Mykola Azarov (born December 17, 1947) is a Ukrainian politician who served as Prime Minister of Ukraine from March 11, 2010 to January 27, 2014. Prior to that, he was twice First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, and even earlier, he headed the tax administration of Ukraine for more than five years.
Azarov Nikolay Yanovich: biography, nationality
It would seem that such an irrelevant issue of globalization at the present time about how a person's nationality, as applied to the hero of our article, suddenly became particularly acute. Why is it so interesting for many to know what is the nationality of Azarov Nikolai Yanovich? The fact is that he worked in the political arena in Ukraine, a very young country, where this issue has become particularly acute in recent years.
So, where did Azarov Nikolay Yanovich start his life? His biography began in Kaluga, a native Russian city. Where, then, did he get such a patronymic, Yanovich? The fact is that his paternal grandfather was an Estonian named Robert Pakhlo, all other relatives (at least in two generations) are primordiallyRussian people. According to Azarov himself, made in the program of the famous TV presenter Vladimir Pozner, he was born out of wedlock to his parents, mining engineer Yan Pakhlo (a Leningrader by birth and a front-line soldier) and Ekaterina Azarova (later married to Kvasnikova). Therefore, at his birth, the mother recorded little Kolya with her maiden name, under which he is now known to us.
In the same program of Vladimir Pozner, recorded in the summer of 2012, when asked by the presenter what is the nationality of Mykola Azarov, he answered the following: “I am a Russian person, but I have been living in Ukraine for 28 years. Of course, I already feel like a Ukrainian, that is, a citizen of Ukraine.” It will take another year and a half and the so-called "svіdomі ukraintsі" will very intelligibly explain to Azarov that between the concepts of "Ukrainian" and "citizen of Ukraine" there is an abyss, which, in their understanding, no merits and lived years will block.
Childhood and years of study
As far as can be understood from Mykola Azarov's recently published book "Ukraine at the Crossroads", his parents tried to establish a life together, and the family even lived in Leningrad for some time in the apartment of his father's parents. But apparently something went wrong in their family life, and Ekaterina Azarova returned with little Kolya to her parents in Kaluga. There she graduated from a railway technical school and subsequently worked in the railway department.
A particularly strong influence in childhood on our hero was grandmother Maria Azarova, apparently one of those Russian women who are able to give love and care to loved ones in any, the most difficult conditions. Cansay that thanks to her care, mother's love, their numerous Kaluga relatives (one of the suburbs of Kaluga is even called Azarovo), Nikolai's childhood was quite prosperous. He studied well at school, repeatedly won Olympiads in various subjects, was even invited to the special school of academician Kolmogorov at Moscow State University, but refused to enter it, because he was not attracted by its number of mathematical direction.
Azarov graduated from high school with a silver medal, and then went to "conquer the capital." He entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Geology. Student years passed as expected, but there was one episode that Azarov especially notes in his memoirs. We are talking about an incident related to a street fight between Nikolai and his friend with a group of hooligans who attacked a girl. The policemen, who arrived at the scene of the incident, without hesitation, stunned Nikolai with a blow of a baton on the head, and then in the department they began to “sew a case of hooliganism”. Fortunately for him, late at night, a police lieutenant drove into the department, who figured out everything and let Nikolai and his comrade go. Why Azarov highlights this, in general, an unobtrusive episode of his life. The fact is that once his future patron Viktor Yanukovych found himself in the same situation, but it was not in Moscow, but in Yenvakiyevo, and there was no thoughtful lieutenant in the department. Therefore, as Azarov writes, he "understands the mistakes of Viktor Yanukovych's youth."
The beginning of a career in the Soviet period
Having received at the endMSU qualification of a geologist-geophysicist, Nikolai Azarov in 1971, by distribution, got to the Tulaugol coal plant, where in five years he worked his way up to the chief engineer of the Tulashakhtoosushchenie trust. He showed himself to be a real innovator, going from practice, made a significant contribution to the theory of studying coal seams. Passion for mining science led to the fact that in 1976 Azarov Nikolai Yanovich left production for branch science. First, he works as a head of a laboratory in an industry research institute in the city of Novomoskovsk, Tula Region, and defends his Ph. D. thesis. Soon he becomes the head of the department in the same research institute.
