Ukrainians and Politics

By Volodymyr Kish

Ukrainians are good at a lot of things.  Embedded in our history, ethos and culture are many things that we can indeed be proud of.  That fertile “Land of Eden” north of the Black Sea has been the spawning ground of many of the developments that our modern global civilization is based on.  The one thing that I am convinced we have always been and continue to be terrible at is politics.  Regrettably, it has always been thus.  For a brief couple of centuries a thousand years ago, the Kyivan Rus State shone as one of the strongest and most developed societies on this planet.  It was not to last.  To be sure, the Mongol invasions played a major role in the downfall of Kyivan Rus, but the lack of unity and cohesiveness amongst the many descendants of Volodymyr the Great, who squabbled and fought each other as much as they fought their external enemies, certainly did not help.

In the centuries that followed, Ukraine was beset by enemies from all sides.  From time to time, Ukraine was blessed with leaders such as Bohdan Khmelnitsky who managed for brief periods to unify the squabbling Ukrainian masses, but such times were short lived. For most of the past seven centuries, Ukrainians have been divided among religious, regional and political lines, making them easy prey for their Russian, Polish, Turkish and Tatar neighbours.  Somehow, Ukrainians never managed to learn the essential lessons of power politics that Poland and Russia became so good at.

Fundamental to this was a strong sense of national unity and an effective centralized state structure.  Through most of the Second Millennium AD, this was in the form of well-established feudal structures with a powerful monarchy and entrenched nobility.  Subsequent to the Mongol invasions, these were completely destroyed in the Kyivan Rus State and never re-established.  Ironically, when Ukrainians eventually managed to regain political and military control of their lands under Khmelnitsky, the strongly democratic and revolutionary nature of Kozak society precluded the return of any kind of feudal system.  This left them extremely vulnerable to their strong feudal and predatory neighbours.  Their idealism was commendable but their timing from a geo-political perspective was all wrong.

The really sad thing is that in today’s circumstances, when the world is consistently evolving towards more democratic norms, Ukraine has reverted to a feudal system of government.  In this, of course, Ukraine is not alone.  Russia and Belarus are currently also being governed by absolute “monarchs” who have established a quasi-modern feudal system of government.  All power and wealth rest with an elite chosen few that in olden days would have been called aristocrats, and today are better known as oligarchs.

This has been made possible by the fact that though the majority of the Ukrainian population is of a democratic and progressive bent, who simply cannot find a way of translating that into political power, Ukrainians seem unable to form effective majority political parties.  It seems that Ukrainians are afflicted with a historical political virus that causes us to prefer someone else to run our affairs because we can’t agree amongst ourselves as to which “version” of Ukrainian nationalism is the “correct” one.

Ukrainians have certainly had the opportunity in the past century to become masters in their own house, but each time we have managed to squander the opportunity through division and infighting.  We missed a golden opportunity in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution when we couldn’t unite under Petliura.  We missed another during the Second World War when the Bandera – Melnyk split greatly undermined the effectiveness of the OUN movement.  We did it again after the Orange Revolution when petty political egos and idiotic political squabbles handed Ukraine on a platter to the Party of Regions kleptocrats.

This fall, yet another opportunity is coming up to test our political maturity when Ukraine holds parliamentary elections.  President Yanukovych and the Party of Regions have done such an abysmal job of ruling over the past few years, that there is no way they could possible win.  Except of course if the Ukrainian political opposition does what it has done since time immemorial and spends more time fighting itself rather than the enemy…