Paper - Chair of Ukrainian Studies

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Middle-Town Ukraine:
A Life-History Approach to
Ukraine’s Neglected Hinterland
by Sofiia Dyak
???
Joanna Konieczna
Warsaw University, Poland
Tarik Cyril Amar
Harriman Institute, Columbia University
■
Paper presented at the Workshop
Second Annual Danyliw Research Seminar
in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies
Chair of Ukrainian Studies
University of Ottawa (Canada)
12-14 October 2006
Draft paper: please do not quote, cite,
or circulate without author’s permission.
■
Over the last 15 years, i.e. the whole history of a post-Soviet independent Ukrainian
state, Ukrainian society has passed through diverse and changing, yet mostly
unfavorable conditions. The thoroughly twisted way to what is now known and perhaps
already mourned as the Orange Revolution, to recent generally high macro-economic
growth since 2000/2001 and to the currently still unprecedentedly possible open discussions
about how to build or protect democratic government has led through extremely
hard experiences of state disorganization (in 1991), high rates of uneployment, severe
inflation even reaching hyperinflation(in the 1990s), increasing labor emigration and pervasive
feelings of hopelessness in Ukrainian society. In short, the society of independent
Ukraine has been deeply marked by shock and disturbance. 1 In fact, while it is commonly
1. Ukraine has of course not been unique and other post-Soviet collapse/transition societies have been hit even
harder. For a recent concise overview putting Ukraine in the context of seven other cases see Roger Sapsford,
Pamela Abbott, “Trust, Confidence and Social Environment in Post-Communist Societies,” Communist and Post-
Communist Studies 39 (2006), 59-71, esp. 61.

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acknowledged that post-Soviet Ukraine’s triple or quadruple transition has had to master
not only democratization, marketization, and state as well as nation-building, it should
also be noted that in all likelihood the single most widely shared present experience of
this emerging post-Soviet nation has been severe crisis.
At the same time, when looking at what has been written on Ukraine both inside
and outside of it, we find that most of the pertinent works keep focusing on decision
makers or public opinion leaders located in the capital city, the foreign or domestic
policy of successive Ukrainian governments or Ukraine’s international position with
comparatively little attention to the specific experiences of the people inhabiting the territory
between Lviv and Luhansk and between Chernihiv and Simferopol. When they do
address society, available works tend to focus on public opinion leaders or are based on
opinion polling and quantitative surveys that reflect either only respondents’ positions
on specific issues at particular points in time or seek to register and represent attitude
changes through long-term surveys, based on highly differentiated yet comparatively
inflexible questionnaires, which, by definition, do not allow for the time, adaptability
and individual approach provided by qualitative interviewing. The latter, arguably, while
its results are by necessity comparatively hard to generalize is the best method to find
out most about individual attitudes, motivations, and biographies. This is all the more
necessary since opinion polls indicate a strong predominance of local identity among
Ukrainians in general. Thus, in the most recent of the annual Razumkov Independence
Day polls, 44 percent of respondents identify with their local heimat even below the
regional level. The latter, in fact, is least salient, with only 15 percent stating their identification
with it. The country as a whole, in this menu of choices is clearly behind the
locality, receiving 31 percent of respondent identification. 2 Meanwhile, especially after
the Orange Revolution, it has been pointed out that “the Ukrainian hinterland will play
an important part in the final shape of Ukraine’s transition and could be the lynchpin of
ultimate success or failure.” 3 Thus, a fresh look at the hinterland and its inhabitants may
help fill an academic lacuna as well as make a contribution to the hopefully continuing
project of reforming Ukraine.
Sociological research in and outside Ukraine itself seems to concentrate mostly
in four main directions: First, issues of identity and the identification of oneself and
others, which are of obvious importance in the process of nation-building post-Soviet
Ukraine has found itself in as well as multiple issues connected with the politics of nationbuilding,
e.g. language policy and its consequences, multiculturalism, or the perception
of heimat-type local, regional or national affiliation; secondly, issues of the transition
to democracy and the rule of law, e.g. the understanding of democratic mechanisms,
2. Liudmyla Shanhina, Pro Krainu, derzhavu ta hromadian u perekhidnomu vitsi, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, no. 31(610),
19-25 August 2006.
3. Margus Hanson, Transition in Ukraine, NATO Parliamentary Assembly Report (065 ESCEW 06 E, 2006 Spring
Session), no pagination.
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political system preferences, or trust in institutions; thirdly, problems of the constructing
and functioning of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state and its institutions, and fourthly, the
effects of economic change, such as social issues and strategies of making a living in difficult
conditions, or labor migration. Yet, as stated above, there still is a lack of detailed
descriptions of Ukrainian society from the point of view of people’s life stories in order
to show life in independent Ukraine from the perspective of the millions of inhabitants
of post-Soviet Ukraine who do not permamently live in large urban centers. There is
little and usually only highly aggregated information on the experience of this important
part of Ukrainian society. In effect, it is no exaggeration to say that we do not really
know what this population has lived through during independence and especially how
they have lived through it. A deeper understanding of social and political processes in
Ukraine is only possible with such deep knowledge. How have people survived what have
often been the most difficult periods of their lives to date and how have changes in the
country’s economy and politics affected their everyday life?
The research approach of this study can also be described as life-story interview.
In essence, we asked our respondents to tell us what happened in and with their lives
since Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Life history research has developed in a
range of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, humanistic psychology
and education, while its most important commonly recognized advantage is the fact that
“life history interviews are not just about collecting facts or reports on life events, they
are about constructing a language-practice place where a life story is put together by the
participants-conversants” 4 . Thus we too made an effort to collect not simply facts. More
important for us was the meaning that our respondents attached to the reported facts,
the context in which these life-events happened and the interviewee’s perception of this
context.