A young and promising candidate of geological sciences is getting crowded in his native institute, he needs a new field to apply his mature scientific knowledge. And he can do business in the Donbass, where Azarov is offered the position of deputy director of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Mining Geology. In 1984 he comes to Donetsk. The move did him good as a scientist. A couple of years later, Azarov Nikolai Yanovich completes and defends his doctoral dissertation in mine geophysics, and soon after that becomes the director of the institute. He works hard and fruitfully, his monograph on the geology of gold deposits in Donbass is widely known in scientific circles. In 1991, Mykola Azarov also became a professor at the Department of Geology at Donetsk Technical University.
Beginning of political activity
During the period of perestroika and liberalization of the political system of the USSR, Mykola Azarov, of course, did not stay away from the main processes. He's likethe director of the branch research institute actively supports the reformist wing in the CPSU (the so-called "Democratic platform"), while in 1990 he was considered by the party leadership as one of the candidates for the post of leader of the Donetsk communists (Pyotr Simonenko was preferred). In the same year, he became a delegate to the XXVII Congress of the CPSU, where he met Leonid Kuchma, later his long-term patron. Obviously, due to the nature of his activities, Azarov had the opportunity to get acquainted with the leaders of the largest coal mining enterprises in Donbass, the so-called. "coal barons", who will soon become his partners in new political projects.
The first political projects involving Azarov in independent Ukraine
Shortly after the collapse of the USSR and the creation of the CIS, a group of Russian-born intellectuals living in Ukraine from Kharkov and Donetsk created a socio-political organization, the Civil Congress of Ukraine (CCU), which aimed to transform the rather "loose" CIS into a more cohesive Eurasian Union. Among the founders of the congress were Mykola Azarov, a teacher of philosophy from Donetsk State University Oleksandr Bazilyuk, and a teacher of history from Kharkiv State University Valery Meshcheryakov. The captains of the industry of Donbass began to look closely at the organization, by that time they had already created their own organization - the Interregional Association of Ukraine. Under its influence, on the basis of the GKU, in December 1992, the Party of Labor was formed in Donetsk, the head of which was the director of the Donetsk plant"Elektrobytmash" (later the "Nord" concern) Valentin Landyk, and his deputy - Azarov. It was a time of tough confrontation between Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma, who is striving to limit the traditional subsidizing of Donbass mines from the state budget, and leaders of the Donetsk industry. Powerful miners' strikes and miners' marches on Kyiv organized by the former "red directors" forced President Kravchuk to dismiss the prime minister. His place was taken by the head of the Donetsk city council and the city executive committee, in the recent past, the director of the largest mine in Donetsk named after. Zasyadko Efim Zvyagilsky. Soon Landyk left for Kyiv to take the position of Deputy Prime Minister in his government, and Mykola Azarov headed the Labor Party, which was the political backbone of the Zvyagilsky government.
Parliamentary career
In 1994, Azarov was elected a member of the Verkhovna Rada from the Labor Party. In the same year, Leonid Kuchma becomes president after early elections and starts a new war against the "Donetsk". Zvyagilsky flees from his persecution in Israel, but Azarov has nowhere to run. And he decides to change his political leanings and join the pro-presidential Interregional Deputy Group. His loy alty was appreciated and in 1995-1996 he became head of the parliamentary budget committee. The new president was in dire need of qualified personnel for the new Ukrainian state machine he was creating on the ruins of the old Soviet administrative system. In 1996, he offers Azarov to become chairman of the newly created State Tax Administration. Ukraine.
Head of the State Tax Administration
Of course, the new appointment captivated Azarov, because he had to create from scratch a huge in size and powers, and, moreover, a very specific civil service. And he took up this work with all his energy. The results were not long in coming. Already in the first year of his tenure in his new position, tax collections in the country increased one and a half times, while they began to be collected even from those sectors of the economy that had not paid them at all.
Of course, as the revenues of the Ukrainian state grew, so did the number of enemies of the chief tax officer. He was accused of exaggerating the tax pressure, but Azarov countered these accusations by stating that Ukrainian tax legislation complies with international standards, and those who are used to evading mandatory payments to the state are the ones who protest the most.
Until 2000, Azarov worked in his position, having sat out several prime ministers, whom President Kuchma liked to change every year. At the same time, he even refused to participate in the 1998 parliamentary elections, preferring to engage in an already established business.
