This year’s YES forum, annually organized by the Kuchma-Pinchuk family, shocked even those who are never surprised. What caused the greatest stir was not the forum’s theme “The World, Europe, and Ukraine: a Strom of Changes,” although it was essentially supposed to do so, but the coming of actor Kevin Spacey who played Frank Underwood, the protagonist of the US cult TV series House of Cards. This immediately triggered a hailstorm of posts and comments in social websites.
“September 16 is the day to honor the memory of Georgy Gongadze, but this year’s YES doesn’t mention it. Symbolically, the chief guest is Underwood who got away with the murder of a journalist,” the killed journalist’s widow Myroslava Gongadze says. She also reacted on the forum’s eve: “This year Pinchuk’s YES opens on September 16. Somebody has pondered very well on the dates – I think Kuchma will attend the opening and the conference will begin with a minute of silence in memory of Georgy Gongadze. September 16 marks the 16th anniversary of Georgy’s death. I’d like to see a show of solidarity from journalists, particularly Georgy’s colleagues, such as Serhii Leshchenko and others who have been customarily participating in this conference and even, as we now know from official declarations, receiving money for speaking at it.”
“A photo taken in downtown Kyiv on journalist Georgy Gongadze memorial day shows Kevin Spacey who has become world-famous again thanks to the serial House of Cards, where he murders a woman journalist to save his office, and Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of President Kuchma who…?” journalist Oleksandr Tkach writes.
“On September 16, speaking at the Brussels panel discussion ‘Money and Politics: State-Building, Democracy, and Corruption,’ I also mentioned YES – how Ukrainian oligarchs buy the loyalty of the Western elite, former EU premiers and US secretaries of state, who are paid big money in person or as donations to their charitable foundations in order to come over and whitewash the corruptionists who were once banned from entering the US. It is cynical and pragmatic. YES is a hangout of sorts, a vanity fair. It’s symbolic that Gongadze was murdered 16 years ago. And the masterminds are still at large,” says Hanna Hopko, chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs.
As long as two years ago, Hopko took a principled stand and backed the call of Oleksii Podolsky, the aggrieved party in the Gongadze-Podolsky case, to boycott Kuchma-Pinchuk events. Podolsky has already said to The Day on this subject: “I have long been calling to boycott Kuchma-Pinchuk events, but the absolute majority deliberately ignores my call – some come here for money, other because they have a commitment, and still others because they are on the payroll. Of course, we can point an accusing finger at foreigners, for they help Kuchma with their presence, but it is, after all, our problem and it is up to us to solve it. On the other hand, it is important that, according to the leading US media, the West begins to take a closer look at the Kuchma-Pinchuk family’s role in financing the Clintons’ fund.”
Answering Aleksander Kwasniewski’s (chair of the YES Supervisory Board) letter of invitation in 2014, Hopko said: “I cannot accept your invitation. Boycotting this kind of events in a critical time for this country sends a clear signal: Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych must be held responsible for the crimes they have committed and stand a fair trial. In the past few years, you have spent very much time in Ukraine but, unfortunately, have paid no attention to high-profile criminal cases and trials connected with Leonid Kuchma’s implication in harsh violence against politicians, journalists, and activists.”
PRESIDENTS CHANGE, BUT THE YES ORGANIZERS REMAIN AFLOAT / Photo by Mykola LAZARENKO
Of course, this forum has its defenders, especially those who picked up “the Kuchma virus” long ago and for a long time. They also stepped in when the information space began to show a great deal of criticism.
“These high-level annual events that address very serious problems and are openly discussed at YES bring to Ukraine a particle of Europe as a dreamed-of space of openness, fairness, progress, and the living standards,” Yevhen Bystrytsky, executive director of the George Soros-founded International Renaissance Foundation, writes on his Facebook page. “They let the powers that be and their political and public opponents meet in the plain view of Europe and the rest of the world. Of course, we perceive this as a contradiction – a contradiction between all this and the fact that all this became possible only thanks to the massive concentration of all the needed funds in the hands of the peaceful oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. This kind of event, which brings and models Europe and the Western world of democratic values here, would not be possible in principle without him.”
Indeed, Pinchuk showed that, as before, he was in a fine shape. There were very many guests, both Ukrainian and foreign. Since the forum was launched in 2004, all the incumbent presidents of Ukraine have visited the West, including Viktor Yanukovych who was being led there like a sheep on a leash and did not seem at all to understand what was going on around him.
This year it was Petro Poroshenko who opened YES. Tellingly, presidents change, but organizers remain afloat. Where is Yushchenko today? In “political retirement.” Where is Yanukovych? He ran away to Russia. And Kuchma? He represents Ukraine in the Minsk negotiations.
I’d like to ask: what result has the forum produced for Ukraine in all these years? The result is that the strategy is altogether “homeless” now, for there is neither Yalta nor Crimea. Instead, there is a cynical statement of Kuchma himself that it is no longer possible to regain the peninsula. The impression is that Pinchuk and “the family” needs this debate platform more than the country does.
“The point is that Kuchma and his next of kin have sufficiently skilled teams to whitewash them. These people can not only comment, but also shape public opinion,” MP Ihor Lutsenko says to The Day. “I must say that Pinchuk does not conceal his intentions and absolutely frankly invites people, including journalists, to his programs. Society should be very wise to be able to filter the imperatives being imposed on it. For certain forces successfully pretend to follow common European trends but still remain donors of some oligarchs. As for Pinchuk, he not only financed them in an absolutely transparent way, but also took part in whitewashing his father-in-law Kuchma.”
