It’s commonly believed that Russia is diving head-first into an ever-deeper authoritarianism. The ideology is no longer Marxism Leninism: instead, it’s an amalgam of resurgent imperialism, Eurasian exceptionalism and a deepening, and popular, hatred of the United States and Europe.
It’s not common, yet, to see Ukraine, with which Russia wages a frozen, part covert, semi-war, as on the same trajectory. But, like Russia, it’s strengthening what’s become known as the "power vertical” — a post-Soviet system of governance in which the formal institutions are subverted. Despite democratic trappings, the central structure is severely hierarchical, with effective power vested in the presidency and the presidential administration.
Two leading political scientists, one Russian and one Ukrainian, have produced important essays on the current situation in their respective states. Both speak to the despair engendered in both liberal-minded Russians and a broader swathe of Ukrainians over the failure of the projects and promises of democracy. In Ukraine, that disillusionment is both sharper and wider, as the hope of a more democratic and "European-style” politics diminishes. Instead, there is political infighting, continuing control by the wealthy oligarchs, unchecked corruption and fears of renewed warfare.
In the first essay, Mikhail Minakov, president of the Foundation for Good Politics in Kiev, writes that Ukraine remains in thrall to wealthy oligarchs, despite a democratic façade. He believes that in spite of the 2014 Maidan Square revolution that toppled Moscow ally President Victor Yanukovych, the system remains configured for continued authoritarian rule. The barely concealed struggle between Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and current President Petro Poroshenko; the shadowy control the oligarchs exercise on politics and on the judiciary; the supine state of the opposition parties – all leave the way open, Minakov believes, for a strengthening of the presidential-dominated "power vertical.
Regional elections last week were poorly attended, and showed continuing low support for Poroshenko in eastern — mainly Russian-speaking — regions of the country. In September, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt made an unusually pointed charge, in a speech to business executives in the ultra-corrupted port of Odessa, that the Prosecutor-General’s Office in Kiev was an "obstacle” to anticorruption reforms. The office had failed to "successfully fight internal corruption… rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the Prosecutor-General’s Office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” he said.
Anders Aslund, the most prominent economic expert on Ukraine, has estimated the loss to the country’s GDP over 2014 and 2015 as 16 percent. That number is comprised of 7 percent in lost production in Eastern Ukraine, 6 percent from Russian trade sanctions and 3 percent in lost foreign investment. He has called, repeatedly, for urgent Western assistance.
Ukraine has, however, been of immense use to Russian President Vladimir Putin — according to the Russian commentator Andrei Kolesnikov, a former deputy editor of the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. In an essay he says that "following the annexation of (the Ukrainian province of) Crimea in March 2014, the Russian public has embraced an increasingly conservative and nationalistic ideology… and have thrown their support behind the commander of the fortress, President Vladimir Putin.”
Kolesnikov shows that hostility to both Europe and the United States has increased steeply since the invasion of Crimea — a rise similar to the increase in inflation over the same period. Over that period, too, those seeing Josef Stalin (architect behind the death of many millions) as playing a "positive” role also grew strongly — an opinion shared, at the beginning of this year, by just over half the respondents to a Levada Center poll. The Russian Orthodox Church has resumed its role as an important but faithful supporter of the Russian ruler. Both "ideology and the Russian Orthodox Church,” writes Kolesnikov, "‘sanctify’ this political system, which closely resembles a corporate state… the state legally enshrines concepts such as "foreign agent” and "undesirable nongovernmental organization” among others, which gives it plenty of tools to exert complete control over real civil society.”
Both Minakov and Kolesnikov argue that change can come. "Sooner or later,” writes the Russian, "both those on top and those on the bottom will create the demand for a pragmatically formulated, liberal economic ideology.” For the moment, however, the strongly nationalistic and militaristic trend in Russia and the weakness of, and disillusion with, the Ukrainian government, combine to make change in a benign direction highly unlikely.
Together, these two states made up over two thirds of the population of the Soviet Union. With much smaller Belarus to Ukraine’s north, these were the core of the Soviet state, the Russians seeing the other two — with some condescension — as both little brothers and big buffers against an always-feared (and often suffered) Western invasion. Ukraine’s efforts to claw its way to the West represents, for Putin, an inadmissible lèse majesté, a move he has sought with present success to kill by weakening the country to the point where its very statehood is put at risk.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s story "Conversation Piece 1945,” a former White Guard colonel, anti-communist and Christian, says that in spite of his views, he puts Stalin on a par with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as a mighty leader. "Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of Old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, of religion and true Slavs.” Such views, writes Kolesnikov, "can still be heard in Moscow’s conservative quarters, corporate backrooms, luxury apartments.” It is the privileging of power and national glory over peaceful co-existence: the need to subdue those within its boundaries who rebel against the national imperative.
Both the EU and the United States encouraged Ukraine to "come west, young nation.” That they may not have thought through the consequence of the invitation doesn’t relieve their responsibility to deal with it.
Ukraine will need very large financial assistance for some years if it’s not to slip deeper into a corrupt authoritarianism — and from there, it would be only a step back to return to the embrace of "Old Mother Russia.”
(Reuters)
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