ANALYSIS

November 2, 2000

Ukrainian Media and Society:
Still "Not so free"

By Mykola Ryabchuk

Some nine years ago, American publicist Abraham Brumberg published an article on the nascent independent Ukraine, which could not but infuriate many Ukrainians. Its curious title "Not So Free at Last" seemed to prove rather little respect to many people, of present and past generations, whose life dream about the "free Ukraine" had got recently accomplished, and whose expectations for a prosperous, democratic, European state had not yet vanished. The editors of the New York Review of Books who featured the article, did their best to add some more oil to the fire, having highlighted the Brumberg's article on the cover with words "Nasty Ukraine".

As it often happens, the arrogant headline and frivolous title had rather obliqued than featured the perspicacious essence of Brumberg's article — his apt observation of the ambiguity of Ukraine's independence and, by extension, of all the dubious changes that have been happening in the post-Soviet countries. Today this ambiguity seems to be the most determining feature of Ukrainian politics, economy, culture and virtually the whole way of people's thought, feeling and behaviour. It largely stems from the fact that the anti-communist revolution in Ukraine, as well as in most parts of the former USSR (except the Baltics), has not been completed.

The so called "democratic Ukraine" ("democratic Russia," etc.) which allegedly emerged in 1991, is nothing more than a wishful thinking of numerous Sovietologists and Kremlinologists who had always known everything about the "Russia" except some, the most obvious, things.

There was a nice joke in the late USSR, about an American super-spy who was very carefully and intensely trained by the CIA, after a number of tragic failures with his predecessors. He was taught by the native-speakers and got acquainted with all possible things that could be relevant: to drink vodka straight up, to never use napkins or handkerchiefs, never pool out a tea spoon from the glass when drinking tea, and so on. Finally, he was brought by a super-plane into the depth of Russia, jumped successfully with a parachute which afterwards was immediately destroyed by special chemicals in the forest, and rather easily found the road since he had known by heart a detailed map made with a help of super-satellites. He worn a typical Russian jacket called telogreika, and typical dirty boots called sapogi, and spread around a slight odour of a seldom washed body, elaborated, again, in super-secret CIA laboratories.

At the bus stop he fired a strong Russian cigarette he'd been trained to smoke without any cough for years, and eventually was approached by some dedushka from the nearby village who asked him for a cigarette, breathed the smoke deeply, and suddenly told:

"Look, man, don't you have better cigarettes in America?"

The spy was completely broken, and the only thing he was able to pronounce was: "But how do you know I'm American?"

"Well, man, it's easy to find. We don't have any blacks here."

Indeed, the 1991 events that climaxed after the failed putsch into the ban on the Communist party and dissolution of the USSR, seemed to be so impressive that some of its very essential, internal features had been largely unnoticed or simply ignored. People saw on the surface what they wanted to see and avoided in-depth analysis which needed unpleasant questions and uncomfortable answers. Even the 1993 Yeltsin's shooting of Parliament was treated candidly and rather benevolently as a fighting of young and vulnerable Russian "democracy" with ugly relics of reactionary Bolshevism. Very few people dared to blame the "democrats" as not so democratic, and to foresee in the fate of the Parliament the prefiguration of many further developments. Even less people dare, even today, to find out any connection between that shooting and last-year explosions in Moscow, allegedly masterminded by the evil Chechens, or, let's say, the farcical assassination attempt masterminded last-year in Ukraine allegedly by the main political rival of the incumbent president Leonid Kuchma during the presidential elections (or, maybe, a mysterious road accident which made his another rival, Rukh's leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, dead literally, not only politically).

All these random events which include also a dirty war in Chechnya, a dirty war with local governors, a dirty war with independent mass-media (in both Russia and Ukraine) seem to have something very important in common: the old-style Bolshevik belief that any means could and should be applied for the right cause, especially if this cause means unlimited power and unaccountable property.

