One poll conducted last March (see The Day, April 28) indicated that 40% of all adult Ukrainian citizens had personally encountered instances of official corruption. The number has obviously grown somewhat since then, and given that so much malfeasance is done in secrecy the consensus that corruption here is appalling and getting worse is a truism that hardly anyone would deny.
This is why this week's article by People's Deputy and presidential contender Yevhen Marchuk is so refreshing. At long last someone on the political Olympus has come up with a plan that combines measures to alter the conditions which make corruption inevitable (a state so big that its demands force business into the shadows) with strictly investigatory and law enforcement measures to make it possible to detect corruption, punish it, and by raising the costs and risks to malefactors deterring them.
The other thing rating kudos from the legislator's work is that the author understands that corruption is not primarily a criminal problem. When it becomes so universal as it is here and now, it is above all a political, economic, and social problem – a problem of how the state and society operate, with everything supposedly just fine on the surface and the real determination of who gets what and how it is fought over being carried out in total opacity.
One might be tempted to add a few refinements to Mr. Marchuk's five-point program: encouraging transparency of how those in a position to become corrupted by protecting whistle-blowers and journalists right to report in a fashion closer to the protections they enjoy in the West (John Peter Zenger, whose 1735 trial for libel of the Royal Governor of New York established in North America the freedom of the press to criticize those in power, would have been found guilty under current Ukrainian law) as well as by enacting strict rules on what is and is not permissible lobbying something like those in the US. One can, in fact, always come up with additional ideas once the basic ones are laid down. And the basic idea is his first point: providing favorable conditions for the domestic producer and easing the tax burden on Ukraine's production-oriented enterprises. Easing the tax burden simply cannot be done without reducing the size of functions of the government structures those taxes have to pay for.






