Via Leopolis, a tiny little thing about Ukraine in The Onion!

It's not funny or too coherent; and it feels like being suddenly mentioned in the New York Times a while back, before the Orange Revolution:

Nobody In Ukraine Notices Absence Of Government
September 28, 2005 | Issue 41•39

KIEV, UKRAINE—The firing of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and the dismissal of most of the federal government continued to go unremarked by Ukraine's 14 million citizens Monday. "Roads are crumbling, the Russian Mafia sets food prices, our currency grows more worthless by the hour, and still the government does nothing," said Brzyny Ilandrovitch, editor of the U.F. Monitor. "Every year, it's the same thing with this group of fat crooks." Upon hearing of the government overthrow, Ilandrovitch said he was reminded of 1991's democratic elections, when the lawless chaos that followed the country's independence from the Soviet Union left many doubting that a central government had been democratically elected.

I think I've become a Zerkalo Nedeli fan. They usually translate their lengthy Saturday texts by the beginning of the week - but here's some fresh Yulia Mostovaya anyway.

(Update: The complete translation is here - but you have to register first.)

Now that the purges in his entourage have ended and the government has been formed, there are reasons to believe Victor Yushchenko is ready to begin using his second chance. According to those close to him, the president intends to start moving forward energetically.

Let's assume this is so. What is to be expected from a responsible head of state in this situation?

[...]

According to my observations, only two politicians - Yushchenko and Tymoshenko - realize that the key people on their teams half a year before the election should be neither 'political technologists' nor PR guys, but the headhunters. On the one hand, intellectual hunger can be felt in the country, on the other - the population's demand for clear understanding of the politicians' plans. The electorate is fed up with charisma; both consciously and subconsciously it has come to realize the need to see the program of action. Today's Ukrainian political palette lacks [...] any significant politicians who have not been seen both in the opposition and in the government. All of them - Yushchenko, and Tymoshenko, and Yanukovych, and Moroz, and even Lytvyn - have shown what they can act like on either side of the power fence. All their slogans have faded, their faces have become too familiar, complaints have been heard, and promises - as well as the possibility of their fulfillment - evaluated. And it seems to me that our society is beginning to need the product that could be evaluated not with one's heart but with one's mind. And thus, only the real programs will be worth it, the ones in which goals correspond to the country's resources, priorities - to the people's demands, reforms do not contradict logisitcs, and problems are associated with faces responsible for their elimination.

[...]

Another notion - "the clean government" and "defamation" [kompromat]. During her [TV address], journalists asked Tymoshenko if she intended to continue the defamation war. Yulia Vladimirovna half-whispered some excuses, instead of asking directly: "Okay, comrade, if you obtained information about someone stealing budget funds, misusing his position, pressuring officials for his own benefit, lobbying a foreign state's interests and thus harming our own - would you remain silent?" [...]

Another question is under what circumstances do the facts that throw a shadow on this or that politician come to light? Who kept Yulia Vladimirovna from openly announcing that the president was violating the Constitution when he was signing appointment orders without bothering with her constitutional right to nominate? She was guided by nothing but her own political considerations. Who kept Yushchenko from questioning - if not in February then in March - the writing off of the debts of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine? Same political considerations. Anyway, in my opinion, defamation is the knowledge of violation of a law hidden until it becomes profitable to drag it out into the open. In this situation, the carrier of the information loses the right to moralize - but the facts that have become known don't lose their public significance and have to be evaluated objectively from a legal point of view. [...]

[...]

