Topic: What people in southeast Ukraine really think of Novorossiya (Read 301 times)
See... these people who did the surveying are very clever. The answering options were made in such a way, as to minimize the people going for pro-Russian options. And it is safe to assume that most of the people who answered "Don't know" are pro-Russians as well, and they avoided answering the questions due to concerns for their own safety.
Novorossiya is frozen. Last week Oleg Tsarev, leader of the ‘parliament’ that ostensibly united the eastern Ukraine separatist entities, the Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR), announced the project was now on hold. The reason Tsarev gave was that Novorossiya was incompatible with the Minsk II Accords, the principles agreed by the ‘Normandy Four’ — French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin – in February to end the crisis in eastern Ukraine. His statement and similar ones by others may signal that rebel leaders have been encouraged to consolidate around territory they now control rather than launching a new offensive to grab more. Time will tell. What it does reveal is belated recognition on the part of separatists and perhaps the Kremlin that Novorossiya as a geopolitical project to break Ukraine has fallen well short of its objective.
Tracing the origins of Novorossiya as a contemporary geopolitical re-imagining of Ukraine takes one to the murky world of relations between Kremlin forces and a spectrum of Russian nationalists. In a recent article, Marlene Laruelle outlined the three colors of Russian nationalism behind Novorossiya: a red Novorossiya preoccupied with reasserting Russia as a neo-Soviet great power, a white Novorossiya concerned with reviving and extending reactionary Orthodox ideals, and a brown Novorossiya driven by Russian ultra-nationalist fantasies and practices. What these power connected networks produced was an opportunistic geopolitical gambit on the heels of the Crimean annexation in March 2014 to detach southeast Ukraine from Kiev’s control.
The envisioned territory stretched from Odesa to Donetsk to Kharkiv, uniting eight southeast oblasts into a singular space. Pro-Russian nationalists in these areas launched a series of anti-Maidan protests as occasions for the seizure of local public buildings and proclamation of counter-coup regimes to the perceived EuroMaidan coup in Kiev. These moves, however, garnered uneven public support and manifestly failed in the two strategic locations of Odesa and Kharkiv. Only in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk did they take hold, and not everywhere there. From the outset, therefore, there was a manifest gap between the aspirational greater Novorossiya and the lesser Novorossiya formed around the DPR and LPR. Putin famously amplified the project in his annual Direct Line television extravaganza in the pivotal month of April 2014 when he reminded everyone that the Novorossiya oblasts “were not part of Ukraine back then” in the tsarist days.
Behind Putin’s remarks were three operating assumptions: that modern southeast Ukraine and historic Novorossiya were equivalent spaces, that this was home to a distinct interest group (“ethnic Russians and Russian speakers”), and that this group was uniformly threatened by Maidan events in Kiev. Putin does not endorse separatism, instead stating that the “key issue is providing guarantees to these people.” Putin’s three assumptions about this region and “these people,” however, proved to be incorrect. Our research reveals what people in most of southeast Ukraine really think of Novorossiya.
Our comparative project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation examines post-Maidan attitudes in Ukraine, as well as in Crimea now annexed to Russia, and in the Russian-supported de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. In December 2014, we organized simultaneous public opinion surveys in these regions and surveyed in 6 of the 8 oblasts of southeast Ukraine (hereafter SE6). We judged it impossible to do reliable survey work in war afflicted Donetsk and Luhansk, instead contracting with the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) to administer a randomized face-to-face survey to 2003 persons in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. We asked a series of questions about Novorossiya.
The first was whether respondents thought Novorossiya was a myth or historic fact. Implicitly this is a question that sought to get at whether they viewed the newly hyped imaginary as legitimate or not. Over half (52 percent) of the SE6 sample deem it a myth but 24 percent considered it a ‘historic fact’ with a further 22 percent giving a ‘hard to say’ response. (Much higher ratios, about three-quarters, in Crimea and in the Russian-backed de facto republics view it as a historic fact). To determine whether seeing Novorossiya as “historic fact’ might be an endorsement of separatism, we asked directly if the concept could be the basis for separatism of the sub-sample of 970 in the SE6 who saw it in these terms or who gave a ‘hard to say’ answer to the myth-or-fact question. Only 14 percent of this sub-sample agreed with this possibility but importantly 38 percent choose ‘hard to say’ indicating that the question was likely a sensitive one for them. Endorsing or considering the basis for separatism, we should appreciate, is profoundly politically incorrect in most contexts where a legitimate government remains in firm control.
We then posed a question to respondents about the use of the Novorossiya moniker giving them two declarative choices as well as the usual ‘hard to say’ and refuse options: (i) “it is Russian political technology to break up Ukraine” or (ii) “it is the manifestation of the fight of the population of southeast Ukraine for independence.” Only 18 percent in SE6 were willing to choose this latter option (for the graph comparison to Crimea see our earlier post here). Barely over half the population (51 percent) in SE6 viewed Novorossiya as Russian political technology, in effect a geopolitical scam manufactured by Russian power circles. This split opinion is hardly a resounding affirmation of the worldview of Kiev and many Western observers, suggesting the term and its genealogy resonated with some even if they did not say so explicitly.
