BUT, to say that the Orange types presided over the “ruin” of their country doesn’t make much sense. Ukraine was ruined before they took over, and it will stay ruined now. It’s always been ruined, it’s been ruined for centuries, and chances are that it will stay ruined. Just the nature of the beast. To say that Yushchenko “ruined” the country is to give both the country and his powers too much credit.

HOWEVER, contra J, it’s not ruined enough that there’s going to be a Russian/Ukrainian separatist split. It just ain’t gonna happen. I’d be interested in knowing what, in particularly, J knows that I and all of my Ukrainian acquaintances do not know.

The fact is, only a couple fringe crazies are interested in any type of separatism. No one else talks about it— I’ve never heard it mentioned as a real possibiility. The Russians are glad to have the separatism thing to use as a lever against Ukraine if they need it, but now that they’ve got a person in the Kiev they can work with again (and Tymoshenko also would have been that person), they’re not interested in problems. They also know, as prehaps J doesn’t, that Crimea (with its radicalizable, Russian-resenting Tatar Muslim population) might be a bit of a poisoned chalice.

The new Kiev government will let the Russian navy stay in Sevastopol, the rifts will be smoothed over, “friendship of nations” will again be cemented between the two Glorious Slavic Peoples, Yanukovych will (if he needs to) severely repress Russian separatests will the Kremlin pretends not to look, jackasses like Luzhkov will continue to ineffectually run around calling for the return of parts of Ukraine, etc. etc. etc. — and things will go on in the same corrupt, dreary, third-rate way that they have around here since, oh, the Mongols sacked the joint in 1240.

Long story short is that seperatism = not an issue.

Yes, the succession is at least initially organized around an aspirational vision with ideals and institutions that the society as a whole realistically is incapable of supporting. The first group of leaders after a highly repressive regime is removed, no matter how well intentioned, is rapidly overwhelmed by the reality of the degraded condition of the people as a whole and the decrepit condition of its institutions, and the mountain of unsettled scores (both immediate and historical) and other unmet needs and violently suppressed urges that have built up and festered in the populace. Yes, that means a rapid collapse of a decrepit civil order and and in most societies outbreaks of retributive violence. The leadership of the aspirational movement is soon irrelevant in public opinion. A relatively harsh strongman soon gains power, often a person who started in the aspirational movement but who is typical of the population as a whole in suppressed urges, investment in historical scores, victim of repression, etc. This leader or leadership recognizes the relative priority of the targets of this thirst for retribution in public opinion, agrees with the retribution, and channels it according to priority in public opinion, giving it a sequential nature and greater thoroughness. In many ways these figures tend be more repressive than their predecessors, especially in peaceable civil life, but they never repress, indeed even encourage, popular rage and popular retributive violence at particular targets. Examples abound, from the French Revolution to post-Tito Yugoslavia to Mao.

At times such a leader attacks and thereby unleishes a superior and better justified pent-up urge for retribution by his opponents and is himself destroyed. The Hitler-led German attack on the Slavic peoples would be the prime example. As horrible as the outcome was, it does seem to have settled the historic scores between Germanic and Slavic and Baltic peoples that were historically largely generated by Swedes and Germans.

Yushchenko and Saakashvili reflect this nasty early post-authoritarian dynamic rather well, as I see it. The anti-Soviet/anti-Russian element to their rule- the deliberate effort at purging of remnants of Soviet and much of the Czars’ presence and power- is in my opinion a feature and priority, in no way a bug. The full outbreak of long-suppressed interethnic violence and wars is also no accident. Much as the warfare in and of Georgia in the summer of 2008 gets read as an American-versus-Russian affair on this blog, for the peoples of the Caucasus involved in them these are, I believe, the incidents of regional historical ethnic score settling. That the tiny South Ossetians finally got to give ethnic Georgians a bloody nose for their high-handed behavior over generations, even though a Russian fist was used to inflict the blow, seems to me how that war mattered in local scorekeeping.

Yes, more moderate leaders usually come to power as violence simmers down rebuilding of the economy and institutions becomes possible and desired. My problem with portraying Ukraine in this election as doing this is that it might be premature. Yushchenko had his secret police break up all militant ethnic Russian separatist groups, from presumable terrorist cells to small fringe parties with overt separatist or secessionist agendas. The Ukrainian secret police under Yushchenko also managed to get the Russian Black Sea fleet to abandon Sevastopol for Novorossiysk. Beyond the obvious fealties to Moscow, a Yanukovych government presumably means an end to this active suppression of ethnic Russian separatism in Ukraine and policies of thwarting Moscow’s various forms of support for it. There will possibly be toleration of it, perhaps even a blind eye turned to it. An ostensibly moderate Yanukovych government could amount to an opening for ethnic Russian backlash. And when the non-Russian regions in turn react strongly negatively to that, quite possibly secessionism.

A Russian/non-Russian breakup of Ukraine gets widely poo-pooed as no longer a significant possibility, but I’m not persuaded the fundamental problem is resolved. The scenario envisioned by the people who call separation unlikely has, as far as I can tell, been a fairly violent one with justifications on both sides largely emanating from the era of Soviet rule. These particular justifications and basis for mass violence have substantially diminished with Yushchenko’s often dirty work and airing out of specifics, e.g. the Holodomor, the German occupation and mass killings, the very harsh Soviet repression of Ukrainian nationalists, etc. The ghost of Soviet rule is not fully eradicated, of course, but what remains as the more solid basis to justify separatisms and nationalisms are differences and scores that date to the times of the Czars or even predate them. When the Patriarch of Moscow campaigns in Ukraine among Orthodox ethnic Russians, as he did this fall, the point made is not merely about Orthodox theology and regional ecumenism.

A relatively nonviolent split of Ukraine strikes me as a significant possibility. If it happens it might even turn out to be the most right option, among problematic ones, for an unwieldy and fractured country of 46 million people to do whose rationale for being a political unit is tenuous. The 15 million or so ethnic Russians in it being by far the the largest such population formally outside Russia proper. To what extent the region in which they live is part of the historical ethnic Russian homeland I haven’t been able to fully determine, but their cultural claim of belonging on it is far more substantive than any made on other parts of eastern Europe (Karelia, East Prussia, ‘Transnistria’, Belarus) or Asia (e.g. the northern Caucasus, Siberia generally) now under Russian rule/control.