May 14, 2007
So, is the Orange Revolution fading to some kind of pale peach?
Ukraine seems to be at some kind of juncture between a tragedy of rising expectations and a stolid retrenchment in the good old days.
One of the problems for President Victor Yushchenko is that the Orange Revolution brought in taxes. The business community is taxed. This gets in the way of doing business! Another problem is that he talked in abstractions – voters wanted their pensions to go up. Soviet believers are severely disillusioned by modernism in its Ukrainian form. There is no guaranteed housing (as there was under the USSR). Pensions don’t cover rentals (400 hryvnias a month, including utilities – about $80).
The suicide rate is high among pensioners. They are prone to depression—which generally remains untreated—and alcoholism. The benefits they were promised, and worked for all their lives, have not been delivered. The evils they struggled against (say, capitalism) have brought a mixed bag of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll along with multinational corporations and a widening income gap. The very rich, in the former USSR, are very rich--a sad contrast to the old women who are hired to sweep (yes) the yards after winter, to collect bits of garbage, to sweep the sidewalks in front of a business of the winter’s dust and cigarette butts.
The just-under-60 set (our, ahem, contemporaries) is collecting money in trams, while they can still balance themselves in the lurching and sideways motion of these effective, efficient relics of the 60s.
The less literate are selling eggs or herbs, salads or underwear at the market. Cold, sometimes despondent, they stand for hours for a dollar or two in daily sales. There is a persistent rumor that the women begging with cups near the market are controlled by the Mafia. That they are not really poor. They are organized. They give half of what they collect to their “bosses”. When I suggested that the Mafia has no interest in small enterprises, and that they need a higher profit, here is the argument: “Those women can take in up to 15 hryvnias a day!” That’s about $3. I put this rumor in the category of an urban legend, a holdover from Soviet days when poverty had to be explained away by things like dissolute character, or underhanded deeds, or lassitude. There is no poverty in the Communist system.
Even during the first of three major famines, in 1921 (others were the deliberate starvation of Ukrainians in 1931-1933 by Stalin, and the post-WWII starvation in 1947), starving people did not complain, and bureaucrats would not have listened to complaints. People starved to death for about 18 months before international aid was received “from the United States, and others, which did help some.” To notice that the system wasn’t working must have been dangerous. Hungry residents in some towns did, however, riot, while they still had the energy to do so.
Modern scarcities, therefore, evoke deep fears. There was nothing on the shelves to buy for several years in the 1990s. Independence in 1991, and “wild capitalism”, and “democracy” were to blame. Those who could afford to do so, went to Poland or Moscow to get simple foods, necessities, and brought them back here by train. A few years ago, armed struggles between the Russian Mafia, the Dnipro Mafia and the Kiev Mafia erupted into a rash of brutal killings and an attempt to take over this city’s enormous central market with a private militia of enforcers, who stormed the place with guns – and there were deaths in that raid.
The city does not pretend to control this situation, in fact, someone in the local government is having his/her pockets lined for the hard work of looking away. Of all things to “privatize” – the market where the babushkas sell a few cups of peanuts? This means that entrepreneurship has a natural brake (protection money). When a person tries to begin a business, he or she pays protection money (which, in the end, did not really protect them). In fact, many of the vendors are paid to sit in a stall all day. These vendors don’t really care whether you buy from their stall or not – they may not even look up when you begin looking at their wares. In this period, bankers were shot point blank through their car windows. Contracted murders were common in the streets.
The oligarchs (wealthy, powerful, and manipulative) are the saviors of the desperate economic situation of the 1990s. In the view of people here, uncontrolled capitalism was an enormous failure. That is what led to empty shelves. In the absence of government regulation, oversight or control, the oligarchs “had to” step in, and now there is a generalized and centralized (and sub-legal) organization to the economy.
When I ask what brought on the Orange Revolution, economic disaster and an adherence to Soviet power politics are the conditions people here mention.
Today, the exigencies the majority felt in 2004 cannot be easily articulated. The Ukrainian constitution is on paper, but it is not widely available, it has not been read by many, and it is even less well understood. Most voters I talk with believe it has become a political football, and therefore, it will be revised to suit the political party with the loudest voice and the deepest pockets. The political horizons of the country are unclear. Ukrainian people, Ukrainian nation. Sovereignty and borders. Beyond that, the discussion gets fuzzy. Is nationhood simply a matter of borders and an army to maintain them? Is there more to it? Stay tuned.
LBG
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