Starving What Creates Wealth

The latest mishap at the Vernadsky National Scientific Library, where books were flooded for several hours and the staff was sworn to silence for several days after, had an eerily familiar ring for me. In fact, in 1993, former members of the US Commission on the Ukraine Famine, of which I was staff director, transferred materials to the Library of Verkhovna Rada. Sometime thereafter, however, I was told that scholars of the events of 1932-33 were being denied access. After going to various sympathetic lawmakers, it became clear what had happened: that particular library had no experience in the preservation of audio materials, and roughly 200 hours of cassettes containing the life histories of those who had lived through this particular horror and wound up in emigration were strewn broken over the floor, irrevocably damaged. Of course, in the former Soviet Union, the first response was to instruct everybody who knew something not to tell anybody anything and then begin the hunt for someone to blame.

Yet, the problem here is not inadequate librarians or plumbers: it is that they work in institutions that cannot financially support the functions for which they were founded. The Academy of Sciences publishes books usually of from 200 to 500 copies. The authors get theirs, and the rest is sent to the Vernadsky Library, which is supposed to distribute them to other libraries, but lacking money for postage, they sit on the floor in the basement and now presumably are taking the waters. The Gifts and Exchanges departments of Western academic libraries have long written it off, because they get nothing in return.

Simultaneously, the scholars who use such libraries are dreadfully underpaid with a top salary of about 400 hryvnia’s a month, and their pay arrears now reach $10 million. Over half have left in the last few years to pursue more lucrative endeavors liking driving gypsy cabs or hawking cigarettes in the bazaar, while the state money goes to subsidize hopeless industries and over-regulation that strangles productive economic activity. Could there be something wrong here?