For, to tell you the truth, many of us are being too soft on the president, unconsciously. "Yes, of course, there are problems, but in Kuchma's times they were cutting off journalists' heads and the opposition couldn't do business at all." "Yes, of course, the country is a mess, but with Yanukovych there would've been cemetery-like order." Such comparisons are called lack of self-esteem. We compare the Ukrainian people who were out at Maidan across the country not with the Belarusian or Turkmen people, but with the Polish, Czech and Lithuanian citizens. The people have placed themselves on the same level with the rest of the citizens of the civilized world. Why, then, when we evaluate Ukraine's leadership's actions, do we look toward uncivilized leaders? Is it because their standards are the same as those of our current original's - or even better in some professional respects? There are many reasons to think this is so, but this doesn't mean that the tall ones have to stoop, and that people have to tone down their expectations and demands, and instead be happy that there hasn't been a total collapse yet.

[...]

There's lots of hard and interesting work ahead, and all of us have a chance to participate.

...I do not believe that this is possible now. But I know it is crucial. So, one more time, let's assume.

I'll post a link to Zerkalo Nedeli's own translation when it's ready. Part of me, though, wishes they knew how to make these same points in a much more concise manner.

Just finished reading Mikhail Brodsky's interview (Part 1 and Part 2, in Russian).

Amazingly sickening, regardless of whether any of it is true or not.

At one point, Brodsky speaks of how intelligentsia, people with access to information, are Tymoshenko's electorate.

Well, I sort of want to declare here that I am no one's electorate - neither Yushchenko's, nor Tymoshenko's.

...WE LIVED ON A DIFFERENT PLANET THEN

Platon met Maria in Crimea, at the Yalta Hotel, where a conference on optimization methods was taking place. Along with the conference participants, also staying at the hotel were either Moscow or Leningrad music hall dancers, two cycling teams, and a small number of individuals who were there without any purpose - but definitely thanks to their connections [po blatu], as there existed no other way for anyone to get into the Yalta Hotel.

Platon's prototype is Boris Berezovsky; this passage is from Yuli Dubov's 2002 novel, Bolshaya Payka (The Big Ration), a thinly veiled story of Berezovsky's evolution from a more or less average research institute guy to the monster he is today. A very interesting book.

I read it at the end of 2002 and found this Yalta Hotel passage somewhat of a revelation.

With our tennis team, we used to go to Yalta twice a year, for three weeks in early spring and two weeks in the fall. Both seasons the weather was - already or still - warm enough to play, and there were few tourists around, so Yalta felt nothing like the hell it always became in summertime. And we stayed at the Yalta Hotel regularly.

It wasn't a completely ordinary thing: a bunch of tennis-playing kids - nothing special, not an Olympic team or something - living in a hotel most people weren't even allowed to enter. But I used to take it for granted, mainly because there was a lot more to Yalta than the Yalta Hotel, and a lot more to the hotel than its relative inaccessibility.

Trying to imagine Berezovsky unable to get himself a room there - or Berezovsky forced to spend even a moment thinking about such a possibility - was overwhelming, and very amusing. He was so much like us then, so much like everyone else - if only everone else's fortunes and status had changed to the same extent as his over the past 20 years! He's so rich and so high above it all now - but back then, just like everyone else, he probably had to stay on the 14th or 15th floor of the Yalta Hotel, the two upper floors reserved specifically for Soviet citizens, a ghetto of sorts...

***

Our own blat, the pass to places like the Yalta Hotel, were kids from the well-connected families: boys like Sergei Pereloma, for example, whose father was a close associate of Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the Communist czar of Ukraine from 1972 to 1989.

Sergei was two years my senior, had a beautiful face and wasn't very athletic. He was very smart, though. Shrewd.

Sometime in 1983 or 1984, in between tennis and at the Yalta Hotel, he managed to hook us on a game he called Business, a very rough imitation of Monopoly. Using a book as a ruler, Sergei divided an A4 paper sheet into 60 or so little squares, then filled most of them with Western company names, drew their logos or product pictures, and scribbled prices underneath each one, in tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. The game had banks full of fat money sacks, jails with barred windows, and the really evil-looking robbers - but there were no community chests or taxes.

We played Business all the time during that Yalta trip - in fact, we played it more than we played tennis. On our return to Kyiv, I got many of my non-tennis friends addicted as well. We played so much we had to create a new sheet weekly - and how I wish I had kept at least one of them!