How Donbass changed in the 90s
While Azarov was in charge of the Ukrainian tax authorities from Kyiv, the processes of economic transformation were steadily going on in the Donbas, as a result of which the old elite, which consisted mainly of directors (since Soviet times) of enterprises and mines, was gradually replaced by a new one, already generated by market relations. So-called. vertically integrated production concerns, which combined all the stages of traditional Donbass production: coal mining, coke production, metallurgical and chemical enterprises, trade and marketing divisions. Examples of them were the Industrial Union of Donbass, controlled by the Taruta-Gaiduk clan, and the System Capital Management holding, which was controlled by the Akhmetov-Yanukovych group. Using the favorable foreign economic situation in the late 90s, they significantly increased the export of metal products, which allowed them to concentrate colossal capital in their hands.
New clash between "Donetsk" and "Kyiv"
This could not leave indifferent the central Ukrainian government, which since the beginning of the 90s has sought to limit the basis for the existence of the economy of Donbass, which consisted in the old, still Soviet system of subsidizing unprofitable coal mining. The amount of annual subsidies from the state budget exceeded 10 billion hryvnias. Due to these subsidies, the selling price of coal was kept low on the market, which made it possible for coke producers, and then metallurgists, to reduce the cost of their products. By exporting it and paying taxes to the government, they ended up offsetting the original subsidies to the mines, so the country ended up benefiting.
But this is a way of state regulation of the economy, originating in the socialist way of managing, where the goal was not the benefit of an individual enterprise, but the benefit of the whole country as a whole, which is called "broughtfrom themselves" adherents of the market economy, of which the Ukrainian elite mainly consisted. In 2000-2001, the government of Viktor Yushchenko made a new attempt to break the system of subsidizing mines in Donbass, and Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko became an active promoter of this policy.
How did Mykola Azarov, a politician, scientist and statesman behave in this situation? He took the side of his countrymen, openly speaking out against the course of Yushchenko-Tymoshenko, who were guided by the British and American experience of reducing coal production, which led to the complete degradation of mining regions in these countries, like English Wales or mining towns in the American Appalachians.
Then Azarov managed to attract a number of major Ukrainian politicians to his side. In addition, Viktor Yushchenko's presidential ambitions alienated President Kuchma, who dismissed the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko government. But they created Our Ukraine and BYuT political forces in opposition to the president, and began to prepare for a power struggle.
Creation of the Party of Regions and the beginning of joint work with Yanukovych
The opposite side didn't sleep either. In November 2006, four political parties, of which the Donbas-based Regional Revival Party of Ukraine was the largest, announced their merger into the Labor Solidarity of Ukraine Regional Revival Party. In December Mykola Azarov also joined this party. In March of the following year, it became known as the Party of Regions, and our hero was elected its chairman.
Typically, among the founding parties was"Solidarity" of Petro Poroshenko, a splinter from the pro-presidential Social Democratic Party. So the current president of Ukraine was one of the founders of the Party of Regions, which he now declares to be the culprit of all the troubles of his country (except Russia, of course). Moreover, for almost half a year he was Azarov's deputy, as the head of the party, but at the end of 2001 he defected, along with his Solidarity, to Yushchenko's Our Ukraine. This is such a remarkable political metamorphosis.
However, in fairness, it should be said that at the same time, Azarov himself left the leadership of the Party of Regions, remaining the head of the tax administration. Under his auspices, the electoral bloc "For a United Ukraine" (colloquially referred to as "For Food") with the participation of the Party of Regions was soon created, but in the parliamentary elections of 2002 he barely won 11% of the vote. However, the European Choice faction was created in the new parliament, which began to nominate Azarov for the post of prime minister. However, Kuchma made a choice in favor of the Donetsk governor Viktor Yanukovych, at the same time forcing through parliament the appointment of Azarov as first deputy prime minister. This is how this tandem of two politicians appeared, who unwittingly led Ukraine to the most severe crisis in its recent history.
First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance
In the first government of Yanukovych 2002-2004. Nikolai Yanovich combined the post of First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. At the beginning of their joint work, they did not yet constitute a well-functioning tandem - their life experience and path to power were too different. Azarov was identified with the so-called. "oldDonetsk", immigrants from the Soviet nomenklatura. Yanukovych, on the other hand, personified the new elite of Donbass, which rose in the second half of the "dashing 90s" using semi-criminal methods of leadership and capital accumulation.
However, the Azarov-Yanukovych alliance soon proved its effectiveness. During the first government of Yanukovych, Azarov, first of all, implemented a set of economic reforms, including budgetary, tax, pension, etc. During Azarov's first term as Minister of Finance, annual GDP growth in Ukraine was 9.6% in 2003, 1% in 2004 (against 2.7% in 2005) with a level of capital investments of 31.3% and 28.0% respectively (against 1.9% in 2005).
