Ukraine: We've Forgotten that for Hundreds of Years Parts of Eastern Europe Were Self-Governing Republics

[Mr. Rostowski is professor of economics at the Central European University, Budapest and a trustee of the CASE Foundation, Warsaw.]

The massive demonstrations on the streets of Kiev, which forced President Leonid Kuchma to concede free and fair elections in Ukraine, and which have now been crowned by Viktor Yushchenko's victory, were only the latest act in a 500-year old conflict between constitutional government and autocracy in the lands stretching from the Vistula river to the Ural mountains.

It is usually forgotten in the West that Eastern Europe long had its own, homegrown constitutional forms of government. From the 13th century the city of Novgorod was a wealthy trading republic that came to rule a quarter of Russia. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an elective monarchy with a powerful parliament and autonomous provincial diets, and Transylvania elected its Prince and had self-governing cities within its borders. Even the Duchy of Prussia had a functioning Diet (local parliament) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Of course, in these constitutional regimes voting rights were limited to the nobility or rich merchants, but that was also largely the case at the time in Britain and Holland. For three centuries, the voting (noble) population of Poland-Lithuania exceeded that of Britain several times over. The onslaught against constitutionalism in the region was launched by Ivan III (the Great), the Grand Duke of Muscovy, who conquered Novgorod in 1477. Over the next 300 years Muscovite Russia, later joined by the autocracies of Austria and Prussia, destroyed one East European constitutional regime after another, until the last of them disappeared with the third partition of Poland in 1795. There is little doubt that the triumph of imperial autocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries helped pave the way for communist totalitarianism in the 20th century.

A key turning point in these developments was the Cossack uprising in Ukraine in 1648. The Sich Cossacks, a self-governing community of escaped serfs turned warriors, wanted voting rights and autonomy within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Blind class hatred prevented the Polish nobility from accepting these demands for equality, and in 1654 by the Treaty of Pereiaslav, just over 350 years ago, the Cossacks placed themselves under the protection of the Russian czar. Not surprisingly, with time they were deprived of the freedom they had sought.

This background makes what has happened in Kiev all the more fitting. ...