At the same time, it is in the nature of the qualitative interview situation that
respondents frequently answer in their very own way, diverging at times strongly, from
the grid of questions guiding the interviewer. This inevitable effect has expectedly complicated
the transcription, collation, and interpretation of the many hours of resulting
audio material. At the same time, however, it also offers a great advantage, since it permits
the recording of such statements and attitudes that otherwise are usually not available
to the researcher.
4. Bridget Somekh & Cathy Lewin (eds.), “Research Methods in the Social Sciences,” Sage Publications, London,
2006.
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Area of the study
It is important to be aware of the
fact that our research method has
inherently restricted the pool of
possible interviewees. The respondent’s
ability to narrate his or her life,
put the facts in some order and
even articulate and effectively convey
evaluations and emotions in an
encounter with strangers and partly
even foreigners does depend on the
level of education and experience.
Because of this important restriction
we effectively interviewed a
kind of local elite: teachers, journalists, NGO activists, the staff of museums, libraries and
similar institutions, small businessmen and one catholic priest.
The degree to which the results of our research can be said to be representative
is therefore an open question. At the same time, in what follows, we have tried to summarize
if not trends than regularities in the responses we received from our interviewees.
The very existence of such regularities, given the open format of our interviewing, is
certainly not surprising. Yet it does indicate that the life history approach, while hard to
quantify, is capable of generating coherent patterns and offer a basis for the achievement
of meaningful interpretation.
In what follows, we have presented the main findings of our research in
a roughly chronological order, i.e. from the respondents’ memories of the pre-independence
period to their reactions to the political events of the summer of 2006 and their
expectations for the future. We have also established a number of thematic categories,
which follow the respondents’ emphases, such as their attitude to local and non-local
authorities, political parties, or the economic situation in general. Since we encouraged
the interviewees to respond and associate freely, our categorization of their answers had
to contain overlaps and sometimes redundancies, while to an extent breaking up the
context, in which the respondents themselves situated their answers. Thus it should be
borne in mind that the structure below is a compromise between the need to preserve the
richness of the life history interview and the demands of presentation.
I. (Pre-)1991-2000
In the beginning of the nineties post-soviet societies often supported popular-democratic
movements and ideas of independence. This support, however, was not and could not
be rooted in any positive experience of life in a democratic political system and society.
Rather it was the expression of widely shared attitudes and values, all referenced to
expectations. In particular, maybe first of all, that support also expressed strong expecta-
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tions of a total improvement of personal life – both in economically and politically. 5 In
the case of Ukraine, such combined expectations were illustrated well if not disinterestedly
or perhaps even honestly in an interview the first president of Ukraine, Leonid
Krawchuk, gave to Polish Gazeta Wyborcza in 2001:
“One could not buy anything without waiting in the line. There were no freedom and no
democracy. […] Every decision was made up by Moscow and Communist Party. Great
famine and repressions showed us, where this could lead us. The nation appeared to be
mature enough, both spiritually and politically, to change this situation” 6
Yet the expectations for the results from the changing the political system were
sometimes contradictory – people expected both strong leadership and widening of personal
freedom. 7 It is trivial but remains true that great expectations have a tendency to
turn into great disappointment. Undoubtedly, what happened to Ukraine after independence
was gained, led to such disappointment.
Probably this is the reason, why among our interviewees the pre-independence
period was a topic that was mostly little mentioned spontaneously and that took a significant
amount of probing and prodding, if we sought more details on our respondents’
attitude’s to it. In fact, even among older respondents, the Soviet period seemed to pale
in their statements by comparison with the energy they invested in speaking about the
post-Soviet period. In this sense, there are signs that post-Soviet independent Ukraine
has its own history and, more importantly, its own, apparently predominant purchase on
the respondents’ own sense of their biographies now.
Moreover, there is at least one more reason for the prevalence of the recent period
in the respondents’ narratives. Generally speaking, most of our interviewees did not
think of their life in comparative terms. They live now and here. Comparisons practically
never appeared in conversations spontaneously. When probed for comparison (to the
Soviet period, to the five-years-before period), the respondents often reacted with kind
of surprise and needed an extra second to formulate their answer. Nearly nobody had this
answer ready. This seems to indicate that normally our respondents do not spontaneously
make such comparisons for themselves.
Moreover, recent polls indicate that the clear dichotomous categories, which
would be necessary for thinking in or articulating sharp contrasts. Thus, quantitative
public opinion polls conducted at the end of 2005 showed a significant contradiction
in the opinions regarding the events of the early nineties. Paradoxical as this may be, a
significant part of poll respondents evaluated the collapse of the USSR negatively (63%),
5. Gibson J.L., 1996, A Mile Wide an Inch Deep (?): The Structure of Democratic Commitment in the Former
USSR, “American Journal of Political Sciences”, Vol. 40, No 2, 396-420
6. Krawczuk L., Król był już wtedy nagi (The king was then already naked), interview for Gazeta Wyborcza 24.08.2001
by Marcin Wojciechowski. [„W sklepach nic nie można było kupić bez kolejek. Nie było wolności ani demokracji.
(…) O wszystkim decydowała Moskwa i partia. Wielki głód i represje pokazały nam, do czego to może doprowadzić.
Naród dojrzał duchowo i politycznie by zmienić tę sytuację”.]
7. Andrzej Rychard shows the same contradiction in Poland (see: Rychard, A. 1989, Centralizm polityczny: centralizm
i pluralizm w opinii Polaków, w: Polacy 88, Warszawa.)
