How important is “regionalism” within Ukraine? Do regions make up separate sub-identities or even primary identities? If so, how many Ukraines are there? One, two, or more? How do regional identities relate to national identities in Ukraine? These questions loomed large even before independence in 1991. The Crimean scholar Andrei Mal’gin has made a distinguished contribution to the debate, focusing on the key question of whether the regions he defines are capable of giving birth to powerful regional movements.
Mal’gin’s key argument is that Ukraine may be independent, but it lacks sobornost,’ which he defines, following the Orthodox philosophical tradition as interpreted by Khomiakov and Bulgakov, as not just a formal togetherness, but an organic communitarian cultural unity (Pp. 13-15). Scholars may debate whether this is a properly Ukrainian concept or not. In German terminology, Mal’gin would say Ukraine is a Gesellschaft not a Gemeinschaft. The country is divided not just by geography or demography, but it also lacks the “homogenous cultural-political unity” (P. 120) provided by a “single ethnocultural community” (P. 224).
Ukraine, Mal’gin argues, is divided into “at least eight regions” (P. 9), depending on whether one follows economic, historical, or linguistic-cultural divisions (see Chapter Three, “How Many Ukraines in all?”). However, much of his analysis concentrates on three “macro-regions,” characterized as follows: “the Greek Catholic and Ukrainian-speaking West, the mixed Center and the Russian-speaking South-East, gravitated towards Russian culture […at the same time as helping] produce it” (P. 224). Finally, Ukraine also has four key “political” touchstone mini-regions, whose specific identity is capable of tipping the macro-regions in rival directions: Transcarpathia and Galicia in the west, and the Donbas and Crimea in the southeast (P. 130).
A key premise for Mal’gin is that “the historical regions of this state were formed earlier than the state itself appeared” (P. 30). Mal’gin therefore spends the first third of his book rewriting a history of Ukraine in which the regions themselves are de facto the main actors, as much as leaders, social classes, or economic forces. He plays down periods of unity such as the “eleven month” union of 1919 (P. 85), and plays up alternative possibilities such as the Donets’k-Kryvyi Rih Republic of 1918 (Pp. 73-76), or the fact that the Soviets supposedly twice toyed with the idea of creating a separate Galician SSR alongside the Ukrainian SSR, in both 1920 (P. 85) and 1939 (Pp. 113-114). The Donbas by contrast, Mal’gin suggests, may have only been definitively included in the Ukrainian SSR in 1920 because of the residual threat of the White and separatist movements in the neighbouring Don region (P. 91).
Mal’gin makes many interesting points about particular regions, but his main thesis concerns the macro-regions, and the difference between South-East Ukraine and the rest. The arc of territories from Odesa to Kharkiv, he argues, “are the least degree connected with the legacy of the Polish Commonwealth and the most with the legacy of the Russian Empire and particularly the Soviet Union” (Pp. 127-128). Mal’gin does not write much about the pre-history of this arc. His version of the region’s history largely begins ex nihilo in the eighteenth century. He agrees with Hiroaki Kuromiya that the region’s often harsh life owes much to its Cossack past,^[1] but he argues that “it gained its cultural-economic character at the end of the nineteenth – [beginning of] the twentieth century, as a consequence of global industrialisation.” This supposedly established the region’s outward-looking identity, and the fact that it, “in contrast to the West and Center, is in large part free of the village sentiments which permeate all [sic] Ukrainian national culture. Here an industrial and scientific culture is dominant… the self-image of the inhabitants of the South-East is bound up with nostalgia for the cult of the working class and the technical intelligentsia that ruled in the USSR” (P. 209).
They do not rule any more, of course. The impoverishment of both classes during the great stagflation of the late 1980s and early 1990s deprived a potential “alternative” Ukraine of quality leadership, leaving it beholden to red directors, new oligarchs, and all too often, thuggish mafia clans. Mal’gin mentions that the poet Yevgenii Yevtushenko and editor of Ogonek, Vitalii Korotich, were both elected for Kharkiv in the 1989 all-Union elections (P. 159), but he says little about their subsequent fate. I am reminded of the TV adverts the would-be regional party SLOn proudly ran in the 1998 elections, reclaiming the history of the “other Ukraine” with fond reminiscence of an alternative intelligentsia led by Akhmatova, Bulgakov, and others. SLOn won a grand total of 0.84% of the vote.
More broadly, however, Mal’gin continues, “the South-East with its history, heroes and tragedies, cannot find its place in contemporary Ukrainian ideology, which gathered its inspiration in the pastoral nationalism of the nineteenth century or in the Nazi self-perception of the OUN-UPA.” Whereas official Ukrainian history now ostracizes the Soviet period, the South-East’s self-image is still “connected to the romantic building of the Dnipro Dam, the achievements of the miner A. Stakhanov, or Soviet rocket-building with its center in Dnipropetrovs’k. In modern Ukrainian culture, the Soviet past means the Famine, the repressions and the GULAG” (Pp. 209-210).
