The captains of Russian business visited Kyiv, marking perhaps the most interesting event in the Russian-Ukrainian dialogue of late. Kyiv also played host to the Russian Premier and the Ukrainian President is planning an official trip to Moscow. So what? Let them repeat a thousand times that Mr. Kuchma will make its first state visit to Russia, no one will be impressed, because we simple mortals know little and care even less about international protocol. The more so that everyone knows the Ukrainian President has been flying to Moscow almost every month. Now getting prepared for the Russian President’s first state visit to Ukraine was a different story, because Mr. Yeltsin had not been to Kyiv for several years. He just wouldn’t, so his Ukrainian counterpart had to visit him several times, reminding that a state visit had to be made, taking Russia’s no the hard way. Well, let bygones be bygones. Mr. Yeltsin finally made his appearance in Ukraine, so it is now Mr. Kuchma’s turn, but first the Ukrainians were offered a chance to take a closer look at their northern neighbor’s key business figures.
There they were, considerate, smiling, and pragmatic. The Russo-Ukrainian business round table resounded with so many warm words, precise recipes... Had we not known recent Russian economic history, we would have been perfectly happy and sure of our morrow listening to Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Rem Vyakhirev (alas, Boris Berezovsky could not make it, being away for a course of treatment in Switzerland, so we had to do without his inspiring spiel about integration).
Over the past several years these businessmen have shown how to fight and win oil wells, TV channels, newspapers, enterprises, you name it! They were the ones to create a modern society in which the word oligarch denotes a profession, one of many, the way it did in ancient Greece.
They came to Ukraine, because real business knows no frontiers. The more so that they needed no Ukrainian support and President Kuchma needed theirs — or President Yeltsin’s, to be precise. And they were the ones to have assisted Mr. Yeltsin in winning an almost lost campaign. So who else would he have dispatched to help his Kyiv friend? They made the trip to see what that friend could offer in return. Business is business.
President Yeltsin had paid them with Russia. Here in Ukraine they were confronted by young reformers who set about convincing them, with hopeless insistence, that a state existed not only to supply the interests of seven bankers, however high and mighty. The VIPs from Moscow refused to understand and were shocked to hear Chubais’s name mentioned. There was only one currency they would accept from President Kuchma. Ukraine. And no young reformers to get in the way. Never.
Of course, big business cannot be stopped by frontiers, provided it is business, and not a system of oligarchic relationships between state power and its favorites. The Southeast Asian economic tragedy was evidence enough that business in a free world is strikingly distinct from that based on a shaky understanding between businessmen and ruling bureaucrats. Moscow was recently visited by IMF Director Michel Camdessu for what he described as sharing the Southeast Asian lesson with the Russian leadership. He couldn’t have timed his visit better, because Russia is building precisely the same model and our Moscow guests are both its architects, and creation. Do we really need them as our architects and masters?
Moscow







