In our youth we did not have the privilege of gala shows. We were accustomed to sharing drinks with friends in our Soviet crumbling apartments, with singing pipes and failing toilets, trading jokes about our Soviet realities.
One particular source of amusement was the daily nine o’clock “Vremia” news and propaganda show from Moscow (for those who missed it, tune into Ukraine’s Channel 1 UTN as a worthy sequel) featuring our glorious Communist leaders being presented with another breast-long load of government orders and medals. One such show became a classic: USSR’s number one ideologue Suslov, his legs giving way, fumbling about Leonid Brezhnev’s legendary jacket, trying to find a spot to pin yet another Star of Hero of the Soviet Union (an old Soviet anecdote has it that the Americans detected a minor earthquake and traced its epicenter to the Kremlin: one of Comrade Brezhnev’s KGB butlers dropped his medal-laden jacket after seeing him to bed).
Seven years ago, when Ukraine proclaimed its independence, we all believed that we would henceforth live a free democratic country and finally rid ourselves of all that Soviet pomp, along with the socialist paradise we had wasted so many decades trying to build, but we all turned out wrong. The hirsute nihilist Karl Marx said the dead hand of the past hangs like a curse on the brow of the living. He was right.
Watching the Ukrainian President awarding “over fifty government orders and medals,” with a number of persons called “shock workers in the sphere of state construction,” reading official periodicals lauding the Chief Executive instituting another Presidential award for Heroes of Ukraine, with precisely the old Soviet presentation scenario, including the Gold Star (in the USSR it was the Order of Lenin and Hero of the Soviet Union gold star), I found myself thinking that the times were taking a strange turn, and that they never learned their lessons. According to the bureaucratic formula, the title, Hero of Ukraine, will be awarded those showing “outstanding personal heroic conduct or labor exploits.” The President has bestowed this merit on a large number of people, mostly members of the political/bureaucratic elite. In a word, we must have witnessed scores of acts of heroism and outstanding labor.
Suppose we try to take an unbiased approach to the matter. Heroic conduct? Every businessman trying to play fair and operate in keeping with the law rates this award, balancing between corrupt bureaucrats and inadequate laws, or every retired person trying to survive on a pension of Hr 49 (almost $22!) a month, living on what is described as way below the poverty line elsewhere in the civilized world, every woman deciding to become a mother in a society going from bad to worse, along with every farmer growing crops despite the chronic shortage of farm equipment and over-regulated, draconian government procurement contracts. Following this strange logic, one would expect the President to institute something like a “Meritorious Shuttle Peddler of Ukraine” trophy. After all, such pioneers of “business”, former schoolteachers, actors, and engineers, are all that has saved Ukraine economically while the powers that be embarked on their “reforms.” (One can only guess when real market reforms will start in this country!). They saved thousands of old men and women about to die of starvation, forcing them to go out and peddle in the streets, something unthinkable, branded as “speculation” under Soviet rule and its promises of universal well-being.
The Soviet government, by bestowing orders and medals on scientists and milkmaids, created the illusion of social equality, simultaneously weighing down Communist Party leaders’ jackets with the USSR’s highest awards. Following in such pharisaic footsteps, Ukraine’s current leadership acts short-sightedly. Ukrainians are primarily equal in terms of misery and lawlessness. In this sense, government awards, as yet another Soviet holdover, may well be used as a weapon in a political campaign. What about ex-Speaker Oleksandr Moroz refusing an Order of Yaroslav the Wise, Fifth Class?
Photo by Leonid BAKKA,The Day:
IN CONNECTION WITH INDEPENDENCE DAY WELL-KNOWN UKRAINIAN FIGURES RECEIVED THE ORDER OF ST. VOLODYMYR, FIRST DEGREE, AMONG THEM PATRIARCH FILARET OF THE UKRAINIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH-KYIV PATRIARCHATE AND EX-PRESIDENT LEONID KRAVCHUK