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which enabled Ukraine to proclaim independence. The latter fact, in turn, was evaluated
positively by every second respondent. Only one in five respondents (19%) expressed a
positive opinion about both facts, 23% evaluated both facts negatively, and 21% believed
Ukraine’s proclamation of independence to be a positive fact, while they evaluated the
collapse of the USSR as a negative fact. 8
Yet the prevalence of fuzzy edges and blurred areas is of course not tantamount
to the complete absence of distinct and more polarized attitudes. Thus, in the atypical
response of an NGO activist from Starobilsk near Luhansk, who generally shows a strong
Ukrainian-national attitude, the dominant memory of the Soviet period is national
offence when he went to Moscow as a schoolboy and was called a “Khokhol,” even while
he was, as he points out, speaking Russian. He describes this incident as his “first cold
shower, such as attitude from above, from the ‘older brother’.”
A chief librarian in Haisyn in Vinnytsia oblast, however, remembers the Soviet
period as one of large factories with many employees and workers and we have found several
similar responses among our respondents, which essentially described the Soviet past
as one, in which their localities were more industrialized and sometimes better equipped
in terms of infrastructure. While we have, at the same time, found that those few interviewees,
who recall and stress national humiliation do so with a strong emotional reaction,
those who remember a more industrialized past, do not seem to regret its passing.
Partly this may be due to similar factors as in the Haisyn chief librarian’s perception. For
her the situation has improved again over the last five years and she stresses that a core
piece of Soviet industry, the local canned food plant, is now working again and that pay
is up.
Moreover, her sense of difference may be influenced by the fact that she – possibly
quite correctly – does not perceive a company held by shareholders of some sort
as “private business,” while she does not think of it as state-owned either. At the same
time, most respondents, who note the decrease of industry in their locality, do not make
similar statements. Rather they make virtually no statement at all. By now and among our
respondents, the de-industrialization following the collapse of the Soviet Union seems
to be perceived subjectively as a kind of force-majeure given without strong emotional
interest.
There is also, it seems, simple confusion of what to think about or how to address
the Soviet period among some. Thus a museum curator from Medzhybizh in Khmelnytsk
oblast, remembers the Soviet past above all as one of oblivion towards national Ukrainian
tradition and national inferiority. Complementarily, she thinks of the achievement of
independence as the point when “we [here, clearly, Ukrainians] came out on top [My na
verkh vyshli.]” At the same time, she points out that under the Soviet regime her town
8. J. Konieczna, Ukraine after the ‘Orange Revolution’: changes in the social attitudes and values. Report, Centre for
Eastern Studies, Warsaw, April 2006 (http://www.osw.waw.pl/files/Raport_spoleczny_Ukraina.pdf), p.49.
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used to be a raion center not only in name but in substance with an infrastructure, which
she clearly sees as far superior to what is there now, while salaries were paid on time.
In currently planned exhibitions, she says, the Soviet period will not be represented
in any manner since it still has to be further re-thought. To add a final twist to
her complex attitude to what the Soviet past means now she also explains that a future
exhibition will have a section on local mishchanstvo life-style in order to demonstrate
that Medzhybizh in pre-Soviet times used to be a major urban center and not a mere
village.
A representative of the younger generation, who graduated from high school in
1994, from Sloviansk in the Donetsk region remembers little of the Soviet period. He
sees some continuation in terms of the concentration of capital, stating that “those who
were well-off during the Soviet period remained rich after [the Soviet Union’s] collapse
and new rich people also appeared.” For him the 1990s and 2000s are marked by their
perceived sameness and stasis, as constantly the same with no dynamic or change. He
knows that there was a financial crisis in 1998, when the hryvnia slumped against the
dollar but recalls that as a student he had little to do with this in his everyday life.
On the level of his personal life, he remembers the 1990s as a period of study
at an institute in Kharkiv, a stay abroad as au-pair in Germany, the return to Sloviansk,
little salaries in job vacancies for his training (engineering of agricultural machines)
and employment at a gas station/motel. Thinking about the most recent years, he says
that there have been attempts to change something but that little has worked out in
Sloviansk.
Unsurprisingly, most respondents remember the 1990s as a period of economic
crisis, usually of great severity as well as strong and painful personal impact. The second
virtually universal feature of our interviewees’ memories of the 1990s was that a central
role in surviving this economic slump is attributed to household plots, farmed either
directly for family subsistence or for sale at local markets.
Thus a school director from Novoukrainka in Kirovohrad oblast describes the
1990s as “very hard, so hard that God give that they will not return” and “you don’t want
to remember [them].” She, however, is also one of the very few respondents, who draw
a clear line of continuity between the last years of the Soviet crisis and the first years of
independent Ukraine’s crisis. For her the final Soviet years were already marked by great
psychological oppression but also general instability and insecurity, a “very terrible situation”
as she sums up her memories.
In less general terms, a female teacher from Petrivka remembers a life with five
children and neither money nor enough to buy. Getting along nevertheless was made
possible by her private plot of land, which, she says, she used not for the market but
entirely for subsistence farming. She states that she was not interested in politics and felt
that her family situation was beginning to improve when her oldest child finished high
school in 1997 and, in spite of some difficulties, succeeded in entering a vuz for free,
apparently meaning that neither fees nor bribes had to be paid. As concerns her village as
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a whole, she is explicit about and deplores at length that there are no jobs for the young
and that in general perspectives are lacking. At the same time, it is important to note
that she insists that life has become better over the last fifteen years, notwithstanding her
family’s severe financial problems. As she puts it there is “more work now but one also
lives more freely.”
