One Year Ago Today in Ukraine: Protests Against The Budget-Worker Scandal

One year ago today, on November 17. 2004, people in many parts of Ukraine held meetings and protests against what became known as the "budget worker scandal." The presidential administration--probably Viktor Medvedchuk himself--had the day before unleashed a plan that was so obviously an attempt to falsify upcoming run-off election that protests broke out in various parts of the country. The authorities ordered all people whose wages were paid from the state budget to turnover their voter registration cards and passports to their managers, who would vote for them in the upcoming run-off election between Yushchenko and Yanukovych on Nov. 21. Authorities claimed that the rationale behind the order was to make it easier for state workers to attend election day festivities. It was later uncovered that managers of state run industries were also instructed not only to vote for Yanukovych on behalf of their workers, but also to organize election day parties--a kind of screen. This is indeed how cynical Medvedchuk and his cohorts were (none of whom, including Medvedchuk, mind you, will ever be prosecuted, it now seems. . .)

I was in Pidhajtsi at the time, and I recall watching an interview on the evening of November 16, the day before town hall meetings and pickets were held, with a manager of a state run plant on 1+1, the state TV channel that up until the OR was mostly a shameless propaganda forum for Yanukovych et al. This manager, in the state of Lutsk, was just talking away, saying mostly nonsensical things, and I recall how he reminded me of Leonid Kravchuk, who if you know what I mean, is a master at talking, and talking a lot, while saying absolutely nothing. This manager had this slippery-slick feel to him, but his cunning was not quite on par with Kravchuk. To paraphrase, I remember him saying something like, "You know, its natural; there are some parties planned for that day that people want to get to, and people want to be with their families on election day, etc. Some of my people even asked me for this favor. . ." Really? He was a really bad liar. And then I recall some interviews with workers at his plant, who were all camera shy or were too frightened to say anything real. This was still pre-OR, mind you.

I was stunned. I recall looking at Oksana, who I have featured on this blog a number of times, asking her once again the same question I had asked so many other times, in reaction to the shenanigans of Ukraine's authorities and oligarchs: Is this real? She said, "Stefan, this is our. . .your Ukraine. Can you believe it?"

The next day, Oksana's father, Hryhori Kolodnytskyj (from now on, Hryts K), who is my father's cousin, came bursting into the house at lunch time to tell us that there would be a town hall meeting in the very same Narodnyj Dim that I wrote about here last week, and that was featured in last week's Ukrainian Weekly. The meetings was being held in order to discuss what action could be taken to stop this obvious plan to falsify the elections. Hryts K, by-the-way, was head of the local branch of the Fatherland Party of Yulia Tymoshenko; he later organized four buses to and fro Kyiv during the OR, and spent himself more than 10 days in the capital. He also spent the previous summer canvassing for Yushchenko in and around the Pidhajtsi area (and I went with him on occassion). Hryts has a long, personal history of fighting against corruption and authoritarianism in Ukraine, a history that includes a run-in with the KGB in the 1970s that left him in a hospital for a month. (The OR did not happen in a vaccuum, and the US did not make it happen.)

These are still-photos I have taken from my video footage of that meeting in Pidhajtsi.


This is Petro Dmitrovych Kalynjak speaking. I wrote about him here just the other day. He opened the meeting by making a call that something be done to stop this attempt at falsifying the elections. If you read what I wrote about him, you will see how there is continuity between the events of the OR and those of Ukrainian history in general. Continuity. No Vacuum. The US did not suck up a bunch of dimwitted villagers and unthinking city dwellers into unwittingly doing its bidding. . .

I forget this fellow's name, but he is reading to the assembled the order that budget workers should turn over their right to vote to their managers.

People got excited as he finished his speech, in the course of which he had said he has a list of names of people who already had turned in their registration and passports. He did not want to read out the names, but people in the crowd started shouting that they wanted to know the names.

The man standing at the podium, by the way, is Mr. Metyk. I forgot his first name, but he is a linguist who speaks, of the Slavic languages, Ukrainian and Russian of course, but also Polish, Czech, and Slovak; then he also speaks very good English and German, as well as French and Spanish. I chatted with him frequently in my days in Pidhajtsi in the two of his 7 extra languages that I know other than English and Ukrainian--i.e., in German and Spanish--in which he was much more fluent than I. He's never been west of Ukraine. He has a gift for accuracy, whereas I have a gift for making lots of mistakes and still being understood in the languages I know in addition to English (I have knowledge also of Latvian and Russian). This includes my Ukrainian, which nonetheless is becoming better and better all the time. . . Mr. Metyk is dieing of a heart condition for which he needs medicines that he has no money to buy, and no family abroad to help him out. His speech on this day was about the dismal state of medical care and of the infrastructure in general in Ukraine, and on the need to prevent Yanukovych from winning. Read here what I have written about the infrastructure in Ukraine.

This woman standing in the background wanted to know the names so that she could go and picket their houses.

This is Hryts K speaking. He made a call for everyone present (maybe 200-300) to join him in a picket at the police station and at the county administration. Immediately after the meeting, he and others proceeded to the pickets. The footage of their picket in front of the police station (a large # of police had already turned over their right to vote) is on cassette #11, the only one missing from my box of footage from last year in Ukraine. I have searched for it frantically all day. Where the hell is it?!

Many cities, towns, and villages had similar responses. The uproar was so great that a day or two later, Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada or Supreme Council, passed a resolution that aimed at preventing managers from voting on behalf of their workers, as well as providing some provisions that aimed at making it more difficult for people to abuse the system to vote more than once, as they had done in the first round. However, the resolution was not binding; I forget the legalities of the whole thing, but recall only that the resolution was not passed into law before the election.

Although authorities were probably still able to use this method to falsify a good portion of the votes, in general people felt emboldened not to go along with the plan by the protests and the parliamentary resolution. Budget-workers, by the way, make up a large portion of Ukraine's work force, from those working within the government bureaucracy to those in state-run industries, especially in the publicly-privately run utilities, etc. The electricity plants that supply the Pidhajtsi region are partially owned by Surkis, one of Ukraine's wealthy and powerful oligarchs, and partly by the state; who do you think the managers would have been voting for?

I recall that all of this made me feel, at the time, two things: 1) I now felt, along with everyone else, absolutely certain that authorities were planning to repeat all their pitiful shenanigans of the first round of voting on Nov. 21; and 2), more importantly, it made me feel that this time, Ukrainians just might fight for their future.

Read here an article I had published in a local Minneapolis newspaper on this day that protests against the budget worker scandal broke out. . .

And one last thought: One of those bastards writing for the Guardian from their armchairs (not from the ground in Ukraine), either John Laughland or Jonathan Steele, had the gumption to, not just speculate, but to confidently claim, that Yushchenko would have done all the same things to falsify the elections had he been in Yanukovych's place. Oh really? I think that the writer (either Laughland or Steele) is himself cynical enough, on par with Medvedchuk, the mastermind of the whole falsification regime, to have done the same in the same shoes; however, when it comes to Yushchenko, although there is much to criticize him for, this claim makes no sense at all, when you look at his personality and personal history.

This makes me think of the statement made by a taxi driver I had in Kyiv this past trip. His name was Bohdan, and he had lived in the US for 12 years and spoke excellent English. He asked me what I was doing in Ukraine, and I told him that I was making a documentary that was in part an answer to the critics of the OR who claim that, more or less, Ukrainians were the unwitting stooges of Western machinations. He asked me what a "stooge" was, and after I explained, he said back to me, "Well, I think that such people are the stooges of their own ideologies. . ." He was an educated fellow who had read Western philosophy and had trained to be an engineer oh so long ago, another one of those fabulously interesting cabbies I have shared time with in Ukraine (another was an anthropologist cabbie in Ivano-Frankivsk who talked on and on about the castles of Halychyna. . .).

