In my course on American politics I like to start off by discussing the American Constitution and pointing out that no Constitution or laws can really make a community much better than it already is. Some of the more egregious and blatant violations of the Constitution in American history — the Aliens and Sedition Act, Cherokee Removal, numerous things done during and after the Civil War, not to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II — serve to illustrate the point that the existence of legal norms does not guarantee their observance in any society, even the one of which I am a proud citizen.
Still nothing in America's at times checkered history can compare with what is happening in connection with the Ukrainian presidential elections. As Communist People's Deputy Heorhy Kriuchkov described in his speech in Parliament, the presidential election law is being openly and blatantly trampled upon. In defiance of the law in force, the entire machinery of the executive branch has been mobilized to reelect the incumbent president. As the closing of the STB television channel on vague (to say the least) charges of tax evasion indicates, freedom of expression on the airwaves has just about ceased to exist. Without really investigating what the firm was actually earning on advertising, they simply froze its bank account, thereby making it impossible for it to operate. Well, in the US the Internal Revenue Service can also seize property and garnish wages, but only after a full audit and hearing. STB looks much more like an issue, which has less to do with taxes than in keeping the legislative branch with its surfeit of presidential hopefuls off the airwaves, where they might be able to communicate directly with the voters before the election, and this is dirty pool by anyone's standards. Even the United States had one presidential election that was most likely stolen (1876), but the country had by then been independent for nearly a century, and the arts of compromise were such that a solution was found, which everyone could live with, and the country survived. Ukraine, with less than a decade of independence and poorly developed political arts, simply cannot afford such skullduggery. And the whole world shudders at what might happen if Ukraine fails to make it.
The diplomatic community is couching its obvious concern in its obligatory diplomatic language. Having the luxury of not representing anybody but myself, I do not have to mince words. The civilized world, which this country supposedly hopes to join, has to do everything in its power to force this unfortunate country, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century. This will be far from easy, but a good start would be for the Council of Europe to heed the appeal from the Kaniv Four to send election observers, hopefully of such rank as to be able to throw their weight around. Ukraine is in such straits that it cannot afford the luxury of such standards as existed in nineteenth-century robber baron America. In a time when even wounded (not least in historical context by the US) Latin America is moving toward the First World, it would be a historic tragedy if Ukraine proved incapable of at least as much.