Nothing seemed strange about the game then, not until 2002, when it occured to me that Sergei's knowledge hadn't been all that common for a 12-year-old, pre-perestroika Soviet kid.

In the early 1980s, both the word 'business' (biznes) and the process it signified were nothing but exotic; 'monopoly' was a term out of a Marxist theory text, not a board game (Monopol'ka) with those awesome, real-looking paper money bills; possession of foreign currency was a criminal offense; ads did not exist, nor did brand-name stores, and to know much beyond Adidas and Pepsi was a secret priviledge of the caste Sergei's father belonged to.

***

Thinking of all this in 2002, I began to wonder what became of Sergei Pereloma. I ended up googling his name, of course.

His face wasn't beautiful anymore, but otherwise he was doing very well. After obtaining a degree in international economics and working for state and private investment, banking and insurance companies, Sergei was appointed financial director of the not-yet-privatized Kryvorizhstal in 2000, at the age of 28. Two years later, in March 2002, he became acting CEO at Ukrtatnafta, a joint Ukrainian-Tatar oil processing plant, the largest in Ukraine.

Impressive, isn't it? And not surprising at all: Sergei was quite brainy even as a kid, and though his father's connections and Communist Party resources must have served as a terrific launching pad for his career, they couldn't have been the only decisive factors. After all, Vladimir Shcherbitsky's grandson Vova managed to get himself drafted into the army in the early 1990s - and that was it, as far as I know, despite all the family connections and resources once available to him.

For the next three years, I occasionally used Sergei's example to illustrate how the labels have changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the names haven't - and how, at a closer look, everything turned out to be so much more complex.

Then, ten days ago, something suddenly reminded me of Sergei as I was reading the transcript of Oleksandr Turchynov's press conference, and I decided to google him up again. (I still can't quite figure out what got me thinking of him this time.)

He's still doing very well. After Ukraine's State Property Fund lost control over Ukrtatnafta to Tatneft and Tatarstan's government in early 2003, Sergei returned to Kryvorizhstal as financial director. He was there in summer 2004, during the company's disgraceful privatization.

After Yushchenko won the election, however, Sergei very quickly found himself near the top of Naftogaz Ukrainy, a state-owned oil and gas company: in late February 2005, he was appointed acting first deputy of the company's head, Yuri Boiko; a month later, he was confirmed in this position, though his boss was by then a different person, Oleksiy Ivchenko (hopefully, just a namesake of Valery Ivchenko, the corrupt guy asserting pressure on the courts, mentioned by Turchynov).

***

It's tempting to believe that Sergei Pereloma's invaluable finance skills make him a man of his own - but, unfortunately, politics is never too far away.

Sergei was once known as Oleg Dubina's protege; Oleg Dubina, in his turn, served as head of Kryvorizhstal from 1999 to 2001, until being moved to replace Yulia Tymoshenko as vice prime minister in Victor Yushchenko's government, under Kuchma.

Here's what the Halytski Kontrakty weekly wrote (in Ukrainian) about Dubina in January 2001, shortly after his appointment as vice premier:

The premier [Yushchenko] is trying to convince the public that Dubina is his candidate alone. The oppositional Internet publication Ukrainska Pravda considers the new vice premier to be under strong personal influence of Leonid Kuchma. Yulia Tymoshenko's allies claim the opposite: "According to some information, Victor Pinchuk has had a hand in Oleg Dubina's appointment. And this can affect his work in the government," said [...] Artur Bilous, a parliamentarian from [Tymoshenko's] Bat'kivshchyna faction.

