CONTEMPORARIES OF INDEPENDENCE
With this feature article by Stanislav Kulchytsky, a noted historian and regular contributor to our newspaper, the editors of The Day are launching a series of articles dedicated to the 15 th anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The Day is also prepared to give the floor to those who wish to offer their analyses of events and processes during the years of independence. We will make every effort to provide our readers with the opinions of observers and the main figures during this period.
Summer is quickly approaching along with the 15 th anniversary of Ukraine’s national independence. On such festive occasions it is traditional to discuss progress and achievements. An analysis of shortcomings is usually done during intervals.
In this feature I will have to break with this tradition because we have considerably fewer achievements than problems that remain to be solved, because we are using our newly acquired freedom to elect hetmans on the national and regional levels. What is disturbing is not the result but the process, so to speak. The presidential campaign, which began in the summer of 2004, smoothly morphed into a campaign to elect a prime minister. There is already talk of the next presidential campaign.
The 2004 presidential campaign and the 2006 parliamentary elections demonstrated a rather clear picture of the structuring of political forces. What comes first: rallying the electorate around politicians’ slogans, or pretenders to the highest government posts borrowing the population’s slogans and demands?
In Soviet times the masses accepted the slogans of the ruling party; today people are imposing their demands on politicians. This is a normal phenomenon, because we are living in a democratic country. However, the problem is that before we were living in a totalitarian country, which left its mark on our mentality.
If politicians are not populists, they try to reconcile the demands and moods of various social strata. Analyses of the challenges facing this country are usually undertaken by politicians, political scientists, and journalists. When unresolved problems are rooted in the past, then historians must step in.
In the early years of independence Ukraine was portrayed on billboards as an attractive child dressed in blue and yellow clothes. However, children who were born in 1991 are already in their teens; 15 years of independence is long enough to reveal sociopolitical trends. To carry out such an analysis, a historian must select two interrelated yet markedly different categories: society and the state. Society personifies ordinary people, while the state embodies the political elite.
1. THE NATURE OF THE 1991 REVOLUTION
In developing this analysis it is necessary to make constant references to the Soviet period. It is extinct, but it has left behind countless unresolved problems. Whatever justifiable allegations exist in regard to the principal distinctions between the European and Eurasian civilizations and the impact of both on modern Ukrainian realities, Soviet realities are incomparably more powerful. Not coincidentally, the republics of the former USSR are known all over the world as post- Soviet countries.
Soviet realities had a deceptive resemblance to the Euro-Atlantic civilization during the period of industrialization. In actuality, they reflected a civilizational mutation that emerged when the traditional society was being transformed into a civic one. Social scientists are still recording only discrete features of the Soviet legacy in post-Soviet society, mostly in emotionally negative terms (generally referred to as sovokism). Nevertheless, we must regard our past without excessive emotion and admit that the hardships during the period of transformation were unavoidable.
The main result of the past 15 years is the separation of society from the state. The USSR was a kind of state-society where all organizational structures were built into the rigid system of dictatorship controlled by the Communist Party, with every citizen politically and economically dependent on a small circle of individuals, who controlled the ruling party, the state, and the whole country.
As years went by, the Soviet method of production, distribution, and life became increasingly inadequate in meeting the challenges of the times. The Kremlin’s feverish attempts to bring the resource potential of the superpower into conformity with its obligations placed the issue of upgrading the political system on the agenda for the first time since 1917. However, the lifting of Communist Party committees’ control over the organs of Soviet rule in 1988 triggered a revolutionary process, something the architects of bureaucratic restructuring never expected. So-called informal organizations, i.e., (organizations that were independent of communist and KGB control) started to mushroom in the Soviet Union. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) lost its status as a state structure and then collapsed along with the socioeconomic order and multinational union state. As it transpired, they could exist only in the force field of the party’s dictatorship.
The emergence of such “informal” civic and political organizations, some of which formed the Movement for Restructuring in Ukraine (Rukh), was proof of an active social response to the manifestations of the Soviet order’s systemic crisis. The revolution of 1991 in the Soviet Union united these increasing active informal organizations with other revolutions known in history. We began to see in such informal organizations an engine of the revolutionary process, i.e., the active beginning without which the overthrow of the old order, change of government, and transformation of ownership relations were impossible.
