Return of the Warlords

Mykola Tomenko's latest contribution to our understanding of how this country's shadow politics works reminds one of that time. Of course, it is not a battle of bandit armies but of political oligarchs (not all that different from the bandit generals of those days) forming temporary "holdings," and more stable "syndicates." That the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs has never solved (and under the current regime, doubtless never will) what in these parts is called a "resonant" (headline) murder clearly means that those with the clout to do so can kill anybody they like with impunity. Hence, we have a bull market in bodyguards. The weapons (now more political and economic, not to mention good old blackmail, but also not at all rarely updated versions of the same firearms and explosives used by the otamans) may be different, but the structure is eerily similar. Perhaps Marx was right: history really does repeat itself, once as tragedy and then as farce.

People's Deputy Yevhen Marchuk's warning that in this context legality is in danger of disappearing completely would seem to be putting it mildly. I would argue that any semblance of what is commonly understood as legality has already disappeared. In a world where the law is such that nobody can obey it completely, everybody is liable to punishment for something, and thus who is singled out for punishment is a purely arbitrary political decision, law as a set of rules equally obligatory on all has long since ceased to exist here. If a foreigner builds, say, a bar, and after it starts making money, his local partners say, "Get out or tomorrow you'll be dead," he had better go. He need not expect much in the way of protection from a militia busy supplementing its income by rolling drunks and working for those who actually pay them (not the state).

Interestingly, Liubov Bevzenko offers polling data indicating that two-thirds of the population believe those in power to be both corrupt and incompetent. The surprise is not that they really are corrupt and incompetent, but that two-thirds of the people already know it. The main disagreement was over whether official dishonesty, irresponsibility, or incompetence was the main reason for this country's woes. Does it matter? Obviously, it is a mixture of all three. The only question is whether things can be turned around before it is too late. Yevgeny Primakov, by ordering the arrest of Berezovsky, seems to be trying to move Russia away from "oligarchia," albeit toward a far from attractive model that has already been tried. In this country, as People's Deputy Hryhory Omelchenko put it, those at the helm of the Ukrainian state also lead a "corrupt Mafia-type pyramid."