Crimean Anthem Approved as Bullets Fly

In Kerch, the police are hunting Yuri Mikhailov, member of the Kerch city council and deputy director of Interiust Ltd., on suspicion of committing felonies. Member of the Yevpatoriya city council and director of the Alliance-90 Company Kostiantyn Bielomyzov has been arrested. He is suspected of extortion and illegal possession of firearms. Also arrested has been deputy of the Crimean Supreme Council and member of the Yevpatoriya city council Mykola Kotliarevsky with more than 20 criminal charges on record.

Such actions of the law-enforcement bodies are actively supported by Crimean Supreme Council Speaker Leonid Hrach, who recently ordered the preparation of documents for a contest to write the words for a Crimean anthem. The Crimea already has the anthem's musical score, as well as an official flag and emblem.

"Where can we find the right person to know whether the right person is in the right place?" The cadre problem, so ironically formulated by wise men, seems to have come to a vicious circle, but we need not accept this state of affairs. One can always say that he is the right man and open a new period.

Leonid Hrach has quite consciously chosen the role of being responsible for everything in the Crimea (much confirms this). He may have done so out of a habit he had acquired in the old days or due to his essence as a leader or by force circumstances, or, most likely, all these factors.

The complete collapse, when Mr. Hrach was staging a comeback to the upper echelons of Crimean power under the slogan "I will save the Crimea of Franchuk," made him act fast, resolutely, vigorously, and consistently. This is what the new-old Crimean leader has in fact demonstrated. Having become Speaker, he did his best to oust Anatoly Franchuk as Premier (The Day covered this quite thoroughly at the time). Then he had his fellow lawmakers adopt a Constitution of the Crimea that fundamentally expanded the autonomous republic's economic powers and the those of its Parliament's Speaker.

Having received a constitution approved by Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada and signed by the President, Mr. Hrach went further: the Crimean Supreme Council's resolution On Measures to Strengthen Cadre Work (approved by 62 of the 78 deputies present) is in fact restoring the nomenklatura as an institution: 392 governmental and administrative posts of various levels are subject to confirmation in certain cases by the Crimean Supreme Council or to approval by its presidium, standing committees, or the Speaker. Premier Serhiy Kunitsyn, who believed on the eve of the vote that he controlled about 30 votes, only shrugged his shoulders after the Speaker's new triumph (the former always loses to the latter both in tactics and strategy): look, there is a "political experiment going on, an attempt to restore the Communist Party obkom on the basis of the Supreme Council."

This nomenklatura revolution, as a reminiscence of the future, caused observers to view it unanimously as what could be called a restrained protest. It is restrained by force of a traditionally respectful subjective attitude to Mr. Hrach's personality. It is a protest because all that reminds us of the Communist Party past objectively triggers a natural and virtually uncontrollable reaction. And it is up to the Reds, not their opponents, to explain this.

As to its essence, everything is not so simple and unequivocal. If we try to look at the situation objectively, without brandishing the bogey of a Red stronghold and a Left revenge in an isolated region, we must deal with real-life cadre problems and methods of handling it.

As to the level of corruption, Ukraine may not yet be first in the world, but only because it got off to a slow start: potential opportunities proved to be unlimited by anything or anyone save the resources of the state itself. These are still available, judging by the incessant clan fighting and regular repartition of various markets. And although it not the human factor that decides everything (to use a Soviet clichО) but the objective conditions under which it is recruited, i.e., the legal framework for the unconditional fulfillment of laws and meting out an inevitable punishment for lawbreaking, today it is specific government and administrative officials who take bribes and team up with criminal groupings, while society is absolutely ignorant about who, how and, what is more, for what merits persons find their way to the green pastures, i.e., leading posts. And society never knows who should be held responsible for a new crash, while those on top - in both the capital and the provinces - are little concerned about what this downtrodden and impoverished society thinks and wants to know until the time when the latter becomes the electorate.

