The former Soviet administrative unit that emerged as independent Ukraine in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union was bounded by the exact borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). That is, it comprised a wholly unnatural polity whose borders and population had been assembled by successive Soviet leaders for the administrative convenience of their brutal communist dictatorship.
Once the external scaffolding of this Moscow disappeared, that construct quickly polarized along regional and linguistic lines. The red-and-blue electoral map below supplies the generic illustration: Western and central oblasts (blue) delivered overwhelming majorities to candidates oriented toward Ukrainian language and Western institutions, while eastern and southern oblasts (red) – from Kharkiv through the Donbas and along the Black Sea rim including Crimea – delivered equally lopsided majorities to candidates favoring closer Russian ties and greater status for the Russian language.
Accordingly, national results stayed reasonably close; regional electoral results did not. The pattern amounted to a standing de facto referendum for partition.
The blue territories of Galicia and Volhynia had spent centuries inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austrian Empire, developing under Greek-Catholic and later Polish institutions. The populations there had little affinity for both communism and Russian culture.
The red territories, by contrast, had been shaped by the Czarist Empire: Novorossiya, the Donbas, Kharkiv, and Crimea were settled or industrialized under Russian rule, with heavily Russian-speaking urban populations economically integrated with Russian economic markets and religiously tutored by the Russian Orthodox church.
Both zones carried scars from the depredations of the Second World War: The criss-cr0ssing of the lands first by the German occupation, then by Red Army reconquest. Those nightmarish experiences reinforced the older divergence.
In the first presidential election in December 1991 a recycled communist apparatchik, Leonid Kravchuk, won nationally with 61.6% of the vote on a national independence platform. Regional variation already existed – Kravchuk was stronger in the center and west, more pro-Russian candidates relatively stronger in the industrial east and Crimea.
But the simultaneous independence referendum that year and the popular relief from the oppression of Moscow rule masked the depth of the underlying split in the polity. So Kravchuk’s pro-independence moderation of 1991 did not last.
By the 2004 presidential election the cleavage had hardened. In the final December 2004 rerun, Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, received 15.1 million votes (52.0%) while the pro-Russian, Viktor Yanukovych, received 12.8 million votes (44.0 percent). The national margin was modest. But inside the regions, the vote gaps were huge.
