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)