Crimean Speaker Hrach literally understood that the body he heads is the elected representative power authorized to control the burning office-holding process on behalf of the common people, while all of us misunderstood him, for we never forgot Mr. Hrach as the first secretary of the Communist Party Crimean Republican Committee whose brilliant career was halted by the August 1991 putsch, and we will never lose our suspicions that the actions of Mr. Hrach as Parliamentary Speaker and Crimean Communist leader are indivisible.

On sober reflection, however, analysis of the actual situation should be based on, for example, such fresh information as how the police busted the well-known Feodosiya criminal gang led by one Bely that had controlled the city for about seven years, and now we are being shown his Lincolns and military helicopters and told that all serious posts were passed out by Bely himself. We need not ask where those who had to do it were before nor recall which premier had his fief there; let us drop questions about where the interests of the former Crimean Premier Franchuk and the Crimean bandit crossed on Feodosiya's sea and land expanses. Let us ask simply: what do the new authorities have to do with this whole legacy, including cadre issues? Is anybody obliged to bear responsibility for what is going on, is anybody going to establish order, is anybody going to systematize this work? Or do all of us have to fish in troubled waters? Who does not know in the Crimea that in the oil and gas complex cadres were appointed and then removed to the accompaniment of funereal music, while vacancies were filled by back-stage decisions of the same offices? Lack of oversight allowed certain circles and persons to "radically" replace a worn-out official by a "deserving" one.

At the end of each year's holiday season Kyiv asks an menacing question: where are taxes and revenues? Who is responsible to whom? Neither the tax men, nor the army, police, nor customs officers are subordinated to the autonomous republic. Moreover, local authorities often learn about appointments in these agencies from the newspapers.

It is not Kyiv, of course, that bears the blame for the Crimea stooping so low. It was difficult even to imagine in the pre-Meshkov period that a more or less pivotal post in the republic might be beyond the Supreme Council Chairman's jurisdiction. Of course, it is not Kyiv to blame that, by popular vote, the Crimean heights were conquered by street thugs who once attempted, machine guns in hand, to take over the Ministry of Internal Affairs (quite successfully) and the Security Service Committee (only to be kicked out). After doing away with Meshkov and his clique and depriving the autonomous regime of all power, Kyiv gradually built what amounts to a control-free executive vertical. In fact, a country where even customs officials are appointed by the President (there must be a special reason for this, otherwise how could Ukraine have become a vanguard corrupt state?) had been carefully honing the vertical of bribes until it became perfect in foreign eyes.

And when Mr. Hrach says today in the Crimea that ill-prepared people are being appointed to important posts, that irresponsibility, negligence, and corruption run supreme, all this is not unique to the Crimea. Having noted this much, what comes next? The Crimean Supreme Council has attempted to take control of the cadres issues, and, after all, the phrase "Supreme Council nomenklatura" sounds no worse than "organized crime nomenklatura."

Mr. Hrach hurries, does not shirk responsibility; on the contrary, he tries to take responsibility, sometimes overdoing it. That Mr. Hrach as a politician is much stronger than Premier Kunitsyn is an objective fact, albeit through no fault of Kunitsyn. Yet, a constitutional division of powers, so slowly being understood as necessary by our state, is the only chance systematize the activity of all spheres with equally systematic responsibility. What is now underway in the Crimea is, despite all Mr. Hrach's noble intentions, not simply a shift of the zone of influence zone from the executive to the legislative branch but merely the creation of a single center of influence. For the Crimean Constitution provides that as many as half nomenklatura posts on the list approved by the Supreme Council are a prerogative of the latter. We can, of course agree subjectively that it is Mr. Hrach who guarantees today an exclusively professional approach to selection and placement of cadres. And incidentally, it is extremely significant that after the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada approved the Crimean Constitution, which Rukh did its best to sidetrack, believing the powers delegated to the autonomous republic too excessive and dangerous, a very wise statesman told our corespondent: "I would have voted for it if it had one more line: 'The Constitution shall be valid only during the rule of Mr. Hrach'." This admission costs a high price, with due account of the Rukh's hostility to all Communists. Still, this interpretation of the issue may be sound: what will happen if, God forbid, a certain new version of Meshkov appears at the head of the Crimean Supreme Council tomorrow?