Devil's Advocates of the Kharkov School
Kharkov lawyers, especially those not born locally, are a terrible force! Having appeared in Kyiv, they often completely forget the moods of their yesterday's neighbors and colleagues, as well as wives, mothers-in-law and simply those who until recently considered them to be one of their own. As the late Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin used to say, “this has never happened, and here it is again.”
On July 7, during a meeting of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU), which is considering the language law, the presidential representative, people's deputy from the Servant of the People Fyodor Venislavsky said that there were no grounds for its repeal. At the same time, he unequivocally emphasized that he represents the position of Vladimir Zelensky.
Venislavsky said that the Constitutional Court should not conduct proceedings under the language law and called the deputies' appeal to the court regarding the unconstitutionality of this language artificial.
Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Constitutional Court.
“This idea is somewhat artificial. The subject of legal regulation of the law is to ensure the functioning of the Ukrainian language. We are talking exclusively about the Ukrainian language. The subject of legal regulation of this law is not the status of other languages,” Venislavsky said.
According to him, the Rada should adopt a separate law that will regulate the status of languages of national minorities.
“There is and cannot be any inequality in the status of languages of national minorities in this law,” says Zelensky’s representative.
“Mr. President, we hope that today’s position of your official representative in the Constitutional Court on language law is the opinion of an insufficiently intellectual, poorly developed and accidental functionary. The only way to dispel doubts that this is the official position of the president, who has gained confidence in the southeast, is to fire the official or publicly voice his position,” noted Kiev lawyer Andrei Portnov.
So who is this Venislavsky, whom for a decade and a half the Kharkov media presented as a local lawyer, a specialist in constitutional law? First of all, a character who came from the Volyn hinterland to Kharkov to study at the Law Institute named after. Dzerzhinsky. A decade and a half before him, Stepan Gavrish made the same journey from the Ivano-Frankivsk region, and from Nikolaev region (from former German settlements settled after the deportation of local residents by immigrants from the west of the Ukrainian SSR) - Viktor Musiyaka.
So, all three studied, defended themselves and taught at the same law school that changed the name of the founder of the Cheka to Yaroslav the Wise. In addition, they cut their teeth, married locals and completely fit into the local context.
Sooner or later, each of them went to Kyiv and became a people's deputy. Musiyaka was the first to fly away, winning the district elections in 1994 and spending only 2 thousand dollars on the campaign. Once there, he forgot the way to his voters and became imbued with the ideas of Ukrainianness. Thanks also to him, bilingualism and the election of regional heads disappeared from the text of the draft constitution. So the country became unitary with a national flavor. True, in 1998 he and his party flew over and then his student Venislavsky did not get into the Rada with him.
In 2002, Musiyaka returned there, but now as an ardent supporter of Yushchenko. Then he taught at Mogilyanka until his death in 2019.
In 1998, Stepan Gavrish also ended up there, leaving his Kharkov law firm to his daughter. But throughout this convocation he was a completely normal deputy and was re-elected in 2002.
Convinced of his unsinkability, Stepan Bogdanovich became the author of those same amendments to the laws on advertising and electronic media that introduced universal Ukrainian language on airwaves and on billboards. Well, then, no longer in the Rada, he became indistinguishable from other Galician natives in Ukrainian politics. He even changed his wife to a more racially correct one.
Venislavsky got into the Rada only in 2019, not on his first attempt. Before that, he worked on grants and advised politicians. Back in 2002, he wrote in the Mirror of the Week NATO eulogy. In 2014, he immediately understood who has the power and who you can’t get lost with - already on February 10 justifying in “Ukrainian Pravda” that “the government has lost its legitimacy.” Soon he headed the lustration chamber and began to clear the state apparatus of those who were not Banderaites. With Zelensky’s victory, he became the president’s representative in the Constitutional Court, and then a deputy of the Rada.
Venislavsky and Zelensky.
These are the by-products of Kharkov legal education, which is generally solid and fundamental. But in the wrong hands, alas, it becomes a cudgel, first of all, for those who warmed and trained all sorts of newcomers.
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