In general, the manner in which macroeconomic crises are integrated into the
interviewees’ own stories about their biographies are, of course, highly personalized. The
Haisyn chief librarian, for instance, finds it at first impossible to remember the 1998 currency
crisis, before she realizes that that was the moment, which she remembers as the
time all the library staff’s salaries were halfed.
However, while we have found that among our respondents economic degradation
is clearly the single most powerful motif of what they say about their experience of
the 1990s, it is not the only experience mentioned. Next to economic degradation, institutional
and more elementary breakdown also features in the image of the 1990s. Thus
for the NGO activist from Starobilsk, the early 1990s are the period of experimentation
with ersatz currencies and temporary food scarcity in shops, while horilka was turning
into a replacement currency, which, however, was also intermittently scarce so that
“people were fighting for vodka, even killing each other.” Yet, importantly, he also dates
a new general interest in politics to these crisis years. While describing his and others’
reaction to independence as an outcome of their view of social issues, which he does not
see as politically re-defining. Rather he points to the experiments with the currency in
the early nineties as the point, at which “people became interested in politics. This was
the beginning of a new development in society.” However, the first thing that comes to
mind about his 1990s is his voluntary military service in 1997. While he was trying to
escape unemployment and find a position as a military physician in what he expected to
be a reputable hospital, he was instead sent to a railway unit as a junior medical assistant.
His experience there left a lasting impression:
“What I got to see was awful. I felt that I had ended up in prison. The quality of dress [was]
like in the 1940s, like [in] punishment battalions, [it] resembled the [penitentiary] zone.
Food bad, bad attitude, and dirt.
In his memory, he even missed part of the economic crisis of his town home raion.
When he returned there in 1998, he had been absent for eighteen months. His impression
of decay was clear. He felt that the situation had got worse and unemployment struck
him as ubiquitous.
The head of an association of market traders from Pryluky of Chernihiv oblast
also describes the 1990s in catastrophic terms,
“such times that you would wish nobody to [have] to live through them. Devaluations,
inflation were eating up peoples’ income. People were losing everything. This was an
experience so hard that you can hardly imagine it.”
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At the same time, this interviewee has clearly been among those who managed
best in surviving the period. He was one of the first Ukrainian migrant workers, who
went to the West, in his case to Poland and Germany, where he says, he gained the
capital and ideas to return to Pryluky and start his own market business, like many of his
acquaintances. Thus, it is hard to evaluate his confidence when he states that in spite of
the experience of the 1990s, people now feel safe about the stability of the currency.
An NGO activist and businesswoman from Svatovo near Luhansk feels that the
general standard of living in her community has been increasing over the last two years.
She states that during that period there has been a visible increase in house and home
repairs as well as the acquisition of new cars, even, as she points out, among the inhabitants
of nearby villages. In the long run she sees a clear, even dramatic improvement,
measured, however against a very low base.
“Our town is looking better and [its] condition is improving. There are flowers everywhere
[now], people say that our town is a ‘small Switzerland.’ This improvement is recent.
There are more shops, the quality of goods is increasing. The prices are going up but the
quality is higher [and] people look out for quality more. More and more people are buying
in shops [as opposed to the market]. Nine years ago [when she arrived in Svatovo] people
were hungry. Tables at wedding banquets were cleaned off rapidly. Now there are fewer
dishes on the tables but people are eating less, too, and dance and celebrate more.”
Yet her perception of local economic improvement is not entirely optimistic.
While she sees more spending, especially on repairing homes to a higher standard, she
also feels that for some these expenditures are very hard to make so that “people have
to earn or steal money. Such people probably do not feel that it is becoming easier to
live.”
Her most personal indicator of local living standards is an acquaintance, who
owns a gift shop. She told her that about a year-and-a-half ago she noticed a sudden
change when her customers stopped buying presents for 20 hryvnia and started spending
100 hryvnia and more. After the March parliamentary elections, however, the same
acquaintance noticed a clear decrease in spending.
Two journalists from the town of Novoukrainka also remarked that over the last
two years there have been strong signs of local prosperity. Thus, traders have been making
the transition from stalls at the market to “nice shops,” while a “total” boom of house
and apartment repair has been taking place. For these respondents, the beneficiaries of
this upturn were not the wealthiest alone. At the same time, they did point out what
they perceive as a continuing connection between some of those who were well placed
in local production in the late Soviet period, e.g. at the miasokombinat, and those who
have been able to raise capital and are prospering now. In the journalists’ view, these initial
pre-independence/Soviet-era capital holders have managed to multiply their funds
by trade on the local market as well as trading trips abroad to, for instance, Poland and
Hungary.
In the case of the Sloviansk interviewee, his personal experience of material
improvement is connected with his au-pair work in Germany, where he was adding
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income by work at an auto service. He is rather pessimistic about material conditions in
Sloviansk now, especially stressing that prices are very high, in particular by comparison
with Russia. He does note some positive changes in specific spheres because companies
have started competing for clients. Yet generally when talking about the question of a
growing middle class in Ukraine, there was a sense of skepticism, especially in relation to
the ability to afford anything. His principal attitude was “that there is no sense of stability.”
Moreover, commenting on growing numbers of shops or cafes, in his opinion “this
is not [genuine] small business, these objects just belong to somebody big (to oligarchs,
[as the] Donbass belongs to Akhmetov) and people working there are simply employees,
because ordinary people can hardly open their own business.” Similarly, he sees little
improvement in material conditions because salaries are not increasing sufficiently to
increase people’s purchasing power.
II. Attitudes to Local Authorities and Local Activity
The museum curator in Medzhybish sees no difference between central and local authorities.
