A Weird Day
May 4, 2007 – 8:22 amToday has proven to be one of those weird days. We all have them, don’t we? (Understandably, some of us may not want to admit this). The day was full of unplanned coincidences.
I had spent most of the day writing a chapter of my Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution book. The chapter dealt with attitudes to the opposition in the thirteen years of Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma’s rule. The chapter began with a section on how Ukrainian dissidents were both the largest proportional group of any Soviet nationality in the gulag but at the same time they originated primarily in only western and central Ukraine. Is it any coincidence that the Orange Revolution primarily encompassed this same region.
Ukraine’s rulers found it uncomfortable to deal with its post-Soviet ‘dissidents’ as their gut instinct was to deal with them as they done in the USSR. But, the gulag was no more and the new buzzwords to be repeated to the IMF and Western governments were ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’. Nevertheless, as the succession crisis of 2004 approached the old guard increasingly fell back on its deeply ingrained Soviet political culture when dealing with the opposition by depicting them as ‘extremists’, ‘destructive opposition’ and ‘Nashists’ (a play on Nazis from Our Ukraine).
The post-Soviet era has not brought any lustration, the opening up of files (except those from the 1930s of people long dead) or any atonement for crimes against humanity. NKVD and KGB retirees receive pensions while former UPA soldiers still do not.
My last writing project of the day was an article for Eurasian Daily Monitor (www.jamestown.org/edm/) on the Ukrainian crisis. The article was quite optimistic in tone and argued that the tide was turning in President Viktor Yushchenko’s favour. Although I am glad that Yushchenko will emerge victorious over the anti-democratic coalition it will not resolve Ukraine’s deep moral problems.
As a political scientist and policy adviser I understand why odious figures such as Svyatoslav Piskun and Stepan Havrysh have been returned to important positions by the president. Yushchenko needs a broad array of allies in his battle with the Donetsk mafia. That is why he also has solicited support from other oligarchs: the Industrial Union of Donbas, Viktor Pinchuk’s Interpipe and Igor Kolomoyskiy’s Pryvat.
But, I am not an Ivory Tower academic. The return of Piskun as prosecutor puts paid to any hopes of Ukraine’s ruling elites being tried for abuse of office in the Kuchma era. A full investigation into the Georgii Gongadze murder will never be completed.
In the evening I went to see the German film ‘The Lives of Others’ (www.sonyclassics.com/thelivesofothers/). Ironically, I went to see it with Jarko Koshiw, the author of the only book on the Gongadze murder The Beheaded. The film is an incredibly powerful portrayal of the work of the GDR Stasi secret police and how it destroyed countless lives. By 1989, when the GDR collapsed, the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants. One in fifty GDR citizens spied on their fellow countrymen, a figure only higher in the USSR.
The end of the film shows a writer who goes to the Stasi archives to read the numerous files collected on him by Stasi informants in the GDR, one of whom is his girlfriend who committed suicide. Reading the files he recognizes that one of the Stasi officers had secretly protected him. Finding the ex-Stasi officer in a thankless job delivering free newspapers the writer plans to say ‘Thank you’ to the ex-Stasi officer but is unable to approach him. Instead, he writes a novel that thanks the Stasi officer in a cryptic way. The film ends with the ex-Stasi officer buying the book which has an acknowledgement to him.
Ukraine is very far from the post-communist environment of the GDR. The post-Orange Revolution environment has shown that Ukraine’s ruling elites, both orange and blue, have no interest in morally evaluating the recent past while having every interest in staying above the law. It has proven easy for President Yushchenko to morally denounce Stalinist crimes but impossible for him to denounce those of the Kuchma era.
A country that cannot investigate and punish the organizers of Gongadze’s murder cannot expect to escape Eurasia and join Europe. Piskun will assist in achieving Yushchenko’s victory but he will never fulfill the demands of millions of Ukrainians who stood on the maidan in winter 2004. I therefore remain optimistic that Yushchenko will win this crisis but remain sadly pessimistic about Ukraine rejoining Europe.
Ukraine is not Russia, as Kuchma told us in 2004, but it is also not even the GDR.
13 Responses to “A Weird Day”
thankyou for speaking truth to power and honoring the people and values behind the Orange Revolution.
dlw
By dlw on May 4, 2007
Let me jump in with a few corrections: Ihor Kolomoisky runs Pryvat; Viktor Pinchuk runs Interpipe.
And Viktor Yanukovych runs for Parliament — again:)
By Taras R on May 4, 2007
So whats your point. I know this.
TIDE SHIFTS IN PRESIDENT’S FAVOR IN UKRAINE CRISIS
Once seen as a lame duck, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko now is out-maneuvering the Anti-Crisis coalition (ACC) and the government of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. During the last week the president has reappointed Syatoslav Piskun as prosecutor, removed the deputy head of the Constitutional Court and a second member of the Court by presidential decree, and appointed a loyalist, Stepan Havrysh, to the Court. He also issued a decree rescheduling early parliamentary elections from May 27 to June 24 (see EDM, May 3).
