Abstract
Leonid Kuchma's second term in office as president of Ukraine (1999–2004) was characterized by the collapse of the national democrat–centrist alliance, the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis, the rise of a non-communist opposition in the 2002 elections and the election of Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 elections following the protests that sparked the Orange Revolution. This revolution cannot be understood without reference to these earlier developments that turned out to have been the preparatory work. Furthermore, the deep divisions that have become evident under Yushchenko had their origins in Ukraine's regionalism, the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis, anti-regime protests and different attitudes to dealing with the past.
This study is divided into four sections. The first surveys the 1998 parliament and 1999 presidential elections during which oligarchic clans first made their appearance in Ukrainian politics.Footnote1 In 1998–99 an alliance was struck between the executive and the oligarchs in Ukrainian politics that remained in place until December 2004. The second section provides an overview of Kuchma's second term in office (1999–2004) during which four main themes are covered: the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in spring 2000, political reform in April 2000, the Viktor Yushchenko government (December 1999–April 2001), and the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis after November 2000. During 2000–2001 the centrist oligarchic–national democratic alliance against the left, which had existed since 1991, collapsed. A new reconfiguration of Ukrainian politics emerged with the national democrats allied to the moderate left against the executive–centrist oligarchic alliance, culminating in the Orange Revolution.Footnote2
The third section provides an overview of the consolidation of oligarchic centrist political parties in the second half of the 1990s and particularly after Kuchma's re-election in 1999. The three main oligarchic clans that emerged to dominate the pro-presidential centre revived the main regional clans (Kyiv–Dnipropetrovsk–Donetsk) that dominated and ruled Soviet Ukraine. The final section investigates the mechanics of how the executive and its oligarchic allies privatised the Ukrainian state through two strategic and eight tactical objectives. These strategies and tactics were an outgrowth of Ukraine's political crisis since ‘Kuchmagate’ and fear on the part of Kuchma and the oligarchs of their fate in the post-Kuchma era.
Oligarchs Enter Ukrainian Politics
The 1998–2002 Parliament
The combined number of leftist deputies elected in 1998 amounted to 171; of these, 122 were from the hard left (Communist Party – KPU – and Progressive Socialist Party) and another 49 from the moderate left (Peasant and Socialist Parties). Thus, the left did not possess an overall majority of seats in parliament (226-plus). These numbers were similar to the 40 per cent of seats they held in the 1994–98 parliament. The majority of the remaining deputies (253) could be divided into two camps depending on their attitudes towards President Leonid Kuchma: national democrats in ‘constructive opposition’ and centrist allies. Pro-Kuchma centrists held the balance of power as they numbered 166 compared with 91 national democrats (for summary information on the parliamentary election results in 1998 and 2002, see ).Footnote3
Table 1 1998 and 2002 (Proportional) Parliamentary Election Results Compared
The 1998 elections saw for the first time the rise of pro-presidential centrist parties that represented regional, oligarchic clan interests who had benefited from economic reform and privatization in the 1990s. These included the Kyiv clan's Social Democratic United Party (SDPUo), the Dnipropetrovsk clan's Labour Ukraine and the still ephemeral Donbas clan's Revival of Regions (later transformed into the Party of Regions of Ukraine). The SDPUo's weakness was that it was the only centrist clan unable to secure a popular home base as it never attracted support in Kyiv.
The SDPUo barely scraped into parliament in 1998 with 4.01 per cent. Apparently reliable rumours suggested that its success was due to some votes having been transferred to it from the Agrarians, who secured only 3.68 per cent. The SDPUo moved fully into the pro-Kuchma camp only in 1999, when it supported Kuchma's re-election (see below).
Ukraine's first attempt at creating a party of power took place during the Valeriy Pustovoitenko government that replaced that of Pavlo Lazarenko in 1997. Pustovoitenko headed the People's Democratic Party (NDP) that obtained 5.01 per cent in the 1998 elections, but failed as a party of power. The NDP faction was always the smallest of the pro-presidential centrists in both the 1998–2002 and 2002–6 parliaments. A similar ephemeral party was the Green Party (ZPU) which revived in the 1998 elections after being taken over by business interests. It secured 5.43 per cent in the 1998 elections but failed to cross the 4 per cent threshold four years later. Neither the NDP nor the ZPU had regional bases.
In 1997 ‘dissident oligarchs’ had emerged with Lazarenko's Hromada Party, which obtained 4.67 per cent in the 1998 elections ( and reflect public understanding of the term ‘oligarch’ and identify ten leading figures named as oligarchs in a poll in early 2001). After his removal as prime minister, Lazarenko became a threat to Kuchma owing to his virulent hostility, his wealth and his presidential ambitions. In February 1999, Lazarenko fled Ukraine after being stripped of his parliamentary immunity because of corruption charges brought against him.Footnote4 The Fatherland faction – led by Yulia Tymoshenko, deputy prime minister for energy in the Yushchenko government and former head of United Energy Systems – brought together defectors from the Hromada faction. In 2000 the Fatherland Party went into opposition to Kuchma and attracted the populist and nationalist camp which had backed former security service chairman and prime minister, Yevhen Marchuk, in the 1999 presidential elections. In 1999 Marchuk had broken with the SDPUo, on whose party slate he had been elected to the 1998 parliament.
Table 2 Public Definition of Oligarchs, January 2001 (%)
Table 3 Public Identification of Oligarchs, January 2001 (%)
‘Constructive opposition’ national democrats consisted of the two wings of Rukh and Reforms Congress.Footnote5 The Reforms Congress faction was linked to Viktor Pynzenyk's centre-right Party of Reform and Order. Although the ‘reformist camp’ (national democrats and centrists) had a numerical advantage over their leftist opponents in the parliament, they were divided by their attitudes towards Kuchma and to the type of reform they wanted Ukraine to pursue. This directly led to splits in four of Ukraine's largest parties in 1998–99 (the NDP, SDPUo, Rukh and Hromada).
The mutual suspicions between ‘constructive opposition’ national democrats and centrists were briefly put aside after the 1999 elections for two reasons. First, they were mutually hostile towards the left, which had controlled parliament since 1994. Second, ‘constructive opposition’ national democrats could not oppose the Yushchenko government (December 1999–April 2001). This alliance began to crumble through the combined impact of the ‘Kuchmagate’ scandal from November 2000 and the removal of the Yushchenko government in April 2001. The real opposition, led by the Tymoshenko bloc and the Socialists, dominated the Ukraine with Kuchma movement during ‘Kuchmagate’.
1999 Presidential Elections
The three main left-wing presidential hopefuls were the Peasant Party leader Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz and the KPU leader Petro Symonenko. With very low popularity rating averaging 2 per cent, Tkachenko dropped his candidature before election day, leaving Moroz and Symonenko as the two left-wing candidates competing to enter the second round. Kuchma's main challenger within the left remained Moroz because he was well known throughout Ukraine and had no corrupt past. Moroz was also the only leftist candidate willing to evolve towards a more social democratic profile.Footnote6 This gave him two advantages over his leftist rivals: first, if he had been pitted in a second round against Kuchma non-leftist supporters might have been tempted to vote for him, since Moroz, unlike the other three leftist candidates, had a less negative image in western Ukraine. Moroz would probably therefore have defeated Kuchma if he had faced him in the second round, as it would have reduced negative voting that worked in Kuchma's favour.
