Newfoundland Memorial University St. Jones (Canada), Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been so fierce that questions have been raised about whether Putin was successful in winning the war militarily. So will he be able to rule the Ukrainians? There are many reasons to believe that he would not be able to do so.
Even if he is victorious, Putin will not be able to achieve what he wants because to be completely victorious, he must rule a country he has conquered against his will. How well a country is governed depends on its culture – more precisely, on how compatible its culture is with its model of government. The late American political scientist Harry Eckstein, an expert on political culture, once argued that governments perform well if their systems of authority are similar to those of a governed society.
In stable democracies, all organizations, including families, have some element of democratic governance. Conversely, in autocracy, power is centralized at all levels of social organization. According to a popular concept in Russia, the father of the nation is expected to act like the father of a family. power distance
The concept of power distance, originally proposed by Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstad, helps measure the extent to which inequality in the distribution of power is socially accepted. The larger the value of the power distance index, the more inequality is accepted, although Hofstad was mostly interested in the distribution of power within companies.
An in-depth comparative study of the perception of power conducted in Russia and Ukraine in 2015-16 shows that Ukrainians and Russians perceive power differently. The power distance index in Ukraine has a value of 100.9, compared to 110.7 in Russia. Educated and affluent Ukrainians have a particularly low tolerance of inequality in the distribution of power.
Putin’s possible regime in Ukraine is problematic because it will not match the model of power that Ukrainians want to accept. Skepticism and rejection of autocratic power is deeply rooted in Ukrainian culture. influence of the Cossacks
Ukraine’s most famous historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, considers the Cossacks of the 15th and 16th centuries the predecessors of modern Ukraine. The Cossacks—the border militia hired by the Polish and Russian governments to ward off Tatar attacks—were famous for causing trouble for any ruler, including Poles, Tatars and Russians.
Hrushevsky described the Cossacks as “a people with no authority. Even the Poles, who had their own problems with the concept of centralized power, called the Cossacks “unruly”. The military leader of the Cossacks was chosen and could easily be changed. After a military loss, the Cossacks usually gathered and elected a new leader. None of them had permanent power. Does the Cossack heritage still influence the culture of Ukraine, at least as far as the perception of power and those holding it are concerned?
The fierce resistance the Ukrainian military is showing against its Russian invaders suggests that this may happen. Ukrainian national culture was suppressed and discredited by Russia during the Soviet Union era. This may explain Putin’s allegations that Ukrainians are ruled by “nationalists and neo-Nazis”. Elements of Cossack culture were revived during mass protests in 2013–14 against the former Ukrainian president’s attempts to replicate Putin’s style of governance. The demonstrators organized their tent camp in the center of Kyiv on the lines of the organizational and spatial method of Cossack military camps. war makes nation
War often acts as a trigger for the revival of the nation’s consciousness. British historical sociologist Anthony D. Smith, an expert on nations and nationalism, who died in 2016, wrote that war “is one of the most powerful factors in the formation of both nations and ethnic communities in every period of history.” This was precisely the effect of the 2014-15 military confrontation in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. Today’s full war waged by Putin is hardly an exception.
This will likely lead the situation to an outcome that Putin could not have imagined – the rejection of autocratic rule by the Ukrainians. If one puts Ukraine and Russia on the continuum of autocracy from anarchy, Ukraine will be closer to anarchy while Russia to autocracy. Russia has always been a power-centric society, where all important decisions are expected to be taken by a few or ideally by a single one.
The alignment of Putin’s regime with the notion of power rooted in Russian culture explains its exemplary stability, at least so far – mass protests against the invasion of Ukraine in many Russian cities point to growing discontent. However, Russia and Ukraine appear to be almost complete opposites, reducing the likelihood that Putin’s Russia will be able to rule Ukraine in a friendly manner, even if it wins the war. The war in Ukraine confirms that for Russia, power means force. It would be a very difficult task, if not impossible, for Putin to transfer that mindset to Ukrainians.