Go East, Old Man – Part II: Opting Out of Opting Out

Go East, Old Man is a four-part series by Peter Emerson, aged 82. It follows his mainly overland journey to COP29 in Baku, an honorary doctorate in Tbilisi, the Tibetans in Dharamshala and on into China, before he comes home via Moscow and Ukraine. Throughout, he makes the case for multi-option voting in place of yes-or-no ballots.

My fifth visit to China in 2019 was all overland, and in November, I got a minibus taxi in Tbilisi to then cross the Caucasus mountains – one of the most beautiful borders on the planet – to Vladikavkaz, in Russia.  Ah, passport control; “Zdravstvuite,” said I, the Russian word for ‘hi’.  “Come here,” was the blunt reply.

I was taken upstairs to be interrogated; questions included silly ones, like, “Where was your grandmother born?” but these guys had the power to deport me, so I only asked, “Is that important?”  Two hours later, they let me go.  Back in the minibus, I said, “Sorry,” while the driver added, “It would have been better if you didn’t speak Russian.”

On the train to Moscow, in the middle of nowhere, we passed through two, brand new railway stations; no towns, not even a nearby village… but both were close to the Ukrainian border, strategic preparations for the war Putin was already planning?  Accordingly, when I returned home in April 2021, I expressed my concerns to the media.

In 2025 – and by this time, Slavs (and others from Russia) were killing Slavs in Ukraine – so I went to China via India, and thus came to Russia only on my way home, from the East: the Trans-Siberian left Ulaanbaatar on 27^th Sept.  Chinese trains are of the bullet variety; in Russia, the old chuff-chuff still chuffs, but the five-day journey gave me the opportunity to meet people, and even run a play group (under the careful eye of mama, naturally worried about her kids associating with a strange, bearded foreigner).  Another passenger intervened: a much longer-bearded Russian Orthodox priest who warned the children of the dangers of talking with strange strangers, strashni inostrantsi.

  In Moscow, I gave an anti-war lecture in a major University, in English, but one of my slides was Убить нельзя, (Ubit nel’zya, my version of ‘Thou shalt not kill’); I chatted with the folks at a memorial to Boris Nemtsov, Борис Немцов, the dissident who in 2015 was assassinated in the centre of Moscow; and in a cemetery in one of Moscow’s suburbs, I visited the grave of Alexei Navalny, Алексей Навальный, who died in an Arctic prison colony in 2024.

Going from Russia to Ukraine, directly, in war, was obviously impossible.  So, despite that earlier hassle on the border in the Caucasus, on 11^th Oct, I went back to Vladikavkaz.  “Tickets please,” is what you sometimes hear on a train, but not on this one: “Passports!”  And no ‘please’.  I was using my Irish one, for obvious good reason, and I was ok.  The next passenger also had two passports, one Russian and one Ukrainian, and even a third, Armenian.  So just in case his Russian self fell out with his Ukrainian self, he could ask his Armenian self to reconcile them… unselfishly?

From Tbilisi, I got a train to the Black Sea coast, a ferry to Bulgaria, a bus up to Odesa, which I’d first visited in 1987, and another one to Mykolaiv, where I’d been a long-term election observer in 2006.  Here I gave the first of my two lectures in Ukraine.  The war was ever present, and sure enough, half-way through my talk in the Petro Mohyla Black Sea State University, a demonstration of electronic preferential voting, with ballots displayed on the full screen and so on, there was a power-cut.

In Kyiv, first things first, I went for a coffee with Anastasia, whom I knew from Belfast.  We’d met at the first NI anti-Russian war demo, a couple of weeks after the Russian invasion of February 2022, where I’d spoken of a Gandhian response to Russia’s tanks, of famous old people – politicians like Mary Robinson and Barack Obama, religious leaders such as the Pope, a Rabbi and an Imam – walking to Moscow and fasting.

Kyiv is full of hills, many of the streets are cobbled and, in November ’25, it was cold.  I gave another talk, now in the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; and because of the war, it was all on-line.  I spoke on the importance of maintaining consensus in wartime.  My work done, I got a bus to Berlin on 19^th.

There are many parallels to be learnt from the conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Caucasus, the Balkans and now Ukraine.  And maybe the biggest one is that important questions on sovereignty and such like should not be ‘resolved’ in simplistic binary votes: “Are you ‘this’ or ‘that’?” – especially when you might be either neither or both.

So let me take you back awhile, to my first visit to Ukraine in 1984, when the USSR was still mighty.  As (a middle-aged) guest of Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation, I spent a week in Crimea, living on a collective farm, visiting Yalta to recall the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill meeting of 1945, and then a few days in Kyiv.  I returned to the capital in ’87, to study Russian, which was a bit like learning French in Berlin, but the Union, the USSR, was still intact, and a student could study Russian in the capital of many a Soviet Republic.  The times, though, were a’changing.

Now according to the right of self-determination, a people (whatever that is) may hold a referendum and, if a majority say ‘yes’, they may declare independence and opt out.  50% + 1, and all that.  In the 1920s, (albeit without a formal vote), Ireland opted out of the UK.  In ’91, Ukraine got out of the USSR, with a referendum, as did Georgia and all the other Republics, so to leave the Russian Federation (in lands not federated but conquered, oh, years ago).  In like manner, in ’92, Bosnia left Yugoslavia in another binary ballot.

