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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Tax Noose

8 December, 1998 - 00:00

Or what gets in the way of the readability of Ukrainian books

By Oksana ZABUZHKO

An agreement with Russia will soon be ratified, giving the green light
to all Russian goods, and books are a commodity under Ukrainian law, not
a product of culture. And when we will collect no taxes on Russian goods,
on the Ukrainian market Ukrainian books will simply vanish

The reason is simple: Ukraine levies the world's highest VAT on its
own books. By way of comparison, consider some statistics from the Council
of Europe. In Poland and the Baltic states books are tax-free. In the Czech
Republic the tax is 5%; in Slovakia 6%; in rich and well-fed Germany 7%.
Incidentally, no taxes are collected on books in Russia, with which we
have a transparent border and no language barrier. So how can Ukrainian
books compete with Russian publications on the market?

To me, the current situation is painfully reminiscent of a period described
by Mykhailo Hrushevsky in his memoirs. He was in his teens and saw and
heard the Ukrainophiles' reaction to the 1876 Ems ukase banning all publications
in Ukrainian in the Russian Empire. They sneered and cracked jokes, saying
that from now one they would have to translated their signatures into French.
No one seemed aware of the serious threat facing them and their people,
that the ukase would destroy a whole generation in Ukrainian culture. Well,
today we face the same threat. We must beat the alarm. Like Lesia Ukrainka's
Cassandra who cried out, "Wake up, Troy! Your death is approaching!" Instead,
there is the overwhelming atmosphere of self-content grant-seekers who
do not have the slightest idea about the book market. Lightly jumping from
one grant to the next, they chirp happily about the "postcolonial syndrome"
and that all will be fine once the people gains "national consciousness."
Mykola Riabchuk writes in The Day (January, 19-25)  that not
a single Ukrainian book can break even, and not a single Ukrainian author
lives on his royalties. An absolutely ungrounded statement and, mildly
speaking, and not really fair play because no one will try to prove differently
using statistics owing to the fact that the state with its draconian taxes
has forced book publishers, like all the other businessmen, to operate
half legally. In other words, not a single Ukrainian book publisher of
sound mind will reveal his actual revenues. However, it suffices to remind
oneself that the Osnovy Publishers, specializing in elite Ukrainian editions,
sell more in Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk than in Lviv and a second edition
of St. Augustine's Confessions in Ukrainian had to be printed due
to growing demand. In other words, here language is not the issue. Mr.
Riabchuk hits below the belt because the competent side has to keep silent
and the incompetent one (including prospective Ukrainian publishing sponsors)
takes his word at their face value. Journalists have a simple word for
this, disinformation. Using Bolshevik formulas, it is "ideologically damaging
disinformation" that can only aggravate all those "postcolonial complexes"
which Mr. Riabchuk seems so fond of dwelling on. Attempting in Ukraine
to copy Western standards where everything is added up, catalogued, and
lined up according to size simply does not work. For one thing, this author
has no idea about how many copies of her Field Research on Ukrainian
Sex have been sold, maybe between fifteen and twenty thousand. Lviv
distributors say that there were three bootleg copies for every legitimate
one on the local market. So it is anyone's guess what the ratio was like
in Kharkiv or Kyiv. Our market is a jungle in which the state robs rather
than protects, where one has to be always on the lookout to keep from being
cheated or, when one has to be, to keep the damage to a minimum. Thus,
talking about breaking even under such circumstances, posing as an expert,
is either a malicious attempt to manipulate public opinion or being a total
stranger to the subject.

 

Files of The Day

  Oksana ZABUZHKO,
Candidate of Science (Philosophy), expert on culture, translator, author
of three collections of verse with some of her poems included in the Anthology
of World Women's Poetry in the Twentieth Century, the widely discussed
novel Field Research on Ukrainian Sex, the literary-philosophical
essay Philosophy of the Ukrainian Idea and European Context: The Period
of Franko, polemical study Shevchenko's Myth of Ukraine, as
well as of numerous articles and essays published by Ukrainian and European
periodicals.

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