While she is generally disappointed by the performance of all presidents, including
by now Iushchenko, she does not believe in the relevance of the local authorities, asking
rhetorically “And what’s there locally?” and clearly implying that the answer would be
“nothing” or at least “nothing of importance.”
The journalists at the Novoukrainka local paper have a special and especially
informed view of the local authorities. Their newspaper, as with many local papers and
as they point out themselves, is financed by the local authorities and they state explicitly
that, while they feel that recently newspaper work has become easier, they do not see
themselves as free to criticize their employers. At the same time, they also believe that the
local population does distinguish between different levels of authorities and in general
tends to criticize either the raion or the central authorities but less so the oblast authorities,
aiming its complaints either “very near or very far.”
The business woman from Svatovo sees local people complaining more about
local power than about the central powers
“because [locally] everybody knows everybody. Here people say that maybe there are positive
changes in the center but at the local level that is not likely because those in power are
old cadres and people know them and know what they are like.”
For her, however, local criticism and discussion are not absent but highly insufficient.
Stressing the fundamental changes brought about by the Orange Revolution, she
states that generally people are still partly afraid to talk about politics openly but that they
are engaging in such discussions much more now than before the Orange Revolution.
Thus, she feels that her town, which she describes as a “stagnant swamp” controlled by
unified “mafia” and political authorities, is now marked by a population, which is “not
silent.” Importantly, she clearly singles out the Orange Revolution as marking the principal
improvement in this regard:
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“People started talking [and] they are talking now but they did not use to talk much. Five
years ago, I started traveling around Ukraine, … to western Ukraine, too. There people
were talking even then but now people here have also begun to talk, [they] discuss all the
time, who says what and so on. People talk about all-Ukrainian matters, but mostly they
are interested in local issues.”
It should be pointed out that this respondent’s – who has no family background
in western Ukraine but rather in Russia – recognition of an earlier freer climate in western
Ukraine does not make her think in terms of a radical division between western and
eastern Ukraine. In fact, her statements on this issue seem contradictory, perhaps also
influenced by some wishful thinking as well as resentment:
“I do not understand why there is so much talk about dividing Ukraine. In western Ukraine
people are more politicized, they care about all-Ukrainian politics and … much more than
here. Here people also talk about all-Ukrainian matters but what they care about is their
private life and what is around them. There is a feeling here that we have no influence on
what is going on up there in the center, that we are pieshki.”
Disregarding her attitude to Ukraine’s regions, she already sees backsliding on the
side of the local authorities, noting that immediately after the Orange Revolution there
was a positive change in their composition and practices but that this change has largely
been reversed by now. She identifies the people in positions of local authority as the same
as before the Revolution and she is pessimistic about their reaction, expecting them to be
“angry” now. In particular, she points out, that local businessmen are beginning to complain
of old problems again. After a period of “free breathing,” marked by the authorities’
not demanding bribes and not making difficulties with “pathos” and “stupid” demands,
the local businessmen are now again deploring the return of such bad habits.
The NGO representative and former “Orange” activist from Starobilsk focuses
much less on business but also describes a picture of temporary change and disappointment
after the Orange Revolution. He stresses the persistence of the local elite, whom
he characterizes as corrupt and involved in electoral fraud. In his opinion, these authority
representatives were expecting punishment after the Orange Revolution but were then
emboldened by it not materializing. At the same time, this activist does mention an, as he
points out, unprecedented demonstration against the appointment of a new head of the
raion administration, who was suspected of criminal activity. The activist sees this demonstration
of, as he says, 5000 local citizens as “unprecedented” and points out that it was
successful in keeping the would-be raion administration head out of office. Importantly,
this story of specific yet limited success is put in a context of an overall sense of failure.
While a local initiative by some unprecedentedly active citizens caught the local authorities
at a moment of disorientation and anxiety, the expected punishment of electoral
abuses from above “did not happen. And they [the implicated local authorities] are still
there and they rule the region. This is why we have such results in 2006.” This activist
suspects that falsifications have continued if on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, the final
assessment of this situation is not pessimistic. Rather, the activist asserts that the “the
raion [already] has no need of [its current] administration. The raion is alive.”
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Some changes were noted also by the gas station administrator in Sloviansk,
when he described the last two years in his town. He said that before, when Kuchma was
president, there was “lawlessness” and that this has slightly changed under Iushchenko.
There was an increase in control over the local police and some order was introduced
in this area. Concerning business, however, he still assumes that each inspection by the
tax administration is followed by some official or unofficial payment. Even while he has
recently heard of inspections finding no wrong and leaving without any payment, he
nevertheless hardly believes in such stories.
Generally, it is still not easy to establish one’s own business in his opinion. He
refers to the personal experience of a friend, who tried to establish a business trading
vegetables near Donetsk but not having a krysha had to fail and did fail. Yet this respondent
also thinks that setting up business is easier in smaller places such as Sloviansk. He
notes as a general improvement in Sloviansk the decrease in crime. In the 1990s crime
reached catastrophic dimensions but within the last few years, the police has taken more
control over the situation.
Among our respondents, there was no clearly dominant view of the role or the use
of political parties at the local level. Thus the Novoukrainka journalists saw their work
impeded not only by the local authorities but by the locally powerful parties. While they
found it not possible to be free in their criticism of the latter, their response to a more
loosely framed question was slightly different. Asked if they could write whatever they
like, they answered that “principally” yes and then qualified this statement heavily. In
their qualifications the main impediment to “writing everything,” however, were not the
local authorities but the parties. In effect, their answer was that the newspaper’s position
is defined and restricted between the latter.