The south-east therefore has at least a negative resistance to the new state mythology being built in Kiev and Galicia, Mal’gin argues. He frequently stresses the weaknesses of the all-Ukrainian idea and of Kiev as a primary capital and intellectual center (Pp. 221, 262). He plays up Kharkiv’s potential as an alternative capital, given its position as the actual Soviet Ukrainian capital until 1934, and its historical role in crystallising a Kharkiv Cultural Little Russianness (malorossiistvo) as a “self-sufficient local variant of Ukrainian culture” (P. 58).
On the key question of language Mal’gin draws a slightly different, if overlapping, picture of three Ukraines. He cites another Crimean scholar, V. A. Temnenko, who in the late 1990s divided Ukraine into the fourteen oblasts where the Ukrainian language predominates (the west and Right Bank), the two oblasts of the Donbas and Crimea where Russian predominates, and the eight oblasts plus the city of Kiev where the situation is mixed. Temnenko used the native-language figure for Ukrainian from the 1989 Soviet census: predominantly Ukrainian meant a self-reported figure for Ukrainian mother tongue over 95%, mixed was between 75% and 95%, meaning that the actual languages of choice or regular use was more evenly balanced. Predominantly Russian meant between 50% and 62% for Ukrainian mother tongue (Pp. 123, 126, and the map at P. 125). Linking language to history, Mal’gin argues that “In contrast to the situation in Little Russia, [Kiev and its environs], on the Right Bank, in Volyn and Podillia, where the use of one or another language was connected with social stratification and where the Russian language was often viewed as the language of the incoming ruling element, in New Russia [Novorossiia] Russian was the home language (and at the same time the language of school and social life) for local Russians and Ukrainians alike” (P. 94).
The final part of the book concerns the history of the regional issue since 1991, with a useful focus on its prominence in the divisive presidential election of 2004. Mal’gin argues that “in practice presidential elections in Ukraine take on the character of a national referendum on the future of the country” (P. 173), but one in which “it’s not so important what one candidate or another actually says, but which sociocultural world he represents” (P. 174). However, 2004 was the first election when the main protagonists stood without a party or broader label, such as Communist or market reformer, so that the two “macro-regional zones clashed face to face, so to speak, having thrown off their secondary idea-political camouflage” (P. 182).
Mal’gin would presumably agree with the thesis advanced by Valentin Yakushik that there were at least two revolutions in 2004: as well as the Orange Revolution in west and central Ukraine, there was a parallel anti-Orange Revolution in the east and south, one that was also a coming of age of its regional consciousness (Yakushik argues that a third, general civic, revolution can potentially unite the two).^[2] Mal’gin talks of a “revolt in the provinces” in 2004 (P. 4), as if the “steppe was carrying out revenge on the [previously] victorious ‘forest’” zone (P. 212). “The Donbas arose. It seemed the idea of regional self-sufficiency (samostoiatel’nost’), so long left in the archive, was reborn like the mythical phoenix after many years of neglect” (P. 191). Mal’gin takes the line that “representatives of the elite and power structures of the region supported” this process, but did not initiate it (P. 191). Mal’gin does point out, however, at the time of the first separatist meting in Severodonetsk on 28 November 2004, neither the Crimea nor Dnipropetrovs’k nor the South in general “was in the vanguard of events” (P. 192), though they joined in for the second congress on 4 December in Kharkiv. Mal’gin is also keen to dismiss the activities of political technologists in 2004. “The problem is much deeper than [… the South-East having] been the site of the falsification of the election results. Whether falsification affected these results or not does not change the heart of the matter much” (P. 6). This is surely too strong – as are the statements by some Orange politicians dismissing the entire Yanukovych vote as a manipulation. I myself have written about both the potential alienation in the region, and about the manipulation of the 2004 election by political technologists.^[3] Unlike Mal’gin, I don’t think regional issues have had a constant valency in every election since 1989. The issue was hugely important in 1994, then went dormant under Kuchma (though his eclectic compromises arguably stored up trouble in the longer term). A latent issue was therefore deliberately politicized from above in 2004.