Since Putin presumed that ethnicity and language was a major cleavage in southeast Ukraine, we examined this belief by sorting our 2003 respondents into four self-declared ethnicity and language categories: Ukrainians speaking only Ukrainian at home (22.6 percent), Ukrainians speaking Russian at home (40.7 percent), Ukrainians speaking both languages (17.4 percent) and those who self-declared as ethnic Russians (11 percent).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/25/what-people-in-southeast-ukraine-really-think-of-novorossiya/
Tracing the origins of Novorossiya as a contemporary geopolitical re-imagining of Ukraine takes one to the murky world of relations between Kremlin forces and a spectrum of Russian nationalists. In a recent article, Marlene Laruelle outlined the three colors of Russian nationalism behind Novorossiya: a red Novorossiya preoccupied with reasserting Russia as a neo-Soviet great power, a white Novorossiya concerned with reviving and extending reactionary Orthodox ideals, and a brown Novorossiya driven by Russian ultra-nationalist fantasies and practices. What these power connected networks produced was an opportunistic geopolitical gambit on the heels of the Crimean annexation in March 2014 to detach southeast Ukraine from Kiev’s control.
The envisioned territory stretched from Odesa to Donetsk to Kharkiv, uniting eight southeast oblasts into a singular space. Pro-Russian nationalists in these areas launched a series of anti-Maidan protests as occasions for the seizure of local public buildings and proclamation of counter-coup regimes to the perceived EuroMaidan coup in Kiev. These moves, however, garnered uneven public support and manifestly failed in the two strategic locations of Odesa and Kharkiv. Only in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk did they take hold, and not everywhere there. From the outset, therefore, there was a manifest gap between the aspirational greater Novorossiya and the lesser Novorossiya formed around the DPR and LPR. Putin famously amplified the project in his annual Direct Line television extravaganza in the pivotal month of April 2014 when he reminded everyone that the Novorossiya oblasts “were not part of Ukraine back then” in the tsarist days.
Behind Putin’s remarks were three operating assumptions: that modern southeast Ukraine and historic Novorossiya were equivalent spaces, that this was home to a distinct interest group (“ethnic Russians and Russian speakers”), and that this group was uniformly threatened by Maidan events in Kiev. Putin does not endorse separatism, instead stating that the “key issue is providing guarantees to these people.” Putin’s three assumptions about this region and “these people,” however, proved to be incorrect. Our research reveals what people in most of southeast Ukraine really think of Novorossiya.
Our comparative project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation examines post-Maidan attitudes in Ukraine, as well as in Crimea now annexed to Russia, and in the Russian-supported de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. In December 2014, we organized simultaneous public opinion surveys in these regions and surveyed in 6 of the 8 oblasts of southeast Ukraine (hereafter SE6). We judged it impossible to do reliable survey work in war afflicted Donetsk and Luhansk, instead contracting with the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) to administer a randomized face-to-face survey to 2003 persons in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. We asked a series of questions about Novorossiya.
The first was whether respondents thought Novorossiya was a myth or historic fact. Implicitly this is a question that sought to get at whether they viewed the newly hyped imaginary as legitimate or not. Over half (52 percent) of the SE6 sample deem it a myth but 24 percent considered it a ‘historic fact’ with a further 22 percent giving a ‘hard to say’ response. (Much higher ratios, about three-quarters, in Crimea and in the Russian-backed de facto republics view it as a historic fact). To determine whether seeing Novorossiya as “historic fact’ might be an endorsement of separatism, we asked directly if the concept could be the basis for separatism of the sub-sample of 970 in the SE6 who saw it in these terms or who gave a ‘hard to say’ answer to the myth-or-fact question. Only 14 percent of this sub-sample agreed with this possibility but importantly 38 percent choose ‘hard to say’ indicating that the question was likely a sensitive one for them. Endorsing or considering the basis for separatism, we should appreciate, is profoundly politically incorrect in most contexts where a legitimate government remains in firm control.
We then posed a question to respondents about the use of the Novorossiya moniker giving them two declarative choices as well as the usual ‘hard to say’ and refuse options: (i) “it is Russian political technology to break up Ukraine” or (ii) “it is the manifestation of the fight of the population of southeast Ukraine for independence.” Only 18 percent in SE6 were willing to choose this latter option (for the graph comparison to Crimea see our earlier post here). Barely over half the population (51 percent) in SE6 viewed Novorossiya as Russian political technology, in effect a geopolitical scam manufactured by Russian power circles. This split opinion is hardly a resounding affirmation of the worldview of Kiev and many Western observers, suggesting the term and its genealogy resonated with some even if they did not say so explicitly.
Since Putin presumed that ethnicity and language was a major cleavage in southeast Ukraine, we examined this belief by sorting our 2003 respondents into four self-declared ethnicity and language categories: Ukrainians speaking only Ukrainian at home (22.6 percent), Ukrainians speaking Russian at home (40.7 percent), Ukrainians speaking both languages (17.4 percent) and those who self-declared as ethnic Russians (11 percent).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/25/what-people-in-southeast-ukraine-really-think-of-novorossiya/
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