Parliament Shapes Up

“America doesn’t have any native criminal class,” said American humorist Will Rogers in the early twentieth century, “except Congress, of course.” I cannot but recall this in connection with the latest shenanigans in Verkhovna Rada, where, despite confronting a hostile majority, Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko seems determined to barricade himself in his office like US Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in 1868 (or, more recently, Crimean President Yuri Meshkov).

The immanent departure of Speaker Tkachenko, as former head of the Land and People Agricultural Association (which seemed to specialize in squandering tens of millions of dollars in government guaranteed loans), can only be welcomed. For one thing, nobody believes agricultural reform would have much of a chance with this representative of the collective farm kleptocracy running the legislative branch. Of course, I cannot really believe that the anti-Tkachenko majority was not formed without vote-buying and the other not-so-democratic but all too familiar hallmarks of post-Soviet politics. But if those are the rules of the game, in this case so be it. The point is that this is an extremely odious figure, who (according to my information, and my info is, as a rule, pretty good) has been hushing up scandals since he was running a district (rayon, basically the equivalent of an American county) Party committee when I was but a gleam in my daddy’s eye. Goodbye and good riddance.

The issue now becomes who will be the next Speaker. If, as a foreign citizen, I may make a modest proposal, the best choice would seem to me not to be Deputy Speaker Viktor Medvedchuk. One need only glance at his article in the latest Political Thought where this promise-them-anything Social Democrat calls for all the goodies of European Social Democracy through progressive taxation of big capital but without taxing any profits from private property. Well then, how are you going to pay for it? If Ukraine wants real reform, it can do no better than to compliment Viktor Yushchenko’s government by Speaker Leonid Kravchuk. I might criticize the former President for a number of things he did then (there were many things we simply could not understand yet), but nobody doubts that this master of consensus can find a solution, if not always the best possible, to virtually any political problem, that he has shown himself to be an excellent senior statesman, and that he as no one else has such respect and prestige to help the Prime Minister do what simply has to be done.