POST-NOMENCLATURA
A quarter of a century after the disintegration of USSR a few things have become clear. Now it is evident that the main concept defining the bygone Soviet era was not its ideology, but its system of power and ownership. The property of the Soviet state, falsely presented as the common property of the people, in truth, had an organized “proprietor” in the form of the bureaucratic class called “nomenklatura”. The term “bureaucratic class” can create a false impression of describing regular state employees in the service of their government. Contrary to this notion, the power structure of the former USSR consisted of people tied to each other by pervasive bonds of mutual support, family connections, and clan loyalty.
The fall of the Soviet Union has battered personal composition of the “nomenklatura” class. However, within just a few years this group re-consolidated itself. While some of the odious figures of the past, such as “The First Secretary" moved to “another world”, the strongest party secretaries of the second rank have persevered. Many of them transitioned into becoming enterprise owners or managers of the new power structure. Former Komsomol leaders, thoroughly lacking in moral scruples, applied their political skills of tribal cooperation toward maintaining their power in the post-Soviet states. Crucially, the segment of the population, which has been schooled in the perverse methods of tribal loyalty and corruption by the prior system, utilized its skills in the institutions of the post-Soviet power structure.
When people joined such institutions by becoming, for example, government employees, they also entered into a network of public/private relationships allowing them to extract unlawful gains in the form of bribes or outright theft, while sharing a portion of the stolen money and goods with their superiors. In exchange, they received protection from the law that their superiors were, actually, empowered to enforce. Such behavior is called “corruption”, which is generally considered as an undesirable state of affairs requiring a correction. However, the post-Soviet regime has not been considering this form of deviancy as undesirable or exceptional. To the contrary, it has been relying upon its unwritten laws for maintaining its structure of power and ownership.
In the independent state of Ukraine the preservation of the “nomenclature” class under the new name of the “national elite” required a new social contract. In order to attain its legitimacy they cynically removed the veil of Communism and replaced it with religious insignia. Appearance of the former communist-atheists in churches, at first, shocked the audience. But, in time, the transition requiring replacement of the red stars with yellow tridents proceeded painlessly. Instead of communistic slogans, the social discourse concentrated on a liberal market ideology. All of these superficial changes only masked the preservation of the Ukraine's political system, where the real ownership was maintained by the core participants of the old “communistic” regime.
However, in a quarter of a century after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, something inevitable has happened: the system self-destructed. Bureaucrats, hiding behind their nationalistic, socialistic and liberal-market oriented rhetoric, were only capable of systematic extraction of resources from the country. They could not organize the economy. Neither did they possess the ability to improve the material and spiritual life of the people. Resources of the Soviet period have been exhausted. The government deficit was replaced by loans. Keeping the economy of the country afloat proved to be an impossible task. Ukraine faced the perilous perspective of seizing its existence as an independent state.
The perspective of Ukraine being liquidated as a sovereign entity seemed almost inevitable. Russia “out of its goodness” lent to Ukraine 15 billion US dollars for a period of two years. Ukrainian government could not repay the loan using any type of currency. Forced into a corner, the country sold its most valuable assets: transmission lines, nuclear power plants, and some enterprises working on the latest technology (production of missiles, aircraft, some types of high-tech machines and modern weapons, etc.) at bargain prices. Given the fact that the key positions in the country were occupied by Russian citizens, who could not even be called spies in the usual sense of the word, and that the parliament was dominated by the pro-Russian party, one could easily imagine the process of possible annexation of Ukraine by Russia in a Crimea-like scenario. One could even imagine some formal preservation of its independence similar to the status of the former Soviet Ukrainian Republic.
Not all Ukrainians welcomed this scenario. In the winter of 2013, while the country was one step away from a political collapse, Kiev’s uprising broke out. It confronted the hopeless Ukrainian political system and the “neo-nomenclature” class. An uprising is a destructive process, which, in principle, is illegal. However, the latest Ukrainian revolt achieved its legitimacy by aiming at the establishment of the rule of law and by replacing the country’s leaders who were engaged in barely-veiled robbery, while being willing to surrender the independence of their country.