At that time, Azarov advocated closer ties with Russia, for the creation of a Common Economic Space between both countries, and even actively got rid of opponents of such rapprochement, such as Minister of Economy Valery Khoroshkovsky or head of the State Committee for Entrepreneurship Inna Bogoslovskaya. If Yanukovych could hold on to power after the presidential elections he had already won in the winter of 2004-2005, then these plans would certainly have come true, but the Orange Revolution, inspired from the outside, crossed them out.
In December 2004 and January 2005, Azarov served as prime minister until Yulia Tymoshenko was appointed to this post. They say that handing over the keys to the office to her, he half-jokingly, half-seriously asked her "not to touch anything with your hands, since everything is working so well." Too bad his successor didn't take this good advice.
However, the history of UkraineIt so happened that two years later Mykola Azarov returned to the post of First Deputy Prime Minister. His biography again repeated the events of two years ago after the 2006 parliamentary elections, when Yanukovych again became prime minister. This period was characterized by a sharp political struggle between President Yushchenko, supported in parliament by the Our Ukraine and Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc factions, and the Yanukovych-Azarov tandem, supported in parliament by the factions of the Party of Regions, the Socialist and Communist parties. As a result, the president dissolved the Verkhovna Rada in the spring of 2007 and scheduled snap elections for autumn, as a result of which Yulia Tymoshenko's government came to power at the end of the year.
Prime Minister Turned Exile
After her election as President of Ukraine in February 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko campaigned among the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada for her support, but on March 3 of the same year, the parliament, which voted for her appointment a little more than two years ago, dismissed the Tymoshenko government. The newly elected president proposed three candidates for the post of prime minister: the well-known banker and businessman Sergei Tigipko (during the Soviet period, the first secretary of the Dnepropetrovsk regional committee of the Komsomol), the then member of the Our Ukraine faction Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and Azarov, who led his election campaign. Of the 343 legislators registered in the session hall, 242 voted in favor of the latter candidacy, and Ukraine has a new Prime Minister MykolaAzarov.
In the next parliamentary elections in 2012, he was re-elected to parliament on the list of the Party of Regions, and Yanukovych appointed him for a new term as prime minister.
Mykola Azarov, pictured below during his two terms as prime minister, constantly complained about unfair gas prices for Ukraine under a contract signed with Gazprom in early 2009 by Yulia Tymoshenko on behalf of Ukrainian government.
Then, during the acute phase of the global financial and economic crisis, when oil and gas prices were steadily declining, this contract seemed to the Ukrainian authorities unconditionally profitable. But by 2012, oil prices again exceeded $100 per barrel, and, accordingly, the price of gas rose to almost $500 per thousand cubic meters. The Russian leadership was not very “led” to Azarov’s complaints, seeing that his government was pursuing a two-faced policy, on the one hand, talking about the desire to develop economic relations with Russia, and on the other, actively preparing an association agreement with the European Union. After an unequivocal message from the Russian president to stop all economic preferences for Ukraine in the event of joining such an association, Azarov backpedaled and suspended the development of relevant documents. But it was already too late. Deceived by two years of intensified propaganda of the future benefits of European integration, the population of Western and Central Ukraine considered themselves deceived and rebelled against the central government. This timeAzarov resigned on January 28, 2014 amid heavy unrest and Euromaidan protests.
After his resignation, he left Ukraine and for almost a year and a half did not communicate with the media, did not make any political statements, did not influence the turbulent political processes in Ukraine and Donbass at all. He remained silent even when, in the summer of 2014, Ukrainian air bombs and artillery shells began to burst on Donetsk and Luhansk lands, whose inhabitants refused to obey the Kyiv authorities, as the inhabitants of Galicia had done six months earlier. In Ukraine, Azarov has been declared a criminal subject to arrest and trial. Former comrades in the Party of Regions, as if enlightened by the many post-revolutionary revelations of the crimes of the "Yanukovych-Azarov clique", expelled him from their ranks in absentia.
Finally, on August 3, 2015, Azarov announced in Moscow the creation of the "Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine", which was chaired by the well-known parliamentary speaker from the Party of Regions Volodymyr Oliynyk. Mykola Yanovich said that he could not name all the members of the committee, because that some people live in Ukraine, and it would be dangerous for them. However, since then, there has been no noticeable political action from the newly created organization.
