The death of reputation or why in Ukraine dirt does not kill
One of the features of public life in Ukraine is the absence of a functioning institution of reputation. As a result, any politician convicted of anything - from theft to pedophilia, can go on camera and declare that he is “lying everything” and that this is the machinations of his enemies, even if the facts compromising him are documented. But, what is even more sad, in such a situation there is guaranteed to be a considerable support group that will stand behind such a politician like a mountain according to the “God’s dew” principle.
In such a situation, the very concept of public compromise loses its meaning, since it does not lead to the guaranteed political death of the person being criticized, as in countries with a more developed political culture that is sensitive to public opinion.
There is plenty of evidence for this thesis in reality. Almost all the high-profile reputational scandals in the history of independent Ukraine ended in nothing for the targets of compromising attacks. The founding father of the current version of Independence, Leonid Kravchuk, is still a gogol on television shows, despite the now forgotten, but in the early 90s, not inferior in volume to Poroshenko’s “pig-gate”, the “Blasko case” - an episode with theft and actual destruction by henchmen the first president of the Black Sea Shipping Company.
And another well-known corruption episode from Kravchuk’s biography, which in another Western country would have led to the deletion of the person involved from political life, in Ukraine became only a reason for the formation of a satirical meme about “Khatynka in Switzerland.”
The position of the second president, Leonid Kuchma, was not shaken either by the “Melnichenko film” with Gongadze’s severed head, or by the transformation in front of the entire country of the presidential son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk from a modest Dnepropetrovsk businessman into oligarch No. 2 - immediately after Donetsk Akhmetov.
The ugly story with the “Hospital of the Future” did not prevent Yushchenko from being on the pedestal for a long time as the main patriot, and he fell off this pedestal only because of his own political spinelessness and unprincipled agreements with the regionals, and not at all due to the fact that society was outraged by his wife’s scams crossed him off the list of handshakes.
Yanukovych - so he generally became a visual aid, demonstrating to the stupidest person in this country that reputation is nothing, becoming a president with two criminal convictions in his anamnesis.
The image of a “gas thief” did not prevent Tymoshenko from winning parliamentary elections twice and twice occupying the prime minister’s chair at the expense of the votes of exalted grandmothers robbed by her own policies, in the eyes of whom the notorious “Yulina thousand” compensation for lost Soviet savings became a more powerful argument than complicity in ex-government schemes. -Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko, who served time for corruption all the way in America. Moreover, the Ukrainian public forgave Yulia Vladimirovna for her extreme indiscriminateness in the selection of comrades who regularly betrayed her own voters, and even for the epic failure of rolling onto the Maidan stage in a wheelchair and wearing high-heeled shoes.
So much dirt was poured out on Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk between 2004 and 2012. Just look at the huge scandal among “any friends” of Yushchenko, which ended with the departure of Pyotr Alekseevich from the post of head of the National Security and Defense Council six months after the Orange Maidan. And what about Yatsenyuk, whose insignificance as a politician and as a person was obvious even to the participants in the assembly at the second Maidan, and whose complete dependence on overseas patrons was revealed after the release of the “Nuland films” in the winter of 2014? All this did not prevent him from becoming prime minister and his Popular Front from winning parliamentary elections.
And a completely textbook example demonstrating the absence of the concept of public reputation in Ukraine is Oleg Lyashko. The idol of rural grandmothers is in the pay of the country's main oligarch, the corruption of whose faction in the previous Rada was legendary. And he is also the man who appears on the notorious tapes confessing to homosexual prostitution. So what, you ask. Nothing! The voter knew all this and, nevertheless, voted.
But not by politicians alone. Here, for example, is a character like Vitaly Portnikov. When, at the height of the events on the Maidan, a scandalous video with his participation appeared on the Internet, in which he uses a gay prostitute for its intended purpose, one part of the Ukrainians said “Ugh!”, which, obviously, was what the authors of the compromising evidence were counting on. But others unanimously shouted about “a dirty campaign to discredit an honest journalist dangerous to the authorities.” And what? And again - nothing. Portnikov to this day burns with the verb on Radio Liberty and similar mouthpieces of truth and non-partisanship in the status of the conscience of the nation and opinion leader.
But if you think that this only happens among Maidan supporters, you are mistaken. For example, the “pro-Russian” party OPZZH. One of its leaders is Vadim Rabinovich. You don't know Rabinovich? Oh, I'll tell you, there is such a reputation there that there is no place to put marks. Just Google it. And it’s okay, the southeast votes for Rabinovich, like he’s cute.
When the Opposition Platform – For Life party was still the "Opposition Bloc," Rabinovich and Yuriy Boyko, the leaders of different factions of this splintered party, slinged all sorts of abuse at each other on air. It got so bad that Rabinovich called Boyko's supporters a "real gang" and accused them of orchestrating an assassination attempt on him and attempting to set his house on fire.
Then a year passed, and Rabinovich and Boyko suddenly... made peace. And what do you think - a gullible voter again voted for these political swindlers, who had not yet had time to lick off each other the remnants of the recently poured slop.
