Ethnic Russians in Ukraine: A Look Back | Quick Take | GZERO Media
Ian Bremmer reflects on his PhD work on Russians in Ukraine after the USSR collapsed.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here, kicking off another week.
It's been a month now of a Russian invasion into Ukraine. Things certainly not getting any better on the ground. I could give an update of all of it, but rather than doing that, I wanted to go back to how I started my career as a political scientist, because believe it or not, it was on this issue.
I started my PhD work back in 1989. And as you can imagine, the most interesting thing in the world was that the Wall came down and the Soviet empire was collapsing, and the nationalities of the former Soviet Union were starting to explode. It looked like the whole place was going to come apart. And so that's of course what I did my research on.
And most specifically I did my research on Russians in Ukraine. That was actually the title of my dissertation in 1994. Can you believe that? "The Politics of Ethnicity: Russians in the New Ukraine", and it was kind of interesting. Back then, one of the most important theories of international relations, certainly very popular at the time, was this idea that, "Okay, the Cold War is over; the Soviet Union is collapsing, and instead we're going to have a clash of civilizations." This was Samuel Huntington, the Harvard don, his big article and book that said the new conflict that we would see now that it wasn't going to be a Cold War. Was civilizational. Western civilization, Orthodox civilization, Islam, Hindu, Chinese, and along those lines are where the fighting would be.
And I mean, first of all, there's a big question about whether that's really true. That sounded like a horrible world to live in. So I hoped it wasn't true. And there wasn't a lot of actual research that drove that view in the book. It was just a lot of sort of analysis and implications. So I thought, well, here you have the Soviet Union collapsing, and by '91 collapsed. And you've got a laboratory, a literal laboratory of 15 new countries. And outside of Russia, all of these former Soviet Socialist Republics that were ethnoterritorial administrative divisions. In other words, they were demarcated on the basis of the ethnic identity of the majority population on the ground there. So there was an Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic that became Armenia. There was a Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic that became Georgia. Ukraine as well.
And the interesting thing is that Russians, ethnic Russians, who were the dominant nationality, and in some ways the titular nationality of the Soviet Union, they became suddenly minority populations in all of these new independent states. And with the exception of Armenia where they were only a couple of percent of the population, they were more than 5% of the population in all of these countries. They were a significant minority. So here's the question: do they or do they not clash on the basis of civilizational divide? And you could go on the ground, as I did, to Kazakhstan and to Ukraine and to Georgia, to these countries, and see to what extent there was conflict on the ground.
And I spent a year in Ukraine back in 1992 and 1993 across the whole country. I went to Kiev, Kyiv now, but Kiev when I was there. I went to Lviv, I went Crimea, I went to Southeast Ukraine, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and did survey research. Actually interviewed all of these people, Russians and Ukrainians and Tatars as well in Crimea, and asking them how they conceived of their role in this new country, with the idea that if there was a civilizational divide, you'd see fundamental conflict in places like Kazakhstan, where it was Islam versus Russian Orthodoxy, where in Ukraine you'd find much less of that. And the reason being is because civilizationally, these people are very, very similar.
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