Second, Moroz had made overtures to other centre-left parties, such as Hromada, to forge an anti-Kuchma alliance. The alliance, although with Hromada's successors, Fatherland and the Tymoshenko Bloc, emerged during the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis and endured through to the Orange Revolution. Three small social democratic parties, led by Vasyl Onopenko, Yury Buzduhan and Marchuk, aligned with Moroz's Socialists. Symonenko, leader of one of Ukraine's largest political parties (KPU) and the party with the largest faction in the 1994–98 and 1998–2002 parliaments, faced an uncertain presidential race. Symonenko lacked the necessary charisma to win, had refused to reform his hard-line KPU policies, and lost the support of Russia's communists.Footnote7
The non-left camp was even more divided, and the only two serious contenders were President Kuchma and former Prime Minister Marchuk. Kuchma had eliminated two potential non-communist presidential rivals by forcing Lazarenko into exile and allegedly organizing the murder of Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil.Footnote8 Kuchma's Accord (Zlahoda) election bloc – which united 12 political parties and was jointly led by then Prime Minister Pustovoitenko, former President Leonid Kravchuk and former parliament chairman Ivan Pliushch – backed Kuchma. Zlahoda included his two ‘parties of power’ (NDP and SDPUo), the Agrarian Party, the Party of Muslims, the Party for Regional Revival, Labour Ukraine, the Inter-Regional Bloc of Reforms (MRBR), the Liberal Party, the Republican Christian Party and the Democratic Party. Most of these parties in Zlahoda became the basis of the election bloc ‘For a United Ukraine’ (ZYU) in the 2002 parliamentary elections: NDP, Party for Regional Revival (becoming the Party of Regions), Labour Ukraine and the Agrarians. The MRBR merged with the NDP in 2001. The same parties that supported Zlahoda in 1999 and ZYU in 2002 also backed Yanukovych as the centrist candidate (and Kuchma's favoured successor) in the 2004 presidential elections.
The only two exceptions among the centrists who defected to the national democrats were the Liberal and the Republican Christian Parties, both of whom joined Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc in the 2002 elections. In the 2004 elections only the Republican Christian Party, representing the ‘constrictive opposition’ wing of Rukh, which had always sought to co-operate with the executive, continued to back Yushchenko's candidacy. In 2003–4 the Liberals defected from Our Ukraine and moved back into the pro-Kuchma camp.Footnote9 The Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (PPPU) led by Anatolii Kinakh, prime minister in 2001–2, also joined ZYU. Kuchma had risen to power in 1994 through an alliance of the MRBR and the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, which he had then headed. The PPPU defected to Yushchenko in the Orange Revolution and has been a constituent party in the bloc ‘Our Ukraine’.
In addition to establishing a five-party election bloc, the Kuchma campaign also adopted three strategies. First, dissident oligarchs, such as former Prime Minister Lazarenko and Vadym Rabinovich, were targeted because of their support for Kuchma's opponents. During June and July 1999 Rabinovich was threatened with a five-year banning order from Ukraine, which was lifted only after he agreed to back Kuchma financially. Second, in order to prevent a repetition of the defeat of the incumbent (Kravchuk) in the summer 1994 elections, government and regional elites were coerced into supporting Kuchma. Finally, independent media outlets were either placed under pressure (for example, the Kyiv-based STB television station), or closed (for example, Pravda Ukrayiny and four independent Crimean television stations). Others were bought out by pro-Kuchma loyalists (including Kievskiye vedomosti newspaper by the SDPUo).Footnote10
Marchuk had to create his own social democratic party in early 1999 after the SDPUo agreed to back Kuchma in the 1999 elections. His popular base of supporters (populists and nationalists) moved to the Fatherland Party and the Tymoshenko bloc during the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis. Marchuk obtained 8.13 per cent of the vote in the 1999 elections, a result close to the Tymoshenko bloc's 7.24 per cent in the 2002 elections.
Kuchma's strategic objective aimed to repeat the Russian 1996 presidential election scenario in four ways. First, Kuchma portrayed himself as the flagship of ‘reform’ and state independence. All other candidates on the left were portrayed as a threat both to reform and to Ukraine's independent statehood. Second, Kuchma's election campaign deliberately ignored his weakest area, the economy.Footnote11 Third, he strove to enter the second round against an extreme left candidate, hoping that voters would reject that candidate and thereby, by default, vote in favour of Kuchma.
Kuchma sought to engineer either KPU leader Symonenko or Progressive Socialist leader Natalya Vitrenko as his second-round opponent, because neither of them would be likely to obtain more than 50 per cent of the vote (they each led in only one Ukrainian region in pre-election polls). Vitrenko had reportedly received covert encouragement from the Kuchma administration when her party was established in 1996 after splitting from Moroz's Socialists. The Progressive Socialists were therefore Ukraine's equivalent of Russia's Rodina or Serbia's Radical Party – in other words, loyal left-wing ‘opposition’ parties.Footnote12
Vitrenko, who represents the left populist wing of Ukrainian politics, accuses other leftist parties of being ‘weak-willed’ or ‘turncoats’. In the 1999 elections, pro-Kuchma media outlets attacked all the leftist candidates with the exception of Vitrenko, who also received greater television coverage than other leftists. On 3 October 1999 an alleged assassination attempt on Vitrenko took place in Southern Ukraine. The RGD-5 grenades used by the assailants were stun grenades, giving out bright light and sound, and therefore could never have been intended to kill her. Vitrenko's ratings increased in consequence of the attack while those of Moroz declined because the assailants were members of his local campaign team and held criminal records.Footnote13
Fourth, strongman Marchuk played a role similar to Alexander Lebed's in the 1996 Russian presidential elections by attracting a large number of populist voters disgruntled with both the left and the incumbent. Unlike Lebed's military reputation, which worked in his favour, Marchuk's KGB past worked against him. After doing moderately well in the first round he agreed to back Kuchma in the second in return for being appointed secretary of the National Security and Defence Council (NRBO). This was a repeat of the Russian elections of 1996 where Lebed backed Yeltsin in the second round. Marchuk was sidelined from Ukraine's political process in the NRBO until he became defence minister in June 2003, a brief appointment until his dismissal on the eve of the 2004 elections.
The second round of the 1999 elections gave voters a clear, but not very palatable, choice between the ‘anti-communist reformer’ Kuchma and the KPU leader Symonenko (). The maximum leftist vote in both the March 1994 and the March 1998 parliamentary elections had never exceeded 40 per cent, and in the first round of the presidential elections five leftist candidates merely increased this to 45 per cent. Many moderate voters who had backed leftist candidates in the first round backed Kuchma in the second as the lesser of two evils, voted against both or did not bother to vote. This reduced Symonenko's vote to 37.5 per cent in the second round. Undoubtedly, as in the 1996 Russian elections, a large proportion of the votes given to Kuchma were in reality votes against Symonenko rather than for Kuchma.
Table 4 1999 Presidential Elections
In a repetition of the second round of the July 1994 Ukrainian presidential elections, Kuchma, like his opponent Kravchuk in 1994, scored his most impressive support in the three Galician oblasts of western Ukraine. Here Kuchma's support never fell below 90 per cent; in this region most votes were probably against Symonenko, rather than for Kuchma. This could be seen in the rapid decline in support for Kuchma in western Ukraine after 2000, when the region became a bastion of the anti-Kuchma opposition. In the 2002 and 2004 elections, Our Ukraine and Yushchenko respectively swept western Ukraine.