This Dubina-Pereloma Connection farce is further complicated by Sergei's alleged/imaginary closeness to Yushchenko. Here's what Ukrainska Pravda wrote (in Ukrainian, reprinted in Obozrevatel) in late June 2005, when Sergei became head of the supervisory council of Ukrnafta, an oil company integrated into the structure of Naftogaz Ukrainy:

In early 2000, Pereloma was the financial director at Kryvorizhstal, then headed by Oleg Dubina; later, he worked at Ukrtatnafta; he returned to Kryvorizhstal when the company was owned by Pinchuk and Akhmetov. This may lead one to believe that the new head of the supervisory council [Pereloma] is connected with Dubina. But in reality, Pereloma's earlier biography demonstrates his connection with Oleksandr Morozov, a parliamentarian from Yushchenko's circle.

Pereloma worked at Prominvestbank, Derzhinvest of Ukraine, and Oranta insurance company, at the very same time Morozov was involved in these structures. Taking into account the friendship between Morozov, Tretyakov and Mykola Martynenko, head of Nasha Ukraina faction, and their proximity to Yushchenko, it appears that the person who'll be watching over the finances of Ukrnafta [Pereloma] is someone who enjoys the president's trust.

This is all so nonsensical and confusing that at some point it seems logical to ask this question: and whose man is Yushchenko himself?

One way or another, would it really matter, though? I mean, really...

***

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make in this entry. None, I guess.

Or - go figure. That's the best way to sum it up, as always.

***

Mishah said today: "And imagine if Ukraine were a really small country, like Estonia. You'd probably know every second state official personally, you'd be neighbors with them or something. And perhaps this is why it all works so much better over there - because they all know each other, more or less..."

Sunsets are slowly moving back to where they were in winter, when we just moved into this apartment. It's getting more and more beautiful, colder and colder. The watermelon season is over.

Oh. Turns out Yulia Tymoshenko was in Moscow this past weekend. Oh.

According to Gazeta.ru (in Russian), she showed up at the Prosecutor General's office on Saturday and answered their questions. As a result, she no longer faces arrest and imprisonment in Russia, according to today's statement by the Prosecutor General's office.

Tymoshenko's consultant Dmitry Vydrin said this:

Tymoshenko was in Moscow on Saturday. [...] It is possible that she met with Putin - in any case, it looks like a meeting like this should have occurred.

What are they thinking of?

Mykola Martynenko, head of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine parliamentary faction said this (in Ukrainian) on Poroshenko's Channel 5 yesterday:

People didn't stand at Maidan for Tymoshenko, they did not come there for her. There was one Maidan, which stood against violations by the ruling elite, and in order to express people's will and support the democratic principles. And there was another Maidan, which yelled "Yulia, Yulia!" during the presidential inauguration. Excuse me, but I think that other Maidan had been paid for.

It's amazing how good this team is at self-annihilation... Perhaps they want to become the opposition again: to be loved by everyone again, to receive money and moral support supposedly for your righteous struggle against the corrupt regime, and to bear no responsibility whatsoever when the country's moving in all those wrong directions...

I can't write or think too clearly because of the cold, so I read a lot.

The book I'm reading now is about the wars of the early 1990s: Nagorny Karabakh, Chechnya; testimonies of soldiers who had to fight there, testimonies of civilians stuck there. These stories are interesting for the little details you rarely see in newspapers.

Stuff like this: a small group of Russian infantry men is retreating somewhere in Grozny, in 1995, and they stumble over the bodies of two Russian soldiers; they find and take the dead guys' documents and tear off the strings with their personal ID numbers: "The boys have no use for that anymore, but their families have to be notified. Otherwise, the government smartasses aren't going to pay pensions to them, explaining that the soldiers were missing in action or have even deserted." (From Vyacheslav Mironov's I've Been to This War.)

It hurts a lot to read it all, but it also reminds me of how to be very positive about Ukraine's post-1991 history: no matter what, we've been so very lucky.

***

Also, this little text by Yiyun Li in the New York Times Magazine - Passing Through - is very nice. In a way, it's about the degrees of luck, too.

