Almost fifty people, concerned about the destiny of the bookshop, gathered in Kyiv in front of Siaivo’s closed doors. The activist decided to call their action Siaivo bookshop is the last barricade of Ukrainian culture!”. Given the 365 days of siege, over 10 unsuccessful meetings, protest actions and press-conferences, 15 unfinished legal cases, and numerous promises given by officials of various ranks, the 50-year-old bookshop may indeed be like a “last barricade.” However, Siaivo is only the tip of the iceberg, say the protesters. According to them, over the last year Ukrainian books have become increasingly threatened. The board chairman of the social network OPORA Olha Aivazovska told The Day that some time ago their organization launched a survey titled “The catastrophe’s anniversary” on the disappearance of bookshops in Kyiv.
They calculated that during the years of Ukrainian independence over 70 Kyiv bookshops were closed. Banks, restaurants, mobile salons, clothes shops and beauty salons grew in their place.
For example, instead of the famous bookshop, with an expressive name “Poetry,” which operated at 2 Mykhailivska Street, there is now a green and white sign “Otpbank”; Art on 26 Khreshchatyk has been replaced by a Life mobile salon; Sports Books at Velyka Vasylkivska became a pizzeria, and the bookshop on Peremohy Avenue was fought off by a clothes and shoes store.
Today the number of the bookshops in our country is four times lower than the number of the boutiques and alcohol shops, sum up the members of OPORA. In fact, the problem is much deeper: in Ukraine the system of book publishing and book distribution continues to be absent. There is no state program that promotes reading. (The efforts of the President of the Lviv Publishers Forum Oleksandra Koval and other enthusiasts are not enough.) Public financing is insufficient, too: domestic publishing doesn’t receive foreign investments. As a result, the bookshops are filled with Russian books; our books are not enough to fill them. According to the President of the Ukrainian Publishers Association Oleksandr Afonin, in 2010 all the Ukrainian state and private publishing houses produced the same number of books as three or four powerful Russian publishers… It means that the shameful rate of 1.2 books per Ukrainian remains the same. Last year it even went lower than one book per Ukrainian. This implies one more problem, probably the most important one, which has to be resolved: Ukraine is the only European country where the state development strategy doesn’t comprise book publishing. “During its millennial history civilization has not found a better way of personal and state development than the knowledge given by the noble BOOK,” sums up Afonin. “That is why we shouldn’t count on the development of Ukraine without well-trained ‘developers’ and, accordingly, without the development of domestic publishing. Moreover, I strongly believe that the crisis in the Ukrainian economy, cultural and social spheres, and in science is largely provoked by the fact that during all the twenty years of independence all the country’s leaders have neglected books as the main strategic tool for the development of the people, nation and the state.”