Kuchma 2 (1999–2004)
After his re-election Kuchma promised to continue to speed up economic reforms, complete administrative reforms, introduce a bicameral parliament, increase regional devolution, move to a professional army, create one million new jobs, pay wage and pension arrears and maintain Ukraine's non-alignment. Marchuk, in his new position as secretary of the NRBO, also promised a tougher campaign against corruption.Footnote14
Kuchma reaffirmed his intention to ‘accelerate’ and ‘deepen’ reform, stalled since 1996, by consolidating the government and pursuing structural economic reform and growth. A major impediment to the acceleration of reform was the parliament, its leadership dominated by left-wingers from 1994 to 1999, and its membership characterized by a large number of unstructured centrist factions lacking in ideological unity.
‘Velvet Revolution’
Immediately after his re-election, Kuchma launched an attack on the leftist chairman of the parliament, Tkachenko, and first deputy chairman, KPU party member Adam Martyniuk. Ironically, Martyniuk was brought back to this position in November 2003 as a trade-off for support for the election of a new prosecutor and was reappointed to the same position in summer 2006.
On 22 January 2000, Tkachenko and Martyniuk were deprived of state bodyguards, official cars and telephone lines. A parliamentary temporary commission began investigating allegations of corruption surrounding Tkachenko going back to 1994 involving the theft of $70 million. This investigation had been dropped in 1998 when Tkachenko became chairman of parliament, showing once again how anti-corruption measures are politically motivated in what has been termed the ‘blackmail state’.Footnote15
The factions within the parliament who backed Tkachenko's removal and the creation of an anti-left majority numbered 253 and hailed from 11 disparate centrist and national democratic factions. The four factions of the left, in contrast, commanded the loyalty of only 171 deputies, while the 11 centrist and national democratic factions were united less in their support for ‘reforms’ or Kuchma than in their hostility to the left's continued control of parliament's leadership since 1994.
After their numbers declined below the minimum of 14 members, the Hromada, Progressive Socialist and Peasant Party factions were disbanded. This meant that the left now had only two factions (KPU and Left-Centre – in reality only the Socialist Party, SPU). A pro-reform majority could not be created to support the desire to accelerate reforms expressed by Prime Minister Yushchenko, whose nomination in December 1999 was backed by all 11 of these non-left factions. On 13 January 2000, 253 deputies from 11 non-leftist factions announced the creation of a ‘pro-reform’ majority with the aim of speeding up reforms and harmonizing relations between the parliament and executive. They also began to collect the 150 signatures necessary to put to a vote the removal of Tkachenko and Martyniuk. If they were removed, the new parliament leadership was to sign a document on political solidarity between the government, the executive and the parliament.
The three top positions of the parliament were taken by pro-Kuchma ‘parties of power’. Parliament chairman Plyushch, a member of the NDP, was previously chairman in the 1991–94 parliament. In 2003 he defected to Yushchenko's Our Ukraine, as did other NDP members such as the president's representative in parliament, Roman Besmertnyi. Besmertnyi's failure to launch the NDP as a party of power was repeated in 2005–6 with the failed attempt to transform Our Ukraine into the People's Union–Our Ukraine as President Yushchenko's party of power. The deputy heads of parliament were controlled by the SDPUo and the Revival of Regions.
Political Reform 1: All Power to the President
Kuchma, and his financial ally in the 1999 elections, Oleksandr Volkov, organized the collection of 3.3 million signatures to hold a referendum. Kuchma went ahead with his plans to hold a referendum on 16 April 2000 with four questions:Footnote16
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the president's right to dissolve the parliament if it fails to form a majority within one month or pass the budget within three months; this constitutional reform came into effect in 2006 following constitutional reforms adopted by parliament on 8 December 2004;
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the abolition of deputies' immunity from prosecution;
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a reduction in the number of deputies from 450 to 300;
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the creation of a bicameral parliament (with an upper house composed of appointed regional governors).
The referendum was not popular among many factions, as seen by the vote by 307:24 deputies approving a temporary moratorium on local and national referendums. The decision to hold a referendum was condemned by the left, which called for an additional referendum to abolish the presidency and transform Ukraine into a parliamentary republic. The national democrats were also critical of a referendum, fearing that regional councils in Eastern Ukraine would add further questions; they also feared that a bicameral parliament would promote separatism.
The referendum had a negative image in the eyes of the electorate, which perceived it as ‘a waste of money’ and a ‘game among politicians’. Only 32 per cent of the electorate understood or had heard of the questions posed. The creation of a bicameral parliament was the least understood by the electorate and had the least support, averaging only 30 per cent, making it likely that it would not be passed in the referendum. Kuchma had been lobbying for an upper house since 1994 when he had created a Council of the Regions. A bicameral parliament had negative connotations for many voters, who believed that it would lead to the growth of regional separatism and the decline of central authority. A pliant upper house composed of unelected regional governors would also act as a powerful ally of the executive against those opposed to the president in the lower house.
On 29 March, the Constitutional Court announced that two of the six questions were ‘unconstitutional’.Footnote17 These two were the most controversial and had received the greatest degree of criticism from the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe and the minister of justice at the time, Serhiy Holovatiy, had long argued what the Constitutional Court recognized; namely, that the executive has no right to dissolve parliament or change the constitution by referendum. The Council of Europe and Minister of Justice Holovatiy had feared that, if these questions had remained in the referendum, Kuchma would have been able to establish an authoritarian regime.
All four questions received highly suspect majorities. According to the Central Election Commission 78.77 per cent turned out for the referendum, a figure which, if believed, was higher than that for the presidential elections in October 1999; 84.78 per cent voted in favour of the right of the president to dissolve parliament if it failed to pass a budget within one month, or create a majority within three months; 89.06 per cent supported the withdrawal of immunity from parliamentary deputies; and 89.97 per cent supported the reduction of the number of deputies from its current number of 450 to 300. The fourth – and most controversial – question, on introducing a second parliamentary chamber, was backed by 81.81 per cent. The highest turnouts were reportedly in western Ukraine and the lowest in the Crimean city of Sevastopol.
The referendum results could have led to greater executive power and a reduction in parliament's power, President Kuchma's long-standing aims and objectives. With the oligarchs backing the referendum, Kuchma was unlikely to want to use it to promote a faster ‘reform’ programme but instead to consolidate a super-presidential regime with a constitution typically found throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States.Footnote18
A reduction of the number of parliamentary deputies to only 300 would have meant that Ukraine would proportionately have had a very low number of deputies. The removal of parliamentary immunity from deputies was a popular decision because many individuals with criminal backgrounds do indeed hide behind their immunity from prosecution. The then head of the state tax inspectorate, Mykola Azarov, said after the referendum that parliamentary deputies and their enterprises controlled 25 per cent of Ukrainian imports and 10 per cent of exports; 364 out of 450 deputies were involved in economic activities as heads of 3,000 businesses.
The main difficulty in implementing the referendum lay within parliament. The constitutional court instructed parliament to implement the referendum results by changing up to 30 articles in the 1996 Constitution. The non-left majority controlled only 265 deputies in the parliament and therefore lacked the 300-plus majority required to implement constitutional changes (in 2003–4 attempts to introduce political reform had also lacked the necessary 300-plus votes).
