[Ohio UZO News] Washington Post; Washington Times; RFE/RL

[Deychak, Orest]

The Washington Post

Can't Stand D.C. Traffic? You Should See Kiev.

By Andrey Slivka
Sunday, November 25, 2007; B02

KIEV <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Kiev?tid=informline> , Ukraine <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Ukraine?tid=informline> 

There's a certain fascination in watching a city destroy itself more or less overnight. Kiev last imposed itself on the West's consciousness when it exploded into mass protests during Ukraine's so-called Orange Revolution in 2004. But looking around this still beautiful capital on Europe <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Europe?tid=informline> 's edge today, you wonder how much strain an urban fabric can take before it rips.

Kiev's problem is cars. The city's increasingly well-off post-Soviet population has taken to automobiles with the intensity of the long-deprived. Ukraine's booming economy is blast-forging the country's first mass middle class, and by many locals' count, perhaps 10 times more vehicles are now rumbling through this ancient city's hilly streets than there were when the Soviet Union <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.S.R.?tid=informline>  expired in 1991. In 2006, according to the Kiev Post, Ukraine climbed from 12th place to ninth place in Europe in terms of new car sales, which a leading Ukrainian newsmagazine reports grew 52 percent here from last September to this. About 60,000 new cars were registered in Kiev this October alone, according to the Unian news agency, bloating a total that Ukraine's Emergency Ministry puts at 1.5 million -- and the number is expected to grow by a million more by 2011.

This has meant something catastrophic for life in Kiev. Streets that in 1991 were almost empty and that five years ago remained passable thoroughfares are now gridlocked for most of each business day. In Kiev, cars are what water must be to Venetians or snow to Eskimos: the fundamental shaper of daily experience. Given Ukraine's distinctly Soviet approach to emissions controls, Kiev's air reeks in a way that residents of even the filthiest downtowns of Western capitals can't imagine. You don't want to open your windows by day if you live downtown; better to wait until well into the evening, after the dissipation of the apocalyptic traffic jams that have become the city's conversation pieces in much the same way that politics were during the Orange Revolution.

All of this is a function of what one Kiev magazine earlier this year dubbed the "Cult of the Automobile" -- the status, unimaginable to Westerners, that comes with car ownership in a society conditioned by Soviet-era scarcity. It was the great Western-looking dream of the Soviet citizen to own a set of wheels, and those dreams are now coming true -- with the help of easy credit, which is everywhere in a country where speculation was a crime just 20 years ago. Many of the late-model KIAs and Skodas in Kiev are wholly owned by local banks, which is only one of the peculiarities of a car culture so seductive that I've heard anecdotes about people who have sold elegant apartments to get cash to buy cars. Another peculiarity: Cars are really unnecessary here because Kiev's Soviet-built subway system is excellent.

And all of this is a shame, given that Kiev has historically been considered the most pleasant of the former Soviet Union's capitals -- a walkable alternative to Moscow <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Moscow?tid=informline> . In his book "Imperium," about his travels through the declining Soviet Union, the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described Kiev as "the only large city of the former USSR whose streets serve not merely for hurrying home but for walking, for strolling." Kiev's main boulevard, Khreschatyk, he wrote, is something like a local Champs-Elys¿es, and he was impressed by Kiev's downtown "crowds of people" out "to get some fresh air."

A decade and a half later, the city that Kapuscinski liked no longer exists. Walking here can be dangerous because the sidewalks are covered with cars, both parked and moving. That ritual of city life -- the promenade -- has become an adventure in the sort of defensive, serpentine ambulation with which the pedestrian makes his way through a strip mall parking lot. And it doesn't help that Ukrainian traffic cops know better than to stop expensive vehicles: It can be bad for their careers. Drive a Hummer or a Bentley here (Bentleys are common), and you can barrel through any red light and over any lawn or sidewalk.

The situation is exacerbated by Kiev's geography. The city is composed of a compact downtown core that would seem better in a smaller city -- Oakland <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Oakland?tid=informline> , say, not a growing population cluster of perhaps 5 million. An increasing number of Kiev's residents live in bedroom communities outside the city, endless developments of high-rise towers that each month radiate farther across the plains. Because these futuristic tower blocks don't include office space, the city's circumscribed downtown is overloaded. It's as though all of New York <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/New+York?tid=informline> 's economic activity were restricted to an area the size of Greenwich Village <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Greenwich+Village?tid=informline>  and SoHo combined.