At the same time, the events of 1991 and subsequent years were proof of the inherent weakness of the civic — political forces that were born contrary to the will of the former state party. These forces demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt their inability to take power and transform ownership relations. This is not surprising, as they could not have become stronger within the short period of time available to them from the start of perestroika. Just as dissidents could not exist in the years of Stalinist terror, no political organizations independent of the state could exist in the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era of liberalized terror. The question is: why did the revolution nevertheless take place and who carried it out? A comparative analysis of the sociopolitical development of the USSR’s union republics after the attainment of independence will help answer this question.
The Baltic countries were part of the Soviet Union for a markedly shorter period, compared to the other Soviet republics, including the main part of Ukraine. Their citizens remembered Stalin’s mass purges, and their attitude to the Soviet government was negative. This secured for the “informal” organizations of the Baltics nationwide support for taking power, transforming ownership relations, and integrating into the European Union.
In the CIS countries, except the western oblasts of Ukraine, the memories of the Stalinist purges died out with the generation whose adult life coincide with the 1920s-1930s. The succeeding generations did not experience the mass repressions and were educated in Soviet schools. “Informal” organizations did not have mass support in these countries, and power remained in the hands of the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura. Bearing this in mind, can we regard the representatives of the old-new government as the motive force of the 1991 revolution?
This question should actually be formulated on a different plane. Facts indicate that the revolution took place regardless of who was in power at the time. The social cataclysm of the early 1990s in the USSR took a course that was markedly different from other bourgeois revolutions whose motive forces were emerging within the traditional society under the influence of the irreversible development of market relations. Within the Soviet order no alternative socioeconomic structures could have emerged. The events of 1991 marked the death of a system that was essentially different from normal civilization. Installed by the means of mass terror, this system had totally exhausted all the reserves that had allowed it to exist, after which it self-destructed.
In trying to find an epithet for the 1991 revolution in the Soviet Union, one should bear in mind its organic, albeit indirect, connection with the events of 1917 in the Russian empire. The Russian revolution consisted of two parallel trends, one bourgeois-democratic and the other, Soviet (peasant-worker). By conscripting millions of peasants into the standing army, the tsarist government created its own gravedigger. The Bolshevik Party, thanks to its appropriation of peasant and workers’ slogans, penetrated the soviets and then came to power on their shoulders.
After establishing its dictatorship, the Bolsheviks proceeded steadily to discard Soviet slogans that had nothing to do with their doctrine, and by spring 1918 they began to establish the communist socioeconomic order by means of reforms that were instituted from the top. These reforms so changed the population’s lifestyle that they fully deserve being defined as “revolutionary.” Accordingly, the self-collapse of the artificial order created in 1918-1938 should be regarded as a revolution, although it was opposite in nature, i.e., anticommunist.
2. SOCIETY AND NATION IN TIME AND SPACE
An analysis of a post-Soviet society should be preceded by a theoretical introduction. Looking at the surrounding world, we correlate it with our own, without any adjustments. In order to determine precisely where we are in time and space, it is necessary to analyze our own and others’ experience, while using identical criteria. Therefore, let us start with the criteria.
Three main dimensions of the historical process must be singled out: technical, economic, and sociopolitical. Regardless of their interrelationship, each of them has a specific dynamic and even a different vector of changes in various times — positive (progress) or negative (regress).
According to the level of technological development, the history of human society is divided into three stages: preindustrial (agrarian), industrial, and postindustrial. In the countries of the Euro-Atlantic civilization industrial societies began forming in the second quarter of the 19th century under the influence of the transition from manufacturing to factory-plant production. The transition to a postindustrial society was initiated by the Second World War. In recent times this type of society is often called an information society.
The economic dimension of the historical process is determined by the degree of commodity-monetary relations and the market, and the sociopolitical one, by the movement from traditional and hierarchical to democratic, and in the long run, a civic society. The traditional society was ruled by a monarch, who held all power in his hands; occasionally not just secular power but also religious. The transformation of a traditional society into a democratic one was marked by the partial, and then total, loss of the monarch’s sovereignty.
A civic society is the product of democratic development. It consists of the totality of economically self-sufficient sociopolitical structures that enable citizens to form, on a constitutional foundation, the staff of government bodies and to control their activities on a daily basis.