Mishah came back from Helsinki with bronchitis (as if two years in St. Pete haven't been enough to get used to that climate); I caught some kind of a cold yesterday, too; and to make things even worse, our internet shut off yesterday noon and hasn't reappeared until now. So - I apologize for the silence but I can't really do anything about it.

Yuri Yekhanurov is our premier.

289 parliamentarians have voted for him this time.

Regions of Ukraine gave him 50 votes; Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc - 7.

Communists and SDPU(o) did not vote.

***

According to Ukrainska Pravda (in Ukrainian), guys from the Regions of Ukraine are saying Yushchenko has signed an agreement with Yanukovych an hour before the vote.

Main points of the document allegedly are: no politicial persecution, freedom of speech, political reform begins Jan. 1, 2006 (according to Ihor Shkir); no reprivatization, amnesty to those election commission workers accused of violations during the 2004 election, adoption of the law on opposition and the law on the president (according to Vitaly Khomutynnyk).

Seems innocent enough except for the amnesty to election commision crooks item.

Found this quote of Joseph Brodsky in my 1999 scrapbook:

People become tyrants not because they have a vocation for it, nor do they by pure chance either. If a man has such a vocation, he usually takes a shortcut and becomes a family tyrant, whereas real tyrants are known to be shy and not terribly interesting family men. The vehicle of a tyranny is a political party (or military ranks, which have a structure similar to that of a party), for in order to get to the top of something, you need to have something that has a vertical topography.

It's from some essay of his, though I've no idea which one and what volume I found it in.

Someone from Multan (Punjab, Pakistan), stopped by here an hour and a half ago, looking for "sex sex sex fucking pictures just fucking pictures of muslim girls" through the Yahoo! Search. Neeka's Backlog somehow came up as the number-one result.

Forty minutes later, someone from the Syrian Arab Republic ended up here looking for something I deliberately haven't mentioned here, not once: "prime minister ukraina movie sex julia."



What am I doing wrong?

State secretary Oleg Rybachuk said this (Ukrainska Pravda, in Ukrainian):

It'd be very logical to propose Lutsenko [for the premier's post] - then there'll be order in Ukraine.

[...]

There's also Oleksandr Turchynov, but he is now busy with the election preparations.

***

Oleg Bilorus, head of Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc's parliamentary faction, announced their intention to create a coalition government that would work until the March 2006 parliamentary election. "There is no other way," he said (Korrespondent.net, in Russian). This temporary coalition government might be headed by Yulia Tymoshenko, according to Bilorus.

***

Both Rybachuk and Bilorus have alleged violations during today's vote.

Rybachuk said parliamentarians were offered cash in the bathrooms during the break - in exchange for a 'no' vote.

Rybachuk said representatives of SDPU(o) were hurt when he said in the morning that this was being done by them [esdeki]. "They came up to me and asked - why we alone? Well, not only they but those who are close to them as well," added Rybachuk.

Bilorus said that Yekhanurov received "fewer than 223 votes because cards of the parliamentarians who were not there were being used in the voting."

Ukraine assembly rejects president's proposed PM

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's proposed candidate to take over as prime minister failed on Tuesday to win parliamentary approval.

Yuri Yekhanurov, a middle-of-the-road technocrat, won 223 votes in parliament, three short of the required majority in the 450-seat assembly.

Yushchenko had proposed Yekhanurov to replace Yulia Tymoshenko, his ally in last year's "Orange Revolution" protests, sacked this month to end months of infighting.

More abstract reading - a Zerkalo Nedeli text by Sergei Rakhmanin (in Russian) - very interesting, as long as I manage to keep chasing away this evil thought: it's always been interesting to read Rakhmanin - in Kuchma's times, too. (And my short attention span was as much of a problem then as it is now.) But what difference does it make?

Some selections, as usual:

On Sept. 13, the president, speaker, acting prime minister, leaders of the ten parliamentary factions and Anatoly Kinakh signed a declaration with a pompous title: "Union and Cooperation for the Sake of the Future." One Ukrainian TV channel called it a historical event. It sounded like a joke, even though the TV host was saying it in an absolutely serious manner. The president's team diligently tried to make the event appear solemn and significant. But, despite their efforts, it all looked absolutely routine, especially with all the numerous permanent and large-scale scandals looming on the background.

