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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Between Two Worlds

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

By Prof. James MACE, The Day
When you live in a country for five or six years, you become part of
it and it of you. You begin


to forget that you still have a different passport in your pocket,
that you are the citizen of another state, for your life and heart are
here.

When I first came to Ukraine, I immediately saw so much that I long
simply could not understand or accept: the very structure of everyday life,
material culture, how people behaved were all completely different from
what I had known. Gradually I outgrew my own prejudices and began to adopt
the local ones. I changed, and the country changed as well.

The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
were very different, but they had one big thing in common: they were not
usual polities built on a nation, in the final analysis on kinship; they
were built on ideas - so-called classical Enlightenment liberalism and
so-called Marxism-Leninism. In this sense both were grand experiments,
one ongoing and the other completed.

Ideas are obviously important in the lands of ideas, for they provide
legitimacy, convincing the people that such a system has a right to exist,
that it is their own and has the right to demand from its citizens obedience
to the laws, material resources, and in time of war even their lives.

The essence of the American system was embodied in one paragraph of
the Declaration of Independence (1776):

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men* are created
equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed. Whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish
it, and to institute new Government, having its foundations on such principles
and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely
to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Of course, reality never quite lives up to ideals. Thomas Jefferson,
who wrote these words, was a slaveholder, and at that time no one took
seriously the notion that women or Native Americans were also created equal.
In fact this very document blamed the British king, inter alia for
not adequately protecting (white) colonists from (red) "savages." However,
there is still here a whole political philosophy: that people have natural
rights, that the state exists to safeguard those rights, and that collectively
the community has the right to change or abolish their government. According
to the American Constitution (1787), all power belongs to those the document
identifies as those who ordained and established it, "we, the people of
the United States." The first ten amendments (1789) clearly spelled out
rights that the federal government could in no circumstances violate. Perhaps
most interesting is the ninth amendment, which holds that none of the rights
enumerated in the Bill of Rights should be taken to allow the violation
of other rights, which might be found to exist. And sure enough, in the
1960s the US Supreme Court found a right to privacy, a concept difficult
to explain here. In other words, at the center of American political philosophy
and culture is the idea that it is not only the government's business to
defend its citizens, but that the citizens must always be defended
from the government.

America never was and never will be an ideal democracy in which all
have equal influence and official policy always reflects the wishes of
the majority. In the final analysis, the very existence of the Constitution
is undemocratic in the sense that it forbids certain things being done
even if the majority wishes to do so. The great French student of American
democracy Alexis de Tocqueville saw the essence of American democracy (representative
government would be more precise) in the virtual mania of the judicially
equal citizens for founding strong but unequal associations, through which
they could defend their common interests from the government and even change
it. Anyone has the right to form such an organization, then seek like-minded
individuals or try to persuade others. While it always helps to have a
solid bankroll in so doing, American history offers countless examples
that this is far from obligatory. I was myself executive director of a
federal commission founded because one Ukrainian-American organization
completely without financial backing (except for what its middle-class
leader spent out of pocket) circulated petitions to Congress, and was able
to get what it wanted even against the opposition of then President Reagan,
the creation of a hybrid (joint legislative-executive) commission to study
the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933.

From this flows Americans' fundamental political belief that they can
themselves influence and change policy. Americans do not much want their
leaders to be better than they are; they want them to be like everybody
else, conscientiously carry out their duties, and equal under law with
all others. There is the myth of the old film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
where a naive Boy Scoutmaster accidentally became a senator, saw a clear
case of graft, and could stop it only with a filibuster (when in those
days one Senator could paralyze the work of the entire chamber as long
as he could keep standing and talking). He finally passed out from exhaustion,
but thanks to his lone efforts, justice prevailed. The issue is not that
no such thing ever happened, but that traditionally Americans believe (or
want to believe) that it could and, more importantly, if need be, he has
the right to try it himself. He might fail, but then again, maybe not.
In other words, the American idea is designed to empower the individual.
Its advantage is that, while millions might fail, sooner or later a new
Bill Gates will enter the scene.

