The assorted democratic watchdogs and acronymed agencies of the international community gave Ukraine’s recent parliamentary elections a resounding thumbs up, making it the third straight national vote in as many years to be assessed as both free and fair by global scrutineers.
The success of this democratic revolution has gone virtually unnoticed in Russia, where the popular perception of Ukraine is of a chaotic country permanently on the verge of the next political crisis with a population deeply disillusioned by the democratic process.
It is hardly surprising that the state-controlled Russian press should wish to present such an impression, given the rather obvious threat Ukrainian democracy poses to existing vertical power structures and Putin’s regime. The motto adopted by the post-Yeltsin generation of Russian political thinkers that democracy is somehow “not for us” is clearly debunked by developments in Ukraine, and this is something which must be countered at all costs.
Free and unfree, order and disorder
As a result of this need to portray Ukraine’s progress in the most unattractive light possible Russia’s propaganda outlets have adopted a wholly pessimistic approach to the Ukrainian question. Instead of acknowledging the benefits of Ukraine’s burgeoning civil society, free media and lively political debate, Moscow commentators have focused almost exclusively on the elements of conflict that this process inevitably throws up. They never seem to tire of reporting on the hardships of Russian nationalists in Crimea and the Donbass, while reveling in coverage of Ukraine’s struggle to come to terms with the divisions created by the Soviet past.
Whereas the European liberal democratic tradition attaches primary importance to the level of personal freedoms in any given society, the current official Russian attitude is the product of a mindset that tends to view everything in terms of order and disorder. We have seen this position employed wholesale by Ukraine’s own Russian-leaning Party of Regions during the past three years of electioneering, with their refreshingly honest “Hope is good, but stability is better” campaign slogans. Such attitudes effectively relegate trivialities like human rights and press freedoms to near irrelevance and instead fit neatly into the old, Soviet worldview of how a country should be run.
Democracy – who needs it?
Any government that attempted to move from pseudo-democracy towards a more authoritarian form of rule would be forced to adopt similar measures. What is perhaps more troubling is the lack of street level opposition to this state dictated anti-democratic dogma.
Unfortunately today’s Russia is not fertile ground for plausible public opinion surveys and I have admittedly not had the chance to question large numbers of ordinary Russians, but nevertheless the majority of those who I have spoken to in recent weeks seem to hold very much to the official party line and go out of their way to remain unimpressed by Ukraine’s emerging democracy.
There is a visible defensiveness among many of these middle class Russians when discussing western perceptions of Putin’s style of government. This reticence is often combined with a certain cockiness brought on by the self-esteem that petro-dollars have pumped back into the formerly crestfallen citizens of the ex-superpower. After years of humiliating poverty and collapse, they sense that Russia is again strong and this seems to be more than enough to counter more trivial issues such as human rights or personal freedoms.
The Russians I have met recently talk almost exclusively about the country’s booming economy and the renewed sense of national pride the current regime has managed to instill via its policy of rattling rusty old Cold War sabres at the West. As they agree with virtually everything Putin is doing, why should they worry that the few existing avenues of opposition have been bricked up?
Time for EU recognition
This kind of thinking makes the success of Ukraine’s bloodless democratic revolution all the more remarkable, and emphasises the cultural gulf that is opening between the two formerly intertwined nations.
It would be helpful if this gulf was acknowledged by the EU in the shape of more concerted efforts to bring Ukraine into the fold. With each free election there remain fewer and fewer reasons not to do so, while the old argument about not interfering in Russia’s sphere of influence appears to be slowly but surely collapsing into the void that separates the two country’s attitudes towards democracy.
