published in Eastern Economist #418, February 5, 2002
Last week might have been heaven-sent, but this week a few worms have turned.
Take Serhiy “Mr. Clean” Tyhipko. It’s been a little rough lately for Mr. Tyhipko. Less than a year ago, he was a serious contender for premier until Anatoliy “Willy” Kinakh got the thankless job instead. Word got out late in January that Mr. Tykipko was being fingered for laundering money through Privatbank to the tune of US $150mn.
That’s twice as much as Mr. Tkachenko scrubbed through Zemlia i Liudy, a 1990s farm sector scam. And it’s a good chunk more – nearly 40% more – than Washington accuses Pavlo Lazarenko of rinsing through. If Mr. Tyhipko goes down, he may drag a few well-placed people down with him. For one thing, Mr. Kuchma also had interests in the bank – even if at arm’s length.
I’d say it’s good news, though, that this kind of stuff is now coming to light, regardless of the political motivations.
Take the president’s Chief-of-Staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn. A nice-looking guy. Clean-cut, silver-haired. Sort of like Jay Leno without the Clintonian jaw. Mr. Lytvyn hasn’t been feeling so good lately, either. He started the new year with a bang after his car apparently hit another car that had drifted into his lane Dec 29.
The driver in the Zhyguli died.
While Mr. Lytvyn was still in hospital recovering, Mykhail Brodskiy, Yabluko’s wide-girthed political gadfly, began to cast doubt on the official version of what had happened. Specifically, he accused Mr. Lytvyn’s driver of “speeding excessively.”
In Ukraine, there are several classes of speeding. There’s “speeding normally.” That’s when you’re doing a steady 10 klicks above the speed limit and step on the gas to make a changing traffic light, never passing the 19-klick unofficial limit above the posted limit.
Then there’s “speeding regularly.” That’s when you consistently drive 20-25 klicks above the speed limit in the city and 40-80 klicks above the speed limit on the highway.
“Speeding excessively” is when someone else’s chauffeur drives faster than yours. Mr. Brodskiy seems to be suffering a slight case of chassis envy.
Luckily, Mr. Lyvtyn has connections in high places, because the next thing, the president’s man in the Interior Ministry not only exonerated Mr. Lytvyn’s driver, but called for an investigation into a possible assassination attempt. Suicide drivers in Zhygulis? Hmmm…
Mr. Lyvtyn got out of hospital with only an ugly white bandage patch on his lobe to show for all the excitement.
But maybe that knock on his head did more damage than X-rays could show. The demon political ambition must have bit the soul of the leader of the Za yedynu Ukraïnu bloc. Because Mr. Lytvyn turned around and published an article Jan. 19 in Fakty, a popular tabloid, called “Civil society: myth and reality.” In it, he argued that the development of civil society was useless in transition countries.
Frankly, I would have flunked him for the dreadful title. It’s the classic title for any BS essay that ninth graders use whenever they write about topics they neither understand nor care about.
Everything seemed hunky-dory – until someone noticed that chunks of Mr. Lytvyn’s piece were taken verbatim from someone else’s article. To whit: an American political scientist by the name of Thomas Carothers published a piece called “Civil society: Think again” in Foreign Affairs – in 1999.
The miracle of the Internet.
Given the irritation that intellectual property law has become for Ukraine, this did not go over very well. But Mr. Lytvyn’s immediately response, in squirmy soviet style, was to deny that he had placed the article and to insist that “someone” had “set him up.”
“These attacks are all coming from NGOs that are financed from abroad,” he told journalists. “They’re criticizing the latest thought in American science in my article.”
This explanation in the domestic press impressed a total of three people. And they thought that he was talking about the car accident.
Then Radio Svoboda – Radio Liberty in American – did an interview with the gentleman. Mr. Lytvyn by now admitted that he had, indeed “borrowed” some ideas from Mr. Carothers, but he insisted that he had added his own thoughts to the mix.
That really stuck in the craw of two Ukrainian PhD candidates at Cambridge. Vlad Mykhnenko and Mykhailo Vynnytskiy wrote an open letter Jan. 29 to Mr. Lytvyn saying, “You signed this article as an associate member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and as a professor… [W]e feel ashamed that that a person of such qualifications, moreover a highly placed official in the Ukrainian government, could have violated intellectual property in this way.”
They called on all Ukrainian academics and scientists to insist that Mr. Lytvyn return any academic honors and recognitions he has been granted. “This is the least that you can do to save your own face and the reputation Ukrainian science.” Amen.
That same day, Mr. Lytvyn appeared on a popular TV show, Same toi [That’s the one]. When asked why he had plaigiarized, Mr. Lytvyn told his host, “It’s a PR thing… I just wanted to show that you don’t have to get too excited about civil society.”
The following day, Ukraïnska Pravda interviewed the original author, Tom Carothers. “I’m even less happy about the fact that he changed some passages… I was raising important questions about civil society. Mr. Lytvyn twisted my ideas to simply attack civil society.”
Is Mr. Lytvyn repentant? On the contrary. He went on the record again in Ivano-Frankivsk Feb. 1, saying that he had not plaigiarized but “summarized and analysed” Carothers’ article. “It was a PR move. I wanted to see public reaction.”
Nor was that all. Mr. Lytvyn now says this was just the first of a series of three articles.
It seems he comes from a long-standing soviet traditon, actually. An old Tom Lehrer ditty called "Lobachevsky" went, "Let nothing new evade your eyes/and plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize…" Of course, he was referring to soviet mathematicians...! •
–from the notebooks of Pan. O
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