Portrait with all the trimmings
A middle-sized Ukrainian businessman little resembles a cooperator at the turn of the 1990s who had to lug crates of pickled herring and tried to figure out the trade margin on his pocket calculator in a jammed subway car. There is very little in common between today’s proprietor of a boutique in a Kyiv underpass and a Turkish shuttle merchant piggybacking his merchandise and storing it on his girlfriend’s balcony, and even less is the resemblance to the new Russian/Ukrainian character spreading his fingers in a convict’s gesture with and without reason. True, the crew cut is still there, making the type easily identifiable among the toiling masses following his Mercedes with envious eyes as he races away to a wonderland where greenbacks grow.
Today, he looks quite respectable and, naturally, is a family man. True, it is also in style to keep a pretty young thing, an inexpensive one (employed) content to live in a single room apartment not far from downtown and drive a second-hand foreign-made car kept in a good condition. Of course, he has children begotten over the years and currently enrolled in a prestigious high school or lyceum, sometimes even studying abroad, although the latter has proved ineffective. There are cases when a teenager fresh from an elite foreign boarding school turns out unable to pass an English entrance exam at a private Ukrainian higher school – simply because the less than perspicacious local teachers cannot quite figure out what language he uses.
He has long sold his first abode in a concrete apartment block (where he had a hard time installing a fashionable door). Now he has a ranch house in a suburb, whose double pane windows open onto ramshackle cabins inhabited by the common folk. His pipe dream is to buy a villa on a tropical island, but it remains a long way to go, for there are tax bloodhounds breathing down his neck.
Unfortunately, business is still done using good old methods: imports (true, colonial produce is no longer in) or exports (surplus army gas masks allowing some gain in terms of VAT). In both cases one must have contacts at the customs and tax authorities. Sometimes one needs physical protection which one can – and does – use as a trump in the game of competition. The latter, being a most refined way to bury other businesspeople, has emerged and developed in the past couple of years, yet it is as heavy a burden as the tax people; it makes one constantly think, so that by the end of the day one muses not of a nightclub (where one can easily run into one’s own daughter), but of getting home and turning on one’s Dolby system (keeping the volume reasonably high).
Finally, there are plans. A trivial but nonetheless relevant question. While earlier practically everybody saw himself comfortably ensconced in parliament, now these ambitions are history, along with the ignominious red jackets. Only an imbecile will tease the tax people with politics where one can easily trip and fall at every step and then have a hard time proving that one’s firm is not fake and that one has never done business with any bogus companies. It is much better to make friends with the city state administration. The latter tends to supply friends with licenses for housing construction on Khreshchatyk, even on Pushkin Street for token money, including mansards, saunas, and pools. Of course, this is not as chic as an underground square, but quite enough for an advanced businessman operating on his own capital. At this stage all one needs to have the time of one’s life is the adrenaline from a couple of rounds of safe boxing (to use an old clichО) in the courtroom. The more so that the courts are packed with complaints from diddled tenants. And local Ukrainian courts are known to differ little from the Ukrainian parliament. Here, too, one can spend years defending one’s interests. In other words, the life of an average Ukrainian businessman is becoming organized; in fact, it is getting to be quite enjoyable. There is another joke about a man who extracted himself from the suicidal noose and then drank and ate to his heart’s content. Perhaps it is high time to follow suit, for far from all businessmen have close friends among the powers that be.
