U.S. historian Timothy Snyder writes a lot about this in his books, especially in Black Earth: Nazi Germany’s key objective on the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and Poland was to destroy the state. The absence of a state made the people who lived on these lands defenseless: there was no one not only to protect, but generally to act in their interests. The processes looked quite different when the Third Reich occupied a country with an intact state. For example, the Jewish population was largely preserved in Sweden and Denmark through the Holocaust, and this concerned both local Jews and migrants from more threatened European areas.
The opposite happened in Ukraine: the state was completely destroyed, having been previously eroded by the Bolsheviks. And so, the Holocaust from bullets, mass murders of Roma, mass deportations of Ukrainians as slave labor, plans to destroy the “excess” Ukrainian population by starvation and rampant—but vital—corruption. Why vital? Because during the terror, it was corruption that became a means of saving people from certain death: prisoners of Soviet camps, German prisons, victims of the local police, etc. In her book The Choice, U.S. psychotherapist Edith Eger describes how she and her husband escaped from prison in post-war Soviet-controlled Slovakia by bribing prison officials.
Let’s go back to the state: the existence of a state is necessary to protect people from deadly threats. Ukrainians understood this very clearly in February 2022: if there’s a state, there’s an army, diplomats, social infrastructure, and even utility services. But a state with a balanced distribution of power—between the state itself, other actors such as businesses or the media, and the citizens themselves—is much more effective in this regard. An authoritarian, and even more so, a totalitarian state, where power is monopolized by a small circle of people, is itself a threat to people on its territory. Both factors—the existence of a state and its quality—have a profound effect on daily life and people’s behavior, and therefore, ultimately, on the level of corruption in a given society.
From this perspective, what are the root causes of corruption in Ukraine? The already mentioned factors—the existence and quality of the state – are, so to speak, historical causes of corruption in Ukraine, and therefore I’ll name them among the first.
To a large extent, corruption stems from the memory shared by millions of people of being stateless during WWII. This is the situation described by Snyder, when the lack of formal political institutions led to a lack of protection. There was no one to speak out on behalf of the people in Ukraine in the face of the aggressor, and even more so there was no one to systematically protect these people. The main strategy to protect civilians was individual rescue through bribery like Edith Eger described, systematic bribery, or friendly favors to those in power. This was a search for protection by individuals, bypassing the aggressor’s institutions.
Secondly, corruption was fueled for a long time by the uneven distribution of power in the Soviet Union. At the time, people lived under an all-powerful state indifferent to human life. The disenfranchised didn’t have any institutional power: elections, trade unions, even rallies—that was all pure fiction. All the power available in that world was concentrated in the state. Here, there was also an uneven distribution with the concentration of power at the very top, which functioned as a closely guarded fortress.
Under these conditions, as well as in the absence of a state, the individual survival strategy remained effective. Metaphorically speaking, citizens looked for cracks in the monolithic state and widened them with their individual influence. An individual official was an opportunity, a loophole, while the means of influence included gifts, money, personal services, and so on. It’s a bit like how water gets into the cracks in the pavement, eventually creating potholes.
But later an even more interesting process took place, which paradoxically continued to stimulate corruption. The process of power transfer from the Ukrainian state itself to other actors began after the collapse of the all-powerful Bolshevik state in 1991. Citizens gained real political influence through elections and the right to protest, which Ukrainians use willingly and with determination. One of the first attempts to limit the excessive concentration of power on the side of the state is a constitutional formula promoted by former Soviet dissidents, which requires a civil servant to act exclusively “on the basis, within the limits of authority and in the manner provided by the Constitution and laws of Ukraine.”
Such strict frameworks, which constrain state officials and civil servants in making arbitrary decisions, in practice lead to a paralysis of governance. However, while it limits bureaucratic power, it flows not only to citizens, but also to other actors: the media, non-governmental organizations, and, especially, to a certain type of economic agents. Namely, to that segment of business founded by former Soviet functionaries or civil servants of the early period of independence, as well as organized crime. It’s this segment that begins to actively influence the state fabric as described above: like water corroding metal. And the state turns from a monolith into a network of gaps and cracks, through which power flows to these new centers of influence. The so-called oligarchic media is the most obvious example from that time. As a result, not only the unequal distribution of power has very bad consequences, but the very process of redistribution, which should lead to a better balance of power in society, encourages corruption.
The next source of corruption in Ukraine is what I would call the criminalization of governance. An early manifestation is actually the already mentioned constitutional formula “on the basis, within the limits and in the manner...” Closer and better known to the current reader is the anti-corruption fight after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, when electronic declaration of assets for government officials and other anti-corruption measures were introduced. But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to constraints under which public officials operate. The problem, however, is that these restrictions lead to a situation where an honest official doesn’t act at all, while a dishonest one uses a specially designed protection system, also known as mutual complicity.
Added to this is the willingness of law enforcement to exploit the criminalization of governance. The honest among them fulfill the efficiency requirements set for them, while the dishonest try to start exerting their own power, given that they can decide whom to prosecute.
We can reach the following conclusion: corruption is a side effect of the social situation and objective processes, and not related to the moral character of the population. We can get rid of it by fighting the causes of corruption, instead of further criminalizing the symptoms on behalf of the state. Such work should be aimed at a fairer distribution of power between the state and its citizens. At the same time, the state shouldn’t remain powerless, because a powerless or absent state is in itself a danger for those living under it. We need a strong military, an active parliament, and efficient municipal services to survive. And all this must be human-centered, i.e. a conscious desire to protect and improve people’s lives should be at the center of their efforts, as opposed to merely chasing a set of quantitative criteria. What we definitely don’t need is a superficial, vulgar understanding of the causes of our troubles related to corruption, because policies based on that tend to backfire.