It is always a pleasure to receive responses from readers. It is a double pleasure when the response is critical, because that means the reader is thinking for himself, and we have an opportunity for a frank exchange of views. The articulate and critical letter concerning my columns from Anatoly Bebelo, a docent at the Kyiv National Economic University, raises questions that deserve answers, which I will attempt to give. Allow me to point out that I represent no one but myself — not America, not foreign experts as such, and not necessarily the editors of this newspaper. Representing nobody is a luxury, because it means that one can say what one thinks, and this is all I have ever tried to do. I have never pretended to be a missionary propounding some truth that has to be accepted. All are quite free to take or leave what I write, but whenever it stimulates one to think, that is in itself gratifying.
First of all, let us examine the educational process. I have now lived here for a decade and put two step- daughters through two different universities. With one there was no problem, but with the other there were some major ones that cannot be passed over in silence. As an extension student, she returned from her sojourn to the campus from which she ultimately obtained her degree to inform me that her instructors were quite open about how many dollars they required for a given grade on a given examination or term paper. In one case she returned to Kyiv disgusted: her instructor had given her a failing mark on a paper without even reading it when the demanded sum was not paid. If this does not happen at other universities, this is very good, but it happens at some. As a parent on whom such demands have been made, I know.
Let us now turn the issue of political economy. There is certainly nothing wrong with the discipline as such, although the term is seldom used in the West these days. The problem is with political economy and scientific communism as they were practiced in the former Soviet Union. I have not sat through these courses, but I have attended conferences and thesis defenses where I have encountered the former practitioners of these disciplines, now renamed as economics and political science. I have also had the pleasure of encountering young university instructors who have learned Western languages, read the relevant literature, and are in no way inferior to their Western counterparts only to face the incomprehension of older colleagues who remain incapable of understanding the way the fields they have now been assigned to are practiced in the West. Prof. Alexander Motyl wrote over a decade ago that when Ukraine became independent there were perhaps ten economists in this country who had any idea of how a Western market economy actually works. Progress has been made — Ukraine used to be ranked as the third most corrupt country in the world — but not enough — it is still in the top twenty out of about 170 — and there are even advisers to high state officials who are simply incompetent, give bad advice, and lead their bosses to make bad decisions that cost this country investment, jobs, and the welfare of its citizens. After all, Soviet political economy was a combination of the classics of Marxism-Leninism rehashed in Brezhnev-era textbooks about how bad classical capitalism was and how good everyone was supposed to think real socialism was, with the result that neither was very accurate in terms of how things really were. If we want to study economic or political process, we simply have to try our utmost to grasp realities that are hidden under a shroud of official opacity. Otherwise, we are simply wasting our time in a country that has wasted far too much already.
I have always told my own students that there are three basic questions for Ukrainian political science (and economics for that matter): Why are things so bad? Can anything be done about it? And, if so, what? Ukraine is an incredibly wealthy country sitting on 25% of the world’s chernozem black soil, which it is prevented from properly exploiting by the vestiges of collective farm feudalism, all kinds of mineral wealth, and is keeping open things that it makes far more sense to close and hampering those fields of endeavor that ought to be encouraged above all else. Why keep open played out coal mines that have already been open for more than a century when those miners could be put to more productive use and be paid more tapping the world’s largest proven reserves of uranium? Could it be because those mines have workers who are dependent on managers, who are in turn more interested in having something to squeeze out of an enterprise than its real economic viability?
After all, in the real world politics is not about finding Plato’s philosopher king who knows what to do and then does it. It is not only about perfecting this or that but about asking fundamental questions about things that are fundamentally wrong. Look out any apartment window early in the morning and see the pensioners going through the garbage in order to find empty bottles and cardboard to turn in so that they can buy bread for that day. In Ukraine this is called a socially-oriented market economy and has about as much correspondence with reality as an earlier generation of children thanking Comrade Stalin for a happy childhood when millions were starving to death. Look at a political process where any head of an oblast state administration can stop an investigation or make life very unpleasant for someone looking too closely into his personal finances. I have often argued that you cannot have meaningful self-government without transparency, and you cannot have transparency when virtually everybody has something to hide. There are a great many things inherited from the Soviet period with its system, the demands of which could not be met without breaking the system’s own rules. And if that were the only thing wrong with this system...
Everyone knows what objectively needs to be done: look at what the postcommunist success stories — Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic — countries clearly on their way to where Ukraine says it also wants to go — and start doing what they began to do over a decade ago. Why is this not done? Could it be because such steps are not in the interests of those in a position to take them? Could it be that such steps are not politically possible here? Perhaps we should ask why, and I have been trying to do precisely this for years.
I hate to sound like a missionary, but when one sees that things are radically wrong it is extremely difficult not to sound shrill from time to time. I make mistakes just like everyone else, but I have studied this country for over a quarter of a century and lived here for a decade — not, I might add, in the cocoon of the expatriate community. Each and everyone is free to disagree with me about anything, and this I welcome. Disagreement is the beginning of serious thought, thought the beginning of understanding, and understanding is the first step toward righting what is wrong. For all Ukraine’s indisputable accomplishments, much remains radically wrong, and it remains the task of all of us to try to figure out how to make it right. If I can stimulate others to think about the basic things, then I am doing a job in which I take pride.