During the civilizational crises of the 20 th century (e.g., the Great War of 1914-1918 and the Great Depression of 1929-1933), in some countries political forces emerged from the masses, which destroyed or subjugated all other political structures, and formed their own state and established totalitarian control over society. Totalitarianism is defined most succinctly and accurately through a paired, but opposite, concept: democracy. Democracy means society’s rule over the state, whereas totalitarianism means the state’s rule over society. Soviet totalitarianism created something never seen before in the history of mankind: a state-society. Millions of people were vested with real powers, which ensured the functioning of the Soviet order. In addition, the uncontrolled constitution of the “worker-peasant” state could do whatever it wanted with them.
Every society, except for the original one, is structured simultaneously on two planes: ethical and social. The agrarian stage in the development of human civilization was characterized by the huge predominance of the peasantry in the social structure, natural economy, and primitive technology that did not change for hundreds of years. The social differentiation of an agrarian society was remarkably ramified because it was influenced by property, professional-bureaucratic, territorial, religious, and sometimes even ethnic factors. There were no social dynamics in this kind of society. In normal conditions it was almost impossible to switch to a more privileged social estate (soslovie in Russian).
In an industrial society, social estates were transformed into classes, a qualitatively superior form of social organization. The bourgeoisie developed more dynamically as a class and was directly involved with technological progress, entrepreneurship, and the market. The bourgeoisie never hesitated to use forceful means to destroy obsolete social orders, in the absence of peaceful alternatives. With the bourgeoisie the concept of revolution entered the history of mankind.
Concentrated in the hands of entrepreneurs was capital whose functioning is impossible without manpower. The proletarization of peasants, craftsmen, merchants, and other petty owners was always noted, but only in the presence of capital did it become the point of departure for the formation of the working class.
In the formative phase, the bourgeoisie and the working masses evolved as antipodal classes. In their Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made the mistake of expanding this particular feature of the age of original capital accumulation to the whole historical perspective. Marx made another mistake when he claimed that it was possible to remove from the process of production the owner of capital or the manager, who was equally interested in effective entrepreneurship.
Finally, Marx was wrong when he declared that the worker would always remain a proletarian. Today hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent to train and retrain a skilled worker throughout his productive life. He cannot be categorized as a proletarian if only because he does not take part in the production process with his own capital. Neither does a manager use his own capital in production.
Marx’s errors were corrected by Western European social democratic parties, which succeeded in establishing cooperation between labor and capital. In contrast, the Bolsheviks tried to revive the ideas of the Communist Manifesto 70 years after its appearance. In the end, the country they now had under full control found itself on the sidelines of the historical process for the next seven decades. Contrary to Marx’s assumptions, nationalization of the means of production did not turn the nation (society) into an owner. As a result of the communist revolution, the means of production became the private property of the state, or to be more exact, of the state party and its narrow circle of leadership. The organ that embodied the political and economic dictatorship was too distant from any enterprise. It could not act as an agent of production, like the owner of capital or his trusted representative. The Bolshevik command economy served as the ideal foundation for a totalitarian political regime, but it remained an artificial and stillborn creation.
In any discussion of the ethnic dimension of society it is necessary to point out its special inertness. In an agrarian society, the ethnic community functioned in the form of tribal unions or nationalities. In an industrialized society a nationality became a nation, in other words it was marked by a higher degree of economic, political, and psychological coalescence. This coalescence was facilitated by the removal of class barriers, the development of market contacts, improved communications among regions, and the rise of the population’s cultural level.
Nationalities corresponded to the imperial organization of the state. When they were transformed into nations, they felt cramped within the empire, so they proceeded to undermine it from within. The nation-forming process was formed by objective preconditions for the transformation of the traditional society into a democratic and civic one. When the Bolsheviks again devised the goal to assemble one of the last traditional empires, they had to invent a new outward appearance for it in the form of a union of free and equal republics. Their constitutions confirmed that each republic had the right to withdraw from the federation, but the Soviet anthem insisted on the “inviolability” of the union.
In time, they sought to fill the term “Soviet people” with concrete content. The Theses of the CC CPSU, commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s birth (1970) and Leonid Brezhnev’s speech during the 24 th Congress of the CPSU (1971) contained a clause about the Soviet people as a new historical community that grew out of the international unification of nations. However, this theoretical construction was kept alive only for as long as the Soviet Union existed.