I begged him to let me film him saying this, but he declined my repeated requests by saying that he was just a taxi driver. . .

On the Road to a Documentary, III: Tradition

Part III: Tradition

(still from video)

"With us, corruption is a tradition. It is deeply embedded. It is a sickness like leprosy that eats away slowly at the body, and most of Ukraine has been sick with corruption for a very long time. Where there was Russian rule before the Soviet Union, it is even worse. But the communists were terrible for the whole country. They brought corruption here [to Western Ukraine] to the point that it is a terrible problem here too. It will take time for things to change. They didn’t [change] after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we needed a revolution to get things moving finally in the right direction. We are truly now in the evolutionary phase. The Orange Revolution was a break with the past, and about what people say about Yushchenko today, that he is just the same as the old powers. . .I think he has done the right thing; it is good that people who continued to work in the old way, for their own interests, are out of the government now [from earlier comments, it is clear that he meant both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko]. Ukraine is changing, but it will be a long and slow process. . .”

-Petro Dmitrovych Kalynjak, official in the county government of Pidhajtsi; also, was head of Yushchenko’s campaign headquarters during the election and is current head of the local branch of the People’s-Union Our Ukraine (Yushchenko’s political party) in Pidhajtsi. He has been an active part of the anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy opposition movement since at least 1998, but he also played an active role in the same movement in the late 80s and early 90s. That is, the Soviet state was also dominated by a click of corrupt and authoritarian politicians, and opposition to corruption and authoritarianism, be it of the communist or post-communist variety, has a long history in Ukraine.

Mr. Kalynjak is an example of the continuity between then and now

The OR did not happen in a vacuum. The US did not come here with big money and flashy PR tricks to dupe simpleton villagers and unthinking city folk into voting for Yushchenko and into unwittingly participating in a “revolution” that served mostly American interests.

What about what Ukrainians themselves wanted? Whose interests were served? The answers are not as black and white as the critics want them to be. . .

The question critics of US foreign policy should ask about the revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Ukraine is this: What is to be done when the US for its own geopolitical reasons actually sides with the people—i.e., the poor and the critical mass of the angry—in their struggle against corruption and authoritarianism? The answer should not involve denying the authenticity of those people’s movements, or begrudging the grassroots activists of a poor nation for accepting whatever money they could get hold of.

The OR was not about Yushchenko. It was about a whole lot more, and it is making a positive difference in Ukraine today.

On the Road to a Documentary, II

Readers of this blog already know that I am working on production of a documentary on the Orange Revolution. It now has a title, Whose Revolution was It? The Orange Revolution One Year Later. It is intended to show some of the reasons Ukrainians had for supporting the OR, how it was organized, how it did not spring from a vacuum, and the role played by foreign governments in the making of the OR. Thus it goes into some detail about the history of resistance to authoritarianism and corruption in Ukraine, and will spend a good deal of time discussing the obstacles that the opposition movement had in organizing and motivating a mass movement against the oligarchy, a very key question. The doc was mostly conceptualized as an answer to those who have criticized the OR as either having been mostly organized through the US, or more simply, that it merely and unwittingly served the interests of the US and the West in general.

But it also will be easily viewed merely as a reminder of why people in Ukraine finally had had enough with the corrupt post-Soviet oligarchy, and of what they were struggling for in the first place last year.

I want to have it done in time for the parlaimentary elections, and there will be both English and Ukrainian versions.

So far I have interviewed professors from Lviv and Kyiv; activists, students, journalists, government officals, and businesspeople from Pidhajtsi, Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, and elsewhere; ordinary people from various places; editors of the journal Ji based in Lviv; etc. I hope to go back to do more interviews soon, after the Holiday season, depending on financial resources. . .

So I will be posting little aphoristic pieces, with photos and stills from video, on this blog as I begin the post-production editing and piecing together of the film. These will be meditations as I piece the doc together. . .

This, by the way means that I am back in Minneapolis and am working with a Canadian friend with Ukrainian heritage (from Zhovkva, near L'viv) on the editing.


On the Road to a Documentary, Part II: Neglect

The Collapsed Top Two Floors of the Local Gymnasium in Pidhajtsi

Read here for the accompanying text

Photos: A Wedding in Pidhajtsi

I just woke up for some reason, and can't seem to get back to sleep, so I am posting these in the meantime. . .

Something politically neutral about Pidhajtsi: Photos of a wedding last September. Enjoy.

The wedding band and procession: There is always a procession through town from the bride's home to the Church for the wedding ceremony. The band can also play at the reception, but there is also the typical synthizer-clad singer available for hire in Pidhajsti, too. . .

Bride and groom, now wedded, throwing candy after the ceremony in the Chruch.

The bus to the reception in a great restaurant in a village not far from Pidhajtsi. Also, this bus this part of Pidhajtsi's connection to the greater world, as it runs daily to Lviv.

How the table typically looks for any major event. . .

Above and below: Becoming a "woman. . ." Traditionally, it takes getting married. . .

Since this was the wedding of Oksana's best friend, here they are dancing together. . .

Ukrainian Weekly Article about Pidhajtsi!

The Ukrainnian-American diaspora and English-language publication The Ukrainian Weekly has a piece about Pidhajtsi on its front page this week! The article is about efforts to restore the town's Cultural Center (I prefer to translate Narodnyj Dim as Cultural Center) and a plan whereby the State would pay for 95% of the project--locals will have to come up with 5% of the cost for the renovation. Read the full article here.

Here is my response to the article that I am sending (in a more edited and scaled-down version) to the weekly:

I was very pleased to see the article, published on the front page of your paper, about the town of Pidhajtsi in the state of Ternopil. I was born in Minneapolis, the grandson of Maria and Michael Iwaskewycz, who were born in the village of Sil’tse near to Pidhajtsi, and who funded the construction of a new Catholic Church in their village and another in Pidhajtsi itself. I was in Ukraine from the spring of 2004 to the spring of 2005 and experienced first hand the Orange Revolution, and I recently returned for another three months to work on a documentary entitled, Whose Revolution was It?: The Orange Revolution One Year Later.

The infrastructural problems in Ukraine are vast and bewildering, and the state of decay of the Cultural Center in Pidhajtsi is a case in point. It is very good that money is being raised to improve this building; and although it is natural that people should want to see improvements to public places such as this center and to Churches, there are many more pressing infrastructural needs in Pidhajtsi. That is, Pidhajtsi offers an even more significant, and terrible, example of these problems of infrastructural neglect and decay that so plague much of Ukraine: Last year, just before the first round of presidential elections, a portion of the top two floors of the three-story gymnasium collapsed. Only pure luck determined that this happened on a Saturday, with no students in the building. Some reporters from the Western Ukrainian press came to Pidhajtsi at the time to make this point, asking: What if? What if it had happened on Monday? This of course was already on most people’s minds in Pidhajtsi, and at the time many explained to me that, “We know our buildings are old; who does anything for them?” Any viewer watching the report in Ukraine could easily have recognized in this an example of the general neglect everywhere in Ukraine.

Post-Soviet authorities in Ukraine have been utterly careless regarding the people and neglectful of their duties to them. A huge gulf has separated the narod (the people) and the government functionaries, and it is the same at the local level as it is at the top levels. Money has been allocated for infrastructural repair and maintenance, but has disappeared. Roads are ordered repaired, but only the bare minimum is done, as a chunk of the allocated funds lands in someone’s pocket. The roads in Pidhajtsi are just short of a total catastrophe, and people know it. Some weeks before the Orange Revolution, I met an old man walking down a steep and deeply rutted road late on a night with no moon, and the street lamps are never lit at night: Is it due to budget cuts, lack of funds, or corruption? Who knows. He was having a difficult time managing, and as I began to help him along, he thanked me and complained bitterly that we should go together to take the city mayor, “by the balls until he does something [to fix the road].” A very common question in my months in Pidhajtsi was, “So, what do you think of our roads!?” Occasionally one can spot a bumper sticker, usually placed on Western-made cars, that reads “I WANT TO GOT BACK TO EUROPE.” Ukrainians joke about their roads because they know their roads are a joke.

People were, and still are, angry. Water pumps and pipes, electric power lines and transformers, etc., all remain old, worn-down, and are prone to breaking down. Many times in Pidhajtsi, both before and after the revolution, there was no water on our street, either because a number of people had not paid their bills and the water was deliberately shut-off (the jointly, privately-publicly run utilities still assign collective responsibility), or because a pump had broke. This was the case just this past August and September; for at least a third of this time no water ran to houses. People had to haul water home from public wells.

In Western Ukraine especially, the whole of the infrastructure chugs along with the help of band-aids and knee braces, and only the occasional cup of coffee keeps these senior citizens running. They should all be retired and younger ones put in their place.

The Orange Revolution has been hailed as the birth of a Ukrainian civil society that fills in the gulf between the people and the government, and Yushchenko promised massive infrastructural improvements. Is this true? Are things changing?

Things after the OR are going like this: There also is a plan for a massive road improvement project in the Pidhajtsi county, but, just as with the Cultural Center, people have to put up a percentage of the funds in donations before Kyiv will send the rest of the money.

Some of the people I talked to in Pidhajtsi approved of the plan, arguing that this is a way of teaching people that they must share some of the responsibility for the state of things in Pidhajtsi and for improving them; others complain that this is just a part of a growing list of betrayals of revolution promises. Such people feel that oligarchs should be made to pay for the infrastructure that they have been neglecting, and that immunity for local officials only guarantees that the money locals would raise and that would come from Kyiv will be stolen once again. To my mind, it is not an either/or question; both are right. Ukrainians should learn to take more responsibility themselves and take some of it away from the State, but the oligarchs should be forced to pay up, too. Remember that Ukraine technically should not be a country of poor people. Recall that Pinchuk and Akhmetov are Forbes Billionaires while 55% of the population lives below the international poverty line and suffer 25-50% unemployment rates, depending on region and season. And given that corruption remains a large problem especially in the rural areas, the law on local autonomy is nothing but absurd.

About Pidhajtsi's Cultural Center, I have enjoyed many a concert at that Cultural Center with many a fellow Pidhajechany, most recently on last Oct. 14, or UPA day. This Cultural Center should always be remembered as the place where people met, nearly a year ago in mid-November, to discuss what became known as the "budget-worker scandal." A plan was hatched by the presidential administration to vote in the second round of last year's election debacle on behalf of all those in Ukraine whose wages are paid by the State budget. The day after the order came that all budget workers should turn over their voting registration cards and passports to their managers, who would in turn vote on their behald on Nov. 21, meetings and pickets broke out all over Ukraine. State officials and managers of State-run businesses claimed that they intended only to make it easier for budget workers to attend election day festivities. In the Cultural Center in Pidhajtsi, an angry group of people gathered to denounce the order and to shout down the names of people known already to have turned in their documents. After the meeting, angry pickets were held in front of the local police station and of the county administration buildings. Due to similar expressions of outrage all across the country, the presidential administration was forced to back down on this method of falsifying the election. However, as one well knows, they had plenty other, equally-as-obvious, tricks up their sleeves.

That something is being done to improve the Cultural Center in Pidhajtsi is, despite the above concerns, indeed a good example of the positive difference the Orange Revolution is having in Ukraine. Most of all, however, the people of Pidhajtsi should be applauded for raising 5% of the funds, and for taking the good-natured step of trusting that the money will be used for its intended purpose. I hope they will not be let down.

Photos of the collasped gymansium in Pidhajtsi, as it still stood one year later this fall.



One of the culprits causing the occassional power-outtage:

A typical road in Pidhajtsi:

This photo is a still from some of my video footage; somehow I never managed to photograph the roads! This is Pidhajsti, and in the background is the dome of the Catholic Church for which my grandfather, who passed away three years ago this November, was the primary founder.

New Links Section: Folk Culture Corner

I should have put up these links ealier, but anyway. . .I have added a new links section called "Folk Culture Corner." So far there are only three. . .I will add more later. These are links to groups of my own homeboys and gals in Minneapolis, where there is a very active community of people dedicated to folk culture performance. Ethnic Dance Theatre is a professional ensemble composed of a dance troupe and orchestra, and which collaborates closely with the Mila Vocal Ensemble. Mila used to be the Ethnic Dance Theater Choir before they became their own entity in order to pursue a very active perfomance schedule of their own.

I have performed as a dancer off and on with EDT for the better part of 6 years (for 4 years solidly, then off and on for the last 2 1/2), and if you are around the Minneapolis area this winter, you will be able to spot me in EDT's folk-dance version of The Nutcracker. By-the-way, I left Ukraine last Th for Riga, and fly tomorrow back to Minneapolis to jump into a month of rehearsals for the show (they have been rehearsing for some time now. . .).

Skeptical about such a thing? A folk-dance version of the Nutcracker? Well, I can tell you this: It is one of the best things this company has ever produced. Think about it: The whole second half after the intermission is nothing but folk dances, and how much more interesting when they are presented as real folk dances by professional dancers and musicians dedicated to authenticity, and not as character ballet (my biases being made obvious here, as usual. . .)?

Also, the setting for the whole story works well for a folk dance troupe: The first half in the EDT version is set in a Franconian (German) bourgeois's home, during which the guests perform a Franconian contra dance from the late 18th century (a dance which is from the EDT repetoire; all the dances in the show are from the company's repetoire). Drosselmeier is returning from Transylvania with a Hungarian Nutcracker doll, and the show ends with a big and rather stunning Hungarian, boot-slappin' and turning, dance (there is also a Hungarian solo thrown-in in the dream sequence as the Nutcracker comes to life . . .).

The fight scene is between Cossacks and Caucasians (North Ossetians, to be exact. . .), who during the fight, dance in the styllistically appropriate manner. Perhaps this all-too-much reproduces traditional antagonisms that should not be reproduced, but EDT's mission is:

"To foster understanding and awareness of world cultures through the re-creation and presentation of traditional ethnic dance and music. In a society where racial tensions are prevalent, we believe it is vital to promote and project the inherent beauty, dignity, and integrity of all peoples. We believe that ethnic music and dance are true affirmations of human artistic expression. Many of the cultures which are represented in our programs are currently in great conflict. Through our performances, we acknowledge the inherent beauty and dignity of all peoples."

EDT has long been very successful at working toward its mission or promoting cross-cultural understanding. For example, just after 911 the company produced a show called "The Silk Road," which was its way of combating the rising tide of anti-Muslim feeling in the US; it also has done an all-Balkan show in times during which the Balkans are looked upon as a savage, barely-European backwater. . .

Well, anyway, back to the Nutcracker, the Snow Queen sequence is set to a very enchanting Russian choral arrangment, after which EDT gets to perform in the second half one of its own Chinese pieces and an Arabic piece, etc.

EDT, as well as Mila, and also the folk orchestra OBI (Orkestar bez Ime, from the Bulgarian) linked in the section, are dedicated to making their performances as authentic as possible. The director of EDT for the last 31 or so years has spent the same amount of time traveling to and fro Eastern Europe to study, as have a number of the other dancers, musicians, and singers in each of these outfits, many of whom have also studied in other parts of the world, such as Central Asia and the Middle East. All three groups are linked to each other by way of sharing performers and ideas and interests. And OBI, as a folk orchestra, bucks the trend of so many folksy, eastern-Europeany groups in the US: that is, they aren't some kind of goofy, hip or hippy-ish, fusion of various Eastern European styles with American rock and rockabilly. They actually care to play in idiomatically correct ways, study with native players, and strive to be as much like the real wedding bands that play in Eastern Europe and elsewhere as possible. This is also true of EDT and Mila, whose members also train with native directors, and who over the years have had native performers join their ranks, either as guests at concerts or full fledged members of the company, and also have had trained members of various diasporas in Minneapolis joining their ranks (for example, from the Latvian and Ukrainian diaspora, hence my daughter!).

So check out the sites. See a show when you can: EDT mostly performs in Minneapolis and at festivals in Europe, while Mila and OBI can be found wandering about the US. Mila also is becoming a frequent guest on Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion show.

You can find samples of the EDT orchestra's, Mila's, and OBI's music on the sites.

And one other thing: what a joy it was for me that this time in Ukraine, I finally began making some contacts with the community of people dedicated to authenticity. . .to village-based authenticity, that is. . .

Music and dance are my first, and perhaps only true, passions. . .

A Literary Note on Henry Miller from one Ukrainian's Perspective. . .

I brought with me a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer on this trip, for two reasons: to reread and see what I liked about it oh so much so many (12? 15?) years ago when I first read it, and to share it--this "shocking," "dirty" little book--with Oksana (in the pictures below), who speaks and reads English nearly fluently.

I was reading along but this time I found the book, well, sometimes interesting, but mostly trite. It really once appealed to my adolescent mentality, inspite of the misogyny and anti-Semitism, which I remember bothering me then (but it bothered me much more now). This time reading it, I had to keep reminding myself that it was written in the 1930s, that few had ever written like this or of such things, that in its day it certainly was not trite as it was a modernist reaction to the stuffy artisty of people like Henry James, a rejection of the realist literature, that I, in fact actually like a great deal more than Miller's (or Kerouac's) prose, etc.

So this time, Miller seemed like a hack and James a real artist. I couldn't really get into it this time, and handed it off to Oksana long before finishing it. Am I getting old?

Well, Oksana read it, was intrigued by it (the language and scandalous themes weren't shocking for her, though; she is quite modern), and when she finished it, she summed up the book quite well by saying, "Here, it was interesting, but you can have that bastard back. . ."

Well said.

Yekhanurov and Lukashenka

Just some thoughts that I am wondering about these days, as I catch up on internet reading and the news about Ukraine (funny that while in Ukraine working on the doc just now, I was too busy to pay much attention to details about current events):

Is the new but hitherto rather weak-on-OR-promises Yushchenko-Yekhanurov team taking up the old hard line on a couple of things?

1) They said no more reprivatizations, but there are murmurings of that list of 70 once again after the success of the Kryvorizhstal process. . .

2) Tough talk on Russia from Yekhanurov: i. e., his suggestion that Russia would, if it entered the WTO first, have greater power to force Ukraine into an even greater neocolonial situation vis-a-vis Russia through economic means; see RFE (Radio Free Europe) articles here and here . . .

(But by-the-way, don't think I am a huge fan of Ukraine joining the WTO. The WTO is a deeply flawed institution in need of reform, away from a neoliberal, free-trade institution to a neo-social democratic, fair-trade one. It is the target of a serious challenge by a large and effective global movement struggling for just such a transformation; i.e., the WTO is the target of a struggle against how it is a mechanism for rigging the world economy for the benefit of mostly the elites of the northern and western hemispheres and for the southern and eastern elites that are their stooges. What this means is that I do support the idea of Ukraine joining it, and as a member, I hope that it will join the bloc of southern hemisphere countries that are struggling for more equitable trade between the south and north and east and west, and that walked out of the Cancun ministerial meeting in protest of northern and western hemisphere machinations. . .)

3) The post-OR hardline on Lukashenka is back, kind of, via Yekhanurov's comment on Nov. 1. . .see RFE here

I am happy about these harder line stances in general, but then unhappy that also, the post-OR tradition of one minister saying one thing and then another taking it back seems to have also returned, with Tarasyuk insisting that Yekhanurov meant no criticism of Lukashenka. . .RFE here

Of course I am frustrated with someone weakly saying to Lukashenka, "No, we didn't really mean it. . ."

My Own OR Retrospectives at Orange Dykun

From now until mid-January of next year, I will be playing around at my other blogger site (Orange Dykun) as well, posting the pieces that I sent to an email list-serve that I established in the course of my first ever stay in Ukraine (from June 2004 to February 2005) and in the course of the OR. The list grew from maybe 100 addresses of family, friends, and acquaitances to some 600 addresses, and judging from the comments from people that they were forwarding the pieces to others, I guess that well over 1,000 people at least recieved, if not read, them.

The pieces were loaded with typos and run-on sentences, etc., as my pieces here often are. I do little editing for my blog, and I am definitely the kind of writer that blathers away and then needs to go back and fix things up. But also, last year, I was writing so fast from internet clubs in various parts of Ukraine, as I wandered around the country to see with my own eyes what was going on in different parts of the country in the course of the OR. I often had to get on a bus somewhere soon, so I wrote what and how I could in short time periods. Oh well. Those uptight about spelling and grammar will be annoyed. So be it. But I think I will do some fixing-up of those pieces as I post them at Orange Dykun, and will sometimes add some more reflections, I guess. . .

As I catch up, I will post each piece one year from the original date that it was sent. I hope some of you will read over there, and comment. . .


Enjoy.

Stefan

Check Out Orange Dykun

I have finally started posting things over at my other blog, called Orange Dykun.

Posted there will be more of my communiques from the OR, and stuff I wrote about my impressions of life in Ukraine during my first stay in the country, from June 2004 to March 2005. I wrote these pieces to a list-serve that I established then, not knowing at the time how easy it is to get your own blog going.

What I posted over there today is something that I think sheds light on the current anxiety over Yushchenko's willingness to compromise with the oligarchs.

I will be posting more things over there as the 1st anniversary of the OR approaches. . .

On the Road to a Documentary

READ AGAIN the comments to the fist photo below, if you already have read this post: I added more text about corruption, nepotism, and meritocracy today, Oct. 23, 2005:

These are all stills taken from some of my video footage. If they turn out well here, I am going to have a new obsession. These are stills on the road to becoming part of a documentary. .

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Men Loading Sacks of Flour

This photo is from the local mill in Pidhajtsi. The mill was part of a factory complex in Soviet times that also included a preservatives section and bakery. In the early 90s, the managers ran the preservatives and bakery sections into the ground while enriching themselves, and when it they closed, the managers sold most of the equipment. More than a 100 people were put out of work. Lesja Kolodnytska, wife of my father's fist cousin Hryts, worked there and has not held a job since then.

There is an overabundance of such stories in rural Ukraine. The mill survived the closure, and the bakery has been re-opened, but the preservatives section never re-opened. The mill and bakery are privately run and the management would not let me in to film.

There also is a dairy factory in Pidhajtsi that was also run into the ground, after which it was bought by a private interest that would NOT let me film. I had an argument with the plant manager, a woman who I asked if she was not ashamed to be defending the plant's secrecy after the Orange Revolution was a push for transparency in government and business practices. . .Of course, the woman has a boss, too, but she would not even try asking her boss to let me in and do an interview. . .

I told one fellow I know in Pidhajtsi about this, and he said to me, "Hey, no worries, I have got a contact there. . ." Such statements are of huge significance in Ukraine (as it is in all poor countries with hugely corrupt governments and business practices): "I have a contact, a friend, a colleague. . .

MUCH MORE than they are in the West, contacts are very important here. Far more people get positions in business or government based on contacts here rather than their competence or meritbthan in the so-called West. The OR in part was the expression of a desire to change this system of nepotism into a system that is more soundly based on principles of a meritocracy.

IF YOU ARE NOT A FAN OF POLEMICIZING (i.e., of ranting about politics), SKIP AHEAD FROM HERE TO THE NEXT PHOTO.