People from the former Soviet Union often return from the US amazed
at how they fail to see signs of class distinction or elitism where they
would expect it. Working with my commission, I never addressed Senator
DeConcini except as Dennis or Congressman Gilman other than Bill. We were
on a first name basis as they were with all their staff. The traditional
difference between a Senator and a cleaning lady is both have their jobs
to do, but neither is any better than the other. Obviously there were (and
probably are) members of Congress who maintain far more formal relations
with their subordinates, but the main thing is that the habit of equality
extends even to the pinnacle of the political structure. And it is not
without substance: the Ukrainian press was ironic about the fact that President
Clinton could not find a job for his White House intern for two years,
but he simply could not. He lacks the power to do so.

I would trace the essence of the Soviet System to Lenin's What is
to be Done and his famous "There is such a party!" Leninism was actually
a unique mixture of Marx with the Russian revolutionary tradition of Chernyshevsky
and TkachСv. In the center of this system was the omniscient "Party of
a new type," consisting of "professional revolutionaries" and armed with
the sole scientific understanding of history and nature. As Trotsky once
put it, one cannot be right without the Party. This strictly hierarchical
Party, which knew everything and continually took care of the people's
welfare, was reflected in the society it shepherded. For the overwhelming
majority of the population, everything one needed to know was in the fourth
chapter of Stalin's Short Course or the latest Pravda editorial.
He who sought further ran the risk of falling into the category of "enemy
of the people" with all its highly unpleasant consequences. It was not
simply a question of a firing squad, the Gulag, or exile, but of being
prevented utterly from building oneself a normal life, finding the kind
of work one wanted, making a career, or building a family. One need not
mention a political career, possible only on condition of complete loyalty
and unreserved acceptance of all rules of the System. Of course, most people
began to think about public affairs the way we think about the weather.
You can talk about it (especially if you say how good it is). A limited
number of people with high posts could even say it was bad (only not in
public). But all awaited their new orders, campaigns, and instructions
from the center, from "above." And practically everybody decided to do
something for themselves quietly, under the table, because there simply
was no other way. Those who see the origin of the shadow economy and corruption
basically in market relationships are completely wrong. Such notions as
"pull," "bribery," and "telephone right" came into the language long ago.
Double morality, double psychology, and double bookkeeping (to cook the
books) are all fingers of that hand of all the dead generations hanging
like a curse on the brow of the living. It was not just yesterday that
people learned how to demonstrate their patriotism for one and all and
then in a small circle of associates make plans to sell under the table
dozens of tons of cement, coal, wood, or foodstuffs. It has been decades
since Konstantin Semis, a dissident who emigrated, wrote his excellent
book, The Corrupt Society about this side of Soviet life.

Obviously, to defend the people from a state run by the "intellect,
honor, and conscience of our era," as Lenin defined the Party, was not
only unnecessary but contrary to the very spirit of Leninism. There could
be "distortions of the general line," but in the end the Party was always
right. On the contrary, in order to defend the "fatherland of the proletariat
of the whole world" from the corrupting influence of the outside world,
in the late 1920s the USSR was isolated from world intellectual processes
almost to the very end of the Soviet regime. Few understand the catastrophic
results of such "defense."

As Harvard Professor Roman Szporluk emphasized recently, Poland had
more or less free access to the Western press and literature with the exception
of 7-8 years from the late 1940s to mid-1950s. From this one can conclude
that the period of intellectual isolation (or intellectual defense) of
the Polish People's Republic was quite short, and when the Communist idea
lost its power Polish intellectual and political elites could quite rapidly
find a common language with the outside world, with which they were already
quite familiar.