A civic society in any country is the result of that country’s lengthy development under the conditions of democracy. In fact, the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial society in the technological and economic sphere corresponds to the transition to a civic society in the sociopolitical sphere. The main characteristic of a civic society is its completely natural attention to human rights. The maturation of a civic society takes place simultaneously with the formation of a political nation. Essentially this is the same process, but viewed from a different angle. In time, the cohesion of people representing various nationalities is transformed into a political nation, which is a symbiosis of social and ethnic communities structured around the state- building nation.
There is no doubt that globalization, as a manifestation of dynamic changes in the technological and economic sphere, is speeding up transformational processes in the sociopolitical sphere. In their commonly accepted sense the terms “class” and “nation” no longer fully correspond to the realities of a postindustrial civil society. However, the maturity of the state- building nation and national state is the necessary prerequisite for the success of such transformational processes.
3. THE UKRAINIAN ETHNIC NATION
Citizens are categorized by their political persuasions as conservatives, liberals, socialists, and communists. In countries with an unresolved national question, the spectrum of parties includes nationalists — or “pure ones” — those whose political orientation is specified (national democrats, national socialists, etc.). As long as nationalists restrict themselves to appeals to take good care of their own nation, they constitute no threat to the surrounding world. If they wish their nation “the best as well as happiness” by oppression, physical destruction, or forcible changes in the mentality of people of other nationalities, they should be described as dangerous even for their own country.
The nation-building process in Ukraine, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, began 100-150 years later than in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian ethnic nation, with its 1,000-year-old history of existing in different forms, was created. Its formation was not impeded even by the border between the Russian empire and Austro-Hungary. However, the formation of the nation in imperial conditions left an impact on its qualitative parameters. The specific weight of the intellectual and economic elite among Ukrainians was low.
The Soviet period of the nation-building process cannot be assessed narrowly. The Bolsheviks recognized the existence of the national republics and allowed them some space to develop, including through declarative constitutional guarantees of secession from the union state, in the conditions of the dictatorship. The Ukrainian SSR united most of the Ukrainian ethnic territories and became an economically and culturally advanced republic, and founding member of the United Nations. At the same time, it was in the epicenter of the Stalinist terror, which was aimed at forestalling all attempts to achieve sovereignty for the largest national republic.
As directed by the ruling party leadership, the nations of the USSR were arrayed in a multistepped hierarchy. The Russians occupied the highest rung, followed by the representatives of the nations after which the various union republics were named. The concept of titular nation emerged in this connection. In third place were the peoples of the national autonomies within the union republics. Fourth place was relegated to “non-titular” nations, who did not have their own union or autonomous republics. Therefore, the Soviet Union was built on the dangerous foundations of ethnocratism, which asserted the inequality of citizens according to national determinants.
Those who believe that we started our life in 1991 on a fresh page are wrong. We are still captives of our past, including the sphere of national interrelations. We did not have bloody international conflicts, although in other republics this indubitable consequence of Lenin’s “nationalities policy” manifested itself in dramatic and tragic forms. Still, our society cannot be described as a civic one.
4. THE UKRAINIAN POLITICAL NATION
A political nation without problems is formed only in a prosperous country. Migrants strive to assert themselves in the new environment, so they master the language of the host country, become its citizens, and adopt its national interests as their own. At the same time, they can preserve their language, culture, and religion. Legislation on national minorities guarantees their rights.
In Ukraine the situation is completely different. Ethnocratic principles have long since ceased to exist, because they were unnatural and could exist only in the force field of dictatorship. However, people who spent a significant part of their lives in the Soviet Union still remember their former status as representatives of their nationality, and for many this causes a degree of psychological discomfort.
For a long time, the problem analyzed here was an abstract one, until it surfaced during the confrontation between the west, center and east, and south in the 2004 presidential elections and the 2006 parliamentary elections. We regarded this problem from the point of view of a confrontation of political elites, which has a right to exist. However, politicians are only exploiting objective circumstances (consciously or subconsciously), so let us try to analyze these circumstances.
How was the Russians’ top place implemented in the Soviet hierarchy of nationalities? Before we attempt to answer this question, several qualifications are in order.
