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Arnold Beichman
The Washington Times
02-Oct-1998
Who Lost Ukraine?
"So if everything is so good, why is everything so
bad?" — Arnold Beichman
Who lost Ukraine?
Arnold Beichman
The Washington Times,
02-Oct-1998, p. A21.
Ukraine, said a World Bank report a few years ago,
has the potential of becoming one of the "richest
countries in the world." Well, it hasn't. Instead,
this onetime Soviet republic, independent since 1991,
is one of the poorest, with little prospect of
rising from its low estate in the foreseeable future.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
has placed Ukraine, the Economist reported
recently, near the bottom of the annual league table
of transitional economies, behind even Albania
and Bulgaria. To the December 1997 Gallup Poll
question "When were you and your family better
off?" almost 80 percent said, "In Soviet times."
How can this be when the country has so much going
for it? Even as an unwilling subject of the
Soviet empire, Ukraine produced one-third of the
U.S.S.R.'s steel, nearly half of its iron ore and half of
its sugar. Its rich, black soil made it the Soviet
Union's breadbasket. Ukraine, the second largest
country in Europe (slightly smaller than Texas), has
great ports in Odessa and Sevastopol. Its
water-power resources are enormous. It benefits from
mild winters and lots of sunshine. Unlike parts
of the Balkans, Ukraine enjoys ethnic stability.
Perhaps as important as all these assets was the
immense good will and hope that the incoming
Clinton State Department had for the newly
independent Ukraine: It became the fourth-largest
recipient of U.S. assistance after Israel, Egypt and
Russia. In 1995, then Secretary of State Warren
Christopher said:
"Ukraine is critical. With its size and position,
juxtaposed between Russia and Central Europe, it is
the linchpin of European security. An independent,
non-nuclear, and reforming Ukraine is also vital to
the success of reform in the other New Independent
States."
Ukraine has held three elections since independence,
the most recent last March for its parliament.
The Independent Republican Institute (IRI), a U.S.
citizens group financed in part by the National
Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for
International Development, has vouched for the
fairness of these elections and their results. The
American Bar Association recently awarded
President Leonid Kuchma, 60, the Central and East
European Law Initiative, an honor given to leaders
and countries they represent for significant steps
they have taken to implement democratic and
market reforms.
So if everything is so good, why is everything so
bad?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that a large
part of its population of 52 million or of its officialdom
simply has been unable to shake off the 70 years of
the Soviet past. For example, there are still huge
40-foot statues of V.I. Lenin, the architect of
Ukraine's misfortunes, to be found in the central squares
of the country's major cities.
When last spring I asked leading Ukrainians why
Lenin's statues were still to be found in Kiev,
Donetsk, Cherkassy, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv, the answer
was usually, "Well, Lenin is part of our
history." No doubt, but so were Adolf Hitler and
Josef Stalin, who together were responsible for the
deaths of 12.3 million Ukrainians, but there are no
statues to them. Shrug-shrug.
Speaker Tkachenko of the left-controlled parliament
has urged publicly that people should take pride
in the Soviet past. To increase worker productivity,
he recommended organizing "Stakhanovite
movements," a reference to Stalin's worker speedup
campaign in the 1930s. That there has been a
noticeable lack of foreign investment is all to the
good, said Mr. Tkachenko, since it would avoid
foreign ownership. The Ukrainian Communist Party,
the largest in the country, which won more
parliamentary seats in the spring election than the
three runners-up combined, is pressing for
"voluntary reintegration" with Russia.
And there may be another problem that Ukraine, with
all its ethnic stability, hasn't really dealt with, an
anti-Semitism that seems to be endemic to part of
the population, even though the government has
tried to do something about this dismal issue. Just
last month, the historic Kharkiv synagogue was
set afire by arsonists, with damages totaling $1
million.
In August, the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress warned
publicly about increasing anti-Semitism and
nationalism in Ukrainian society. This is a country,
birthplace of the Chasidic movement, where in one
day the Germans, according to Nazi archives, killed
33,771 Jewish men, women and children in Babi
Yar, four miles from the center of Kiev. There is
now a memorial plaque to this tragedy that does not
mention that the victims were Jews. More than half
the Jews living in Ukraine were wiped out. There
are now some 600,000 Jews, little more than 1
percent of the population.
The next test for Ukraine's democracy will come with
the election of a president in 1999. In the
meantime, its economy, not quite as bad off as
Russia's, seems to be spinning out of control. The
Ukrainian people have survived Lenin, Stalin and
Hitler. How much more can they survive?
Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, is a columnist for The Washington
Times.
Copyright © 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
Arnold Beichman, Who lost Ukraine?, The Washington Times, 10-02-1998, pp A21.
