Much is riding on what is known as the lustration effort. This is the firing of public officials who fattened themselves at the public trough under ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, the most corrupt leader that independent Ukraine has seen. Lustration was in a package of anti-graft laws that Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada passed in October 2014.
The package includes a provision requiring high-ranking officials in government, the courts and law enforcement to declare their own and their families’ assets. That wealth will be measured against the officials’ public salaries. If their assets far outstrip their public incomes, they will be subject to firing and punishment.
The major short-term stake in Ukraine’s anti-corruption effort is the government’s ability to continue operating. The International Monetary Fund has made cleaning up graft a condition for the nearly bankrupt country to obtain more bailout money.
The major long-term stake is that an end to corruption would help create the kind of equitable society that Ukraine’s new leaders have asserted that they want.
The rest of the former Soviet Union — a group of countries that is collectively among the most corrupt in the world, according to Transparency International — will be watching to see if lustration and other Ukrainian anti-corruption efforts work.
Most of the rank-and-file in these countries have said in opinion polls that they want an end to the graft. Sadly, most have also said that they doubt it will happen.
Politicians in a number of former Soviet countries have announced high-profile anti-corruption initiatives from time to time. They’ve included anti-graft legislation plus commissions tasked with catching those with their snouts buried too deep in the public turnip patch.
So far, all of these efforts have failed.
Then-President Dmitry Medvedev raised hopes that he could make a dent in Russian corruption by having the Duma pass legislation in 2008 that spelled out specific acts of graft that officials could be prosecuted for.
But the law’s punishment provisions were so light — mostly small fines — that corrupt officials continued stealing public funds or taking bribes.
Three years after the anti-graft legislation was passed, in January of 2011, Medvedev admitted that his initiative hadn’t worked. “We created anti-corruption laws but they failed to reach their objectives,” he said.
Four months later, in May of 2011, he directed the Duma to pass legislation that ratcheted up the level of fines for corruption. Some of the fines were so stiff that in certain cases they could reach into the millions of dollars.
That legislation also failed to curb corruption. In fact, those who keep a close eye on the world’s billionaires maintain that Vladimir Putin, who makes a modest $187,000 salary as Russia’s president, is the world’s richest man, outstripping Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mexico’s Carlos Slim.
Other ex-Soviet countries besides Russia have announced anti-graft efforts, largely to curry favor with a fed-up public. All have failed.
Ironically, Yanukovych campaigned for president partly on a platform of eliminating corruption. After taking office, he amassed a larger fortune than Ukraine’s second president, Leonid Kuchma, whom observers thought was in a class by himself when it came to graft.
Armenia is another former Soviet country that has launched an anti-corruption campaign. Transparency International praised the anti-graft legislation it passed as specific and comprehensive.
But the legislation hasn’t been enforced. Our government created an Anti-Corruption Council to oversee a clean-up. But President Serzh Sargsyan appointed to the council the kinds of wealthy government and business leaders whom the law was supposed to catch. It’s a classic case of the fox watching the henhouse.
Ukraine’s new anti-graft legislation goes further than any other ex-Soviet state’s with its provisions for checking officials’ assets against their public incomes and firing those who became rich through corruption under Yanukovych.
The lustration effort is well under way. It led to the firing of 2,000 former officials between October 2014 and April. In addition, 15,000 officials have resigned rather than let the government match their public incomes with their assets.Both proponents and opponents of the lustration law say it is helping root out corruption.
But the detractors say that it may do more harm than good over the long run by establishing a precedent of a party in power being able to fire thousands of officials who worked for the previous regime.
That could lead to non-corrupt officials as well as corrupt ones being fired, the detractors say. In addition, the critics contend, mass firings of civil servants will make government less responsive by replacing experienced people with the uninitiated.
Ukraine’s leadership is aware of those arguments, but determined to press forward.
If it can rein in corruption with such tactics as checking officials’ assets against their public salaries, and by lustration, the country may finally begin catching up to the prosperity levels seen in Poland and the Baltics, former Soviet states that are now part of the European Union.
You can bet that other ex-Soviet countries will be Ukraine’s new anti-graft experiment closely. If it works, they may have to rethink the lip service they’re giving to their own anti-corruption efforts.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.
