This week's semiannual progress report of the SBU Ukrainian Security Service along with the attack on Ukrainian Perspectives Fund and My (We) editor-in-chief Serhiy Odarych reported in the previous issue point to a disturbing feature of contemporary Ukrainian life. In this country, where no big-league economic or political assassination has ever been solved, the SBU reported that it had information on who killed People's Deputy Yevhen Shcherban "and why," that the plotters were either dead or abroad, but nothing further. The more recent assassination of former People's Deputy and Stock Exchange Chairman Vadym Hetman was similarly explained as having "benefited certain persons abroad," but nothing on who or where. Investigation of the Odarych shooting also seems unlikely to produce any more in the way of results. They call it the local tradition. One can understand secrecy in an ongoing criminal investigation, but when the suspects are dead or on the lamb, at least a decent respect for public opinion would seem to make a general public explanation in order. That is why in the Kennedy assassination in the US was followed by the Warren Commission, but not here.
Former Vice President of Ukrainian Perspectives Mykola Tomenko provided a vital clue to what is happening in an article that has already become something of a classic in the political analysis of postcommunist Ukraine, "Real and Ostensible Conflicts in Power Structures" (The Demons of Peace and the Gods of War, Kyiv, 1997; reprinted from Political Thought), in which he persuasively argues that the public politics of wrangling between the President and Parliament is really just so much smoke and mirrors. The main issue is which clan gets what, an issue settled only occasionally by bullets but always settled out of from the public eye. And this opacity of the real political process makes it practically impossible for people to understand what is going on and conduct an informed political discourse. When people are held in ignorance of the real political issues being confronted in their society, there is no way they can make the informed choices that are the life blood of the democratic process, and clearly it is in someone's interest to keep things this way. In other words, Ukraine's democratic facade covers a conscious policy designed to make popular participation in political life impossible.






