The following story is a continuation of this narrative. It will be posted here until the powers that be grant me another subthread.
My trip to Kharkiv, April 3rd to 17th, 2000.
2. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:40:19 PM
The second time, I decided to go to Kharkiv because I had decided to quit Microsoft and join a small company, and wanted to take a vacation – and another visit to my native city would be more intellectually stimulating than, say, Waikiki. Valery Ivanov had sent me an “official invitation” valid from February to May. In the fall, I set up a scheme for donating money to Sintez that would bring in Microsoft’s matching funds (the company matches employees’ contributions up to $12,000 per employee per year) and a tax deduction for me. I agreed to donate money to a Pennsylvania charity called the North-West Association of Immigrants from Eastern Europe, an employee of which called Janna knows Valery, and has sent him parcels with food, old clothes and shoes donated by former Soviets living in Pennsylvania. NWA was supposed to channel the donation to Sintez, take the matching funds and channel them as well, and write me a receipt that I could use with next year’s income taxes. In January, Valery wrote that he was running out of money, and would like a donation. I sent $1400 to NWA. However, they held the sum for a month, until Valery truly ran out of food, so I had to wire emergency $200 and threaten to sue NWA. Janna complained that she couldn’t send any money without the authorization of NWA’s director Ella, who wanted to shut down the program that includes sending parcels, and Janna wanted to quit NWA. I should have realized that the route is unreliable; however, when Valery said he was running out of money again, I exercised stock options for $10,100 on February 29th, and sent the check (and the matching funds form) to NWA. The money disappeared off my checking account on March 15th. However, as of April 3rd, Ella hadn’t transferred it.
3. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:40:26 PM
She complained that she didn’t have the necessary account information, though I sent it to her, and used it perfectly fine last year, and had all sorts of disingenuous excuses. So before I went, I asked my wife to resolve the money question while I am in Kharkiv.
4. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:41:39 PM
I also set up a website for Sintez, which is now located here and tried raising money at Microsoft, aware that an enterprise this big can burn up all my money in no time. However, out of the 164 people on the alias “Microsoft employees from the ex-USSR”, only one responded, and even her enthusiasm quickly faded when she realized she actually has to spend real money out of her pocket, rather than just give away some old clothes. So this burden fell on Ilyusha, like everything else. I also corresponded with a clinical social worker who occasionally visits Salon Table Talk forum under the nom de keyboard Donna Dear, who promised to go visit the shelter, and set up professional contacts. However, I foolishly advised her to get a tourist visa rather than a visa through an official invitation from Sintez, so she lost some time, and eventually said she couldn’t deliver on her promise. I didn’t realize that psychology isn’t high on Valery’s list of priorities; food, repairing the building, and paying the employees’ salaries was more important; however, it certainly wouldn’t hurt. I translated a great deal of correspondence between Valery and Donna, and corresponded with Donna myself; however, when she asked me, she can diagnose the children, but who is going to treat them? – I couldn’t answer. I also sent them three parcels, mostly with children’s books, two of which arrived, as I eventually discovered. Overall, due to certain life circumstances, Sintez-related things developed into a major part of my life, overshadowing night school and taking priority over work. Valery wanted me to bring a laptop because of the electricity outages in the town where the shelter is located, and I bought a used one, and a music synthesizer, which a co-worker gave to me as a gift. Out of gratitude, Valery agreed to drive me to Kharkiv from the airport.
5. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:42:28 PM
I flew from Seattle to Kiev via Amsterdam by Northwest Airlines and KLM, a Dutch airline. During the 9½-hour flight from Seattle to Amsterdam, I started reading a Yiddish textbook by Uriel Weinreich, which was to be a 29th birthday gift for my friend Volodya, but then began to talk with the neighbors. My neighbor from behind was a 20something American woman who used to teach high school biology, a fan of Jared Diamond and a reader of Discover magazine. She quit her teaching job and was now studying to be a dental assistant, because a schoolteacher is a demanding and poorly paid occupation. Though a Swedish-American, she has never heard of Scandinavian children’s authors Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson. My neighbor from the left was a 60-year-old Russian biologist, a Doctor of Science, who specializes in ungulates, who was returning from a festschrift honoring an American colleague. He defended his candidate’s dissertation on Arctic reindeer and their role in the economy of the native peoples of the Arctic, and his doctor’s on Central Asian deer. I told him that I’d seen a website with a conference of indigenous peoples of the world, and there read a scary report by a Chukchi woman about how Soviet nuclear weapons testing in the Arctic caused radioactive matter to get absorbed by reindeer moss, and thence it passed to reindeer, and thence to humans – and asked, how true this is. He said that this is unadulterated bullshit – he himself has measured radiation levels in the Arctic, and the only herd of reindeer that is contaminated lives in Finland and Sweden, because that’s where the Chernobyl winds blew. He also said that nuclear weapons testing was done in Novaya Zemlya, thousands of kilometers from Chukotka, and the effect on the indigenous people was to increase radioactivity to twice the background level, which is nothing. He was very curious about Microsoft, and critical of its products.
6. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:42:36 PM
When I mentioned that I was going to an orphanage, he said that his wife and he have an adopted daughter, and he also has two other daughters, aged 18 and 25, from two different women. He says that many of his friends have adopted children, but a professor’s or a researcher’s adopted son oftentimes grew up to be a plumber or a laborer, which proves that it is all in the genes.
7. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:43:01 PM
During the flight from Amsterdam to Kiev, a 60something American woman was sitting next to me, who was flying with a blond boy about three years old. The boy’s legs were twisted unnaturally, and I realized that they are prosthetics, flesh-colored with socks and child’s shoes. She was standing next to me in the passport control line, and I held the stroller when she adjusted the prosthetics; the boy’s legs were missing below the knee, and socks were on the stumps. The boy made noise, but apparently could not speak; however, he calmed down playing with the rope on the passport control stall. A fat American couple in front of us came to Ukraine to adopt, too – apparently, adoption from Eastern Europe is big business nowadays, and Ukrainian law gives priority to crippled and defective children. Behind me stood a group of about ten Hasidim, black coats, sidelocks and all. One was listening to music from an apparently expensive walkman.
8. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:43:15 PM
Having passed passport control, I waited for baggage – a large suitcase with a change of clothes for me and gifts for my mother’s friends, and the synthesizer. However, it did not arrive. I filled the necessary forms, and gave the address of Mark – the neurologist I was staying with the previous time – as the place to deliver it to. A total of five passengers lost baggage there, including a couple with a Slovenian passport, with whom an airport worker conversed in Ukrainian, and they seem to have understood it. Fortunately, the money, the passport, the tickets, and the laptop were all in the backpack on my back. I was deathly afraid that Valery would think that I missed the plane, and drive away, but he stayed. At last the synthesizer was found – but the suitcase wasn’t – and I was let out. Because at the customs they knew I lost the suitcase, they didn’t examine my backpack, so I bluffed through without paying the import duty on the laptop. Valery and a volunteer driver named Yury were waiting outside, as was my mother’s aviation friend, though without the suitcase I could not give her my mother’s gifts.
9. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:43:27 PM
Yury, Valery and I got into a small ramshackle two-door Ukrainian car called Tavria, and started a six-hour drive from Boryspil (the town near Kiev international airport) to Kharkiv. Yury is a 28-year-old teacher of shop in a middle school, and his wife teaches English to the first three grades, and Russian from the fifth grade on. Nowadays, Russian, Ukrainian and English are taught from the first grade on, and Ukrainian and English are given much more class time than when I was a kid. The school they teach in has an experimental schedule, and had a break in early April while ordinary schools were in the middle of a quarter, so Yury had a lot of time to volunteer for Valery. Along the way, we saw horrible villages – huts with roofs of corrugated asbestos broken years ago, rusting agricultural machinery, peasants selling sacks of sugar and potatoes on the roadside because that’s how the collective farm paid them, having no money. And there was Lenin everywhere – a statue of Lenin in one collective farm, a bas-relief of Lenin in another one, a village renamed after Lenin. In some gutters, there was still snow that hadn’t melted since the winter. In the cities and towns we passed, such as Poltava, street scenes haven’t changed at all since I was a kid – same high-rises, shops, Soviet-made cars and trucks, people dressed as before – quite a shock after Bellevue, WA. In the fields there were haystacks, and we once saw rabbits. As the night drew, we drove behind a convoy of trucks – the long-distance truckers drive at night because the roads are empty, and do it together for security. The smell behind European trucks was much nicer than that behind Russian ones; Yury later told that he once asked a trucker, Why don’t you install a catalytic converter, and he replied, It is like putting your foot in a sweaty sock in a plastic bag.
10. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:43:40 PM
During the trip, I sang many Russian songs by folksingers Alexander Galich and Yuly Kim, who neither Valery nor Yury had heard about, because they were too self-consciously elite. In English, I tried “Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” and “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” but didn’t know all the words. Yury almost didn’t sing, and Valery not at all. We did not talk much; I remember Valery talking about unexplained phenomena. Allegedly, a few days before Hitler attacked Russia, Valery’s grandmother, a simple Siberian peasant, and her entire village saw an omen in the sky, a broom pulling a cart. I said that the German-Russian war was but one front of World War II; by mid-June 1941, the Chinese-Japanese War had been raging for almost four years – did Chinese peasants also see things in the sky? The day before, Valery and Yury drove to Kiev on some business besides bringing me to Kharkiv, carrying a deputy prosecutor on juvenile crime with them, and the car lost a wheel in the field. They gathered all the parts, jury-rigged something, and drove to the nearest repair shop. They spent the night in the car, on a parking lot.
11. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:43:49 PM
We arrived in Kharkiv near midnight. In Kharkiv, Irina Ivanov met us in a two-room apartment they were renting as the shelter’s “office”. In order to get hot water, cold water has to go through a 1970s gas heater that blew up a few days before, burning Irina’s eyelashes. By cups of very strong tea and cognac, they started telling me about their work with street children, happy to find a sympathetic soul in me. Recently they broke the habit of a six-year-old glue sniffer, Irina being at his side as he suffered. My mind was blurry after the long sleepless trip, and I vividly imagined the scene from the Chinese movie “Farewell my Concubine” where an opium smoker’s habit is being broken. Another glue sniffer, a 17-year-old, could converse with space aliens during a trip, claimed to know eight alien languages, and even recorded samples with Russian translations on tape. Finally I was led to an iron bed in an otherwise empty room, and fell asleep fast.
12. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:44:10 PM
The “office” stands in the working-class Kharkiv neighborhood called Kholodnaya Gora, or Cold Mountain, “cold” being a euphemism for prison, as there a famous prison stood there since the Czarist times. Another folk name of the prison is Belyy Lebed’, or White Swan, allegedly because an albino prisoner with last name Lebed’ had been kept there for sixty-some years, unable to spend more than a week free. Kharkiv’s main railroad terminal, Southern Terminal, is there. My father, born 1948, grew up in this neighborhood in a communal apartment. I woke up at 5 in the morning, my internal clock all mixed up, and having nothing better to do, after counting to 1000, started watching the streetcars, which were already full, trucks, which transported various machine parts and scrap iron, and cars. After the United States, Ukrainian and Russian cars seemed strangely small, almost like toys. There were few books in the apartment; most of the Ivanovs’ library is in the shelter in Yuzhny. There was the Russian Bible there, where I later read a surprisingly good translation of Ecclesiastes into modern Russian, and a few adolescent psychology books. One interesting one was called The Secret World of Children and Adolescents by a St. Petersburg psychologist, about how children and adolescents explore urban environment – playgrounds, parks, public transportation.
13. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:46:03 PM
After Valery and Irina woke up, and Yury drove by, we converted $200 of my money into Ukrainian hryvnias – Valery ran out of money again, expecting Ella to transfer my donation any day. The exchange rate was about 5.5 this April, as compared to about 4.0 last July, so life was fabulously cheap, like for the American expatriates in postwar Italy in the movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. We first drove to the Central Market, and bought an excellent jacket for me for 110 hryvnias (about $20), since it was too cold to walk in a Microsoft Office 2000 tee shirt. We then drove to the shelter. It was as I remembered it, though it had been repaired much in the meantime. It was fairly damp in there, so much that when posters are glued to the walls, they fall off in a few days. They have no money to waterproof the building. There were about 15 kids in there, a number that shrunk to 9 when I left, and all were excited to see me, calling me “Uncle Ilya” (they also call Yury “Uncle Yura”, Irina “Aunt Ira” etc.), among other reasons because they have no contact with men – the shelter staff is all women. I did not stay in the shelter for the night, though, and drove back to the office. Valery usually stays in the office, Irina and her two children in the shelter, though they meet daily. Also, one of the children is usually at the office after school, playing computer games and answering the phone. This had brought them a reprimand from the Provincial Authority on Juveniles, that they are “exploiting child labor,” as though the child were put to work gluing labels to bottles ten hours a day, like young Charles Dickens.
14. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:47:34 PM
I spent another night in the office, unable to wash after the trip because the water heater was broken, and felt quite dirty and sweaty. So after converting about $5 out of my pocket in a convenient currency exchange kiosk, of which there are many in the city, I set out for the city, riding the subway to Central Market. All sorts of goods were on sale, from moped parts to pedigreed puppies to World War II medals with profiles of Lenin and Stalin. I bought two pairs of socks and Polish underwear, and rode the subway to Lermontov Street, where I know there is a public bath. However, the bath had no soap and no towels, so I paid 6 hryvnias just for the privilege of standing under hot water for the first time in three days. The currency exchange kiosks refused to accept the remaining dollars in my pocket, saying that they have been washed, and in order to convert them at the bank you have to show your passport, which I did not have on me. So I went to my friend Volodya, who lives nearby, and who was glad to see me, he gave me hryvnias for my $8, and we spent about 7 hours together, talking about the various interests we share, including history and linguistics, and about common acquaintances, including Salon Table Talk’s Dino Bianchi. When Volodya’s dad first saw me, weary from travel, unshaven and dark-featured, he thought that I was a Chechen. Overall, the amazing thing is that nobody considered me a foreigner, and some people even said “thou” to me, the way adults speak with children. When I arrived back at Valery’s “office”, Yury was just taking off for the shelter, and I went with him, and spent the night at the shelter, on an iron bed under a red blanket in the older boys’ room. All the boys were very curious about me, and about America, and all were yearning for attention and kindness – this is true in general, not just then. I mostly slept there during the vacation, though during the day was in the city, for the most part.
15. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 9:47:38 PM
I don’t remember if it was that night, but once, when the light was switched off at 10 o’clock, the boys started speaking about what they would do if they got rich. One said that he would organize races down the subway elevators that are going up. I laughed so loud Irina Ivanov walked into the room. Another said that he would open a karate and kung fu school for orphans.
16. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 10:13:45 PM
The children and adolescents, by and large, have had horrible lives. While ten years ago most street children in Russia lived this life out of the spirit of adventure, nowadays the overwhelming majority was driven to the street by need, or because their home environment was unbearable. For example, two brothers, Maksim and Dima, who I believe are 14 and 13, lived on the Southern Terminal for two years, forced to beg by their mother, who drank away the money with men, and fed them boiled hay. However, as they grew older, passers-by began to give them less, and one fine day the mother failed to come to the designated place at the designated time, abandoning them. They have a third brother, now at an orphanage. Soon enough, Valery picked them up. Maksim is far too short for his age, for obvious reasons, and his language is funny – he speaks Russian with a Great Russian accent, which he picked up from his Russian mother, which is quite unlike ordinary Kharkivite talk, which is Ukrainian-influenced, but his speech is sprinkled with Ukrainisms. Although I expected them to show off their sophistication, like this American kid, I saw none of that – they were very childlike, even exaggeratedly so. What American 13-year-old will admit to liking Maurice Sendak’s and Mercer Mayer’s picture books? The funniest thing to observe, though, was the budding sexuality; for example, one adolescent tried to provoke a 24-year-old “instructor” with the joke, “What is nostalgia? Yearning for the place one was born from.” The oldest kid, a 17-year-old, kept writing love letters, and because he hadn’t had much schooling, he kept asking Irina Ivanov for help.
17. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 10:39:49 PM
The children live, eat and sleep in the shelter, and help with the maintenance of the building and the garden. However, some go to school in the town of Yuzhny, which has about 10,000 residents, and some go to school in Kharkiv. The district board of education didn’t want them, but the teachers protested collectively, and forced their hand. The shelter has a cook, two night watchers who work on alternate nights, and two “instructors”, who alternate days, and who are mostly there to help the kids, who have missed several years of schooling, with homework – all women. Because Valery has no money, he pays them with aid that is unsuitable for children. For example, when I was there, a chain of grocery stores donated a truckful of chocolates and candies, which were at their expiration date, and which would otherwise have to be thrown out – 1500 hryvnias’ worth. The children cannot eat this much, so much chocolate was distributed among the staff. The shelter also has a manager called Zoë, who ran the kindergarten the shelter is based in for thirty-five years, during more plentiful times. Zoë and Irina have overlapping spheres of responsibility. The shelter has one room where Irina Ivanov and her children Vova, aged 15, an avid computer gamer, and Olya, aged 8, live. The children seem to enjoy living in such an unusually large family. Irina’s books are in her own room, separate from the shelter’s library, which consists of donated books. Some of these are truly odd, such as Gogol translated into Ukrainian – translating Gogol into Ukrainian is a sacrilege, like translating Nabokov into Russian.
18. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 10:39:54 PM
There is also a Ukrainian translation of Dersu Uzala, a 1906 account of friendship between a Russian explorer of the corner of Siberia just north of Korea and an indigenous Udehe trapper. I once read an article claiming that what the explorer thought are an expression of the animistic beliefs of the trapper, such as referring to boars as “people”, were in fact merely grammatical features of the Chinese-Russian pidgin the trapper spoke.
19. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 11:19:27 PM
I didn’t have much to do in the shelter – not as a source of male strength, for nobody would ask a guest of honor to transport sacks of flour, and I couldn’t help with the garden, knowing nothing about agriculture – for example, I didn’t realize you aren’t supposed to water your garden with soapy water. Here the Ivanovs, one or two generations removed from Siberian peasants, were much more at home. The one exception was a translator – my first parcel had excellent American children’s picture books, such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak and There is a Nightmare in My Closet by Mercer Mayer, and I also brought Chingis Khan by Demi with me (and Sendak’s Dear Mili, both stolen from my wife’s kid, but it wasn’t as popular). Several kids and I translated the aforementioned books into Russian collectively, writing the Russian text on the margin (Chingis Khan was only 2/3 of the way done). One boy, Sasha, referred to the hero of In the Night Kitchen as a “fat boy” – perhaps he is, by Ukrainian standards. I learned a new Russian word, byl’tse – the headboard of a bed, which popped up when we did the Mercer Mayer book. They also wanted very much an adult male playmate, and I fit into this role because at 27, I am much younger than Valery Ivanov, who is about 40. We played “twelve sticks”, a hide-and-seek game, in the yard of the shelter. The shelter has an indoor toilet, used in the winter, but in order to flush it you have to fill a bucket with water from a faucet. Some bowls were always unflushed. It also has an outdoor toilet, used in the summer, which stank big time as I ran during the “twelve sticks” game. I remember reading a Time magazine article about Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas, which mentioned that when he was growing up in the 1950s, his family was so poor they didn’t have an indoor toilet.
20. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 11:19:55 PM
To be continued tomorrow.
21. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 11:20:15 PM
Comments are appreciated.
22. ilyavinarsky - 4/22/2000 11:41:20 PM
In Kharkiv, I met Mark, the neurologist I stayed with last time, and was overjoyed to discover that my suitcase was, in fact, found, and delivered to him. After I washed and changed into the newly found clothes, we talked much about various subjects; when I told him about honorable Pseudoerasmus, he said that he had recently examined a Pathan woman who spoke good Russian. According to him, there are many Afghans, including Pathans, living in the former Soviet Union – collaborators with the Soviet occupiers, employees of the Communist government, foreign students – who were decidedly unwelcome in post-Communist Afghanistan, and especially in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The West doesn’t want them either, and Ukraine doesn’t give them citizenship, just a residence permit that has to be renewed with bribes, that doesn’t give them the right to work or get an education. So they trade at the enormous bazaar near Barabashov subway station – even Ph.D.s and engineers. He agreed to treat the Pathans for free, but didn’t realize, how many of them there are. In general, there were many blacks, Chinese, South-East Asians on the streets of Kharkiv, especially the downtown. One noodle company heavily advertised in the subway is a joint Vietnamese-Ukrainian venture. The shelter’s kitchen has a calendar with advertising by this company on the wall, with beautiful azure tropical sea, and a fisherman in a conical Vietnamese hat.
23. PincherMartin - 4/23/2000 12:56:44 AM
Hello Ilya -- (I'm Ren-Jie in TT)
I'm enjoying your travelogue.
Could I make a request, however?
Would you please break up your posts into paragraphs? It would make your writing easier on the reader's eyes. Thanks.
24. jexster - 4/23/2000 1:00:10 AM
Ilya -
Do you know the Jewish Vocational Service here in SF? Formed initially to help Russian jewish emigres, they do a great deal of work with all faiths and, indeed, many disadvantaged groups, teens etc.
Not on topic I guess but your opening comments made me think of it.
25. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 4:08:06 PM
jexster, I have a few more contacts to explore.
26. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:42:10 PM
The state of Ukrainian economy can be described in one word – disastrous. Small business is suppressed with outrageous taxes, up to 70%, I was told, which nobody pays because otherwise they wouldn’t have enough to eat. The shelter’s 24-year-old instructor’s husband, who is 27, is a baker. The bakery where he was employed was losing money, and owed the employees several months’ worth of wages; it was bought by a new owner, who refused to honor the previous owner’s obligations. They cannot sue the new owner because the salaries the paperwork said they received, which is what they paid taxes off, were ridiculously small, and had nothing to do with what they really received, when they did. The instructor and her husband have a two-year-old daughter to feed. “Otherwise,” the instructor complained to me, “why would I work here?” In general, nonpayment of salaries is widespread; as of early April, Yury the teacher of shop was recently paid for January, and in my middle school, teachers hadn’t been paid since December, and have been working for free since. Sometimes, if a state enterprise has no money, salaries are paid in kind, so people stand on roadside selling chocolate cakes, or sacks of sugar, or electric equipment. Because it is impossible to live legally, everybody is guilty – what kind of rule of law can you have if on books, the speed limit were really 5 kilometers an hour, and the traffic police could arrest, or extort bribes by threatening to arrest, everyone at will for violating it?
27. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:42:19 PM
Besides taxes, there are also hordes of government officials demanding bribes. The government ministries are bloated even compared to Soviet times, and based on what I’d heard, lead a completely parasitical existence. Early this year, Valery had undergone fifteen inspections by sanitary commissions, having no money to bribe them off. If only somebody had fired one of the inspectors, and channeled his salary to feed the kids! Valery’s enterprise is private, but the state shelter also has no money, and when I was there they asked Valery to lend them a few sacks of flour. Hospitals have no money to change the patients’ linen. In the tuberculosis clinic’s children’s ward 38 kopecks per day per child is allocated for food; an apple from a street vendor cost me 80 kopecks; a 50ml glass of fried sunflower seeds 35 kopecks. Yet it also has to undergo never-ending inspections, as Mark’s wife Irina, who heads a biological analysis lab in the clinic, complained to me. For 60-some children in the children’s ward of the clinic, there is just one nurse and one nurse’s assistant, so pandemonium reigns there. The clinic is terribly understaffed, and the low-ranking staff is paid so little they are not nourished well enough, and sometimes catch tuberculosis themselves, which was unheard-of before. Yet the government now launched a scheme to rank health care institutions first-class, second-class and third-class, and the clinic has to devote time to making sure the inspectors rank it highly enough. The fact that there is a tuberculosis epidemic in the country is not on the government’s radar screen.
28. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:42:27 PM
Under these circumstances, it is impossible to be rich without having the right connections. If you live opulently without guanxi, to use a Chinese term, you can easily get “Masques-Show” (the name of a popular TV show, here meaning a SWAT team, members of which work in masks) which can break into your house and “find” minute quantities of drugs behind your wardrobe. You get two years’ probation, during which you and your money part. Thus people with money try to emigrate. I was told that the English-speaking countries are not as popular nowadays as a destination as are the Czech Republic and Poland, the Slavic cultures and languages of which are close enough to Russian, and which respect private property, and there are whole “The Talented Mr. Ripley”-style communities of expatriates from the CIS living in Prague and Warsaw. A few years ago, my parents visited Hungary, and saw my mother’s friends’ friends, who are the “New Ukrainians” living there – according to my father’s description, and incredibly opulent mansion, museum-class art, and gold everywhere. My father was horrified – these are the unpaid salaries of whole factories – but did not express his displeasure to the hosts. However, the truth is that were the investment climate in Ukraine normal, they would invest in business rather than gold and museum-class art, and their opulent life in Hungary means that their wealth trickles down at the Hungarians rather than at their former compatriots.
29. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:42:36 PM
An observation that someone suggested to me: look at the age of the drivers of expensive cars. When my power engineer father visited Hungary in 1983, many people he’d talked to told him things like: now that I am 40, and have had a long career in electric power, I’ll work in this industry for the rest of my life, but if I were 20, I would open a restaurant. Indeed, young people have many advantages opening a business: they don’t have families to care for, their parents can help them, they are healthier, they aren’t as tied to old ways of thinking. Yet the vast majority of the people in expensive Mercedes cars and SUVs, Jeep Cherokees, BMWs and other luxury vehicles that drive through downtown Kharkiv looked like they were in their 40s and 50s, gray, balding hair and all. They are the former “Red Directors”, Party and Komsomol officials, high-ranking officials of the Ukrainian government – not businessmen. I didn’t see any expensive motorcycles in Kharkiv, such as Harley-Davidson, which young people would be more likely to buy. I was told that there are many more motorcycles in Dnepropetrovsk, though, and the Kiev bikers even have their own website.
30. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:50:08 PM
A few words about how Yury got his car. His parents have worked at the automotive plant for over thirty years, his father a shop foreman, his mother an accountant. Five years ago, Yury had a summer job entering data into a computer, and saw a forklift dent a new car’s door. He typed in that the car’s windows were shattered, and its doors all broken, which reduced its worth from $2400 to $1600. His parents’ salaries hadn’t been paid for several months, and as workers with over twenty-five years at the plant they were entitled to a discount, so they suggested to be paid with this car in lieu of their salaries. The plant’s management agreed. After the deal was closed, the plant director sighted the car. “This is the car without windows and without doors? You fucked me up again!” He did not consider failing to pay his employees’ salaries fucking them up. Such are the realities of everyday life in Ukraine. I was told that if it hadn’t been for Western aid, there would be a humanitarian catastrophe. With his perestroika, Gorbachev wanted to build a society like Sweden, which combines the best of capitalism and socialism. What came out is something closer to Romania, which combines the worst: it is impossible to do business legally (even the jokes begin, “Hare set up a business, and Wolf came to Hare and started extorting money, so Hare asked Bear for protection…”), and the government doesn’t even pretend to care for its citizens’ welfare. What welfare – we are talking survival. Mark’s son Ilya, a young medical school graduate, has to rehabilitate senior citizens after heart attacks to the point where they can work in their backyard gardens, for otherwise they wouldn’t have enough to eat.
31. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:50:12 PM
When I told people that I’d read in an article by Robert Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly magazine that when a Budapest-Bucharest train crosses the Hungarian-Romanian border, a railroad official visits all the restrooms and removes all toilet paper, so Ukraine still has room to grow, everybody laughed sadly.
32. ilyavinarsky - 4/23/2000 11:50:55 PM
Comments, please.
33. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 12:10:49 AM
Ilya: Pseuder, what do you think of my picture of the Ukrainian economy? [from international]
The underlying picture is familiar, but the personalisation of the picture is first-rate.
One observation which surprises me: the one about the age of drivers in expensive cars in Kharkiv. In Moscow, you see a lot of young faces, very young faces, driving expensive cars, the favourites being a sparkling new Range Rover or Toyota SUV. (This is of course when you can see them through the tinted glass.) Without exception all the nice cars have yellow licence plates, the sign in Russia that you are allowed by the government to hold overseas bank accounts. Or at least that's what the locals say, but I never know whether that's true. The one thing which you must studiously avoid is cutting them off or having an accident with them. There are always stories of truncheon-bearing thuggish-looking characters storm out of a dark-tinted Range Rover and smash the windows of a man in some beatup Soviet car who had the misfortune of knicking their car.
34. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 2:08:56 PM
On April 16th, Ukraine was supposed to have a referendum. The goal of the referendum was weakening the power of the Ukrainian Parliament, and strengthening the power of the country’s President, now Leonid Kuchma. The questions of the referendum were: stripping the parliamentary deputies of their immunity before criminal prosecution, reducing the number of deputies, making the legislature two-chamber, and something else I don’t remember. Posters urging citizens to vote “yes” were on every building, as were flyers telling people to “stick it to the criminals who hide under the deputies’ mandates” and more in the vein of populism Huey Long would be ashamed of. I didn’t see any posters that would urge people to vote “no”, though there was plenty of chalk graffiti on fences to that effect. The director (“chief physician”) of the tuberculosis clinic received a call from the above, telling him that if all his staff doesn’t vote, he would be fired. During the Presidential election in the fall, he also received a call, asking how many of the patients voted for Kuchma. He bravely answered, “I don’t know, we have secret ballot.” Recently he was found unconscious on the floor of his office, having collapsed from overwork and stress. In fall, the young doctor Ilya treated an elderly woman, a residential manager of a student dormitory. She had received a call from the above, asking her why so few of the students in her charge voted for Kuchma, and had a heart attack. The people I’d overheard on the street were apathetic towards the referendum; one mother walking a small child complained to a street vendor, “Two-chamber legislature… another layer of parasites on top of us. I get 7 rubles [sic] subsidy for my child!”
35. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 2:09:03 PM
I asked Yury, how he would vote, and he said that he strongly supports the questions of the referendum. He said that the deputy from the district that includes Kholodnaya Gora, where he lives, has his finger in 42 enterprises, which the police cannot investigate because of his parliamentary immunity. How does he know this? A worker for one of the enterprises told him. The mechanism of simply failing to re-elect the deputy, which would apply in normal democratic countries, is out of question in Ukraine. If Ronald Reagan ever lapses into lucidity from his senile dementia, he should congratulate himself for bringing democracy to Eastern Europe.
37. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 2:13:19 PM
The chief physician of Kharkiv TB clinic #1, Vitaly Mankovsky, with his charges.
38. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 3:15:02 PM
I should probably write more about the shelter. It is situated in a town perhaps 50km from Kharkiv, which bears both the Russian name Yuzhny and the Ukrainian name Pivdenne, which means the same thing: southern (from Kharkiv). The population of the town is about 10,000 people; I was told that before the 1917 Revolution, all the land in it belonged to four landlords. It used to be a resort town, where city folk could enjoy country air and fresh milk, and swim in a large pond. It also has a broom and plastic products factory. However, the industrial enterprises have become unable to afford providing their workers with country vacation, and the “recreation homes” have closed, all of their property stolen. Nowadays the nouveau riche Ukrainians are building two- and three-storied summer houses there. What is wonderful about the town is the quiet, as well as the absence of advertising of any kind. There are unpaved streets, on which chickens cluck, motorcycles with sidecars distribute fresh milk, and children hang around. Several kids from the shelter go to the local school in Yuzhny, befriend the local kids or fight with them, and go to a local discotheque. Recently, five young locals almost stole a cast iron bathtub from the shelter, which they meant to sell to a local scrap metal dealer, but a night nurse frightened them. For this purpose, the shelter lets the dogs out at night. The shelter has three dogs: a mutt that is allowed outdoors all the time, and two more dogs that are only let out at night, and are forced back into the building during the day, an Irish wolfhound and some other breed. Valery Ivanov is a dog veterinarian by education, and Irina Ivanov is also a dog lover. Valery told that when the Irish wolfhound bitch was sold to him, she was so fat you could not feel her ribs, yet her legs were pencil-thin; now he cannot find another Irish wolfhound to mate with the five-year-old spinster.
39. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 3:15:07 PM
The shelter also has a few geese, duck-turkey hybrids, and chickens, which have to be locked in their pens when the dogs are let out at night; they are slaughtered when the shelter is short of food; the children feed and care for them.
40. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 3:15:40 PM
Is anyone reading this?
41. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 3:16:38 PM
Ilya, the parliament is a racket in the CIS countries. The idea of weakening it might actually be a good idea -- that of course depends on the president in power. Ukraine is not fortunate in Kuchma!
42. ScottLoar - 4/24/2000 3:24:15 PM
Well Ilya, since you asked, do I understand you to mean a duck-turkey hybrid is the consequence of a duck mating with a turkey? A duck mating with a turkey? I need ask twice.
43. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 3:26:07 PM
From today's newspaper The Day: a 110-year-old Ukrainian peasant woman. 
44. Absensia - 4/24/2000 3:31:25 PM
Ilyavinarsky,
I'm reading this..and with much interest.
45. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 3:31:53 PM
Actually, I just searched on the web: this is a South American duck species; that it is a duck-turkey hybrid is an urban legend.
46. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 3:36:07 PM
By the way, your story of in-kind payments is all too true but also all too neglected. On the flight from London to Moscow last December, there was this Canadian businessman who'd been invited to Voronezh to inspect a some factory he was interested in investing in. He was a complete virgin to Russia and he asked me how could it be given all the payments arrears Russian workers could feed themselves? "I'll show you once we land at Sheremetevo", was my response. At the airport, I introduced him to the regular feature right outside the gates, near the taxi stand: an old woman pensioner selling everything from wines to brand new bricks. I've seen this woman for years now. She'd become a super-kommersant and trader -- she buys all kinds of items from workers at factories and businesses who get paid their wages in goods. I've even seen her sell "salary" puppies she had bought from a worker at a kennel outside Moscow which supplies pets to New Russians!