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Imagine a continuum of how one gets jobs or positions of power or influence, with contacts on the one side and merit on the other. The people of every country in the world, whether the West or otherwise, rely upon a combination of contact and merit. The question is which takes precedence. In the West, one can say in general that merit has an advantage over connections/contacts, especially ideologically if not in actual practice. However, there are those places in the West that the need for contacts is especially strong, such as in the journalists' and academics' world.

In Ukraine, the obvious emphasis is on connections/contacts. You often can't even get an interview without a contact, and people in the past (i.e., pre-OR), and I am sure that they still do, often pay just to get an interview. Sometimes there is no interview. You will get a job somewhere just because some family member or colleague works where you want to and has influence. I have family who have jobs purely through these means, through connections. They did not have any experience with their profession before they took their specialized jobs. But they were family and they needed work. Unemployment, scarcity, poverty all lead precisely to nepotistic and kleptocratic systems, no matter how democratic they appear in form. (And unemployment, poverty and scarcity are the creations or symptoms of a political-economic system sick with corruption and abuse of power, since scarcity and poverty are human-made problems, human-made constructs, especially in a country as rich in labor and natural resources and tourist/historical destinations as Ukraine).

The OR is making a difference in all this, however, in the following way: People can invoke it (depending on region, I am sure) in tough situations when dealing with police, or secutiry, or officials, or in seeking an interview, or getting medical care, or in just correcting people's brutish and annoying public behavior, etc. If you run into a problem, you can say, "What was the OR about?" etc. I was waiting in line to buy a train ticket in Kyiv when someone cut into the front of the line and someone confronted her by saying, "Do you remember how we all behaved during the revolution?" I had a problem getting into the Ivan Franko University in Lviv to do an interview (with the renowned Prof. Yaroslav Hrytsak). They have security guards who check IDs as you enter the school. This is a good thing in general, but I told the guard that I needed to get in to do an interview with Prof. Hrytsak, and that I didn't know that I would need a pass, and that I could not call him as I only had his home number, so could you please either escort me to his office or just let me? The guard sent me to the security desk where the other guards sat on their asses and told me, "We don't know him, we won't let you in, we can't help." I was so mad. I said, "What, is Ukraine still a wild country or did it become a more friendly place after the Revolution? Either let me in to go find his office, or walk with me, and if you don't want to do any of the asking to find, I'll hold your hand through the building and do the asking myself. . ." To which the captain stood up startled and told the guard at the gate to let me in!

There are more of such stories from others, but anyway, this would make the subject of a great anthropological study: How mere invocation of the memory of the OR is making a difference, however small.

Of course, one encounters plenty of such unhelpfulness in the US as well, but there is much more of it here. And once again, in connection to all of this I can talk about why I am so against the Bush administration. In addition to systematically eliminating hard won guarantees for transparency in government and in business through the Patriot Acts and the phony excuse of terrorism, it is one hell of a nepotistic and clannish (business clannish, mind you) administration. For example, was it mere coincidence that during the first Bush administration that the son of Collin Powel was made Chair of the FCC, at the very moment that Clear Channel, a Texas-based multimedia GIANT and Bush campaign supporter was pushing for further media deregulation along with Rupert Murdoch, the arch conservative media mogul, all against a massive grassroots campaign against further deregulation? Or how about Halliburton, whose CEO was VP Dick Cheney, being one of a number of Bush-friendly companies and campaign supporters to get no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq, and which is a company that has overcharged the federal government, i.e., which has overcharged US taxpayers.

Didn't Ukrainians just begin a fight against politician-tycoons getting rich on public revenues? Didn't they just begin a fight for more transparency? Did they not just begin a fight against nepotism? And the US is going in the opposite direction. . .

And oh, once again, a message to all those activists in the West who think the OR (and the rebellions in Georgia and Yugoslavia) was a slick, postmodern coup led by the US: Perhaps activists should either pay more attention to what is going on in the US, or if they want to talk about Eastern Europe or the post Soviet world, they should get out of their armchairs and come here and talk to people on the ground, as they do in relation to people's struggles in Latin America!

I would be very happy to be any fellow progressive activist's guide if one should decide to come here and become more personally familiar with people's struggles on the ground in Eurasia!

Now, here's a thought: Observation or study of the countries of the post Soviet world, whose peoples are in the main nowhere near to as immiserated or impoverished as are the masses in countries such a India or those of subsaharan Africa, may just suggest what the critical mass of poverty and scarcity is for nepotism to take the advantage over merit. No doubt, there is a huge social sciences dealing with such questions in the abstract if not dealing specifically with the post-Soviet world, actually. . .surrounding such terms as collective action, game-theory, tragedy of the commons, etc.

As for Ukraine, after the OR and after expression of a great will to creat a more meritocratous system, we still wait to see how competent the people who have made into government after the OR will be. This comment includes Yushchenko, who still has yet to prove himself as a competent politician, to my mind and that of many others in Ukraine. I have always felt, before the OR and then during, that he is "zamajkyj (too weak)," which is a comment I have heard quite a few people make about him; check out this link to something I wrote to my list-serve last year about him during the Orange Revolution. He began his administration by relying too much on Soviet/post-Soviet practices of widely rewarding those connected to him, and insofar his appointment of a supposedly "technocratic government" is an attempt to reverse a policy of pleasing allies who did something for him and an attempt to create an effective government based on skill and competency, it is indeed praiseworthy. But only time will tell if these technocrats are competent at much more than betraying OR promises. . .

Also, one more complaint about Yushchenko: his attitude toward the press has been too similar to that of post-Soviet executives by virtue of his condescending attitude. It is of course a relief that he does not issue official orders--i.e., temnyky. But he does give unofficial ones when he scolds the press and tells them what they should be taking seriously, as he has in realtion to his son, to the charges of corruption among his cohorts, and in relation to his memorandom with Yanukovych and the Regions party. More on this matter of Yushchenko's problematic attitude toward the press later. . .

The rest of the photographs in this post are a continuation of the story of the sugar beet harvest discussed in the previous post. . .

Cleaning Beets in the Fields

Before the beets can be brought to the burjakpunkt, all the stems have to be chopped off.

Vladimirets on the Scale

The Vladimirets being weighed in at the burjakpunkt. The tractor and trailor are standing on top of a large scale. You weigh-in with the trailor full of beets, then you dump the beets, and then you weigh-in again. Thus you know how many beets you dropped off, and you will be paid in sacks of processed sugar accordingly, with the factory taking a cut of your sugar as payment for processing your beets.

Villager

This fellow is from the tiny village of Muzhyliv, about 7km from the Pidhajtsi limits. He brought his sugar beets to the burjakpunkt by horse-drawn wagon, which is pictured below. Notice the pile of sugar beets behind him. A quarter of his day was spent getting there, another quarter getting home. He might have had enough in that wagon for half a sack. While talking to him, I learned that he was quite poor. I asked him why, to his mind, so many Ukrainians have remained poor while Pinchuk and Akhmetov (Ukrainian oligarchs) are billionaires. He said, "Because we don't have any good leaders. They always think about themselves. . .

"

And His Horse and Wagon

About such wagons: One day during my first ever week in Ukraine I was with my father's cousin and his daughter, Oksana, who turned to me and said, in perfect English, "Stefan, look. . .our national mode of transportation for centuries, which, still has not died. . ." The last clause of what she said was an allusion to the Ukrainian national anthem, whose opening line is "Shche ne vmerla Ukrajina (Ukraine still has not died). . ."

Mountain of Sugar Beet

To the left of this photo is the start of a huge pile of sugar beets.

6 Sacks of Processed Sugar for 3 Trailor Loads of Sugar Beets

All those sugar beets piled up outside get processed, and people get paid in sacks of sugar.