Despite the really impressive changes that shook and rapidly reconfigured the post-Soviet world in 1991, some basic features of Soviet system remained unchanged. In time, they proved to be the main hindrance to further development and the main source of countries' stagnation and social ambivalence. The major fault of the "unfinished revolution" of 1991 was just that it was "unfinished." First, it didn't replace the old political class with a new one; the major changes occurred within the old ruling elite; the opposition forces proved to be rather weak and their leaders had little choice (and little imagination) but to accept the second-rate positions within the old-cum-new regime. And second, the "unfinished revolution" didn't bring virtually any new institution at place and didn't abandon any old one. A lump of the Soviet army became the Ukrainian army, with the same officers and politruks; the notorious KGB became SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) — again with the same staff, skilled in fighting "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists" and other dissidents; University departments of Marxism-Leninism, Scientific Communism, Atheism, etc., became departments of Philosophy, History of Religion, and so on — but again, with the same people who seldom bothered to revise the content, not to say methodology of their courses. Even the Communist Party as a state institution remained virtually untouched: its ideological functions were really abandoned but administrative functions preserved; the "party of power" remained in power; nomenklatura just changed the chairs and shields to keep on ruling the same country by the same methods of the "telephone law"— now, however, under the guise of the state administrators.

In sum, Ukraine (as well as Russia and some other post-Soviet republics) became a show-window democracy: it has seemingly free elections, free mass-media, free, as they claim, market economy, however none of these institutions work properly, in Western style, just because none of them is based on the rule of law. Lack of a strong and unshakable, independent, transparent, efficient legal system, accompanied with a very low legal consciousness of both common people and ruling elites, is the main obstacle that hinders any real reforms in post-Soviet countries. You perhaps remember that the Soviet Union used to have a very nice Constitution, maybe the best in the world, but very few people had ever tried to employ it just because there were no real mechanisms to implement the numerous rights and freedoms it guaranteed, in practice. There was a nice joke about some Communist Party professional propagandist who delivered a lecture to workers at a weekly political information meeting. His topic was Constitutional Rights of the Soviet Citizens, and after a lecture he was to officially answer the questions. Nobody was yet eager to ask anything because everything, in actuality, was clear even before the lecture.

Suddenly though, somebody Ivanov rose his hand and put the question: "Comrade lecturer, have I a right to…" "Yes, yes, you have!.." — interrupted him lecturer who was apparently eager to end up the senseless ritual and go home. "Well, comrade lecturer", — insisted a worker, — "you don't listen to me. My question is whether I have a right to…" "Yes, yes, citizen Ivanov, of course you have!" — exclaimed the lecturer impatiently.

"No, comrade lecturer", — the nuisance was really unbearable, — "I just wonder if I have a right to…" "Yes, you certainly have!!!" — the lecturer was deeply annoyed by that stupid guy. "Well," — the worker told thoughtfully, — "can I then…" — "No, you definitely can't!…"

Such a situation when people have plenty of paper rights but cannot employ them in reality, has largely persisted in the post-Soviet space. The only substantial difference between the post-Soviet states and the Soviet Union is that the latter had had a compulsory ideology, i.e., had to use an excessive violence for the ideological purity which, however, as perestroika and further developments proved out, was absolutely unnecessary for meeting the major goal of the ruling class — keeping power and property.

Of course, such a difference is very significant since it marks the systemic transition from totalitarianism to various sorts of authoritarianism that emerged in the versatile post-Soviet states. One cannot deny however that, in terms of legality, authoritarian systems have much more in common with their totalitarian siblings than with Western-style liberal democracies. None of the 12 authoritarian states that replaced in 1991 the authoritarian Soviet Union (which ceased to be totalitarian due to Gorbachov's perestroika and eventual collapse of the central institutions) have evolved into liberal democracies. To the contrary, virtually all of them became more authoritarian and some, like Turkmenistan, slid back to totalitarianism — this time, however, of local rather universal (Communist) brand.

To make sense of what happened in the USSR in 1991 and afterwards, one should probably look at the process of perestroika as a many-fold struggle between the degrading but still strong totalitarian state, subverted by Gorbachov and reformatory nomenklatura, and nascent civil society striving for emancipation from the state. In the Baltic republics, where civil society proved to be strong enough, the revolution succeeded and much-needed systemic reforms have been implemented. In Central Asia, where civil society was too weak or virtually non-existent, no substantial changes have happened; the late Soviet authoritarianism was merely substituted with local forms of post-Soviet despotism, more or less liberal or tyrannical.

In Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia civil society proved to be strong enough to challenge the state and even, sometimes and somewhere, to seemingly get upper hand, but nowhere it managed to essentially change institutions and to establish the new, democratic rules of game. As a result, democratic leaders had been easily swept away — by the coup (in Georgia and Azerbaijan), by the elections (in Belarus and Moldova), or just had been corrupted and compromised by the ruling nomenklatura which deceptively "shared" the power with "democrats" (in Ukraine and Russia), never though giving them any significant "share" in its profitable business.

From this point of view, one may claim that Gorbachov's perestroika — as a painful multi-facet process of emancipation of civil society from the totalitarian-cum-authoritarian state — did not end in 1991 but, rather, continued in the successor states throughout the 90s, and seems far from being over today, even though authoritarian tendencies apparently prevail everywhere. In a sense, we still have a situation of the "cold civil war," and mass-media still have to take care of this battleground.

At the first glance, Ukrainian media seem to technically be as free (at last) as their Western counterparts. Anybody can found a newspaper, a journal, a radio or TV company; no censorship is permitted; no media can be shut down otherwise than by the court decision. And at the second glance, you would also hardly find any serious problems with Ukrainian media. There are plenty of TV channels in Kyiv, and only one of them, owned by the state, seems to be hyper-loyalist to the President (none the less its propagandistic effect is quite dubious because of the extreme stupidity of the staff). There are even more independent radio stations and newspapers, of which very few seem to be President's trumpeters. You may find very different opinions in Ukrainian mass-media, some of them very critical about authorities, even about the President.

Ukraine is apparently not a totalitarian state, and Ukrainian president is not a bloodthirsty paranoid dictator, eager to eliminate innumerable conspirators, enemies of the State, of the People, and of His Own Person.

To the contrary, Mr. Kuchma and his numerous spokesmen have never got tired to emphasize Ukraine's "European choice" and commitment to democratic values. I dare to call this regime "authoritarianism with a human face".

Such a regime never applies excessive violence; it pretends to be "democratic" and usually follows democratic procedures — to the extent this doesn't threaten its political (and economic) dominance. Yet any procedure can be abandoned and any law violated as soon as the threat emerges. The Russian case is the most graphic; the Ukrainian rulers are dragging behind — however not because of their democratic commitments but just because in Ukraine there are many fewer assets at stake to kill — sorry, to fight — for.

The "party of power" that rules Ukraine (you may call those people fashionably "oligarchs," but I would prefer the old Soviet term "nomenklatura" which is actually generic for most of them), pursues a rather subtle and sophisticated policy towards mass-media. First of all, being ideologically free, the party of power needs not to care of any ideological purity, any dogmas, making thus virtually any topic, and any approach to it, permissible. The only thing which is not desirable is investigative reporting. You may blame oligarchs with the worst words but avoid, please, mentioning their names, and God forbid you to go deeper in their business. You may bitterly complain of corruption, economic decline and even of government inefficiency but avoid, please, mentioning President's name, and God forbid you to trace the connection between all these phenomena and President's and his men's activity.

Secondly, the party of power is smart enough to neglect the marginal publications with a low circulation (of 10,000 copies and less), and to focus primarily on daily newspapers with national circulation of 100,000 copies and more, and especially on a few radio and TV channels which have nation-wide transmission (hardly surprising that the only channel available in most rural regions of Ukraine is the state-owned Channel-1).

And thirdly, the party of power learned to be highly inventive in manipulating or, so to say, "managing" mass-media. It applies a wide range of both sticks and carrots to promote obedient species and punch out disobedient. The set of carrots, of course, is limited because of scarcity of resources, but the set of sticks is extremely large: it includes various legal (technically speaking) measures of influence and even more versatile set of semi-legal and overtly illegal, mafia-style, methods of coping with media.

Handling the media without censorship, without ideological secretaries and raikom instructors proved to be unexpectedly easy job in a country where civil society has a very weak economic and therefore social base, and even weaker legal ground to stand up firmly. The post-Soviet economies, despite broadly trumpeted privatization and emergence of seemingly free-market institutions and market-style relations, still have much more in common with the Soviet administrative system ruled by the "telephone law" than with a real free market where all subjects are playing the same game, according to the same stable rules, and their success depends rather on their entrepreneurial skills than on personal ties with authorities and ability to be "more equal" than others. Low efficiency of the both Soviet and post-Soviet economies is largely determined by their basically medieval, feudal character: economic prosperity of any "businessmen" here depends very little on how he tills his land, or which technical innovations and structural changes he introduces in his business, but primarily — depends on which concessions, licenses, tax reliefs, and other privileges he manages to arrange in the corridors of power, and which shadow schemes he succeeds to realize in cooperation with authorities.

Power still is the major source of income in post-Soviet republics, and this is why nobody cares about production but first and foremost about getting in power or making appropriate contacts with appropriate people.

