‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’

Andrey Slivka

28 November 2007

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The effect of the markets in Ukraine has been disastrous

And so when the money arrived, there followed things like Kiev’s grotesque building boom, which has helped turn what was widely considered the Russian empire’s most pleasant big city into the ‘stone jungle’ lamented by Kiev’s occasional worthy local political leader. Given the lack of oversight, real zoning laws or a functioning court system in Ukraine, a well-connected tycoon can simply commandeer a public park in a neighbourhood of low-slung charm and build a 26-storey office tower in the middle of it. It happens all the time.

Then there’s Kiev’s car boom, about which a treatise in dystopian urban sociology could be written. The sudden appearance in a compact city centre of hundreds of thousands of new automobiles — the status symbols of the nascent post-Soviet corporate classes — has degraded life in this once-walkable city in the way only automobiles can degrade urban existence. Morons rumble down sidewalks in SUVs. Within several years, Kiev will have an air-quality problem that rivals Beijing’s.

It’s also of no small importance that, given the influx of new money into the city, plus rumoured collusion among the government-connected building interests, Kiev’s real estate has become as expensive as that in a Western city. The result is to kill small entrepreneurship in its cradle. That crucial urban actor — the guy who opens his own storefront and sells falafels or glasses of beer or Italian dinners or magazines and books — can’t afford to exist in Kiev. And so street-level life remains dominated by large international café and clothing-store chains. The result is a streetscape of increasing mediocrity — at Paris prices.

It’s hard to know what the ‘average’ Ukrainian thinks of all this. In my experience, middle-aged people tend to accept it — but then, they spent decades putting up with the filth the Soviet regime fed them. They’re used to surviving the impositions of an elite.

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Guy

November 29th, 2007 8:08pm Report this comment

Not too disimilar to Tblisi, sadly.

R. Luchkan

November 30th, 2007 2:42pm Report this comment

Spot on! Really, impressive insight! Great piece!

Walter Bruderer

December 3rd, 2007 1:56pm Report this comment

This article is nonsense… 10 years ago Kyiv was a dull drab place in terms of life on the street with little or no entertainment or decent places to eat… those that were there had nothing in stock that was on the menu. Oligarchs or not, Kyiv and Ukraine is a much better place today… what the writer longs for is a place in which rich people can play at being rich among humble simple poor people… like the Americans did when they first discovered Spain or parts of the South of France and wrote books about their debaucheries.

Clive Hunter-Dunne

December 4th, 2007 1:47pm Report this comment

Mr. Slivka (cream in Russian) demonstrates the typical American tendancy to concentrate his 'experience' on the heresay of capital centre youth and, no doubt, a view from the main street (Kreshatyk). As an expat Brit of some ten years standing in Ukraine I can assure the readers of The Spectator that the reality is quite different.

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