Ukraines Transition from Socialism to Capitalism - Essay Example

Ukraine’s Transition from Socialism to Capitalism Background: Since history, Ukraine has been raided and looted by several of its powerful neighboring countries, which moved the country away from the course of self-determination. One of the major events that marked a change in Ukraine’s political identity was the revolt of 1648. Following the revolt, the rulers of Ukraine turned to Russia for protection and hence laid down the path towards Russian imperialism. This colonialism made a new distinction among the workforce in Ukraine. A large-scale labor migration from Russia occurred which acquired high skill and better pay job opportunities while the domestic workers suffered from a low wage and bad working conditions. The protests against such unjust and exploitative attitude lead to the upheaval of the 1917-1920 and 1942-1947 revolution. The struggle weakened because of the withdrawal of the Bolshevik members of Ukraine. In October 1917, the revolutions of Russia and Ukraine fused but the leaders in the parliament, Rada, who were against the notion of a Russian workers’ republic, decelerated the progress towards a Ukrainian socialist uprising. The Rada had diverged so much from the objectives of the Ukrainian mass that during its disposition in 1918 (by the Red Army) it had already lost its ground of support. In this so-called defense of sovereignty, the incident that took place was that these Rada leaders gave Ukraine away to German, Austrian, and Polish occupations. The transformation The year 1920 saw another upsurge to dispose of Russian colonialism by the Ukrainian Communist protesters. However, with the strengthening of the powers of Stalin and Russia, the dynamics of centralism shattered the rest of the hopes of national equality. In the 1930’s, a mixture of rapid industrialization and enforced collectivization sowed the seeds of a mass aggression. Millions of people died in the false famine of 1932-33 and a considerable number were deported to Siberia. Those who thought to venerate, analyze, or dissent these tragic incidents were either imprisoned or tortured. The after effects of this famine created in the name of so-called socialism produced a generation resort to revolutionary nationalism. The revolution of 1942-1947 resurged against the German and Russian imperialism to achieve an independent and united country. The revolt came to an end in 1947 when the Russian and Polish Stalinists wiped the people from the areas of Western Ukraine, transporting over fifteen thousand people. In the year of 1972 Moscow attacked these revolutionaries who were considered to be national deviators and launched waves of arrests of Ukrainian protestors. All through the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Russian power and its subjugation increased and made scope for another resurgence in Ukraine (Ford, n.d.). The primary struggle of Ukraine was to achieve a socialistic economy but this quickly gave way to a new notion of capitalism. The movement of socialism started in 1988 and aimed to give Ukraine a republic where the farmers are the owner of land and workers the owner of factories. However, soon the movement converged to the idea of a free market economy, integration with the European Union and parliamentary democracy. This movement towards the struggle for capitalism gained momentum with the occurrence of cold war, which reinstated that there is factually no substitute for capitalism. Stalinism, the decline in Eastern Europe and the misery of the Third World gave new evidence of the collapse of socialism. During the period of 1980, neo-liberal ideas seeped into sheathes of the executive economists, planners, advisory committee and academicians of the Eastern Bloc, even flowing through the dissenting intellectuals and opponent movements the regimes had maltreated. This situation was aggravated by the fall of the socialist mission in the Western labour movements and increased due to the deficiency of a significant commonality movement among the anti-Stalin strugglers. With capitalism inscribed on the placard of the movement, an attempt to reinstate private capitalism was initiated. The fight for independence came to be based upon the concept of freedom that linked democracy with private possession and freedom with the idea of a free market. The Orange Revolution was instigated by the corruption prevailing in the ruling system of government, which was quite under pressure at that time. The government realized that without making an alliance with the national democratic forces it would not be able to sustain its rule and power in the country. To do so, the only way would be that it controlled the course from the control state-capitalist economy to a capitalist free-market economy. This led to the formation of a tacit alliance between the ruling government and the national democratic movement. Again, at that very time, an independent workers pressure group surfaced in eastern Ukraine that formed a coalition with the movement in Western Ukraine in support of independence. In the year of 1991 miners supported the struggle for independence by insisting that the republic take the authority ownership and management of factories. All this led to the crafting of conditions for an assertion of independence in the Rada on August 24, 1991 and the collapse of the USSR. In spite of the Russian threats, independence was largely endorsed which was reflected in a referendum on December 1, 1991 where 84 percent of the people took part and among them, 90 percent voted positive (Ford, n.d.). However, after getting its independence, when Ukraine decided upon a shift to a private capitalist economy, it was badly struck by the worldwide economic crisis of the early 1990’s. In 1994 the regime of Leonid Kuchma took action with severe measures, together with an agenda of privatization that forced open the state monopolies and facilitated the privileged and wealthy class to build up private business domains. This class organized themselves into mafia-styled groups receiving heavy protection from the state and accumulated huge amounts of capital in the 1990’s. Terms like “crony capitalism” and “clan regime” have been created to depict this new arrangement (Ford, n.d.). A different kind of politics evolved in the Ukrainian parliament under the new