The Day has frequently reported that Kyiv is the scene of the destruction of publishing houses, bookstores and public parks, and illegal seizures of medical institutions. Meanwhile, city bureaucrats are allowing park and woodland areas to be used for the construction of offices, entertainment centers, and highrises.
Last Thursday, opposite the Kyiv City Council, where a meeting was in session, powerful loudspeakers were blasting cheerful songs from the soundtracks of children’s cartoons. Singing along were crowds of brawny men holding white flags printed with the logo of Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky’s bloc. A few people in white smocks, holding placards next to an iron barrier set up to keep undesirables from entering the corridors of power, were trying unsuccessfully to outshout the loud music.
“We’ve come to City Hall to be heard by the Kyiv City Council members, who are voting today on reorganizing our central city hospital into a district-level one. This means staff and funding cuts, and the gradual closure of this medical institution. But the mayor deliberately gave orders to play loud music so that nobody will hear us,” says Lev Maloletnii, chief of the Central City Clinical Hospital’s trade union committee.
The medical staff at the Central Clinical Hospital began having problems last summer, when Liudmyla Kachurova, chief of the City Administration’s General Public Health and Medical Care Directorate, ordered the dismissal of the hospital’s chief doctor Valentyn Bidny, who was on vacation. But the doctor managed to get reinstated after a series of court actions. Bidny says that Kachurova is not exactly rushing to obey the court ruling.
“At first, the directorate decided to fire the chief doctor, then it will reorganize the hospital, and after some time it will own several hectares of land in a posh area of Kyiv. Our hospital is not the first medical institution to end up in this situation. So the city doctors chose to raise this matter in an open letter to the president of Ukraine,” Maloletnii says.
The staff of the Central Clinical Hospital is still pinning hopes on bureaucratic common sense, because their institution is home to 11 academic departments. If they are disbanded, this will deal a heavy blow to Ukrainian research.
While the people in white smocks were trying to attract the bureaucrats’ attention near City Hall, the nearby Planeta Bookstore was hosting a closed-door conference “Vandals Are Seizing the City.” The participants — artists, book publishers, and writers — supported the doctors’ protest against the destruction of Ukrainian spirituality by the Kyiv authorities.
“Nineteen bookstores have recently closed in Kyiv, and the closure of 18 more is imminent. We have repeatedly appealed to Mayor Chernovetsky and the city councilors in this matter, but they won’t listen to us. Meanwhile, local bureaucrats are telling the media that all the problems have been solved, that artists have returned to their studios on Andriivsky uzviz, and nobody is going to shut down bookstores. But this is a lie,” says Yevhen Karas, president of the Ukrainian Association of Modern Artists.
“On Oct. 11 the Supreme Court ruled on the transfer of the Planeta Bookstore to the Kyiv City Administration. At 8 a.m. the next day some tough-looking men broke through the back door of the bookstore, blocked the entrance, splashed the windows, and prevented the staff from entering. The only answer to all their questions was that the bookstore no longer exists. It has been here for 55 years, and now City Hall is going to use it to house one of its departments.”
The Raiduha Publishing House, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year, is also being evicted from its building on Bohdan Khmelnytsky Street. “Raiduha was evicted once before: this was in 1937 and now the clock seems to be turning back. It is no surprise that City Hall is encroaching on our premises because the land is worth an estimated 40 million dollars,” says Kostiantyn Klimashenko, manager of the Book Supermarket chain.
The organizers of the Culture Against Vandalism campaign are pinning their last hopes to save Ukrainian culture on support from the public and President Yushchenko whom they are urging to stem the tide of the destruction of Kyiv’s cultural environment.
COMMENTARY
Oleksandr BRYHINETS, secretary, permanent commission of the Kyiv Council for culture:
“Twenty bookstores have already been closed in downtown Kyiv. This year alone has seen the real or imminent liquidation of the following publishing houses: Mystetstvo, Muzychna Ukraina, Dnipro, Oberehy, Urozhai, Alaton, M. P. Bazhan Ukrainian Encyclopedia, and Kyivska Rus’; the IVL book-binding workshop, the editorial offices of Ukraine’s Book of Memory and the journals Soniashnyk and Raiduha, the Siaivo, Znannia, and Abzats bookstores, and now Planeta. All this was possible because Article 118 of the Ukrainian Law ‘On the State Budget of Ukraine for 2007’ enabled the most rapacious government officials to take actions aimed at wiping out cultural and art institutions, publishing houses, and bookstores. I hope that the budget drawn up by the new cabinet will not have a similar article that puts commercial and cultural institutions in the same category. But will this bring back the enterprises that have already closed? One more thing: the mayor of Kyiv has to be replaced immediately.”