This is why, also, no oligarch has made his fortune producing whatsoever; all of them got their millions from very dubious trade operations with natural resources and state-cum-privatized property. That's why, by the way, virtually none of them wants to share his business experience with general public and to reveal where his fortune comes from.

Such a perverse economic situation has a destructive impact on both society and mass-media. Since virtually all economic activity is controlled and, if necessary, manipulated by the state with its notorious "telephone law," no citizen can feel free and economically independent vis-à-vis authoritarian state. This hampers dramatically the development of civil society anywhere beyond the capital city and some other large urban centers where the economic scene seems to be more competitive due to the presence of foreign companies and institutions, and due to the greater number of participants in general, but also due to the presence of foreign journalists and diplomats who dare, from time to time, to remind Ukrainian officials about their "democratic" commitments and the so called "European choice." But in small towns and especially villages where the kolkhoz serfdom remained virtually untouched, people are completely dependent economically and therefore politically on the authorities, who are certainly no friends of democracy and legality.

In turn, this means that relatively independent mass media are contained largely in Kyiv and some other big cities, but in most cases are unavailable in the province due to a number of reasons. First, most people in the province have usually no idea about their very existence, since the newspapers they are accustomed to read and the only TV channel they are allowed to watch provide no information about the worthless junk. Second, even if somebody gets information about the alternative publications, he could easily be barred from the subscription at the post office under some awkward pretext (the publication doesn't exist any more, subscription is over, circulation is limited, and so on. And besides the state-run post-offices, one can hardly find any other place to subscribe to periodicals in the province). And thirdly, even if one succeeds in subscription, he may have serious problems with delivery: "undesirable" publications are often lost, or delayed, or damaged, and usually nobody is guilty. As a result, very few people in the province dare to challenge the existing state of affairs and to launch a war for their civic rights, which seem to be merely rights of customers. The decades of totalitarianism have taught them a simple thing: might makes right or, as they say, not one who's right is right, but one who has more rights.
    In big cities, however, the "telephone law" doesn't work as perfectly as in the province, and urban folk is usually not as obedient as the rural one. Party of power thus needs much more skill and inventiveness to keep major mass-media at bay. You may find a long list of crimes against journalists indirectly permitted if not directly committed by the authorities. Every year half a dozen Ukrainian journalists are killed or are said to have committed suicide under very dubious circumstances, or merely disappear — as happened to extremely courageous Georgiy Gongadze two months ago. So far, nobody has yet proved that authorities are involved somehow in these crimes. Two things, however, make their role in all these events very suspicious. First, none of the numerous crimes against the journalists have been yet investigated successfully. This may mean that authorities are highly incompetent, at best, or that they have their own reasons not to find the killers. And second, virtually all Ukrainian journalists who were murdered, beaten, wounded, all who suddenly disappeared or committed "suicide," used to practice investigative reporting: all of them traced very concrete political and economic affairs in which the top Ukrainians officials and their friends — "oligarchs" — were involved.

And finally, all these events occurred in a very peculiar context of the permanent pressure on media, aggressive obstruction, and persecution of journalists carried out by the authorities in the most different ways: from direct threats, arrests, and blackmail to false libel suits and fantastic multi-million fines imposed by the courts on the authors and periodicals (ironically, some persons' allegedly defamed dignity costs much more than other people's lives — miners' relatives, for example, get some £250, or 2,000 hryvnias, in compensation for lethal accidents). One can hardly deny that brutal murders and strange "suicides" of Ukrainian journalists seem to be rather a natural part of this context than any tragic exception from a relatively normal state of affairs.

I wouldn't bore you with a rather extensive record of numerous violations of people's right to inform and to be informed committed by the Ukrainian authorities — from "stepping up tax checks" and "hygiene inspections" to freezing bank accounts, asking the fire brigade to inspect offices, and even organizing power cuts to obstruct journalists in their work. Many, though far from all, of these violations are listed in annual reports by international organizations monitoring human and, particularly, journalists' rights in different countries. (See, for example, the comprehensive annual collections of relevant data by the French group Reporters without Borders, or Freedom House reports, or The Ukrainian Weekly's coverage of subsequent authorities' crackdowns on Vseukrainskie vedomosti, Pravda Ukrainy, Kievskie vedomosti, Sil's'ki visti, STB and some other TV channels, and so on). The Ukrainian entries in those international reports, I must confess, are not the longest or the most impressive. They are too long, however, for a country whose authorities talk non-stop about their belonging to Europe and commitment to democratic values.

