All the authors in this collection of essays on Ukrainian politics stress the lack of improvement in the political situation in recent years. The authors identify a range of reasons including pre-Soviet history, the Soviet legacy, national identity, and political gridlock. While the authors disagree slightly on the extent to which change is impossible or merely difficulty, none is hopeful. The challenge for scholars is to avoid moving from objective analysis to assigning political blame. Some authors identify specific political actors on whom they fix blame, while others focus on less personal structural factors. The relative weight of structure-based and agent-based explanations is important in assessing the prospects for change in the future, and the possible paths to it.

In the early years of independence, Ukraine’s crucial accomplishment was the establishment a degree of sovereignty and independence that few thought possible. Since that time, Ukrainian foreign policy has largely stagnated. Despite attempts of various internal leaders to adopt decisive policies, and despite significant external pressure, Ukraine has done very little. This paper reviews the first 20 years of Ukrainian foreign policy and accounts for the inertia that has developed. Ukraine’s foreign policy passivity results from three uneasy balances: an external balance between the pulls of Russia and the West; an internal balance between Ukraine’s regions, and an internal balance between forces of democracy and authoritarianism. These balances mean that while few are happy with Ukraine’s policy, no one has been able to decisively change it. While Ukraine’s domestic regional division is unlikely to change, change in the balance between domestic political forces or that between international forces could reduce the inertia in Ukrainian foreign politics, most likely leading to a drift toward Russia.

Since 1999, the post-Communist states have seen a series of attempts to overthrow semiauthoritarian governments, with the successful attempts known as the “colored revolutions.” However, not all such attempts have succeeded. This paper seeks to explain the variation in outcomes. Most accounts have focused on the development of grass-roots activist movements. The central argument here is that elites, and in particular security services, play a much more significant role in these revolutions than has generally been appreciated. This hypothesis is elaborated through a threshold model of protest, in which the central question is whether protests achieve a “tipping point” that makes them continue to grow larger until success is inevitable. The actions of elites, it is argued, play a decisive role in whether mass protests reach a tipping point. The argument is examined through a paired comparison of two failed attempts to overthrow governments through street protests (Serbia 1996e1997 and Ukraine 2001) with two successful cases (Serbia 1999 and Ukraine 2004). By studying cases with variation on the dependent variable, this paper seeks to improve the empirical and methodological basis of research on post-communist revolutions.

This paper considers Ukrainian politics from 1994 to 2004 (the term of Leonid Kuchma’s presidency) from the standpoint of ‘‘machine politics.’’ Many authors have argued that Ukraine and other post-Soviet states have combined elections with partly authoritarian regimes. The concept of machine politics, applied in this paper, helps explain how they do it. The paper then considers how and why the Kuchma machine collapsed in the ‘‘Orange Revolution’’ of 2004, and the comparative lessons of the Ukrainian experience.