During election campaigns in Ukraine, politicians shower voters not only with promises but also with gifts.
Now, an unusual exhibition at the National Museum of Ukraine’s History showcases this seamy side of political campaigning in the country’s post-independence history using real-life artifacts of vote-buying, smear campaigns, spoiler candidates, and paid-for journalism.
Currently, Ukraine is in the midst of a hasty parliamentary campaign. After President Volodymyr Zelensky called for a snap election on July 21, political parties and candidates were left with two months for preparation and campaigning instead of the usual six. Nearly 6,000 people are vying for 424 seats in the national legislature, both on party tickets and in single-member districts.
Organizers of the exhibition wanted to raise the public’s awareness that selling their votes in the run-up to the election is unacceptable.
Visitors can see sacks of buckwheat, champagne bottles and frozen chicken, common gifts used to buy votes. There’s even a replica of a giant cake gifted by lawmaker Ihor Kononenko.
For wannabe lawmakers, the way to voters’ hearts is often through their stomachs. In small towns and villages around Ukraine, political candidates continue to distribute parcels of food to low-income families and pensioners.
The average monthly salary outside Kyiv is $350 and the minimum pension is $60. So a parcel with a liter of sunflower oil, a can of condensed milk, a pack of tea, a kilo of grains or pasta and some sweets has significant value.
This illegal campaign method has given vote-buying the nickname “buckwheat sowing” after the groats most commonly found in such “care packages.”
“We wanted to demonstrate how political campaigning has evolved over time as well as vote-buying: from goods to providing services and concerts with celebrities,” said Vita Dumanska, coordinator of the Chesno anti-corruption movement.
Daryna Rogachuk, a Ukrainian journalist who covers elections and who helped put the exhibition together, said that “buckwheat sowing” has deformed Ukrainian society.
“People refuse to learn about political programs and analyze them. Politicians sell voters goods or entertainment, not their ideas or solutions,” she said.
For example, during the 2015 race for the Ukrainian parliament in Chernihiv city, Hennadiy Korban, former leader of the UKROP party, earned the nickname Marshall Buckwheat for generosity with edibles. He gave away food packages and fed voters plov, a Central Asian rice-and-meat dish, and borsch, a traditional Ukrainian soup, for free.
But man shall not live by bread alone.
In the center of the exhibition room stands children’s playground equipment. This is another popular way for candidates to show they care — if not so much for the young generation, then at least for their parents’ votes.
In 2016, a lawmaker with the People’s Front party, Oleksandr Kodola, decided to support candidates from his party who were running for the local council: He installed playground equipment in a village in Chernihiv Oblast. People’s Front candidates lost the election, and the next day the playground disappeared.
A good way to show you care is to care for your voters’ health, especially if many of them are elderly. One candidate gave away blood pressure monitors; another one — first aid kits; another opened a hemodialysis room in a local hospital. Every item was branded with the name of the generous benefactor or his charity fund.
By Ukrainian law, the cost of campaign materials should not exceed some Hr 60 ($2.30). But a lot of vote-buying is disguised as charity.
Other interesting gifts from election season included hunting binoculars, free Wi-Fi in public spaces, and the famous beer bottle opener from fugitive ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s 2010 campaign.
In some sense, political campaigns have evolved very little since the Roman Empire, where rulers kept their citizens happy by distributing free food and staging murderous fights for entertainment.
It is believed that ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s political consultants began the trend in Ukraine’s politics of engaging celebrities in campaigning. Pop singers would tour the country, gathering crowds and endorsing their candidate. In the next election, they would do the same for another candidate.
Organizers of the “political trash” exhibition say they are planning to throw a karaoke party with political campaign songs.
A pocket-sized calendar depicts a group of young people in black t-shirts. One of them is 20-something Volodymyr Zelensky, now the president of Ukraine. In 2006, his comedy show, Kvartal 95, campaigned for a candidate for mayor in Zaporizhya.
