Ukraine’s Evolutionary Transformation

Although a failure as a radical project, the Orange Revolution was a success in progressing Ukraine toward a democratic state. But the revolution created neither democracy nor the preconditions of democracy. Some 15 to 20 years of confusion and change—starting in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, continuing through Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and the subsequent slow adoption of reforms before 2004—had done that. Ukraine had become independent partly because nationalist democrats had launched popular movements for change, and mostly because the USSR had collapsed. Ukraine’s elites, like the elites in all the post-Soviet states, suddenly found themselves with a country to run. Not surprisingly, the Communist elites who had grossly mismanaged Ukraine before independence became the primary beneficiaries of independence: they rebranded themselves as patriots and proceeded to consolidate power, accumulate wealth, and establish some degree of stability and order in the country. They became state-builders because only an independent and stable Ukrainian state could guarantee their status as power-holders at home and abroad. Radical change, and particularly radical economic change, was not on their agenda, as it would have interfered with their designs for self-enrichment.

More by accident than design, these same elites also began laying the institutional foundations of democracy. Divided between tough authoritarian ex-Communists and inexperienced well-intentioned democrats, between a westward-leaning west Ukraine and an eastward-leaning east Ukraine, between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, Ukraine’s elites created a cumbersome system of government that balanced a strong president with a strong parliament. In effect, they gave birth to an institutional tug-of-war that survives to this day. Although President Leonid Kuchma tried hard to disrupt that balance in the late 1990s, he failed. In the years before the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, became the base within which the democratic opposition could find safe haven and from which it could mobilize its forces. This tug-of-war eventually became a central precondition of democracy—a balance of power between the executive and the legislature.

Unlike Vladimir Putin, who inherited a super-presidency confronting an emasculated Duma and faced few institutional obstacles to a further aggrandizement of power, Kuchma had to deal with a resilient Rada, a democratic opposition that had shown its strength in several competitive elections in the 1990s, and civil organizations that coalesced around the democrats. Unlike Putin, who could use his power base in the presidency and the secret police to crack down the media and oligarchs, Kuchma could at best place restrictions on media freedoms and harass Ukraine’s millionaires and billionaires. Kuchma’s power was therefore fragile and once it weakened, as it did after his implication in a popular journalist’s disappearance and death in 2001, his opponents began to press their own interests. Kuchma’s last attempt to entrench his regime took place in late 2004, when he and his minions falsified the elections, installing his prime minister, Yanukovych, president over his challenger, the people’s favorite, Yushchenko. When the falsification was exposed, cascading popular protests combined with elite defections and oligarch support of the Orange revolutionaries to spell defeat for the Kuchma-Yanukovych forces. They, in turn, agreed to step down peacefully in exchange for constitutional constraints on the Orange victors and a promise of non-retribution. The upheaval had produced not massive social, political, and economic change, but a “pacted transition”—a deal between outgoing and incoming elites.

The Meaning of the Orange Revolution

The Orange Revolution thus built on Ukraine’s existing institutions and pushed those institutions toward democracy. The Orange coalition that came to power under Yushchenko and Tymoshenko had to be democratic and had to act within the framework of the institutions and the elite pact that made it possible. That meant cutting deals, engaging in horse-trading, and avoiding radical change. More important, even the Orange Revolution’s opponents—in particular Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which enjoys the support of one-third of the country’s population—had to adapt to Ukraine’s more explicitly democratic rules of the game. Although it is doubtful that Yanukovych and his supporters have undergone a change of heart, their behavior during the turmoil following the Orange Revolution has been more or less democratic. Indeed, after Yushchenko dissolved the Yanukovych-controlled Rada in April 2007, the Party of Regions criticized his move on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and that they, and not the Orange forces, were the sole defenders of democratic procedures, constitutional order, and rule of law in Ukraine. In reality, both sides took liberties with the constitution, and both sides showed a distressing willingness to manipulate the courts for political advantage in the run-up to parliamentary elections in September 2007. But their shenanigans resembled those of fledgling democracies and not authoritarian states.

Yushchenko the moderate reformer, Tymoshenko the radical, and Yanukovych the conservative nicely symbolize the strong and weak points of Ukraine’s democracy. Their political agendas represent the full range of alternatives found in most democracies and presuppose a grudging willingness to coexist peacefully; but their relations are tense, unfriendly, and generally mistrustful. The process by which Tymoshenko was elected premier on in 2007 illustrates this point: Yanukovych’s supporters in the Rada engaged in every form of chicanery to delay the vote, Yushchenko’s supporters were unable to agree until the very last moment whether they would in fact support her, and Tymoshenko claimed that opposition to her derived only from opportunism and corruption, and not principle.

This tense intra-elite détente has both promoted democratic behavior and enabled the economy to take off and the media and civil society to consolidate. Ukraine’s oligarchs and incipient middle class have taken advantage of elite squabbling and government weakness to pursue their own interests and, despite relentlessly rising energy prices, to produce annual GDP growth of about 7 percent in 2006 and 2007. It is hard to imagine that these increasingly prosperous citizens will ever permit the one-man rule of Kuchma or Putin to reemerge. Ukraine’s newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations have also become a fourth estate that continually, even if on occasion hysterically, monitors the government and its elites. Civil institutions such as churches, synagogues, non-governmental organizations, are also booming in the absence of state intervention. Younger generations of Ukrainians, especially students, are developing the healthy skepticism, entrepreneurial spirit, and cocky self-confidence that characterize many young people in the West.