Abuse of Power: Corruption in the office of the president
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.