Someone once asked me, “Don’t you have it hard living in such a poor country?”
“You’re wrong,” I answered. “Ukraine is a rich country. Only the people are poor.”
In truth, it has taken an enormous amount of inertia, ineptitude, and downright crookedness to turn this country with the world’s most fertile soil, great mineral wealth, and a workforce more literate than that of the USA, into the basket case it has become – with a government so much bigger than its economy can afford and with so many more functions than it needs that most economic activity either has to flee into the shadows or is strangled, a state spiraling deeper and deeper into debt and thereby eating up the credit resources that ought to go into investment, the worst environment in Europe, a population declining in number and losing hope that things will ever get better, and so forth. As this century goes out Ukraine is as least as much a sick man as was the Ottoman Empire one hundred years earlier.
To understand Ukrainian state policy I recall an old story about Lenin who on the eve of adopting the New Economic Policy in 1921 visited Prince Kropotkin, then Russia’s leading anarchist.
“What is to be done?” the dictator asked.
“Don’t do a damned thing!” the prince answered. After all, the doctrinal core of anarchism is that people can work things out for themselves without any state to interfere.
The self-anointed leader of the world proletariat is said then to have paused, stroked his beard, and slowly assented, “But under our control, of course.”
That this is the essence of current state policy in Ukraine becomes especially clear in this issue’s interview with Prominvestbank President Volodymyr Matviyenko: the state is doing everything it can to get the banks and business in general under its control at a time when the state cannot even do effectively the things states really need to do. Recall how a few weeks ago the government halted all exports of scrap metal until the less connected traders go broke and leave the field to those in political favor. And when it comes to things the state knows it cannot control like shuttle trading, it simply strangles it. No wonder Vyacheslav Medvid ends his talented essay on citizenship in Ukraine by noting that the citizens look much sadder than they used to. With things the way they are, what do they have to be glad about?
In this connection, Vice President Gore’s tough love approach was the right one. In fact, if anyone still has my column from April 28, this writer called for it back then. Maybe someone out there is listening after all.






