For years the practice of falsifying elections was considered as much a part of post-Soviet society as strip clubs, begging pensioners and cheap vodka. The West found it all distinctly distasteful, but seemed to consider it a cultural thing, as much so in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as in Russia itself. Coming after decades in which the concepts of Russia and the Soviet Union had been interchangeable in Western public perception, this was perhaps to be expected.
However, the experience of recent years demonstrates emphatically that such generalisations are no longer valid. Ukraine’s democratic progress may not be as neat and tidy as that of her former Warsaw Pact neighbours in eastern Europe, but it remains light-years away from the creeping authoritarianism and anti-democratic demagoguery of Putin’s regime.
At present, the scoreboard shows three national votes in the past three years in which the majority of the Ukrainian electorate has opted for the pro-European integration, pro-democracy option. Each of these votes has been declared freer and fairer than the last by a host of international organisations.
Goodbye to Russian democracy
Contrast this state of affairs with the situation in today’s Russia, where international observers were actually blocked from monitoring Sunday’s Duma elections, which in turn appear to have been accompanied by the usual molotov cocktail of threats, arrests, bribes and mass fraud. Kremlinologists like to refer to this process of mass vote-rigging as the use of administrative resources, a euphemism almost as sinister in its implications as the term ‘purge’ was for the preceding generation. The end result is that we are now confronted by a Russia where the president has chosen to remain in power by radically altering the machinery of government and effectively tearing up the country’s fledgling institutional traditions in the process.
Once the dust settles on this constitutional coup, the democratic world in general and the European Union in particular may well find that it is forced to embark on a thorough reassessment of relations with the new Russia and its national leader for life, Mr. Putin. Any such assessment would necessarily include a reappraisal of attitudes towards Ukraine.
What does the EU stand for?
Ultimately, the EU must ask itself what it really stands for. What unites the many member states of the Union, countries which have spent so many centuries fighting one another and celebrating their differences? Surely the only credible unifying factor is a commitment to democracy, freedom of conscience and free speech. None of these things are present in today’s Russia. All, to varying degrees, are fast emerging in post-Orange Ukraine. It is time this difference was openly acknowledged.
Apologists for the EU’s “wait and see” approach to Ukraine might well point to the large minority of Ukrainians who would appear to favour closer relations with Russia and who continue to view relations with the West through the distorted lens of the Cold War. This is a somewhat disingenuous approach which fails to acknowledge the uneven playing field on which the battle for Ukraine’s soul is being fought out.
On the one hand, there are hundreds of years of Russian influence and culture, family ties and shared experience coupled with the long-term impact on perceptions of growing up submerged in Soviet propaganda. Set against this we have the EU’s ambiguous relationship towards Ukraine, which has been at best lukewarm and remains decidedly distant. No wonder old habits die hard.
Ukraine’s Orange elite, most notably the President himself, have added to this problem by failing to seize the initiative created by the popular protests of 2004. Instead of squabbling and fighting among themselves over the latest redistribution of government posts or losing themselves in internal jealousies, they should be focusing on presenting a united front to the outside world. Ukraine may well come to rely more and more on European support in the coming years, and it should be a top priority of the new Orange coalition government to push for the broadest possible recognition for Ukraine’s status as the new eastern bulwark of European democracy.
