Revisiting the Regional Factor in Post-Maidan Ukraine: Quantitative Analysis of the Nationwide Survey Data on Historical Memory: ―「ユーロマイダン革命」以後の社会調査データをもとに―

Abstract

Are there any experts who successfully predicted how the Ukrainian crisis would unfold after the Euromaidan revolution? On the one hand, the “Russian spring” project obvi-ously failed: Vladimir Putin’s call for consolidating “Novorussia” did not catch the hearts of people beyond the limited part of Donbass. For example, after the launch of anti-terrorist operations in spring 2014, even such a Russified eastern city as Dnipropetrovsk turned blue-and-yellow, full with volunteer citizens supporting the government forces, thereby exhibiting the rise of Ukrainian patriotism. However, that was not the end of the story. During the national parliament elections in October, 2014 in the same Dnipropetrovsk Oblast the Opposition Bloc consisting of former Party-of-Regions members that did not endorse the Euromaidan surpassed the president’s party, Petro Poroshenko Bloc. Other eastern regions such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia mirrored Dnipropetrovsk in their electoral behavior. These snapshot observations speak for them-selves: the social and political dynamics in Ukraine is much more complicated than is routinely described with the popular “east-west divide” discourse. Most them, however, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as well as the collapse of the USSR and the country’s independence. In the ordered logit estimation with these principal component scores, the effect of the regional factor was mediated by historical memory in all eastern regions in -Keywords: