From the Editor's Desk
s of an undemocratic regime is that every once in a while a number of its top officials get replaced and no one is able to clearly explain why. For most countries with such regimes there's a set of political scientists ready to offer informed guesses. But in Ukraine the system is so opaque that even that much is hard to come by. Instead all you get is a bunch of speculation from armchair analysts such as myself.
The subtext of Ukraine's latest shuffle of the government deck, at least, is well-known: the upcoming presidential election and the ever-intensifying struggle for control over the ever-shrinking economy. As first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Holubchenko's main job was to oversee the transit and sale of natural gas, the most powerful lever of control over Ukraine's heavy industries. The question is, who exactly did Holubchenko cross and how?
Holubchenko's dismissal appears to be a reaction to an attack on him from Russia's Gazprom, which charged earlier this month that some 2.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas went missing in Ukraine in December alone. Rumor has it that Gazprom didn't like the food-for-gas debts deal that Holubchenko had recently struck with the Russian government and going public with its kompromat was its way of paying him back.
But why would Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma be so quick to accommodate Gazprom? Did Holubchenko negotiate terms in his own interest and against those of his patrons? Did Gazprom reveal something that upset one of Kuchma's allies, someone Kuchma is counting on for support in the election campaign? Or is Kuchma courting Gazprom itself? All of the above seems the most likely answer.
Holubchenko was replaced by Volodymyr Kuratchenko, a former deputy industry minister and member of the People's Democratic Party's leadership committee who had been governor of Zaporizhya oblast since April 1997. His role probably won't be very different from Holubchenko's: to represent the presidential administration within the Cabinet. Presumably, he'll be more careful not to step on the wrong toes.
Besides the energy sector, Holubchenko also oversaw agriculture. Now a separate deputy prime minister will have the latter job. Kuchma's appointee to the new position, Mykhailo Hlady, was until recently governor of Lviv oblast. Kuchma is advertising him as a strong proponent of land reform, as if dabbing the gray apparatchik with rosy makeup just in time for the International Monetary Fund's latest mission to Ukraine.
Naturally, Hlady is more of a Westernizer than his comrades on the eastern side of the pre-war Soviet border. By appointing him, Kuchma could be extending an olive branch to the western Ukrainian arm of the old nomenklatura, which has been feeling somewhat stranded lately.
But Hlady is far less notable for who he is than for who he is not. Since Oleksandr Tkachenko struck a deal with Kuchma that gave him the position of speaker of parliament, Tkachenko has been demanding that the government create a position of deputy prime minister for the agricultural sector. So when sources inside the government and presidential administration began to say that such a move was imminent, the prevailing assumption was that Kuchma had agreed to appoint Tkachenko's nominee in order to assure Tkachenko's continued collusion.
Hlady isn't likely to push for the kind of radical reforms Ukraine needs to stop the collapse of its agriculture. After all, restricted trade and corruption of the principle of public ownership of property are the essence of the Ukrainian elite's power. Less than a month ago Kuchma was scolding Holubchenko for not ensuring that domestic sunseed processors receive enough sunseed. Since those processors are too inefficient to pay market sunseed prices, the only way to ensure supplies to them is to prevent the market from operating – which is exactly what Kuchma intended to do until he was pressured to back off by the International Monetary Fund.
But Hlady may push for mild reforms to the agricultural sector such as reorganizing collective farms as (theoretically) worker-owned private companies. And even that much is anathema to Tkachenko, the former agriculture minister of Soviet Ukraine.
Members of Kuchma's circle have been getting nervous that Tkachenko is getting powerful enough to challenge Kuchma for the presidency. Meanwhile, Tkachenko has begun opposing Kuchma more and more directly, most recently by supporting a request to the Kuchma-friendly Constitutional Court to rule on whether parliament could abolish the presidency, the only point of which seemed to be to insult and agitate Kuchma.
It looks like Kuchma has returned the salvo. And that his dispute with Tkachenko will only escalate from here.
