A portrait of Viktor Yushchenko on display in Zhitomir during the Ukrainian president's visit to the city on March 13, 2007.
Photo: Konstantin Ilyanok
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The View from Moscow
// Russia's Beef with Ukrainian Politics
Events in Ukrainian politics have long evoked feelings of barely concealed disgust among the Russian elite. From the vantage point of Moscow, Ukrainian politics looks like a cesspool of human vices combined with a complete absence of principles on the part of the main players, who also seem to lack the ability to put the interests of the government ahead of their own. Those in Moscow sniff that it is all just endless leapfrogging in government positions, defectors from one camp to another, ad hoc coalitions, alliances, and misalliances, and absurd friendships between everyone with everyone against everyone else. From the airy heights of Russia's newfound majesty, it might have been possible to turn a blind eye to all of this – if Moscow had not decided that the actions of the Ukrainian ruling class are depriving Russia's brother-next-door of its political stability. According to Moscow, along with political stability, Ukraine is endangering its relations with Russia, and it is also squandering a key prerequisite for economic growth and attractiveness to investment. And in general, every time Euronews shows the latest fistfight in the Ukrainian parliament, the country becomes the laughingstock of the entire world. In the end, it is the millions of Ukrainians themselves who will have to pay with their presents and futures for the kind of politics that a few hundred politicians insist on pursuing.
Against that background Russian politics, which unlike Ukrainian politics features the crystallization of a four-dimensional (or four-sided) political space comprised of United Russia, A Just Russia, the Communist Party of Russia, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, looks, if not like an objective standard, at least like a qualitatively new evolutionary step forward. Is it really possible to compare the robust Russian "big four" parties with the four parties – the Party of the Regions, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and now the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs – that make up Ukraine's current ruling coalition? How long will this latest Ukrainian variant of the swan, the pike, and the crab (the heroes of a famous Russian fairytale) last? Six months, three months, a month, a week? Hence the feeling of disgust that infuses the attitude of the Russian superior type towards the inferior Ukrainian type.
But here's the paradox: this view of Ukraine is still only the Russian viewpoint. And it replaces reality with conceptions of what should supposedly be unavoidable in a country whose politics are such an unpredictable operetta. Meanwhile, the reality is that there has been no catastrophe in Ukraine traceable to the absence of the definitiveness and predictability that are considered the golden standards of political stability. Economic growth isn't going too badly, and, strangely enough, the country's attractiveness to investment is in no danger. It is emerging that Ukraine's image isn't so awful after all. With regard to image, we can even go further: according to the most recent opinion polls in the West, one of the world's major exporters of terrible news is not Ukraine, but Russia – a country which, of course, is having no trouble staying on top of the heap when it comes to gas and oil exports.
In general, there is no point in laughing so hard at Ukrainian politics. It's not nonsensical, and it doesn't go around trampling on the interests of society. In addition, Ukrainian politics is not boring. Unlike its Russian counterpart.
Sergei Strokan
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 22, 2007
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