Volume 10 Numbers 2/3

Spring/Summer 2001

Ukraine's New Virtual Politics
Andrew Wilson

It is not the purpose of this paper to repeat the details of the Gongadze scandal, with which most interested readers will probably be sufficiently acquainted. Rather, it seeks to say something about the post-Soviet Ukrainian political culture of which the scandal is sadly symptomatic-in particular, the glaring gap between public verisimilitude and private cynicism. As the tapes supposedly made secretly in President Kuchma's offices claim to reveal, what Ukrainian politicians say in public is very different from how they act in private, where their attitudes are often chillingly frank. For example, the then-security chief Leonid Derkach allegedly says of the procurator's office, "if we are the power, that is an instrument of our power" (the transcript is at www.pravda.com.ua/?101211-3-1; for the translation, see Kyiv Post, via Ukraine List, # 116, February 13, 2001.) More broadly, the scandal has exposed-or confirmed-a whole culture of virtual politics, where a public world of gesture and imagemaking masks an alternative reality of private intrigue and complicity. Or, to use an alternative metaphor, Kuchma and his entourage are revealed as players in a type of theater politics, but a theater without an audience, or a theater where the public has only a restricted view. The tapes' great service, however, is that they allow us to look behind the scenes at how modern Ukraine really operates and to observe at close quarters the workings of the powerful state holding company that Kuchma and his entourage have built to monopolize power and economic influence.

This virtual model provides a better way of understanding modern Ukraine than the standard academic unilinear and teleological transition models. Democratization in Ukraine exists only on the surface, in a society which proclaims itself to be Central European but maintains a very Soviet political culture. On the other hand, Ukraine is not an autocracy; democracy is not completely absent. A virtual democracy can exist only if there is some gap between rhetoric and reality, between performance and underperformance (therefore it is not found in Central Asia, where the attempt is not even made). The formal commitment is there, but the shortfall is so great that Ukraine is arguably one of the most virtual of all postcommunist states. Size exacerbates this effect. Ukraine is big enough to make the formation of a national civil society or of true national political parties extremely difficult, but small enough for Kyiv still to control national media and prevent the regions, as so often happens in Russia, from escaping the clutches of customs officials or the tax inspectorate. Both factors privilege state power. There is no paradox in the Ukrainian state being simultaneously both too weak and too strong-too weak to resist falling prey to special interests, too powerful in other people's lives. Another factor is the relative importance of the public arena in comparison with Russia; political parties are more important because the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) is more powerful than the Russian Duma; power does not disappear into the executive as it does in Russia. But the public arena has to be mythologized. Given analogous patterns of post-Soviet political economy, real politics is dominated by similar special interests (new business conglomerates and corrupted state agencies), whose machinations have to be carefully camouflaged.

Spin-Ukrainian Style
The first aspect of virtuality in Ukrainian politics is, therefore, the masked identity of key political players. In the first place, this is because so many players are blatantly self-interested (new business) or potentially unpopular (most representatives of the state) or both. Secondly, and consequently, such virtuality is due to the increasingly important role played in Ukrainian political life, as in Russia, by political consultants or prchiki- indeed, many are hired specialists from Russia. Some perform the same job as in the West (see the ostensibly respectable guides by Georgiy Pocheptsov, Kak stanovi- atsia prezidentami: izbiratelnye tekhnologii XX veka [Kyiv: Znannia, 1999]; and Imidzh i vybory [Kyiv: ADEFUkraine, 1997]); others are masters of the black arts of cynical image-making, manipulative propaganda, and kompromat. The job of the prchiki, moreover, is not the refinement of an ongoing two-way communication between politicians and electorates (and certainly not the subordination of elites to focus groups that is often decried in the West). Their service begins and ends with their clients' successful election. Rather than match image to reality by delivering on their promises, clients are free to choose a different image next time around. Manipulation of public opinion, moreover, has been made much easier, first, by the continuing weakness of civil society and, second, by the progressive strengthening of state control over the mass media. The first is a common feature of most post-Soviet societies. As for the latter, the national media market was created not by the first president, Leonid Kravchuk (for "nationalizing" reasons), but by the second president, Kuchma (to control the informational space). Many parties are "broadcast parties" (a term coined by Sarah Oates in a paper delivered to the 1999 United Kingdom Political Science Association conference) that appear for one election and then vanish. With very few countervailing forces and independent channels, any exposure effect, which might undermine the virtual politics, is inherently limited. Most voters lack sufficient information to verify, let alone to challenge, politicians' publicly proclaimed positions. A case in point is the Green Party, one of the surprise successes of the 1998 elections. As the wags have it, the party's "greenness" consists largely of its leaders' fondness for the American dollar. Of seven Ukrainian deputies under investigation for corruption in the spring of 2000, four were Greens, including Serhiy Rys, president of the Shelton Oil Company, and Vasyl Khmelnytskyi, of the Real-Group. However, as this has not been widely publicized, opinion polls indicate that the party's leaders have not depleted the political capital they purchased in 1998 and might pull off the same trick in 2002.

