On December 4, we marked the 40th day since the death of the great Ukrainian Bohdan D. Hawrylyshyn.
Hawrylyshyn has left us a huge intellectual legacy which has been neither properly appreciated nor really used by Ukrainians so far; to quote Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna, “...we have used this ‘bonfire’ only to heat ‘a little mug of water.’”
Because we are seeing a growing tendency to declare that the issues which Ukraine is now facing are unprecedented, we believe it is high time to revise the views of the great Ukrainian Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, which he made known in his larger contributions, comments, and interviews. They were published by many media, including this newspaper which he greatly respected. As evidence of this respect, we can point to his letters of response to our initiatives, regular appearances as a lecturer at Den’s Summer School of Journalism, and even memoirs, which are by definition a highly explicit genre.
Incidentally, Hawrylyshyn stressed the Ukrainians’ inherent nobility of spirit in his contribution “My Memories of Otto von Habsburg” (published in Den on July 12, 2011). That nobility seems to have been forgotten in Ukraine as of late, as people indulge in the populist spontaneity.
Hawrylyshyn’s article “Ukrainian Signposts at the Crossroads of Civilization,” published in the magazine Suchasnist in 2007, outlined the main issues facing our country and indicated what was to be done.
His recipes are particularly relevant today, especially when it comes to the need for genuine ideology-based parties to be created or genuine political elite to emerge.
It was Hawrylyshyn’s article that started 15 years ago, in 2001, Den’s joint project with the Russian intellectual weekly Novoye Vremya, in which Ukrainian and Russian politicians and experts were answering the following questions: what our relationship could be like and on what basis it would be built after a decade of separate existence of Ukraine and Russia, what were their paths to the wider world, where they collided and diverged, and what opportunities were presented and threats posed by the era of globalization for the two nations.
“Germany may well offer an instructive example for Russia. Adolf Hitler mobilized the Germans to conquer Europe, if not the whole world, with the slogan of Lebensraum, that is, by stating that the German nation’s huge energy needed more living space for self-expression. Had Germany won, it could have survived only as a dominant power with a brutal regime, but it would be a brutal regime not only for all the conquered peoples, but for the Germans as well. The state would have been economically inefficient, because conquered peoples are not productive. Having found itself with a smaller area than it had at the start of the war, and having concentrated all its social forces on building up the country, Germany has become an extremely free and democratic nation with many powers spread amid its constituent states, the greatest economic power of Europe, and it has no ambitions of dominating other nations,” Hawrylyshyn wrote then.
“Globalization presents opportunities for Ukraine and Russia to become better societies, but it can only happen provided that the two neighboring countries, which do really have a lot in common, go into the future along parallel paths and confidently, harmonized in some ways, not with Ukraine on its knees. Ukraine would then move towards the EU, while Russia would concentrate its efforts on the development of modern society,” he warned 15 years ago.
Till his dying day, Hawrylyshyn was as concerned about the fate of Ukraine as he had been throughout all these years.
During World War Two, his family moved from Ukraine to Canada. There, Hawrylyshyn organized evening schools for Ukrainians and studied management. Subsequently, he himself began teaching economics and management worldwide. He created the International Management Institute in Switzerland and conducted workshops for leaders from all over the world.
However, Hawrylyshyn’s most important workshop was intended for Ukraine.
On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, he left his job in Geneva and came here to help Ukraine get on its feet.
He served as adviser to Leonid Kravchuk, Oleksandr Moroz, Viktor Yushchenko, and Viktor Yanukovych.
“When the Soviet Union collapsed, we had a fantastic opportunity to create not only an independent state, but a good state. Nobody seized that opportunity,” Hawrylyshyn recalled with regret.
He regretted the fact that wrong people came to power. “Our misfortune is that few of those people who suddenly had to govern the new nation were patriots,” the economist thought.
A year before his death, Hawrylyshyn honestly admitted that all the presidents of Ukraine had ignored his advice: “I am not going to serve as a presidential adviser anymore. It was a waste of time. They had too little accumulated knowledge to be able to receive my recommendations.”
Meanwhile, the incumbent government showed no interest in Hawrylyshyn’s knowledge and experience. They showed far more interest in the money which he allocated through his Foundation for development programs targeting Ukrainian youth – there was a story of the Hawrylyshyn Foundation losing two million dollars it deposited in the failed Khreshchatyk Bank.
