Society and the state weighed on the scales of history

5. INDEPENDENT UKRAINE RULED BY THE SOVIET-COMMUNIST PARTY NOMENKLATURA

Earlier I mentioned that the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet system were different phenomena, but in the public’s mind they merged into one. This thesis should be developed by stressing not the differences but the common features of these phenomena, namely the collapse of a civilization based on a doctrinal rejection of private ownership.

A socioeconomic order is a category that is directly linked to a population, a people, and a nation. The state is a category linked primarily to the political elite. Therefore, let us examine the evolution of the Ukrainian political elite.

In an attempt to free their mentality of Marxist-Leninist postulates, our intellectual elite jumped at the idea of a civilized approach proposed by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. Ukrainian history started being depicted as a battlefield between the Western and Eurasian civilizations, and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religious world views. But to a decisive degree only the recent past influences contemporary political, socioeconomic, and cultural processes. Not coincidentally, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are referred to as postcommunist or post-Soviet ones.

Ukraine should also be described as a postgenocidal country. For several decades the politically active segment of Ukrainian society, its intellectual potential, was destroyed in a systematic and deliberate fashion. In 1932-1934 Stalin broke the backbone of the freedom- loving Ukrainian peasantry and the national intelligentsia that had emerged from the peasant milieu, and in 1937 he made special efforts to destroy the entire Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine during the mass terror.

The Bolshevik party was building a “bright future” for Soviet citizens under the slogan of liquidating private ownership of the means of production. Communist Party committees were created according to the principle of “democratic centralism,” with the result that all power over society, the state, and the party was in the hands of a “chosen few,” namely the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)/All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)/CPSU. Under these circumstances, nationalized (socialized) ownership of the means of production remained private but concentrated in the hands of several people, who ruled the state party.

As Soviet propagandists declared, the building of communism was supposed to secure the distribution of material and cultural benefits among the members of society in accordance with their needs. Since the state could satisfy only minimal, survival, needs, communist construction was carried out under the guise of building the socioeconomic foundations of socialism. The political dictatorship instituted by the Bolsheviks in the first months after the October coup was initially maintained only through terror. The creation (also by means of terror) of the political dictatorship’s socioeconomic foundations made every citizen materially dependent on the state.

This multinational union state was ruled by the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura, later identified by the Soviet emigre Mikhail Voslensky as a new privileged class. In actuality, this clan (not class) of leaders had absolute control over its subordinates, yet was totally without rights vis-a-vis their superiors. The nomenklatura clan was a nervous system created by the Bolsheviks as a state-commune, and it exercised rigid control over all civic-political and trade union organizations that were also built according to the principle of “democratic centralism”. But it was not a carrier but the leader of the dictatorship implemented by the party’s leaders; and from 1929 to 1953-by Stalin personally. After Stalin’s death the systematic execution of leading cadres ended, but the institutional situation of the Communist Party nomenklatura did not change. Like before, its boundless control over society was connected to positions. Deprived of his position, an individual lost everything and became marginal. One should not be surprised that the nomenklatura shed few tears over the collapse of the Soviet system. For them, maintaining power was the main thing. After the disappearance of the CPSU leadership’s dictatorship this power had been acquiring new, even more attractive, content.

The totalitarian construction of power burned through the social environment of Ukraine. There were no tangible manifestations of pre-Soviet socioeconomic and political structures left in the republic. What was left was a sense of national separateness that united the society atomized by communism. Despite fundamental regional distinctions, Ukrainian citizens continued to identify themselves as a single nation and displayed an unwavering will to make their republic sovereign. The Kremlin-bred Soviet Communist-Party nomenklatura understood this. It turned to its nation only when Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin began fighting for power in Moscow.

In the early 1990s a revolution was brewing in this country oversaturated with radios, TVs, and a developed network of newspapers. Thanks to the modern mass media, the people became direct participants in political events. Under these circumstances public thought became a weightier factor for the representatives of the political system than the order in which they had been raised. This was manifested most vividly in the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, when it adopted the Declaration of National Sovereignty of Ukraine. The impellent forces of the national revolution in Ukraine were formed in the course of revolutionary events.

This revolution quickly involved so-called informal organizations united by the Popular Movement (Rukh) of Ukraine. At the same time, millions of citizens, representing every nationality, who were working in various union structures, adopted an unambiguous stand. Most of the members of the Communist Party of Ukraine supported the idea of the republic’s sovereignty — and of their party. This fact could not have been ignored by the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura, people who had been tested during the first free elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR and local soviets in 1990, and who had retained power. In the Supreme Soviet they were opposed by the National Council, which consisted mostly of members of Rukh. However, they could only submit proposals, which the majority of Soviet Communist Party deputies either approved or rejected.

This majority acted quickly and decisively in the stormy atmosphere following the debacle of the Moscow coup in August 19-23, 1991. On August 24, acting jointly with the opposition at an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet, they voted in favor of independence for Ukraine and the departization of all state organs, institutions, organizations, as well as the army and law enforcement agencies. The government was instructed to arrange the transfer to Ukrainian ownership of former union enterprises, introduce a national currency, and secure its convertibility.

