Precommunist Legacies and the Ukrainian Crisis

Despite overwhelming desires for Ukrainian sovereignty in 1991, two decades of independence shifted many loyalties in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine back to Moscow. In 1991, the Ukrainian referendum to secede from the Soviet Union was supported by all ethnic groups and regions in Ukraine, including 54% of the population in Crimea and well over 80% in all eastern oblasts. Now, over twenty years later many in Crimea and eastern Ukraine organized in an effort to join the Russian Federation. To help answer why many in Crimea and eastern Ukraine now look to Russian rule and militancy and those in other parts of Ukraine do not, I conduct a structured comparison of three Ukrainian regions. I argue that a bureaucratic political culture in Western Ukraine more easily allowed diversely affiliated party leaders and bureaucrats to take governing positions leading to greater stability but a traditional patrimonial political culture, supported by pre-communist legacies, more easily allowed strong-man politics and a single party to weakly dominate in the east and south. Consequently, the collapse of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, the party that dominated the more patrimonial Eastern and Southern Ukraine, left a large vacuum. With no other organized political parties and leaders in town, war entrepreneurs took over the region. However, merit based bureaucracy and democratic competition helped Western Ukraine’s administrative units become more politically diverse in terms of party representation, and as members defected from the Party of Regions, the west’s other parties provided organization and order, greatly limiting insurgent opportunities