A Moscow Perspective on Ukraine's Election By Sergei Markov Moscow Times Wednesday, October 27, 2004.
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It is a mistake to believe that the political-cultural divide in Ukraine runs between Russians and Ukrainians. In fact, the real cultural and civilizational boundary, as Samuel Huntington shows in "The Clash of Civilizations," is drawn between: Western Ukraine, which is Greek Catholic and which formerly was part of Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (accounting for 15 percent of the population), and Westernized Kievans (approximately 5 percent of the population) on the one side; and, on the other side, the rest of Ukraine, where the traditional Orthodox Russian-Ukrainian majority lives that, incidentally, does not speak literary Russian or literary Ukrainian, but a mixture of the two -- so-called Surzhik.
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This is interesting and fills in the ocean-wide gulf between true information and yawningly predictable story telling (i.e. one candidate is pro-Western and pro markets, the other is the new Stalin) corporate media 'consumers' are force fed here in the US.
Just yesterday for example, I listened to a report on American 'National Public Radio' about these events. The reporter on the scene in Kiev described the "hundreds of thousands of people" (about 250,000 I think he said) in the streets staging a "chestnut revolution". The thinly veiled implication was that this many people showing up in "bitterly cold weather" meant that Mr. Yanukovych was totally unpopular and perhaps on the way out. Of course, the reporter made no mention of the possibility this turnout represented a segment of the population - perhaps being even limited to a portion of the cosmopolitans of Kiev.
Crisply English speaking Yushchenko supporters (along with some curiously hyperbolic fellow from London) predicted Russian tanks and special forces would be deployed to stop this people's movement. There will be bloodshed, the pro Yushchenko folks said, because there was no way Putin would allow democracy to flower without a fight.
The news item began as a piece about Ukrainian elections but quickly morphed, as almost all American media stories about this region do, into a bizarre resuscitation of the ever more ancient Soviet Monsters versus Freedom Heroes meme.
.d.