Bringin' the Sugar Home

In these three photos, Taras Kolodnytskyj and his mother Lesja unload the sacks of sugar, which are 25k each. I did put down my camera to carry in two sacks as well. I am no stranger to physical labor, as I grew up in a family of woodworkers and as the son of a good immigrant father who tried to teach me the value of hard work. While friends slept-in on weekends I went to work at his shop. While friends goofed around for the summer, I went to work at his shop. It's probably why I became such a hippie (I am not serious; there are real reasons of protest against the #1 American sickness of workaholism that one becomes a hippie). But now I like to thank him for the fact that, through his guidance and effort, I can work with both my hands and my head. When I work in the US, I drive a truck and do contract gigs, and am damn proud of it. . .

Bringin' the Sugar Home

Bringin' the Sugar Home

They have a Ukrainian flag flying because this was UPA day, last Oct. 14. . .read the previous post for more. . .

Tales from the Village 1: Beet Harvest in Pictures

This is Oksana Kolodnyts'ka heading with me up to the fields where we will be harvestingher family's sugar beets. The view is of the village of Sil'tse across the Koropets River Valley from her grandmother's (Ol'ha Sybul'ska) homestead in the village of Halych. Sil'tse rests on a hill on the eastern side of the valley, while the town of Pidhajtsi and the village of Halych are on a hill to the west of the valley. Mind you, this is not the Halych for which much of Western Ukraine is named; that Halych is 45 km away from Pidhajtsi, and was a fortified town in medieval times. Remains of the medieval castle still stand. The village of Halych is basically a suburb of Pidhajtsi; you need a native to tell you where the town ends and the village begins. One can refer to the whole area, the town and surrounding villages, as Pidhajtsi. The population altogether is abut 7,000, and Pidhajtsi is 75km from Ternopil (pop. approx. 250,000) and 35km from Berezhany (pop. approx. 25,000). The town of Pidhajtsi also is the seat of the Pidhajtsi county (Pidhajets'kyj rajon).

The area between the town of Halych and Pidhajtsi is quite desolate. Many of the villages between the village of Halych (or Pidhajtsi) and the town of Halych have a disproportionate population of old people, as many youngsters have left in search of work in bigger cities or abroad. This means that the roads and other infrastructure in this area are quite run down even by Western Ukrainian standards, because pensioners don't pay taxes.

Last summer, that of 2004, Oksana and I once had to hitchhike from the town of Halych to Pidhajtsi. We didn't think that we would make it, as traffic was practically nil. The desolation of the area made a strong imperssion on us. An old couple returning from work in the fields that evening told us we were crazy to be traveling by auto-stop (Uki for hitchhiking; i.e., avtostop) that late in that area, and they waited with us until a car came. In the meantime, they told us about their hardships and how depressing it was in their village with so few young people around. Their own children had worked abroad, and now are living in other parts of Ukraine.

Altogether these are the Halychyna heartlands, and to some extent they are becoming depopulated. In other words, this is rural decline Ukrainian style, and which is something that the West underwent for a period of generations. The processes of deruralization in the West and the ongoing one here in Ukraine may be different, but either way, in both places, deruralization is the effect of rural neglect and profiteering by powers beyond the contorl of rural populations.

(One great book about the process of "rural modernization" in the US is Wendell Berry's classic The Unsettling of America. Berry also is a fabulous poet and essayist.)

In this region in general the villages and most of the towns are built from the valley floor to mid-way up the hills, and usually on one side of the hill. On top of the hill and on the opposite slope usually are the fields. The above photo is another view of Sil'tse from the fields above Halych.

These fields were all part of collective farms, but now each family has about one and a half hectares (or about 3.7 acres). This is enough for subsistence and for a degree of produce to take to market. However, here is an important point: the fields surrounding Pidhajtsi could easily be worked by a few American farming families using all the contemporary agribusiness techniques; however, if you were to apply them here, you would displace hundreds of families and ruin their livelihoods. This has been a problem in some parts of Ukraine, and is one contributing factor to rural flight.

Here I appear for the first time ever on this blog. This is proof that I do actually work sometimes. The real reason I am posting it here is that I somehow managed not to get a picture of someone else picking the beets from the ground.

This year I was lucky. The Kolodnytskis all decided to pool some money and hire a guy with a tractor attachment that would dig the earth up from under the beets and turn it over, thus leaving the beets in loose soil near the surface. Last year, we picked each beet through the wet earth one by one. You can read an earlier post of mine here in which I talk about what is so important about wet earth at harvest time. In a nutshell, the Ks decided on this course of action this year as there has been no rain, and when the soil is dry, you can't pull the beets up from the earth. You have to dig each one from the ground. We tried waiting for rain before starting the work, but alas it got much too late to wait--we risked having to work in the rain, blowing winds, and the cold of the Pre-Carpathian autumn (as you can see from the photos, we are not far from the Carpathian Mountains).

Of course, the work went faster this way--last year we worked almost a week and a half, while this year the work took just three days. The Ks also gathered together a small company of neighbors and family to help out. These folks all owed the K's some help in return for their help to them. The K's have a tractor, and Taras, who is Oksana's brother and who is, like Oksana, my second-cousin, has been helping these others haul their beets to the burjakpunkt (the Beet Point), where you go to drop off and weigh your load of beets. In return you get a certain number of sacks of processed sugar, while the factory also takes a cut of the sugar for its work in processing the beets into sugar. All the sugar in Ukraine comes from sugar beets. Sugar beet is the main cash crop in the subsistence farming regiment of most of rural Western Ukraine. Lesja K, Oksana's and Taras's mother, will go to the weekly bazaar through the winter to sell sugar as the need for money arises. She is pictured below, as are Taras and Oksana again, and most significantly, as is their beloved Vladimirets Tractor. (Which makes me think of the book A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which is a decent read; you can go to Neeka's site for her review of the book.)

Lesja has not held a job since the early 90s. She used to work in a preservatives factory in Soviet and early Post-Soviet times, but the managers ran the business into the ground while enriching themselves wildly. When the business closed, they sold the equipment. 100 or so people were out of work. This also happened at a woodworking plant in Pidhajtsi that produced sheets of wood out of the forests surrounding this area. From the environmentalist's perspective, it is probably a good thing that the plant shut down. However, the shut-down occured in such manner that again some managers got rich by mismanaging their business and selling off the equipment (which citizens of the Ukrainian SSR paid for, mind you), and ultimately by destroying the livelihood of another 100 or so people. I have other family who worked in that plant.

Oksana and Taras now have jobs, but for years no one in their family, not even their father Hryts, had a job. I will be posting a piece I have been working on about Hryts later. Their family's main source of income came from money sent from my grandmother in Minneapolis (their grandmother is my baba's sister), these beets, Baba Sybul'ska's pension, and the money that Hrtys made while working in Germany some years ago.

Things are a bit better for them now, as Hryts has now become a high-ranking official in the county administration. This was in part a reward for all the hard work and effort he put into the Yushchenko campaign and in organizing the OR, but his appointment also was made possible due to his local reputation as one incorruptible man. Someone in Ukraine's overwhelmingly paternalistic, connection-based kleptocracy made it into government based on principles of a meritocracy! That is, he got his post based on his merit, and not on his connections! Perhaps this a small sign that the OR has succeed a little; however, it is true that kleptocrats and nepotism still run amok in rural Ukraine, and this is why Yushchenko's cooperation with a plan to grant immunity to local officials is absurd, is indeed a betrayal of OR goals, and is why so many people in the countryside are PISSED off and disappointed.

More on Hryts and all of this some other time. . .

One of the neighbors "obligated" to help out. It is not as bad as it sounds. People rather willingly help each other. Without this kind of exchange, labor for labor, the people of rural western Ukraine would not survive. There is a self-organizing specialization that happens here: this one guy knows how to fix clocks, this guy locks; that guy has a tractor, but that guy who used to have a tractor has certain combine attachments, etc.

