Kiev: Modernity And Greed Can Upset An Outpost Of The Empire

KIEV, Ukraine -- The USSR used to rule fourteen republics, divided into many non-Russian speaking peoples, always indignant that Mother Russia should turn out to be a brute with a huge moustache and a liking for killing – mass killing wherever feasible.

Kiev, Ukraine - Independence Square
Of these non-Russian nations, the biggest and most nationally conscious was Ukraine. In 1982 her population was already 70 million. Under both the tsars, and later the Politburo, Ukraine drew special attention, usually of the grisliest kind.

Even under modern conditions, with tsars long assassinated and Stalin and Lenin in their mausoleums, Ukraine is virtually divided into west and east.

The West stretches from Kiev westwards towards the Polish border. It used to form part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was more ‘europeanized’.

In the East, where the countrymen have lived for centuries under the thumbs of Russian tsars, and if they are religious at all, it is Orthodox.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘end’ of communist rule (most of today’s politicians were members of the Party once) Ukraine has become free to hold democratic elections and become as rich as everybody else – not necessarily through honest toil.

Westerners have come from the USA, and from the rest of Europe, not to mention Japan and China and India, to join in the bean feast, and in many cases honest toil has not been their guiding inspiration either.

Make a very quick million bucks and get out is more like it.

In Ukraine, you could be a tall, spotty youth with a backpack and a Wisconsin accent who showed up in Kiev and lived under a bridge for a short while.

Then you cornered a positive source of income in an otherwise unused hole in the markets, and within ten years you find yourself spotless, dressed by Savile Row, with three dachas and this year’s Bentley Continental.

Your huge fortune might come from a media empire publishing neo-liberal economic news and forecasts. Your magazines and cheap pamphlets get their facts from The Economist and the Wall Street Journal.

You could have been Robert Fletcher, an American who became a ‘millionaire’s mentor’, instructing Ukrainians how to get rich quick for huge fees. He published a magazine too, called, with promising grammar – The Rich’s Club.

He went too far, tried to get out of the country on a false passport and got banged up.

In Kiev, the Catholic religion has been mostly replaced by ‘markets-and-mass-consumption’. As a result, what appeared to be growth and development has been enormous – and a catastophe.

Unlike the West, Ukraine has not enough watchdog financial journalists publishing advice in a daily column; there is hardly enough watchdog media; where are the American or British armies of eagle-eyed lawyers expert in dragging potential marketeers from court to court wrapped in a mile of red tape?

Ukraine’s elite are mostly coarse ex-peasants who were there first, with their armament factories, and their franchise to sell Kalashnikovs.

Kiev, that is ancient Kiev, is fast vanishing beneath a grotesque building boom, turning what Russians used to refer to as their ‘most pleasant big city’ into a brick and cement jungle of ill-designed skyscrapers and easily collapsable blocks of flats.

As the court system doesn’t work – never has – any young tycoon with good connections in the town hall can find himself a nice, large, unused car park and convert it into a low neighbourhood of little charm, with a, unattractive but money-spinning skycraper of a mere 26 storeys in the middle.

As the chief status symbol of the newly rich is a motorcar, hundreds of thousands of German, Japanese, Scandinavian and home grown cars now litter the streets and create traffic havoc.

The less intelligent, Slivovitz-fuelled citizens tend to drive down pavements in SUVs. Most citizens of Kiev carry a handy handkerchief fixed to their nose in downtown Kiev, where air pollution nearly rivals Peking’s.

This dark picture of what is happening in Ukraine is not relieved by the fact that city politics here is as corrupt as any other Eastern European state.

The get-rich-quick merchants are hand in glove with city hall, especially where building interests are involved. Kiev’s real estate is now as expensive as in Madrid, Rome or London.

One of the negative results of this is that small-time try-your-luckers cannot now exist – as they did at the beginning of the boom.

Prices are so high they cannot live here and look for the quick buck.

The chap who wants to open a small shop selling bric-a-brac and cheap jewellery can’t because he can’t afford the rent. In this way street life is dominated by huge cafeteria chains, fast-food outlets and clothing shops by the dozen.

As a leading journalist said recently, “the result is a streetscape of increasing mediocrity – at Paris prices”.

Older citizens tend to look on all this zing and muck with resignation. The average middle-aged Ukrainians spent all their lives - and their parents before them - in the Soviet queue for bread and never entered a car.

Younger Ukrainians are frustrated by the lack of superstructure, higher education, and opportunity. As one put it, “who wants to live in what is now a less than viable city, a laboratory for the imposition of the money culture?”

And yet, and yet, in the West, Ukraine is seen as a great success.

As the people struggle through another general election without actually killing each other, Westerners crow about capitalist wonders.

In Brussels the Euro-Deputies clap Ukrainians on the back and praise their ‘maturity’ and ‘evolving democracy’: anything to keep the capital flowing, in and out of the state.

How interesting it is that whenever a liberal or populist Ukrainian politician suggests re-nationalising industrial property robbed by oligarchs, Brussels and Washington shriek, “hands off!” as if an immediate regression to Stalinism has been proposed.

Younger Ukrainians are leaving the country by the thousands, fed up with the money culture, and bewildered because the values they might have been taught at school have disappeared.

They are surrounded by new crime and old bad air. Who can blame them?

Europe’s only problem is finding room for yet another dissatisfied immigrant from Eastern Europe.

In London you can now hardly find an Englishman. In Madrid and Barcelona it is almost better to know Bulgarian or Chechen than Spanish or Catalan.

Source: Tenerife News