For a few days already, we have been subject to an endless barrage of information about the so-called “slush fund” which the Party of Regions used to finance its activities including election campaigns. This “sensational discovery” was made public by Serhii Leshchenko MP and journalist Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk. In fact, the information on the slush fund can hardly be seen as truly sensational, since it is nothing more than an open secret. Since the 1990s, we have known in great detail the ways of party financing in Ukraine (and this applies not only to the Party of Regions and its reincarnation which is called the Opposition Bloc), which was made particularly evident by the Melnychenko tapes. It was in the office of President Leonid Kuchma that the creation of slush funds was discussed. (Incidentally, Ukrainska Pravda offers just-mentioned Melnychenko tapes on its website [the link is http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2001/10/9/2984273/view_print/], and they reveal all the features of the Kuchma era election campaigns, which substantially apply to modern-day campaigns as well). Moreover, the freshly released documents are legally inadmissible, and can only be used for, on the one hand, targeted attacks on opponents, and on the other, as yet another reason for reflection. Besides, we would do better by pondering the origins of such slush funds rather than digging out people’s names from the list. It was back in 1999, when Kuchma embarked on an election campaign which used what was then unprecedentedly cynical and Kremlin-inspired means, that those slush funds were born. Speaking of it, the illicit money transfers were only part of a systematic phenomenon, which involved not only bribing voters and influential people, but what amounted to manipulating consciousness of citizens as well. It is worth recalling, for example, the regime’s success in hyping-up the so-called “red danger” represented by Petro Symonenko, which copied Boris Yeltsin’s presidential campaign in Russia in 1996. Let us recall that in Russia, too, hyping-up Gennady Zyuganov allowed Yeltsin’s almost-zero support to leap to a level where electoral fraud could have been employed with decisive effect. It was this scheme which was followed by Kuchma in 1999. One may also recall the fact that it was at that exact moment that the Donbas was surrendered to local strongmen, such as Oleksandr Yefremov, Viktor Yanukovych, or Rinat Akhmetov, in exchange for guaranteed votes of the region. The end result of these “strategies” in historical perspective is common knowledge. Was it not an earlier example of slush funds and criminal electioneering? The cynicism in politics is inevitably accompanied by cynicism in journalism. I mean especially that kind of it, which allows people to place advertising banners of creators of the corrupt system on their websites, and then selectively “fight the system.”
Journalist Serhii Shcherbyna ironically noted on Facebook: “In the darkest of houses, the darkest slush fund of all times was located, and it was guarded by the darkest soul in the Party of Regions...” Meanwhile, Serhii Makhnovets and Marianna Morgenstern stressed in the comments to this post: “And under the darkest table, one could see the lily-white and totally honest pigeons from Ukrainska Pravda, picking up crumbs thrown to them... by a red-haired old man [that is, Kuchma. – Ed.].”
It seems that some organizers of the effort to publish the lists, who have been diligently helped by some journalists, have seen their effort backfiring. All indications are that their goal was to convince the public that the country’s woes began with the Party of Regions’ ascent to power. But the public is increasingly looking into the root causes of our troubles, and is growing more aware that a lot of problems originated in the 1990s. And by the way, it is not deceived by the “muckrakers” either, because they are just a product of the same old system.
Indeed, the only people who may be impressed with all these media bombshells are Western politicians, who are once again astounded by the scale of the corruption in our politics, and once again put off by our rotten political class. For instance, Petro Poroshenko’s involvement in the offshore scandal was enough for ordinary Germans to become apathetic towards our attempts to get closer to Europe. Meanwhile, Ukrainians are not surprised by these media bombshells and, worst of all, do not draw appropriate conclusions from them. Our elites are rotten, and their operating principles are cynical. Who and how will eventually introduce the new rules, then? Maybe we should start with ourselves and look closer whose banners are placed on the front pages of websites publishing exposes directly below.
