Yesterday I saw an acquaintance of mine, once a talented photographer, rummaging in a garbage can. He was carefully looking for discarded bottles and food leftovers as his cracked spectacles kept falling on his gray beard. We talked, and he told me his simple story which only a little differs from mine. A 60-hryvnia pension, an ailing wife with no money to buy medicine, rent arrears, disconnected telephone, a paralyzed and hungry sister, and sadness and tears in his eyes from all this social humiliation. He even refused to give me his address: perhaps he was right to do so, for my situation very little differs from his. My wife is also recovering from a heart attack, I get the same starvation pension, have no kith and kin or even good friends.
In 1942, in a Stalingrad basement, we, two 12-year-old adolescents, caught and ate a rat. At that time it was not so painful and hurtful as now because army quartermasters and other crooks, who profiteered during the war, kept a low profile, carefully hiding what they stole.
I remember the current President saying during the 1994 election campaign that he would never have poor old people standing with outstretched hand. Five years have passed since then, and in this period we have been robbed of our savings, theater, film, decent food, free communication with our relatives in the CIS, adequate and cheap housing, medicines, and free health care. Today we have power outages, and perhaps tomorrow our gas will stop burning, water stop running from the faucets, and radiators will go cold. In such conditions, it is impossible to demand that the downtrodden, robbed, and outcast people show some kind of patriotism, and it is immoral to reproach them for nostalgia over cheap sausages and the USSR.
They say there is no money for increasing pensions, but, surprisingly, this supposedly missing money becomes readily available when it comes to raising the salary of state officials or beefing up the army and police (money was found even for the new police uniform). They are cheating us, saying that, to raise pensions, they would have to double the pension fund tax.
For it is not necessary at all, in my opinion, to double the pensions of those who already get 200-300- 600-1020, etc., hryvnias, but the authorities are obliged to increase the pensions of about four million of our pensioners up to the poverty line.
Those who remain defenseless are mostly the ones who lived through famines, repression, the Nazi occupation, terrible war, and who in fact created with their own hands all the material values now at the disposal of unscrupulous nouveaux riches. I understand that it was perhaps no longer possible to live the way we did and some changes were required. But those currently in power are doing their utmost to make the life of ordinary pensioners unbearable. References to the hardships of the transition period — “cut wood and chips fly” — also ring empty, for the simple reason that, given the current qualifications of our woebegone reformers, these temporary hardships could well last a lifetime. There is so much talk about the fuel, agrarian, economic, and financial crises, but I think the main crisis is entirely different.
It is common knowledge that a productive economy and observance of the principle of social justice in the distribution of public wealth are central to the stability of any state. Our state lacks both, and the Constitution’s provision on decent old-age compensation is never mentioned in high forums, while the problem of language in state institutions becomes, for some reason, the object of Constitutional Court deliberations. I want to note, too, that the US President’s salary is only 8.5 higher than the wages of a skilled worker in that prosperous state.
For this reason Messrs. ministers, Deputies, and members of the President’s team, I want to assure you that our main problem is not the shortage of funds for old-age pensions but the acute shortage of conscience of those in power.
