Maidan

All who follow the activities of Ukraine’s capitalists (oligarky) know well some of the results of their "business activities" - not the least of which has been the horrific destruction of Kyiv described by Oksana Zabuzhko http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/zabuzhko/483c1a8676ead/. Any perusal of Maidan.org.ua will also show, that while Ukraine’s politicians engage in seemingly endless confrontation, the oligarchs continue “ business as usual.” This includes, regrettably, a corporate–led destruction of lives and property beginning with parks and playgrounds in Kyiv, to the demolition of a 12th century cathedral in Chernihiv to make way for a casino-hotel complex http://maidan.org.ua/static/news/2007/1214397626.html. Even presidential decrees failed to stop someone from building a monstrous high-rise for the rich on the banks of a Dnipro, near the Marianska Palace that now blots its once beautiful sky-line. Since few oligarchs pay taxes, if they pay at all, the corresponding short-fall in revenue means the government cannot maintain run-down public areas and services, which then discredits the government in citizens eyes. What people do see, however, are ever- more "private" buildings and sites that are not o¬nly clean but "safe" thanks to innumerable "private security" guards.

This "privatization of security" is an indication of something the average citizen does not see - a re-feudalization of society that is occurring under the name of “free-market economics” or “capitalism” -- that is, a situation where the government no longer has a monopoly o¬n the control of violence within its borders. That control is now shared, as it was centuries ago, with privately-commanded armed- men which were them called mercenaries and who in Ukraine today are now called (okhorona). The rich and powerful in Ukraine today even want to pass a law that, as in feudal times, would allow them to evict and resettle whoever lives in buildings they want to demolish and replace with more of the monstrous highrises (svichky) for the rich that now dot Kyiv’s landscape. http://maidan.org.ua/static/mai/1206609260.html. Despite the persistence and extensive nature of this criminal activity, there is no organization similar to CORPORATE WATCH monitoring it – given the rampant corruption in government there is clearly no possibility of prosecuting the guilty.

Another area of activity where the owners of private corporations are engaged in activities which are difficult to imagine as in anyway helping Ukrainians overcome their historical legacy of foreign domination is publishing. Here owners foreign and native seem to be more interested in keeping Ukraine under Russian influence than in helping its government create a national public communications sphere. As any one who has been to Ukraine knows, even in the capital, it is almost impossible to find a Ukrainian-language newspaper or popular glossy-magazine. In a country where less than 20 % percent of the population is Russian and where all Russians who were born and educated there can read Ukrainian, the printed media is over 80% Russian-language. Particularly curious is that this situation seems to be totally unrelated to considerations of profit. Three big media conglomerates, for instance, (the Dutch- based Telegraaf media group, and the Kyiv- based KP Media and Segodnya multimedia) publish a total of 28 newspapers and journals. Of these, only two are Ukrainian-language products. Among these products are three mass-circulation 4-page Russian-language daily-newspapers that are distributed free in hundreds of thousands of copies in at least 4 major cities. Why in a country where everyone can read Ukrainian do companies distnbute, for free, Russian-language publications? Russian-language publications in Ukraine, simply by virtue of being in Russian, perpetuate the rationalization for being able to read in Russian, and thus they maintain a channel for Russia’s Kremlin- dominated politicized media to influence opinion in Ukraine. But that having been said, Russian-language materials produced in Ukraine, need not necessarily be anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian and to placate Ukrainian concerns, the issue could be empirically examined by a rigorous content analysis. Yet, oddly enough, after 17 years of independence no one has done such an analysis, and even worse, no-one is even engaged in such a project.

Another important unresearched issue concerns Ukraine’s oligarchs. What appears to be case is that very few of Ukraine’s wealthy are Ukrainian-speakers, or that they run their organizations in Ukrainian, or that they are in the least concerned about the lack of Ukrainian- language products on the market, or that they sponsor Ukrainian national culture. On the one hand, Rikhnat Akhmetov, now purportedly supports President Iushchenko and, implicitly, his initiatives concerning issues of national significance. On the other hand, not only does AKhmetov not seem to finance even one Ukrainian-language publication, but he supports a Russian-language newspaper (Segodnia) that regularly publishes the Ukrainophobic rantings of the Russian extremist-nationalist Oles Buzina. How many “Ukrainian” oligarchs can stand alongside someone like Viktor Pinchuk who generously provides grants and stipends for students in Ukraine, and most recently established a multi-million dollar fund to enable Ukrainian students to study in the best European and North American Universities? How many “Ukrainian” oligarchs own Ukrainian-language media enterprises? How many of them use their wealth and influence to encourage their European and American counterparts to produce Ukrainian-language products? If indeed there is no national Ukrainian capitalist class, the implications would be profound, as it would mean that today, just like 100 years ago, the divide between rich and poor is enforced by a divide between poor Ukrainian-speakers and rich non-Ukrainians. If this is indeed so, it would mean, that the national and social questions in Ukraine are not "resolved" despite independence.

In a recent international bestseller, journalist Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine analyzed how, throughout the world since the 1970s private corporations, with the collusion of governments, have used disasters to rid territories of local inhabitants and re-make their former "unprofitable" homes and neighborhoods into "profitable" shopping-malls and hotels. Exploiting the initial shock of political and or natural disasters, corporate agents and their lawyers strip-away laws protecting national economies, the environment, and health standards; they steal state-assets and eliminate social programs, full-time skilled jobs and unions. The redistributed incomes produce polarized societies with a few more wealthy, many more poor and less in the middle-class than previously. This scenario is also visible in South-Ossetia, where the o¬nly group poised to win from the misery are Russia’s oligarch’s and their corrupt local agents http://www.rferl.org/content/Article/1189525.html.

