The Buried Revolution

Last Thursday the three-day crisis in the ranks of Ukraine’s leadership reached its climax: in a televised appearance President Yushchenko sacked his government amid a spate of resignations and allegations of high-profile corruption.

“We have seen many new faces come to power. Paradoxically, though, the face of power has not changed. The country is again accused of corruption and absence of public processes in the economy, including privatization processes. Today, no matter how difficult it is, I must cut this Gordian knot in the name of Ukraine.” This was President Yushchenko’s explanation of his September 8 decision to sack the cabinet led by Yulia Tymoshenko and National Security and Defense Council Chairman Petro Poroshenko. The president also fired his first aide Oleksandr Tretyakov for the duration of the investigation into corruption allegations made by former Secretary of State Oleksandr Zinchenko. Chief of the SBU Security Service Oleksandr Turchynov also resigned, calling the president’s decision to fire the government “a threat to Ukraine’s national security.” Turchynov has been replaced by his deputy Ihor Drizhchany.

Petro Poroshenko claims to have submitted his resignation a few hours before the president signed his order. Ironically, on Thursday Ukrainian parliamentarians also voted to strip Poroshenko of his parliamentary mandate, ignoring his previously announced intention to return to the Verkhovna Rada.

For Yulia Tymoshenko the bitter pill was sweetened by news from the 15th International Economic Forum in the Polish city of Krynica Gurska, where she was named Person of the Year in Central and Eastern Europe for her “outstanding and most significant positive contribution to the political and socioeconomic development in the region, and for her country’s accomplishments in 2004 and 2005.”

Before cutting the Gordian knot, Viktor Yushchenko attempted to unravel it over a period of three days, by forcing his warring team members to “shake hands in reconciliation,” thus hoping to find “a softer resolution that would involve dismissing only people in charge of combating corruption in this country.” After all, as the president put it, in the face of the latest accusations he had to react politically. The president obviously overlooked the fact that he was not dealing with children but with “experienced political wolves,” to quote Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk. Viktor Yushchenko must also have forgotten that “breaking agreements,” which he bemoaned in his statement on Thursday, is usual practice in Ukrainian politics.

In essence, the current situation in the country is the result of processes that began long before the Orange revolution. It has also been caused by political approaches that were overused during the previous regime. The former opposition, i.e., the current leadership, relinquished some of them but adopted others. When Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn said that all of them are “Kuchma’s children,” he was not far from the truth. At least none of them tried to deny this. According to Mykola Tomenko, “in joining the nation that had made the revolution,” they planned to continue their old ways. What they lacked was administrative experience and professional human resources. As a result, as Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday, “frankly, the basis of relations that existed for the past eight months began to disappoint both you and me, and the 48 million [citizens].” The president “had hoped that if everybody shouldered his share of the burden, they wouldn’t have time for schemes targeting one another or for mudslinging among the political forces within the single coalition.” He was certain that his friends, to whom “the people had placed unique trust and heretofore unseen powers would be able to put these resources to good use in their work.”

Yet what were the chances that a team formed on the basis of nepotism and predetermined quotas would “work exclusively in the interests of the citizens and the state, this being the highest priority for a government official,” instead of engaging in self-promotion and beating the drum for their individual political forces? Meanwhile, in the wake of the Orange Revolution the credit of trust in the new government was so great that there was absolutely no need for the president to put together the proverbial swan, crawfish, and pike. Neither was there any need to “distribute portfolios as a token of gratitude for contributions to the revolution.” What can justify gratitude at the cost of economic growth? The president himself singled out moral integrity and professionalism as the criteria for making appointments, i.e., he could find candidates for his appointments in the country’s west, east, or center, or among the professionals from the previous government, thereby completely untying his hands. Instead, as Leonid Kravchuk rightly pointed out, the president did an unprecedented thing: he handed the uniformed services over to political leeches, granting them extraordinary powers, none of which their predecessors had enjoyed. Thus, to expect that these people, all of whom have different business and political interests, ambitions, and needs, would work in a coordinated manner was naХve, to say the least.