The Haisyn chief librarian’s attitude towards the parties was different, possibly
also due to her lack of direct professional evolvement with them. For her the parties
were noticeable above all during elections, when “you hear them” but “busy in their
[own] milieus” at all other times, when “you don’t see them.” Significantly, this view did
not imply disappointment or dissatisfaction as she immediately invited her interlocutors
to compare this situation with what it was like in the Soviet Union, when “we all were
chased into one party,” while now there were more of them, which, essentially kept to
their own business.
Importantly, the Svatovo business woman does not see the emergence of more
and freer public discussion as either incontrovertible or a panacea. On one side, she
characterizes the emerging discussions of local issues as “primitive” precisely because
the town is a face-to-face society: “…we know everybody and it comes down to personal
issues.” She goes so far as to deny the existence of any local community in Svatovo and
emphasizes that people do not “know how to talk to each other, how to agree on certain
issues and act together.” Like the Novoukrainka journalists she points to mentality as
the root cause of this inability and adds that, in her experience, it is hard to address this
problem: “We had plenty of seminars about how to act together in order to solve issues
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of local life but the results are not good. This ability is not in [people’s] nature, in [their]
hearts, so to speak.”
A different picture is presented by the gas station administrator. In his opinion, the
whole Donbass belongs to oligarchs and these people do not really care about improving
the social sphere. In his perception the “state [here clearly meaning the center] forces the
local oligarchs to increase salaries, but immediately in return these oligarchs are raising
the prices and the effect of the the salary increase is eaten up by this.”
III. Attitudes towards the Political Events of Summer 2006
and Expectations for the Future
The majority of our interviewees express attitudes of skepticism or rejection towards the
making of a new government under Viktor Ianukovych. There are differences of degree
but few respondents feel optimistic about this event. Thus the Novoukrainka journalists
express “shock” and uncertainty as well as their “need” to hope that at least things will
not get worse but find it “personally” very hard to remain optimistic. For one of them,
the return of a Ianukovych government marks an even deeper crisis. Identifying the root
cause of problems in Ukraine, a country which he describes as having a great potential
yet very poor, as the “Ukrainian mentality,” in particular a general refusal to engage in
politics, he expected the Orange Revolution to mark the decisive breakthrough away
from these long-term, pervasive features of national identity. Now he feels that the
breakthrough has not come about after all and that “our nation is too slow.”
The Svatovo business woman is aware that her pessimistic reaction to Ianukovych’s
return is unusual by local standards. She feels that the vast majority of the local population
received the news “very positively,” while only a small minority – “maybe five percent”
– were unhappy. She acknowledges the necessity to “adapt” to the majority. At the
same time, she retains a clearly dissenting point of view and states that she does not trust
Ianukovych and does not believe that he has changed for the better.
The head of the Pryluky Market Trader Association combines statements of disappointment,
shame, and principal optimism. Describing himself as having “agitated for
Iushchenko” as well as an activist of the Orange Revolution, when he was following, Iulia
Tymosheko’s call to go to Kyiv, he feels that his reputation in his local community has
been damaged by the end of the Orange Coalition:
“I am ashamed before some people. I was agitating for Iushchenko and now [there is] a
different constellation in power … We went to the Maidan at the moment when Iulia
Tymoshenko called on people. We took a car and went to Kyiv … It was a risk … There
was great support so that there will be justice in the country … [Now] many people in the
market say, what has changed, what is new? People here from the market were expecting
justice [and] that bandits will go to prison. [They] were not thinking that they will get an
extra ‘piece of bread,’ that it will be materially better. It was first of all about justice. There
was a sense that one can say more and more freely. But now this has changed and it is not
what we expected.”
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In retrospect, he sees this disappointment as confirming a sober rule about change
in Ukraine. Thus he recalls that in 1991, when independence was achieved, there was
“no fear … People were waiting for changes. But it was swept away, these expectations. [It
was] similar after the presidential elections in 2004. Expectations were very high … I could
not sleep for several nights … And now it looks as if quick changes are not our fate.”
He also, however, repeats several times that he believes that “the general principles”
of the Orange Revolution will remain. His expectations for the future are, however,
effectively more mixed. In particular, he expresses his worries that the new government
will not only lower taxes for big business but also increase the burden on small business,
i.e. market traders like him and those his organization represents. His idea of how to
resist such a development is ambiguous. He refers to petitioning the government directly
“from below.” Yet while he stresses that generally business and politics should be disentangled,
he also looks precisely to this connection when seeking redress against a feared
government intervention:
“Does [Mykola Azarov] mean that small business will suffer and will [have to pay] higher
taxes? … [In order to protest such an outcome] we will write letters to the government.
The owner of the market is an oblast deputy from the Party of Regions. He should be
interested in supporting this market.”
At the same time, “business and politics have to be separated. I have seen what
was going on in Pryluky and I think that these two things are not good to combine. One
cannot use state bodies for solving business questions.”
Our interviewee in Sloviansk, assumed that almost everybody in his region have
to be happy because Ianukovych has been appointed a prime-minister, “since this is
Donbass. This should be good for Donbas,” yet in his opinion for Ukraine generally
Iushchenko would better.
The Complexity of Assessments and Expectations
While we have found that virtually all respondents were willing to make meaningful
statements about their hopes and anxieties about the present and the future, these
statements usually turn out ambivalent. A particularly telling but typical example is the
Medzhybish curator’s response. As noted above, she is explicit about her disappointment
by the recent return to power of Viktor Ianukovych and a general failure of the “politicians”
to make use of the opportunity offered by “the people’s” Orange Revolution as
well as about her overall sense that her raion is still poor and youth and schools in a bad
state. Moreover, she deplores general corruption, insufficient respect for the law as well
as elite conspicuous consumption. As also noted above, at the same time, she repeatedly
cites specific evidence of rising prosperity, such as more births, better dress or the celebration
of weddings in parties outside the home.
