Anastasia employs a convicted and registered sex offender as their tour manager.

[Boethius]

Why?  Because you are wrong? 
 
An arrest record is "expunged" by the CPSU.  That did not happen to common criminals.  Even most of the dissidents arrested in the 1960's and 1970's did not have their arrest records expunged.  Vasyl Stus, the last dissident to die in a Soviet prison (under Gorbachev's leadership) is still, technically, a criminal.  So you are telling me that all these innocent men still have criminal records, yet somehow, the CPSU, while still in power, wiped the record of a real criminal, and then allowed him to join the party?  Uh huh.
 
This is how Soviet "crimes" occurred - In the 1970's, I had a relative in Ukraine who was working a second job.  A workmate asked him if he could take a package to a neighbour.  It was on his way, so he said sure, he could do that.  He walked out of the workplace, and, just after, he was arrested for theft.  At trial, he plead guilty.  Why?  Because he knew that at a Soviet trial, there was no such thing as "innocent", so you hope, at least, that your sentence will be reduced based on some false "contrition".  Why was he arrested?  He came from the wrong family.  He learned his lesson - never took anything from anyone, never helped any "friends" thereafter.
 
I also had a friend, in the 1980's, who was attacked by two guys on the street.  He did not fight back, knowing he could be jailed for hooliganism.  A crowd called the police during the fight.  The police did not arrest the two guys who attacked my friend, but did arrest the friend.  He was jailed for two years for hooliganism.  These things were common.  Anyone who believes that a Soviet trial was fair, or that people pleaded innocent knows nothing about how the USSR worked.
 
I suspect Yanukovych was a party lackey and a well placed informant, and there is likely a string of people, both real criminals and innocent individuals, arrested for nothing based on his position as an informant.  That is how the USSR worked, particularly in Ukraine.

 Perhaps you can have one of your "well cited sources" come here to explain to everyone why the CPSU would wipe the record of a common criminal.   
 
Note - In none of this am I defending Yanukovych or expressing any support for him.  I just happen to know, through personal experience how the USSR's criminal system was an organ of the state, very politicized.  The guilty walked free, the innocent did their time.

[Boethius]

Oh, and to join the CPSU in Ukraine, after being in the Komsomol, you had to have proven your loyalty to the party.  That usually meant doing party errands, such as rounding up men with "unsuitably long hair" and forcing them to go to a barber - I actually witnessed this while sitting at a juice bar during so called "perestroika", or standing outside a church on Easter Sunday and rounding up selected individuals, driving them out to the country, and having them walk back to the city, or arranging for the arrest of an "undesirable", as I illustrated above, etc.  Once fealty was proven, the potential member had to be approved by the political department at his place of work, and by the chief of his region. 
 
Yeah, that would be a truly simple task for a common criminal.

[Boethius]

I asked my husband, who survived without arrest, despite being surrounded by informants, and a cat and mouse game with the KGB for about six years.  I asked him about Yanukovych's record.  His response (in part) -
 
Yanukovych allegedly served time for sexual assault in the 1960's.  The article of the Soviet criminal code for which an individual was convicted was emblazoned across his prison uniform.  I can guarantee you, Soviet criminals convicted of rape did not last in Soviet prisons.  In the late 1970's or early 1980's, the USSR started to put sex offenders in separate prisons, becuase they were killed, usually within a week of landing in a prison.  Nevertheless, according to a prosecutor looking into his record, he was convicted of robbery, not rape -
 
http://www.rg.ru/2005/07/13/yanukovich.html
 
Yanukovych went abroad in the 1970's, which means that his family records to before the Revolution were reviewed by the KGB, and he was deemed an "honourable member of the proletariat".  It was extremely unusual for Soviet citizens to travel to the West then, let alone someone convicted of a crime.   
 
ETA - Later, he told me "The USSR collapses.  A guy in Donetsk uses force to collect a fortune, buy a football team, and builds a sports arena.  He goes to a game, surrounded by bodyguards, and sits to watch a football match.  All of a sudden, he is blown up, together with hundreds of innocent spectators.  Shortly after that, Akhmetov steps into the vacuum.  And who happened to be at that match?

Obscure people will point to Yanukovych's criminal record and shout 'Tut tut', without looking at the whole picture.  Look at information that is being released today from the East (he means Eastern Ukraine).  It is not a coincidence that information from 2 decades ago is slowly making its way into the press now.

Everything points to Yanukovych being a former member of the KGB."