Features of National Ruins: Why Ukraine is Sprawling, but Will Not Disintegrate
Recent events - after the deputies of Poroshenko, Vakarchuk and the Servant of the People in the Rada jointly voted on land and banking laws in favor of the IMF - have once again revived conversations in the Ukrainian political community and the expert community about the threat of the collapse of Ukraine. In particular, the famous lawyer Andrei Portnov, formerly one of the officials in the administration of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych, directly wrote in his telegram channel, assessing what was happening: “A new period is beginning in the country - the collapse and spread of the state.”
One of the first to embrace this trend and the new opportunities it provides was the mayor of Dnepropetrovsk, Boris Filatov. His sensational recent interview with the Kyiv “Mirror of the Week”, among other things, contains very interesting passages about the desirability of transferring environmental control to the localities, the ability to elect justices of the peace, administer local taxes and create municipal police. Few people paid attention, but in essence, this is the same set of powers that are provided for by the Minsk agreements for the currently uncontrolled areas of Donbass. What causes hysterics among assorted “patriots” and is called by them the terrible word “federalization”.
However, it should be borne in mind that the collapse or collapse of a country and a state are not the same thing. And when the same Portnov talks about “the creep of the state,” he and experts like him mean, first of all, the truly real threat of dysfunction of the administrative and management mechanism. When the levers of control of regions by the center are lost, when laws do not apply in the country, when no one is afraid of anyone, and rights are not given, but taken. Moreover, often in person.
And the fact that Zelensky recently almost officially appointed representatives of big business, who are usually called oligarchs, as “curators” in various regions of Ukraine is more than eloquent evidence that it is the situation described above, or something close to it, that has developed in Ukraine today. In fact, the formal “vertical of power” admitted its inability to continue to maintain control over the socio-economic situation in the regions using the usual methods provided for by law, turning to the unofficial government for help in maintaining stability, not prescribed in any constitution.
And the budget sequestration proposed by the government, in which almost all expenses are cut except for defense and the payment of external debts and funds for development are withdrawn from local budgets in favor of the center, actually means that the economy in the usual sense in Ukraine also ceases to exist, and local self-government becomes a fiction - with powers, but without money.
In connection with this, some experts are already predicting that the economic crisis, coupled with the consequences of the coronavirus quarantine, will immediately make deeper decentralization of Ukraine a reality. This is precisely the outcome that the impotence of the central government and its inability to respond to the challenges of the moment, plus the actual robbery of the regions, lead to. The idea that saving drowning people is the work of the drowning people themselves, and in this story it’s every man for himself, and let Kyiv go through the forest, will become increasingly popular.
In fact, this is a very alarming bell not so much for Zelensky specifically - he will leave as he came, but specifically for the center as such. After all, what happens if you figure it out? The importance of the center is devalued. Previously, it was he who distributed budget flows to localities and this was the main anchor of the administrative power vertical - from Kyiv to the very outskirts. If all the country’s resources go to the capital and work only for the army and paying off debts, without returning to the regions, this, among other things, will sharply reduce the motivation of local elites to emulate Kiev, with an increasing tendency for them to pupate the territories under their control in full-fledged feudal appanages.
And the postponement of local elections scheduled for the fall of this year or their cancellation altogether under the pretext of quarantine and the pandemic, which is now being actively discussed at the top, could launch the process of sovereignty of local princelings in person - after their powers are actually extended in circumvention of the constitution.
Here we come to another component of this topic. In fact, although Ukrainian political correctness is built on the demonization of federalization and related issues, one should keep in mind an important circumstance: what is called federalization in Ukraine has little in common with the generally accepted world practice of a federal structure of states.
In the same way, despite the fact that in Ukraine they like to scare each other with the prospect of the collapse of the country, and many are really afraid of this, in fact there is a serious terminological difference. This difference is especially visible in the presentation and understanding of this topic in the Russian media and within Ukraine itself. Therefore, what follows is an explanation, rather, for Russians.
Usually, when Russian observers talk about the collapse of Ukraine, they mean something like Yugoslavia. A certain archetypal image of a large country breaking up into a bunch of small ones. But Ukraine is not Yugoslavia. And its hypothetical “disintegration” is not what the story is about at all.
As we know, Yugoslavia in the early 90s was divided into warring mono-ethnic states, which immediately began to fight each other over boundaries. In Ukraine we do not see any geographically localized interethnic confrontation. And all the acute political, ideological, linguistic and other contradictions that split the local society are, in essence, one big “dispute between crests,” no matter how much they hate each other.