Ironically, women like her are the true capitalists but also the most diehard nostalgics for the old system...
But in-kind compensation is a seriously neglected part of the Russian economy. Judging by the amount of what I take to be "salary" that's being sold in the streets, I'd say the level of barterisation in the economy must be staggering.
In Norilsk last summer one of the managers at Norilsk Nickel (which I was visiting) explained how most of its lowest-level employees were now being paid primarily through company-owned facilities like schools for their kids, housing and clinics.
But still there were locks and chains around everything and anything that could be moved in the offices and the factory. A stapler was chained to the desk. A cabinet containing office supplies had three locks and metres of chain.
Compensation has to be limited, I guess...
47. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 3:42:34 PM
(The in-kind payments are not just workers in the remaining state enterprises. Private enterprises also use them, because cash flow goes to Cyprus and Switzerland.)
48. JayAckroyd - 4/24/2000 4:05:15 PM
"I can't go on like this."
"That's what you think."
--Samuel Beckett
So how do the Russians get out of this box? I'm going to Poland in July, and am looking forward to seeing how much better things are than the last trip (1990). There's a tradition of democracy, of property rights, and reward for toil there that wasn't crushed by occupation.
There are no such traditions in Russia, at least AFAIK from my reading of the situation there, and from college courses in the dim past.
So, with apologies to Chernyshevksy, What is to be done?
49. jexster - 4/24/2000 4:08:42 PM
WRT Message # 25
Ilya - Well if that's your interest, I know for a fact that the JVS here in SF is most frustrated to tell highly educated Russians that they have to take jobs as security guards......
50. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 4:10:00 PM
Where's the Polish tradition of democracy? Do you call the interwar years democratic?
51. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 4:11:39 PM
Russia from the 1880s to 1914 had a functional capitalist economy with a system of property rights.
(As Ilya knows, I don't think "traditions" matter that much...)
52. JayAckroyd - 4/24/2000 4:23:58 PM
The Treaty of Lublin created the Sejm, which lasted in one form another for over 200 years, before the first partition. The Sejm was reestablished in interwar period, but Pilsudki's notions of democracy pretty much required he run things.
But I'll grant you, traditions don't matter that much. I still don't see Russia can get bootstrap its way out of the situation its in right now. Do you have any idea what the country will look like in 20 years?
53. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 4:37:43 PM
(I'm actually fairly optimistic about Russia right now. But you must go to TT to read why.)
54. JayAckroyd - 4/24/2000 4:38:38 PM
I really dislike TT. Where would that particular set of posts be?
55. PelleNilsson - 4/24/2000 4:42:34 PM
Jay
You were in Poland in 1990? That's interesting. I went there for the first time in April of that year and I then became a frequent visitor (7-8 trips per year) through 1993. It was fascinating to watch the transformation take place. I haven't been there since 1994 but I think you'll be amazed at the change.
Ilya
Sorry for this digression. And don't worry about readership.
56. uzmakk - 4/24/2000 5:51:26 PM
Pelle Nilsson, I don't say it often enough, but you are a cool dude in my book.
57. stostosto - 4/24/2000 6:23:35 PM
ilya
I read too.
Jay
I am looking forward to hearing about your trip to Poland.
I was in Warsaw on a business trip in 1993 and found it seriously depressing. Not the transformation of it, the city itself.
Pseuder
Re barter trade: What to do about it? I mean, it's such an atavistic feature of an economy, awkward, impractical, distorting. One place to start is making debtors pay their due, including enterprises towards tax authorities, towards other businesses and towards employees; and the government towards pensioners, and public sector workers. This would include -presuppose - a willingness to let businesses go down that cannot pay. (But how about the government? Hyperinflation?) Then let others take over the assets who know how to make use of them (yeah, right, who would that be?).
But it's probably a highly entrenched and complex problem. The prohibitive tax rate that Ilya mentions is also part of it.
58. pseudoerasmus - 4/24/2000 6:47:13 PM
I went to Poland about five times on business trips between 1994 and 1996 and I found it one of the least interesting countries in Eastern Europe. Not entirely their fault, though, since the Germans and the Russians both wiped clean a lot of Polish history and culture. The only time I really enjoyed myself was the detective work involved in finding out the whereabouts of the house in Wroclaw that had belonged to my grandmother's family when the city was still German and called Breslau. It turns out the spot where the house was is now a radio components factory that went bust, also shorn of the greenery that is supposed to have surrounded the house.
Sto: The tax rate in these countries isn't just prohibitive, but arbitrary. Because the tax schedules aren't clear, and the amount may depend frequently on the whim of the tax collector, few businesses let alone small businesses can do any kind of tax planning. Uncertain tax rates are far worse than high tax rates.
Ackroyd: I'm not in the mood for it now, but I'll reiterate the gist of it later.
59. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 11:18:05 PM
When I arrived, Valery was in a legal quandary. There is a state shelter for homeless children, where the policemen herd the children they catch on the street (which, incidentally, has no money to feed them, either). However, the stay there is limited to three months. Afterwards the child either has to be reunited with his family, or go to a state orphanage (or back to the streets). However, the state orphanages are overcrowded and understaffed, and the conditions there are quite poor. Valery and Yury drove to one of them to meet two boys on some business, and the boys complained that the mathematics teacher called them ubytki (losses; the mathematics teacher probably called them ublyudki, or motherfuckers, but the children didn’t know the word). Valery told that the principal of this orphanage used to be a sadist who beat the children, herself the product of an orphanage. At the shelter, the older kids told me that “in the orphanage, everyone is out for himself, and here we’re one for all and all for one,” quoting a movie adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. So they run away from the orphanage, into the streets, and we’re back at the starting point. There is pressure being put on Valery to limit the stay of the children there. For example, the Provincial Authority on Juveniles told a 15-year-old son of alcoholics to move back in with his parents “or Uncle Valera will go to jail.” He did, and started drinking again. So Valery wants to reorganize the shelter as an “Experimental Center for Helping Children and Adolescents in Distress.” He needs money in order to prove to the authorities that he is able to do it.
60. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 11:18:09 PM
A beautiful young female lawyer, who has the rank of police lieutenant, is helping Valery with legal matters, and wants to defend her dissertation on Valery’s shelter. She admires American family law, and didn’t believe me when I told her that American family law turns very ugly when one party has access to much greater financial resources than the other party.
61. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 11:18:42 PM
As I was there, one of the many dramas unfolding was the story of a 17-year-old whose only surviving parent, mother, died, so among his other worries Valery had to organize a funeral. The boy’s aunts want to have nothing to do with him. If he wants to get educational privileges as an orphan in the next few years, he has to live in an orphanage at least for a few months. He refused at first, thinking that Valery was trying to get rid of him, but eventually conceded, and if I remember correctly, was accepted at last.
62. ilyavinarsky - 4/24/2000 11:40:22 PM
The one person whose company I enjoyed the most was Irina Ivanov. She graduated from a “medical high school” and is thus a nurse’s assistant by education. She is a broad-minded person who has excellent common sense, and likes to read, Mikhail Bulgakov being among her favorite authors. She loves very much both her own two children and the formerly street children in her charge, and can talk about them for hours. I told her that literary translation is my hobby, and that I recently translated a short story by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, the main character of which is quite like her husband. She hadn’t heard of the author. I downloaded the story “Family Robinson Nouveau” off the site of the Novyy Mir literary magazine, and read it aloud. It turns out that the story has many incongruities, apparent to a person familiar with agriculture – for example, a nanny goat matures sexually way too fast. American journalist Richard Rhodes spent a year with a farming couple in the 1980s, filled forty-two notebooks, and compressed them into a very interesting (for a city slicker) nonfiction book called “Farm”. Even literary writers such as Philip Roth and David Guterson could be expected to do sound research when they write about glovemaking and growing apples. Yet Petrushevskaya the litterateur considers such work beneath her. I told Irina that I once read an essay that claimed that it takes ten years to learn any subject professionally, from computer programming to writing music, and asked if the same is true for peasant work. She answered that it is a culture you have to be born into. We also laughed together at Petrushevskaya’s trademark horror, agreeing that it is overdone. Irina says that you have to watch a horror movie or an erotic movie alone in order for it to have the desired impact; if you watch it with a friend, you’ll laugh together.
63. sakonige - 4/24/2000 11:49:52 PM
Ilya,
You make the old world sound hideous. You seem to have been born in a pool of human decay.
64. sakonige - 4/24/2000 11:51:40 PM
I will never touch your home country, and I worry about you touching mine.
65. sakonige - 4/24/2000 11:54:18 PM
We've had serious problems with old world diseases here.
66. PincherMartin - 4/25/2000 12:12:08 AM
We've had serious problems with old world diseases here.
