Long ago when a little boy in Oklahoma, this writer loved to watch cowboy films on television. The good guys wore white hats, the bad guys wore black ones, and everything was simple. Good always triumphed over evil in the end, and, just as with Voltaire’s Professor Pangloss, all was right with the world Sometimes even now we are tempted to stereotype politics in the same way, especially after one of the guys with a big white hat said not so long ago that Ukraine today is in the grip of a corrupt mafia and he will clean everything up with the help of those he asks for support. Then all will be right with the world. With all due respect to the man in question, whom personally I like, things are not quite that simple. I first came to Ukraine in 1990, lived here since 1993, and in that time have seen all sorts of things others might prefer that I had not. Since most of my friends were and are national-democrats, I have a wealth of stories to be told about them, perhaps as many as about those in power.
When the People’s Movement (Rukh) of Ukraine was first formed, my Ukrainian friends in emigration were overjoyed. They wanted to help and bought all sorts of copying machines and computers that somehow just disappeared. One person did force the creation of a special commission to find out where a big $13,000 Xerox had gone, but the question was dropped, and the inquisitive crusader soon moved to a better apartment. Then after one election campaign where some hundreds of thousands of dollars had gone to various national democratic camps that had lost, a representative of an oblast organization of Rukh approached and asked if a few hundred dollars might be found for a used mini-van so that his people could travel to villages where people were asking for help.
“Didn’t you get any money from the national organization?” I asked.
“Sure, they gave us $200 and our candidates each got $200 in cash.”
Simple arithmetic will tell you that much of that largess from the well- meaning Ukrainians abroad did not make it very far from its immediate recipients and certainly not in meaningful amounts to build organizations on the grass-roots level.
Sometime later, an idealistic young American came to visit me at this newspaper. “I’d just like to pick your brains for a moment. What do you think of humanitarian assistance such as my organization sends to Ukraine?”
“Still have to pay bribes to get it in?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “but we try to mask it as junkets, scholarships for somebody’s kids, or something else more or less legal. But we know that 70% of what we get is just stolen and sold. If we can get 30% through to the people we want to, we think we’re doing well. Sometimes you have to ask yourself whether the good you’re doing is worth the evil you’re subsidizing.”
Soon I heard that he had left that particular organization for other employment.
Then, when I thought nothing else in this land of wonders could surprise me, my wife said that she had just met a neighbor, whose husband was at the time my close colleague and is still quoted in the press as an authority on Ukrainian politics. His wife was in a responsible position of a ministry best left unnamed, the minister of which was a prominent national democratic politician first elected to Verkhovna Rada in 1990. The ministry, it seems, had for no apparent reason come into the possession of a fleet of ships. Mrs. X had documents over the minister’s signature selling the said vessels for ridiculously low prices such that an ocean liner went for the equivalent of several hundred dollars. “I’ve been a bureaucrat for years, and I know that if something is lying in the wrong place, somebody will put it in their pocket. But I’ve never seen anything like this.” As they would say in my native Oklahoma, he was running after money as fast as a rabbit runs away from a fox.
With all due respect to the former minister in question, it seems that he had never seen serious money before, lost his head, and those who keep the files were happy to have something to hang over him in case they needed that he sometime see things their way. The last time I saw him, he was already a former minister addressing an adoring crowd about how together they were all going to save Ukraine.
There is, to be sure, also quite enough dirt on the guys in black hats: I can think of a couple of doctoral dissertations being defended but not written and energy deals that boggle the mind. Some might even argue that certain versions of the political reform are motivated less by concerns of public policy than the determination to keep what they have from those who might want to redistribute it among their own supporters. However, the point is somewhat different. Those who might think that the political play in Ukraine today is one of good guys versus bad guys are being naive. Politics is about the specific groups with enough money, influence, and power to make things happen, let things happen, or prevent things from happening. It is a function of the alignment of forces in the society that generates it. And changing Ukraine’s universe of the politically possible will take time, effort, and a bit of faith tempered by realism from all those involved. Those of us who want to see Ukraine become what it should will simply have to resign ourselves. We are in it for the long haul.
