Arming the Troops

A teacher’s life is measured by semesters, and I gaze at the table overflowing with sixty-odd exams and term papers. This time I had the opportunity to teach the course I had long wanted to put together under the nondescript name of Introduction to Political Analysis at the International Christian University. Really studying in a business program, my ICU students are not going to become political scientists, and this led me to try to tailor a course in order to attempt to empower future businesspeople as active political subjects in their country. Carefully explaining that everything I was telling them was controversial and subject to discussion, I gave them a few elementary concepts and then got down to business. I attempted to pull things out of the Soviet period in order for us to try together to understand why Ukraine’s economy and state fail to work like their Western counterparts, despite a perfectly good Constitution, laws, elections, and all the other attributes of Western representative self-government. Being cut off from the outside world’s intellectual discourse since the late 1920s, having a society that was literally consumed by the Party-state, an industry built in a world without free prices (grossly inefficient and run by politically connected engineers), and a civil society still in statu nascendi, it simply does not work the way its people, especially my students, would like. In a situation of all-pervasive opacity — the Soviet system was such that the demands of the System could not be met without breaking the System’s rules, and that means staying quiet about a great many things — I tried with them to understand what they will be up against. We dealt with such concepts as the virtual economy and what Oleksandr Turchynov modeled some years ago as administrative industrial groups (a.k.a. clans, a triangular structure of state, economic, and criminal grouping designed to keep the more efficient competition out and the inefficient traditional structures afloat). If this country can be turned around, they will do it. In a society where no so- called resonant murder has ever been solved, I can only wish them well. I have to keep reminding myself that I am not a citizen of Ukraine. I can only analyze and advise. But for those bright, brilliant, and beautiful young people, I can only wish them well. Forewarned is forearmed.