One must immediately discard the claim of Ukrainians’ colonial status in the Soviet empire, the differing mentalities of Ukrainians and Russians, etc. The Soviet Union was an empire, of course, but it was different from traditional or colonial ones. It is true that the Kremlin preferred Russians because they were the numerically largest nation in the empire. However, the Kremlin “internationalists” had no favorite nations and loved only themselves and their posts. In creating political conveniences for people of a certain nationality, they were only concerned with strengthening their power and not with the well-being and happiness of the chosen people. The Soviet government, despite its undoubted populist nature (as a result of rootedness in the masses) did not depend on the will of the electorate. Therefore, people of a nationality were not responsible for the activities of the totalitarian Kremlin regime.
If we analyze the situation of Russians in the Soviet Union (allowing for the above-mentioned reservations) we are instantly struck by their institutional inequality in comparison with the citizens of other national republics. Despite the fact that the republican Communist Party-Soviet centers were merely territorial branches of the central union center, the Kremlin decided that setting up a full-fledged center of the Russian Federation was dangerous. The Soviet republics could not exist without a capital city, so a purely symbolic center was created in Moscow: the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Sovnarkom of the RSFSR), which supervised minor enterprises and agencies.
Large enterprises and all other branches of the Soviet economy on the territory of Russia were subordinated directly to the Sovnarkom of the USSR. There was no party center, and local party committees were subordinated to the CC CPSU. The Bureau of the CC CPSU for the RSFSR was instituted after the 20th Communist Party Congress, yet it too enjoyed only symbolic rights. In other words, what we know as Russian statehood was imperial rather than national.
After Mikhail Gorbachev’s constitutional reform Soviet organs became independent of party committees. As a result, Gorbachev found himself unexpectedly confronted in Moscow by competition from the Russian center of power headed by Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin showed how the union republics could use the previously inactive provisions of the Soviet constitutions to achieve sovereignty. The republics were quick to follow his example, and the Soviet Union collapsed.
The collapse of the USSR was a natural phenomenon. The fall of the communist socioeconomic order was also inevitable. After putting an end to mass terror in the early 1950s, the Soviet government was gripped by a systemic crisis that sooner or later would result in the collapse of all its structures. This double collapse, however, took the last Soviet generation completely by surprise.
We often underline the fact that 90 percent of the Ukrainian population voted for independence during the nationwide referendum. But it was held after the Moscow putsch of political leaders whose goal was to destroy all of the gains of democratization and to return our society to Brezhnev’s hateful times. Under different conditions the results of that referendum could have been less defined.
The fall of the USSR and the Soviet order are different phenomena. However, in the consciousness of most citizens they merge into one because they occurred at the same time. As a result, people replied differently to two essentially identical questions asked by the Ukrainian National Academy’s Institute of Social Studies in 2004. When they were asked “What is your attitude to the collapse of the USSR in 1991?”, only 20.1 percent of respondents gave a positive answer; 66.1 percent were indifferent or had a negative attitude to this historic event, i.e., two-thirds of all respondents. In response to the differently formulated question “What is your attitude to Ukrainian independence proclaimed in 1991?” 43.7 percent gave a positive answer, while 35.9 percent, or nearly one-third of respondents, were indifferent or disapproved.
A comparison of both formulations indicates that people had something else on their minds when they were replying to both questions. It is not difficult to ascertain the reasons for their disappointment in their government. They were becoming aloof from it because it was dominated by oligarchs and corrupt bureaucrats.
The category of “titular” and “nontitular” nations was connected to the ethnocratism in the structure of the Soviet Union. In fact, these are two hypostases of one and the same category. The collapse of the union state led to the disappearance of ethnocratism and, accordingly, to “titular” nations. In each of the post-Soviet states emerged a two-tiered national structure made up of the former “titular” ethnic nation, as the center of crystallization of the future political nation, and national minorities-ethnic material alien to this crystallization process. The Russians found themselves in the most uncomfortable situation because they had been the state-building nation during the existence of the USSR; in other words, they had felt at home in each union republic. Today those living outside the Russian Federation have found themselves in the unusual role of ethnic minority. The only exceptions are Kazakhstan and Ukraine where, owing to their large numbers and/or degree of Russification of the native population, Russians do not regard themselves as a minority and in fact are not one.
