‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’
‘Money-culture is ruining Kiev’
The effect of the markets in Ukraine has been disastrous
Or, a step down the generational totem pole, you were an aggressive kid from Phoenix who showed up with a backpack and saw a market hole, and started a business magazine on a shoestring, and ten years later found yourself running a media empire that disseminated neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, straight from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Whoever you were, whether you knew it or not, you were an apostle of what an eminent beatnik once called Moloch. You existed on the same continuum as your countryman, Robert Fletcher. Even the quietest American has a bit of a missionary streak in him, and here you were, smack dab amid bone-through-the-nose economic innocents.
Well, the markets-and-mass-consumption religion took in Kiev, and the results — the ‘growth,’ the ‘development’ — have been catastrophic. This is in part a result of the fact that the market culture was slapped down overnight on a place almost completely without civic organisations, a watchdog media, or the necessary evil of hordes of lawyers who can tie up money interests in miles of red tape. In Ukraine there’s a disengaged citizenry, a coarse elite that abuses and ignores them, and not yet much else — certainly not the confident, self-interested mass bourgeoisie that grounds a culture.
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Guy
November 29th, 2007 8:08pmNot too disimilar to Tblisi, sadly.
R. Luchkan
November 30th, 2007 2:42pmSpot on! Really, impressive insight! Great piece!
Walter Bruderer
December 3rd, 2007 1:56pmThis 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 1:47pmMr. 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.