Freedom Day for Ukraine and Russia

MOSCOW, Russia -- Ukraine’s Orange Revolution has discredited itself over the past year — this seems to be common knowledge in and around the Kremlin. The Ukrainians must envy the solid stability of President Putin.


Indeed, Ukraine today lacks much of what is the Kremlin takes pride in. Things like huge supplies of oil and natural gas. Like the power vertical — a multi-level system of bribes accumulation and distribution. Like the Public Chamber. Like the Council on National Projects Realization.

President Yushchenko

However Ukraine has something that Russia today does not and could not possibly have. Like freedom of speech. On any TV channel, in any newspaper any politician or just anyone can criticize the authorities as harshly as he chooses. And nobody from the Presidential Service would start calling the editorial office, hysterically demanding to “stop the provocation”.

The post-revolutionary Ukraine also has real political competition. The opposition’s parties — Viktor Yanukovich’s the Regions Party and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshina today top the public opinion polls, and for some reason nobody expects the existing authorities to cancel their registration, ban them access to the media and arrest their sponsors.

In Ukraine a very high ranked official can be fired if suspected of corruption or professional inefficiency — something that never happens in Russia. On September, 8 president Viktor Yushchenko, who the Kremlin thinks is weak and useless, sacked Yulia Tymoshenko’s government, two of his closest aides and several more businessmen-ministers who received their positions as a gratitude for help in the revolution.

Ukraine has other achievements. In February 2005 this poor, energy dependent country set the newborn child benefit at 8,000 hryvnas, or $1,600. In Russia, rich and oil-wealthy, the newborn child benefit is 8,000 rubles, or $285.

On October 24 Ukraine signed the first honest and effective privatization deal to be signed in a post-Soviet country: 92 percent of Krivorozhstal shares were sold to an Indian investor for $4.8 billion. In June 2004 — only 16 months before that — the “wise” pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovich government managed to receive only $800 million, six times less, for the same asset.

It is worth mentioning that the transparent Krivorozhstal privatization almost coincided with the not so transparent Sibneft nationalization. Sibneft, that the government sold in 1995 for $100 million, was bought back from Roman Abramovich’s offshores for $13.1 billion. I can see the Kremlin’s point when it prohibited its representatives to comment on the Krivorozhstal tender.

The Krivirizhstal story has proved that Ukraine is finally starting to separate power from property. Former proprietors, classical post-Soviet oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk did their best to wreck the tender. They even got a statement from the Rada — Ukrainian Parliament. But the tender did take place and Lakshmi Mittal, that paid the market price for the asset, will only be a proprietor — it’s definitely not going to take over Ukraine, place its people in Parliament and appoint its loyal men ministers.

Viktor Yushchenko has also managed to stabilize Ukraine’s position in the world. The fact that the U.S. Senate is canceling the Jackson-Vinnick amendment exactly one year after the revolution speaks for itself. In the past year Ukraine has secured the niche of the leading post-Soviet country — the niche that seemed to have always belonged to Russia.

Of course the new authorities have made their mistakes. One of them was the arrest of the opposition’s Boris Kolesnikov and Yevgeny Kyshnarev. But both politicians were freed long ago and are now getting ready for the parliamentary elections, not for moving to the uranium mines.

I have all the reasons to say — Yushchenko, criticized by everybody, full of drawbacks, the man who literally lost his face — this man did for Ukraine too much of what Vladimir Putin promised to do for Russia, but never managed to. All that is left for the Kremlin now is to tell tales of the miserable Ukraine that is sinking rapidly.

The Stable Chaos

Another fairytale the Kremlin spin doctors tell us is that Ukraine is on the verge of sinking in the chaos of confrontation between its Eastern and Western parts. Indeed there are serious cultural contradictions between Ukraine’s East and West. Moreover, both the parts are complicated in their own structure too. Different researchers count up to ten so-called political and mental clusters in Ikraine: Kiev, Galichina, Don region, the Crimea etc.

Ukraine only started to exist within its current borders as a separate state in 1991. Bits of several ruined empires were hard to put together. In the beginning of 1990s Ukraine was facing a serious risk of disintegration.

These times are gone. Ukraine is still far from a politically united nation, and the leading political forces still tend to represent the will of separate regions and not the society in general. It was this way at the 2004 elections, it’s going to be this way in 2006 too. Regions fight for the all-Ukrainian power, the president’s post and right to form the government — but they are not struggling to get separated from the country.

Russia’s fate looks much more pessimistic in this respect. Under the virtually-cleptocratic power vertical, two instability factors are gaining power: the Caucasian terrorism and the Chinese expansion in the Far East. These two processes are a real threat to the unity and integrity of our state. However the subjects of these processes do not sit in Parliament and do not have any legal status at all, noreover, they don’t seem to need it.

So in the stability rating I would rank Ukraine more stable than Russia.

25 Kinds of Non-Freedom

Russia’s political elite is sensitive about what’s happening in Ukraine, not just because it bet on the wrong horse at the 2004 elections and lost. Also because the Orange Revolution and what followed it brought out the serious differences between the Russian and Ukrainian elites.

Putin is the smallest evil — this is what Putin’s stability apologists keep saying recently. What they mean is this: we have always dreamed of having 25 kinds of sausage in our shops, a round-the-clock bar in the National Hotel and trips abroad. Freedom, democracy, national interests — we only brought those in for better PR. So let us bless the authorities that give us 25 kinds of sausage and trips abroad, and let us forget about Russia’s future!

Ukraine’s political and intellectual elite consists of all kinds of people — liberals and socialists, Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking, those who fancy unity with Russia and pro-Western activists. But there are two things uniting these people. The first is — Ukraine’s statehood is a priority. The second thing is the question: what have you done for Ukraine? These two things were behind the orange Revolution. It wasn’t organized as the paranoid Kremlin says, by American spies. It was organized by people who desired freedom in their own independent state.

Ukraine is the mirror that shows Russia’s post-Soviet elite’s own swollen, distorted, both scared and cunning ugly face. This is why we are so jealous of Ukraine. This is why those who choose 25 kinds of slavery as their life goal feel so bad about November, 22. The freedom day.

Source: MosNews