Most of the key players in Ukrainian politics (see Table 1) have been carefully mythologized. This is most obviously true of the self-proclaimed center, made up of almost entirely virtual parties. These organizations are, in reality, fronts for business interests or power structures whose formal name and public image say very little about their real political priorities. They could never stand without a mask; their true face would be too repellent. Most notorious is the very same Green Party, originally a genuine environmental lobby. First established in 1990, it sold its good name to business interests (many of them notorious polluters) in 1998. Then there is the Social Democratic Party (United), which, despite its ambitions to gain respectability as a member of the Socialist International, is actually a forum for Kyiv's leading businessmen. Their rivals, Labor Ukraine, provide further testimony to the popularity of leftcenter images and slogans in Ukraine, even when put forward by powerful figures from the security service and interior ministry who, in fact, dominate the party. The parliamentary faction Revival of the Regions and its corresponding party the Democratic Union are both personal vehicles for presidential adviser and leading oligarch Oleksandr Volkov-a leading representative of the energy consortia, which are bleeding the Ukrainian regions dry. Because of money-laundering charges laid against Volkov in Belgium, the faction is often called Revival of the Belgian Regions. Fatherland is the party of controversial former vice premier Yuliya Tymoshenko. Most of its members originally belonged to the vaguely Pan-Slavist Hromada party in 1998 (when Tymoshenko's business interests were spread throughout the CIS); however, after little more than a year in government, during which her domestic interests have prospered, she has switched fatherlands and successfully reinvented herself as a would-be sponsor of the national-democratic opposition.

An even more worrying development came in March 2001, when Mykola Azarov installed himself as head of the newly formed Party of the Ukrainian Regions. Azarov, unlike Volkov (who comes from Kyiv), actually is from one of the main Ukrainian regions (Donetsk), but his main role is as head of the state tax inspectorate. Few could object to the obvious impropriety: the party is not expected to be short of funds for the 2002 elections. (Azarov and his "Donetsk clan" are also supposedly in control of the Solidarity faction.) The closest thing to a genuine center party in parliament is the Popular Democrats but only because most of its original oligarchs, including Volkov et al., left the party faction in late 1998 and early 1999.

The strength of the various groups in parliament is shown in Table 1. A group's original position, when parliament was first elected in March 1998, is also shown in order to indicate the spectacular Brownian motion that has confused the electorate since then. Left factions are listed first, before the center and the right, but, as is already clear, in many cases the ordering is arbitrary.

Sources: Yuriy Shaihorodskyi, ed., Vybory 98. Dokumenty, statystychni dani, analiz (Kyiv: Center for Social-Psychological Research and Political Management, 1998); Interfax, March 21, 2001. The Socialist and Village parties were originally elected on a joint list that split in September 1998.

