My Country is Corrupt: A Structural Analysis of Ukrainian and Polish Corruption

By Alexander Gerasimchuk, Brown University

All happy countries are alike; each corrupt country is corrupt in its own way. Corruption occurs in all institutions from the Supreme Court to the Post Office. Although there is no singular phrase that captures all of its manifestations, Robert Brookes identifies core concepts in his 1909 definition: “the intentional mis-performance or neglect of recognized duty or unwarranted exercise of power with the motive of gaining some personal advantage.” By this definition (or indeed any other), my native Ukraine, and the countries which surround it, are quite corrupt. The Corruption Perceptions Index (as a scale of 1 to 100, 1 being most corrupt) reflects this: Ukraine (33); Russia (28); Moldova (39); Belarus (39); Hungary (46); Romania (46); Poland (55). This ring of data illustrates several matters: Eastern Europe is particularly corrupt (Denmark scores 90 in comparison), but there is less corruption in the EU countries. The chasm within Eastern Europe is between Ukraine and Poland (an EU country).

It was not inevitable: both countries emerged as independent states around 1990; both have similar post-Nazi, post-Soviet epistemes. Their people instinctively distrust the state: apparatchiks and nomenklatura were seen as harnessing the state for themselves; interactions with power were mediated by oppressive institutions: the SB in Poland and the KGB in Soviet Ukraine. 

Is the explanation for the chasm constitutional? The 1997 Polish Constitution and the 1996 Ukrainian Constitution are almost identical documents: de jure they provide for similar environments that try to control corruption. Idealistic language makes frequent reference to ideals of democracy, truth, justice, and above all, the rule of law; both seek to institute a ‘recognizable duty’ towards the state. Both structures separate powers of the executive, legislature, and judiciary; executives and legislatures are elected by free and fair elections and are representatives of a sovereign body-politic; powers of judicial review are held by a (familiarly Soviet-sounding) Constitutional Tribunal. This institution, and the wider concept of judicial review, are made more credible by laws ensuring judicial independence and neutrality and an apolitical state apparatus including the public prosecutor’s service. Both provide the same protections against corruption: recognizable duties to the state for all apparatchiks; mechanisms of enforcement, most notably an independent civil service. They both suffer from the same weakness: the members of the constitutional tribunal are political appointees chosen by parliament in Poland; by parliament, president, and a council of judges in Ukraine. Were the constitutional set-up decisive, Poland and Ukraine would be equally corrupt.

Next, we consider the people’s trust in state efficiency: they have it in Poland, but not in Ukraine. EU membership may explain Polish state efficiency. Accession forced Poland to adopt the OECD anti-bribery convention in 2000 and set up institutions which are designed to fight corruption: the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Supreme Audit Office. These changes reshaped the citizens’ perception of the state: the Polish civil service ranks in the top half of the EU-27 on professionalism; and only 10% of public sector users paid a bribe in the last year. This suggests that Polish corruption is not institutional in the sense that it is not inflicted on individuals by corrupt state representatives. Consequently, a relatively high-trust society has emerged in Poland: in 2017, 64% of people trusted the state. People do not directly feel the impact of Polish corruption. In Poland, the bribery of officials is a form of disrespectful treatment. If you bribe the taxman, he reports you to the institution responsible, rather than taking the bribe. Instead, the flavor of Polish corruption is political. Under the Law and Justice Party (PiS), Poland has become more prone to corruption at the top through encroachment on judicial independence. In the Constitutional Tribunal Crisis from 2015 onwards, the PiS forced the Tribunal to accept the judges it wanted, then created a two-thirds-majority rule to ensure their judges are included in all proceedings. With the government, parliament, and now the tribunal controlled by the PiS, the rule of law has been undermined and political (packing the courts etc.) rather than personal corruption is growing. While this may change with their ousting, so far Donald Tusk has resorted to many of the same extra constitutional methods to free Poland from PiS’s yoke therefore not bearing significantly on our analysis. This is different from the flavor of Ukrainian corruption, where the apparatchik disregards the laws and weaponizes the state against individuals: a border official gives one a lecture on the bribery legislation and then demands a $500 payment for their education; a public prosecutor starts a malign investigation to racketeer one’s house. Yet, to chalk up the differences in corruption to Poland’s EU membership would be misleading. Polish corruption has increased since accession (as evidenced by the CPI dropping from 61 in 2014 to 55 in 2021 and public trust declining to 34% by 2020). The explanation is anyway circular: Poland could not have joined the EU had its institutions been as corrupt as Ukraine’s. 

