Olena Stiazhkina, philosopher and historian at the National Academy of Science of Ukraine

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In order to understand the historical roots of distrust in government, post-communism and post-colonialism are a good place to start. For Ukrainians, the experience of being part of the soviet empire, the successor to the Russian empire, was extremely dramatic, involving numerous social catastrophes such as the destruction of the intelligentsia, the Holodomor, mass deportations, and powerful social engineering aimed at creating the New Soviet Man, that is, a local proletariat with an international and class consciousness.

Both the catastrophes and the social engineering were generated in Moscow, although the system of government and intergovernmental relations was not a simple binary opposition between the centre and the periphery. The system of government relations penetrated the entire social sphere from top to bottom and was reproduced at every level: at the level of enterprise and the kolhosp, schools and hospitals, the family and the community, and so on. It involved or formed a multilayered hierarchy—what Caroline Humphrey*[1], calls a nesting hierarchy.

In reality, this meant that the instigator of any form of persecution, violence or force was the local powers-that-be. The visible persecutors were not in distant Moscow, but the person’s own local elected representative, government official, police officer, head of an enterprise, and so on. It was locally that all the lists of “enemies of the people,” “kurkuls,” “nationalists,” “spies,” and “accomplices” were also drawn up. The chairs of local councils and the directors of local penal facilities were directly involved in organising arrests, carrying out food searches, resettlements and deportations between the 1920s and the early 1950s. Thus, the most rational strategy for relations with those in power was to maximally distance yourself from it and to a priori judge local government, like the central one, as a profoundly hostile institution.

Despite all the seemingly democratic procedures of soviet elections, not on local deputy was ever truly elected: they were all appointed from above. On one hand, this strengthened the strategy of distancing but, on the other, it shaped a persistent paradigm of distrust in elections as a complete soviet profanation.

It’s worth noting that for a certain contingent of Ukrainians, participating in soviet games provided a social lift: career, improve personal material standing, joining the elite, and so on. Still, including Ukrainians in administrative, representative or party structures in soviet society was directed at the interests of the imperial state, not the community. Despite all the lip service to “common happiness,” this configuration of relations between the state and the citizen, those in power and ordinary people, treated the individual as a cog in the wheel of the mechanism for a socialist victory on a global scale. Thus, people tended to see local representatives and government agencies as links that were not decision-makers but merely followed the Kremlin’s orders. But when it came time to complain, people generally wrote their letters to the capital, Kyiv and Moscow, and the union-wide papers.

The “normalisation” of the soviet project, which began in the mid-1950s, stopped, and even condemned, for awhile at least, repressive practices, and so local government agencies stopped being the instigators of terror, moving more into the realm of economic and administrative functions. In the late soviet period, relations between the people and their local governments no longer posed the threat of repression. Instead, they began to involve corrupt “deals” that affected the resolution of domestic, educational, medical, residential, and other issues. This new configuration was clearly not the manifestation of a paradigm of trust, since those in power “sold” their services, opportunities and permissions to those who could afford to pay for them.

Between the corruption component and the alienation from their local governments that ordinary Ukrainians had picked up during more repressive times, the institutional habits inherited by the young Ukraine affected both the government and all the country’s elected bodies. Lack of skill in the functional duties and the level of opportunities available to local government bodies, together with their traditional orientation on decisions from the “centre,” gradually transformed them, especially at the town and county level, to (1) subordinate local “back-ups” of the oblast and central branch of government, (2) “trading centres” involving the corrupt sale of government services and state assets, (3) the place to gain the status of privileges for a person’s resume and career advancement, (4) and controlling and disciplinary agencies for the power to audit budget-funded and non-budget organisations that made little sense to the average voter.

To this day, the style of organisation and functioning of governments at the town, county and city level still reflects its soviet—both communist and colonial—past, in terms of the lack of a real tradition, leading to the absence of well-entrenched mechanisms of responsibility and accountability. Local bosses report to their higher ups or to their shady sponsors—oligarchs, politicians, and so on. The absence of public oversight, as a real and not just declarative mechanism, is the main factor behind the distrust that continues to fester as long as the situation remains unchanged.

In the end, distrust in government, whether through traumatic soviet experience or the corruption of the post-soviet government environment, leads to the maintenance of a “safe” distance between the people and those in power, and to inaction on the part of voters — “since this doesn’t make a lot of difference”— to somehow change the situation. In a 2020 survey run by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts, 61.5% of respondents admitted that they had shown no initiative whatsoever regarding interaction with the government or their community. Only 9-10% of those surveyed said that they had turned to community enterprises and institutions in their own town, signed petitions, appealed to their local elected representative — through the mayor’s office, the executive committee, the county council, the village council, or the county administration. And only about 40% of this group said that their efforts had led to a positive result*[2].

In short, considerable focused effort is needed to establish a playing field and the rules of trust between Ukraine’s citizens and their administrative and elected bodies: (a) understanding the historic experience and the reasons underpinning distrust, (2) studying the functions, duties, levels of responsibility of government agencies and its free use, (3) establishing proper oversight mechanisms, and (4) undertaking a symbolic re-formulation of the soviet notion “the people for the state” to the contemporary “power to the people.”

Ultimately, trust is a verb that appears there where citizens begin to take action rather than just waiting, demand results and oversee them. Based on the studies mentioned here, homeowner associations (HOA) in urban areas are becoming more and more a good example of the opportunities and success of collective action to improve their own space. They are rapidly becoming mini-labs in practicing common effort and responsibility. Not all the experiences have been equally successful, but they are drawing people’s attention*[3].

 

Translator: Lidia Alexandra Wolanskyj

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All terms in this article are meant to be used neutrally for men and women

Olena Stiazhkina has participated at the International Expert Exchange, "Development of Municipalities: trust, institutions, finance and people", organized by U-LEAD with Europe Programme in December 2020. Her speech delivered during one of the workshops is to a great extent depicted in this article.

In the name of the U-LEAD with Europe Programme, we would like to express our great appreciation and thanks for both inputs of Ms. Stiazhkina. The article will be included in future online publication Compendium of Articles.

Compendium of Articles is a collection of papers prepared by policymakers, Ukrainian and international experts, and academia after International Expert Exchange 2019 and 2020, organized by U-LEAD with Europe Programme. The articles raise questions in the fields of decentralisation reform and regional and local development, relevant for both the Ukrainian and the international audience. The Compendium will be published online in Ukrainian and English languages on the U-LEAD online recourses. Please, follow us on Facebook to stay informed about the project.