The only opposition prior to ‘Kuchmagate’ to this creeping authoritarianism came from left-wing factions and the Fatherland Party. National democrats, who were in ‘constructive opposition’ and created the bloc ‘Our Ukraine’ in 2002, only moved to a mild opposition stance after the ouster of the Yushchenko government in April 2001. The 2001 referendum was ultimately undone only by the onset of the ‘Kuchmagate’ scandal seven months later.
Another problem for Kuchma was that the majority was united only by its hostility towards the left – not by its positive attitudes towards ‘reform’. It included a diverse group ranging from national democrats to oligarchic centrist factions, many of whom would not back some of the constitutional changes required by the referendum. National democrats opposed the introduction of a bicameral parliament, while centrist factions were uninterested in the removal of deputies' immunity for fear of criminal charges being brought against them.
Yushchenko's Reformist Government
In March 2000, President Kuchma went on record to say that the government has the ‘complete support’ of the executive. This public announcement came after mounting criticism of the former National Bank governor and reformist prime minister Yushchenko from the oligarchs. Oligarchic centrists were unhappy with Yushchenko for two reasons. First, they were losing major sources of income from the cancellation of privileges for joint ventures, many of which they controlled. This applied particularly to the energy sector, which was being brought under control by Deputy Prime Minister Tymoshenko. Her efforts returned over $2 billion to the budget which was used to pay wage and pension arrears. Tymoshenko, herself formerly head of United Energy Systems, targeted energy distribution companies owned by the oligarchs which had accumulated large debts for energy supplied by Russia.Footnote19 Second, centrists were angry at being left out of the government and with having little influence over Yushchenko. Calls were increasingly made for a ‘coalition government’ to be made up of national democrats and centrists. After the removal of the Yushchenko government this understanding of a ‘coalition government’ was narrowly understood as representing only centrists.
The Yushchenko government had difficulty in manoeuvring. Not only was it increasingly undermined by Kuchma (as proven by remarks made by him on the Mykola Melnychenko tapes made illicitly in the president's office) and by the oligarchs: the ‘Kuchmagate’ scandal also drove a wedge, on the one hand, between centrists and the national democrats. On the other, within the national democrats between the opposition Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party and the ‘constructive opposition’ that would become Our Ukraine.
In April 2001, the Yushchenko government was removed by a parliamentary vote of no confidence organized by President Kuchma and SDPUo leader Medvedchuk and voted through by centrists and the KPU. This would not be the last time that the KPU came to Kuchma's rescue. The KPU moved into the opposition camp only after the March 2002 parliamentary elections, refusing to back the ‘Ukraine Without Kuchma’ demonstrations in the winter and spring of 2000–2001. Ultimately, the KPU looked upon the centrists as less of an evil than Yushchenko. During attempts to change the constitution in 2003–4, and during the 2004 presidential elections, the KPU were direct and indirect allies of the Kuchma camp. During the 2004 presidential elections many KPU voters defected to Yanukovych and the KPU joined with the Party of Regions and Socialists to create the Anti-Crisis parliamentary coalition and government in 2006.
The ‘Kuchmagate’ Crisis
On 28 November 2000, Socialist leader Moroz released illicitly made tape recordings made within President Kuchma's office between 1998 and 2000 by a former presidential guard, Melnychenko. A member of the Ukrainian equivalent of the US Secret Service, Melnychenko had regular access to Kuchma's office over a number of years. The tapes were revealed 25 days after the beheaded body of the opposition journalist Heorhiy Gongadze was found in Moroz's constituency in Kyiv oblast and a few days after Melnychenko had fled Ukraine.
Later known as ‘Kuchmagate’, this evolved into a deep political crisis that laid the foundation for the Orange Revolution four years later. The tapes provide evidence of many illegal acts:
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undeclared sale of weapons abroad;
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rigging of the October–November 1999 presidential election and the April 2000 referendum;
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persecution of independent journalists;
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manipulation of US money-laundering investigations;
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high-level corruption;
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abuse of office and misuse of public funds;
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violence against politicians and journalists.
By January 2001 the authorities had regained the initiative (see Serhiy Kudelia's contribution to this collection). The authorities used every available means to counter the opposition that arose from the crisis. State television poured scorn on them in a manner not seen since the anti-‘bourgeois nationalist’ campaigns of the Soviet era. President Kuchma used Soviet-era language when describing ‘Kuchmagate’ as a ‘conscious provocation and clearly planned’ campaign, an argument he has continually stuck to. The demonstrations were allegedly led by ‘pseudo-oppositionists’ and ‘professional revolutionaries’ who were like a ‘herd of cattle’ and a ‘circus’ that represented unemployed ‘bomzhyky’ (homeless people) who were paid from abroad. Their actions were allegedly based upon unpatriotic motives and threatened Ukraine's independence and territorial integrity because they were ‘extremists’, ‘national socialists’ and ‘a brown [fascist] plague’. Similar comments were included in a statement issued in February 2001 and signed by President Kuchma, Parliamentary Speaker Pliushch and Prime Minister Yushchenko. Opposition to the president was understood as opposition to the Ukrainian state, reflecting a corporatist view where the private and public domains are ill defined and there is a lack of transparency in the political and economic process.
For the first time state television aired anti-Western programmes, alleging that the West was in cahoots with Melnychenko to replace Kuchma with Yushchenko as president. This came to be known as the ‘[Zbigniew] Brzezinski conspiracy’, which had allegedly been first successfully tried in Yugoslavia in October 2000 to remove Slobodan Milošević and then again in Georgia against Eduard Shevardnadze in November 2003.Footnote20 These media campaigns became the backdrop for the anti-American campaign conducted by Yanukovich and Russian political technologists in the 2004 elections.Footnote21
Military cadets in civilian clothes were used to break up the Kyiv tent city set up by the opposition. ‘Tryzub’ (Trident) nationalist paramilitaries from western Ukraine were brought in to act as agents provocateurs in the 9 March 2001 demonstration against Kuchma. The violence that ‘Tryzub’ organized was blamed on the Ukrainian National Assembly radical nationalist group that supports the Tymoshenko bloc. Tryzub is linked to a loyal nationalist party, Rukh for Unity, and was one of four loyal nationalist parties used by the authorities in attempts to discredit Yushchenko in the 2004 elections.Footnote22
State employees, such as teachers, were forced to demonstrate in support of the ‘constitutional order’ or face dismissal; these demonstrations were then used to show mass support for the president. Soviet-style congresses of mainly oligarch-linked, centrist political parties were held which pledged their allegiance to the president. These tactics, showing virtual support for the authorities, were used extensively in the 2004 elections.
The ‘Kuchmagate’ scandal's lasting legacy upon Ukrainian politics in 2000–2006 was sevenfold. First, public trust in Ukrainian institutions and elites dropped even lower. Second, over 1,000 members of the ‘Young Ukrainian Intelligentsia’ signed a damning indictment, reflecting the disillusionment with the regime of young people who went on to become the foot soldiers of the Orange Revolution.Footnote23 Third, the 1991–2000 informal alliance between former national-(sovereign)-Communists-turned-(oligarch)-centrists and the national democrats was irrevocably undermined. Within the national democrats two groups emerged: a real opposition (Fatherland Party–National Salvation Front–Tymoshenko Bloc) and a ‘constructive opposition’ (Our Ukraine). Many moderate national democrats were former members of the NDP who had been loyal to Kuchma throughout most of his decade in power, creating Our Ukraine after Yushchenko's removal as prime minister. The chasm between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko, set aside during the 2004 elections and Orange Revolution, was present in 2001–3 and resurfaced in 2005–6 when it became an irrevocable split.