On August 25 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, represented mostly by the Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura, adopted a decree on the nationalization of the property of the CPU and the CPSU on the territory of the republic. On August 30, the decree “On the Prohibition of the Activity of the Communist Party of Ukraine” was adopted. Can we assume that the nomenklatura was acting against its own interests?

On the contrary! It had become dangerous for the Soviet nomenklatura to remain members of a party that was no longer yielding any dividends because it had lost its official status. The political elite occupied Soviet seats, including those in the Supreme Rada, which gave them real power. Therefore, they easily disowned their colleagues, who had been too slow to reorient themselves and continued to occupy important posts in Communist Party committees.

The political elite was inexperienced because it had always been taught to act on orders from the union center. It implemented market transformations by blindly copying decisions made in Russia or countries with an advanced market economy. As a rule, bills passed by the Ukrainian parliament, as recommended by Western experts, were cut off from reality. The discrepancy between the new legislation and economic practice resulted in the weakening of the state’s influence on economic progress. Thus were laid the foundations of the criminalization of Ukraine’s economy.

The nonparty-affiliated status of the post-Soviet elite was the result of the ban on the CPSU and the low popularity of political parties. The “party of power” now consisted only of those former nomenklatura members who had been filtered through the elections. They had no serious rivals. Those who tried to push party functionaries out by adopting anticommunist slogans mostly failed. The qualifications of such rally politicians were low.

6. THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE POLITICAL ELITE

An entire spectrum of leftist, rightist, and centrist political parties formed in the mid-1990s. Inter-party squabbles were intensifying, even though half of the party leaders were former CPSU members. The multiparty system existed in and of itself, at a certain distance from both the bulk of the population and the power structures. Which party was in power or in the opposition was anyone’s guess. Nevertheless, conditions emerged for a structuring of political life. Society was becoming less atomized, i.e., disunited on the personal level.

The inability or unwillingness of Ukrainian lawmakers to develop transparent heavy plans to privative large industries did not stop this process. Privatization followed a pattern that was most disadvantageous to the bulk of the population, according to which unlawful and uncontrollable clannish-monopolistic alliances emerged. By taking advantage of their connections with representatives of the executive and legislative authorities, they secured themselves super-profits and inflicted tremendous losses on the central budget.

During 1991-1993 only 3,600 enterprises and organizations, mostly small businesses, were transferred to private (and cooperative) ownership. The privatization campaign, supervised by Leonid Kuchma’s Presidential Administration acting hand in glove with the legislative branch, introduced crucial changes in the Ukrainian economy. In late 2001 the number of state-owned entities on the Single State Register of Enterprises and Organizations of Ukraine read as follows: 2,808 out of 97,637 in industry, and 1,772 out of 53,530 in construction. Those who had a talent for business and contacts in high places became owners of denationalized property. Members of the nomenklatura, together with Soviet “shadow” businessmen, enterprising Komsomol members, semilegal co-operative operators from the perestroika era, and leaders of criminal structures swarmed around state property, grabbing the best pieces of the cake. The lengthy absence of laws and regulatory procedures in the privatization sphere was not coincidental; they would interfere with the process that became popularly known as prykhvatyzatsia (grabitization).

A significant part of the national economy was distributed among a handful of oligarchs. Powerful financial-industrial groups (PFGs) uniting technologically interrelated enterprises and cooperating banks emerged.

In assessing the results of market reforms that were launched in 1994, it should be remembered that no one could have proposed a rational approach to privatizing factories and plants that had been state property for three generations. In a similar fashion, only the powerful PFGs connected with the state and formed on the basis of a supermonopolized and noncompetitive economy stood a chance of reaching the world market. However, the fact remains that the monopolistic associations assured themselves super-profits thanks to their growth with the representatives of executive and legislative authorities.

Similar processes were taking place in the Russian Federation. Striving to keep the post-Soviet countries under control, Yeltsin made sure they would keep receiving energy supplies from the RF at prices lower than those on the world market. The patterns of industrial links between Western Siberia and the Donetsk-Prydniprovia economic region remained approximately the same as in Soviet times. Supplied with cheap gas, the owners of metallurgical enterprises sought to devalue their products and could offer them at prices acceptable to foreign market consumers.

Whereas in the early 1990s the Soviet Communist Party elite wanted to distance itself from Russia by ideological barriers in the form of the state symbols of the Ukrainian National Republic, in the early 2000s an alliance started taking shape between Russian state institutions that controlled economic life in their country and Ukrainian oligarchs, who remained interested in steady and cheap energy supplies.

The Swedish-American professor, Anders Aslund, who studies market reforms in Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, has described the Ukrainian postcommunist regime as “a rent seekers’ state.” He considers rent in the specific postcommunist meaning of this term to be income that was many times higher than revenues from entrepreneurship in a competitive environment. Members of the “party of power” had mostly built their fortunes via large enterprises that became their property or their relatives’ and purchased at token prices in return for “assistance” in entrepreneurial or political activity with hard currency.

