Abuse of Power: Corruption in the office of the president - Tapa blanda

Abuse of Power – Corruption in the office of the president reveals Ukraine’s ruling elite to be exploiting the state for its personal benefit. The book focuses on the first four presidents of Ukraine starting in 1991, and in particular on the two considered to be the most corrupt: the second president Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) and the fourth and current president Viktor Yanukovych (2010). Its genesis is in the author’s personal experience as a journalist in Ukraine since the fall of the USSR in 1989. The book is the first to make extensive use of secret recordings of President Kuchma’s conversations, and of those of Viktor Yanukovych’s lieutenants who falsified the results of the 2004 presidential elections. It also reveals how the recordings of Kuchma were made, and why.

The author J.V. Koshiw is a writer on Ukraine. Abuse of Power – corruption in the office of the president is his most recent book. His first book, Workers Against the Gulag (Pluto Press, London 1978), which he co-authored under the pseudonym Viktor Haynes, dealt with a group of Donetsk coal miners who attempted to organize an independent trade union. This was followed by The Chernobyl Disaster (Hogarth Press, London 1988), also co-authored with the same pseudonym. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone on three occasions to make documentaries for HTV Wales. Between 1998 and 2001, he worked as a journalist in Ukraine, first with the Kyiv Post, and then other publications. He investigated the disappearance of the journalist Georgi Gongadze, whose headless body was discovered outside the capital. The research formed the basis for his book, Beheaded, the killing of a journalist (Artemia Press, Reading 2003). An updated version of the book was published in Ukraine (2004). On May 20, 2004, the book was launched inside Ukraine’s parliament building. A further updated version was published in Moscow the following year. In 2007-8, the author was a visiting scholar in Washington DC at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Washington University, during which time he analysed the hundreds of hours of recordings of President Kuchma’s conversations secretly made by his guard Melnychenko, and the recordings of the group of people who fixed the 2004 presidential elections – the catalyst for the Orange Revolution. The recordings presented a wealth of new information, which became the impetus for this book.