Interethnic Relations and Ethnic Tolerance in Ukraine.

The data obtained also made it possible to establish a significant link between the socioeconomic attitudes of people and their level of general national/ethnic tolerance.

8. Influence of SocioEconomic Orientations of Population on National/Ethnic Tolerance

Put in its most general form, the interconnection between socioeconomic orientations and national tolerance is characterized by the following regularity: the more people are oriented towards market orms in the economy, the higher their national/ethnic tolerance level tends to be. As an example we can provide data that illustrate the interdependence between general attitude to economic orms and general national/ethnic tolerance index: those people who advocate a complete transition to a market economy have a lower index of general national/ethnic intolerance than those who would like to return to the socialist economy of the Brezhnev era of stagnation (see Table 9).

Table 9

Influence of SocioEconomic Orientations on National/Ethnic Tolerance

“What is your attitude to economic transformations in Ukraine?”Index of overall national intolerance (on a scale from 1–7)

There must be a complete transition to the market economy4.15

There must be only some individual orms4.62

The country’s economy should be brought back to the state it was in at the beginning of the perestroika4.61

A similar trend has been revealed in the analysis of the interdependence between national tolerance and other indicators of socioeconomic orientations. For example, national/ethnic tolerance is lower among those people who per low prices and the accompanying shortage of products and goods’ than in those who per ‘high prices and the accompanying sufficient supply of goods and food products’. National/ethnic tolerance is lower in those people who have negative attitudes towards business, entrepreneurship, private property, etc.