Fourth, a gulf emerged between the pro-statehood, anti-Kuchma Socialists and the anti-statehood KPU. The SPU supported Yushchenko in the second two rounds of the 2004 elections while the KPU remained hostile and many of its votes went to Yushchenko. Fifth, plans to implement the April 2000 referendum results to reduce parliamentary powers and increase those of the executive collapsed. Changing the Constitution would have required votes from centrists and national democrats (as centrists would never themselves have mustered 300 votes). Sixth, ‘Kuchmagate’ made the possibility of a Russian-style succession more difficult. Although Kuchma managed to retain office he remained fearful that the parliament elected in 2002 would not grant him a peaceful retirement and immunity from prosecution after his second term ended in October 2004.
Finally, if there had been no ‘Kuchmagate’ there would have been no Orange Revolution. The crisis did not lead to Kuchma's downfall; nevertheless, it severely undermined the legitimacy of the ruling elites, discredited Kuchma, created a hard-core group of activists and awakened young people from their political apathy. Many of the youth and senior activists from the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis went on to play key roles in the 2002 and 2004 election campaigns of the opposition and strategic roles in the Orange Revolution.
State Capture
After the removal of the Yushchenko government, the pro-Kuchma centrist camp was isolated, with opposition on both left and right. Following the March 2002 parliamentary elections the executive and its oligarchic allies reinforced their capture of the state through two strategies. The first strategy ended in December 2002 and involved a wholesale takeover of all state institutions by pro-presidential forces who had lost the proportional half of the elections. The second strategy began in March 2003 and aimed to achieve a victory for pro-presidential forces in the 2004 elections. On 21 November 2002, 234 members of the Ukrainian parliament from the nine pro-presidential majority factions voted to support Yanukovych, who had served as governor of Donetsk oblast since 1997, as Ukraine's tenth prime minister. After the failure of the April 2004 constitutional reform vote, Yanukovych was proposed as the presidential candidate of the pro-Kuchma camp.
‘Election Technology’
Seven tactics were used in the process of fulfilling these two presidential strategies.
1. Guiding Role of the ‘Party of Power’. All the pro-presidential blocs and parties lacked substance except the SDPUo, which became the new ‘party of power’ during the last two years of Kuchma's rule, replacing ZYU which disintegrated a month after the election into regional clans. The SDPUo gained the most from the 2002 elections, despite winning only 6.3 per cent of the vote. The main architect of Kuchma's 2004 strategy was party leader Medvedchuk, head of the presidential administration from May 2002. The close association of the SDPUo with the Kuchma regime in its last years damaged the party irrevocably: in the 2006 elections it failed to enter parliament, obtaining less than 1 per cent of the vote, meaning five years in the political wilderness.
2. Image Building. In the 2002 elections the SDPUo made use of the Fund for Effective Politics (FEP), headed by Gleb Pavlovsky, Russian President Vladimir Putin's image maker. FEP established a Ukrainian branch, the Centre for Effective Politics (CEP), led by Pogrybynsky, whose think-tank, the Centre for Conflict and Political Studies, has long worked for the SDPUo. The aims of the FEP and CEP were to improve Kuchma's image. The CEP also had an illegal side, being ultimately responsible for preparing temnyky (secret instructions) sent to television stations advising them what to cover and what to ignore.Footnote24
3. Marginalization of the Opposition. Kuchma successfully marginalized the two left-wing (KPU and Socialist) and two centre-right (Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko) opposition groups which had won nearly two-thirds of the votes in the proportional half of the 2002 elections. The opposition was unable to remove Kuchma from power through impeachment or forcing him to hold early elections. Demonstrations by the ‘Ukraine Without Kuchma’ movement (2000–2001) and protests under the slogan ‘Arise Ukraine!’ ranged from 20,000 to 50,000 participants, insufficient numbers to remove Kuchma. Hence the surprise within the opposition and the authorities at the one in five Ukrainians who participated in the Orange Revolution.
Passivity was especially pronounced in eastern and southern Ukraine, pro-Kuchma strongholds. Of the four opposition parties only the KPU has a base in these two regions. Ukraine's regional and linguistic divide negatively influences the ability of opposition groups to mobilize national support. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine failed to cross the 4 per cent threshold in the 2002 elections in the two Donbas oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk) and the city of Sevastopol.
Second, as the 2000 Serbian and 2003 Georgian revolutions showed, a condition for the opposition to be able to force out a president was that it should be united. Yushchenko and Our Ukraine never supported Ukraine Without Kuchma, never gave their full support to Arise Ukraine! and never coordinated their activity with the other three opposition groups. Our Ukraine always remained badly divided over co-operating with the KPU (a factor preventing it from joining the Anti-Crisis coalition in 2006) and also over the tactical usefulness of street protests.
In 2002–3 Yushchenko and Our Ukraine's twin tactics failed, just as they did in 2006. While flirting with the opposition, Our Ukraine also conducted negotiations on creating a parliamentary ‘democratic majority’ based on Our Ukraine and the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk clans. The aim of such a coalition would have been to marginalize the SDPUo and return Yushchenko to government, permitting him to become Kuchma's official successor. In return, Yushchenko would have given Kuchma immunity from prosecution and supported the adoption of constitutional changes in 2004.Footnote25 Following the 2006 elections, Our Ukraine simultaneously negotiated with its Orange partners for an Orange coalition and with the Donetsk clan (Party of Regions) for a grand coalition.
On both occasions, in 2002–3 and in 2006, Our Ukraine's duplicitous tactics failed. Our Ukraine also failed to obtain Kuchma's support for a round table modelled on that which took place in Poland in 1988–89. The aim of the round table would have been to oversee a transition to the post-Kuchma era. Kuchma opposed Poland's proposals to hold round table talks in Warsaw, and public pressure was insufficiently strong to force Kuchma to negotiate. Kuchma was eventually forced to sit at the negotiating table with Yushchenko and Polish President Alexander Kwaśniewski during the Orange Revolution. Crowds of over a million ensured a round table solution to the political crisis, which crowds of 20,000–50,000 during Arise Ukraine! protests in 2002–3 had failed to accomplish.
Tymoshenko's association with Lazarenko in the mid-1990s meant she would have an image of a ‘dissident oligarch’. Only the Socialists had no qualms about co-operating with Tymoshenko. Our Ukraine believed that Tymoshenko had taken many of their votes in the 2002 and 2006 elections.Footnote26 Ultimately, Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko bloc had little choice but to co-operate in the 2004 elections, where Tymoshenko worked for a Yushchenko victory after he signed a secret agreement that would make her prime minister if he was elected.
4. Control over Institutions. In May 2002, SDPUo leader Medvedchuk was appointed head of the presidential administration. Medvedchuk orchestrated a drive against the opposition and a takeover of all key state institutions by three main oligarchic clans – SDPUo (Kyiv), Labour Ukraine (Dnipropetrovsk), Regions of Ukraine (Donetsk); five smaller satellite clans – Democratic Initiatives, European Choice, People's Power, People's Choice, and Agrarians; and the former ‘party of power’, the NDP.
The former head of the presidential administration and leader of ZYU, Volodymyr Lytvyn, was installed as parliamentary speaker in May 2002. Lytvyn obtained 226 votes, only one more than was required, with the help of former Prosecutor-General Mykhayko Potebenko who had been elected in the KPU list. Potebenko had stalled the enquiry into the murder of the journalist Gongadze that had sparked the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis.