Virtuality is not confined to the center. The national-democratic right split in both 1999 and 2000 so that there are now three branches of the main Rukh movement. In the 1999 presidential election, the leading centrist and former Ukrainian security chief Yevhen Marchuk sought support both on the far right, including many former dissidents he had persecuted in the past, and among the official trade unions on the left. Several far-right movements are reportedly financed by the security authorities or the church (the paramilitary Ukrainian Self-Defense Force [USDF]) or by rich patrons like Tymoshenko (Shield of the Fatherland). The USDF has been accused of acting as agents provocateurs at recent anti-Kuchma demonstrations. On the left, artificial divisions (the best example being the Progressive Socialists, now disbanded, at least in parliament) helped secure Kuchma's victory in the 1999 election. Since his reelection, several new virtual center-left spoiler parties-Solidarity, Justice, Yabluko (in theory, a wouldbe Ukrainian equivalent of Russia's Yabloko, but actually a clone of the Social Democrats)-have been created to compete with the Socialist Party, Kuchma's strongest real opponents on the left. On the other hand, the president is quite happy with the Communists' status as the so-called official opposition (see below).

Virtuality is also ephemerality. Three years after the 1998 elections, only four out of the fourteen factions still represent the eight parties that originally passed the 4 percent barrier for representation in the Rada. (The Socialist Party would have made it five. In March 1998 they stood in alliance with the Village Party, but links were severed in September 1998. They are now formally known as the "left-center" faction.) Half of the original number have therefore disappeared (Hromada, the Socialist-Village alliance, the Progressive Socialists, and a united Rukh). At a similar stage in the 1994-98 parliament (in the spring of 1997), only four out of eleven factions represented entities formed after the original voting in spring of 1994. Moreover, there was almost no carryover from one parliament to the next. Only one of the new factions created during the 1994-98 parliament (Reforms) could, with any plausibility, claim to be the same entity in 1998-2001 (Reforms-Congress), and it ran in the intervening 1998 elections under yet a third label as Reforms and Order. It won only 3.1 percent and three seats. Table 2 shows this lack of continuity. To emphasize the point, data is also given for the 1990-94 parliament, after independence and the temporary banning of the Communist Party in 1991, although the situation then was not closely comparable with 1994-98 and 1998-2001. As in Table 1, the listing of factions vaguely correlates, in descending order, with the movement from left to center to right.

Sources: Khto ye khto v ukrainskii politytsi (Kyiv: Petrol Mohyla Society, 1993); Oleksiy Haran and Oleksandr Maiboroda, eds. Ukrainski livi: mizh leninizmom i sotsial-demokratiieiu (Kyiv: University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, 2000), passim. Before 1994, deputies could belong to more than one faction.

In his study of the 1999 elections to the Russian Duma, Richard Rose defines such groups as "convenience parties." In his words, "an election fixes the supply of Duma [here Rada] members, but not necessarily the parties to which they belong" (Richard Rose, "A Supply-Side View of Russia's Elections," EECR 9, nos. 1/2 [Winter/Spring 2000], p. 55). Convenience parties tend to be created after elections, leapfrogging into politics at the elite level and so obtaining the privileges attached to parliamentary accreditation, such as cars, computers, office space, and committee representation. In principle, this would not conflict with at least one Western pattern, whereby many parties that were originally established as parliamentary factions (such as the British Conservative Party) subsequently built party machinery and electoral linkage from the top-down. In Ukraine, however, parliamentary convenience parties have been among the most ephemeral. There is little point in establishing themselves "in the country," and going to the trouble and expense of actually campaigning, when the rules allow them to reestablish themselves again "in parliament" after the next elections regardless of whether any such campaign had been successful or not. Between times, all sorts of business were brazenly conducted from party offices. Not surprisingly, it is extremely difficult for the electorate to keep up. Readers may be finding it difficult themselves.