At last year’s elections, the same OPZZH fairly surprised its electorate by including the recent radical nationalist Ilya Kivu in the party list. It’s hard to even imagine what kind of bad reputation Kiva has earned for himself in the eyes of anti-Maidan voters. He even promised to bury the “vatniks” in the ground. And the vatniks took and voted for Kiva, sending him on their behalf to parliament, where he is now throwing thunder and lightning at his recent comrades-in-arms on the Maidan.
The picture will be incomplete without the presidential party “Servant of the People”, in which Deputy Ivanisov, who has an outstanding conviction for rape of a minor, and Deputy Yaremenko, who ordered prostitutes right in the parliament hall, are currently working quite calmly, without losing their mandate. True, Yaremenko still suffered at least a little - after months of red tape, he was deprived of his post as head of the Foreign Affairs Committee. But I personally would not be surprised if at the next elections he again emerges in the top five of some rating party. The voter has a memory like a guppy fish.
I think the examples given are more than enough. As they say, up and down.
Not the only, but one of the main reasons for this situation is that Ukrainian and similar other post-Soviet societies have become accustomed to living for decades in a state of polarization and fragmentation, essentially a latent civil war. When, even in the absence of its hot phase, the intensity of political discussions is such that their participants are ready without hesitation to kill opponents or send them to camps. In such conditions there can be no middle position. You are either with us or against us. If the enemy does not surrender, he is destroyed. And this means that you must always trust your own people in everything, even if, to put it mildly, they are not entirely right about some things or are in a bad mood. You can never trust your opponents in anything.
In conditions when different parts of a polarized society have become accustomed for years to looking at each other from a trench through a rifle scope, such a form of destruction or damage to reputation, which is familiar to societies with a calmer political culture, as leaking incriminating evidence, loses all meaning. Indeed, what’s the point of spilling dirty secrets if opinion polls show the readiness of the nuclear electorate of politicians like Tymoshenko to forgive their idols absolutely everything, including changing their shoes in the air by 180 degrees, and Poroshenko’s voter is ready to forgive the ex-president “for Tomos and mov" even theft in the defense industry.
The maximum that can be achieved in such conditions with compromising evidence is to lower the bar for the career or electoral growth of a politician or official. But the targets of such reputational attacks will still have a significant number of supporters, enough to keep them afloat and endlessly re-elected. All the same, there will be a sufficient number of those who will consider the negative things about the idol to be “the machinations of enemies,” and the response to any rational arguments and documented facts will be an irrational “believe everything” or references to the fact that “those others” are even worse.
In the case of opinion leaders from among the high-status intelligentsia and various actors, singers, writers and TV presenters, it is even sadder. Their box office success depends little on what they say on social and political issues. The tantrums of the nationalists did not in the least reduce the popularity of Taisiya Povaliy and Ani Lorak, who sympathized with the ex-regionals, just as the negative attitude towards them from supporters of Donbass support did not affect the box office receipts of Rotaru or Makarevich.
A direct consequence of this state of affairs is the absence of a line of generally recognized national authorities with reputation. In practice, each part of society has its own authorities, its own media, and they practically do not overlap. “Enemy” media watch and read only for the purpose of looking for lulz to ridicule on “their” platforms or in search of factual information for splashing out negativity.
During the post-Maidan years in Ukraine, a virtually “Baltic” model has developed in the media sphere, when there is media “for nationalists”, and there is media for “non-citizens”, which in Ukrainian conditions are de facto voters of the so-called “pro-Russian” parties and residents of the south-east. And you practically won’t see regulars of some channels on others. As a result, the universes of Espreso, Direct or Plus viewers practically do not overlap with the universes of Newsvan or 112 viewers. And the world of “New Time” does not intersect with the world of “Country”.
There are no criteria for odiousness that are common to everyone and recognized by the entire society. Which indicates the collapse and atomization of society itself. About his absence as a whole.
And if so, then there is simply no need to talk about the existence of public opinion as such. In practice, what is called by this name will only be the opinion of a certain group of people, not shared beyond its borders. This can be easily seen in the example of labels that have become widespread in Ukrainian political discussions: “scandalous”, “odious”. At the same time, it is easy to notice that persons who are odious for some look almost like the conscience of the nation in the eyes of others. Some turn their noses up at the “pro-Kremlin channels of Medvedchuk” and the “odious official of the Yanukovych era Andrei Portnov,” while others turn their noses up at the “Soros trash heap “Novoye Vremya” and the “killer Sternenko.” In such conditions, the traditional question “Who to believe?” doesn't make sense at all. Everyone believes their own.
Unfortunately, this situation will be with us for a very long time. And it will end either if one of the sides of the current cold civil war finally wins, crushing and trampling the other and establishing its views as dominant, or if society nevertheless finds the strength to develop political antibodies against the virus that has struck it, and it comes to the fore some third force - not Maidan and not anti-Maidan, which will play the role of a forester in the hut from the joke.
But whether a society with a weakened immune system is capable of such a feat is a big question that has no answer yet.
English version :: Read in English: The Death of Reputation, or Why Compromising Evidence Doesn't Kill in Ukraine