Russia in Global Affairs

Efforts to unite Ukraine around the ideology of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism have proven futile. The complete fiasco of the ideas of Rukh was quite obvious way back in the 1990s. The phenomenon of Victor Yushchenko, who tried to give nationalism a new lease of life, rests on support gained from external forces, first and foremost, and also on support given to Yulia Tymoshenko’s populist movement that harvested votes in the cities and districts where an overt ethnic nationalism would not have had any chances otherwise.

Successful self-identification within the post-Soviet states often involves taking a new look at one’s national history. Not all titular nations in the CIS had states of their own in the past, but all of them had a history on which to build their national self-consciousness.