Virtual Opposition
Virtuality is also to be found in the lack of congruity between political principles and political behavior. The most obvious example is the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), which is supposedly in resolute opposition to the "current comprador-Mafia regime" in Ukraine (from party leader Petro Symonenko's speech to the fifth CPU congress; Komunist Ukrainy, no. 3 [2000], p. 12), but which has, in fact, supported it since the Gongadze scandal began-most notably by abstaining in several key censure votes in parliament. One source describes the party as an "obedient" (slukhniana) and an "in-thepocket (kyshenkova) opposition" to Kuchma (Politychna dumka, no. 3 [2000], p. 132). At the very least, there is a coincidence of interests. When Kuchma claimed, in March 2001, that he would not negotiate with the groups leading street protests against him (Ukraine Without Kuchma and the National Salvation Forum) because "there is only one real opposition in Ukraine," he was really defining the opposition he would prefer, that is, an opposition that can strike a rhetorical pose but cannot, and does not want to, challenge him seriously. The communists are also happy to defend their current status, maintaining but not actually seeking to expand the quarter share of seats they won in the elections of 1994 and 1998. It is also certain, however, that the communists need to maintain their nascent business interests (nothing reprehensible about this, they need financing to compete). It has even been alleged that money has changed hands; it is reported that compromising conversations between Kuchma and party leader Petro Symonenko are on the tapes.

Significantly, moves by Volkov and/or leading oligarchs from Labor Ukraine to create a rival, and more "national," Ukrainian Communist Party to compete with the existing Communist Party of Ukraine in 2000 seem to have been put on hold now that the latter is playing ball. The "official" Communists are calculating that their compromised position will not alienate their captive electorate (which, once again, will not be informed of it in the official media) and will support the party, come what may, in 2002. Moreover, the state's administrative resources can be used to see off the challenge of potential rivals, namely, the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants that split from CPU's ranks in April 2001. Just to play safe, since some younger party members have sought to join the real opposition, the party has organized street protests under the slogan "Ukraine without Kuchma, Ukraine without [reformist Prime Minister] Yushchenko," albeit sometimes only emphasizing the latter.

Overall, this is a depressing picture. Little is as it seems to be. The widespread sentiment that "they are all the same" has made it difficult to mobilize opposition to Kuchma during the current crisis. The inability to unite in opposition to him in 1999 has carried over into 2001. However, the two years have made a considerable difference in some respects.

The 1999 Campaign: Kuchma Reaps the Whirlwind
Ukraine's motley crew of virtual political actors combined to produce an almost entirely virtual campaign in 1999. Virtuality has its costs, however. In simple summary, Kuchma's prchiki were able to secure him victory but have been unable to contain or control the consequences (author's conversation with Dmitrii Furman, March 2001).

The basic model of Kuchma's advisers was a wellplanned repeat of Russia 1996. This meant running on the center-right against the "red threat"; that is, either the Communist Party itself or the homegrown alternative, Nataliia Vitrenko, populist firebrand and leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, which had conveniently emerged as a splinter group from the Socialists in 1995-96. Assuming the planned corollary of the captive support of the right, the only genuine danger was the emergence of a real competitor from the center or center-left. "Anticorruption" candidate Yevhen Marchuk apparently played the role of Alexander Lebed in Russia 1996, handily winning 8.9 percent of the vote before accepting Kuchma's "surprise" offer to chair the National Security Council between the two rounds of polling. It was made abundantly clear to the rival oligarchs that their business interests would not survive any direct challenge to Kuchma. Former prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko was forced into exile and his business ally Tymoshenko was encouraged to split their Hromada party; the latter also made peace, albeit temporarily, with Kuchma. The murder of his predecessor Vadym Hetman in the summer of 1998 was widely interpreted as a warning to central-bank governor Viktor Yushchenko not to stand. At the same time, Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz was obstructed at every turn and was able to win only 11.3 percent of the total first-round left-wing vote of 44.4 percent (Vitrenko took 10.9 percent, and Petro Symonenko 22.2 percent for the Communists). Given a larger share, or a different order among the victors, and Kuchma would still have been under threat in the second round-when he easily defeated Symonenko by 56.2 to 37.8 percent.