The genie is now out of the bottle again of course, though the Party of the Regions’ apparent triumph in the 2006 elections should also be looked at in this context. Regions is basically led by the elite of one region only, the Donbas. Although it came out on top in every oblast in the south and east in 2006, variations within the macro-region were significant – from almost 75% to under 40% at the oblast level, and from 83.7% (no. 46, Donets’k) to 25.7% (no. 70, Zaporizhzhia) at the constituency level. Only in the Donbas was the party truly hegemonic.^[4]
The fact that Ukraine now has a proper party of the South-East is hugely important, but so is how Regions chooses to represent the other Ukraine. Significantly, some Russian nationalists thought it had already compromised with Ukrainian realities too much, and supported Nataliia Vitrenko’s People’s Opposition instead, to push Regions in a more radical direction. Vitrenko won 2.93% nationally, but 6.2% in Crimea and 6.8% in Donets’k – thanks in no small part to heavy exposure on Russian TV, which still reaches Ukraine’s border regions.
The 2004 and, to a lesser extent, the 2006 Yanukovych campaign concentrated on negative stereotypes: telling the voters of South-East Ukraine what they were not, but failing to provide much of a positive identity message. Intellectual justifications for the separatist movement in late 2004 were few and far between. Mal’gin lists only one major exception.^[5] Mal’gin also writes that Ukraine may have “regional clans” but has yet to develop real regionalism. The real potential for a regional movement and actual dual power in the state (P. 189) was perhaps again in the West. What if Yanukovych had been successfully installed as president, and organs of government and civil society in West Ukraine had refused to recognize him, as was already beginning to happen in the first few days of the crisis?
At other points, Mal’gin accepts that regional movements in Ukraine have potential, but have achieved only limited results (P. 199). He accepts “the lack of a native ‘philosophy’ in the South-East and [acknowledges the region’s] famous political conservatism” (P. 210). He states that “we cannot talk about identity, but only about vague feelings of closeness, characteristic for the representatives of different regional communities” (P. 205), and describes the South-East as a “newly-opened up macro region, where stable traditions, solidarities and links between individuals are not yet formed” (P. 209). His suggestions for the “main cultural hero” for the region admits a “nowadays paradoxical triumvirate: Artem, Makhno, and Vrangel’,” and for Crimea the poet and writer Maksimilian Voloshin (Pp. 206-207). Likewise, his argument that “a country cannot develop normally if ideology and culture are designated by one macro region and material wealth is produced by another” (P. 269) accepts that the South-East currently has a problem producing a rival ideology of its own.
Finally, Mal’gin discusses possible scenarios for the future, though not so systematically. In fact, somewhat bizarrely, his main list of possibilities is tucked away in a footnote on page 225. “If the period 1999-2004 was a time for the development of ‘Galician regionalism’, a memory of which is left in the publications of the L’viv journal П, the time of the new president [Yushchenko] will become a period for the development of south-east ‘New Russian’ regionalisms [plural as in original]. It can be assumed that they will develop in three directions: as an ideology for building a ‘second, alternative Ukraine’ via the ‘deprivatisation’ and the development of the south-eastern Cossack myth, ‘illegally adopted by the modern Ukrainian state,’ the development of an alternative to the Galician variant of the Ukrainian language and orthography; on the basis of a Russo-Slavic orientation, meaning the rehabilitation of the imperial-Soviet inheritance and the development of the idea of integration within the framework of the CIS-SES [Single Economic Space], and as a certain variety of ‘New Russian originality,’ that is via developing the representation of New Russians as a unique community (in this case not excluding the rehabilitation and rethinking of the Turko-Grecian cultural component and also the Jewish component of New Russian culture).” Mal’gin considers that “the artificiality and impropriety of the ‘Cossack myth’ for modern pro-Western ideology are felt even by its adepts-intellectuals in Galicia and Kiev” (P. 212). It should therefore be returned to its Orthodox, East Slavic and, in terms of global ‘civilizations’, anti-Catholic roots, better understood by the likes of Gogol. Mal’gin also suggests at one point that the region might develop its own version of Eurasianism (P. 215).
Constitutionally, Mal’gin is, not surprisingly, a keen supporter of federalism, and has fun quoting Ukrainophile scholars in support, particularly Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (P. 20) and Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, the father of Ukrainian geography (P. 22). The book jacket juxtaposes the words of Hrushevs’kyi and V”iacheslav Lypyns’kyi to Yushchenko attacking federalism as a “pathological idea.” Mal’gin also enjoys contrasting Yushchenko’s support for the EU with the EU’s support for the principle of subsidiarity.
Even if Ukraine fails to negotiate a vertical division of power on these lines, however, the constitutional changes enacted in January 2006 and the close result of the elections in March 2006 mean that power will be shared horizontally. Ukraine’s regional issue will be around for a long time to come. The regional movement in the South-East does not have all the resources it might, but it has leadership of a sort, albeit one that is still deeply corrupt, and the political opportunity structure has changed.
Mal’gin’s book also deserves a long shelf life. Mal’gin clearly has a point of view, but his analysis is always comprehensive and dispassionate. The book contains many useful maps and is a great source of information for any interested reader.