The journalistic investigation carried out by Denis Bigus’ group (see here) shocked Ukrainian politicians and shocked a large part of Ukrainian society. This impression consists of what is done on my tape in the networks. Words of indignation and calls for the “overthrow of this government” and the impeachment of the president are heard from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada.
Naїve! Is what journalists D. Bigus and L. Ivanova are really talking about a sensation?
Following the processes in Ukraine in terms of the project “Ukraine Fighting Corruption”, we see this story as one of the characteristic, typical phenomena of Ukrainian reality.
The trend of independent Ukraine is such that all presidents and their close associates became incredibly rich during their tenure, as the merging of crime with business and politics after the collapse of the USSR flourished.
Rooted in the old Bolshevik tradition, similar processes have taken place and are taking place at all levels of state and public life, turning Ukraine into a totally corrupt country.
The fight against corruption in such conditions turns into fiction. Both state and public anti-corruption bodies do not fight corruption as a phenomenon, but against corrupt officials as subjects of certain acts of corruption.
The selectivity of the prosecution of corrupt officials depends on the capabilities or interests of anti-corruption activists. Therefore, there are corrupt people who have the status of “sacred cows” and who remain untouched under all conditions and circumstances. There are corrupt people against whom criminal cases are opened, but they are slightly frightened. Of course, there are also “goats gone” …
The regularity of the selective subjective approach to the fight against corruption is such that the corrupt only become arrogant, their actions become more sophisticated, and thus corruption becomes an incurable chronic disease of society.
Criminal amber mining, ruthless felling of the Carpathian virgin forest, making money in a war in which tens of thousands of patriots die and millions become crippled and homeless, and other high-profile stories are just what is happening in front of everyone and why there is no end.
“Our Money” and other similar investigative journalism projects bring to light what is going on in the “gray zone” or in the deep underground, from where information is most likely leaked by participants in corruption deals most likely deprived of participation in the “case”.
Although Anatoliy Hrytsenko is convinced that there are more “honest people”, in fact “garbage from the house” is not taken out as honest as offended or deprived, and Oleksandr Onyschenko is the first example of that. It is obvious that the same person “merged” his “collection of compromising material” to journalists.
However, it could also be an employee of one of the anti-corruption structures or one of the law enforcement agencies, who knows that a formal investigation into the crime of the president’s own partners in the defense industry is a priori impossible.
Anti-corruption politicians and anti-corruption activists, like the general public, are convinced that it is the “change of government”, “change of the political system” and the coming to power of new, “honest people” that will make the fight against corruption effective.
But if there are really “more honest people”, as A. Hrytsenko and his supporters are convinced, then why do those who were considered honest and decent get lost in the first steps of their way into politics, show their double standards and expressive traits of corrupt officials?
Want examples? Follow the evolution of the square “Cossack” Gavrilyuk. And last year’s story with Bubenchyk was worth something. I do not name the much louder names of novice politicians who emerged from the mud in the prince.
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of people are able to withstand the temptation and remain honest and decent in their service to society, to their people.
Victor Hugo said over Honore de Balzac’s coffin: “He sought to take a place among those whose world he was destroying with his merciless pen.”
Take a closer look at Ukrainian anti-corruption fighters both in their official capacity (investigators, prosecutors, special services officers) and by vocation (journalists, public activists).
They are usually overgrown with public scandals, and not because the real corrupt do everything to discredit them. They discredit themselves, if not by their own participation in corrupt practices, then by their simply reckless actions, which disappoint ordinary citizens.
An even bigger problem for anti-corruption activists is that they are essentially fighting only the consequences of corruption (ie corruption) and not corruption as a phenomenon.
As for the state anti-corruption bodies, they are created to perform such tasks – to identify corrupt people, catch them hot and bring them to justice.
According to China’s experience, even the public execution of corrupt officials is not effective: corrupt officials are physically destroyed in stacks, but corruption remains eradicated.
Have you not thought about why the level of corruption in China remains as high as in the former Soviet Union, and in such developed countries as the United States, Japan, etc. – low, the maximum allowable?
