How Elitist is Our Elite?

Apart from timely and urgent measures on "filling in the gaps and plastering over the cracks," the current crisis, the most dangerous since Ukraine's independence, also makes our people face the painful problem of who, in fact, runs this country. The question "Does Ukraine have a political elite?" can be heard more and more frequently in the mass media, in conversations while waiting in line, from various podiums, and at seminars on politics alike (on the street this question is phrased more rudely). For what particular sins did our country get this very kind of elite? (The question "Why did our 'progressive-reformist' elite have such bad luck with the country and the people?" is asked much less frequently.) Does the elite we have really deserve this proud name? In the situation we all have found ourselves, these questions are by no means academic but exclusively practical.

Everyone can be sure at least of one thing - Ukraine does have a political elite. However, one needs to understand this concept correctly - here it is not the elite who run the country, but whoever runs it is defined by necessity as our political elite. In this sense the political elite, just like the mafia, is absolutely immortal. Cannibal tribe chiefs who decide whom a tribe will eat today and whom it will hunt for tomorrow are none other than the political elite of the tribe, which later becomes the elite of a tribe union, and so forth, all the way up to the creation of state institutions (by that time, of course, cannibalism as such remains in the past). All this is historic fact. There are countries without a statehood, but there has not been a single human community registered without a ruling stratum. And it is not surprising, since the basis of political leadership - hierarchic relationships - came into being long before humankind did.

A more difficult question is how elitist our national elite is, and how adequate its activity is to the general situation in the country and the crisis that struck Ukraine. Unfortunately, it is difficult to say anything good about our establishment. On the one hand, it is obvious that neither the political elite groups nor their tightly intertwined business elite groups generally accomplish their "textbook" mission: "to organize means to unite many people in a happy, successful, joint activity; to arrange people and objects in such a way that the desired useful action is fully accomplished" (Sombart, Bourgeois). On the other hand, theoretically we cannot rule out the possibility that we are content with the aberration of closeness and are simply unable to see a well-thought-out and wise strategy behind the slapdash measures of the President, Parliament, the government, and the NBU. This strategy will yield its beneficial fruit in the somewhat distant, perhaps even very distant, future. At any rate, thus far we have not seen a focused, long-term policy behind the government's actions, and from a glance these actions look like a fussy and reflex desire to urgently rob those who have not gone bankrupt or hidden "in the shadows". Government resolutions on "the domestic manufacturer" increasingly remind people of the legendary Drakont, who, when asked why his laws stipulated capital punishment for both state treason and a trifle theft, responded that he could not think of a more severe punishment for grave misdemeanors.

The people of Ukraine and their rulers are enduring the hardships of this "transition period" together, but in different ways. Lately, politicians and political scientists, while reflecting on the patience and hardiness of our "tolerant" population, have virtually been ignoring the fact that nominal stability had been achieved almost exclusively by way of simplifying the social structure of society and irreversibly degrading its infrastructure: in the cities, streets are not lit anymore and public transportation is almost at a standstill; in the countryside, gas and electricity shutoffs are a regular occurrence; payments between remaining functioning enterprises are getting increasingly difficult to make; factories are going out of business; doctors, teachers, scientists, and other qualified specialists are forced to change their occupations and become petty traders, salespeople and the like in order to survive. This is all very bad in and of itself, yet the causes of the catastrophe are not in it but rather in the unproductive use of the resources pumped out of the country.

One of the consequences of the first wave of the crisis (economists believe that the worst is yet to come) is the obvious lack of resources for the elite themselves. In his time Schelderupp-Ebbe, the first to research the hierarchy phenomenon using domestic chickens as a basis, introduced the term "pecking order" to determine the hierarchical structure (the highest rank sets priority access to feed). It is not difficult to see that the relationships between groups of political and business elite are currently being simplified and are mostly boiling down to "inter-genera struggle" for access to the feeder.

This tendency displayed itself most vividly (since it was before the crisis, it took a relatively mild form) in the months-long agony of Pavlo Lazarenko's premiership ("an endless nightmare"), whose main flaw in relation to the other elite groups (a real flaw, but not publicly incriminating) was that he, according to a journalist's accurate definition, "did not know how to share". It is possible, however, that the experienced Pavlo Lazarenko did foresee the repletion of the country's reserves, an end of his premiership, and the economic consequences of his resignation for commercial structures close to him, and therefore was prudently trying to take as much as possible.

 It is no secret to anyone how closely related proximity to the government and a chance to do business in our country really are. To a larger or lesser extent, this connection exists in most countries, including the most developed ones (where it is called lobbying). However, the lobbying that widely uses state institutions (mostly the executive branch) for creating favorable conditions for "their people" and the most unfavorable ones for all other competitors is called corruption. In Indonesia, for example, until recently virtually all profitable entrepreneurial sectors were divided between President General Suharto's family members. Ukraine has not gotten that far yet, but the principal difference between this country and Indonesia or other "developing countries" (or not really developing) is not the level of corruption or  the fact that we are a "great European nation," but rather the much harsher climatic conditions. We have very cold winters and we need to somehow keep ourselves warm (in the future, one must remember, near hand-made hearths). Besides, such a useful plant as, for example, the banana-tree does not grow in Ukraine (unfortunately, this is the only reason why Ukraine cannot be called a banana republic). And the banana is not only a tasty and nutritious product, but the tree also has leaves wide enough to allow working people to wrap themselves and sleep through a warm southern night right on the ground. Regular funding is necessary to maintain our country's usual infrastructure at the level of minimal needs, and therefore the "eating away" of Ukrainian potential has been going on at a tremendous speed.

It is the quick repletion of  the country's resources, including such a strategic one as the people's trust in the government, that became the real reason for the general crisis in Ukraine. No "pyramid" (and our financial and economic systems have been developing according to the "pyramid" principle) can exist too long. At some point, this system collapses because of the fallaciousness inherent in its structure, and an event that triggers a breakup is just a straw that deals the final blow to the camel. Russian authorities have much more grounds to cite the world crisis than Ukrainians have to cite the Russian crisis. Moreover, objectively the Russian crisis, which, to name just one thing, has caused the the drop in energy prices, could give the Ukrainian leadership a chance to balance "on the verge" for some more time, provided the domestic conditions were at least a little more favorable. The responsibility of the current ruling elite for "organizing" the crisis and the "revolutionary situation" in which we all now live is enormous. This is the kind of "elite" we have. One could, perhaps somewhat cynically, quote Leonid Kravchuk, "We have what we have," if it were not for the fact that we will have to live and work nowhere else but here, in our country, in Ukraine.