Oct 6, 2026

The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy

Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism

Nataliya Kibita

Hosted by Megan Buskey

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Summary

Ukraine and Russia are today at opposite points of the political spectrum: Despite 300 years of contact with Russian authoritarian politics, Ukraine's post-independence period has been characterised by pluralism. To explain why and how Ukraine's and Russia's paths diverged, this monograph investigates the century-long and Soviet origins of regionalism in Ukraine, which the author argues are at the foundation of the modern Ukrainian institutional system. Drawing on unused archival material, the book re-examines the relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and the Ukrainian regions in the period from spring 1917 to summer 1994 to demonstrate how interlinked political and economic incentives and constraints determined the opportunities and institutional interests of both the Ukrainian leadership and those of the Ukrainian regions, and how this institutional framework affected in turn the dynamic of the relationship between the central leadership in Moscow, the Ukrainian leadership, and the regions. The result - weak central authority and pronounced regionalism - was Ukraine's Soviet legacy, and the established power of regional clans made (post-Soviet) Ukrainian politics resistant to Russian-style authoritarianism, even when the Soviet centralised party-state system collapsed.

Nataliya Kibita is a visiting academic at the University of Oxford in Russian and East European Studies. She is the author of Soviet Economic Management under Khrushchev: The Sovnarkhoz Reform (Routledge, 2013) and The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023).