With many of Ukraine’s business, charity and governmental institutions functioning so badly, citizens are going straight to the top – asking President Viktor Yanukovych and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov for help in solving their problems.
Natalia Melnychuk feared she would soon not be able to walk.
For 10 years, she had been unable to get the hip replacement she needed to save her mobility. The state said it didn’t have the money; charities ignored her pleas.
But after writing a letter last fall to Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, Melnychuk received a phone call in January from an aide saying he would pay Hr 45,000 for the operation.
Now she is recovering well from her operation in February, walking better every day.
“I still don’t believe it happened,” Melnychuk, 37, told the Kyiv Post by phone.
Thousands of Ukrainians appeal to the country’s leaders every year after giving up hope of getting help from the government’s social security system or pushing local authorities into action.
Dozens of personal pleas appear every day on Azarov’s Facebook page. Supplicants ask not only for medical treatment, but also for the prime minister to intervene to protect a local lake from loud parties, to make pensions arrive on time or to drive prostitutes away from a courtyard.
“If you look at appeals to call centers and letters to the president, it looks like there are no authorities apart from the president and the government,” Azarov said at a government meeting in March. “Why are the president and prime minister asked to bring firewood?”
The frequent inability of authorities to solve even the most basic problems is driven by rampant corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and lack of funding across all levels of government, analysts say.
The tradition of sending petitions to top officials dates back to medieval state of Muscovy, where supplicants would beg before the czar in an act called chelobitnaya, or “beating one’s forehead.”
“Here is the idea of applying to the supreme authority,” said Mykhailo Kirsenko, professor of history at Kyiv Mohyla Academy. “It is obvious that the supreme authority will not get involved personally, but he will urge lower officials, which are impossible to be reached from below,” to solve the problem.
If you look at appeals to call centers and letters to the president, it looks like there are no authorities apart from the president and the government,
– Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s Prime Minister
This tradition continued in the Russian empire, where citizens appealed to Tsar Batiushka, or Father Czar, for help.
In Soviet times the General Secretary of the Communist Party carried out a similar role. While he never saw the appeals himself, his administration forwarded them to the relevant officials, demanding that they report on the results or face punishment, Kirsenko said.
Times changed but the principle of “chelobitnaya” remained.
Another woman recently received a free hip replacement thanks to President Viktor Yanukovych after her daughter wrote him a letter, according to Volodymyr Khaniuk, who heads the department in the presidential administration that deals with people’s appeals.
He said the administration forwarded the appeal to the Health Ministry and Kyiv City Administration.
Yanukovych receives about 10,000 to 12,000 letters from people every month, asking for help acquiring documents proving land ownership, or restoring gas supply to a local school, for example.
“Most of them refer to different personal problems of the applicants,” Khaniuk said.
The requests are collected by the administration and forwarded to the relevant officials.
Sometimes the stories of modern “chelobitnaya” bring the politicians into funny situations.
When travelling to Kirovohrad in February, Viktor Yanukovych, the president’s son and namesake, picked up a call on the local governor’s hot line and heard an old lady complaining that the intercom in her building hadn’t worked for several days.
Yanukovych junior, a lawmaker in the pro-presidential Party of Regions, assured the woman her problem would be solved. By the evening, the intercom was working, the press service of the local state administration reported.
Sociologists say that relying on a good czar rather than an efficient and fair system of governance leads to problems for both people and the authorities, as a paternalistic society lives in constant disillusionment over unfulfilled hopes.
“Since the presidential elections in 1999, the opposition has always won. Why? Because people got used to expecting manna from heaven from the authorities and before all elections the authorities promise it,” said Iryna Bekeshkina, head of Democratic Initiatives Foundation. “But when they come to power the new authorities of course can’t fulfill the promises and the people get disappointed.”
Bekeshkina said this disillusionment is currently leading some Ukrainians to cooperate in order to solve their shared problems, which she called a “spring of civil society.”
Lawyer Tetiana Montian, who for years has encouraged apartment owners to unite to deal with communal issues without relying on local authorities or state communal services, says her attempts often collide with resistance from ordinary people.
“We have no tradition, no skills of common actions. There is instead a belief that the authorities have to solve everything,” Montian said. “People need to accept that nobody owes them anything.”
Historian Kirsenko said that modern Ukrainian paternalism is a Soviet legacy that would be diminished soon. “In Internet times people are getting wiser fast,” he said.
Melnychuk, meanwhile, is delighted with her new hip and praised Azarov profusely. A spokesman for Azarov said the money was paid by private donors including the prime minister.
Commenters on Azarov’s Facebook page were less impressed.
“So many children were left without help,” one wrote on Azarov’s Facebook page about Melnychuk’s story. The commenter added that the state recently suspended financing of prostheses for handicapped kids.
“There would be many fewer cases like this if the local authorities listened to people,” another commenter wrote.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]
