Sociologist discusses the transition from totalitarianism to civil society

RECOVERY FROM ROMANTICISM

The Day: Mr. Holovakha, the 1990 poll left you amazed by the inadequacy of responses to what was the classical scale of political movements; your respondents confused the Right and Left with each other. Why do you think they did? If you carried out a similar poll now, would you expect the respondents to have found their bearings? Or would they perhaps react the same way?

Y. H.: That Left-Right response was very informative, especially for our colleagues in the West. The poll showed that the Communists proved to be a Right extremist force, using a ten-point scale. Accordingly, the nationalists and Rukh were placed on the Left extreme. This indeed reflected the situation in society, that crucial change in mentality due to social transformations resulting from perestroika. At the time I explained — and I still think I was right — that such an absolutely crazy shift in the public view of that scale, in the eyes of classical political scientists, was due to the fact that the Communists were believed to be conservative in the early 1990s, regarded as a party wishing to keep the status quo, meaning no social change, even obstructing any such changes. By comparison, Rukh and other political parties born of perestroika were portrayed as innovative radicals. In the public eye at the time this has always associated with the Left.

That was a period of romantic reevaluation. We then believed that the more we change, the better. Ten years later, we can only wonder if the people have correctly assessed everything there was to assess (regrettably, we could not repeat the 1990 poll, but I am sure that we will one day, and that The Day will be the first to carry the results).

We thought that the ten years [of independence] should have contributed significantly to our domestic democracy and enhanced our respect for the liberal values and market economy. What happened in reality took quite the reverse course. I would say that the peak in the orientation toward democracy and the market economy was reached in 1990-91. Now it’s history, and for the past several years we have witnessed very slow, almost imperceptible progress in approaching such political democracy and market economy with greater caution.

Even now most people believe that discarding free enterprise would be disastrous for Ukraine. However, attitudes toward privatization as the key vehicle boosting such free enterprise have noticeably worsened, especially with regard to the land being made private property.

In fact, most people living in Ukraine were for land privatization in 1991. Then a very interesting phenomenon took place. Almost three-quarters of those living in big cities, almost half of those in towns, and a lesser number of residents in rural areas (that is, those supposedly most concerned) favored such privatization. The situation is strongly reminiscent of workers voting for their enterprise to be put up for auction. This is an aspect of the political culture inherent in our society. People seem willing to support market economy and democracy precisely where it affects them least.

The Day: You mean they would even favor the collective farm provided it would be established somewhere outside their village?

Y. H.: Precisely. Workers support land privatization and peasants have nothing against industrial enterprises being privatized. But when any of this happens to concern someone personally, most will show a very cautious attitude.

The Day: How do you explain this?

Y. H.: For a long time the Ukrainian population has suffered from steadily declining living standards. In 1998, we were pushed against the wall, the social climate was very bad, and people had an extremely grim view of the reality. Over the past two years this climate has improved significantly. Personally I attribute this to the process of adaptation to the new conditions. However difficult, people are getting used to these conditions. Figuratively speaking, our people have accumulated so much bitter experience over the past decade, living in this wild capitalist society, that they are getting to be “immune” to whatever perils. I mean they no longer feel as estranged from this society as they did. And I think this is the reason for their caution; they continue to accumulate experience with various kinds of socioeconomic cataclysms. Their first shock came when they lost all their bank savings. From then until 1993, our people took a noticeable Left turn. Then came hyperinflation. People felt disoriented in the financial wilderness. After that they experienced a degree of stability, but they stopped receiving wages and salaries and this was the third major shock.

Incidentally, pay arrears is a post-Soviet invention, a Russian discovery to be precise, which we started to use the way we would anything, however stupid [from Russia]. In this sense we could be shown to the rest of the world as a unique species of Homo sapiens. You won’t find a single civilized country where people in the employ of state-financed institutions have to wait to be paid for their jobs for months, sometimes years. One precedent took place in Zaire. Its army had not been paid, and they simply staged a coup d’etat, overthrew Mobutu, and that was the end of it.

The Day: But we seemed to have wanted a monetarist policy.

Y. H.: No, we did not. Monetarism is a subtle affair, understandable only to economists, and it has nothing to do with back wages and salaries. Those were things we ourselves invented.

The Day: Yet this did not seem to show up in popularity polls.

Y. H.: And this is what makes us so unique. I plan to write a paper called “The Unique Social Phenomena Born of Post-Soviet Transformations.” The fact remains that no one, even people in Africa, would put up with back pay for months on end. Our post- Soviet society can, with its history, GULAG “schooling,” Communist Party, and suchlike.

The Day: Does such shock therapy serve to block reform?

Y. H.: Our people have lived through a lot of shocks. Unfortunately, we haven’t come to adopting a shock therapy concept. Instead, we accepted a concept best describe as cautious reform. The authorities have been extremely cautious. They were afraid of social outbursts and did not trust sociologists. Back in 1990-91 I wrote that the Polish option of shock therapy could be incorporated by Ukraine without change because then we did not have any preconditions for social outbursts. Nobody believed me. Everybody was convinced that any abrupt economic measures, especially in the sphere of privatization and price liberalization, would cause a major social cataclysm after which no one would need such measures. But in reality, precisely this was triggered off by our cautious strategy. No actual economic changes have taken place and everything was let drift. Instead of shock the way our Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and other neighbors did, in varying degrees, we lived through several shocks: loss of savings, hyperinflation, back pay, no economic growth, meaning living standards in steady decline for a long time. All this would be intolerable in a traditional society.

ALL QUIET ON THE RIGHT FLANK, QUIET STEPS ON THE LEFT

The Day: Is such a high level of conformism in the socially active strata good or bad?

