I wouldn’t claim that Ukraine is more of a democracy than the other countries—better to say it’s a more competitive authoritarian regime. The political system that emerged in Ukraine was from the outset more pluralistic than those of, say, Russia, Kazakhstan or Belarus. One of the main reasons for this was the country’s cultural diversity: there were very significant regional differences between the east and the west, and these were reflected in electoral outcomes from the 1990s onwards. Any candidate who won the presidential elections would not be seen as legitimate by almost half the population, who would immediately voice strong opposition to him. The strength of regional identities also tended to politicize socio-economic questions very quickly. This was one reason why the neoliberal reforms were not carried out as rapidly as in Russia, for example—the political forces behind them were unable to build up the same kind of momentum. The difference is also apparent in Ukraine’s constitutional system, which was much less presidential than those of the other post-Soviet states. In Russia, 1993 was clearly a crucial moment, when Yeltsin imposed his will on parliament by force, sending the army into Moscow. Nothing like this happened in Ukraine. The 1996 constitution, approved under Kuchma, gave the president more powers than parliament, but not to the same extent as in Russia: it was a presidential–parliamentary republic, rather than a purely presidential one. This was also a very important factor in the evolution of the political system: presidential elections were not winner-takes-all contests to the same extent as in many other former Soviet countries.

None of them were full-scale authoritarian; it was definitely not a dictatorial state. In the late Kuchma period, the presidential administration would send broadcasters recommended topics for their news programmes, but it’s unclear to what extent this was implemented; there was no direct censorship. The real problem for freedom of speech has been that the majority of the tv, radio and press are privately owned. In that sense it has worked more along Western lines, where the media corporations advance the political agendas of their owners. Economically, you could say that Kuchma, and later Yanukovych, played the role of a kind of protectionist state for Ukrainian capital. With the state’s assistance, figures like Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Viktor Pinchuk acquired old Soviet industries at fire-sale prices, and then made huge fortunes not so much by investing or upgrading as by using them to make quick money, shifting their capital to Cyprus or other offshore havens. For many years, Kuchma and Yanukovych were also able to balance on the question of whether to integrate into Europe’s economic sphere or Russia’s, moving neither to the West nor the East. This shielded Ukraine’s oligarchs, preventing them from being swallowed by stronger Russian or European competitors. It’s worth pointing out, too, that the oligarchs were able to play a different role in the political system from their Russian counterparts: here the state was unable to dominate them and exclude them from participation as Putin did.

One of the most important factors was that Russia had natural resources—oil and gas—which Ukraine did not; hence they were able to maintain living standards at least a little better. Ukraine had a lot of plant in high-tech sectors—aviation, cybernetics, the space industry—which suffered especially from the ussr’s collapse. Much of the country’s machine-building and engineering industries also went down when they lost their connections with the former Soviet republics, and what remained was not so competitive compared to Western European production. The 1990s was a period of severe industrial decline in Ukraine. Some people, including many on the left, think that it’s still a developed industrial country. I very much disagree, because although metallurgy, which accounts for a major part of its exports, entails some processing—producing rolled steel from ores, for example—it doesn’t involve a high level of value added. Still, the rise in commodity prices in the 2000s meant that there was something of a recovery, mainly concentrated in the east, and mainly in metallurgy. But the slight growth was very unevenly distributed, bringing greater inequality.

It was a change of elites rather than a revolution: it didn’t create the potential for radical structural and institutional change. One of the reasons it was resolved so quickly—it was over in three weeks—was that a deal was made within the elite. Kuchma agreed to surrender and to stop backing Yanukovych in exchange for revisions to the constitution, diminishing the powers of the president so that Yushchenko would not be winning so much. You could say that after 2004, the system went from being presidential–parliamentary to parliamentary–presidential. The electoral system was also changed to give more control to the party leaderships. Before 2004, half the Rada was elected from party lists, half from majoritarian districts. After the Orange Revolution the system was based exclusively on party lists, with no mechanism of popular control over who got included on them. The party leaderships had tremendous power—they could exclude any dissenting mps and automatically replace them with another person from the party list. Partly as a result of all this, Yushchenko ended up being a very weak president, counterbalanced by a premier with a strong parliamentary base—Tymoshenko and Yanukovych each held the post for a time. But Yushchenko’s weakness was also partly down to his own decisions: he did almost nothing on the economy, and towards the end totally devoted himself to the nationalist agenda—focusing on things like making Stepan Bandera a national hero, and commemorating the Holodomor, the great famine of 1932–33, as an ethnic genocide of the Ukrainian nation by the Communists. By the end he had completely alienated his electorate, scoring only 5 per cent in the 2010 presidential elections.

One of the first things Yanukovych did was to increase the president’s powers again, securing a decision from the constitutional court to annul the 2004 amendments and go back to the 1996 constitution. This also meant half the Rada mps would be elected in first-past-the-post constituencies again, and half from party lists. As well as attempting to monopolize political power, Yanukovych tried to concentrate financial and economic power around his own team, especially his family. The result was a tremendous amount of personalized corruption—visible in the luxury of his former residence at Mezhyhirya. On the economic front, by the time he took office Ukraine had already been hit hard by the global crisis: there was a slump in prices for Ukrainian-produced goods, especially metals. The hryvnia was devalued by half in late 2008, a number of large enterprises shut down and unemployment rose; small business was suffering too. In 2010 Yanukovych started to introduce austerity measures, which of course quickly proved unpopular. In some cases—for example an increase in taxes on small businesses—the reforms had actually been demanded by the imf, but since half the population already distrusted Yanukovych, for reasons mentioned earlier, he received all the blame. The underlying problem was that the basic social standards which enabled most of the population to survive were deteriorating, and he was unable to find a way to maintain them.

I would say that Yanukovych actually made the correct decision in suspending it. Now the new government has split the political components from the economic ones, but there were no such discussions in 2013. Not many of Ukraine’s industries would gain from the free-trade provisions—it would mean intensified competition for them, and the loss of many jobs. The terms of the imf credit that the government was negotiating at the same time also played a role: the imf demanded a rise in gas consumption prices for the population, wage freezes and significant budget cuts, all of which would be a blow for the poor classes of Ukraine. Not so much for the middle classes; defined mainly by consumption levels, these amount to no more than 10–15 per cent of the population, and are concentrated in the biggest cities, working either for our oligarchs’ industries or in the offices of Western corporations. At the same time, it’s worth recalling that Yanukovych suspended the agreement rather than rejecting closer ties with the eu outright—European integration was one of his own policies, and what mobilized people was that he made this very radical U-turn. The people who came out onto the streets in November were protesting in support of the government’s original policy—that was the irony.