The Kuchma-Pinchuk family’s efforts to bring reality into line with its own interests have in fact deep roots. First they designed an election victory in order to come to power. The 1999 election was one of the most important and most rigged elections in the history of Ukraine. At the beginning of the election campaign, Kuchma stood a slim chance to be reelected, but his spin masters managed to “mold” a victory. They applied the Russian technique of “red menace” – it was Ziuganov vs. Yeltsin there in 1996 and Symonenko vs. Kuchma here in 1999. I can remember well a product of the second president’s spin doctors – a poster that shows Kuchma with a Mohawk haircut. The poster reads: “It’s all gonna be OK.” This move was aimed at underlining Kuchma’s closeness to young people and deriving support from the new generation.
We requested Mykyta Poturaiev, a member of Kuchma’s election team at the time, to tell us about the details of that campaign.
“There were two authors of Kuchma’s image as a Mohawk guy, who, incidentally, have come to Kyiv now from Europe. They are Ihor Podolchak and Ihor Diurych, rather well-known Ukrainian art figures. In general, the part of Kuchma’s 1999 election headquarters managed by Viktor Pinchuk invited a large number of talented people. For example, the best-known photo artist Viktor Marushchenko was taking all the photographs of Kuchma.
“I must say we pinned our high hopes on Kuchma, though I can’t say they all came true. We thought the country would develop in the direction of authoritarian enlightened liberalism. But, unfortunately, we saw a destructive role of oligarchic groups. It would be wrong to say that Kuchma depended on oligarchic groups before 1999. But then everything changed, especially after the Gongadze case. Kuchma changed course and rejected the Euro-Atlantic direction. But we must not forget such a revolutionary step as introduction of the single tax. This triggered the formation of the middle class which eventually came out on the Maidan in protest against the then system.
“Unfortunately, the people who chanted ‘Down with Kuchma!’ or ‘Put Yanukovych Inside!’ did not understand that the system had not broken down. Then we got Yushchenko, a man of the system. As a matter of fact, the current Olympus of power, including Tymoshenko, consists of the people of that very system. Of course, Kuchma showed weakness when he changed course. I think voluntary resignation would have been a far more drastic step on his part. This would have been convincing. Anyway, even without resigning, he needn’t have come to a compromise with Russia.
“It is wrong to say that the Russians joined Kuchma’s publicity campaigns, for they had never come out of this process. In other words, they were there from the very outset. The group of Russian spin masters was represented by some former members of the Moscow Logical (later Methodological) Study Group (also known as Shchedrovitsky School) founded in the 1950s by Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Aleksandr Zinoviev, and Merab Mamardashvili. It was quite a serious school. Some of its members – originally free people – later turned into apologists of Putin’s regime. These people appeared in Ukraine in 1998 to help Viktor Pinchuk who held his parliamentary election campaign in Dnipro. This group was involved later in Kuchma’s presidential election campaign. But they had nothing to do with creating the abovementioned image of Kuchma. Kuchma’s team was rather international at the time. When some of them later supported Russia’s aggression, I broke off contact with them. They think they are designing the future, but I believe they are redesigning the past.
“There were also some communist followers who, incidentally, helped make materials that allowed Kuchma to lure a certain number of votes from Symonenko. In a way, Yeltsin’s 1996 campaign techniques were directly superimposed on Kuchma’s election campaign in 1999. It’s an open secret. Gleb Pavlovsky, founder of the Effective Politics Fund and one of the 1996 scheme’s authors, was not directly involved in our 1999 campaign, but his people were present. That was an obvious scenario of confrontation between a seemingly liberal and a retrograde leader. Other politicians also cooperated with the Russians: for example, Tymoshenko with the same Pavlovsky. Oleg Medvedev had worked in Moscow for a long time, and then he worked with Tymoshenko. In other words, this kind of links had always existed.
“As for YES and Kevin Spacey’s visit, I must say that I dealt with this forum for some time but quit it in 2007. Frankly speaking, when I heard that the star Kevin Spacey who played a president who murdered a lady journalist, was invited to the forum, I was surprised, to put it mildly. On the part of YES organizers, it is, as they put it, worse than a crime. It’s a mistake.”
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I can add that this “mistake” is of a deeply symbolic nature. While House of Cards is a fictional film in the United States, it has a documentary plot in this country – a plot that leads the country down a totally wrong path, using such things as YES forum as a cover. The forum may be discussing some exalted subjects, but this country is only losing out due to Kuchmism. “Ukraine has not changed much since Gongadze’s death,” volunteer Yurii Kasianov writes in Facebook. “Embezzlement and lies are rife as before, but we’re now accustomed to blood – while the murder of one person was a tragedy earlier, the death of dozens and hundreds is statistics today. The two Maidans have left no imprint on the minds of dozens of millions of people. Even the war did not become the limit, the Rubicon, beyond which it is no longer possible to live as before. But let’s imagine for a minute that the Gongadze case was solved 16 years ago and the guilty were punished. Kuchma, Kravchenko, Pukach, and instigators were imprisoned. Ukraine’s history might have taken an entirely different, perhaps even European and law-abiding, path. There would have been no Yanukovych in power, no the first and the second Maidans. Leshchenko would not have earned enough money on his ‘investigations’ to buy a posh apartment. There would be no need to hold YES forums. And, maybe, Ukraine would not have lost Crimea and nothing would have happened in the Donbas because we could have had a strong army and a real national policy.”
…All this will come. We must broaden the circle of the persistent and the principled. Time and effort!