Piskun and Havrysh had been allies of former president Leonid Kuchma before joining Yushchenko’s steam. Piskun was prosecutor for the first ten months of 2005 and was elected to parliament in 2006 as part of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. His defection to Yushchenko and appointment as prosecutor is a defeat for Yanukovych. The defections will be widely seen among Ukraine’s elites as a power shift in Yushchenko’s favor.
Havrysh is a senior representative of the Kharkiv clan, the intellectual center of eastern Ukraine. On the eve of his appointment he had ridiculed the parliamentary resolution in support of simultaneous parliamentary and presidential elections as “political hysterics.†Simultaneous elections would be legally impossible to undertake, he argued, as this would leave a vacuum as to who was running the country.
The defections increase Yushchenko’s ability to negotiate from a position of strength with the Party of Regions and to compete with them in elections in eastern Ukraine. Yushchenko already has the support of former Kuchma loyalist and pro-Western national security expert Volodymyr Horbulin. Former presidential secretariat head Oleksandr Zinchenko has been reappointed as his adviser.
Similar shifts in Yushchenko’s favor are also emerging in the business sector. Dnipropetrovsk oligarchs Viktor Pinchuk (Interpipe) and Igor Kolomoyskiy (Pryvat), who until 2005 were mortal enemies, have now created a joint venture to manage the Nikopol ferro-alloy plant over which they were in severe dispute in 2005. Both are now pro-Yushchenko loyalists.
The ACC had banked on encouraging divisions to widen between the radical and moderate wings of the Orange camp. But instead, the revived orange coalition, which signed an opposition agreement on February 24, has remained solid.
The ACC had also mistakenly assumed that Yushchenko would retreat from his demand for early elections. His second presidential decree on early elections, which was legally prepared in a more professional manner, has convinced them that this step is also unlikely.
The ACC are concerned about the tough tone Yushchenko took in a speech on April 29, in which he promised to punish anyone who fails to fulfill his second decree. Prosecutor Piskun has pledged to ensure that this decree is implemented.
The ACC, or the two left parties in it (Socialists, Communists), could still call for a boycott of the elections. However, this would open up the possibility of a complete Orange takeover of the new parliament. In Ukraine’s full proportional system any boycott would mean that the parties that took part and crossed the 3% threshold would obtain a larger proportion of the final seat distribution.
A complete Orange takeover of parliament would have two consequences. First, the Orange camp could annul recent constitutional reforms on the division of power and adopt legislation in support of NATO membership. Second, it could lead to greater regional divisions in Ukraine, with eastern Ukrainians feeling excluded from the political process.
The Yushchenko camp clearly hopes that any boycott would only be undertaken by parties on the left end of the political spectrum, which have everything to lose in an early election. Opinion polls show that the Socialists — with 1% support — would be wiped out as a political force and fail to enter parliament for the first time since they were established in 1991. The Communists might still scrape through.
Polls show that the Party of Regions will again come in first with about one-third of the vote. In a proportional system this does not signify that they would automatically create the coalition and government, as they could be still out-flanked by Orange parties.
Yanukovych is likely to personally lose, as he would only be prime minister if the ACC prevailed. The Tymoshenko bloc’s first preference is an Orange coalition, but it is unofficially willing to enter a grand coalition that would create a government of national unity. The stumbling block would be who would receive the post of prime minister, which neither Yushchenko nor Tymoshenko would return to Yanukovych.
The Tymoshenko bloc is banking on increasing its support to the 30% mark by attracting Socialist voters and increasing its support in eastern and southern Ukraine. Our Ukraine is likely to improve its support beyond that of 2006 (14%) but will be unlikely to regain its 2002 support of 24%. This is because of three factors.
First, Yushchenko’s ratings have doubled in the last month, putting him for the first time ahead of Tymoshenko in the polls. Yushchenko will use a successful outcome to the crisis to re-launch his bid for a second presidential term in the 2009 elections. Prior to the crisis all observers had written off his chances of winning a second term.
Second, Our Ukraine is establishing a mega-bloc consisting of itself, the Ukrainian Rightists, and the Yuriy Lutsenko bloc.
Third, Our Ukraine has been reinvigorated as a national democratic party now that it has returned it to its more successful 2002 composition.
The ACC had pinned hopes on international organizations and foreign governments pressuring Yushchenko to back down, but this never happened. International organizations and Western governments remain distrustful of Yanukovych’s authoritarian instincts, blame both sides equally for the crisis, and accept that it is up to Ukrainians to peacefully resolve the crisis.
Only Russia has tried come to “rescue Ukrainian democracy,†by one-sidedly condemning Yushchenko. But on a visit to Washington this week, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk stated that Ukraine was able to resolve its crisis without outside intermediaries.