On Independence Day President Yushchenko once again appealed to the “spirit of Independence Square.” It turns out, however, that Tymoshenko’s team will be reaping the fruits of the revolution. It was no accident that Mykola Tomenko, speaking at a news conference called to announce his resignation (which took place before the sacking of the government became known), expressed readiness to launch the second stage of the Orange Revolution. At this point skeptics can draw parallels between the February and October revolutions of 1917. There is no doubt that past experience of political publicity and populism will be used during the upcoming election campaign, much like the slogans about the war against the oligarchs and promises to solve the Gongadze case. Incidentally, Yushchenko’s attempt to justify himself and challenge Tomenko, who accused the nation’s leadership of holding back the results of the investigation into the killing of the journalist, was the weakest spot in Thursday’s televised appearance and may be seen as a sign that this case indeed poses major problems for the leadership.

Disillusioned with the multi-vector quasi-coalition, the president went to the other extreme: apparently he will form a new team that will be entirely his own, making appointments from among the people in his immediate circle. This explains the appointments of Oleh Rybachuk and Yuriy Yekhanurov. Clearly, these appointments did not come as a result of broad political consultations.

It is absolutely clear that the major political players will now be involved in a struggle to accumulate the largest possible resources ahead of the 2006 parliamentary elections, especially if the political reform comes into effect. Meanwhile, how the current political crisis ends will depend on whether the president has a vision of the ultimate goal of his recent shakeup.

COMMENTS

Vadym KARASIOV, director of the Global Strategies Institute:

“With these dismissals the president showed a new side of himself. He acted not just as a political and revolutionary leader but as a head of state. One could not calmly watch as the two groups in power accumulated the potential for conflicts inside the country, unbalancing it from within. In essence, the two parties of power recently pushed the country to the edge of administrative and political instability. Parties should form within the political system, in a political arena, not within the state and its governmental structures. With this decision the president emphasized that from this moment on he will act not merely as a politician but as a statesman and head of state.

“Another point is that these dismissals have in fact put an end to the epoch of revolutionary impatience, revolutionary shocks in the economy, and counterrevolutionary trends. Yulia Tymoshenko personified the revolutionary, Robespierrian line, especially in the economy. The group rallying around Petro Poroshenko personified a counterrevolutionary, conservative line. However, these were essentially two oligarchic groups struggling for monopolistic control of state power. These dismissals in fact ended the revolution and the struggle among the inevitable conflicting revolutionary trends. An epoch of pragmatic stabilization has begun. The appointments of Oleh Rybachuk as state secretary and Yuriy Yekhanurov as acting prime minister are designed to satisfy society’s demand, primarily that of the middle class, for a period of pragmatic stability, which Ukraine needs today. After all, the revolution must end at a point where society has grown tired of revolutionary upheavals. The revolution has ended to make way for an era of stabilization.

“We will see a significant regrouping in the political arena. Most likely two major poles, or magnets, will form, attracting smaller political forces. On the one hand, there is the presidential pole as opposed to Tymoshenko’s pole, which will form a new opposition both from among the Independence Square revolutionaries (PORA, part of the Reforms and Order Party) and the old pro-government forces (maybe the Social Democrats, part of the Regions Party; the Communists may also provide a certain degree of support). After these dismissals there will no longer be a division between the representatives of the new and old power, who tried to form a new opposition. A new opposition has matured within the ranks of the new leadership, which confirms the main law of Ukrainian politics: offended today, you join the opposition tomorrow. This happened under Kravchuk and Kuchma, and this will most likely happen under Yushchenko. Meanwhile, Yushchenko will be a magnet for political forces that seek stability in everything: the economy, social life, and administrative sector. Yushchenko will also attract the political forces that never tolerated Yulia Tymoshenko’s revolutionary impatience. Some political forces will remain in between, but they will be even more removed from Tymoshenko and closer to Viktor Yushchenko.

Yevhen HOLOVAKHA, Ph.D., deputy director of the Institute of Sociology at the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences:

“I expected everything to end in economic collapse, spiders in a jar [you come back after a while and sitting in the middle of the jar is one, big fat spider — Ed.] but I never expected this to happen so soon. I thought that the greatest political and economic cataclysm would take place after the parliamentary elections. But they couldn’t even make it as far as the elections. I treated the new leadership with the utmost respect. After all, they had managed to topple the previous, relatively strong, regime. I thought they were fairly good organizers. Meanwhile, they turned out to be organizers/destroyers. They called Medvedchuk a crisis manager, but they turned out to be destructive managers themselves. They destroyed the previous government