The deeper explanation of the chasm is the presence of a demographic in Poland which founded and maintained a new civil society. The 1989 partially-free elections happened because of widespread support for Solidarity (the political trade union founded in 1980), rooted in the Gdansk shipyards, which won all the freely contested seats in the Sejm (Poland’s lower house) and all but one in the Senate. Despite the political wing of Solidarity failing at the 1991 elections and fracturing thereafter, its demographic has resized the Overton window of acceptable political discourse in Poland and shaped the institutions of the 1997 constitution as distinctly democratic. The people who voted for Solidarity in 1989 were the same 30–40-year-olds who had fought for it under the Soviets. The historical memory, and their revolt against Soviet corruption, unprofessionalism, and usurpation of state power, motivated a deeply political group who kept post-Communist institutions democratically accountable and largely uncorrupted. It was a bottom-up revolution that led to the first peaceful transition of power in the post-Soviet sphere. This was uniquely important as there was a core group of people who believed in the state and its democratic institutions and drove the political will for joining the EU. If we consider the uptick in corruption together with demographic data a picture emerges: the people who were active in the 1980s remained so up until 2015, when they were about 60 and began to retire. From 2015 onwards, standards in public life have been slipping, and Poland has fallen to the populist PiS. The politically active demographic is now dependent on state pensions; the politically active group was bought off when the PiS introduced a 500 zloty per month pension bonus and reduced the retirement age. Poland’s secret democratic weapon was neutralized—at least in part—by largesse.

Ukraine never had this hardened demographic holding the government to account from the bottom up. While political protests did take place, in the Orange Revolution (2004) and Revolution of Dignity (2014), they were reactionary to President Victor Yanukovych rather than for democratic institutions or the Ukrainian state. The charge upon which Yanukovych was thrown out for was collaboration with Putin rather than the corrupt practice of the politicization of organs of state; this is still the modus operandi of the government. This lack of a group with a historical memory of courageous action against oppression goes a long way to explaining the prevalence of Ukrainian corruption. In Poland, independence was won by working-class action; in Ukraine, President Kravchuk unilaterally declared independence from the top without much popular groundswell. There was never a pressure group which forced the government to accept a ‘recognized duty’ towards the state to sack the corrupt officials. The Ukrainian state apparatus from nomenklatura to the Post Office is indistinguishable from the hapless bureaucracy of the USSR, making ‘allegiance to a recognized duty’ almost a comic absurdity out of Gogol.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine may create a politically active body-politic on the Solidarity model. Western media reports a deep belief in Ukraine; the majority wish to continue fighting (70%) and 94% approve of President Zelensky’s performance. In truth, these data overstate the patriotism of Ukrainians. The surveyed population is much diminished (a quarter fled); support for fighting the war is much higher in western Ukraine which is further away from the frontlines and higher still among Ukrainians who have left for the EU; only 64% of women support the war compared with 74% of men. In terms of support for Zelensky the CNN survey only had a 15% response rate and support for him is perhaps best summed up in one of those interviewed, ‘He is all we’ve got’. Ukrainians feel rebuked by the invasion and motivated to keep their country alive, but not only does it appear that the people who support the war most are not affected by it and have no clear intentions of coming back. 18-year-olds are extorted for money to avoid the draft, subjected to malign police raids, and then plucked from public transport on their way home by an army that is riddled with corruption. In a state which weaponizes itself against innocent citizens, it is difficult for a Solidarity type group with the belief in the ideals of the state to emerge. 

The Constitution and EU membership lack full explanatory power: the chasm between Poland and Ukraine must stem from the people themselves. In Poland in 1991, a critical mass of people had faith in each other and built a new state and through that faith maintained a republic of the people rather than a Kafka-esque kleptocracy. Poland is losing that group as they age, but Ukraine never had it. The war may be decisive in Ukraine’s fight against corruption, for the recovery funds be in the billions of dollars and will not be given without reassurances. Such sums present huge scope for improvement, and progress has been made with legislation requiring a public Ultimate Beneficiary Owner registry, a new digital tracking software to track recovery funds, and the use of judicial experts to ensure integrity in the judiciary. These reforms are inevitably top-down; the scope for squandering will still be huge. It is up to a reborn civil society to manage it. The power must be from distant bodies and the well-meaning European bureaucrats crafting a future for Ukraine at the Venice Commission; to be effective, the people must seize control. 

One can hope that the negative brand of civil society in Ukraine—a reactionary nationalism rather than a commitment to the idea of state—is burned out by the war and replaced with the state-building solidarity of the Polish post-Soviet generation. But hope has never been an assurance, and there is a fear this may not happen. 

Cover photo taken from Raw Pixel.