The victory of the Maidan’s uprising marked the initiation of the power restructuring of Ukraine. The main objective of the reconstruction that followed the uprising was to oust of the post-nomenclature class, while dismantling the old networks of power and property. Another objective was to replace the corrupt state institutions of police, courts, prosecutor’s office, and election offices, while getting rid of various dummy inspections, false tenders, unjustified benefits and subsidies. At the same time the aggressive reform targeted "gray" and "black" markets, while replacing them with "transparent" structures.
In a fictitious institution of the Soviet and post-Soviet era any interaction with a government agency quickly becomes personal interaction with its representative. The citizen does not deal with the court but with the judge; not with the traffic police, but with the policeman; not with military offices, but with the military commissioner; and so on. That situation becomes possible when decisions are not regulated by the rules of the relevant institutions. Instead, they rely on selfishly motivated actions of their functionaries. Practice has shown that the fastest method for resolving events favorably for a given person was to give official money. At the time of interaction with the State everyone automatically becomes a supplicant. However, with the help of some cash one can simply become a consumer, who procures services of an officer. An objective of the "Euro- Maidan" movement was to achieve a "revolution of dignity", which would result in liberating the majority of Ukrainian citizens from humiliation of living outside the law.
The political agenda of the past year in Ukraine can be described as a struggle over the transition to a legitimate, open and fair government. On the one side of this conflict there is an active minority of the population that seeks to reorganize relations between the state and citizens on the basis of legal regulations, which are currently defined in Ukraine as "European values". The opposing party to in this struggle is comprised of numerous beneficiaries of the old "corrupt" system of public-private property ownership
This conflict emerged in the east of the country, where the leaders of the former corruption-based Ukrainian regime enjoyed the greatest political influence. It was expressed in the mass support of the population, which has been traditionally committed to totalitarian-paternalistic model of relations between the state and its citizens. The possible reforms threatened many. If the idea of the proper "European values" could take hold across the country, then millions of employees of all ranks (from a fire inspector to the minister) would lose their illicit income. Informal envelope-enclosed salaries would stop arriving. Bribe-based mechanisms for resolving business disputes would come to a halt. The beneficiaries of the old system desperately tried to delay its disappearance.
While pursuing the reform, Ukraine is also dealing with the crisis of ideas ranging from nationalism to liberalism. Resolution of this crisis can help in consolidating the nation for the sake of its structural renovation. However, while this search for the national identity continues, joining EU or NATO cannot help Ukraine in the resolution of its problems any more than the current membership in the UN or WTO. Elite of the country, which needs at least some credibility among the population, injects into the popular discourse conflicting ideas of various kinds. The latest political direction has been towards consolidating the society on the basis of anti-communism. Bleached by time, the symbolic legacy of the Soviet Union suddenly appeared at the center of the national agenda. On the one hand, the denial of the Soviet legacy demonstrates the mental distance between Ukraine and Russia. Superficially, removing the monuments of the Soviet leaders, renaming the streets carrying Soviet names, banning the promotion of Soviet symbols, and banning of the Communist Party can create an impression of a radical change. However, it obscures the weakness of the reform. The country's lack of political infrastructure capable of creating meaningful alternatives to the institutions of the past leaves the current government with few options for pursuing its main task - pulling the country away from the edge of an economic collapse.
Another important factor is the current war in the eastern Ukrainian provinces between the pro-government forces and the rebels supported and armed by the Russian Federation. This conflict takes place on the background of the desperate fear of change prevalent in the population of the eastern Ukraine. Russian annexation of the Crimea and intervention in Donetsk simplified the political choices among the Ukrainians. It enabled its citizens to identify themselves with one of the parties to this struggle. Sudden and rapid creation of armies and voluntary support units in a given region leaves no doubt in the choice of the majority in a given region. Under these circumstances, in a pragmatic effort to keep the unity of the population under its control, the national elite has been demonstrating radical patriotism.
At the present time the Ukrainian society faces two existential challenges: combatting the fatal threat to the country’s economy and defeating the foreign occupation. Addressing these challenges requires popular mobilization, which partially obscures the urgency of addressing the whole range of other internal problems. After the current crisis is over, the nation will have to address the task of consolidation based on the ideas shaping its future. Instead of dealing with the ghost of Communism, Ukrainians will have to come together while absorbing "European values” and merging various conflicting interests into a coherent national ideology. They will have to part with the governmental paternalism and with the “post-nomenclature” class whose perverse values brought the country to an edge of a precipice.
(2015)
Translated by Michael Feygin