In late 2004, Ukraine underwent the “Orange Revolution”—several weeks of peaceful mass demonstrations that reversed a fraudulent election, catapulted a democrat to the presidency, and promised to transform the country into a modern European state. Just a few months later, the Orange coalition, led by President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was already at loggerheads, and by late 2005 it had split. Continued bickering among the Orange democrats enabled the man who had been humiliated by the Revolution, Viktor Yanukovych, to stage a spectacular comeback in mid-2006. After Yushchenko dissolved parliament and called new elections in 2007, however, a reconstituted and exceedingly shaky Orange coalition managed to win.
This seemingly endless elite infighting marked by mudslinging, accusations of betrayal, and demagoguery was the last thing that Ukraine’s population had expected from the hopeful days of 2004. Instead of smooth sailing toward Europe, Ukraine appeared to have been caught in a series of devastating storms. It is small wonder that, by late 2007, most Ukrainians turned their backs on politics and focused their energy on their personal lives. Ironically, though predictably, political apathy among the Ukrainian population results from disillusionment with the overly enthusiastic revolutionary rhetoric generated by the Orange Revolution, confirming the pragmatic, evolutionary, and thoroughly unromantic progress Ukraine has made since 2004.
The Orange Revolution as Romantic Upheaval
Popular disillusionment was the result of missed opportunities and political mistakes by the Orange leadership. It was also the product of the exalted expectations created by facing down a corrupt regime and forcing it to the popular will. There are, after all, two distinct ways in which the concept of revolution can be understood—as a popular upheaval or as a fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change. Upheavals may or may not lead to massive change, while fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change may or may not be caused by upheavals. Thus, the upheaval known as the French Revolution actually produced far less change than it promised. The Nazi Revolution entailed enormous change but was not produced by an upheaval. The Iranian Revolution, meanwhile, involved both an upheaval in 1978 and 1979 and a complete systemic transformation in the years that followed. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was an upheaval that did not lead to fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change.
But like all self-styled revolutionaries who attempt to sustain a popular uprising, the Orange revolutionaries employed a romantic rhetoric that went far beyond mere upheaval. They promised a transformation of everything, immediately. Ukraine was going to join the European Union and NATO, free itself from Russia’s embrace, cast all its corrupt “bandits” into jail, enjoy impeccably clean and efficient government, adopt full-scale economic reforms, experience a cultural revival, and live like the developed West. These extravagant promises were expectations that the revolutionaries, as the peaceful reformers they really were, simply could not meet. They were, thus, hoisted with their own petard. Popular disillusionment was inevitable because fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change was never in the cards; the Orange coalition’s split was inevitable because the rhetoric of revolution could only clash with the realities of Ukraine’s evolutionary politics. The ancien regime represented by Yanukovych was able to return in 2006 because it had never quite left.
The Undesirability of Revolutionary Change
Ukraine is supremely fortunate that the Orange revolutionaries did not attempt to introduce fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change. Had they tried, they would have failed, and Ukraine’s population—saddled with broken institutions and violence-prone elites—would have been far worse off today than it is and would have had far fewer prospects for meaningful reform than it now has. Historical record shows that revolution as a “great leap forward” results in countries falling flat on their face, as China witnessed in the early 1960s. The shock therapy endorsed by Western economists at the Cold War’s close appeared to work in Poland only because Poland had already undergone evolutionary change since 1956. When applied to Russia by Boris Yeltsin’s weak democratic regime, shock therapy failed and instead helped create a super-presidential regime that ultimately made Putin’s return to authoritarianism possible.
There are four reasons that revolutions as massive transformations fail. First, changing a country fundamentally, comprehensively, and rapidly requires enormous financial, coercive, and bureaucratic resources that revolutionaries, as outsiders, usually lack. The only revolutionary transformations that may have come close to achieving their goals have been imposed from above by brutal dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin or by occupying armies ruling over prostrate countries, such as post-World War II Germany or Japan.
Second, massive change always generates massive opposition that requires equally massive applications of force and violence to overcome. Democrats and reformers generally prefer to avoid such violence. However irresistible the temptation, democrats would be well advised to eschew revolutionary rhetoric because they always make bad revolutionaries who cannot deliver. On the other hand, populations should be wary of authoritarians promoting revolution, precisely because they make good revolutionaries and can deliver.
