Ukraine - Dual power is intrinsically unsustainable.

A Defining Moment in Ukraine's Future 

by Alexander J. Motyl

When, on April 4th, the Party of Regions responded to the opposition’s continued blockade of the parliamentary podium by leaving the Rada premises and setting up its own legislature on Bank Street, near the president’s office, it effectively created a condition of what the Bolsheviks once called “dual power.” Russia’s socialists did the exact same thing when, in the aftermath of the czar’s overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917, they established the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Petrograd. Lenin’s Bolsheviks used the Soviet to launch their own coup in November of that year.
If there’s one thing the Regionnaires know, it’s their Soviet history. Well-schooled in Communist Party lore, they knew that, in moving the Rada’s seat to Bank Street, they weren’t just responding to the democratic opposition’s filibusters. The Regionnaires had to know they were creating what Lenin understood as a “revolutionary situation”—an unstable condition in which the legitimate authorities are effectively challenged by revolutionaries. When I told an ex-Sovietologist of mine about this development, he responded with three short words: “That’s very bad.”

The reason it’s very bad is simple. Dual power is intrinsically unsustainable. You can’t have two parliaments or two presidents or two popes. Once a condition of such “binary opposition” emerges, there is no room for compromise. One side has to cave; one side has to prevail. Or the ultimate power holder, President Viktor Yanukovych, has to resolve the standoff by knocking heads together or by abolishing both bodies.

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