The finale of the executive's takeover of parliament was to have been its redistribution of the heads of its committees. But this was one step too far after the opposition threatened to boycott the parliament. Centrists again showed their true authoritarian colours, backing down only after a show of force. Although ZYU and the SDPUo elected only 54 deputies in the proportional half of the elections this grew to 234 through additional deputies elected in single-seat districts, which favoured ‘independent’ pro-presidential centrists. Added to this were defections from the opposition through bribery and intimidation, such as the Liberal Party within Our Ukraine and leaders of the Federation of Trade Unions.
The appointment of Yanukovych as prime minister in November 2002 by a vote of 234 deputies heralded another step in taking control of state institutions. Nine pro-presidential factions representing the ‘parliamentary majority’ signed an agreement on co-operation with the new government after government positions were divided among centrists in the three main clans and their smaller allies. Kuchma's candidate for the head of the Supreme Court, Vasyl Malyarenko, was elected in November 2002. The Supreme Court would be important to head off any legal challenges to Kuchma's immunity deal and to regulate any potential disputes over the 2004 election results. Medvedchuk was also a long-standing head of the Union of Ukrainian Lawyers. Serhiy Tyhipko, head of the Labour Ukraine clan, obtained only 214 votes in the first attempt to place him in the position of national bank chairman, but after voting irregularities he eventually succeeded in being elected to this position. The national bank was crucial to ensure a relaxation of financial discipline to support populist social measures by the new government and to have ‘administrative resources’ available for the 2004 elections. This effectively divided the plum top three positions between the three main oligarchic clans. The presidential administration was obtained by Kyiv's SDPUo, the government was controlled by Donetsk's Regions of Ukraine and the national bank by Dnipropetrovsk's Labour Ukraine.
The final element of presidential strategy was the takeover of the Federation of Trade Unions headed by Oleksandr Stoyan. Stoyan was number two on Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc in the 2002 elections and was pressured to defect to the parliamentary majority, which he eventually did. At the annual 2002 congress of the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, the SDPUo backed the first serious challenge to Stoyan's decade-long leadership by his first deputy, Valentyna Pozhydayeva. Regional governors attended the congress for the first time to pressure delegates from their regions to vote for Pozhydayeva. This pressure worked and Stoyan defected to the pro-presidential majority. In the 2006 elections, Stoyan was elected to parliament in the Party of Regions.
5. 2004 as a Re-Run of 1994. The strategy used against Yushchenko in the 2004 elections was to re-use the tactics successfully followed in the 1994 presidential election by Kuchma against Kravchuk. Kuchma won on that occasion by promoting a pro-Russian orientation that helped sway voters in the more populous Eastern Ukraine. In the 1999 presidential and 2002 parliamentary elections the Donbas clan had proved itself to Kuchma by ensuring he received his greatest support in their region. Donetsk oblast was the only region where ZYU came first in the 2002 election, with every other region won by Our Ukraine or the KPU.
6. Managed Democracy.Footnote27 The pro-Kuchma oligarchs and Prime Minister Yanukovych agreed on the outlines of a post-Soviet system that has been developed in other CIS states, notably Russia, of what has been termed a managed democracy or an electoral democracy.Footnote28 Many of these features had been already implemented in the Donbas by the Party of Regions and, in the event of victory by Yanukovych, would be transplanted to the remainder of Ukraine. As Donetsk oblast governor in 1997–2002, Prime Minister Yanukovych presided over a politically authoritarian and corrupt regime in Donetsk. In 1996–97 Ukraine had already experienced an earlier example of a corrupt prime minister (Lazarenko) from one clan (Dnipropetrovsk) attempting to take over the whole of Ukraine. That experience had proved disastrous.
7. Russian Support. The same day that Kuchma arrived in Moscow for his summit with Russian President Putin on 8 August 2001, the Moscow garrison's military court ordered the main military prosecutor's office to rearrest the Russian defence minister's former chief financial officer, Colonel-General Georgii Oleinik. Oleinik was accused of abuse of office that had cost the Russian state $60 million. One month earlier, an old criminal case had been reopened against former Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Tymoshenko, who headed the eponymous populist bloc. The synchronization of the reopening of criminal cases against Tymoshenko and Oleinik dated back to 2001 when Putin began assisting Kuchma in his drive to neutralize the opposition that had grown up during the ‘Kuchmagate’ scandal. As in most such cases in Russia and Ukraine, the charges were politically motivated. Tymoshenko claimed that the presidential administration had offered to halt any criminal cases against her and stop destroying her business interests in return for her co-operation with the authorities.Footnote29
Tymoshenko was first charged on 5 January 2001 and arrested the following month, spending three weeks in jail, which made her opposition to Kuchma even more pronounced. At that time, she was deputy prime minister in charge of energy in the Yushchenko government. In September 2001 these charges against herself and her husband, Oleksandr, who was arrested in August 2000, were lifted. In August 2001 Russian prosecutors handed over evidence to their Ukrainian counterparts on two criminal cases against Tymoshenko involving charges of ‘complicity in bribe giving’. The alleged recipient of the bribe was Colonel-General Oleinik. Tymoshenko was also accused of attempting to smuggle $100,000 out of Russia in 1995. The sum was alleged to have been confiscated by customs officials at Moscow's Vnukovo airport. A Russian newspaper article quoted Tymoshenko as saying that the attempt to link her to Oleinik was politically motivated.Footnote30 A Ukrainian commentator wrote, ‘The Ukrainian authorities are taking unprecedented measures to neutralize Tymoshenko and Yushchenko, but they seem to have exhausted their own resources and to be relying on external help’.Footnote31
Different law enforcement bodies and courts argued among themselves over Tymoshenko's case. The Tymoshenko bloc, despite the numerous obstacles placed in her way by the authorities, obtained the impressive result of 7.26 per cent in the 2002 elections. After a US court threw out charges on 7 May relating to Tymoshenko's links to Lazarenko, the Ukrainian authorities were forced to switch to another angle in their attempt to indict her. Only 11 days later new charges were brought in what the pro-Kuchma media dubbed ‘Tymoshenkogate’. On 10 June the prosecutor asked parliament to strip her of her immunity on new charges. As with an earlier attempt in June 2002, this attempt also failed (the Ukrainian parliament has only ever stripped Lazarenko of immunity).
Why was Tymoshenko seen as such a threat in election year? With 200,000 members, Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party, the cornerstone of her bloc, is stronger than any of the individual political parties who are members of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine.Footnote32 As a very good organizer, Tymoshenko was crucial to Yushchenko's 2004 election bid, and the Orange Revolution would have been unlikely to take place without her; Yushchenko, after all, was never a revolutionary. In a joint statement, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko accused the authorities of using law enforcement agencies to crush the opposition and establish a ‘fascist regime’ in Ukraine.Footnote33
Political Reform 2: All Power to the President or Parliament
Kuchma's constitutional changes in 2003–4 were presented as aiming to improve the efficiency of the political system and move Ukraine to Europe. In reality, as during his first attempt to introduce constitutional changes in 2000, the proposals were an attempt to maximize power. ‘They look upon the rest of the nation as just a crowd, who can serve as a tool for making power and money at an opportune moment’, one commentator wrote.Footnote34
In 1999–2000 Kuchma attempted to secure greater presidential power as he was beginning his second term in office. This had been a long-standing aim since 1995. In 2003–4, as Kuchma was leaving office, his strategic aim was to deny his presidential powers to Yushchenko, the most popular candidate in the 2004 elections. During his second term in office Kuchma had twice attempted, but on both occasions failed, to introduce constitutional changes: in 2000 to increase presidential powers and in 2003–4 to reduce presidential powers. The second attempt was rescued only with the assistance of the round table, a format for negotiations between the authorities and opposition that he earlier rejected, in the Orange Revolution. The constitutional reforms rejected by parliament that spring were adopted by parliament on 8 December 2004 as part of a ‘compromise package’ negotiated at the round table talks. Yushchenko was guaranteed a victory in the repeat election on 26 December but at the cost of losing some of his powers on 1 January 2006.