The answer is simple: because China continues to live in an authoritarian-totalitarian system and administrative-command mode of government.
Ukraine also continues to live in the conditions of the authoritarian-totalitarian system and administrative-command mode of government, which it inherited from the USSR / USSR.
The only difference between Ukraine and China is that Ukraine has abandoned the communist ideology, got rid of the dictates of the one-party system and introduced the institution of the president.
The institution of the president, however, has become such a clearly unconstitutional executive body as the presidential administration, which is functionally an incarnation … of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This structure remained even in the same building, and perhaps the branch offices remained in the same places as the relevant departments of the Central Committee. It is possible that during the presidencies of Kravchuk and Kuchma, people who had remained there since the Communist Party continued to sit there on their still Communist oak chairs.
It is noteworthy that the institution of the president has retained the former Communist Party vertical, forming regional and district administrations. Apparently, it is even more probable that the old tested Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura cadres remained there for a long time (sometimes, perhaps, they remain) in their heated places, educating new generations of the post-Soviet nomenklatura.
However, what post-Soviet ?! Soviet power, established more than a hundred years ago by the Bolsheviks, has not been abolished since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine remains a “country of councils”, with a well-structured system that correlates with the presidential vertical and recognizes the priority of the latter or even is in the same team with it: the Verkhovna Rada, regional councils, city / district councils …
At certain levels, we even see a merger of the presidential vertical and the Soviets, which was not the case even under the Communist Party-Soviet government. Let’s remember at least mayors who are also chairmen of city councils.
A characteristic feature of public administration, as in the Communist Party-Soviet times, is collective responsibility (or irresponsibility). This encourages government officials to look into the mouth of the president at the national level, the “governor” – at the regional level and the head of the RSA – at the district level.
In turn, this encourages these actors to use manual control methods, gives them the indulgence of “punishing and pardoning”, and thus defining the limits of participation in certain illegal / criminal “deals”, which are called corruption.
Public opinion is convinced that the “father” of Ukrainian corruption is the second President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma. This may be the case if we do not understand the true nature of corruption in Ukraine and in the former Soviet Union.
Kuchma did not create corruption.
The merging of crime and politics is an “invention” of the Bolsheviks, who from the very beginning financed their “political” activities by robbery, banditry, racketeering, and other popular and now criminal methods.
The merger of crime and state power took place only after the October Bolshevik coup, known in history as the “Great October Socialist Revolution,” especially since February 1918, when Lenin issued a decree to the Soviet People’s Commissar releasing one hundred thousand criminals from tsarist prisons. to shake the term »).
Let me remind you that almost all these criminals joined the Bolshevik ranks and formed the backbone of the newly formed “Emergency Commission” under the leadership of the Dzerzhinsky Cheka (later the OGPU, later the NKVD, and later the MGB and KGB).
The lumpen proletariat and the criminal became the nurseries of the Bolshevik party and state cadres, from a select part of which sprouted a phenomenon that was later called the “Communist-Soviet nomenklatura.”
The Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura in class society, however, did not become a class. It became a supra-class segment of society, which “could” do more than the proletariat as a “hegemon of society,” and even more so to the “collective farm peasantry” and the “working intelligentsia.”
Tough, even cruel, Communist discipline helped each cricket know his place, punish the guilty or pardon the internal Communist Party court, and few fell out of the cage and ended up behind bars like ordinary criminals.
This was the case before the collapse of the USSR.
Note that throughout the former Soviet Union, the first presidents of the newly independent countries were mostly high-ranking Communist Party figures. Where they did not become the first presidents (Lithuania, Georgia), they became the second presidents.
And here the question arises about the interaction of the institution of the president and the Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura.
As a former secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party on ideology, and then on personnel (personnel, ie the nomenklatura, were, in fact, the competence of the second secretary of the Central Committee), Leonid Kravchuk as the first president of independent Ukraine could not but rely on the party “elite” knew and trusted.
Thus, the administration of the president of the first four years of independence could not but consist of those “proven cadres”, even if they were already repainted as “national democrats”. The same happened at the regional and district levels.