Despite Moscow’s efforts, the elections seem likely to happen. Central Election Commission chairman Yaroslav Davydovych has publicly stated his readiness to organize the vote. Minister of Finance Mykola Azarov, a high-ranking Party of Regions loyalist, has agreed to increase the allocation in this year’s budget to finance the elections.
Recent events and a sense of defeatism in the ACC suggest that the tide of events is shifting in Yushchenko’s favor. Early parliamentary elections are likely to take place on June 24, but before the voting booths open both sides are likely to reach some form of political compromise.
(Ukrayinska pravda, April 29-31, May 1-3, Zerkalo Nedeli, April 21-27, http://www.president.gov.ua)
–Taras Kuzio
By Taras Kuzio on May 4, 2007
with all due respect, it seems “little taras” did find an error in your original post…
“That is why he also has solicited support from other oligarchs: the Industrial Union of Donbas, Viktor Pinchuk’s Pryvat and Igor Kolomoyskiy’s Interipe.”
give the blogger/activist a break, and maybe an apology…
dlw
By dlw on May 5, 2007
Again, I ask. Whats his point. The information is correct in my blog and my Eurasia Daily Monitor article. Are there not more important things to deal with this than such knit picking.
By Taras on May 5, 2007
Do you think that elections will be on June 24th or in the autumn? or somewhere in between?
By Hello on May 5, 2007
I suspect 8 July. This is the last day before the summer recess. Yushchenko wanted the elections before the summer and Yanukovych in the autumn. The reason, the Yushchenko camp believe, was so that the government could raise wages and pensions. I suspect that a face saving compromise will be 8 July.
By Taras on May 5, 2007
Your writing reminded me of my visit to the Intl Spy Museum in DC. Disney-sqe though it may be it does provide some very intense information.
I was particularly struck by the story of an East German dissident who after re-unification was voted to Parliament and promoted a bill allowing citizens to view their own files. She read her own and discovered that the person who had been informing on her for years was her own husband. She divorced him.
I look forward to the day when the files will be open in Ukraine and the material which was transported to Moscow would also be made available. But perhaps this may not occur in my lifetime.
By Hello on May 5, 2007
Regarding the lack of opposition in the East perhaps this could be explained by the identification with Russian culture? Which might also partially explain the attitude in the east to PoR?
“The Russian nation has always organized itself around the government. … Since that time we can seldom provide similar examples of the extra-state organization of the nation. It is usually oriented on the existing power, not the opposition.
“Only when this power begins to decline do people’s movements emerge, as it happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But as soon as the government acquires some strong features, the population starts orienting itself on this power. This is an objective factor explaining the opposition’s low popularity, but there have been subjective ones as well.” from an interview with Igrunov which was posted on UNIAN
http://www.unian.net/eng/news/news-194354.html
By Hello on May 5, 2007
The point is, we all make mistakes, and all I wanted to do was correct the credits. I didn’t mean to be rude. You guys bent it out of shape:)
Now that a major civil war has been happily averted, but Pinchuk and Kolomoisky are still engaged in a takeover one, the last thing we’d want to see in Ukraine is to have these two proud oligarchs claim each other’s possessions. They’d ruin the whole election thing.
By the way, as an officer of the Soviet Army, my uncle spent eleven years in the GDR. Although he remains a committed homo Sovieticus at heart, he still would love to spend the rest of his days in the unified Germany. Well, millions of Ukrainians are that way.
By Taras R on May 7, 2007
Taras, regarding the number of citizens of the GDR and the USSR who spied on their on countrymen… I still there is some left over from those time… There is the sense of shpyhunomania in Ukraine… You may even recall that one time I told you that diplomat of an former East Bloc country once told some journalists I know, that they have to be careful with me as I am both linked to the CIA and CSIS…
Don’t read your blog as often as I would like but will try to now that I have better connectivity.
Cheers,
Vasyl
By Vasyl on May 14, 2007
Taras, why should anyone be surprised about the return of Piskun and Havrysh? I’m not. The thing is Yushchenko, just like Kuchma, just like Kravchuk, has always had his “otochennja” but failed to create his “komanda”. The latter is supposed to tell the leader what he needs to hear, not what he wants to hear.
Whom did Yushchenko have? He had Rybachuk who is all great schmooze and no substance; he’s had Bezsmertny who was loudly promising us The Great Administrative Reform and turned out to be completely incompetent in his position (well, he screwed up in Nasha Ukraina, too). And you can go on with your list.
So, yeah: na bezryb’ji j rak – ryba. Meaning, if you don’t have “komanda”, Piskun & Havrysh will do fine. Heck, Yushchenko even beat some dust off Pljushch and put him in charge of RNBO. That’s not even funny anymore. The guy’s become lame duck before he even reaches the middle of his (supposedly, first) term.
By the way, great blog!
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By MoreNarodyNaSait on Nov 23, 2007