Ukraine's political crisis that engulfed most of Kuchma's second term in office had its roots in the delegitimization of Ukraine's ruling class. This delegitimization made it impossible to arrange a transfer of power as in Russia in 1999–2000 from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Since Kuchma is widely perceived as ‘an extremely unpopular and incompetent leader’, his endorsement would prove ‘a heavy weight that could drown’ any potential presidential candidate, Anatoliy Hrytsenko, president of the Razumkov Centre, believed.Footnote35
Pro-presidential leaders were unpopular because of the public perception of the ruling elites as corrupt, amoral and indifferent to the needs of the population at large. Not surprisingly, therefore, a Razumkov Centre poll found that 81.6 per cent were opposed to Kuchma standing for a third term, while a similar number of Ukrainians opposed any attempt at granting him immunity from prosecution.
Kuchma's 2003–4 constitutional changes added two new questions to those he had earlier sought in 1999–2000:
-
fully proportional elections to the lower house of parliament;
-
all elections were to be held in the same year. This would have meant that the 2004 presidential elections would have been moved to March 2006, when Ukraine held its next parliamentary elections.
In the 1998 and 2002 elections, 50 per cent of parliament deputies were elected in single-seat constituencies and the other 50 per cent under the proportional (party list) system. Kuchma's proposals for a fully proportional election law were discussed in parliament but failed to obtain the required number of votes until the left agreed to support constitutional changes. The draft was backed by the ideologically driven left (KPU, Socialists) and the right (Our Ukraine, Tymoshenko), but only by the SDPUo in the oligarchic centre.
The change of the law on parliamentary elections into a fully proportional system was adopted in March 2004 as part of a compromise to entice the left into backing constitutional changes. The deal fell through when those members of the pro-Kuchma camp who stood to lose most from this law, who were elected in single-seat districts, did not vote for constitutional changes contained in legislative proposal 4105 the following month; less than three months later, however, an identical proposal, 4108, was passed (for results, see and ). Among the centrists, the SDPUo were in favour of fully proportional elections because only they, among centrist parties, had invested resources in developing a nation-wide party structure. Hence, during the 2002 elections only the SDPUo among centrists stood alone and successfully crossed the 4 per cent threshold in the proportional half of elections. The Party of Regions, which feared the move to a full proportional system, came first in the 2006 elections with 32 per cent, the only former pro-Kuchma centrist force to enter parliament.
Table 5 Parliamentary Vote on Constitutional Changes 4105, 8 April 2004
Table 6 Parliamentary Vote on Constitutional Changes 4180, 23 June 2004.
A final ‘insurance policy’ was for Kuchma to run for a third term. This was encouraged by Medvedchuk who was as concerned about a Yanukovych presidency as he was about a Yushchenko victory in the 2004 presidential elections. The constitutional court ruled in December 2003 that Kuchma could stand again after it defined his 1999–2004 term in office as his first, arguing that the 1994–99 term in office did not count as it had begun before the 1996 Constitution had been adopted.Footnote37
Ultimately, the Yushchenko camp took a gamble in not supporting the Moroz variant of constitutional changes which still allowed for a nation-wide vote. There was little fear of Yushchenko abusing the extensive powers inherited from Kuchma; indeed, he failed to use these powers in 2005. But, what about his main rival – Yanukovych? Not only the opposition, but many in the pro-Kuchma elites, feared the head of the Donbas clan coming to office and inheriting Kuchma's powers. Yanukovych failed to be elected through fraud in 2004 but returned to the more powerful position of prime minister in 2006 through free and fair elections that his party won – elections made possible by the Orange Revolution that had arisen against him.
Conclusion
Ukraine's oligarchs entered politics in 1998–99 in an organized manner through centrist political parties. After supporting the creation of the Yushchenko government in 2000–2001 they split from the national democrats. The centrist–national democrat split was more than an ideological conflict, as each group had a regional base of support, with centrists based in Russophone eastern and southern and national democrats in Ukrainophone western and central Ukraine. After a decade of stability, ensured by a national democrat–centrist cohabitation, the split served to divide Ukraine further in the ensuing 2002, 2004 and 2006 elections. Divisions between centrists and national democrats were not the only chasm that appeared during Kuchma's second term. Divisions within the national democratic camp also emerged in the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis between the ‘constructive [that is, loyal] opposition’ headed by Yushchenko and Our Ukraine and the real opposition headed by the Fatherland Party and Tymoshenko bloc. In 2002–3 and again in 2006, Yushchenko and Our Ukraine failed in their simultaneous negotiations with the authorities and the opposition, on both occasions unclear about where their ultimate loyalties lay.
The rise of Ukraine's oligarchs, the discrediting of these elites during the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis, and the ensuing Orange Revolution that followed an election campaign declared by the international community as neither ‘free nor fair’, are a series of linked events. The Orange Revolution was a call for change against corrupt political leaders and oligarchs whose attempt at consolidating a managed democracy had already been severely undermined by the ‘Kuchmagate’ crisis. The party of power during Kuchma's last years in office, the SDPUo, was marginalized during the 2006 elections because of the unpopularity of its leaders and hard-line policies. The Orange Revolution's enduring legacies are the holding of free elections in 2006 and the move towards a parliamentary system that could transform Ukraine along a Central and East European trajectory.Footnote38
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Taras Kuzio
Taras Kuzio is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the USA and Adjunct Professor, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His publications include Ukrainian Security Policy (1995), Ukraine under Kuchma (1997), Ukraine: State and Nation Building (1998), and Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence (1994 and 2000).Notes
1. One of the few studies of the rise of Ukraine's oligarchs is by Rosaria Puglisi, ‘The Rise of the Ukrainian Oligarchs’, Democratization, Vol.10, No.3 (Autumn 2003), pp.99–123; see also Lucan A. Way, ‘Rapacious Individualism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Ukraine, 1992–2004’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.38, No.2 (June 2005), pp.191–206.
2. Taras Kuzio, ‘Kuchma to Yushchenko: Ukraine's 2004 Elections and “Orange Revolution”’, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol.52, No.2 (March–April 2005), pp.29–44; Lucan A. Way, ‘Kuchma's Failed Authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.16, No.2 (April 2005), pp.131–45; Paul D'Anieri, ‘What Has Changed in Ukrainian Politics? Assessing the Implications of the Orange Revolution’, Problems of Post-Communism, Vol.52, No.5 (Sept.–Oct. 2005), pp.82–91; and Special issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies on ‘Democratic Revolutions in Post-Communist States’, Vol.39, No.3 (Sept. 2006).