Comments on the Beichman Article
Lubomyr Prytulak
In addressing the question of "Who Lost Ukraine?" above, Arnold Beichman never does ask the question "Who?" but rather addresses only the question of "What were the causes of the loss of Ukraine?" And the causes that Beichman manages to come up with consist of a small number of off-the-cuff, defamatory stereotypes. His bottom line is that Ukrainians failed because that's the way they've always been (well, for the past 70 years of Soviet rule, anyway), and because they're nuts (which is what the psychiatric diagnosis of anti-Semitism is equivalent to). What is missing from Beichman's article is any sign of awareness of several phenomena that may have played a substantial role in the "loss" of Ukraine. An awareness of these phenomena would have led to a very different article than Beichman's, and might have led to Ukrainian under-performance being described as the "destruction" of Ukraine, rather than merely the "loss" of Ukraine. Below are a few of the phenomena that Beichman fails to discuss, but that may have contributed to the loss, or to the destruction, of Ukraine.
Western advisors didn't know what they were doing. Elbowing for first place among the causes of Ukraine's failure might be that the Western experts who stepped forward to guide Ukraine's first steps following emancipation turned out to know less than they imagined, to have been bad predictors of what effects their policies would produce, to have been overconfident of their ability to serve as midwives at the birth of nations. Judging by the superficiality of his comments, among such experts might be included Arnold Beichman himself.
The plundering of Ukrainian brains and talent. Tens of thousands of Ukraine's top scientists and engineers being lured to other countries, foremost among these Israel, would have a devastating impact on the viability of the Ukrainian State, and yet this plundering is not mentioned by Beichman as contributing to Ukraine's underperformance. Ukrainian scientists and engineers furnish the manpower for Israel's computer industry centered in its "silicon wadi," while the Ukrainian computer industry stagnates, but Arnold Beichman seems unaware of this phenomenon. And it is not only Ukrainian brains that are plundered, it is Ukrainian talent as well, talent of all kinds. This talent adds to the economic success of the countries to which it flows and subtracts from the economic success of Ukraine. Examples? How about Olympic gold medalist skaters Oksana Baiul and Victor Petrenko, presently living and working in the United States, bringing glory to the United States, and paying the American taxman rather than the Ukrainian; or how about the Klychko brothers, boxing champions Vitalii Klychko, holder of the European super-heavyweight title, and Volodymyr Klychko Olympic gold medalist in the Atlanta games — these two today live and train in Hamburg, bringing glory to Germany, and paying the German taxman rather than the Ukrainian. Multiplying such examples of loss of brains and talent by hundreds, and multiply slightly less outstanding examples by thousands, and multiplying still less outstanding — but nevertheless significant — examples by tens of thousands represents a devastating loss to the Ukrainian economy and to the viability of the Ukrainian State. This loss, however, Arnold Beichman does not take into account in discussing Ukrainian under-performance.
Fabrication of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. One of the tools which promotes the plundering of Ukraine is the fabrication of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. That is, it is plausible that the fire in the Kharkiv synagogue mentioned by Beichman below was set by Israeli agents, or perhaps local Zionists, whose purpose was to increase the flow of Ukrainian Jews to Israel. The Kharkiv synagogue fire, then, would resemble the bombing by Israeli agents of the Mas-uda Shemtov Synagogue in Baghdad as part of their earlier effort to induce Syrian Jews to emigrate to Israel. If there is no evidence as to who the perpetrators of the Kharkiv arson were, then Arnold Beichman would have done well to lay out the two chief possibilities — Ukrainian anti-Semites and Israeli agents — and to point out further that the Baghdad synagogue bombing was a possible precedent for the Kharkiv synagogue arson, and to top that off with a cui bono analysis pointing out that the only material gain of the Kharkiv arson would have been to the State of Israel, namely the gain of an influx of immigrants. As Ukrainians would only lose from such an arson, a cui bono analysis does not point an accusing finger at them.
Calumniation of Ukraine. The calumny heaped upon Ukraine by the Western media does not conduce to the success of the Ukrainian State. Arnold Beichman below, while purporting to analyze the Ukrainian situation, in fact merely adds to this calumny, this in his accusation of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. For this anti-Semitism, Beichman presents no data. In repeating the accusation without supporting data, he gratuitously disseminates a damaging stereotype. It has been argued that the accusation of anti-Semitism amounts to a psychiatric diagnosis which Jews hold themselves uniquely competent to make. Arnold Beichman's analysis then, reduces to "Ukraine is unsuccessful because Ukrainians are nuts," a conclusion which is unsatisfactory for several reasons — Beichman presents no evidence of any Ukrainian anti-Semitism, and suggests no mechanism as to how any unusual degree of anti-Semitism — if it did exist — could have caused the observed economic failure. That the contempt toward Ukraine elicited in the West by the Western media may have contributed to the under-performance of Ukraine appears to be a possibility that Arnold Beichman is unaware of.