What should be pointed out here is that we need to be careful before labeling
such ambivalence as a priori contradictory. In fact, the curator also shows an apparently
undented expectation that Ukraine cannot but finally improve, stating that the “15 years
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of free Ukraine,” while “there isn’t what’s necessary” mean that the situation simply must
improve.
The Petrivka school teacher, who maintained her five-children family in the 1990s
largely due to her private plot, also shows an ambivalent sense of opportunities. She finds
that, while life is still hard, one can now get by if one has “initiative.” Yet she also laments
the general lack of the latter as well as the fact that such initiative is bound to be without
result in the end – “spanner in the works for you and that’s it.”
The Sloviansk interviewee expresses doubts in how the future will turn out, especially
with a view to increasing prices for gas and communal fees. In his opinion this will
be very hard for many people and for him. He has little optimism in future. There is also
little to be hoped for from the state because, he feels, state bureaucrats are still mainly
taking care of themselves.
The Svatovo business woman, who does explicitly not trust Ianukovych, at the
same time, does state that for her Iushchenko managed to “rehabilitate” himself, i.e. his
decision to agree to Ianukovych as prime minister and a big coalition, by his speech arguing
that it was necessary for the unity of the nation.
Ukraine’s place in or with respect to Europe
Ukrainian sociologists like to repeat that Ukrainians’ beliefs and attitudes are unnstable,
often incoherent and tend to change dramatically under the influence of current events
in the Ukrainian political arena or opinions spread through the mass-media. This holds
true especially about issues of foreign policy. The comparative absence of thinking in
clear contrasts and dichotomies mentioned in the introduction to this text can be seen
as a major reason of the disorientation regarding the issues and processes of euro-integration
and the position Ukraine should take in these processes. Here, no comparison
also means no assessment. Ukrainians mostly do not evaluate successive governments’
performance in areas affecting Ukraine’s relations with other countries. Ukrainians are
not much interested in the subject since – as they feel – it does not directly affect their
everyday life.
As a result, many Ukrainians do not have any opinion as to what place their country
should occupy in or maybe outside what Europe, nor as to what kind of relations
with its neighbors it should generally have. In the 2005 public opinion survey mentioned
above one out of five Ukrainians do not know whether Ukraine should join the European
Union, while 17% have no opinion as to Ukraine’s NATO membership. Additionally,
there is an exception to the general lack of opinion on foreign policy. While attitudes
towards EU membership are predominantly supportive when they exist, the politically
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arguably more realistic membership in NATO has significantly more opponents than
supporters among the great majority of Ukrainians. 9
Support for the idea of Ukraine joining the EU and NATO in four regions.
Data source: public opinion poll 2005 (Polish Robert Schuman Foundation; CES)
From the middle-town perspective the European Union or NATO are not obvious
but nonetheless clearly present. In very few interviews these issues appeared spontaneously
in any context. If they did appear, respondents talked rather about the EU than
NATO. When probed, however, the majority did have an opinion on both organizations.
The interviewees’ attitude towards the EU or NATO depended mostly on two factors,
i.e. in which part of Ukraine the respondent lived, which is not surprising especially
in view of prior poll data, and on the degree of political mobilization – in our sample,
NGOs activists tended to be more western-oriented.
9. For more data, see the article: J.Konieczna, Wschodem a Zachodem (Between the East and
the West), available from the Stefan Batory Foundation (http://www.batory.org.pl/doc/wsch_zach.pdf)
or the report „Ukraine after the ‘Orange Reviolution’ op.cit.
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Positive attitudes towards EU membership
In the western part of Ukraine (mostly in Dubno and Medzybizh) very positive attitude
towards the EU are connected with the respondents’ strong national feeling. They see
Ukrainian culture as emphatically European and consider it evidence that “we, Ukraine”
should also belong to political Europe, i.e. the EU. According to these respondents, the
EU is a natural place for Ukraine to be and there are only some, as it were, technical
problems for Ukraine to overcome in order to join. These respondents tend to also have
positive attitude towards NATO. Concerning the latter, it sometimes does sound as if
they are proud of expressing and demonstrating their positive opinion while knowing
that most of their compatriots are against Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Others who support Ukraine’s EU membership stress the economic and general
welfare status of the EU countries, saying that they would like Ukraine to be at least like
Poland in this respect. They believe that it is a good idea to set ambitious goals. Thus
they positively evaluate government declarations regarding EU membership as a strategic
goal for Ukraine.
Importantly, in the clear majority of our conversations regarding the EU, the
respondents see the difference between the EU and Ukraine as one rather of a quantitative
than qualitative nature. Most comparisons concentrate on the standard of living.
Obviously the EU is perceived as a place with a generally higher quality of life but
this usually means higher income as well as the lack of the everyday problems of many
Ukrainians, i.e. how to get by on very low salaries and prices not much different from
those in central Europe, where the salaries are significantly higher. No mention is made
of the different organization of the state, public services, opportunities for youth, quality
of education, culture and cultural diversity. These are issues of comparatively little concern
to our sample respondents. This phenomenon, however, is not absolute. An association
of the EU with higher standards of legality or government was, however, mentioned
by some interviewees.
However, as before “Europe” is generally associated with something of good
quality. Thus in ubiquituous advertisements the prefix “euro” is often added to highlight
special quality. In everyday speech people often use the expression “in Europe” to say
“abroad” or “in western Europe.” “Europe” may be good and attractive, but at the same
time it is not “us.”
