Russian vs. Ukrainian Transitions, 1990s

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 43-44: In Ukraine, as in Russia, the economy and public reaction to the dissolution of the USSR were the two key issues that turned national politics into a never-ending drama, casting president and parliament in opposing roles. But those issues played out differently in Ukraine, where, most importantly, the political elite enhanced rather than undermined the democratic institutions born out of the chaos of Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms. Russia’s “democratic moment” became an “era of democracy” in Ukraine. Leonid Kravchuk was never the revolutionary that Yeltsin had become during the late Soviet period. If Yeltsin had served in the course of his party career as a regional boss responsible for administering large administrative and economic entities such as Sverdlovsk oblast (province) and Moscow, Kravchuk was a quintessential apparatchik, running the propaganda department…