Too bad that our old friend George Orwell did not live to see the wreckage
of the post-Soviet world, for so many aspects of his 1984 continue to be
so painfully true. Take his idea of doublethink, the ability to hold two
diametrically contradictory points of view simultaneously and not notice
the contradiction. Officially, the current Ukrainian regime is all for
reform, the market economy, democracy, Western values, and the like. However,
as the excellent material in this issue by Olha Len and Viktoriya Podhorna
makes clear, the real model Ukraine has chosen is that of post-Soviet Russia:
a sort of monopoly state capitalism based on speculation by an oligarchy
of political insiders as well as a state which lives on credit with perpetually
growing debt and keeps the real politics of who gets (or controls) what
safely out of the public eye.
Against this background President Kuchma's fit of pique at the European
Union for not admitting Ukraine as an associate member is not merely inappropriate;
it has a touch of surrealism. The EU is less a political organization than
an economic one, based on the integration of more or less similar national
economies into a common European one. Whether by choice or by sheer drift
and incompetence, Ukraine and Russia have wound up with an economic model
that inherently cannot be integrated into the European one because it works
fundamentally differently, according to different rules and with different
players. In fact, anyone who really tries to change it had better have
good life insurance, for he would have to step on the toes of boys who
play for keeps. Remember Vlad Listiev in Russia? Or Vadym Hetman in Ukraine?
There is also a political problem. Neither Russia nor Ukraine are really
democracies, for democracy is not just about going to the polls. It is
about going to the polls with enough knowledge of how things really work
in one's country to be able to make an informed choice between real options
in anticipation that the resulting victor will do more or less what he
promised. Anyone familiar with the current President's career knows that
this simply is not the case here. When it becomes so, it will be possible
to talk about Ukraine joining Europe. But I would not count on it happening
anytime soon. It simply is not in the interests of those with the power
to make it happen.






