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Aboard the Titanic 

22 December, 00:00

Every Russian visitor to Ukraine is now anticipated with special interest. It is obvious that the Russian economic and financial crisis is not a local event, and everyone will have to find a way to escape it. Hence, the recipe finding is so captivating. However, visits of Russian parliamentary leaders convince us of different things: representatives of the deputies' corps of the neighboring country live in some other country, not in Russia. With absolutely different problems. Not with Russian ones. There is a country called the Red Flag Duma. It has its own views of policy, the economy. and borders. As the living standard of Russians gradually fall, Duma Chairman Gennady Selezniov proposes to print money and to pay back the debt to international financial organizations with this paper. There is also another recipe for combating the crisis fighting, integration. Selezniov during his scandalous visit to Kyiv, and now his deputy Sergei Baburin proposes we join in. But join what? The Mythical Russian Belarus union, which helped consolidate the power of one of the major economic losers, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenka? The customs union of four (now it seems to be of five), which is famous in Europe for uncontrolled drug delivery routes, the participants in which criticize it more persistently than those who failed? Or merely with Russia, whose government has been failing to decide what to do with its thrice wretched economy for four months? Do they really want to deal with our problems as well?

Mr. Baburin, whom I like very much, had not noticed this before, does not notice it now, and never will notice it in future. The last romanticist of the rotten empire, he does not want to see that the Soviet Titanic is already at the bottom of history's ocean, and there is no technology capable of lifting this clumsy contrivance. He still feels like a passenger or perhaps even captain of the powerful liner: the sea breeze wafts, he walks majestically, the public is satisfied, the red flag flies, and Lenin's portrait hangs by the helm. After all, we all have our dreams. I do not ask what politics has to do with it; what Ukraine and our bilateral relations have to do with it.

I merely ask what Russia has to do with it.

Newspaper output №:

№46, (1998)

Section

Day After Day