ANALYSIS: Oligarchic Social Democrats suffer setback (12/23/01)

ANALYSIS

Oligarchic Social Democrats suffer setback

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

On December 13, 234 members of the Ukrainian Parliament voted to dismiss Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk from his position. Mr. Medvedchuk is also the chairman of one of Ukraine's most important, but least liked, oligarchic political parties - the Social Democratic Party (United).

Mr. Medvedchuk achieved notoriety during the Soviet era when he helped send well-known Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus to the Gulag, where he died in 1986. In the 1990s, Mr. Medvedchuk's rise to fame was meteoric, and he recently set his sights on the post-Kuchma presidency.

The factions that gathered the 150 signatures to place the motion of dismissal to a vote came from the two Rukh parties (36 members), Reforms-Congress (14), Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland (25), Solidarity (21), and the newly created Unity (15) led by popular Kyiv Mayor Oleksander Omelchenko. The remaining votes came from the Socialists and Communists, who together command 130 members. Those two factions blame Mr. Medvedchuk for the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada last month of the land reform bill.

It has been increasingly evident that both the SDPU and Oleksander Volkov's Democratic Union have been out of favor with President Leonid Kuchma. Mr. Volkov, a businessman who is reputed to have ties to organized crime and is wanted by Belgian police on money-laundering charges, received a medal from President Kuchma in February in honor of his "selfless work and personal merits in promoting Ukraine's socioeconomic development." But since then his star has also waned.

A new party of power, Regions of Ukraine, was created by the head of the State Tax Administration, Mykola Azarov, earlier this year in the Donbas, and many deputies from Mr. Volkov's Parliament faction joined it. The final indication that Mr. Volkov had fallen out of favor with President Kuchma and was no longer needed as an "adviser" was his replacement as head of the Democratic Union by Mr. Kuchma's long-time personal friend, Volodymyr Horbulin, who was Yevhen Marchuk's predecessor as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.

Four factors have led to Mr. Medvedchuk's decline.

First, Mr. Omelchenko's Unity faction dislikes the SDPU-O because of its control of many of Kyiv's prize assets, including the Dynamo Kyiv soccer team. Mr. Azarov's rival Regions of Ukraine has supported recent draft legislation to tax payments made on the transfers of soccer players from which the SDPU inordinately gained. Mr. Omelchenko also dislikes Hryhorii Surkis, Mr. Medvedchuk's ally and president of Kyiv Dynamo and the Football Federation of Ukraine, who was his rival in the bitterly contested 2000 Kyiv mayoral elections. Mr. Omelchenko is the president of the Hockey Federation of Ukraine.

Second, the SDPU feared that as in the 1998 elections, they would again fail to garner the minimum 4 percent of the vote to secure seats for candidates on its party list. The SDPU, therefore needed, to gain votes in Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine because its main base of support in western and central Ukraine was less reliable. The party sought to capitalize on the language question by collecting 140,000 signatures demanding that a new law on languages be adopted to replace the 1989 law. The new law would elevate Russian to the status of an "official language" while keeping Ukrainian as the "state" language.

It is unclear to all concerned what the difference between "official" and "state" languages is - a distinction first introduced by President Kuchma during his 1994 election campaign but then shelved after his election. On November 30 the Rada began to debate the replacement of the 1989 law, which ensured that the national democrats would target Mr. Medvedchuk as the person behind this move to place it on the Rada agenda only three months before the elections. Rada Chairman Ivan Pliushch has spoken out against discussing the language question on the eve of the elections.

Third, the SDPU is suspected of being one of the most likely culprits behind security service officer Mr. Melnychenko, whose bugging of President Kuchma's office led to the "Kuchmagate" scandal. There are rumors that in mid-2000 the SDPU made a proposal to Mr. Kuchma that he hand over power to Mr. Medvedchuk in a manner similar to the transfer by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. But Mr. Kuchma refused to do so. The SDPU-O was angry also that President Kuchma tolerated Yulia Tymoshenko's presence in the Yuschenko government. The SDPU argued that Ms. Tymoshenko and former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko made a lot of money from insider energy deals and therefore knew how to undercut this source of corrupt funds to the oligarchs.

Mr. Melnychenko has always spoken highly of Marchuk, his former boss as chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Melnychenko tapes include no conversations between President Kuchma and either Mr. Medvedchuk, Mr. Surkis, or Mr. Marchuk.

Finally, the other oligarchic parties could not have abstained in the vote of no confidence to dismiss Vice-Chairman Medvedchuk without a nod of approval from the presidential administration. Mr. Kuchma's blessing for Mr. Medvedchuk's fall from grace allows For a United Ukraine to become the main pro-Kuchma election bloc. Led by presidential administration head Volodymyr Lytvyn, a trusted friend and the only surviving member of Mr. Kuchma's 1994 election team, it includes five parties of power - Regions of Ukraine (Donbas), Labor Ukraine (Dnipropetrovsk), National Democrats (Kharkiv and southern Ukraine), Agrarians (Galicia and Volhynia), and Prime Minister Anatolii Kinakh's Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Each of these can draw upon "administrative resources" in the election campaign in the regions and institutions they control.

The rise and fall of the SDPU is characteristic of Ukrainian politics insofar as oligarchic parties lack any ideology and exist only at the whim of the executive. Although the oligarchs and the executive need each other, neither side trusts the other.

Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.

| Home Page |