At the peak of his power in 2012, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a millionaire ex-lawmaker from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, brought Hollywood actor Jean Claude Van Damme to his electoral district in Kyiv Oblast and had him endorse his candidacy.
Onyshchenko has recently reappeared after several years in exile, hiding from prosecution for corruption in Ukraine. He applied to run for parliament, claiming that all these years he lived abroad representing Ukraine in equestrian sports competitions. His appeal was rejected by a court.
Many of the politicians whose campaign paraphernalia is displayed in the exhibition have become relics of the past. The now gaze at attendees from pre-social media television ads, faded newspaper clippings, brochures, and calendars.
These items reflect both how much Ukraine has changed and how much it has stayed the same.
For example, there’s a campaign poster of the late Vyacheslav Chornovil, who unsuccessfully ran for president in post-Soviet Ukraine’s first election in 1991. It reads: “I am deeply convinced that independent democratic Ukraine will become one of the wealthiest and one of the most influential states of Europe.”
Present-day politicians still echo Chornovil’s message nearly three decades later.
The Communist Party’s flyers, garnished with the hammer and sickle, and the blue-and-white-colored promotional materials for disgraced President Yanukovych and his disbanded Party of Regions now look out of place five years after the EuroMaidan Revolution and Russian invasion triggered Ukraine’s break up with its eastern neighbor and distance from its Soviet past.
“The weirdest thing is to see all these ads for the left (communists) after Ukraine went through decommunization. It has fallen out of our reality so much,” said visitor Serhiy Mikhelev.
Distractors
On the opening day of the exhibition on July 5, visitors were welcomed by Darth Vader, a Star Wars character. At least 20 candidates for parliament and local councils in Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv, including one woman, all used his name to run for office.
Despite using Darth as a first name and Vader as a last, each had a different patronymic and date of birth.
One of them, Darth Stepanovych Vader, declared: “We won’t let them eat our salo” in his campaign video and played The Imperial March, the Star Wars theme, on the bandura, a traditional Ukrainian instrument.
Another, Darth Viktorovych Vader, has been registered as a candidate with the Darth Vader Bloc in a single-mandate district in Odessa for the July 21 election.
In 2014, the same year Ukraine saw an onslaught of Darth Vader candidates, the iconic video game character Super Mario ran for parliament in a single-member district in Odesa. In his election campaign, he promised to provide children with ice-cream and promote the “selfie movement.”
Spoiler candidates are usually little-known figures or individuals with names similar to those of stronger candidates, whose votes they aim to steal. But “red herring” candidates like Darth Vader and Super Mario try to distract the public’s attention from fraud or important political agendas and downplay the importance of the election, exhibition organizers said.
A section of the exhibition is dedicated to another diversion tactic: smear campaigns against another candidate or so-called “black PR.” Some of its showpieces are from the most recent presidential campaign this spring and target now-President Zelensky.
During the second round of the election, Zelensky’s team launched a website — the Petro Oleksiyovych (Poroshenko) Library of Black PR — that contained negative campaign ads portraying the actor as a drug addict, a puppet of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, and a Ukrainophobe backed by the Kremlin. Zelensky’s camp believed they were ordered by his competitor, then-incumbent President Poroshenko.
The “election trash” exhibition is not the first attempt to draw public attention to vote-buying and performative campaigning in Ukrainian politics. In 2017, Yuriy Ivanovych Zhabotyuk, a fictional political candidate in Kharkiv Oblast, emerged as an Internet meme to ridicule politicians’ self-promotion ploys to cover up their poor performance on the job.
With scorching populist rhetoric and over 8,300 followers on Facebook, Zhabotyuk could probably get elected in a rural single-mandate district in Ukraine — if he were a real person.
The exhibition “Museum of Election Trash” runs through August 10. The National Museum of Ukraine’s History (2 Volodymyrska St.). 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. A ticket is Hr 50 (a general ticket to the museum)