There are quite a few people in Ukraine who are determined to treat Russians as an ethnic minority. However, objective statistics show that the Ukrainian and Russian population of Ukraine can be categorized into three more or less numerically similar linguistic-ethnic groups: Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and Russian-speaking Russians. Logically there should be a fourth group: Ukrainian-speaking Russians. These people do exist, but they are numerically insignificant compared to the other groups.
This division of the bulk of Ukrainian society (excluding national minorities) into linguistic-ethnic groups is more or less clearly observed in the answers offered to questions posed by the personnel of the Institute of Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who have been monitoring social changes since 1994. These polls show that the share of Ukrainian citizens communicating mostly in Ukrainian within their families increased from 36.7 percent in 1994 to 41.8 percent in 2005, while the number of those using mostly Russian increased from 32.4 to 36.2 percent accordingly. The number of people who use Ukrainian or Russian, depending on the circumstances, dropped from 29.4 percent to 21.6. The number of people who use other languages in their families or who declined to answer decreased from 1.5 percent to 0.2. The latter two figures are provided in order to illustrate the overall dynamic. The linguistic situation among representatives of national minorities can be determined only by conducting surveys in their milieu.
The number of Ukrainian-speaking families has increased by five points and that of Russian-speaking ones by four points. The increment is largely due to those whose linguistic status within the family is undetermined. Changes in the language sphere tend to be slow as a rule. These active and rather controversial dynamics allow one to arrive at two important conclusions.
First, in Soviet times Ukrainians in cities where Russian was dominant (it was dominant everywhere except in the western oblasts) often switched to the foreign language in their families so that they could feel more comfortable outside their families. This inferiority complex is gradually disappearing in independent Ukraine. Second, non-Ukrainian citizens of Ukraine feel no discomfort in the language domain because the number of those who choose Russian as the language of family communication is increasing.
One cannot draw conclusions about the nature of the processes connected with the formation of a political nation by relying on the dynamic of linguistic-ethnic self-identification. The emergence of a unified community of people joined by citizenship does not harm national identity. At the same time, a comparison of the population’s linguistic-ethnic self-identification and national-spatial self-identification allows one to assess the civic maturity of Ukrainian society (see Table 1)
We see that few members of our society regard themselves as representatives of their ethnos or, conversely, as cosmopolitans. These opposing stages of national-spatial self-identification, according to their historical dynamic, are equally uncharacteristic of both Ukrainians and Russians living in Ukraine. In the postwar Soviet Union persecuted Jews, who considered themselves above all representatives of their own nation, were branded as cosmopolitans. But at the time this term carried out masking functions to conceal state anti-Semitism.
Among those who still regard themselves as citizens of the Soviet Union there are few Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians but many Russian-speaking Ukrainians and especially Russian-speaking Russians. These people cannot be regarded as individuals with an exclusively imperialist mentality. Most of them are probably people who are nostalgic for their quiet, safe life, even if it was the bare minimum.
The large percentage of people in all linguistic-ethnic groups, who do not regard themselves as citizens of Ukraine, is striking. For Ukrainians this may be explained by their cooling attitude to the social parameters of national statehood whose construction began in 1991. Two-thirds of Russian-speaking Russians who live in Ukraine are still gravitating toward Russia. In response to this, the leadership of the Russian Federation has begun to pay serious attention to the needs and moods of their countrymen (nonresidents of the RF) in the CIS countries. The main conclusion of this comparison of national-spatial self-identification and linguistic-ethnic self-identification is disheartening: Ukrainian society is only at the initial stage of forming a political nation. In the event of a negative development of socioeconomic processes, increasing numbers of Ukrainian citizens will end up in Russia’s sphere of gravitation, and the consequences will be tragic for national statehood.
(To be continued)
How do you mainly consider yourself?
Ukrainian-speaking Russian-speaking Russian-speaking
Ukrainian Ukrainian Russian
Citizen of Ukraine 49.4 39.9 33.2
Citizen of the former USSR 5.3 16.6 22.4
Citizen of Europe (world) 2.1 6.3 3.2
Citizen of my nation 3.3 2.6 2.6
Resident of my region 40.1 31.8 36.5
Results of a poll conducted by the Institute of Social Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in 2004