Ukraine, however, is not a simple carbon copy of Russia. The import of an artificial claque began to pull Kuchma in several directions after 1999. His natural instinct was to close ranks, further enrich his supporters, and bring Ukraine's political system more into line with superpresidential Russia. This was manifested in the botched referendum of April 2000, in which four proposals to reduce the role of parliament were put to vote: an end to deputy immunity, a reduction in their numbers from 450 to 300, enhanced presidential dissolution powers, and the creation of a bicameral system that would be more amenable to the president's control. The administration claimed the referendum had been backed by an implausible 82 to 90 percent of the voters, but it was "botched" in two important senses: the credibility threshold was dramatically transgressed, and proper-or clever-procedure was reversed. Two-thirds of Rada deputies must vote to change the Constitution, and Kuchma had hoped to browbeat them into doing so with the referendum results. In the dramatically changed circumstances created by the Gongadze affair, the referendum may simply be forgotten.

For Ukraine's Western allies, on the other hand, the country's image was revamped and "reform" was relaunched. Yushchenko was appointed prime minister, with Tymoshenko as his deputy, but both had to share power in a government in which all the virtual factions of the center had their share of posts. Unlike Yeltsin in 1996, Kuchma also had to deliver to his supporters on the right and did so by backing, in February 2000, a program on "Broadening the Functioning of the Ukrainian Language as the State Language." Combining all these moves was always likely to be difficult.

Furthermore, many of the characters in this drama were reluctant to play their allotted role. Yevhen Marchuk, like Lebed, had his own agenda but was more capable of implementing it, given the resources he still controlled from his time (1991-94) as head of the Ukrainian State Security Services and as prime minister (1995-96). Many have claimed to see his manipulative hand behind recent events. Both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko proved rather more determined advocates of reform than Kuchma had expected. Once in government, Tymoshenko, in particular, began to reaccumulate resources and pose as potential patron of the opposition. It should be noted that Tymoshenko's reforms did not necessarily create the transparency she proclaimed. The money extracted from various energy debtors often went to structures under her personal control and-allegedly-offshore companies. (See "Gazovaia printsessa Ukrainy," posted at www.kompromat.ru. This article is actually a reprint from the FreeLance Bureau, September 28, 2000; also Kompaniia, August 28, 2000, Den, August 23, 2000, and The Financial Times, October 19, 2000.)

Other factors, finally, were Moroz and his Socialist Party, elements totally absent from the Russia 1996 scenario (there being no equivalent party in Russia). Bloodied but not destroyed, they nursed considerable grievances after their mistreatment in 1999. Inching away from their traditional Communist allies, they began building links with Tymoshenko and the national-democrats instead. Significantly, as leader of the patriotic and uncorrupted left, it was Moroz who would receive the secret tapes in the autumn of 2000.

And so, while Kuchma had much at his disposal, the aftermath has not been entirely smooth sailing. Ukraine is not a tabula rasa for any type of political experiment or maneuver. Ukrainian society, although in many respects as atomized as Russia's, has elements of regionally concentrated civic activism, particularly in Kyiv and the western regions. Nor is virtuality, as we have seen, omnipresent or absolute. The communists' recent behavior, for example, has helped give Moroz a new lease on life and alienate their own youth wing. Rukh may have split into two rival parts (Rukh honest and Rukh virtual) but there are still many genuine oppositionists on the right. The mainstream media face many rivals on the margins-the attempt to silence their voices having been the spur to the current crisis-and several oligarch-controlled channels and papers have had to echo aspects of the rival coverage since the demonstrations began.

The Gongadze affair was, therefore, a scandal waiting to happen. The tensions have been building ever since Kuchma's reelection. As soon as the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko reforms began to bite into the oligarchs' interests, it was widely rumored that Kuchma-regardless of the damage to his image in the West-planned to ditch both, replacing Yushchenko with a more reliable (and reliably virtual) figure, such as Azarov, Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, or former Dnipropetrovsk banker Serhiy Tyhypko. In addition, the Socialists, as a party, were further persecuted. A Justice Party, led by former Moroz confidant Ivan Chyzh, was encouraged to split from its ranks (Chyzh has backed the administration during the current crisis), and the Solidarity and Yabluko factions in parliament were created to undercut the Socialists' political base. The right began to find alternative and more-reliable patrons in Yushchenko, and, more surprisingly, given her past links with Lazarenko, Tymoshenko. Most dangerous for the existing system was that Ukraine was only at the beginning of its own, highly deformed, privatization process in 1999. The unity among oligarchs, temporarily established from November 1999 (Kuchma's reelection) to January 2000 (the establishment of a New Majority in parliament), was soon lost as the competition over the further distribution of assets heated up. New parties of the center emerged as existing players repositioned themselves in the competition, and new alliances were sought. Azarov's party, for example, represents a dangerous challenge to the previously dominant center trinity of Labor Ukraine, Revival of the Regions, and the Social Democrats.

