Literacy, Nationalism and Communist Collapse

Recently I came across quite an interesting article by Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse in the World Politics* which can shed the light on the differences in coming to terms with Soviet legacies in West and East Ukraine.

On the example of East European Countries the authors convincingly demonstrated that the roots of communist exit** and its divergent outcomes in post-Communist countries lie in pre-communist conditions, and ultimately in schooling "which fomented and fostered nationalist ideas that led to the delegitimation of communist rule. The exit itself was the culmination of decades of nursed nationalist grievances, invidious comparisons, and carefully sustained mass hostility to the communist project as a foreign and inferior imposition" (84). Responding to a vast research on the topic of communist exit Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse argue that  "structural/geopolitical factors and precommunist legacies (including those of modernisation) explain less of the patterns of communist exit than mass literacy This suggests that [they] may be capturing the unmeasured cultural differences that many scholars have attributed to "regional effects" or the "Soviet legacy".

Moreover, they argue that "[p]rewar democratic statehood is a more likely candidate [to influence opposition and legitimacy of communism], since it may very well engender memories of noncommunist governance and the subsequent identification of communism as an "abnormal" form of governance." (89) The authors add that in the countries with successful communist exit the rescue of the nation from the "abnormal" communist form of governance was realized by the anticommunist opposition which was fused with nationalism. Anticommunism opposition and national sentiments were stronger in the societies where the level of literacy in the pre-communist times was higher (here lies the correlation communist exit - nationalism - strong anticommunist opposition - pre-communist schooling).

Ukraine falls under the exceptional case in this scheme. Belonging to different political entities in pre-war period a part of Ukrainians in the East Galicia had memories of noncommunist governance, had been more literate than their counterparts in Easter Ukraine, moreover, their education was national in content (they were educated as people belonging to a specific nation - Ukrainians), hence, now people in Western Ukraine express stronger anti-communist feelings which are reflected in their voting for anti-communist parties. In the Eastern Ukraine, on the contrary, the literacy rate at onset of Communist schooling was much lower (46 in East Ukraine against 70 in West Ukraine), furthermore, the schooling in East Ukraine was not national, it was Russian/Russophile in content. Here, it is also interesting to look into the intra-regional differences in Western Ukraine: whereas in Lviv the precommunist schooling was nationalist, in Zakarpattia it was procommunist, this pattern is reflected also in the post-communist preferences in voting.

*Keith Darden and Anna Grzymala-Busse: The Great Divide, World Politics, Vol. 59, No.1, October 2006, pp. 83-115

**The importance of communist exit for transitional societies lies in the fact that in the societies where communist was successful (communists represented as only a small minority or not represented at all in result of first three elections after the collapse of socialist bloc), "it has been strongly correlated with subsequent democratic consolidation, successful economic reforms, and patterns of political party competition." (83)