ANALYSIS: The Communist Party, the executive and Ukraine's approaching elections (01/20/02)

ANALYSIS: The Communist Party, the executive and Ukraine's approaching elections

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

Two recent decisions by the Constitutional Court and the executive in Ukraine have again raised the question of the relationship between the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) and the executive. The timing of those decisions, during the run-up to the March 31 parliamentary elections, is in itself suspicious.

First, on December 29, 2001, the Constitutional Court rejected as unconstitutional a decade-old ban on the CPU and stated that only the courts have the power to declare political parties illegal. The CPU was suspended and subsequently banned by two resolutions of the parliamentary presidium on August 26 and 30, 1991. All CPU property and other assets were nationalized by the Ukrainian state, although the Constitutional Court rejected calls for these assets to be returned to the post-Soviet CPU. The Constitutional Court's December 2001 ruling was the result of a motion submitted by 139 left-wing deputies as far back as January 23, 1997.

With 3.5 million members, the Communist Party of Ukraine was the largest republican Communist Party in the USSR until the Russian SFSR created its own republican branch in 1990. The CPU was fortuitously registered as a party independent of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) only on July 22, 1991, a month before Ukraine declared independence and the CPU was banned. Allowed to re-establish itself in October 1993, the current CPU claims to be the direct descendant of the Soviet-era CPU. Nevertheless, it has managed to attract only about 150,000 members, or less than 5 percent of its Soviet-era membership.

The relative weight of the CPU within Ukraine's multiparty system, therefore, is less due to its size than to Ukraine still being an unconsolidated democracy, the weakness and diffusion of Ukraine's remaining 129 political parties, and the ideological amorphousness of the oligarchic center.

Support for the CPU during the 1990s has declined from approximately 30 percent to 20 percent of the electorate, and is drawn mainly from pensioners and veterans (former Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko's Our Ukraine bloc is the first Ukrainian political force to be more popular than the CPU). This support ranges from its high concentration of voters and members in the industrialized east and Crimea, to very low support in western Ukraine.

Throughout the 1990s, pro-statehood ideas evolved across the Ukrainian political spectrum from the center-right, which propelled Ukraine to independence, through the oligarchic center to the center-left (including the Socialist Party). The only main party to escape this evolution was the CPU. Ukraine's ethnic and linguistic divisions have prevented the evolution of the CPU into a post-Communist or national Communist party (the national communists left in 1990-1991). The Socialist Party, therefore, has taken upon itself the role of a pro- statehood, left-wing post-Communist party.

At its height, the combined left bloc had 170 to 180 deputies in the 1998-2002 Verkhovna Rada - still less than a majority but more united than the fractious non-left. This unity of the left was ended in November 2000 by the "Kuchmagate" scandal that opened a wide gulf between the CPU and the Socialist Party, which played a central role in the crisis and remains one of the two wings of the radical anti-Kuchma opposition. Mykola Melnychenko, the presidential guard who recorded audiotapes of conversations in Mr. Kuchma's office, is to run for election on the Socialist Party list.

The second recent development concerns the relationship between the executive and the CPU. President Leonid Kuchma has repeatedly reiterated that "there is only one real opposition in Ukraine," the Communist Party, and has refused to recognize any non-CPU opposition to his "pragmatic centrism." Mr. Kuchma identifies "opposition" to him in the Soviet sense as opposition to the state he supposedly personifies. Consequently, by definition only the CPU can be in "opposition" as it is the only major party that is opposed to Ukraine's independence.

The CPU had shielded President Kuchma from blame during the height of the Kuchmagate crisis by not supporting parliamentary votes of no-confidence in Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko - this despite Mr. Potebenko's inept and unsympathetic investigation of the murder of opposition journalist Heorhii Gongadze in September-November 2000.

Commenting on Mr. Potebenko, CPU Chairman Petro Symonenko said this month that "there is nothing to reproach him for." The CPU will again abstain from a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in Mr. Potebenko's record as procurator-general in the near future. Mr. Potebenko is No. 20 on the CPU list of candidates to be elected by proportional voting. He has refused to relinquish his post before the March election.

In return for shielding Mr. Kuchma, the CPU has been promised executive "support" in the March elections, the prosecution of young nationalists who seized the party's Kyiv headquarters on March 9, 2000, and recognition that it is "the sole opposition party" in Ukraine.

The CPU ceased to be a threat to the executive following Mr. Kuchma's defeat of CPU Chairman Symonenko in the second round of the presidential elections in November 1999. The executive had always wanted to be challenged by the CPU - not Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz - in that round. A CPU candidate provided negative votes for Kuchma (who could not count solely on positive votes to win a victory) because of the CPU's hostility to independence and its hard-line Marxist ideology.

After President Kuchma began his second term, the CPU complained that "anti-Communist hysteria" was sweeping Ukraine. The left had been removed from the parliamentary leadership in a "velvet revolution" in the spring of 2000 and, for the first time, the non-left had created a majority in Parliament.

At the same time, oligarch Oleksander Volkov initiated the launch of a rival pro-statehood CPU(o) (revived) on behalf of the executive. The CPU also accused the executive of being behind a split in the Komsomol when a new Communist Youth Union was created in March 2000.

Later that year, the Kuchmagate scandal led to the collapse of the non-left parliamentary majority, and no more has been heard of the executive-backed CPU(o) ever since.

The need for a pro-executive CPU(o) to split the Communist vote would not have arisen if the non-left parliamentary majority were still united and able to do the executive's bidding. Since the collapse of this majority the executive is facing, for the first time, a bigger threat from Mr. Yuschenko, whose popularity rating has fluctuated between a high of 60 percent and its current 30 percent. The executive, therefore, has resumed its mutually beneficial relationship with the CPU because, together with the oligarchs, the CPU represents a second anti- Yuschenko force. This oligarch-CPU alliance successfully worked together during the Kuchmagate crisis and brought down the Yuschenko government on April 26, 2001.

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

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