The "capitalism" Klein describes is not the of the Keynesian mixed-economy sort that Ukrainians imagined they would have in 1991, that brought with it skilled full-time jobs, good wages, fair corporate taxation, social services and union rights wherever it was established. It is a variant of the "new" capitalism that has been emerging in the world since the 80s and is most often identified with Milton Freidman and “neo-liberalism.” This is a throw-back to the vicious capitalism of the early industrial revolution. It is a semi-criminal kind of activity dominated by unelected corporation managers, bankers and money-traders who consider laws passed by elected governments protecting public assets and interests and regulating international capital flows as restrictions o¬n their right to make profit. These people then direct their untaxed profits o¬nly to a small group of shareholders and to off-shore accounts and in their wake they leave behind them Zimbabwes, Zaires, and most recently, George Bush’s America http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney08292008.html. The majority of jobs that remain in countries where this kind of capitalism is established are part-time, unskilled, non-union, low-paid, with no benefits, pensions or health-care. What benefits it does bring are skewed in favour of the very rich.

While Ukraine, for the moment seems to have been spared the horrors of “disaster capitalism” it is getting its share of the Dickensian-Friedman version. O¬ne of the people involved in this "new" capitalism, as Klein points-out, was a former US ambassador to Ukraine http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein. The semi-criminal corporation Haliburton, meanwhile, that made billions in profits from its corrupt activities in Iraq
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Halliburton_Company, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12266, is a member of the US-Ukraine Business Council-- www.usubc.org. Another member of this important group is the Cargill Corporation which, in pursuit of monopoly and ever higher profits, during the last decades has used government subsidies, that is taxpayers’ money, to systematically dispossess farmers and destroy the environment with monoculture plantations. In general this involves replacing the production of staple crops with luxury crops for export. Most recently, the men who run this organization are destroying the Brazilian rain-forest with their soybean plantations – of which some are worked by de facto slave labour http://www.corpwatch.org.

Nonetheless, Ukrainians and all those concerned with Ukraine’s fate, do not seem to be concerned about this and have not set about studying how American Friedman neo-liberal corporate criminality is supposed to bring Ukraine into the EU faster if it polarizes and pauperizes the population. Will the Ukrainian society this “new capitalism” is making resemble the shape of an egg or a pear? If the latter, then Ukraine’s future is dim. No one should forget that, for the moment, the EU, with the exception of Britain, is among those fortunate parts of the world where neo-liberal “new-capitalism” is weak. Nor does anyone ask why the US-Ukraine Business Council apparently has no criteria of membership. Why, beside Cargill and Haliburton does it include companies like Vanco, which are likely linked to the Russian mafia http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2373367? Why has the USUBC has not issued any formal statement condemning illegal corporate “raiding” and destruction of public or citizens’ assets in Ukraine? Why does it condone its members running their businesses in Ukraine in Russian?

Political loyalties in Ukraine are not determined by language-use. Russian-speakers in Kyiv, as is well-known, overwhelmingly supported the national-democratic Orange Revolution. Russian-speakers are within the majority of the population which supports Lytvyn, Iushchenko, Tymoshenko, Kostenko and Lutsenko – all national-democrats in the broad sense of the term. The majority of Russian-speakers, in short, accept independent Ukraine as their country http://www.mw.ua/1000/1550/62942/. Nonetheless, poll after poll tells us that urban Russian-speaking Russians are more likely to be pro-Russian anti-Ukrainian and anti-EU, than rural/small town Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians (J. Besters-Dilger ed., Movna polityka ta movna sytuatsiia v Ukraini [Kyiv, 2008]). It is also the case that whereas there are well-organized extremist-nationalist pro-Russian fringe-groups supported directly or indirectly by the Kremlin in Ukraine, there is no compatibly influential extremist Ukrainian nationalist group. In so far as such a group once did exist (UNA-UNSO) it has since disintegrated. One of its leaders, Dmytro Korchynsky, formed a group called Bratsvo, which he now runs under the auspices the Kremlin and Russian extremists under Alexander Dugin http://www.ucipr.kiev.ua/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=6032579&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0. Another group based in Kharkiv that uses variants of Ukrainian national symbols and extremist-nationalist rhetoric, is also in fact, pro-Russian http://www.khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1220644493. Set-up by Party of Regions hardliners, presumably with the participation of the mayor Dobkin, the “Patriots of Ukraine” are a Kremlin “black-ops” project aimed at discrediting Ukrainian national ideas and independence. Alongside these two pro-Russian front-groups, are of course, the openly pro-Kremlin anti-Orange anti-Ukrainian organizations like the Communist Party, the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, The Russian Block and Vitrenko’s Block – all considered part of the Russian “Fifth Column” in their country by national-democrats, yet who enjoy all the benefits of the democracy brought by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The clearest evidence of their work is visible in the Crimea (J. Tyshchenko et al, Suspilno-politychni protsesy v AR Krym: osnovni tendentsii (Kyiv, 2008) 54-74. Available on-line: http://www.ucipr.kiev.ua/index.php?newlang=ukr

In light of these considerations, the question arises: how is the dissatisfaction and anger generated by the social dislocation, poverty and polarization that Russifying neo-liberal capitalism has brought to Ukraine, supposed to prepare the country for entry into the EU? Regrettably, this is a question no one seems to be studying.

Stephen Velychenko
University of Toronto