Talk on the events in Ukraine, Russia, and Crimea.

 

Leticia Wiggins 

This edition of the Origins podcast, History Talk, was brought to you by the Public History Initiative and the Goldberg Center and the history department at The Ohio State University. Our main editors are Steve Conn and Nicholas Breyfogle. Our executive producer is David Staley. Our audio and technical advisor is Paul Kotheimer. Our audio editors and co-hosts are Patrick Potyondy and Leticia Wiggins. Find our podcasts and more at our website, origins.osu.edu, and you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Thank you for listening.