Y. H.: This is not conformism but awareness of one’s own interests. These people accept the regime. Varying estimates point to some 10% publicly active community members in Ukraine. Add here the younger generation, which is traditionally one social force capable of bringing about real cataclysms for a number of reasons. First, young people care little for what we regard as our historical heritage. Second, they are very energetic. Third, reform is their watchword. What the older generation regards as intolerable conditions the younger one considers perfectly acceptable in terms of their self-realization.

The Day: If so, why are there no radical Right parties in Ukraine?

Y. H.: Radical Right parties emerge and receive public support under certain conditions. First, they need a lot of national humiliation. Ukraine has been spared this. In fact, it became an independent state with the Soviet Union’s collapse. This inspires a certain national pride. No matter how negatively people can respond to socioeconomic realities, this pride is still there. Even though there is value it is lessened in mass consciousness, but the elite holds it high. Why? Because this elite, once so expressly provincial, found itself representing a major European country reckoned with by the world’s leading powers. This elite received social positions, something these people could only dream about during Soviet times.

Besides, any social outburst never emerges as a purely mass response; it has to be organized or provoked by a certain elite. There is actually no such elite quarter in Ukraine. Third, an extremely radical movement requires a chauvinistic ideology. I would say that Russia provides fertile ground for this with its inherently imperial mentality, but I would be hard put to visualize Ukraine as such a venue. Even if a chauvinistic ideology were to emerge somewhere in Western Ukraine, it will never spread over the rest of this country; it will remain a regional ideology. And there can be no chauvinism whatsoever in the East. Rather, an element of secondary pro-Russia chauvinistic ideology, which can never be integrated into all of Ukrainian society, because the Center will never accept it. We have a very interesting regional structure: we have our western and eastern regions that are ideologically polarized. And we have the central part of Ukraine which is very powerful, with an ideology far remote from that of the western and eastern territories. The differences are so strong that nobody has been able to come up with an ideology suiting both the west and east of Ukraine.

The Day: In other words, there is no juridical threat whatsoever.

Y. H.: Absolutely not. Ten years ago the radical Right was supported by some 10-15% of the population (mostly in the Western and in Kyiv). Now their number has shrunk to 1-2%. It has lost its base.

The Day: What about the Left threat?

Y. H.: It faded after Leonid Kuchma won the elections, beating the Communist contender by a broad margin and Parliament produced an anticommunist majority. This, however, was achieved largely due to circumstances. We still have fertile ground for the Left’s evolution. All political scientists agree that if we held parliamentary elections on the basis of proportional representation and if no campaigning were done in the majority constituencies, the Reds would have over 50% of the seats in Verkhovna Rada. In other words, we would have a Communist-dominated Parliament. The Left found it hard to win the winner-take-all districts controlled by enterprising businesspeople and those representing the top officials, because local voters have realized they could get something from these businessmen and officials. As for the presidential campaign, the picture was clear enough. The Left had lost so much face with their internal rivalries, shown so little by way of political and moral fortitude, the electorate could no longer accept them as a political force having any reliable future.

However, the Left threat should not be shrugged off, not at this stage. One ought to remember that, in the mid-1990s, there was an established 10% of convinced Communists among the population. Now it is approaching 20%. This is the nucleus, meaning sympathizers can always emerge in orbit. It all depends on how active this nucleus proves to be. Fortunately, the Communist nucleus has proven quite passive during the past couple of years, largely due to the fact that this nucleus is made up of elderly people incapable of doing political work.

ELITE ARCHAISM

The Day: Do you think that the elite, as a universally accepted notion, acquires a new meaning as a caste in Ukraine?

Y. H.: This phenomenon is characteristic of Ukraine and other states as well. It resides in the fact that we have our nomenklatura tradition, meaning that nomenklatura members have immunity, privileges, and so on. This process is based on handshakes and sometimes kinship. After all, we urbanized only recently and the rural family relationships were effectively transferred to the cities. This process turned the entire social structure upside down, such that the urban dwellers traditionally regarded as carriers of urban culture have long since become a minority. And it is only natural that such contacts should reach all the way up the hierarchical ladder. Under the Soviets, a sure guarantee of a bureaucratic career was coming from a worker or peasant family and ethnicity.

The Day: Now, despite all the countless other problems, we are faced with finding our bearings in the surrounding world. Some say that Ukraine will have to end its multivector [foreign policy] and adopt a proper one. Do any of your recent polls give evidence that there are changes in attitudes concerning Ukraine’s integration into Europe?

Y. H.: Such polls over the past decade show a steady trend: 15-17% of the respondents are for Ukraine’s Western orientation and consider it a top political priority. And there is a very interesting situation with those who support the Russian vector. The percentage has dropped from 25% to 8-10%. At the same time, the idea of Ukraine integrating into a Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian union is becoming more and more popular. The inference is that Ukraine is still traditionally oriented toward Slavic integration. However, this does not mean that the people want to integrate into a new Soviet Union. Many speak for lifting customs barriers, simplified border procedures, and so on. In other words, we are faced with everyday problems and not the liquidation of independence.

The Day: Does it mean that we did not have to stage that referendum and that the problem could be solved?

Y. H.: I am generally against any referendums in a transitory and unstable society. Under such conditions a referendum is a totally nonsensical way to ascertain the people’s will. The times are different and the people are not likely to delve into the matter adequately. Evidence of this is the latest referendum when the respondents supported the President but failed to realize the actual impact of the questions on our political life. The fact is that our people are just not very concerned about such issues; they just supported the re-elected President, thus confirming his legitimacy.

(To be continued)