capitalistic system, which saw the Green Party being financed and supported by bankers and businessmen. There were other instances, which showed that the corrupt and criminal clans backed one or the other political party. For instance, the Kiev clan controlled the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (United), the Donetsk ran the Party of Regions and the Dnipropetrovs’k clan backed the Labour Party. These oligarchs financed and bribed Kuchma, and he in turn molded the administration to accommodate these provisions. By the year 2004, over three hundred out of the four hundred fifty members of the parliament acquired millions of dollars and cushioned themselves well from criminal prosecution. The corrupt state authorities along with the clans started to dominate all the vital markets and disallowed small business from functioning freely without giving out a part of their profits to them. The change in the constitution of the parliament was called by international capital. Kuchma assigned a government under Viktor Yushchenko and the monetary policies designed by him speeded up privatization and brought the accumulation of capital in the shadow economy under their firm control. Yushchenko supported a greater free market economy to attract more foreign. Dissent increased with the assassination of journalist Georgiy Gongadze who was a critic of the oligarchs in 2000. This brought in a new chapter of struggle headed by the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) in opposition to the government and Yushchenko. The SPU has around forty thousand members with a combination of reformist social democratic and Marxian socialist ideals. The SPU defined the post-independence nation of Ukraine as one of a criminal nation. When Kuchma was constitutionally disallowed to the third term of presidentship, he supported Viktor Yanukovich to stand in the elections. Yanukovich’s decision to contest the presidential election was also supported by the government of Vladimir Putin in Russia. The opposition party was led byYushchenko. Particularly the youth and speakers from the western regions of Ukraine, who were mainly opposed to the corrupt Kuchma administration, encouraged Yushchenko’s bid for the presidential election. However, Yushchenko got much less support in the principally Russian-speaking eastern areas of Ukraine, where Yanukovich was more powerful. Most of the workers in that region depend on industries strongly tied to Russia and did not back Yushchenko’s free market recommendations or his campaign’s petition to Ukrainian chauvinism. From the time when Yushchenko was sworn into the bureau in January 2005, he has crushed the illusions of all those young persons who supported him in 2004. Since the time when the reactionary political nature of his government has become obvious his popularity has plunged. Yushchenko has been in-charge of a regime as fraudulent as that of Kuchma. Corruption, cronyism, bribery, and the buttressing the interest of a small number of oligarchs have persisted unabated. The nation’s politics continue to be dominated by the extremely wealthy oligarchs, who use the pedals of state power to press on their own interests and work out their issues with their rivals. In Ukraine, the workers’ economic and social situations for have gone down since Yushchenko came to power coupled with the adverse impacts of the economic crisis of 2007 and the following global recession. The industrial exports of Ukraine have declined sharply and the nation’s financial system continues to be trapped in a crisis (Green, 2009). There have been two groups of nations that have transited from socialism to capitalism. The first group consists of the wealthier countries like Poland, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Estonia. These nations have attained the level of OECD countries with regard to privatisation and transformation to market economy and have made a contribution to the global economy. Owing to the conditionality imposed by the European Union, these countries are moving to a comparatively greater level of complimentarity. The other group consists of the relatively poorer nations like Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Turkmenistan. These nations suffer from remarkably high-income differentials and huge levels of poverty and joblessness. They possess the features of dwindling income, primary sector exporting nations with very little integration with the global economy and above all a very low level of nationally source investment. These nations are also typified as hybrid states or markets that have an uncoordinated sort of market capitalism. Most of these socialist countries that have transformed into capitalists are subjected to a greater level of state control compared to market capitalist countries (Lane, 2005). Concluding remarks Ukraine suffered a continuous fall in economic efficiency with respect to its inconsistent market reforms whereas, Poland underwent a non-continuous fall for sometime owing to its radical market reform policies and after that faced a continuous and rapid growth. The most persistent and durable burst of economic efficiency was seen in Ukraine where in the first nine years of transition the productivity of the workforce declined twofold. Ukraine only holds a mere portion (7.7 percent) of Poland’s Foreign Direct Investment per capita (Goncharuk, 2006, p. 130; Lane, Oding and Welfens, 2003, p.258) Reference 1. Ford, C, n.d., “The Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s freedom struggles today and in the mirror of history”, Available from: http://newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=339 (Accessed on Jan 14, 2009). 2. Goncharuk, 2006, “Economic Efficiency in Transition: The Case of Ukraine”, Available from: http://www.fm-kp.si/zalozba/ISSN/1581-6311/4_129-143.pdf (Accessed on Jan 14, 2009). 3. Lane, D, 2007, “Post-State Socialism: A Diversity Of Capitalism”, Available from: http://www.uws.ac.uk/schoolsdepts/business/cces/documents/AbstractPaisley.rtf (Accessed on Jan 14, 2009). 4. Lane, D. T., Oding N and Welfens, P. J. J., 2003, Real and financial economic dynamics in Russia and eastern Europe, Springer 5. Green, N, 2009, “Five Years Since Ukraine’s Orange Revolution”, Available from: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/ukra-d28.shtml (Accessed on Jan 14, 2009). Read More