Friend among enemies, enemy among friends

Getting prepared for this interview, I browsed through the Internet and found Vladyslav Kyrychenko’s photo as a volunteer with a spade in Unizh. My first reaction was surprise, for seeing a man with a fat bank account use a spade was something out of the ordinary. My second reaction was distrust. After all, it could be a publicity stunt, and not a bad one at that. But after we met, things fell into place.

While making money in Russia, he is investing some of it in Ukrainian culture. A list of his benevolent projects includes support of a Ukrainian Sunday school in Moscow, a number of Ukrainian rock festivals, festivities commemorating the UPA’s 65th anniversary in Kyiv, founding and holding the Unizh festival in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, publishing Ukrainian audio books, and setting up a Ukrainian scholarly club to which only scholars whose research efforts meet international standards can be admitted. He launched an agency that makes Ukrainian audio and video products and named it “Our Format” in response to some businessmen in the cultural field who scornfully referred to such products as having the wrong format. There is every reason to say that Kyrychenko is a representative of a new Ukrainian generation of successful businessmen who really care about what is happening around them.

Your friends have a story about you and they’re convinced that it shows just what made Kyrychenko a Ukrainian. You were a small boy when you moved to Donetsk to live with your parents and found yourself being ridiculed by your peers because you preferred to speak Ukrainian.

“I lived with my grandparents in Horlivka until three years of age. On the maternal side I come from a Ukrainian Cossack family. After the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed [by the Russian government], my ancestors settled in the Donbas, so that makes me a fifth-generation resident of the area. Grandma never spoke Russian, only Ukrainian (although she was half-Greek), because the local milieu was still Ukrainian. Once an instructor at my daycare center told my parents (who were trained engineers and Komsomol members) that I was asocial and that unless I learned to speak ‘the right kind of language’ [i.e., Russian], I would be expelled because I did not socialize with the rest of the children. In other words, the Ukrainian language was being destroyed in Donetsk oblast before my very eyes. Today there are some characters who keep trying to convince us that Ukrainian has never been used there.

“One of my great grandfathers deserted the UNR army because he couldn’t figure out the purpose of this national liberation struggle; he couldn’t see further than his vegetable plot. He couldn’t pull off the same thing with Nestor Makhno, because he would have been shot. One of my grandfathers searched his fellow villagers’ homes and confiscated their grain during the Holodomor. My great grandmother had thirteen children of whom only six survived in 1933.”

Some believe that convinced and resourceful Ukrainians emerge precisely from the eastern territories because they grow up in an unfriendly environment.

“I consider myself to be one of those who are resourceful, meticulous, responsible, pragmatic, and constructive. Any constructive individual must also practice a flexible approach if he wants to achieve success in business, especially in such post-totalitarian countries as Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia; he must be prepared to meet others halfway. The question is the extent. Regrettably, most of our businessmen specialize in hostile takeovers on the intellectual level; they seldom go further than financing pocket soccer teams, let along universities and science!”

The Kapranov brothers said that Ukrainians mostly tend to remember their national identity after being dragged through the dirt.

“They’re right. By the way, I first met the Kapranov brothers in Moscow and you can say that we became aware of our Ukrainian identity at the same time there.

“It’s just that whenever you visit a backwater province in Russia you experience a kind of cultural shock. This is especially true of those who spent their childhood in the Ukrainian countryside and then found themselves in Russia’s rural areas. Ramshackle village homes, with just potato, cabbage, and carrot planted on their vegetable plots. Few if any villagers grow apple trees because they are killed by winter frosts. You may ask: When was the last time your apple trees were destroyed like that? ‘When Stalin died [i.e., in 1953],’ they will tell you.”

When did you start investing in Ukrainian projects?

“In Ukraine, after the Orange Revolution. Previously I’d been sending checks to a Ukrainian Sunday school in Moscow. I still do, although my family moved to Kyiv a year ago. It’s hard to facilitate our projects in Moscow. Russians like the kind of Ukrainians that make me personally nervous, I mean Ukrainians who use the surzhyk [Russian-Ukrainian patois], sing simplistic songs about Halia, and keep saying they’re suffering at the hands of the fascists in Halychyna.”

How are you being treated by Russian business partners?

“I have gone through the radical, conflicting phase of my business career, so when I am out fishing with my Russian colleagues, politics is never discussed, because this would lead to nothing else but confrontation. We are different. What is a matter of pride for us is something they scornfully shrug off. It went so far that one day my daughter returned from school and said they’d been told that the fascist Yushchenko went to the fascist Saakashvili and the two thought up the Holodomor and then attacked Russia. (This was actually the last drop, and I made up my mind to move the family to Kyiv.)”

There is a worldwide trend to copy things in showbiz. Russian film directors and pop singers often copy Western productions. Do we have anything that makes Ukraine original or even a trendsetter?

“I can’t visualize an individual who has read only Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, but not Kafka, Hemingway, or Dovlatov, as being capable of making any truly significant accomplishments in any creative sphere today. In other words, every effort must be made to assert our culture in the world context. Some believe that ethnic projects will get the better of the kitsch and pop ones. I think that poor quality pop productions can be overcome by higher quality ones, just like better rock-’n’-roll can get the better of second-rate rock-’n’-roll.

“I’m saddened to know that people are emigrating from Ukraine after receiving top quality education and being capable of making major scientific discoveries instead of earning a living assembling cars. Do you know the fundamental-science-per-capita rates in Ukraine and Russia? An audit conducted by the Ukrainian Scholarly Club shows that Ukraine’s national product is one-tenth of Russia’s and one-hundredth of the US product. Sad but true, today Ukraine isn’t even a second-echelon country — I mean in terms of intellectual elite and its potential. For some reason, contemporary art is strongly correlated with the development of the state, particularly the economy. You know that a pessimist is a well-informed realist, but understanding realities is no reason for putting up with them and giving way to depression.

“I’m working on a club that will unite people who are fully aware of the challenges Ukraine is facing today and are capable of meeting them effectively. I’m not going to give up and sit back. I’m not leaving Ukraine. I have at least 20 years of active life ahead. I’m going to use this time to make lots of achievements. I’m sure I will.”