The main and least visible problem I'd like to draw your attention to is the problem of economic vulnerability of Ukrainian mass-media and, therefore, their heavy dependence on subsidies. Nowhere in the world, actually, can media survive without external subsidies or significant revenue from advertising; the newsstand price of any Western newspaper is lower than the cost of the paper the newspaper is printed on. In post-Soviet Ukraine, however, with its very peculiar, underdeveloped "market" and impoverished middle class, revenues from advertising make up a relatively small part of the media's budgets. As a matter of fact, all Ukrainian mass media exist rather for political influence (as quite an expensive tool of public relations) than for profit per se. Again, as in other post-Soviet economies, political weight and connections are much more important and profitable than mundane media, agricultural, or other business.

Of course, mass media should be efficient, if not quite profitable, in order to effectively complete their political/propagandistic/public relations function. In this view, oligarchs who own the media cannot afford to produce bad products. They should compete with each other if not for profit, then at least for readers' and therefore rulers' attention. This means also that they should hire competent staff, which may agree to omit some names and problems (for a good salary) but would hardly agree to lie openly and deliberately for any royalty, because that would compromise their professional names, which are major assets to be sold. Moreover, there is a significant number of not-for-profit media in Ukraine, subsidized from various funds and other, mostly international, sources (Radio Liberty, Den' daily, Dzerkalo tyzhnya). They provide not only alternative information for readers and listeners but also job opportunities for honest and courageous professionals fired elsewhere.

Moreover, they establish some quality standards, which can not be ignored.

Thus, there is a significant space in Ukraine for media pluralism, which is not, however, protected by law and results rather from the weakness of Ukrainian authoritarianism than from the strength of Ukrainian democracy.

I'm rather optimistic about Ukraine's future in the long run, even though I don't expect any significant changes for the better in the nearest years — at least not until the new generation comes to power (the government of the current prime minister, Viktor Yuschenko, seems to be the first step in that direction). There is a number of reasons why Ukrainian authoritarianism can not be as strong and rough as in neighbouring Belarus or Russia. First, civil society in Ukraine, besides in the capital city of Kyiv and some other urban centres, has a very important stronghold in the western part of the country, which had not been exposed to Russification/Sovietization until 1945 and still has a different political culture, similar rather to that of Poland and the Czech Republic than to Russia, Belarus, or eastern Ukraine. And second, Ukrainian leaders, as long as they want to be independent from Moscow (and they do want that), have no choice but to emphasize their commitment to Europe and accept, volens nolens, European rules. It doesn't mean we should take their words at face value and neglect their tricks under the table. It means only that the European Community has a powerful lever to influence Ukrainian politics — a lever that, so far, is largely underestimated or even misused since Ukraine still is treated as a Russian appanage.
    Meanwhile, a double-track policy towards Ukraine, if properly applied by the West, could be even more efficient than in the case of Yugoslavia. On the one hand, it would be desirable to get tougher with Ukrainian authorities and force them to strictly follow the rule of law, to fully protect human rights and democratic procedures and institutions, and to effectively fight corruption. On the other hand, Western representatives should clearly state that a democratic and economically reformed Ukraine can become a full member of the European Community, including NATO and EU membership. So far Europeans have been rather reluctant to state this unequivocally, even though they have welcomed countries with worse economic or human-rights records (Turkey, Albania, Romania, Macedonia).

There are actually only eight post-Communist countries that have performed better than Ukraine. The rest — and there are, as you know, 20 countries more —have performed alike or much worse. Again, we can refer to the old parable about a glass of water. Optimists may say that the glass is half-full, pessimists that the glass is half-empty. I would say only that the glass is there, on the table, and it is rather a large glass — of the size of France or Italy or England — and needs to be tackled carefully.

Mykola Ryabchuk is the deputy editor-in-chief of the monthly litrerary review Krytyka (Kyiv). His two recently published books (Vid Malorosiji do Ukrajiny: paradoksy zapizniloho nacijetvorennia and Dylemy ukrajins'koho Fausta: hromadians'ke suspil'stvo i rozbudova derzhavy) have been heading the list of Ukrainian "intellectual bestsellers" in the three last months. Currently Mr. Ryabchuk is at Oxford University as a Reuters Foundation Fellow.

The article is based on his lecture delivered at Green College on November 2
Copyrighted by the author