3. See special issue guest edited by Paul D'Anieri and Taras Kuzio of Problems of Post- Communism on ‘A Decade of Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine’, Vol.52, No.5 (Sept.–Oct. 2005).
4. Lazarenko was imprisoned on money-laundering charges in the US in 2006.
5. On the phenomenon of ‘constructive opposition’ in Ukraine see T. Kuzio, ‘Groundhog Day Politics’, Kyiv Post, 12 Oct. 2006; ‘Yushchenko: Constructing an Opposition’, Transitions On Line, 11 Aug. 2006, at <http://www.tol.c2>, accessed 8 Feb. 2007; and ‘How to Understand Yushchenko’, Kyiv Post, 15 June 2006.
6. See O. Haran and O. Majboroda, Ukraiins'ki Livi: Mizh Leninizmom i Sotsial-Demokratieiu (Kyiv: KM Academia, 2000).
7. On the Ukrainian left see Andrew Wilson, ‘The Ukrainian Left: In Transition to Social Democracy or Still in Thrall to the USSR?’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol.49, No.7 (1997), pp.1293–316, and ‘The Long March of the Ukrainian Left: Backwards Towards Communism, Sideways to Social-Democracy or Forwards to Socialism?’, The Masaryk Journal, Vol.3, No.1 (2000), pp.122–40.
8. On Yevhen Marchuk's knowledge of the murder of Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil see <http://www.Korespondent.net>, accessed 10 Dec. 2000; Ukrayinska Pravda, 11 Dec. 2000; and Kyiv Post, 26 Jan. 2001. Rukh's conclusion that Chornovil was murdered can be found in Ukrayinska Pravda, 24 March, 2, 10 and 18 Nov. 2003. Taras Chornovil remembers his father, Vyacheslav, and discusses his murder in <http://www.versii.com>, accessed 25 March 2004.
9. Liberal Party leader Volodymyr Shcherban fled Ukraine in early 2005 fearing arrest on corruption charges; he was extradited to Ukraine in November 2006.
10. Marta Dyczok, ‘Was Kuchma's Censorship Effective? Mass Media in Ukraine before 2004’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 2 (March 2006), pp. 215–38.
11. Kuchma deflected blame for economic stagnation and high levels of corruption: see Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller and Gwyn Erb, ‘The 1999 Ukrainian Presidential Elections: Personalities, Ideology, Partnership and the Economy’, Slavic Review, Vol.61, No.2 (2002), pp.315–44.
12. See T. Kuzio, ‘Loyal Nationalism in Post-Communist States’, RFE-RL Newsline, 30 June 2003.
13. ‘Violence, mud-slinging mar Ukraine election campaign’, 20 Oct. 1999, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/480571.stm>, accessed 20 Oct. 1999.
14. Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller and Gwyn Erb, ‘The 1999 Ukrainian Presidential Election: Personalities, Ideology, Partisanship, and the Economy’ Slavic Review, Vol.61, No.2 (Summer 2002), pp.315–44.
15. See Keith Darden, ‘Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma’, East European Constitutional Review, Vol.10, Nos.2/3 (2001), pp.67–71.
16. Constitutional Referendum in Ukraine, Venice 31 March 2000, available at <http://www.venice.coe.int/docs/2000/CDL-INF(2000)011-e.asp>, accessed 31 March 2000.
17. ‘Kuchma gets chance of third term’, 30 Dec. 2003, available at <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3356579.stm>, accessed 30 Dec. 2003.
18. See John T. Ishiyama and Ryan Kennedy, ‘Superpresidentialism and Political Party Development in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgystan’, Europe–Asia Studies, Vol.53, No.8 (2001), pp.1177–91.
19. See Anders Åslund, ‘Ukraine's Return to Economic Growth’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, Vol.42, No.5 (2001), pp.313–28.
20. ‘UKRAINE: Anti-Americanism an Election Tool for Kuchma’, Oxford Analytica, 8 Jan. 2004.
21. T. Kuzio, ‘Large Scale Anti-American Campaign Planned in Ukraine’, Jamestown Foundation, Eurasian Daily Monitor, Vol.1, No.102 (8 Oct. 2004).
22. T. Kuzio, ‘Russia and State-Sponsored Terrorism in Ukraine. Parts 1 and 2’, Jamestown Foundation, Eurasian Daily Monitor, Vol.1, Nos.90 and 91 (22 and 23 Sept. 2004).
23. T. Kuzio, ‘Civil Society, Youth and Societal Mobilization in Democratic Revolutions’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.39, No.3 (Sept. 2006), pp.365–86; and T. Kuzio, ‘Ukraine is Not Russia: Ukrainian and Russian Youth Compared’, SAIS Review, Vol.XXVI, No.2 (2006), pp.67–83.
24. T. Kuzio, ‘Russians Run Censorship of Ukrainian Media’, Jamestown Foundation, Eurasian Daily Monitor, Vol.1, No.35 (21 June 2004). For an expanded study, see T. Kuzio, ‘Russian Policy to Ukraine During Elections’, Demokratizatsiya, Vol.13, No.4 (2005), pp.491–517.
25. Anatoliy Halchynsky in Den, 15 April 2004. Halchynsky called it a major mistake that the pro-Kuchma camp aligned itself with the left, rather than with Our Ukraine, as the left is uninterested in Ukraine's Euro-Atlantic integration.
26. T. Kuzio, ‘When Oligarchs go into Opposition: The Case of Pavel Pazarenko’, Russia and Eurasia Review, Vol.2, No.11 (27 May 2003), and T. Kuzio, ‘Dissident Oligarchs Under Attack in US and Ukraine’, Jamestown Foundation, Eurasian Daily Monitor, Vol.1, No.30 (14 June 2004).
27. Special issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, guest edited by Taras Kuzio and Paul D'Anieri, on ‘Regime Politics and Democratisation in Ukraine’, Vol.38, No.2 (June 2005).
28. See Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, ‘Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regime Change in Peru and Ukraine in Comparative Perspective’, paper presented to the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, 30 Aug.–2 Sept. 2001; Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, ‘Autocracy by Democratic Rules: The Dynamics of Competitive Authoritarianism in the Post-Cold War Era’, paper given to the American Political Science Association, Boston, MA, 28–31 August 2002; and Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way, ‘The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.13, No.2 (April 2002), pp.51–65.
29. Moloda Ukrayina, 12 Dec. 2001.
30. Rossiiskaya gazeta, 9 Aug. 2001.
31. Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, 10–17 Aug. 2002.
32. Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, 5 July 2003.
33. Ukrayinska Pravda, 26 May 2004.
34. Yulia Mostova, ‘No Air to Breathe’, Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, 26 Dec. 2003.
35. The Razumkov Centre, available at <http://www.uceps.com.ua>, acted as the analytical centre of the Yushchenko election campaign in 2004; Hrytsenko became defence minister. Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, 8–14 March 2003.
36. Moroz, interviewed in Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, 13 Feb. 2004.
37. T. Kuzio, ‘Will Kuchma Seek a Third Term?’, RFE-RL Newsline, 4 Nov. 2003. A secret document prepared in November 2003 by Russian ‘political technologists’ working for Medvedchuk was leaked to Ukrayinska Pravda, 25 June 2004. The document outlines a strategy for Kuchma to stand for a third term, which the December 2003 constitutional court's decision allowed him to do.
38. In 2006, Freedom House upgraded Ukraine from ‘partly free’ to ‘free’ status, the first CIS state to enter this category. See map at <http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2006&country=7081>.