The last time Ukraine was separated into competing states was in 1917 when Ukrainian national leaders proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kiev and the Bolsheviks established a rival Soviet republic in the eastern city of Kharkiv. When the Red Army finally secured Soviet rule over Ukraine after a prolonged civil war, Bolshevik authorities placed the capital in Kharkiv, viewing the eastern, industrialized part of the republic as more hospitable to Soviet rule. After wartime additions of western territory, Nikita Khrushchev reassigned the Crimea to Ukraine from Soviet Russia in 1954, acknowledging Ukraine’s geographic and historical economic ties to the peninsula (and possibly as a reward for Ukrainian Communist support for his leadership).

But Ukraine in 2014 is not the Ukraine of 1917 and 1954. The Soviet government restricted (but did not curtail) Ukrainian national culture and could be brutal towards the republic’s population, but residents of the Ukrainian republic nevertheless increasingly recognized the reality of a Ukrainian territorial identity regardless of their ethnicity, language use, or views on the imperative of statehood. Twenty-three years of post-Soviet Ukrainian independence have only strengthened this sense of identity.

Talk of possible civil war and the division of Ukraine into “pro-Russia” and “pro-West” territories has taken place ever since the country achieved independence in 1991. Those who suggest this view are fond of reproducing maps suggesting a Ukrainian and Russian linguistic divide.

A more recent innovation has been the insertion of a map of the 2010 presidential elections that is supposed to bolster evidence of a politically motivated linguistic split (majority Russian-speaking provinces in the southeastern and southern parts of Ukraine are correlated to provinces whose electorate voted for the now ousted president Viktor Yanukovych).

When deputies of Ukraine’s eastern provincial assemblies met in Kharkiv on Feb. 22 to defend the “constitutional order” against what they viewed as a radical, nationalist opposition in Kiev, their assembly brought to mind the history of the 1917 divide. Recent demonstrations in Sevastopol, the naval base of the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea, in favor of the territory’s union with the Russian Federation also prompt reminders of Khrushchev’s “gift” to Ukraine.

Ukraine is perhaps closer to a split than it has ever been in the post-Soviet period. The interim president, Oleksandr Turchynov, an associate of former prime minister and jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, has warned of the dangers of separatism in Ukraine and suggested anyone fomenting secession will be held criminally liable. But there are multiple reasons to think this will not come to pass.

First, the linguistic divide of Ukraine is vastly overplayed. Russian is widely spoken on the streets of Kiev and among protestors on the Maidan (Independence Square). Leaders of the opposition, such as former heavyweight boxing champion turned politician, Vitali Klitschko, are Russian speakers first. To speak Russian does not mean a rejection of Ukraine. Turchynov and Tymoshenko, both hail from predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.

Second, a vote for Yanukovych in the 2010 elections was not a vote for union with Russia or even a vote for membership in a Russian-led customs union. After all, Yanukovych ran on a platform backing integration with the EU and many in eastern Ukraine took him at his word.

Finally, although the demonstrations in Crimea in favor of a union with Russia are significant, they are not new. Crimea has long seen a history of such protests. Crimea is different from many parts of Russian-speaking Ukraine in that ethnic Russians form an absolute majority of the population. But Ukrainians and ethnic Tatars constitute a not insignificant 24.4 per cent and 12.1 per cent of the population respectively and a Tatar political movement supporting the maintenance of ties with Kiev is particularly well organized.

Furthermore, Crimea is recognized as an autonomous republic under a 1998 constitution for the territory that guarantees protection for the Russian language. There is nothing to suggest that the ousting of Yanukovych will alter Crimea’s autonomy and it arguably enjoys greater rights than any autonomous territory in the Russian Federation. While announced Russian military maneuvers near Ukraine’s borders and the recent seizure of the Crimean parliament and major airports in the territory by an unknown, well-armed “militia” are rightly alarming to Kiev, Russia does not ultimately covet Ukrainian territory or want to own Ukraine’s problems.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of Ukraine’s integrity is the very border that Yanukovych had difficulty crossing. Yanukovych fled first east to Kharkiv, then to his home base in Donetsk, but was denied further transit to Russia by border guards at the airport. He then traveled to Balaclava, outside of Simferopol, where his security detail left him. Although he has since resurfaced in Russia, Yanukovych sought and failed to find initial refuge in the very parts of Ukraine that are said to be on the verge of splitting away.

Ukraine’s new leaders must address very real regional tensions that persist. Mykhailo Dobkin, the governor of the Kharkiv province, has warned that the Ukrainian parliament, cajoled by the anti-Yanukovych opposition, has passed laws “that threaten all those who do not accept fascism and Nazism” and warned against possible new strictures on the use of the Russian language. It seems highly unlikely that the Russian language would ever be under threat in overwhelmingly Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine.

What Dobkin’s comments speak to is a different history, the legacy of the Second World War, which remains a politically contentious issue in Ukraine. Some of the hardcore protestors in Kiev represent the extreme political right; they claim Ukrainian nationalist organizations of the wartime era as their antecedents and paradoxically have little regard for integration with the EU. But these groups are still a minority among the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the Maidan since the protests first begin in November. And the protests were not limited to Kiev. Similar protests, in smaller numbers, took place in predominantly Russian-speaking Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya and Odessa.

In the end, the protests in Ukraine have little to do with a West versus Russia split. The prospective trade agreement with the EU represented an opportunity, however optimistic, for Ukrainians to force their government to face the endemic problem of corruption that has plagued the country since independence. Yanukovych’s decision to unilaterally back away from an agreement his government had been preparing to sign exposed his disregard for democratic accountability and own political callousness.

The protesters on the Maidan ran ahead of the leaders of the opposition in their ambitions. Unlike the Orange Revolution of 2004, this was a protest movement that resisted orchestration by political parties. The corruption of the Yanukovych presidency is now on view for all of Ukraine to see at his sumptuous residency outside Kiev. The trick now for Ukraine’s new rulers is to convince all Ukrainian citizens that they have a stake in a change, that further reform will benefit the entire country and proceed transparently according to the rule of law.

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This is a formidable challenge, but Ukraine’s fracture should not be in the offing.

Matthew Pauly is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, a former political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, and author of Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–34 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Forthcoming, October 2014).

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