Is Kuchmism really invincible?

A holiday is coming up – the 25th anniversary of the declaration of Ukraine’s independence. A significant date indeed… Willy-nilly, you will recall all stages of this long enough road. But, at the same time, you can’t possibly escape the thought that the state was run for the most part of this time by Leonid Kuchma, first as prime minister with almost dictatorial powers and then as omnipotent president. And although it is not he who laid the foundation of the state, the “first floors” of this building were, to a large extent, the handiwork of Kuchma and his inner circle.

Of course, far from all that was done in those years is the result of the actions of Kuchma and Co., including the 1996 Constitution which remained only partially implemented (was the clause that bans foreign military bases on the territory of Ukraine ever observed? And what about jury trial?). By contrast with neighboring Belarus and distant Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the then Ukrainian government never managed to turn into a tough autocracy. A number of key politicians, including Yevhen Marchuk, Vadym Hetman, Viacheslav Chornovil, et al, and intellectuals resisted the attempts to irreversibly push Ukraine to the fringes of historical progress. But when KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Putin ascended the presidential throne in Moscow, his agents almost immediately found themselves in top offices around Kuchma, and an attempt was made again, which resulted in the Maidan.

In the early 2000s, Kuchmism became the dominant idea of Ukraine’s political life. Political science dictionaries say that its characteristic features are concentration of power in the hands of a consolidated financial multiparty corporation; decorative democracy, when elections are an instrument of periodical self-legitimization, not rotation, of power; merger of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches as an integrated mechanism for controlling society and guaranteeing an unchangeable nature of the regime by means of the uniformed services and “correct” media that are out of public control; and total corruption of the governmental apparatus. Luckily, the 2004 Maidan cut short the establishment of this system, but Kuchmism managed to survive because most of the members of the Yushchenko and Tymoshenko teams (including their leaders) had been formed within the limits of the “Kuchma system” and were unable (or unwilling, which does not matter, as far as the result is concerned) to squeeze, at least drop by drop, this system out of themselves.

Today, after the Revolution of Dignity, we have to admit that, although Kuchmism, which reached its peak in the shape of the Kuchma-fostered Yanukovych regime, has taken blows, it has not vanished. On the contrary, it has been gaining strength lately, sometimes in more subtle forms than before. Incidentally, some are still writing “Kuchmism” with quotation marks only. It is wrong to do so because it is no longer a metaphor but a scholarly term which denotes an important profile of Ukrainian – above all, political and economic – reality.

Now about this reality. What is our political system like? It is a mixed system of Verkhovna Rada elections, when a half of MPs are elected in first-past-the-post constituencies, where administrative resource and all kinds of sops are used. Who created this system, vetoing in 1997 the parliament-approved law on party list elections, which also demanded that candidates should have fluent command of the official language (for they will have to look into the subtleties of draft laws)? President Kuchma. He did so not in the least because this law kept almost all oligarchs and some people from Kuchma’s own inner circle, who never managed to learn at least some Ukrainian, from entering parliament. Besides, the notorious “Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law,” the pre-election “parades of sop-givers,” and the bribing of parliamentary defectors (let us recall 2002, when the For a United Ukraine bloc “crawled” into parliament with a great difficulty, but when 99 “independent” deputies joined it, it formed the largest faction) are also the still-living consequences of Kuchmism.

And that’s not all. Almost all the parliamentary parties were and still are funded by either business oligarchs (including some foreign residents) or those who contend for being oligarchs in the future. Even the familiar “faces” of such “qualitatively new” parties as Democratic Alliance were seen in contact with oligarchs, including Kuchma’s universally-known son-in-law. Some will say: “What’s wrong about that?” Of course, there’s nothing wrong, unless you are going to drop Kuchmism, even though it is a bit “modernized” and “Westernized” now.

On the other hand, is the current Presidential Administration not striving, as it was in the Kuchma era, to be the “guiding center” of national politics? Is it not trying (and successfully so!) to minimize the role of parliament, as was the case after 2002, when the Kuchma-Medvedchuk-Yanukovych triumvirate held sway in Ukraine? And are heads of local and regional administrations not being selected, as before, on the basis of personal devotion rather than professional qualities? And courts? What was sown there in the Kuchma era is now running riot, and Ukraine still has no courts that abide by the norms and precepts of law only.

An oligarchic clan-based economy is also living – it may have changed just a little and remains a dangerous parasite on the body of an impoverished country. Yet it is a separate subject: I will only note that this economic system is the fruit of a deliberate policy of premier and then president Kuchma, of which I wrote in Den about two years ago (http://day.kyiv.ua/uk/article/podrobici/kuchma-i-kuchmizm).

And, finally, Mr. Kuchma is now negotiating in Minsk on behalf of Ukraine and signing the documents that endanger the existence of our state.

Of course, there are some strong factors today which resist Kuchmism in all its forms – both traditional and modern. Despite the government’s considerable success in impoverishing most of the citizens (according to the UN, over 80 percent of Ukrainians are below the poverty line), civil society is still living and working. There are also differences in the media world – not everybody has given in to the government and oligarchs. In the conditions of a war against Russia and pro-Russian militants (officially known by the moniker “ATO”), the army, not the police, is the main armed structure in the country. Moreover, the Armed Forces and the National Guard are battle-hardened and usually patriotic-minded and responsible. Finally, it is also important that a lot of ordinary people are armed (several million units of small arms are registered in Ukraine) and dozens of thousands of men and women have undergone battle training.

There are some other factors that block an all-out revanche of Kuchmism. But this blocking is not enough – what must be changed is not some details but the whole system. Modern-day political techniques allow rebuilding several “floors” of the political structure, without ruining all of it, as some hotheads and their overt provocateurs suggest. But we have very little time for this reconstruction for the well-known external and internal reasons.