The Soviet Union used to propagate the notion that dissidents were funded by Western intelligence agencies.
Today, those same (now, post-Soviet) elites, push an updated version of this notion by arguing that their opponents work with Western foundations and nongovernmental organizations to foment democratic “revolutions.”
In Ukraine, President Viktor Yanykovych’s campaign against the opposition is an outgrowth of his Party of Regions’ alarm about the Arab Spring and of his rapidly collapsing popular support.
In 2003-2004, when the Communist Party and Party of Regions first raised this fear of “revolution,” the threat was portrayed as a contagion spread by the 2000 Serbian and 2003 Georgian democratic revolutions.
Yanukovych sees the world through the prism of foreign conspiracies, continuing to believe the 2004 Orange Revolution was not an authentic popular uprising but a U.S. conspiracy to deny him the presidency that he allegedly won.
For instance, he believes that former Economics Minister Bohdan Danylyshyn was granted asylum in the Czech Republic only after bribes were paid to Czech ministers, and that Western criticism of his administration is written by paid hacks. (The Czech government believes that the expulsion last week of two of its diplomats was Kyiv’s response to the granting of asylum).
At this year’s Davos summit, Yanukovych lamented the popular overthrow of the Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali because he had provided decades of “stability.”
Immediately after Yanukovych’s election, Western foundations came under Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, and Party of Regions scrutiny.
In October, the SBU admitted it was investigating foreign funding for NGOs because of suspicion that “this money will be used for political activity in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian member of parliament Olena Bondarenko wants to restrict Western funding for NGOs.
The 2006 Russian law restricting foreign funding of NGOs, and the ideology behind it, was inspired by similar Ukrainian initiatives.
Party of Regions deputies, such as Bondarenko, are publicly airing their support for draft legislation restricting Western funding of Ukrainian NGOs and the halting of Western training for activists and journalists.
Yanukovych has transformed parliament into a rubber stamp institution and such legislation, if introduced, would be adopted.
Communist Party leader Peter Symonenko demanded that all NGOs be closed during the 2004 elections or, even better, shut down permanently.
The State Tax Administration increased investigations of Western-funded NGOs ahead of the 2004 elections. Last year, that head, Mykola Azarov, became prime minister and head of the Party of Regions.
The Communist Party and Party of Regions have accused the Our Ukraine party of being directed from the U.S. Embassy. The Communist Party argued that a Yushchenko victory in 2004 would have led to Ukraine’s becoming a “US and NATO protectorate.”
Russian political technologists such as Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked on Yanukovych’s 2004 campaign, imported conspiracy theories such as the so-called “Brzezinski Plan,” alleging that the US was behind presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko and the “Kuchmagate” crisis, in which former President Leonid Kuchma was allegedly heard ordering that violence be used against journalist Georgy Gongaze.
Kuchma and Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvn continue to insist the tapes are a product of a “U.S. conspiracy.”
The People’s Party that Lytvyn heads issued a statement in 2009 alleging that “the organizers of these events had as their aim to undermine the system of state power in Ukraine and, especially, to weaken the position of the president who was in power at that time.
This series of events had as its aim to clean the political field for Viktor Yushchenko and to blacken his opponents as politicians who had lost their humanity and any elements of morality.”
The return to conspiracy theories draws on the Soviet pathology of paranoia, the fear of encirclement by “enemies,” hostility to Ukrainian nationalism and old-fashioned anti-Americanism.
That the Communist Party and Party of Regions have revived these tactics, after first airing them eight years ago, shows how little democratic evolution has taken place in the Yanukovych administration.
Taras Kuzio is a visiting fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. Copyright Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
