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Saturday 5 July 2008

‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’

‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’

The effect of the markets in Ukraine has been disastrous

Fletcher, I read in the news here, had been arrested trying to cross into Russia using a fraudulent passport, and he was the greatest thing I’d seen in a while: a massive hillbilly of early middle age, his hot-curled blond locks flowing around the crumb-eyed head of the rustic who rips you for another 80 bucks after he adjusts your muffler. He was magnificent. Images on the website of his ‘company’ depicted him throwing a thumbs up sign and grinning the grin of the guy who knows how good he has it. Besides mentoring, Fletcher was involved in other projects. One was a ‘Millionaire’ Institute’, apparently located in a school building in a lumpenprole eastern Ukrainian void known as Alchevsk. Another was a magazine called The Rich’s Club (sic). A third was a beach resort on the Azov Sea, a body of water that made the news in November after a hurricane cracked open some tankers, fouling local coastlines with sulphur and crude. Fletcher himself was a ‘Doctor/Academician’ who’d come to Ukraine to acquire a wife before the natives, struck by his financial acumen, begged him to stay and teach them the money game.

I’d happened across a keeper — a creature straight from the purest alkaline depths of the American mulch-heap. And as so often when it comes to us Americans, it was difficult to tell whether he was a huckster or whether, in his louche way, he was — which is even more disconcerting, and drives the Europeans crazy — utterly sincere.

Anyway, I was seized by a fit of twisted patriotism. If I’d had a recording of Sousa marches, I’d have played it; if I’d had a leftover 4 July firecracker lying around, I’d have blasted it off.

I’m fascinated by the role Western, and especially American, expats like myself have played in the culture of this massive post-Soviet republic. There’s a little bit of Robert Fletcher in most of us. After all, most of us showed up here to do our small part to help Ukrainians get rich; to mentor potential millionaires; to induct post-Soviet citizens into that universal Rich’s Club, membership of which is the birthright of every child of God. If you moved to Prague in the Nineties, you were probably a grunge kid with aspirations toward the proprietorship of a ’zine and a guitar on which you banged out Meat Puppets songs on the Charles Bridge. If you moved to Kiev, on the other hand, you were probably a twice-divorced agriculture consultant from suburban Toledo, come to liberalise the feed sector. You pulled the waistband of your Levi’s up to your sternum; you pottered about Kiev in friendly white sneakers, and learnt how to sing out a cheerful ‘Lager — Jumbo!’ in the local pidgin. You stuck around, perhaps, and opened a marketing company — the first in the whole undersaturated country of 48 million people — or else broke even importing incubators for piglets. Life was OK.

More articles from: Andrey Slivka | this section

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