Are any specific political figures or the whole political elite responsible for the situation that developed in Ukraine at the beginning of the new century? There is no longer any room for doubt. On the debris of a sociopolitical order that self-destructed they built a structure to which Aslund has applied that unattractive term. But one should not demand from these kinds of people something that they are inherently incapable of accomplishing. They cared for their own interests, and in its atomized state, society was incapable of impeding them.

Gradually, however, economic and political structures were formed in Ukrainian society, which were capable of loudly declaring their interests. A conflict between the “party of power” embodying the communist past and society undergoing a process of self-organization was inevitable under these circumstances. The Ukrainian people prevented the emergence of a horrible mutant, communist feudalism with a capitalist face.

Not everyone considers the social cataclysm linked to the 2004 presidential elections as a revolutionary event. We are accustomed to understanding the notion of a “true” revolution as one that is accompanied by civil wars and bloodshed on a large scale. During those months, however, we experienced a cataclysm that changed all of us, not just the leadership.

In the early 21st century, as a result of the process of society’s self-organization, changes in the “party of power” became apparent. These changes lacked institutional or personalized clarity. The leader of an anticommunist party or a so- called oligarch could be close one day to the center of power and stand on one side of the barricade, yet emerge the next day from the presidential milieu and cross over to the other side. These moves were and still are part of the overall transformation of society.

The new alignment of political forces on the eve of the parliamentary elections in 2002 and 2004 was proof of the birth of a civic society. Differences among the leftist parties had undergone a qualitative change; for the first time communists and socialists found themselves on the opposite sides of the barricade. Differences within the ruling party had also undergone changes; for the first time it was divided into those who were pushing Ukraine to an opposite path with the aid of slogans calling for a return to Europe, and those who linked their political future to the consolidation of democracy. During the parliamentary elections in 2002 the PFGs were divided into two camps.

Monopolistic alliances that controlled heavy industry and had set up powerful banks were the same kind of elements of society’s self-organization as rightist parties, independent trade unions, and all the other “informal” structures (to use a term from the late 1980s). In terms of the speed and effectiveness of self-organization they were naturally ahead of other structures of society that could restrict their hypertrophied claims to ownership and power. Striving to assert this status, the oligarchs began to set up their own political parties capable of fitting into the constitutional system and protecting their interests within state bodies. Pavlo Lazarenko was the first to embark on this road; within a few months he had created the regional bloc “Hromada” and succeeded in surmounting the four-percent barrier during the 1998 parliamentary elections.

The self-organization of the PFGs developed at various speeds. The Dnipropetrovsk clan was the first to be formed, and its members had personal connections with the centers of power in Moscow and Kyiv, dating to the Soviet period. Later, the Donetsk clan grew stronger, developing on the same industrial base. The Donetsk-Prydniprovia economic region, formed as a result of three consecutive phases of development (in the pre-revolutionary empire, during the first five-year plans, and during the 1950s- 1960s) was one of the most powerful in Europe. In the 1990s it saved Ukraine’s economy from collapse by earning hard currency through the sale of heavy industry’s semifinished products. The clans were saving their own regions and the whole country, but above all they cared for their own interests.

After assuming power, the electoral bloc “For a United Ukraine” fell apart into its various components. The electoral bloc “Our Ukraine”, after winning the elections (a victory that would later turn into a failure) rallied organizationally around Viktor Yushchenko. Their failure is explained by the fact that, according to the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine, the highest post was that of president. Meanwhile, Our Ukraine was in opposition to the president of Ukraine. The further unification of the Yushchenko bloc and the strengthening of links with other Kuchma opponents were the necessary prerequisite for a possible success in the 2004 presidential elections.

The opposition of political forces in conjunction with the presidential elections almost instantly merged into a confrontation linked to the parliamentary elections of 2006. The subjects of the new confrontation were complicated by the entirely predictable breakup of the Orange coalition “Power of the People.” This bloc fell apart in the same natural way as “For a Single Ukraine!” which was formed to compete in the 2002 parliamentary elections. Those who experience defeat unite, hoping for a return match. Those who win cannot distribute the fruits of victory among themselves.

Optimism may be derived from the fact that after the Orange Revolution, the representatives of the political elite have learned how to ask for government posts from ordinary citizens, who cannot control them on a daily basis owing to the absence of advanced civic institutions, but who have the sovereign right to have their say during elections.

With every passing year this society, atomized by communism, is becoming increasingly diversified in terms of parameters. Nor is it surprising that during the collapse of the Soviet system the former Soviet Communist Party nomenklatura seized control over this society. However, it is natural that in the absence of dictatorship it is ultimately society that wins the contest with the state, embodied in the “party of power.” All bureaucrats-those who are first red, then blue-and-yellow, then orange and white-blue, and any other possible color — should work not with the population, which is expecting benefits from them, but with citizens, who know that they are the ones who sustain them through taxes.