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Feedbag Politics

29 December, 00:00

This issue's material on the electrical energy sector provides an important insight on how this country's economy really works. In a world of mutual indebtedness and barter transactions those who control energy usually wind up with the goods which are exported for money that hardly ever makes it back to Ukraine. With both fossil fuels and electricity the National Security and Defense Council and its secretary Volodymyr Horbulin (acting in strict conformity with the President's wishes no doubt) decide who gets monopoly rights to sell how much energy to whom and thus who gets how big a share at the feedbag. If someone like former Premier Pavlo Lazarenko gets out of line, he is simply excluded from the party, as happened, for example, when Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine was cut out of the natural gas trade. The money winding up with whom the state sees fit is not reinvested in even keeping the system at its current level, and it simply degrades. Degradation is perhaps the hallmark of the whole process, that and the feeling of fatality overshadowing it all. Remember last week's interview with Vasyl Volha? Even I was shocked when he recalled the words of the enforcers sent by one highly placed official: "Nobody can save Ukraine, not now. If we don't take what we want today, somebody else will take it tomorrow."

If even the people running a country have no faith in it, how can its ordinary citizens have more? This virtually universal lack of faith is almost as tragic as the cynicism and dysfunctionality causing it. It is time for someone to stand up and say that it does not have to be that way. We can change things and not in the way Comrades Symonenko, Tkachenko, Moroz, or the other members of the back-to-the-future crowd would like to. This country is sinking under the weight of its own state; it has more state structures, employees, and functions than its economy can support. That makes everybody run away from the state as far into the shadows as possible, promotes disinvestment instead of investment, and means that there is so much law and regulation that virtually everybody is to some extent a criminal. It is not only in Russia that the middle class has become thoroughly criminalized. Where something can be hung and virtually everybody, it means that those in power can always do a little digging and shut down virtually anyone or anything. In other words, too much law leads to lawlessness as sure as too much state leads to the virtually reality state where bribes are far more important than a bureaucrat's official pay envelope and the state itself can neither pay its bills nor adequately fulfill such indispensable functions as law enforcement and national defense. Things cannot go on this way forever. Not even a people as trained to submission as citizens of the former Soviet Union will tolerate such idiocy forever. The only question is in what direction their frustration will be channeled.

Newspaper output №:

№47, (1998)

Section

Day After Day