So the Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura remained in power. The rigidity of party discipline is a thing of the past along with the “classical” CPSU. “Democratization” therefore affected primarily corruption processes. To give you an idea of the strength of the nomenklatura, let me remind you that Khrushchev lost because he underestimated the internal strength of the Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura.
And leaders taught by Khrushchev’s lessons eventually realized the unproductiveness of “voluntarism” as a method of administrative-command governance. Thus, it was during Kravchuk’s presidency that the Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura realized and felt its historical mission, and at the same time its historical memory awoke in it.
Thus came a new stage in the merging of crime (especially criminals in law), politics (parties) and public administration (government). It is noteworthy that not only the crime sought a way out of politics and power, ie politicized, but also politics (parties) and the government sought a way out of crime, ie criminalized.
This began before the actual collapse of the Soviet Union and may have even accelerated its collapse. In any case, we have been noticing active processes of interaction between the nomenklatura and crime since the beginning of Kravchuk’s presidency.
With the participation of criminal elements, in particular, there was a “reform” of the world’s largest Black Sea shipping company. At first, it was transformed into a joint-stock company called Blasco, and then Blasco disappeared.
If you are interested, dig into the history of Kyiv’s FC Dynamo, whose honorary chairman has been L. Kravchuk since his presidency. Dynamo is associated with the creation of various companies and joint ventures with opaque property, numerous financial frauds and even serious crimes both in Ukraine and abroad, which are described in a series of interviews by a former criminal and active participant. events of the early 90’s L. Roitman.
During Kravchuk’s presidency, “new Ukrainians” stood on the wing and gained strength, receiving communist or Komsomol money (V. Sumin, L. Chernovetsky, and others).
If during Kravchuk’s presidency, the Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura was just beginning to relax and criminalize, during Kuchma’s presidency crime came to power and then began the active “privatization”, sawing and selling everything that could be sawed and sold, as well as squeezed.
The explosive mixture of Communist Party-Soviet nomenklatura and criminality formed what is now called the oligarchs. Corruption has taken on open and cynical forms, in which we now observe it.
So, if someone wants to call Kuchma the “father” of something, he is the “godfather” not of corruption, but of oligarchy and oligarchic government.
The result of this oligarchic form of government has been private political projects, which call themselves parties or even public associations, but are more like organized criminal groups.
The oligarchy proved to be a convenient tool for Yushchenko, and especially Yanukovych, to exercise his presidency, although they were not oligarchs themselves.
Petro Poroshenko is a 100% product of the oligarchy, both as a businessman and as a politician. Without politics and participation in power, its enrichment would be simply impossible. Without wealth, oligarchic status, his presidency would also be impossible. Such is the phenomenon of Poroshenko. So no wonder what is happening to him and his surroundings.
Poroshenko’s administrative-command presidential rule is a logical consequence of the evolution of the authoritarian-totalitarian system in the still “Soviet Ukraine.” It could not be otherwise.
The future presidents will be no different from Poroshenko, no matter how different they would seem to the average voter.
Oligarchic traits are seen in almost every one of this year’s presidential candidates. Even the most intelligent of them is a rentier. This means that enrichment and a prosperous life are subconsciously more important for them than the desire to serve their people, society and go down in history as a prominent statesman.
Their parties or other forces behind them are not ideological parties with well-thought-out and balanced strategic development programs of Ukraine, but private organized groups whose goal is to come to power and populist promises of reforms, which then turn into cosmetic repairs at best.
Some candidates rely on the support of their colleagues’ professional associations. But there are also those who, due to the lack of their own ideas and concepts, ask the people what they expect from their presidency in case of their victory.
No candidate, no socio-political force behind him even stutters about the urgency of systemic change – the replacement of the authoritarian-totalitarian system and administrative-command mode of government inherited by Ukraine from the USSR / USSR, without which even talk of overcoming corruption, oligarchy, etc. do not make sense.
February 26, 2019.
Dr. Volodymyr Ivanenko | Др. Володимир Іваненко 