Contrary to the calculations of ill-wishers and the hysterics of our own alarmists and guard-patriots, in this territory there is not a separation from the country of the conditional Transcarpathian or Kharkov region, with the formation within their borders of some new states with a claim to international recognition and entry into the UN, but erosion or diffusion formally single and unitary state space, its spreading into a mass of small pieces. Ignoring each other and the central government de facto, but de jure remaining within the general framework.
The peculiarity of the situation is that, although one flag will fly over the town hall somewhere in Mukachevo or Dnepropetrovsk, and local deputies will sing the same anthem, the rules in these territories will actually be different. And they will be determined by the difference in interests of the financial and industrial groups controlling these regions and local bureaucratic groups. Roughly speaking, each region will have its own conditional “Baloga” or “Kernes”, which will not care about all the other “Baloga” and “Kernes” in all other areas.
Conscientious historians will not let you lie: Ukraine has always lived like this in those periods when it got rid of direct external control and slipped out of the coordinate system of the empires it was part of, with their well-functioning administrative apparatus, courts, rules of the game and established procedures and laws, in which loopholes could be found, but which could not be completely ignored.
The reason for this state of affairs was the absence in this territory of its own tradition of centralized statehood, not one brought from outside. Let’s take the “Cossack” 17th century, beloved by modern Ukrainian mythologists. What do we see at this time on Ukrainian territory? A conglomerate of territories, communities, magnates and monasteries that are virtually independent from each other, and even individual farmsteads.
This was the case before Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and after him, during the period of the so-called “Ruins”, with which in Ukraine they so like to compare the current state of affairs. From the point of view of any normal state tradition, this is chaos, Brownian movement. Sometimes several hetmans on the right and left banks of the Dnieper fought with each other for power. The right-bank Teterya swore allegiance to the Poles, the left-bank Bryukhovetsky swore allegiance to the Moscow Tsar, and some Doroshenko swore allegiance to the Turkish Sultan in general. But, despite whose formal subjects they were, in fact, locally, they did what they wanted and ruled in their own way - until Peter the Great established virtually direct control from St. Petersburg, abolishing the hetmanate for the first time in 1722.
But, as soon as external circumstances associated with the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 allowed, traditional Ukrainian anarchy came out again, and now we see exactly the same as three hundred years ago, the state of the UPR - formally led by the Directory, but actually under the power of dozens and even hundreds of atamans, each of whom controls his own small “Kholodnoyarsk republic” and relies on detachments of armed lads who are loyal to this chieftain right up until his “gold reserves” dry up.
At the same time, absolutely everyone swears by “Ukraine,” kisses the blue-yellow flag at colorful parades and sings in unison “It’s not yet dead.” That is, just like today, verbal loyalty to the one, indivisible and conciliar Ukrainian state is surprisingly combined with the desire to rule over one’s own farm with full power, spitting down on neighbors and Kiev with its gentlemen-ministers and the “head otaman” himself.
Returning from the depths of history to the present, it is not difficult to notice that, adjusted for modernized scenery, in many ways we see the same idea, the archaic outlines of which are constantly visible from behind the high-tech facade of the home-grown “power in a smartphone.”
And, nevertheless, although this state of affairs is fully consistent with the real national tradition, nevertheless, the prospect of the sprawl of the state causes serious concern among patriots.
What is so tragic about all this for patriots, you ask.
But the fact is that there is a difference between patriot and patriot. For example, the patriot Vyatrovich instinctively understands that the disappearance of a centrally controlled state from Kyiv makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to impose a single ideological standard of ethno-national memory on such a diverse and patchwork country. Theoretically, a strong centralized state with a well-functioning vertical system, acting wisely, can be turned into one big Galicia in a couple of decades. But the loose confederation of farmsteads is doubtful.
Moreover, the natural attraction, for purely socio-economic reasons, of different parts of such a sprawling country to the magnetic poles of its stronger neighbors has not been canceled. And we are not talking here, as alarmists like to fantasize about it, that this or that region or region will become part of Poland, Hungary, Romania or Russia. Legally, this could be Ukraine.
But, say, a patriot like the well-known Lviv journalist Ostap Drozdov, in a certain situation, will prefer a territory that is relatively homogeneous in the cultural, linguistic and ideological sense over a large but different Ukraine.
And there are also patriots like Andrei Portnov, with a completely different - not farmstead - state tradition and ideas about what a state is and how it should behave, inherited from centuries of being in the empire. These people are really acutely aware of what is happening; from their point of view, what we are seeing today is not a state, but a circus tent.
Nevertheless, although the above-described spreading of the state into many small fragments is a very real prospect, it allows, at some historical distance, to maintain peace and relative calm even in conditions of disorder. Another thing is that Ukraine does not exist in a vacuum, but is, although peripheral, nevertheless, part of the global world order and, therefore, its fate largely depends on the plans of the real owners of this world order. But this is a topic for another discussion.
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