In the decade after 1991, the paramount feature of life in the new Ukraine was change.
Change is usually gradual and incremental. In Ukraine, it was neither. Throughout the century, the country experienced either too much or too little change. The Revolution and Civil War of 1917–20, the Stalinist “Second Revolution” of the 1930s, and the devastation of the Second World War brought upheavals of the most radical and traumatic kind.
Moreover, in the second half of the century, stagnation transformed the Soviet Union into one of the most conservative societies in the world. A similar dichotomy between transformation and stagnation emerged in the 1990s. This time, however, the two phenomena were compressed into a narrow time span; not only did they occur simultaneously, but they were often interrelated.After independence, many Ukrainians hoped for a swift transition to democracy and a market economy. But this required revolutionary changes in the Soviet system. And in 1991 there was no revolution: there was a collapse. What followed was the disintegration of the old order, especially its social, economic, and institutional structures. It was this depressing experience – the slow, painful disappearance of a way of life – that most touched the lives of ordinary Ukrainians throughout the decade. Simultaneously, elements of the new order – independent statehood, democratic forms, if not practices, disparate elements of a market economy (or, at least, of consumerism) – appeared. The benefits of these transformations were slow to reach the general populace. Indeed, many blamed them for the grinding poverty, corruption, profiteering, and crime that inundated society. Especially among the elderly, nostalgia for the old order was widespread. Thus, much of the decade witnessed a precarious wavering between old and new, of leaving one shore and not reaching the other, of society cast adrift and barely staying afloat.