I'm sure this line was not meant to be intentionally funny, but hahahahahahahahahaha!
67. pseudoerasmus - 4/25/2000 12:16:19 AM
Yes, I agree, I would call it desert-dry wit if I knew that the Sasquatch wasn't incapable of it.
68. sakonige - 4/25/2000 12:16:48 AM
PincherMartin,
Are you an old world disease?
69. sakonige - 4/25/2000 12:24:39 AM
PE,
What I am incapable of is guile. You may never have encountered anyone else in your travels who is.
70. sakonige - 4/25/2000 12:43:35 AM
Garrison Keillor logged in drunk tonight at TT. Do you think I should tell him he is an old world disease? He is.
71. sakonige - 4/25/2000 12:47:43 AM
I think he is a fungal parasite.
72. stostosto - 4/25/2000 5:25:53 AM
sakonige
The world has a disease. It's called humans.
73. pseudoerasmus - 4/25/2000 5:31:10 AM
Actually, the disease is called Dano-Sultan-Gulievism.
74. pseudoerasmus - 4/25/2000 5:34:07 AM
that's
Dano-Sultan-Galievism
75. stostosto - 4/25/2000 6:13:41 AM
Wie heißt denn das?
76. marjoribanks - 4/25/2000 10:29:36 AM
Very interesting reading, Ilya. The personalized detail is outstanding, even if the world you describe is quite painful to read about.
77. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 2:56:20 PM
Besides the lawyer, I met two more women who work with (or against) Valery. One was the Provincial Authority on Juveniles, who has an office in the 1920s Constructivist building called Gosprom. Valery and I went up to her office; Yury the driver of the re-purloined Tavria hatchback was waiting for us below. We didn’t figure out why she wanted to see me; perhaps she just wanted to look at an exotic animal. She asked me whether I sponsored Valery’s shelter because it offers me tax advantages, or as a cri de coeur. I answered that it is a cri de coeur. She asked whether my family complains that I am taking this money away from them. I answered that my wife has worked in an orphanage in the town of Bel’sk near Novosibirsk, and understands me, and there is enough left for my family. She then asked me, what my overall impressions of the country were, and I innocently gave her the spiel about Sweden and Romania, and about the drivers of expensive cars being over age 40, apparently the former Party cadres. She was outraged, told me that I am completely wrong, and that she had worked in the ideology sector of a district Party committee for many years, and that I don’t understand, how hard and unrewarding her job was. Her accent was strange, even though she is a native Kharkivite; perhaps it is the Party sociolect. This class enemy presented me with a photo album of Kharkiv, published in 1986. Everything looked cleaner and in better repair then. As we drove away, we drove past several expensive cars; one driver of a Toyota Tundra looked young (perhaps it was presented to him by his mother-in-law as a “safe” car for her grandchildren?), but the other drivers of expensive cars looked quite old.
78. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 4:48:06 PM
The "Gosprom" building: 
79. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 6:52:05 PM
We next drove to a Catholic church, which was seized from the believers in the 1920s and returned in the early 1990s, like the synagogue a few blocks away, which my brother and I visited last year. We wanted to meet a priest in order to work out a funding agreement for the shelter, so the homeless Ukrainian kids would feed not only off the blood of Microsoft’s competitors but also off the sweat and toil of Philippine peasants. However, the priest was out of town, so we just met an accountant who does both the church’s and the shelter’s budget. They have a “sister church” in Greensboro, NC, USA, and she promised to investigate if it can offer a donations channel for me that would be tax-deductible. The accountant is a well-educated woman with a good sense of humor, who laughed when told about the mini-scandal in the office of Provincial Authority on Juveniles. The office on the premises of the church had a picture of Christopher Hitchens’s favorite Albanian nun, an old Russian-Polish and Polish-Russian dictionary, a history of Renaissance art in Polish, translated from the Russian, two Polish Bibles and a Polish-language history of the Roman Catholic Church. The accountant said that like Odessa, historically Kharkiv had a large minority population – Polish Catholic and Jewish – but while Odessa was a port city on the margins of the Imperium, Kharkiv is deeper into the Russian heartland, so expressions of difference were suppressed more effectively. Looking at the history of the Church book, I said that a few years ago, I’d read a novel about the origins of Christianity, Julian by Gore Vidal, but because Vidal is homosexual, he paints pre-Christian Rome in rosy hues and Christianity uniformly black. We agreed that history has many unexplored corners. Incidentally, Julian has recently been translated into Russian.
80. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 6:52:38 PM
I bought far fewer books this time than last time. I decided to stock up on Ukrainian-language books: while it is possible to mail order Russian books from Brooklyn and Palo Alto, the demand for Ukrainian ones is far smaller, and so is the supply. Kharkiv book bazaar had no contemporary Ukrainian literature, but bookstore “Poetry”, which is the factory outlet for Folio publishing house, had a large collection. There I bought Gatherings, a collection of four humorous absurdist novellas by author Volodymyr Dibrova, three about Kiev intelligentsia in the 1970s-1980s and one about a Ukrainian academic immigrant in the United States. Although Dibrova is considered among the top 10 living Ukrainian authors, whose previous work has been translated into English and possibly other languages, and this is his first book in eight years, its total print run is 1000, more appropriate for the Chukchi language with 13000 speakers than for Ukrainian with 30 million. The publication was subsidized by Harvard Institute of Ucrainica. I also bought a novel published together with the selected stories by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, an anti-Communist Socialist politician of the 1910s-20s and a major Modernist writer. Because of his political activities, Vynnychenko was a “forbidden classic”.
81. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 6:54:26 PM
Because the store staff was happy to see such an eager customer, they recommended that I buy a new edition of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry, free of censorship at last. Shevchenko (1814-1861), a household slave in his childhood and youth, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, was a noted Realist painter and a Romantic poet of national and social liberation, who did for the Ukrainian language what Pushkin did for Russian, Martin Luther for German, and Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible for English. When I expressed disbelief at the claim that the Soviets censored Shevchenko, a bookstore clerk said that it is really true; for example, she said, whereas it was permitted to lay flowers at the Shevchenko monument by a work collective, it was forbidden to do so individually, since it was considered an expression of Ukrainian nationalism beyond the control of the powers that be. Now that I think about it, the bookstore clerk was probably correct. In school, we had to learn by heart a long excerpt from a poem by Shevchenko about the hardships of serfdom, which talks about work so intensive “they won’t let you stop and pray.” I once heard a man a few years older than my father, who now lives in Israel, recite it from memory; the line was “they won’t let you stop and rest.” Volodya’s mother, who is also a translator, has an edition of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories and The Devil’s Dictionary, published in Moscow in the 1980s for students of English; The Devil’s Dictionary lacks my favorite definition “Russian: a person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul; a Tartar emetic.”
82. pseudoerasmus - 4/25/2000 6:58:58 PM
What does it mean for someone to be a Tatar emetic? That he causes others to vomit a Tatar?
83. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 7:03:25 PM
The monument to Shevchenko, to whom it was permitted to pay homage collectively but not individually: 
84. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 7:19:37 PM
A Tatar that makes you vomit.
85. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 8:34:15 PM
I bought one more book in Ukrainian in The Book World store, The Demon of Love by Valery Shevchuk, which I haven’t looked through yet, and which seems to be a collection of fantastic short novels set in 16th- and 17th-century Ukraine. In the same store, I also bought a bilingual Russian-Yiddish children’s book, which had a print run of 500. Even though I would have considered it a great treasure at age 12, 15 years later, with all my Yiddish-speaking grandparents dead, it is pretty worthless, so I don’t know myself what sentimentality caused me to buy it. Neither the stores nor the book bazaar had any contemporary Russian literature worth reading. At the bazaar, one “intellectual” vendor in military fatigues had Victor Pelevin, a Russian knockoff of Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon and other “shocking postmodernists” whose bite was weak even 30 years ago. He also had a novel by nihilist author Vladimir Sorokin, titled Blue Lard. I asked the vendor if it is any good, and he said that if I don’t like Pelevin, I won’t like Sorokin – he is disgusting, but some people like to be disgusted, so he is writing for this market. Almost all the other vendors had cheap thrillers called Thief in Law and the such, pirated translations of Western science fiction and Harlequin romances. The news kiosks in Kholodnaya Gora neighborhood reminded me of the reading material produced for the proles in George Orwell’s 1984 – e.g. a lurid tabloid proclaiming “Pedophiles Prey on Our Children.” The thing that was most fun was pirated software – e.g. a compact disk with Russian Microsoft Office 2000, Russian Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000 Workstation and a few more items sold for $2. Unfortunately I was foolish enough to try to upgrade Valery Ivanov’s computer to Windows 98 off this CD, but the low-quality CD corrupted the system, so we had to take the computer to the store to restore its configuration.
86. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 8:35:19 PM
I did buy a few books in Russian, though. Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, which proves that Rushdie is a young snotnose punk, was one. A collection of aphorisms Uncombed Thoughts or Unkempt Thoughts by Polish-German-Jewish wit Stanislaw Jerzy Lec is another one; I owned an old Soviet edition, lifted from my mother, but the afterword of this edition says that the old one had, in fact, been combed. A favorite of U Thant and W H Auden, Lec is the author of such aphorisms as “If a cannibal uses the knife and the fork, is it progress?” and “Don’t tell your dreams – what if the Freudians come to power?” and “I wish the world were like Le Grand Guignol. Sadist! No, there it’s all make-believe.” I also bought an anthology of fantastic literature compiled by Jorge Luis Borges, and now translated into Russian. It is interesting that the translations from English (the story about the monkey paw and many others), Japanese (Akutagawa), German (“Singer Josephine and the Mouse Folk”), French (Pantagruel) and Latin (an excerpt from Satyrica) are done directly from the respective languages, by superb translators such as Rita Rait-Kovaleva, the same for Spanish, though there are just two literary translators, and Arabic and Chinese are done via Spanish. Perhaps Russia’s long isolation from China caused absence of demand for translators.
87. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 8:36:25 PM
For the kid, I bought an adaptation of folk ballads about Ilya Muromets, a legendary 9th-century Russian knight; the adaptation is more politically correct than the original is. Now the kid says that Ilya Muromets, a Russian, is the strongest man in the whole universe, as if he were Batman. I also bought Karlsson on the Roof by Astrid Lindgren (we have the Russian animation), and some poems by Eduard Uspensky. Uspensky is an institution of Russian children’s literature, the author of many popular fairy tales, such as Cheburashka. Cheburashka is a cat-sized bear with enormous ears, who arrived in Russia as a stowaway in a crate of oranges from a faraway tropical country, and who befriended a zoo crocodile named Gena. In downtown Kharkiv, there was a graffito on a wooden fence, “Che-Burashka”, depicting Cheburashka in an Ernesto Guevara beret.
88. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 8:45:03 PM
89. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 8:49:10 PM
Are you people bored? Should I continue?
90. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 9:35:47 PM
I am now convinced that Cheburashka is the illegitimate offspring of Mickey Mouse and Kero-Kero-Keroppi, whose mother concocted a Moses-in-a-reed-basket story in order to confuse people about his origin.
91. ilyavinarsky - 4/25/2000 9:49:55 PM
Cheburashka comes to a grocery store.
"Have you got urranges?"
"Not urranges, oranges. No, we don't."
The next day: "Have you got urranges?"
"I already told you: not urranges, oranges. No, we still don't."
The next day: "Have you got urranges?"
"If you say 'urranges' once again, I'll nail you to the wall by the ears."
The next day: "Have you got nails?"
"No, we don't."
"And urranges?"
92. PelleNilsson - 4/26/2000 1:40:10 AM
This is fascinating, Ilya.
93. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 12:52:24 PM
"Gena, be careful on the ladder."
"Thank you, Cherem-berem-burum-burashka."
94. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 2:08:19 PM
With my mother’s second cousin, we went to the cemetery where my maternal grandfather is buried. The 60something man, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, has become religious about ten years ago, going through several religions in the process and mailing various religious literature to my mother, including the book by the Aum cult, which has nerve-gassed a Tokyo subway. The book modestly offers a synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. The cemetery is located in a large neighborhood west of the very long Klochkovskaya street; I don’t know if the neighborhood has a customary name. This neighborhood is very much like Yuzhny in that it consists of many one-story brick houses with corrugated asbestos roofs, dogs walking through the streets, old folks sitting on benches, and goats grazing near the streetcar line. There are no currency exchange kiosks there; however, there is a scrap metal dealership, where you can bring a cast iron bathtub stolen from an orphanage. The shelter kids asked me if such dealerships exist in the USA, or do they only accept scrap gold? A few kilometers due west is the Lopan river, and beyond the river there used to be a tank repair plant, where my brother and I once sneaked through a hole in the ground, and sat in a tank. This sounds incredible, but I remember too many details about this for it to be a childhood fantasy. When I told this to Irina Ivanov, she told that she grew up near a chocolate factory, and workers returning from the shift often threw chocolates over the factory fence, to pick up and resell them later – Irina and her brother wasted no time.
95. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 2:08:29 PM
The cemetery had many graves of soldiers who died in Afghanistan, and many custom-decorated graves reflecting the dead person’s occupation – a taxi driver was depicted near his cab, a space station was engraved on a space scientist’s tombstone. The biggest gravestone by far belonged to an “Engineer – Lieutenant Colonel”. One gravestone belonged to “So-and-so, a Doctor of Technical Sciences,” as if it matters now that he is dead. The graves of the nouveau riche Russians were especially grotesque; my uncle wondered aloud if any nouveau riche Russian’s family would have the chutzpa to displace the monument to the WWII dead. We cleaned up the grave; my uncle said that if a grave is not maintained properly, the cemetery management thinks that it has been abandoned, and considers it vacant. I wrote down the directions to the grave; he inquired if I was preparing for the time he would be lying there. Unfortunately, I did not visit my great-aunt’s and paternal grandparents’ graves during this visit. His younger daughter, my third cousin, also holds a recent Ph.D. in physics, and teaches a seminar on magnetism in Kharkiv State University. She asked me if there are any reasons not to emigrate. I answered that, like marriage and divorce, this is a personal decision.
97. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 3:58:09 PM
98. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 7:15:48 PM
I visited my middle school, which was in the middle of a school year. The teachers of mathematics and English have emigrated; the teacher of Russian remained. She remembered me well, even though she hadn’t seen me for 14 years. She said she recalled me recently: a mother asked her whether to send her child to school one year early, and she recommended her not to because there used to be a boy here by the name of Vinarsky, who was one-one and a half years younger than his classmates, and though his intellect was strong, his practical mind was not sufficient for his grade level. She remembered several amusing episodes from my school years, and that I was often beaten up, and asked me why. I answered, seriously, that it was because of narcissism that my mother instilled in me during my childhood, something I have been trying to get rid of ever since. She said that she doesn’t think so: it was because I was “different”. As far as I know, Mary Kay LeTourneau has also said such things about her favorite student. A character in Alexander Griboedov’s play The Woes of Wit, which I read about ten years later than the curriculum mandated it, says “God preserve us from our masters’ anger and love alike.” Schoolteachers not excepted. There are some nastier stories about this teacher, which I chose not to recall during the conversation. For example, when Brezhnev died and Andropov rose to the top, one of the kids said in class that he’d heard that during the war, Andropov betrayed somebody to the Germans. This teacher said that no, our government has crystal-pure people, only once did a bad person sneak in – Yezhov (whose successor on the job was the better known Lavrenty Beria).
99. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 7:17:11 PM
I told the teacher that I am sponsoring an orphanage, and she complained to me that their salaries hadn’t been paid since December, and that if I want to help my middle school, I should talk to the principal, who also remembered me. I wasn’t ready for this turn of events, but she told me to think about it “when you get rich.” She was curious about the shelter, though not particularly eager to visit it; they also have many children from at-risk families, but she is skeptical they will ever come to any good. She has read and respects Makarenko (a 1930s Soviet pedagogue famous for his work with street children), who worked “when the Soviet government was young and creative.” I answered that the Ivanovs say Makarenko used to beat up the children in his charge, though he didn’t mention this in his writings; I didn’t say that when the Soviet government was young and creative Lenin wrote, “We are shooting too few professors (malo rasstrelivayem professury),” an out-of-context quote, of course. She was genuinely happy to hear that I have volunteered in an American school, about which she knows from Up the Down Staircase; the mathematics teacher, who has emigrated to the United States, has also done so, and was very excited about it.
100. ilyavinarsky - 4/26/2000 10:39:12 PM
I spent some more time with Volodya and his mother. Volodya’s mother is a translator from English, French and Italian, while her son is more into English, German and Polish; because of what she’d seen during the war, which she experienced as a child, and some of which she told me, she had a visceral dislike for the German language and culture for most of her life. Both mother and son give private lessons, Volodya to local Jews who want to emigrate to Germany. He says that the German authorities will soon have a rude awakening concerning the people they’re letting in, and Jews will have to emigrate to Israel. Volodya borrows books from the local Goetheinstitut, and quietly photocopies them, for example Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon. This family bought a summer house and a plot, and grow vegetables – peppers, melons – on it in their spare time; Volodya says that without it his father, a retired officer and a former ROTC instructor, would go crazy from idleness. For his 29th birthday, he invited a few friends from both school and university. Two brothers, who are identical twins, but who now differ in that one has a mustache and the other one doesn’t, work as computer programmers, doing contracts for an American company founded by someone who emigrated to the States long ago. Several people told me to start another such company: on $100 per month one can live very comfortably in Kharkiv, while for $300 per month people will lick your ass.
