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Doublethink 

03 November, 00:00

Too bad that our old friend George Orwell did not live to see the wreckage of the post-Soviet world, for so many aspects of his 1984 continue to be so painfully true. Take his idea of doublethink, the ability to hold two diametrically contradictory points of view simultaneously and not notice the contradiction. Officially, the current Ukrainian regime is all for reform, the market economy, democracy, Western values, and the like. However, as the excellent material in this issue by Olha Len and Viktoriya Podhorna makes clear, the real model Ukraine has chosen is that of post-Soviet Russia: a sort of monopoly state capitalism based on speculation by an oligarchy of political insiders as well as a state which lives on credit with perpetually growing debt and keeps the real politics of who gets (or controls) what safely out of the public eye.

Against this background President Kuchma's fit of pique at the European Union for not admitting Ukraine as an associate member is not merely inappropriate; it has a touch of surrealism. The EU is less a political organization than an economic one, based on the integration of more or less similar national economies into a common European one. Whether by choice or by sheer drift and incompetence, Ukraine and Russia have wound up with an economic model that inherently cannot be integrated into the European one because it works fundamentally differently, according to different rules and with different players. In fact, anyone who really tries to change it had better have good life insurance, for he would have to step on the toes of boys who play for keeps. Remember Vlad Listiev in Russia? Or Vadym Hetman in Ukraine?

There is also a political problem. Neither Russia nor Ukraine are really democracies, for democracy is not just about going to the polls. It is about going to the polls with enough knowledge of how things really work in one's country to be able to make an informed choice between real options in anticipation that the resulting victor will do more or less what he promised. Anyone familiar with the current President's career knows that this simply is not the case here. When it becomes so, it will be possible to talk about Ukraine joining Europe. But I would not count on it happening anytime soon. It simply is not in the interests of those with the power to make it happen.

Newspaper output №:

№39, (1998)

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Day After Day