Negative attitudes towards the EU membership
Negative attitudes were expressed not as often as positive ones and they were shaped
mostly by two kinds of attitudes: fear of the economic strength of the EU by comparison
to Ukraine and the conviction that membership in the EU precludes good relationship
with Russia. The first fear is expressed especially frequently in the rustbelt Donbas
region, where many people work in coal mines. They are afraid that an accession to the
EU would mean closing down the mines and mass unemployment. This fear needs to be
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set against the background of the lack of any effective social programs to assist the unemployed.
There are some NGOs helping them but the demand for such services is much
greater than supply. People from Donbas do understand that the current state of eastern
Ukrainian heavy industry is poor and that reform threatens serious lay-offs.
Moreover, there also is a fear of price increases after the EU accession, perhaps
deepened by the 1990s experience, when prices rapidly increased after the collapse of the
USSR and the incomes did not change commensurately.
Thus the Sloviansk interviewee is afraid that if Ukraine should enter the EU,
everything will start becoming more expensive. A source of more fear are talks with truck
drivers from new members of the EU (e.g. Slovakia, Rumania) complaining about rising
prices. He says that none of them is content with their countries’ accession to the EU.
At the same time, he acknowledges that the level of quality is higher in these countries,
as, for instance, with gas.
He summarizes by stating that “we are closer to Russia. In the western regions,
they want into the EU but do not know what it is going to be like there. There is little
industry [in the western regions], so they have nothing to offer.” But at the same time
he concludes that “generally the EU is good, life there is good, but the visas are a problem.”
In general, the relationship with Russia is the second problem when discussing
Euro-integration issues with Ukrainians. Public opinion surveys conducted in Ukraine
show that Ukrainians generally feel themselves closer to Russia than to western or even
central Europe. 10 It is true that such results need to be treated carefully and contextualized.
Thus the latest Razumkov Center Independence Day poll has shown that, indeed,
twice more Ukrainians state identification with Russia than with Europe. At the same
time, however, both are, in fact, extremely low on the identification scale, with 2 percent
choosing Russia and one percent Europe. Moreover, it is also probable that the realtionship
between attitudes about living-standards and Europeanness are more complex, to
an extent even inverted: When asked if they feel themselves to be Europeans, 26 percent
of the Razumkov poll give an unqualified or qualified positive answer but nearly all of
those who do not, i.e. 73 percent say that their reason for saying no is their low standard
of living. 11 While this result does confirm the strong link between standard-of-living
issues and Europeanness it is also open to an interpretation, which would permit for the
possibility that an uncounted number out of the 73 percent do feel that there is more to
Europe than wealth and may even feel that they are in possession of these non-wealth
criteria but do also see wealth as a necessary, though precisely not sufficient condition of
being European, so that its absence disqualifies but its presence would not be enough.
10. See the the report „Ukraine after the ‘Orange Reviolution’ op.cit
11. Liudmyla Shanhina, Pro Krainu, derzhavu ta hromadian u perekhidnomu vitsi, Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, no. 31(610),
19-25 August 2006.
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Nevertheless, Russia for many still is the part of the world more understandable
for them than the West, or, in particular the EU. When forced to choose between Russia
and the EU – many of them tend to choose Russia. Some of those of our respondents,
who talk about economic issues, point out that Ukraine is fully dependent on Russian
energetic resources. That is why it should maintain good relationships with Russia.
Moreover, these respondents do not criticize the way, in which Russia is using its position
of energy exporter politically in eastern Europe. Such a style of policy making is seen as
justified or at least “normal” and not surprising.
NATO
Among our respondents we have met very few who supporte Ukraine’s membership in
NATO. However we did not meet many explicitly opposing NATO membership either.
Rather the question of NATO was difficult for respondents. They often did not know
what to say. “We have no idea what NATO really is”, as the Haisyn librarian puts it quite
typically. Several respondents, mostly women, oppose NATO seeing it as an aggressive
military organization. However, when probed, they can either not give any example of
this aggressive activity or refer to the air campaign over Kosovo against Serbia.
Obviously one of the reasons for such a situation is the lack of reliable information,
as well as a lack of direct personal experiences of Ukrainians in their contacts with
the West. At the same time, Ukrainians do not seek knowledge of NATO or the EU on
their own, as they do not need it for dealing with everyday life. International issues are
not seen as attractive for the mass media. Most local journalists, moreover, may not know
their way around these questions any better than the average citizen, so the media often
still reproduce the stereotypes, shaped by Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.
Conclusions?
Middle Town Ukraine remains, at this point, merely a first approach to the application
of life-history interview methods to Ukraine’s hinterland, while this paper presents
nothing but an early draft for an interpretation of its results. Perhaps the most pertinent
preliminary conclusion is that these results appear to chime in well with what we know
from quantitative research. Put differently, they do not constitute a sensation. This seems
strong evidence that qualitative research, while not easily generalizable, makes sense and
can be verified by quantitative methods.
At the same time, secondly, the qualitative interviews have added depth and variety,
also as expected. Their results complicate matters in, arguably, a productive way.
Thus the ambivalence not only of collective or aggregate attitudes but of individual
reponses and ways of making sense of one’s own biography, which is what history breaks
down to at this level, have been preserved. Yet, thirdly, it is perhaps precisely this fact
that diminishes the perceived peculiarity of Ukrainians. While other approaches stress
the hamletish “alienation” of the Ukrainian “Faust,” such arguments retain their merits
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but appear less exceptional once we realize that the inconsistencies, contradictions and
ambiguities are built into individual narratives of self. In that sense, however, they appear
less unique and more akin to what many non-Ukrainians, even non-post-Soviets do.
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