Third, projects of massive change require calculating the consequences of thousands of interrelated minor changes—a task beyond the intellectual or political abilities of any leadership. As a result, even if revolutionaries succeed in changing societies, they rarely change them in the way they had orginially hoped. The Bolsheviks, for instance, were shocked to learn that Russia’s transformation through 1921 had empowered the peasantry they despised, rather than the proletariat they glorified.
Lastly, fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change involves transforming institutions—the regularized and stable patterns of behavior that define human interactions—but institutions cannot, by definition, be transformed from top to bottom over night. Institutions can, however, be destroyed over night and, as the United States learned in Iraq, replaced with a Hobbesian state of nature that benefits no one.
Although the Orange Revolution and its aftermath are often interpreted as an exercise in futility, the fact is that they marked an important stage in Ukraine’s evolutionary transformation from a backward totalitarian province of the Soviet empire into an increasingly modern, democratic, and market-oriented state. The importance of that stage has escaped many Ukrainians, who understandably yearn for the painless transformations promised by revolutionary rhetoric. Despite its appeal, the fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change that revolutionaries promise never takes place.
Ukraine’s Evolutionary Transformation
Although a failure as a radical project, the Orange Revolution was a success in progressing Ukraine toward a democratic state. But the revolution created neither democracy nor the preconditions of democracy. Some 15 to 20 years of confusion and change—starting in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, continuing through Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and the subsequent slow adoption of reforms before 2004—had done that. Ukraine had become independent partly because nationalist democrats had launched popular movements for change, and mostly because the USSR had collapsed. Ukraine’s elites, like the elites in all the post-Soviet states, suddenly found themselves with a country to run. Not surprisingly, the Communist elites who had grossly mismanaged Ukraine before independence became the primary beneficiaries of independence: they rebranded themselves as patriots and proceeded to consolidate power, accumulate wealth, and establish some degree of stability and order in the country. They became state-builders because only an independent and stable Ukrainian state could guarantee their status as power-holders at home and abroad. Radical change, and particularly radical economic change, was not on their agenda, as it would have interfered with their designs for self-enrichment.
More by accident than design, these same elites also began laying the institutional foundations of democracy. Divided between tough authoritarian ex-Communists and inexperienced well-intentioned democrats, between a westward-leaning west Ukraine and an eastward-leaning east Ukraine, between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, Ukraine’s elites created a cumbersome system of government that balanced a strong president with a strong parliament. In effect, they gave birth to an institutional tug-of-war that survives to this day. Although President Leonid Kuchma tried hard to disrupt that balance in the late 1990s, he failed. In the years before the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, became the base within which the democratic opposition could find safe haven and from which it could mobilize its forces. This tug-of-war eventually became a central precondition of democracy—a balance of power between the executive and the legislature.
Unlike Vladimir Putin, who inherited a super-presidency confronting an emasculated Duma and faced few institutional obstacles to a further aggrandizement of power, Kuchma had to deal with a resilient Rada, a democratic opposition that had shown its strength in several competitive elections in the 1990s, and civil organizations that coalesced around the democrats. Unlike Putin, who could use his power base in the presidency and the secret police to crack down the media and oligarchs, Kuchma could at best place restrictions on media freedoms and harass Ukraine’s millionaires and billionaires. Kuchma’s power was therefore fragile and once it weakened, as it did after his implication in a popular journalist’s disappearance and death in 2001, his opponents began to press their own interests. Kuchma’s last attempt to entrench his regime took place in late 2004, when he and his minions falsified the elections, installing his prime minister, Yanukovych, president over his challenger, the people’s favorite, Yushchenko. When the falsification was exposed, cascading popular protests combined with elite defections and oligarch support of the Orange revolutionaries to spell defeat for the Kuchma-Yanukovych forces. They, in turn, agreed to step down peacefully in exchange for constitutional constraints on the Orange victors and a promise of non-retribution. The upheaval had produced not massive social, political, and economic change, but a “pacted transition”—a deal between outgoing and incoming elites.