The fellow pictured above lives in the house that is brightly illuminated in the first photo above, across the street from Baba Sybul'ska. I forgot his name, but he remembers my grandparents and recalls in vivid detail the day that they left Ukraine in 1944. By-the-way, my paternal grandparents (my mother's side is also from Ukraine) left their village on June 26, 1944. My first ever day in Ukraine and in Pidhajtsi was June 26, 2004. That I should arrive sixty years to the day that my paternal grandparents left was not a consciously planned event, as I discovered the relevant date only a few weeks before I returned to the states last February. The fellow who gave me this info was Ivan Kolodnyts'kyj, Taras and Oksana's grandfather, and husband to my baba's sister. I had asked him if he remembered the day that my grandparents left, and he said that he remembers it vividly, as he was quite fond of my grandfather. Ivan himself did not know what day I had arrived in Pidhajtsi, and after I told the date, his mouth opened in wonderment and his eyes welled with tears. Ivan is a passionate and gentle kind of man, and this is quite refreshing, given the stuffy air of machismo that far too many of the village youth try to put on and that makes me feel like I am beginning to suffocate after I have been in the village world for long enough.

Dealing with the stupid machismo is much, much worse for me than dealing with the sense of isolation one can get while in the village; or perhaps the machismo is the main source of the feeling of isolation I get when in the village world for long enough. Because of this, I generally prefer the company of women and of a few gentle fellows I know when there, and of Dido Ivan. However, I do like to go out for drinks once in a while, and the unmacho, but still real guys that I know are not drinkers (you know, if you ain't macho, you must be holobyj or some weirdo, or wait, the word that the kruti-macho guys like is a pedarast. . .). I don't much enjoy going out drinking with the macho men (the kruti) because, of course, drinking for them is a ritual of displaying extreme machismo by extreme drinking. I need to find some unmacho, but still cool, drinking buddies in Pidhajtsi. So far, such buddies have all been much older men. Anyway, I could perhaps someday write some pieces called "Tales of the Kruti". . .but nah, for they will just be scathing rants!

The above fellow's wife. Check out the hilliness of the terrain.

Taras, Oksana, and Lesja K tossing beets into the trailor of the Vladimirets. That's not a jug of moonshine (samohonka), but of water. The moonshine will appear in a photo below.

At the end of the work, we sat for a bite to eat, and to drink and be jovial. This is the moment that makes all the work SOOOO valuable, the sitting, resting, chatting, eating, and singing in the fields. This, in so many ways, is what life in rural Ukraine is really all about. Below is a photo of the third, or fourth, or wait, was it the fifth, toast? Well, if it was the fifth, that means there was a sixth, for God loves all things in threes.

The view from the northern edge of Pidhajsti, where the K's live, to yet another village, Stare Misto.

The Vladimirets parked safely back on Sunny Street (vulytsja sonjachna) in front of the K's home in Pidhajtsi, in front of another few tractors, at the end of the day after the stop at burjakpunkt.
A few moments later, Oksana and I were all cleaned up and quickly headed to the local Cultural Center (Dim Kultury) for what turned out to be a rather entertaining concert in honor of the day--this was last Friday, Oct. 14, the traditional UPA day in Western Ukraine. They are trying to make it an all Ukrainian holiday, but because of the lingering effects of Soviet ideology, this holiday remains controversial in Ukraine. Check out Neeka's blog (see my links list) for some of her commentary one what took place in Kyiv (communists and others brawled with UPA veterans and celebrants on Independence Square).

As you can see, the rain started to fall just as Taras and I were heading back from the burjakpunkt in the Vladimirets. We are lucky that we got the work done, because it has been very cold and raining ever since then, including here in L'viv from whence I right.

Us'oho najkraschoho (All the Best),

Stefan

Tales from the Village. . .

Bright Lights, Big City. I have finally emerged from my sojourn in small-town Ukraine. I was not expecting to spend so much time in Pidhajtsi--I was there a total of three weeks--but one thing just led to another. One weekend there was a wedding I did not expect to go to, and that was REALLY fun; another, I spent an evening at a major party with 20-something colleagues, which meant the next day was a wash. But the main reason that I stayed for so long is that it took nearly a week and half of searching for and then begging the same people over and over to do interviews with me for my film. I was quite surprised at how difficult it was to find anyone willing to have an interview shot. But I now have some great footage, especially of work in the fields and of the few small-scale factories in Pidhajtsi.

But this is not why I am writing. In the coming weeks I will be posting photos and some pieces about my stay in Pidhajtsi. Pidhajtsi is a really interesting place in the sense that, being in the heart of the Ternopil region, it is in the heart of Halychyna, and is perhaps one of the most representative towns of what "Halychyna" is all about. It seems that every other person here has stories about family member who were active members or supporters of the OUN/UPA. In 1991, the Ternopil region had the highest voter turnout and most votes for independence. When Kuchma facecd off against UCP leader Petro Symenenko in a runoff, Pidhajtsi had (ironically, if you don't what was then at stake) the most votes for Kuchma (who had compaigned on the most pro-Ukrainian platfrom at that point in post-Soviet history). And last year, Pidhajtsi had the highest voter turnout and the most votes for Yushchenko in all of Ukraine in all three rounds of last year's election fiasco. The county of Pidhajtsi is also one of Ukraine's most impoverished with very little industry that is not related to agriculture, and it is an agricultural economy geared almost entirely to regional markets, which is to say, to neither of the more lucrative national nor export markets. It also has among the highest rates of unemployment in Ukraine, and therefore a huge number of people from here are working abroad.

I have often ruminated on the irony that this town and county of Pidhajtsi, in the heart of Halychyna and so typically Galician and thus this most fiercely patriotic of places, would have so many of its people leaving to work abroad. The pop superstar Skrjabyn (who is from Lviv but who openly and unapologetically supported Yanukovych, and who has since the OR excused himself by saying he owed his loyalty to those who helped him become such a pop star) sang a song that was kind of an anthem of sorts for a while in Ukraine; I forget the title, but he was singing to those Ukrainians living and working abroad, telling them that they should plan to return to their homeland and not forget that they are Ukrainians. It is a great song. The majority of those working abroad do hail from Western Ukraine. The fiercest supporters of the OR came from western Ukraine. Hm. Is there irony or contradiction in all this? One does sometimes hear criticism of of Western Ukrainians as pseudo-nationalists or patriots, and relatedly, one hears that they really are not patriotic but materialistic. Hm. But as I have already mentioned, Western Ukraine is much poorer than the other regions of Ukraine, and the infrastructure in Western Ukraine is in much worse condition than in the east in general. The point is, there is no irony or contradiction in any of this at all. And so here's the question: is it, willy-nilly, super nationalism that has always made Western Ukrainians so uppity, or is it the fact that they have long been the most neglected part of Ukraine? Galicia was among the most backwards, isolated, and impoverished parts of Europe in the late nineteenth century. Large numbers of Galicians left for a better life because of this, forming the first wave of Ukrainian (back then, Ruthenian) immigration to North America. The situation has hardly changed. West Ukrainian nationalism is a symptom of deeper concern. These are the folks who have suffered most from the corruption and neglect, and thus who have always fought for and needed a change in the country the most.

I write this because I am a bit tired of disparaging comments about "West Ukrainian nationalism" one encounters here and there, in the blogosphere and elsewhere. . .

Look for photos and some writing in the coming days. . .

Aslund and Kuzio Articles, Current Election Stats

Here are two articles--one from Anders Aslund and the-now-usual rebuttal from Taras Kuzio--that I have cut and pasted from the Ukraine List sent out by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the U of Ottawa, write to him darel@uottawa.ca to get a free subscription to the list.

I of course appreciate the rebuttal by Kuzio. . .

Sorry, no time to edit in the paragraph breaks (for some reason when I cut and paste to blogger, the paragraph breaks get lost. . .)