101. jexster - 4/26/2000 10:57:59 PM
$300/month!!!
Off to Kharkov!!
How much Piotr?
102. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 12:09:02 AM
I think the only other place I’ve visited was the Kharkiv Zoo, with the shelter’s kids and their “instructor”. We saw the tiger, the lion and the lioness, the polar bear, the wolf, the camel, the kangaroo (what impressed the kids the most were its balls-on-a-rope), the hippo (though it was a bad idea to throw ball bearings down into the pool at it), and the monkeys. The male baboon was especially pretty, twice the size of the females, with long well-groomed gray fur. The entrance was free for the kids; the guard wrote down the name of the orphanage in order to charge it later (if ever). There is an arcade near the zoo entrance; some machines haven’t changed since I played there 20 years ago, but some were obsolete Western ones from the 1980s. Two(!) of the kids were thrown out of it because they tried to look for spare change in the machines’ coin returns pockets. They also told me ways to ride the subway for free: one way is to pretend to put a coin into a slot, and then go to the subway worker on duty, and tell her with a straight face that “your machine doesn’t work.” We bought a hot dog each after leaving the zoo; I told the children to hold on to the wrappings until we get to the nearest garbage can, but one kid didn’t have them; he confided that I didn’t see him throw them away because he hid them under a rock.
103. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 12:09:16 AM
The money from Ella finally arrived (via my wife), and Yury and Valery drove to Kiev in order to pick it up, and also drive me to the airport. The road back was uneventful; Valery was mostly sleeping, and I was reading Günter Grass. We ate in a roadside café “Fortress”, which had cow skins on the walls, standing for the skins of wild beasts killed by the lord of the fortress. Two café workers, 20something women, were conversing in Ukrainian; east of there, Russian is more prevalent among young people. The bus stations along the route were decorated with interesting mosaics, resembling some Kharkiv mosaics; it is possible that the same artist created them. We saw cats in the middle of a field, probably hunting voles, and underground storage bins for seed stock, which looked like bomb shelters. On the roadside, peasants were selling potatoes, brooms, and sunflower seeds. On the plane to Amsterdam, a young English woman to the left of me was reading an article in Czech about some medieval Bohemian castle.
104. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 12:09:43 AM
I arrived in Amsterdam, back in the rich world. In the Schiphol airport, I saw the first morbidly obese person in two weeks, standing in line behind me for hotel reservation. The VISA card that didn’t work in Kharkiv suddenly started working in Amsterdam. I had almost no time to explore the city, but the little I saw looked extremely similar to the United States: office parks, shopping malls, Tower Records, a high-speed train network similar to BART or CalTrain. The two exceptions were pornography on every corner, and Dutch spoken and printed everywhere. A poster advertised a magazine with a picture of Adolf Hitler sitting in a lounger, with a dog on his side. A newspaper kiosk had an issue of Colors magazine, bilingual in English and German, marketed to people who want to experience the frisson of living in the Third World, but do not want to expose themselves to unsafe drinking water. During the flight from Amsterdam to Seattle, my neighbor from the left was an enormously fat working-class woman from Washington State, a mother of three, who had divorced her abusive husband, and was now returning from a trip to a fiancé, a US serviceman stationed in Italy. Should I be abusive to my wife so she would reward me with three children? To the right were four boisterous women in their early 30s, friends since college who were returning from a vacation in Spain. They had a novel by Barbara Kingslover, which they were reading for a book club. One, a Filipino-American, is some kind of a counselor working with Native Americans. She gave me some references of people who can substitute for Donna Dear. I asked her if she agrees that, while Sherman Alexie’s early work is interesting and original, lately he has sacrificed his talent to the Moloch of political correctness. She proceeded to defend Sherman Alexie against all charges.
105. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 12:23:21 AM
That’s all. There are few good things about Ukraine. It is good that the Soviet-era shortages of consumer goods are a bad memory, and stores have plenty of sausage and cheese, but shortage of money is no less acute. It is good that censorship is gone, but the reading public cannot afford to buy many books, and the nouveau riche Russians, as Tatyana Tolstaya put it, are people who have never read anything but children’s books. It is good that believers are free to practice their religions, but the down side is that totalitarian cults spread through the frightened populace. One “Missionary Church” helped Sintez a little, but when Valery Ivanov refused their demand that the children attend their services obligatorily, they withdrew their help. It is good that the military is smaller than it used to be, but something is clearly wrong when soldiers ask the passers-by for money, which a college friend of Volodya’s saw. And while it is good that few people are obese, it is bad that many people are malnourished, which is the cause of the TB epidemic.
106. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 12:25:56 AM
This thread is open to questions and comments.
107. marjoribanks - 4/27/2000 10:55:49 AM
Ilya,
This has made for excellent reading, but in all the tight detail and acute observation, there hasn't been much of general color or mood. What about some more impressionistic observations of life, your friends and the streets of Kharkov?
108. pseudoerasmus - 4/27/2000 11:21:02 AM
(You're not going to ask Ilya about the Rushdie comment?!)
109. marjoribanks - 4/27/2000 11:32:12 AM
Eh, I saw it, I'm not going to quibble too much. Rushdie has acknowledged that Grass was a big influence on him. I can see some merit in the comparison even if I disagree with Ilya's conclusion.
110. marjoribanks - 4/27/2000 11:39:25 AM
BTW, Rushdie rather fancies himself as a snotnose punk. he revels in that kind of idea of himself (and of himself as a ladies man) even as he ossifies and becomes more balding and paunchy. His new girlfiend is HOT, though.
111. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 1:32:22 PM
I think my narrative has plenty of color and mood.
112. ilyavinarsky - 4/27/2000 11:58:27 PM
Actually Oxford Russian dictionary defines ublyudok as 'mongrel'... but 'motherfucker' is probably right given the word's contemporary connotations.
113. ilyavinarsky - 4/28/2000 1:32:33 PM
This is kinda irrelevant, but I just came across a fine Ukrainian translation of Slaughterhouse Five here.
Goodness me, the clock has struck,
Alackday, and fuck my luck
is rendered as
O bozhe miy, uzhe hodynnyk b'ye,
Y poviya-dolya het' mene zhene.
The Russian translation by Rita Rait-Kovaleva makes it
B'yut chasy, yadryona mat',
Nuzhno s bala mne bezhat'.
114. jexster - 4/29/2000 11:26:15 PM
But do they eat Chicken Kiev in the Ukraine?
and how much for caviar?
115. ilyavinarsky - 4/29/2000 11:52:27 PM
But do they eat Chicken Kiev in the Ukraine
They do. It glows on your plate.
116. PelleNilsson - 4/30/2000 6:37:09 AM
Ilya
I suppose you are already familiar with this site about Ukraine.
117. ilyavinarsky - 4/30/2000 2:04:56 PM
The Dickens reference comes from this passage in Orwell's essay on Dickens:
Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that no child ought to be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.
I don't know enough about Dickens's life (or care to) to say whether or not this is autobiographical.
118. ilyavinarsky - 4/30/2000 2:08:08 PM
From Kharkiv Art Gallery: a variant of the famous painting "Rapids Cossacks are Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan": 
119. pseudoerasmus - 5/1/2000 1:39:57 AM
ilya, you need to throw away my rocketmail address, which is semi-defunct; and use the hotmail address to send me emails. On a lark I just checked the rocketmail address and noticed your email. thanks for the articles I printed them out to save for the ride to the airport tomorrow.
120. ilyavinarsky - 5/1/2000 11:27:28 PM
Vitaly Mankovsky's picture didn't come out right. Here it is again: 
121. VHN - 5/3/2000 4:51:18 AM
Excellent reading, ilyavinarsky. A bit pessimistic about the country, though.
122. jexster - 5/3/2000 6:15:12 PM
Pelle - thanks for the Ukraine link! I've added to my Slavic Section.
Didn't see the story though about how the Ukrainian Nationalists managed to give the Bolsheviks the slip in 1919. The one where those brave souls managed to get out of Kiev in the dead of night by plastering the town with stories about some new violet death ray that would wipe out everyone caught out of doors....
123. ilyavinarsky - 5/8/2000 8:35:31 PM
The thread will retire on May 10th.
The Mote | Mote Archive
back to top