Given the foregoing, it would be next to impossible to make predictions regarding the political storm that has engulfed Ukraine since November 2000. The fact that so many forces and interests, in so many combinations, are now possible has fed the appetites of the conspiracy theorists. The predominance of so many virtual players also means that few combinations can be excluded as incredible or inconceivable. That the stale and artificial political formula to which there seemed no alternative in 1999 now seems to be breaking up is a cause for celebration. That the electorate is playing such a small role in the potential political realignment is not. Most aspects of the virtual system are still extant. The current crisis seems, therefore, more likely to result in a change of leadership than a change of regime.

What Is To Be Done?
How can political virtuality in Ukraine be minimized? How can politics be made more real? Most obviously, in a political culture where money and power are so intimately connected, the rules for party finance must be made much stricter and principles of disclosure far more transparent. In 1998, many parties did not even register their finances; most declared implausibly modest budgets. A general reform of asset ownership and property law will also make it easier to identify who is who in any particular party. State financing for political parties is a difficult option to consider in a country where politicians are so widely perceived as leeches on taxpayers' hard-won contributions, but it may be the lesser of many evils. It would at least allow currently marginal groups- sectorial interests with few of their own resources, the ideologically motivated-to compete with existing patronage networks. A general "register of interests," for both parties and individual deputies, is also of vital importance, as would be new legislation regulating the representation of corporate interests and lobbying tactics.

A second area where reform is absolutely necessary is in parliamentary rules and procedures. The single most important modification would be to prevent deputies from changing sides or creating new factions after their election. The eight factions originally elected in March 1998 remained more or less stable until a disastrous ruling by the Constitutional Court in December 1998 elevated an idealized Burkean notion of a deputy's freedom above the electorate's right to maintain the original channels of representation. Chaos then ensued. The total number of times deputies have changed sides since is more than the total number of deputies (450); some individuals have moved half a dozen times. The minimum number of deputies required to form a faction (14) is also dangerously low, even in contrast with Russia's minimum of 35 (in parliaments of the same size), and it is actually less than the 4 percent (barrier for party representation). If the 2002 elections were held on a strengthened or even purely proportional basis-(as proposed in the draft law vetoed by Kuchma in February 2001)-the case for maintaining the original verdict of the electorate would be even stronger. Faction-size requirements would then be less relevant. If deputies were not allowed to change sides, then the minimum faction size would become at least the same as the barrier for election, whether 4 or 5 percent of the total votes, and would typically be a good deal higher, given the likely number of excluded votes below the barrier.

Finally, the most important area for reform involves the least obvious aspect of the political system. Virtuality mainly exists in, and by virtue of, the mass media. To quote Jean Baudrillard, the official Ukrainian media, at least when it is packaging politics, "rather than creating communication, exhausts itself in the art of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning" (Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994], p. 80; emphasis in original). The creation of an independent board to oversee the media, particularly television, perhaps after the Polish model would contribute greatly to minimizing this effect. Under the pressure of recent events, Kuchma has stated that he would consider such an idea. One assumes he has no intention of doing so voluntarily. But more effective (and earlier) oversight of the 2002 elections by the OSCE and others, although primarily designed to correct flagrant abuses of both Ukrainian law and European standards, would also have the important side effect of making the job of the prchiki much harder.

Andrew Wilson is a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His most recent book is The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (Yale University Press, 2000).

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