Depressed Donetsk ignores election hype
Khartzysk , Ukraine – ‘I, Sergei Azyukovsky, turn to you in the hope that I will be heard and understood.’ On this particular Friday afternoon, the man using that flier headline in his bid for the 60th election district’s seat in Parliament is neither.
One planned meeting with the voters falls through when the town’s retirees, having apparently heard enough, fail to show.
Azyukovsky regroups, then crashes a gathering of workers of a heating plant. Here, his pitch about making a difference falls flat. ‘Why should we believe you,’ shouts one man. ‘Kuchma talked a good game too, and look what happened,’ says another.
Azyukovsky reassures the crowd that he cares. It is only later, in his office at the campaign’s headquarters, that he can return the voters’ contempt measure for measure. ‘Screw them all,’ hisses the candidate.
That just about sums up the surly campaign in the depressed Donetsk Region, where interest in politics is as tepid as a coke oven running short of coal. Neither the candidates going through the motions nor voters inured to tired come-ons expect change to follow the balloting. Had seats in Parliament not come with some perks and had the fight for them not entailed expenditures of cash and patronage, it is unlikely anyone would bother.
But since the election is inevitable, Greater Donetsk is enacting one of the final skirmishes of an old class struggle.
On one side of the barricades are the Communists, whose nationwide lead is built on the loyalty of the area’s destitute miners and struggling metal-bashers. A Democratic Initiatives Foundation/Socis Gallup poll released on Feb. 16 placed the Communists’ support in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions at 37 percent, double the party’s share in Ukraine as a whole. The Communists’ leader, Petro Symonenko, and the token coal miner who occupies the third spot on the party’s slate both hail from the region. Challenging them for the proletariat’s affections are their ancient foes, the capitalists. Here, that means the directors and friends-of-directors of Donetsk’s nearly bankrupt industrial giants. Their private commercial concerns have grown fat on proceeds siphoned off from the dying state-owned plants they have mismanaged. Once the cash has been laundered, the parasitic firms have often poured it back into industry as private investment, giving their owners a second, legitimate claim on the plants’ revenues.
These New Ukrainians hardly present a united front – they finance a half-dozen lookalike parties. But their programs are broadly similar: an amnesty for (their own) hot money circulating in the shadow economy, tax breaks and the sort of bastardized capitalism that will preserve their ownership of industry without jeopardizing its access to the public subsidies that have emptied Ukraine’s treasury. Donetsk’s most powerful capitalist is Yefim Zvyagilsky, a former acting prime minister who returned last year from exile in Israel when a probe into the alleged misuse of public funds during his tenure came up empty. Zvyagilsky controls the region’s largest and most profitable coal mine, the flagship of a business empire with interests in everything from banking to hotels to farming. Other sharks prowl Donetsk’s industrial wasteland: there is the former regional governor Vladimir Scherban, who chairs the Liberal Party, Igor Yushko, the First Ukrainian International Bank chairman running as an independent in a Donetsk constituency, and Rashid Bragin, relative of the slain reputed mob boss Aleksandr Bragin and chairman of the Party of Moslems in Ukraine.
But it is Zvyagilsky who sits atop the region’s tangled web of commerce and politics. In Italy, he would be addressed as don. Here, he is known simply as Papa. ‘Whatever Papa says goes,’ says a local journalist.
Zvyagilsky’s business acumen (his thriving concerns pay their miners’ and farmers’ wages far higher than industry averages) make him the region’s most popular figure. Trade union leaders say miners living in Zvyagilsky’s district will overwhelmingly vote for him in the local race, while also backing the Communist national ticket. Other barons of industry are less loved. But while the Communists have the sympathies of the poor, the plant directors have another vote magnet – cash. ‘A hungry man is easily bought,’ says Vladimir Martynov, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Coal Industry Workers Union.
But not everyone has the sort of cash that Zvyagilsky can lavish on his constituents.
In Khartzysk, the machine-building plant managed by candidate Azyukovsky has not paid workers’ wages in months. Even the Khartzysk Pipe Plant – the town’s largest employer, a big supplier to Russia’s Gazprom and the darling of Ukraine’s undemanding stock market – has wage arrears.
When Azyukovsky stands before the voters, they ask about the overdue wages. Instead he offers them barter goods accumulated by his enterprise.
‘The only thing I don’t have at the plant today is money everything else, from flour to valenky, I can give you.’ Valenky, the traditional Slavic snow boots, is what one needs to navigate the sea of mud eating away at Khartzysk and neighboring towns. The voters, however, ask knowingly about other, unavailable barter commodities. ‘Got any sugar?’
‘Moonshine?’
The accompanying snickers are of a bitter, sugarless variety.
As Azyukovsky talks inside the hall, Yevgeny Zotkin stands outside puffing on a cigarette.
Zotkin, a retired machine-building plant employee who now works at the heating plant, has no time for his former boss.
‘A thief, a jackal,’ he says, recalling how he never got paid for the work he did on Azyukovsky’s mansion while he was on the machine-building plant’s payroll. Zotkin’s brother is a Communist, but he himself won’t go to the polls, even to vote for one of Azyukovsky’s 18 opponents.
‘I wish they’d just install whomever they want and stop calling meetings,’ he says.
‘I’m so angry I wish I could execute all the [expletives].’ He is particularly steamed today because earlier in the day some muscle boys came and, with official approval, removed fencing from the heating plant’s premises for use at a private filling station. It is another victory for private enterprise, albeit one that will not pad privatization statistics.
Azyukovsky knows he faces an uphill battle. He is one of the district’s four leading candidates, but must still defeat the deputy head of the Donetsk Regional Administration, a representative of gas trading interests and the Communist incumbent who is the acknowledged frontrunner.
He is not ashamed of his private fortune, the nice house and the fancy car. They are in fact a selling point, he hopes, marking him as an enterprising man of action. ‘Fairness means that whoever works harder lives better,’ instruct his fliers.
On the campaign trail, he promises to produce results in Parliament within a 100 days or resign (in a subsequent interview, he extends his own deadline to a year.) He knows voters are deeply skeptical, but then again so is he. ‘If I trusted anyone else, I wouldn’t be running myself,’ says the plant director.
In truth, Azyukovsky’s time frame is a lot shorter than the next Parliament’s first 100 days. He has noticed the hryvna’s steady fall, and heard his friends in banking talk about the huge sums of money they are being asked to channel to well-connected candidates. He sees this campaign as the straw that will break the hump of Ukraine’s economy. ‘Don’t expect miracles,’ counsel Azyukovsky’s TV commercials. He has taken his own advice.
‘After the elections, everything is going to hell,’ says the candidate.