Kiev's preponderance of wide boulevards and vast plazas -- communist showcases for an era before the automobile reigned -- exacerbate the situation, too. What 10 years ago were pleasant poplar-lined boulevards are now clogged eight-lane highways that scream and honk and pound through the city's heart. Looking at central Kiev's Victory Square is like looking down at a gridlocked Los Angeles <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Los+Angeles?tid=informline>  freeway, except that many of the cars are going in opposite directions, there's more toxic haze and tens of thousands of people have to live within yards of it.

Where all this will end up, it's hard to tell. Kiev's transformation -- from a charmingly shabby stroller's city of dusty squares and streets in which there might be more stray dogs than SUVs into an increasingly charmless automotive dystopia -- has happened mostly during the past five years of economic growth.

Like survivors of a flash flood, residents (especially those who don't own cars) are just coming to terms with the sudden change in their physical reality. Their neighbors in Europe have started dealing with the antisocial effects of urban car use and are banning, restricting or taxing driving in many downtown cores. But Ukraine, despite the aspirational rhetoric of some of its Western-looking politicians, isn't Europe. In a macho culture that has embraced conspicuous consumption, the idea of people taking to bicycles like the burghers of Amsterdam <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Amsterdam?tid=informline>  is inconceivable. Just a little less so is the idea that, in a nondemocratic culture defined by elite prerogative, the newly affluent will use public transportation like wealthy Westerners. And a culture with an almost totally corrupt public life, no functioning justice system and a tendency toward political murder seems unlikely to make "green" choices when it comes to urban planning.

Barring some unexpected development, Kiev seems fated to become less and less the "European" city that the westward-looking Orange Revolution declared it to be and more and more a hub of Third World-style chaos. Certainly the pollution situation is disturbing. Ukraine was an ecological basket case even before the car culture, and unlike car-mad America or similarly polluted Russia <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Russia?tid=informline> , it doesn't have excess space to destroy.

There is a geopolitical irony to all this: Ukraine, a poor and weak country with no oil of its own, is giving itself over to a car- and oil-based culture at a moment when that culture is approaching its limits. The global cheap-oil party is approaching its end even as Ukraine shoves its way into the rubbish-strewn foyer near midnight.

And while Ukraine may be spared $100 barrels of oil on the world market, that's only because it has a potentially bigger problem: It gets all its oil from or through Russia, an assertive power whose leadership resents seeing its old vassal persist in its delusions of independence. Russia has also proved willing to use the "energy weapon" against Ukraine, as seen in the 2006 European gas crisis, when Russia briefly shut off gas supplies to its southerly "little brother." And so every time a patriotic Ukrainian proudly fills up his new Prado, he's pushing his vulnerable country further into the arms of the hegemon to the north. It's yet another bleak historical irony for Ukraine that its giddy embrace of Western automotive culture may someday seal its ultimate submission to Russia -- and sever it from the West.

aoslivka at gmail.com

Andrey Slivka is a writer living in Kiev.

The Washington Times

Ukraine seeks recognition of '32 genocide
November 24, 2007 

By Maria Danilova - KRASYLIVKA, Ukraine (AP) - After authorities broke into Yakiv Atamanenko's home in autumn of 1932 and confiscated the family's food, his mother and two brothers died of starvation and their bloated bodies were tossed among others in a freshly dug grave on the outskirts of this farming village. 

Mr. Atamanenko and other survivors said their neighbors, Oleksandra Korytnyk and her husband, ate their two children. "They cut their children into pieces and ate them," recalled Mr. Atamanenko, now a frail, gray-haired 95-year-old. 

In the end, he and others said, the Korytnyks died as well. 

Today, Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across what was then the U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions perished. 

It began on November 24, 1932, with an order raising the quota for the state procurement of grain and wound up as an all-out forced collectivization of agriculture. Ukraine was hit hardest because it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. 

Now, President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of Holodomor - or death by hunger, as it is known here - as a crime rather than merely a disaster, by labeling it an act of genocide. 