The Meaning of the Orange Revolution
The Orange Revolution thus built on Ukraine’s existing institutions and pushed those institutions toward democracy. The Orange coalition that came to power under Yushchenko and Tymoshenko had to be democratic and had to act within the framework of the institutions and the elite pact that made it possible. That meant cutting deals, engaging in horse-trading, and avoiding radical change. More important, even the Orange Revolution’s opponents—in particular Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which enjoys the support of one-third of the country’s population—had to adapt to Ukraine’s more explicitly democratic rules of the game. Although it is doubtful that Yanukovych and his supporters have undergone a change of heart, their behavior during the turmoil following the Orange Revolution has been more or less democratic. Indeed, after Yushchenko dissolved the Yanukovych-controlled Rada in April 2007, the Party of Regions criticized his move on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and that they, and not the Orange forces, were the sole defenders of democratic procedures, constitutional order, and rule of law in Ukraine. In reality, both sides took liberties with the constitution, and both sides showed a distressing willingness to manipulate the courts for political advantage in the run-up to parliamentary elections in September 2007. But their shenanigans resembled those of fledgling democracies and not authoritarian states.
Yushchenko the moderate reformer, Tymoshenko the radical, and Yanukovych the conservative nicely symbolize the strong and weak points of Ukraine’s democracy. Their political agendas represent the full range of alternatives found in most democracies and presuppose a grudging willingness to coexist peacefully; but their relations are tense, unfriendly, and generally mistrustful. The process by which Tymoshenko was elected premier on in 2007 illustrates this point: Yanukovych’s supporters in the Rada engaged in every form of chicanery to delay the vote, Yushchenko’s supporters were unable to agree until the very last moment whether they would in fact support her, and Tymoshenko claimed that opposition to her derived only from opportunism and corruption, and not principle.
This tense intra-elite détente has both promoted democratic behavior and enabled the economy to take off and the media and civil society to consolidate. Ukraine’s oligarchs and incipient middle class have taken advantage of elite squabbling and government weakness to pursue their own interests and, despite relentlessly rising energy prices, to produce annual GDP growth of about 7 percent in 2006 and 2007. It is hard to imagine that these increasingly prosperous citizens will ever permit the one-man rule of Kuchma or Putin to reemerge. Ukraine’s newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations have also become a fourth estate that continually, even if on occasion hysterically, monitors the government and its elites. Civil institutions such as churches, synagogues, non-governmental organizations, are also booming in the absence of state intervention. Younger generations of Ukrainians, especially students, are developing the healthy skepticism, entrepreneurial spirit, and cocky self-confidence that characterize many young people in the West.
To be sure, Ukraine’s progress has been marred by a deep and persistent corruption, popular disgust with most political institutions, a frustratingly slow policy-making process, a decaying infrastructure, severe health problems and demographic decline, and continued economic penury for those who lack the skills and wherewithal to benefit from ongoing change. Ukraine’s proneness to periodic nervous breakdowns of its political system could, if projected unchecked into the future, produce intransigence, radicalism, an unwillingness to play by any kind of rules, and a willingness to tolerate iron-fisted rule. But the chances of such a dreary denouement are slight, as long as developments within Ukraine occur naturally. The main threat to Ukraine’s continued democratic development would come—if it comes at all—from Russia. Its turn to a fascist-like authoritarianism and aggressive foreign policy under Putin, and the inherent instability of one-man rule of a corrupt energy-rich state, brings to mind interwar Europe, with Russia as Germany and Ukraine as Czechoslovakia.
The End of Revolution
Barring such a gloomy, unlikely scenario, Ukraine’s evolutionary development toward Italian-style politics, society, and economy should persist, with systemic snags and never-ending elite zigzags. There will be no euphoria in Ukraine in the next few years. Mass upheavals, revolutionary change, and revolutionary breakthroughs are unlikely, as the country continues crawling away from authoritarianism and toward democracy. In 2014, when Ukrainians celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Orange Revolution, most will fail to appreciate that the upheaval marked the end of authoritarian experimentation in their country and enabled them to consolidate their democratic institutions in a manner supportive of economic growth. With any luck, they will even conclude that the Orange Revolution is dead, that they alone made the difference in their own lives, and that life in Ukraine has become predictable, uninteresting, and perhaps even boring.
