{"id":272,"date":"2014-03-13T18:11:11","date_gmt":"2014-03-13T22:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/?p=272"},"modified":"2022-03-11T18:58:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T22:58:57","slug":"feygin-ukraines-post-soviet-condition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/2014\/03\/13\/feygin-ukraines-post-soviet-condition\/","title":{"rendered":"Feygin: Ukraine’s post-Soviet condition"},"content":{"rendered":"

In “Ukraine is Stuck in a Post-Soviet Condition<\/a>,” Yakov Feygin<\/a> provides a very perceptive and interesting analysis of the country’s situation based on the relationship between economic realities and political affiliations.<\/p>\n

Some excerpts:<\/p>\n

“Soviet enterprises were not just sites of production, they were also the core of the Soviet welfare state. Factories, in addition to employment, also provided housing, medical care, child-care, education and holidays. Essentially, what many of the Western-minded reformers of the 1990s did not understand was that capitalist property rights would not displace this complex and embedded network of authority, perks and exchange. The post-Soviet state \u2013 not only Ukraine \u2013 is thus a weak state with extremely strong institutions and local networks; and they are especially strong in Eastern Ukraine, and have been since the death of Stalin.” [. . .]<\/p>\n

“But Western Ukraine had something else: it was the capital of the underground trade in black market goods coming in from the satellite states of Eastern Europe. That was part of its history \u2013 a multicultural and multilingual entrop\u00f4t that had been part of many empires, which had naturally become, in Soviet times, a hub for illicit exchange: not only goods but also ideas and culture including Western rock \u2018n roll, which was pouring in from the relatively more liberal Eastern European socialist states.”<\/p>\n

“Western Ukrainians had less industry to be privatised during the 1990s, thus creating a less powerful network of oligarchs to control not only the economic, but also political, life in the region. […] the smaller scale of these networks meant that the same kind of hegemony over the economy and politics does not exist.”<\/p>\n

“In Eastern Ukraine, deeply connected networks of managers and functionaries were able to scoop up large, vertically integrated Soviet industries and their attendant networks of patronage and power.”<\/p>\n

“The lesson is that leaders like Putin and Yanukovych are not strong dictators ruling over powerful states but in fact weak leaders of weak states balancing strong institutions.”<\/p>\n

“Viewing the events in Ukraine in terms of the political-economic networks of the \u2018post-Soviet condition\u2019 explains why Eastern separatism is being sustained by Russian military pressure, and has so far had difficulty mobilizing a sustained protest movement. Outside of occupied Crimea, whose economy is deeply tied to the Russian military and Russian tourism, we have not yet seen pro-Russian mobilisation on the scale that can establish political hegemony.”<\/p>\n

“What lessons can be drawn from the above, for those who want to see a liberal democracy emerge not only in Ukraine but all across the post-Soviet world? Most immediately, the problems in Eastern Ukraine should be seen not so much as an ethnic conflict as a conflict between clans of rent seekers who have lost the stabilising factor of Yanukovych mediating between them. More importantly, Ukraine and the rest of the post-Soviet states need to become strong states. If the European Union, the United States or any other international actor really wants to build a liberal democratic society in Ukraine or the post-Soviet world as a whole, it needs to encourage the transfer of what should be the welfare and protective functions of the state away from rent-seeking oligarchs who have managed to hold entire governments hostage, into an independent state. This means doing something that European and North American policy-makers might consider anathema: weakening ownership rights. Instead of austerity, we need to encourage the formation of a functional and strong welfare state that can liberate citizens from networks of patronage linked to old Soviet industrial structures<\/strong>; <\/strong>and encourage the formation of independent unions that can represent the economic interests of workers, before the state. Only through these institutions can the \u2018post-Soviet condition\u2019 finally be relegated to history, and \u2018liberal capitalism\u2019 built. Until then, the peoples of Ukraine and many other post-Soviet countries will remain stuck in a post-Soviet state.<\/p>\n

The entire article can be read at Open Democracy.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

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In “Ukraine is Stuck in a Post-Soviet Condition,” Yakov Feygin provides a very perceptive and interesting analysis of the country’s situation based on the relationship between economic realities and political affiliations. Some excerpts:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[701784,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identities","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdPO21-4o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}