However, such a long period of isolation, especially for "old" Soviet
Ukraine (within its pre-1939 borders), gave birth to many misunderstandings,
and sometimes it became simply an impenetrable wall between Ukrainian and
Western intellectuals. The first time I was in Ukraine, someone for some
reason told me, "We need to CONSOLIDATE (konsoliduvaty)."Understanding
the word in the American sense as making something more solid or compact,
I only gradually came to understand that for people here it almost always
means to unite. We use the same words with different content. This example
is illustrative but not so important as others, showing that not only Ukraine
needs to understand the world, but the world Ukraine, with its distinctiveness,
traditions, far from simple history, and, finally, its customs. I was ready
to throw up my hands when I first saw a sign for one local bank (One wants
to ask, is it a bank for broke businesses or is the bank itself broke?)
or when at a presentation of a book published by the Arc Publishing House,
they proudly announced themselves as "Arse" Publishers (my American readers
will surely recognize the British word for an odoriferous, if universal,
orifice). Perhaps a coincidence, but they are begotten by the incompetence
of experts and translators, of those through whom communication with the
Western world goes. Not long ago in one Kyiv McDonald's my Ukrainian wife
and I read a bilingual advertisement for children. She found over fifty
errors in Ukrainian, and I somewhat more in English.

Still, the worst and most important problem is the bureaucratic Newspeak
which literally eats away at the flesh of the language - all those TsUMs.
TOVs, TsOSes, and RIKs, which the Western interlocutor finds virtually
incomprehensible and which, it seems, call forth on an all too important
level disagreements between Western and Ukrainian businessmen in negotiating
contracts. Consider one case. A prestigious firm was negotiating with Ukrainians,
all the relevant consultations had been done, and all the details worked
out. But the documents and plans submitted were in Russian, and at the
moment of signing it turned out that the Ukrainian party had been registered
in Ukrainian, something on the order of Goskom-Derzhkom, with the name
given on the bottom line precisely this way. Now, the bank computer is
not so smart as to figure this out, and not every Western businessmen so
stupid not to understand that a confusion in nomenclature can mean his
quick separation from his money. I really do not know how this history
ended, but I know perfectly well that a great deal of money has gone down
the drain, followed by talks that remained fruitless because the Ukrainians,
as they put it, came up against the "impassable stupidity" of their Western
counterparts.

When in 1991 the political elite faced the task of integrating into
the world from which it had for so long been isolated it simply could not
understand the basic traits of that world. "Reform" can mean anything from
return to an earlier better time (original meaning) to a transition to
an infinite variety of new states of affairs. If one does not know quo
vadis, there will be no reform. From the current Ukrainian regime the West
heard an endless choir: "Yes, yes, we're for reform; we're building democracy,
civil society, and a socially oriented-market economy." To a West schooled
in this doublespeak after a number of financial crises, it became clear
what the slogan, "Lenin said, we mean by the Party," signified -
we say and say one thing but subconsciously have in mind something else,
something outside the conscious mind, and that which lives most tenaciously
from "the most alive of all those living" comes from there. Thus, serious
analysts can point out that East Germany was also "democratic," that Brezhnev
and Kosygin also carried out "reforms," the Soviet Union already had a
fully formed "civil society," that markets (black and collective farm)
already existed, and that all this comprised a "socially oriented economy."
Western analysts read about the political conjuncture without really
understanding just what it is, and when they understand, the impression
arises that all politicians in Ukraine are venal and that politics in general
is an object of commerce.

True, these terms meant a certain transformation precisely toward democratization,
but if one reads the term "civil society" in Ukraine on the Threshold
of the Twenty-First Century by former presidential adviser Vydrin and
former head of the Presidential Administration Tabachnyk, it becomes clear
that the people supposed to build it simply did not know what they were
supposed to build, and the flight of foreign investment of Ukraine along
with their growing distaste for cooperating with it comes from the psychology
born of the totalitarian machine itself: "Say one thing and have something
else in mind." Agreement on one thing (with terms defined and money given)
actually can turn into an agreement to something else or about nothing
at all, even when Ukraine's best lawyers and economists worked on it. Recall
the well-known history of Coca Cola, decided on the highest level and with
millions already spent, and then it had to suspend building its plant because
of a question of who owned the land it was being built upon, the collective
farm or the district. "Whose land is it?" asked the character Kalyta from
the classical Ukrainian writer Karpenko-Kary. At present in Ukraine nobody
really knows, and this is far from the only outstanding question.