But if, in that majority, a minority then wants to opt-out of opting out and to opt back in again, they too may hold a vote…  It’s all a bit like those famous Russian dolls, matryoshki: inside every doll (majority), there’s another smaller doll (minority).  Referendums everywhere could have led to a break-up of the Russian Federation, so the Kremlin used to call the process ‘matryoshki nationalism’.  In 2006, however, when South Ossetia ‘voted’ for independence from Georgia, Putin changed his mind; he now supported self-determination… sometimes: not for Georgia opting out of the USSR, but for Abkhazia and South Ossetia trying to opt out of Georgia… and maybe, later on, opting to return to ‘Mother Russia’.

In summary, 100 years ago, Northern Ireland opted out of Ireland opting out of the UK; in ’91, Republika Srpska tried to opt out of Bosnia opting out of Yugoslavia, Kosova out of Serbia, South Ossetia out of Georgia, wars everywhere, Croatia, Bosnia, Abkhazia, all bloody dolls.  Lessons unlearnt, in 2014, a region of western Donetsk called Dobropillia (an area bigger than our little Northern Ireland) tried to opt out of Donetsk trying to opt out of Ukraine opting out of the USSR: four little dolls, and again, all were bloody.

In August 1991, after the downfall of Gorbachev in Moscow, the USSR was falling apart, and the First Party Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Stanyslav Hurenko declared, “Today we will vote for independence, because if we don’t, we’re in the shit.”  Hence the  referendum of 1991, in which every region voted in favour by 80%+ … except one, Crimea, only 54%.  Such a narrow margin should have meant, (I would argue), there was no consensus; that the topic should be re-run, with maybe another option or two on the ballot, ideas like ‘joint authority’ or ‘independence’.

In 2014, after Russia’s man in Kyiv, Viktor Yanukovich had fled, Putin organised a second Crimean referendum, and the peninsula, having narrowly opted to stay in Ukraine, now, supposedly, opted out, as did Donetsk and Luhansk.  2014, of course, was also the year of Scotland’s referendum, and Russian separatists in Luhansk used the word Scotland, ‘Shotlandiya’ Шотландия, to ‘justify’ the unjustifiable.

None of these Ukrainian 2014 votes were recognised internationally; many complained of the ‘little green men’ and other abuses, but few if any critiqued the binary nature of the ballot.  In 2022, Putin changed his mind, again, and in another referendum, Donetsk now voted, not to be independent (from Ukraine), but to be dependent (on Russia).  In a nutshell, in many instances, the right of self-determination is not a way of resolving disputes; as often as not, it exacerbates them.

In like manner, here in NI, maybe we too should think about a non-binary methodology, and discuss other options, and maybe the Good Friday Agreement’s border poll could include a compromise or few.  After all, it does seem odd that the authors of that Agreement should argue that we, the voters, in any election, should be able to vote across the gender gap, the political divide and even the sectarian chasm, so we should keep the PR-STV electoral system; but on decision-making, there is to be no such pluralism, no, no, everything has to be binary, ‘yes-or-no’, ‘for-or-against’, no compromise!

Following on from Ian Paisley’s “Ulster says ‘NO’!” protest, the late Dr. John Robb of the New Ireland Group hosted Belfast’s first research into multi-option voting – the People’s Convention of 1986.  It was an open public ‘experiment in consensus voting’ with some 200 participants, everything (except the DUP) from SF to the UDA.  They proposed options, 12 of them; they examined each in separate workshops; and then, back in plenary, they voted, either ‘yes’ for something or, ‘yes’ in their order of preference, for a few things, but nobody voted ‘no’.

After all, in theory, to find the people’s will, we should first ask everybody, “what is your individual will?”  If they vote ‘no’ in a binary ‘yes-or-no’ vote on only one option, then nobody knows what they want; we only know what they don’twant.  In other words, a ‘yes-or-no’ vote cannot be democratic, unless there are only two options.  “Shall we drive on the left or the right?” is fine.  But a binary Brexit, when the UK could have been in the EU, the EEA, the CU or the WTO, was a load of another word starting with ‘b’.

In 1991, with Michael D our guest speaker, John Robb’s endeavours were repeated in another cross-community experiment in consensus, now with electronic preferential voting.  Our main guest was from Sarajevo – Petar Radji-Histić – and this was six months before the war in Bosnia.  We tried to say, please, no binary referendum in Bosnia, not least because it was divided into three: Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic, 40:30:20.  So there was no majority.  We warned in vain.  The vote was held.  It started the war.

Back to NI, and John suggested an alternative option for the proposed Belfast Agreement’s border poll: a ‘W-I-S-E, Wales-Ireland-Scotland-England federation’, not unlike the Nordic Council.  Politics, after all, is the art of compromise.  Lessons should be learnt.  At the very least, a compromise option or few should be both ‘on the table’ and the ballot paper.

In 1988, a Moscow paper called Nagorno-Karabakh “our Northern Ireland.” In Part III, Peter Emerson, the son of an English Catholic and an Irish Protestant, asks why “this or that?” questions divide us, from Belfast to the Balkans. He makes the case for multi-option, preferential voting, which lets people vote with each other rather than against.