ELECTORATE

The 1998 parliamentary elections have shown convincingly that Ukraine is an inalienable part of the post-Soviet political space, the CIS. Take for example, the Baltic States, our not so distant neighbors. The situation is quite different there: hardly a person can be found in any of these states who believes that the Communists can win in his country. And the truth is as simple as that: neither Latvia nor Estonia nor Lithuania has such an organized political force that could be strong enough to win. Some former Communist chieftains in these countries have long forgotten their old ideals, having plunged headlong into business. Others are still active in political life but under Social-Democratic banners. But let’s return to Ukraine. The results of the Ukrainian elections are very close to those shown by the last elections of deputies to the Russian State Duma or by the recent parliamentary elections in Moldova.

Yet, there are no grounds to speak of a renaissance of Com-munism in Ukraine. Not so much because nowadays Com-munists are more interested in becoming part of the powerful and rich than in advocating ideas, but because severe impoverishment forces many people to join the longtime Communist stalwarts. Under other circumstances these people would undoubtedly give their votes to Centrists or the Left-Centrists. No matter how hard the Communists have tried to use a very complex social situation, they failed to win even simple majority, to say nothing of a constitutional majority. The same holds true in all the former Soviet republics. It proves that the Communist electorate continues to cling to the view that voting is a tradition. Many of the current supporters of the red flag formed these views as far back as the prewar period. Incidentally, there are such people in the Baltic States as well whose mentality is identical to that of Ukrainian advocators of Communism. In the prewar Lithuania, the popular masses, urged by the call of His Majesty the State, used to vote for the rightists. It has become a tradition since then for elderly constituencies to give their votes for conservatives. And pensioners in Lithuania prefer to vote for the Peasant Union, led by the former President Ulmanis, who is uncle of the current Lithuanian head of state. Perhaps that is why residents of Western Ukraine who found themselves under the Communists only in 1945 have so easily forgotten about Communism: the Khrushchev regime could not control and influence people’s thoughts and actions as strongly as the Stalin regime did.

It is clear now that Communist electorate will shrink with the years. But honestly speaking, I would like this to happen because more people will come to realize that democracy and a market economy are not empty slogans but the only path toward a normal decent living. I would like those elderly people who vote today for the Communists to live their last years like human beings, to be taken care of by the state and treated by it like human beings instead of like an abstract entity called the electorate.

Then, the election results would surely be different.