No one has yet had time to forget that similar collective oaths were popular with the former government. However, the new folks' attempt to use this old device looked like a talentless copy of a bad painting. It all seemed tasteless, pointless, secondary and even comic. A trite title, a threadbare text, unjustified pompousity - all this only served to emphasize the routine nature of the event. The document cannot be called the beginninng of a new alliance, nor is it a treaty of friendship and cooperation, and it is not even a non-aggression pact. Signing the declaration doesn't really impose any obligations on the signers - they wouldn't have to participate in the vote for the new government and they are free to vote for the new special temprorary investigation committee.

The only thing special about this event was this: among other autographs, under the text of the declaration was a signature of the leader of the Regions of Ukraine parliamentary faction.

[...]

There are several reasons [Yushchenko] has been forced to create such a document.

[1.] Victor Andreevich had to take initiative right away. Naturally, he had to pay much attention to the parliament. Only recently was [he] thinking about formalizing the numerous pro-presidential majority in the [parliament]. But today he's facing the threat of emergence of an anti-presidential majority, as numerous. He doesn't have much time to change the situation. He couldn't wait till some of his allies started having doubts and those who were having doubts already joined the opponents' ranks. It was necessary and urgent to demonstrate that the president elected by the people had a significant number of parliamentarians behind him. [Yushchenko] badly needed to have if not allies then those who could pass as such, as many as possible of them.

[...]

[2.] The second reason is directly related to the first. The president's goal wasn't just to draw representatives of certain political forces to his orbit - he was doing all he could to prevent them from ending up on the ex-premier's orbit.

[...]

[3.] The president needed at least relative support from the leading factions on the eve of the vote for the premier. The bargaining isn't over yet, but the declaration has allowed to begin them - to see what the prices are, to evaluate potential losses and potential dividends, to compare what's needed and what's possible, and, finally, to understand who needs who and who would suffocate without who.

[4.] The next reason has to do with technologies. The declaration and all around it are part of an absolutely obvious and quite justified PR move. The president was obliged to distract the society at least to some extent. Thus he hoped that the voters would see him as a peacekeeper, not a party in the war, and the refereee judging a conflict, not one of the conflict's sides.

To what extent has [he] succeeded? Opinions on this differ. The author of this article thinks that the attempt was clumsy. Maybe, he was a bit in a hurry. Definitely, the result wasn't as good as planned because of the scandal with Boris Berezovsky's money.

[...]

"Tell me who your friend is and I'll tell you what time it is."

If this proverb is any good, then the time now is the time of crisis. Otherwise, the president wouldn't have to look for sympathy of his yesterday's enemies. Victor Andreevich has dug up as many as 186 allies. And he was forced to look for the hidden reserves in the camp that calls itself opposition.

[...]

The revolution isn't a year old yet. The wounds haven't healed yet. And yesterday's leaders of Maidan seem to be already actively competing for their former enemies.

Can this be called betrayal of ideals? If you believe in ideals, then yes. If you don't, you're ready to be a politician. And then you'd call it a political necessity. Because the ideal of any politician in this country is power and nothing else. Tell me what time is on the political watch and I'll tell you who's gonna be my friend.

In any case, voter are the politicians' friends only during the election.

[...]

I wanted to translate some more, but I'll stop here. What's the use?

Yushchenko has had a meeting with Yanukovych today - at the latter's request, of course... (Yanukovych also met with Lytvyn and Tymoshenko.)

Following this country's politics too closely is as useless as being an expert on all the comings and goings at some obscure little company.

***

Zerkalo Nedeli has posted a translation of Rakhmanin's piece - here - but I think you need to register for free in order to be able to read it.

Yulia Mostovaya's translation is here.