Incidentally, following Hawrylyshyn’s death, MP Oksana Bilozir, also known as a singer and godmother of the president’s child, sent a request to the prime minister asking him to clarify the fate of the Hawrylyshyn Foundation’s money. Bilozir’s spokesperson told The Day on December 1 that they had received no response yet.
No doubt, the Khreshchatyk scandal did not improve Hawrylyshyn’s health. He was a man of extremely strong will, but sensitive to displays of ingratitude, according to those who knew him closely.
Shortly before his death, the economist gave an unprecedentedly frank interview to the online media outlet Mir: “There are no patriotic, competent, and decent people in the Ukrainian government.”
“I must say that I had a high opinion of the current president previously. I was impressed by how he developed his business. He did not obtain it in the manner of Viktor Pinchuk who paid almost nothing for the assets he received. He really was a very effective enterprise leader... When he became president, Petro Poroshenko did not seek any contact with me, although I think I could have given him some much-needed advice...”
Still, he was able to point to one definite trump card held by Poroshenko: “For example, he speaks good English. It facilitates his communication with his counterparts, since he does not need an interpreter. His predecessors had stupid interpreters.”
“Just imagine that: Leonid Kuchma had a university professor as his interpreter, I will not name him. He was an English language professor. But he had not mastered the language. He might have spent time learning it, but he did not think in English. It makes a huge difference. He made such terrible mistakes! You know, an English word can denote opposite notions sometimes. When it was a public affair, I could not correct him. But when we held meetings with some very important people abroad – which I attended, of course, even though I was not technically an adviser to Kuchma – then I corrected him. Despite it being such a shame, I corrected him. They then appointed him ambassador… yes, ambassador,” Hawrylyshyn said in an interview with Istorychna Pravda in May 2011.
Incidentally, he saw the ignorance of English as the worst weakness of Mykola Azarov and his Cabinet: “He understands the economy, but suffers from one limitation. It is actually a tragedy. The thing is, the people at the top, none of them speaks English. This makes it impossible for them to establish a closer relationship with people on their level, foreign prime ministers or presidents. It is not so easy with an interpreter.”
“How many prime ministers have we had? Is it 12 or 13? And only one of them spoke English, I mean Yevhen Marchuk,” Hawrylyshyn noted.
Half a year ago, he said that a real transformation of Ukraine would start “in six years and will last another seven years.” In his opinion, the country will get moving due to “innovations.”
“I once invented a tool, a valve that released steam. I was naive then, and gave my patent for free to a US company that went on to earn 20-30 million annually from this invention for decades. I was intrigued then by the very process of innovation, by one’s ability to change the world. It is not the accumulation of knowledge that serves as the catalyst of the invention, but rather a keen sense of the need for ‘something new.’ Ukraine can look up to two countries in this field, Japan and Switzerland. In Japan, every worker had a chance to propose some innovation, while their company’s board of directors implemented such ideas at once. People of every class pondered daily what they could improve, each in their field. For its part, the government issued so-called White Papers, which described all new technologies. In particular, they dealt with implementation pathways and potential markets. Industrialists and government officials gathered together and allocated to this or that company this or that country for implementation of innovative projects. Switzerland also lacks natural resources. Ukraine, meanwhile, has fantastic resources. Switzerland has just two polytechnics. Their role is huge. This is despite the country having the lowest percentage of people receiving higher education out of all developed countries. However, they offer very high quality education for skilled workers. Many graduate students do not just write theses but work on their own technologies as well. Many open businesses of their own. They can get a loan at 3 percent per annum, and sometimes even less. Mortgages are offered at 2.5 percent for 50 years. All these things contribute to the accumulation of capital. It is a good model for Ukraine, isn’t it?”
Still, according to Hawrylyshyn, innovation is primarily a change in the structure of the economy. Ukraine, meanwhile, needs a total transformation. Therefore, fundamental changes should affect all branches of government. “The current political class must be completely replaced. Also, we should reform the socio-political system. If we start now, real change will come after seven or eight years. There are legislators who understand that the country needs reforms. And then, the first question is developing a strategy. We should answer the question: what country do we want to build? Until it is done, we will not start moving forward.”
“We will survive everything. We have survived worse things. We have survived the Holodomor. Still, the people’s roots are alive,” Hawrylyshyn believed.
