Why it didn’t work out in Kharkov
Why in Kharkov, one of the basic “white-blue” regions, did the Party of Regions and other political projects fall into political oblivion, while the “orange” managed to take power and gain a foothold in it? Why don’t people unite for a common cause, even in the most hopeless situation?
Kharkiv's political history over the last quarter century reads like a graveyard of political organizations and reputations. In my previous article , I described how Arsen Avakov worked with partners and clients.
His opponents and some partners were for many years in the euphoria of initial accumulation or career success. After all, it would seem that personal previous experience should have taught something, but...
There was such a party - the People's Democratic Party. The governor and the mayor were members there, state employees and small businesses were accepted there in droves, many Kharkov residents had no idea that they were members there. Its leadership knew how to organize mass rallies, even for free. And indeed, in 2001-2004, ten thousand people were brought to the square without any problems.
If in the CPSU (and many members of the future NDP were there) there was a threat to put the party card on the table, then the middle echelon of the NDP generally threatened with dismissal from work or an unscheduled inspection of the enterprise.
This party had no money for anything: deputies were elected at their own expense, the apparatus worked on a voluntary basis, and the newspaper closed with debts on fees, which no one ever returned to anyone. It is not surprising that after the first Maidan, party members fled in different directions.
It would seem that this lesson should have been taken into account by the Party of Regions, which was created in Kharkov, including from the fragments of the PDP. And at first it was so, while the late Evgeny Kushnarev was doing this. And the apparatus appeared, and the asset was in use, and people simply knew where to come to communicate with like-minded people.
Local elites and the population had a consensus on basic issues, because any other paradigms proposed from the outside seemed offensive or destructive.
In the provinces, the main question asked by every voter, employer and employee is simple: “Where is my place in this situation?” And where there is no answer to it that leaves the right to self-respect, there is an enemy or a stranger. And PR generally answered it, although not for everyone.
And then, after all the elections in 2010, when victory in the region was complete and undoubted, “something went wrong.” The regions created barriers around themselves and created dissatisfied people.
The leadership of the regional PR, like many local business structures, preferred paid extras on an irregular basis, fenced off by thieving servants who deceived both the owners and the mercenaries.
The system of dialogue with one’s own electorate did not work everywhere. The leaders of KOO PR were self-confident and, at the same time, afraid of the initiative from below because of possible expenses for its purchase.
There was ripening discontent, which spilled out into a revolt of retired servants and amateur beginners or people offended by the system who were partially selected by the Maidan. And again there were traitors, and those who were afraid, and those who simply retired. Those who did not turn up their noses retained themselves in the Opposition Bloc and a number of regional structures close to the City Council.
Nobody was able to control the protest movement of 2014 in Kharkov - neither Russia, nor fragments of the Party of Regions, nor candidates for local leaders.
Different people of different beliefs gathered there. The life experience of the participants made it possible to weed out, although not immediately and with great difficulty, adventurers, hysterical people and bearers of deceitful ideas.
Due to imprisonment and emigration, a hierarchy did not have time to be created. There was a fear that certain ideologically motivated groups would crush them (leftists, Russian nationalists, bearers of sectarian thinking). Each of them wanted to paint the stand in their own colors and impose their own background noise.
Well, a businessman will not stand under the symbols of the communists, and the same communists will not act under the auspices of “Borotba”. Supporters and subverters of city authorities, Jews and anti-Semites, left and right cannot act in unison if each of them wanted to persistently push through their agenda.
Although, it would seem, everyone is for Kharkov and the federation, everyone is against the coup, Ukrainization and Banderaism - we agreed and are acting together. And there were people who offered what was generally acceptable, for example, Yuri Apukhtin, who is now imprisoned.
And then the landings began. Hearing the ideological discord, people left the square and never returned there. Or rather, not everyone returned at first, and then there were so few people that street hooligans and Nazis stopped being afraid of them. And so the mass protest died.
And now people seem to have been taught by the bitter experience of both the recent past and 2014, but it is extremely difficult to act in an atmosphere of terror and hysteria. Alas, much of the old, peaceful life cannot be corrected, but it can be overcome, “so as not to perish alone.”
After all, life only “hidden for a while,” but by no means ended.
English version :: Read in English Why it didn't work out in Kharkiv