Long kept secret by Soviet authorities, accounts of the great famine still divide historians and politicians, not just in this nation of 47 million but throughout the former Soviet Union. 

Some are convinced that the famine targeted Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Others argue authorities set out to eradicate all private landowners as a social class, and that the Soviets sought to pay for the U.S.S.R.'s industrialization with grain exports at the expense of starving millions of its own people. 

The dictator Josef Stalin's collectivization drive affected the entire Soviet Union, but was particularly calamitous for Ukraine, which had some of the Soviet Union's richest agricultural land. The campaign coincided, as well, with the Kremlin's efforts to root out a growing Ukrainian nationalist movement. 

Estimates of the number of people who perished in Holodomor differ, but there is no doubt the death toll was horrific. Mr. Yushchenko estimates 10 million Ukrainians died, while Stanislav Kulchitsky, a Ukrainian historian, thinks the number is closer to 3.5 million. 

Authorities set production quotas for each village. But these quotas generally exceeded crop yields and in village after village, when farmers failed to meet their targets, all their food was confiscated. 

Residents were prohibited from leaving their homes - effectively condemning them to starvation. 

In Krasylivka, as many as 1,017 persons - roughly the village's present-day population - died in the course of that terrible year, according to a list of the victims compiled by village authorities. Elders say the famine nearly wiped out the village. 

Villagers tell stories of their neighbors collapsing in the street and dying. Driven to despair, people ate whatever they could scrounge: leaves, dirt, birds, dogs, rats and - several witnesses said - even each other. 

Olena Yaroshchuk, 94, her wrinkled face framed by a green kerchief, said she filled her aching stomach with grass. "Those who could, survived; those who couldn't - that was the end of it, one house after another - almost all died," she said. 

Mr. Kulchitsky, a leading famine researcher, argues the famine was a genocide aimed at Ukrainians who resisted Soviet rule. "The conditions authorities created for the Ukrainian peasantry were incompatible with life," he wrote in a recent article. 

But Heorhiy Kasyanov, a top historian with the National Academy of Sciences, says the issue is more subtle. "There is no hard evidence that there were concrete statements or actions aimed at destroying ethnic Ukrainians by someone else. I don't have a clear answer whether or not it was genocide." 

The Ukrainian parliament already has labeled the famine genocide. So have the U.S. and some other countries. But Russia, the legal successor to the Soviet state, resists the label.

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC ___________________________________________________________

RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 11, No. 217, Part II, 26 November 2007

November 26, 2007

UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT HOLDS FIRST SESSION. Ukraine's newly elected Verkhovna Rada finally held its opening session on November 23, Ukrainian media reported. The session was opened by former parliament speaker Oleksandr Moroz and later headed by Raisa Bohatyryova, the head of the committee preparing for the first session of a newly elected parliament. All political forces represented in the Verkhovna Rada formed their parliamentary factions, but the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (BYuT) and the Our Ukraine-People's Self-Defense bloc (NUNS) did not manage to create their planned parliamentary coalition. The BYuT and the NUNS have a slim majority in the parliament, but some representatives of the latter disagree with provisions of the coalition deal on changing to a fully professional army in 2009. During the session, outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych relinquished the powers of his cabinet, so a new government must now be formed within 60 days. Bohatyryova, who closed the session, scheduled the next meeting for November 29. The BYuT representatives said that Bohatyryova herself does not have the right to determine the date, and they promised to convene on November 27. AM

 

UKRAINE COMMEMORATES VICTIMS OF GREAT FAMINE. Events devoted to the commemoration of 75th anniversary of the 1932-33 Great Famine were held on November 24 across Ukraine, Ukrainian media reported. In a speech in Kyiv, President Viktor Yushchenko compared Bolshevik crimes to the crimes of Nazism, claiming that the two ideologies are united by a hatred for humanity. Yushchenko once again called for the recognition of the man-made famine in Ukraine as genocide and thanked all the parliaments around the world that have already done so. The famine, orchestrated by the regime of Soviet leader Josef Stalin, killed as many as 14 million people in Ukraine. Yushchenko intends to submit to the Verkhovna Rada a bill introducing criminal penalties for the public denial of the Great Famine. AM

 

 

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