For example, the West understands a market economy as getting the state
out of the day-to-day management of the vast majority of enterprises (the
exceptions are almost all unprofitable, "saved" by the state for political
reasons and living at the expense of state subsidies) and the gradual duplication
of Western type economies (which the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians immediately
began to do with fairly obvious results). Yet, as Iryna Klymenko (whose
brilliant economic analyses are most probably due to the fact that her
mind was not poisoned by "political economy") recently correctly underscored,
those in power in Ukraine de facto dream of something else, the
Chinese model, which is now also in crisis.

If I may be more brutal, the only real experience Sovdepia had with
the market economy was the black market, and the only intellectual understanding
official "economists" had was derived from the not entirely accurate and
utterly dated classics of Marxism-Leninism along with completely inaccurate
textbooks on political economy. Well, if there will be private property,
it might as well be ours! We have to above all protect the domestic producer
(that is, ourselves)! Thus, we have what we have. As early as 1994 I wrote
about the Ukrainian "kleptocracy" born of such a system, but I could not
foresee how far it would go.

Strangely, people get used to dictatorship, embrace it, and adopt it
as their own. There are countless witnesses that in the last days of World
War II the inhabitants of Berlin calmed each other, saying, "Grofaz (German
abbreviation for the greatest military commander of all time, i.e., Hitler)
will save us!" There really is a "charm of the knut," although it must
be admitted that the average German under Hitler lived somewhat better
than the average Ukrainian or Russian under Stalin. Yet, the USSR within
its pre-1939 borders also became a subjective emotional fatherland for
the overwhelming majority of the population, and the System Stalin built
provided them the only (albeit, I think, highly relative) normalcy they
ever knew. Not without reason did Masha Rasputina sing, "Once there was
a country, and then they said there was not."

Five years ago there were still dreams and expectations; Ukrainians
were then proud that they had become citizens of an independent state.
True, there were vendors in kiosks who could not tell the difference from
the feminine version of the Ukrainian word, two, from three or the Ukrainian
word for cigarette lighter, but everyone still had hope. Then hope began
to disappear. It disappeared on the level of everyday life. I recall how
one evening my wife and I went to buy cigarettes. Some young man was trying
to rob the kiosk, and the young lady within calmly explained, "You can't
rob me; I already paid. They'll find you."

It had already become clear that all was not quite right in the neighborhood.
From this we have seen a whole system grow up before our eyes: details
are unnecessary; suffice it to say that where the state becomes unable
to carry out its basic functions (say, maintaining order in the bazaar
or collecting taxes from it), other "informal" and "experienced" entities
take its place in the sociopolitical food chain.

I find it most lamentable that people in this intolerable situation
still expect some kind of Grofaz to save them. It seems to me that the
essence of the current situation lies in an amalgam of the ingrained habit
of submission to totalitarianism with the economic culture of the black
market. When everybody is guilty before the government, how can anybody
change it? Convicts lose their political rights even in America.

A change for the better is possible only if the average citizen is convinced
that he can do (or contribute to doing) it himself. People understand perfectly
well how to take care of themselves in the "shadows." If it becomes worthwhile,
they will come into the light of day, and those who today trade counterfeit
vodka or contraband cigarettes in the bazaar will tomorrow (or the day
after) become honest domestic producers.

However, one must understand that those in power already have what they
need, that they will change the situation only when the people force them
to - only when the Ukrainians themselves firmly and clearly establish themselves
as WE THE PEOPLE. Only then will they become a force and a power to be
reckoned with by their own government.

There are plenty of grounds for criticizing the Western system. That
is a separate theme, but one cannot deny that it works and has had certain
successes. Perhaps that is why our neighbors, the Poles (who have as much
a complex and shared history with the Ukrainians as do the Russians), did
what they did. Who in Ukraine would not like to live like they do in Poland?
Maybe only those "who have because they have."

* In the Ukrainian and Russian versions they so wanted to rehabilitate
the American Declaration of Independence that the word, men, was rendered
unisex. I really doubt that Jefferson understood it that way.

 

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