One other thing: a recent poll published in the newspaper Express (from Lviv) stated that if the parliamentary elections were held today, Regions of Ukraine (Yanukovych's party) and BJUT (the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc) would basically tie at around 23%, while People's Union Our Ukraine (the party of Yushchenko, Poroshenko, et al) would garner about 8 or 9%. As for the rest of the major players, I forget the stats. . . (Sorry, I got these figures slightly wrong--Regions and BJUT have around 20% while People's Union Our Ukraine has 13%; edit Oct. 11)

Ukraine's Orange Revolution Can Still Succeed
by Anders AslundFinancial Times, 26 September 2005

The writer is director of the Russian and Eurasian programme at theCarnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Washington, D.C.

Ukraine's parliament last week confirmed Yuriy Yekhanurov as the country'snew prime minister by an overwhelming majority. Mr Yekhanurov replacesYulia Tymoshenko, the colourful heroine of the Orange Revolution.The move closed a chapter in Ukraine's history but the accomplishments of that "revolution" remain palpable. Ukraine has become a real democracy withfree and lively media, and its foreign policy has become western-oriented.For the past eight months, however, Ukraine's economic policy has beennothing short of disastrous. Economic growth has plummeted from an annual12 per cent last year to 2.8 per cent so far this year, driven by a fallin investment.The blame for this startling deterioration must lie with the government'seconomic policies. By agitating for widespread nationalisation and renewedsales of privatised companies, the government undermined property rights.In addition, it raised the tax burden sharply to finance huge increases inwelfare spending and public wages.Very publicly, Ms Tymoshenko interfered in pricing and property disputes,criticising individual businessmen. Chaos and uncertainty prevailed. Thispopulist policy had little in common with the electoral promises of ViktorYushchenko, the president, about liberal market reforms.Therefore, it was a great relief for the business community and economiststo see the revolutionary firebrands leave the government.Simultaneously, Mr Yushchenko dismissed several big businessmen fromofficial posts who were accused of having confused high government officewith their private business.It was a welcome sign that the newly born Ukrainian democracy was strongenough to be able to oust them after only seven months. Ukraine could nolonger afford their extravagant public quarrels.Today, Ukraine needs a competent government that can pursue a sensibleeconomic policy. For this task, Mr Yekhanurov appears almost ideal.He is one of Ukraine's most experienced economic politicians, having carriedout an earlier programme of mass privatisation and served as then primeminister Yushchenko's first deputy from 1999 to 2001.He has a clean reputation and few enemies and is known as an effectiveadministrator. He keeps a low public profile but that is exactly whatpost-revolutionary Ukraine needs. Mr Yushchenko appears to have kept thisloyal man in reserve.The composition of the new government will be announced any day now butits contours are already clear. About one-third of the incumbents will stay;one-third of the ministers will be able and untainted technocrats from theprevious Kuchma regime; and one- third will be newcomer professionals. Asthis government is supported by nine of the parliament's 14 party factions,it has a sound majority.Thus there are hopes the new government will be quite productive, althoughit will serve for only half a year until parliamentary elections next March.Its first task will be to stop the destabilising re-privatisation campaign,which is likely to lead to only one or two re-privatisations, and declare abig amnesty for other privatisations.A long-promised major deregulation, eliminating thousands of harmful legalacts, will finally be promulgated. The last laws needed for Ukraine'saccession to the World Trade Organisation can now be swiftly adopted. Thebudget for next year, which contains some tax cuts, needs to be enacted.The crucial political battle, however, is the elections next March. Theconfirmation vote for Mr Yekhanurov suggests a new dividing line inUkrainian politics. Most of the rightwing and centrist party factionssupported Mr Yekhanurov, while Ms Tymoshenko's bloc, the communists,and two oligarchic parties opposed him.From now on, the big antagonists in Ukrainian politics are likely to be MrYushchenko and Ms Tymoshenko. Their individual popularity remains roughlyequal. A consolidation around these two figures is possible, especially asthe next elections will be proportional.Ideally, a US-type Republican party could be formed around Mr Yushchenkoand a more leftwing, populist Democratic party around Ms Tymoshenko, butit is also possible that the old fragmentation will persist.Each side has "orange revolutionaries" as well as oligarchs from the Kuchmaperiod. The big question is whether Ms Tymoshenko's revolutionary fire hasburnt out or whether Mr Yushchenko's bold attempt at post-revolutionary
stabilisation is premature.

The Rift that Wrecked Ukraine's Revolution
Letter to the EditorFinancial Times, 29 September 2005
From Prof. Taras Kuzio.

Sir, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, like all revolutions, has a growing a number of myths surrounding it. One, according to Anders Aslund ("Ukraine's Orange Revolution can still end in success", September 26), was that Viktor Yushchenko's election programme supported "liberal market reforms". Yet any careful reading of his election programme shows it was highly populist in the economic and social domains.Mr Yushchenko's election programme became in essence that of the Yulia Tymoshenko government. Mr Yushchenko supported the inclusion of Socialists in the Tymoshenko government, including the head of the State Property Fund.Mr Yushchenko said Ms Tymoshenko led a "young, enthusiastic and self-confident government [that] has demonstrated both macroeconomic culture and increase in social standards".Throughout this year the president has only intervened after crises reached boiling point. Whereas his predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, was a micro-manager, Mr Yushchenko has a distant, hands-off style. His lack of direction was made worse by his attempt at balancing Ms Tymoshenko with his business ally, Petro Poroshenko, as secretary of the National Security Council, in effect creating two competing governments.While concurring with Mr Aslund that some of the Tymoshenko government policies were damaging for Ukraine's economy, we should lay the blame fairly on both Mr Yushchenko and Ms Tymoshenko.

Taras Kuzio,Visiting Professor,George Washington University,Washington, DC 20052, US

Some quick observations on Ukraine then the US

Not much time to write. Follow the links to Neeka's Backlog for good, ongoing commentary on the ongoing situation in Ukraine. Also follow the news links on my blog. . .

Still no beet-harvesting with my family in Pidhajtsi. But I have done a ton of filming and inteviewing. Based on my observations from L'viv, some locales in the Carpathians, Pidhajtsi in the Galician heartlands, Ternopil, Kyiv, Odessa, and Poltava, it seems the following is the case with all of those who supported the OR:

By and large, average people are either now completely against all of them (Yushchenko, Poroshenko, Tymoshenko, et al) and still have no idea who to vote for next Spring, or if they are still for someone, they are overwhelmingly pro-Tymoshenko. .

I guess this is an obvious observation. But even among those who have been critical of them all, people seem to hold the least against Tymoshenko; whether this will be for better or worse, we will have to see.

I will be in Kharkiv and elsewhere in the east in a week or two to see what is up there.

Now on to the US:

I just read that Bush is giving his first press conference since May. Does this mean that he didn't once speak directly to the nation of which he is the nominal leader during the immediate days of the hurricane crisis? What, he can't defend himself to the people? I am tired of this aloof and executive-power drunk administration and the damned congress that tolerates it. Can the congress altogether say, "Bah! Bah! Bah!" Bush is not the God-appointed good Shepherd he took himself to be after 911 (don't forget he proclaimed that he felt he was meant to be president in this supposedly new time of terror). He's given the least press conferences of any president for a long time, while at the same time his administration and his justice-department wonks are doing everything they can to eliminate or limit transparency in government and business based on the excuse of terrorism. He's becoming ever more aloof and out of touch, while at the same time demanding the upmost respect for the post of presidency. Amreicans are being slowly convinced to accept a kind of king again. This is hyperbole, of course, but the point is: The US system under the Bush administration and under the Patriot Acts and under a president who looks as ridiculous and aloof as Kuchma used to at his press conferences has become far too tipped toward executive power.

I hope no heir to Bush is elected--or steals the election--next time around and that the Patriot Acts will be in every way revoked.