Paucity of aid for Ukraine. That Ukraine received less assistance and support than Russia might be attributed, at least in part, to Russia continuing to be a nuclear power, and thus a threat to the United States, and to the whole world, if it remained backward or unstable. Ukraine, in contrast, divested itself of its nuclear weapons, naively imagining that the world rewards good deeds, and failing to understand that the world acts in its own interests, and its interests lay in supporting Russia for having nuclear weapons, and supporting North Korea for threatening to acquire nuclear weapons, but not bestowing money where no clear advantage was to be gained from doing so. Ukraine failed to understand that the world has nothing but contempt for a country that gratuitously demotes itself from the world's third-largest nuclear power to an insignificant backwater. Furthermore, examination of the aid that did flow to Ukraine would lead to the discovery that much of it was in fact not helpful, and some of it may in fact even have been harmful. Specifically, most aid ends up in the pockets of Western advisers and the Western airlines that carry them to Ukraine and back, and whether these advisers accomplish anything of value is open to question. Some of the aid may have gone toward de-nuclearizing Ukraine, which hurt Ukraine by divesting it of its status as the world's third-biggest nuclear power. Some of the aid may have gone toward luring the Ukrainian intelligentsia out of Ukraine and settling it in such places as Israel, which was harmful to Ukraine. Some of the aid was channeled exclusively to Jews within Ukraine, and so might be considered to be aid to factions within Ukraine that are hostile to Ukrainian political independence and Ukrainian economic success. Arnold Beichman's assertion that Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of US aid is superficial, and if examined would show that the United States aid had done little to help Ukraine, and had done much to injure Ukraine.
Strangulation of Ukrainian exports. Ukraine does have goods to sell, and is able to offer them at competitive prices, but is kept from engaging in the export which would provide it with this best of all economic aid by a world which closes its doors to Ukrainian products even while proclaiming the benefits of free trade. What the world means by free trade is the freedom to strangle manufacturing in third world countries, then pay these countries low prices to supply raw materials so that the advanced countries can ship back to them manufactured goods at high prices. Several instances of the strangulation of Ukrainian exports that have been mentioned so far on the Ukrainian archive are the cases of Ukrainian wool coats against which the United States agitated for quota ceilings, and the case of Ukrainian steel against which barriers are erected because of its low price. We have seen also the aborting of the Ukrainian sales of electricity-generating turbines to Iran. That the suppression of Ukrainian exports may have contributed to the under-performance of the Ukrainian economy appears to be something that Arnold Beichman has not thought of.
Foreign interference in Ukrainian politics. Leonid Kuchma, the current president of Ukraine, is a gangster, and has gangsterized the government of Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma was initially placed in power and was initially controlled by the Americanized Hungarian Jew, George Soros. The effect of this external interference in Ukrainian politics has been that Ukraine has been plundered of the equivalent of tens of billions of US dollars. In this plunder, prominent participants have been Swiss banks, Soviet citizens of Jewish extraction, and the State of Israel. Arnold Beichman seems unaware of this theft of Ukrainian wealth, or if he is aware of it, does not see it as contributing toward Ukrainian economic under-performance.
Western imposition of dictatorship in Ukraine. The West appears to work to promote Ukrainian democracy, but in fact institutes a system which is equivalent to a dictatorship controlled by the West. That is, a democracy requires more than periodic elections which are not terribly marred by fraud, which Ukraine does in fact enjoy. Thus, we might expect President Jimmy Carter to come to Ukraine for the 1999 Ukrainian presidential elections as one of a large team of observers monitoring the fairness of the voting process. Well and good, but not enough. Necessary but not sufficient.
In the absence of a free press, voting alone does not make a democracy, and in Ukraine the press in not free. Journalists in Ukraine are routinely sued and harassed and intimidated and assaulted and murdered. The government enjoys an incestuous relationship with the press, owns the press, controls the press, shuts down the press. By "the press," I mean of course not only newspapers, but also radio and television. Given near-total control over what the people are told, elections become meaningless. Anyone who participates in election monitoring in Ukraine without during the years leading up to the election demanding freedom of the press in Ukraine is lending support to a sham and a fraud, and to the enslavement and pauperization of the Ukrainian people. The United States consigning many of its client states to a perpetual dictatorship (as for example Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia) appears to be the pattern that it intends to impose on Ukraine. That the strangulation of a free press, and the takeover of the Ukrainian government my a mafia, may have contributed to Ukrainian under-performance appears to be something that Arnold Beichman has not thought of.
Shoddy world journalism. Thus, Beichman's article is noteworthy primarily less for what it says, than for what it leaves unsaid, not for its list of causes of Ukrainian underperformance, for the list of significant causes of underperformance that it ignores. Added to our list of factors contributing to a Ukrainian lack of success, then, is the superficiality of the commentary that the world press offers on Ukraine. Having as little to say about Ukraine as he does, one wonders why any newspaper would give Arnold Beichman any space on its pages.
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