Tag Archives: #MyWriting

Parkhomivka Art Museum

I thought I should finally follow up on the post about my visit to Kharkiv and describe the unlikeliest art museum in the world.

From my Lonely Planet guide:

“Possibly Ukraine’s best collectino of Western art isn’t in Kyiv, Kharkiv or Odesa. Rather, it lies deep in rural Kharkivska oblast near the obscure town of Krasnokutsk. We say ‘possibly’ because it has not been verified that all of the works at the Parkhomivka History & Arts Museum belong to the names they are ascribed to — names like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet, Rembrandt, Picasso and Renoir. But if you think we’ve fallen for a classic Ukrainian scam, think again. Many of the works by big-name artists have been verified….

How did such a rich collection land here? The man responsible is one Afansy Lunyov, a teacher and master networker who ran an art school here in the heart of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. He used to take his students on field trips to art museums across the Soviet Union, in the process becoming close with artists, collectors and curators.”

***

I stayed with my friend Mike-the-historian in Kharkiv. On the first evening, he needed to schedule some interviews before we left for dinner. He and Olga, his multi-lingual assistant (Ukrainian, Russian, English, German, Spanish), made calls, and I flipped through my Lonely Planet guide to kill time.

That’s how I discovered the museum. We asked Olga to try the two phone numbers in the guidebook to confirm their hours. One number was disconnected. The other turned out to be the head curator’s personal mobile phone. I have no idea how it got into my Lonely Planet guide.

The next day, our taxi driver asked directions through his window, first around major intersections to find the village, then in the village to find the museum. Eventually, we pulled down a dirt and gravel lane toward a building with a pink exterior which stood out from the surrounding small village homes. A shabby dog paced in the adjacent lot, lazily dragging this chain back and forth. The two teenage security guards snuffed out their cigarettes and stood from the stoop. They glanced at us, avoiding eye contact, as we gathered our things from the cab.

Three old babushkas worked the coat check. Neither I nor my friend Mike checked our coats, so the three of them supervised Olga’s. We were the only visitors. Two other ladies made an elaborate show of taking our money and ripping each of us a ticket from a booklet, using the straight edge of a ruler.

It seemed none of the two dozen employees had a plumbing background, because the toilet was broken. I resorted to their outhouse.

There were two floors, and a cadre of grumpy old women who flipped the lights on and off as we came and went and watched us as if any moment, through some miraculous slight-of-hand, one of us would whisk a painting off the wall and into our pants.

They seemed unbearably stressed when the three of us drifted toward different parts of a room, not knowing who was the thief, and who the decoys. Sometimes their colleagues from adjacent rooms came to assist. Fortunately, we were the only visitors.

The first room had 18th century portraits donated from the Hermitage.

In the second, I saw sketches of mermaids by Mikieshyn (1835-96). One was entitled “Prince Among Mermaids.” (Мікєшин — “Лицар Серед Русалок”)

These were swamp mermaids. They had legs, emerged from the fog and were ugly and menacing. Olga told me they were illustrations of a folk story which transliterates as Vij.

A painting by Kovalevs’kyi called Stsena Silskoho Jytia (Stage of Village Life) depicted a boy riding bareback shepherding a couple of cows through a gate. This was one of my favorites. (
Ковалевський — “Сцена Сільського Життя”)

I’m please at my ability, so far, to remember the paintings from their titles which I jotted down in my notepad. The boy had a red shirt and a stick.

There were breathtaking sketches of trees and woods by Shyshkyn (1832-1898) which reminded me very much of the obsessive detail of the great Ukrainian diaspora artist Jacques Hnizdovsky.

One of my favorites was by Kryjytskiy, Zumoviy Peizaj (Winter Landscape), 1903. It shows a small row of Ukrainian village houses blanketed by snow beneath a startling yellow sky. Do you know that bright, fresh morning sunlight that only comes in winter? This was the painting. (Крижицький — “Зимовий Пейзаж”)

Another one of my favorites was Landscape with Hunter, 1882, by Volkov (1844-1920). It showed an enormous, impenetrable forest — the kind that no doubt inspired Mikieshyn’s swamp mermaids — and, almost unnoticed beside the immensity of the trees, a hunter finding his footing on the bank of a small creek. (Волков — Пейзаж з Мисливцем)

The first artist whose name I recognized was Pissaro. Olga later chided me for not having known Shyshkyn — I do now. Pissaro’s “Spring,” 1891, hung in the third or fourth room. It showed the beauty of the spring from an unlikely angle. Where a sidewalk and lawn meets a building, shadows of some elaborate trees cast colorful shadows.

Four Picassos were in the same room:
Decorative Vase,
Dove with Olive Branch (Is Blue Dove the correct name???),
Portraint of G. Curi (F.J. Curie???),
and Decorative Place with Divers.

I guessed the divers were a man on horseback and one laying prone before sounding out the Ukrainian-language title and seeing the divers.

I don’t know the value of these works, but I suspect it is a lot, especially for such a little village and two bashful teenage security guards. I wondered about various possibilities of fakes being on display to foil thieves, or else already replaced with the originals which went to one of Ukraine’s ubiquitous oligarch.

Some of the most exciting paintings were by unknown artists:

– A small, badly damaged which I think was from the 17th century showed a vigorous fight between a hunting party and a big, round pig with tusks. I don’t know enough about art to name the style or exact era, but the painting was flat — the objects in the distant landscape were smaller but in the same perfect focus as the foreground. I enjoyed looking at the action.

– Blue palms which filled most of the painting and were summarized with distinct, recurring shapes, like Grant Woods Iowa landscapes.

– Glassy roses beside a window. Everything dancing with colors.

– A painting entitled “Bronze Snakes” seemed to show a biblical scene with a line of tents and people agonizing as snakes rain down from the sky. A prophet-like figure preaches amid the suffering.

There were a couple of 17th Century Dutch harbor-scapes with astounding, majestic detail.

In my notebook, I also wrote “Unexpected Meeting” and “Bruno,” but my memory fails me.

A corridor at the end of our second floor tour showed Soviet era industrial portraits. One depicted a forest of power lines, which was cool and surprising. I didn’t care for the others.

The first floor had more recent work, such as those of Bolshevik poet and artists Maiakovski (Маяковский). His cartoonish, “Who Will Lift the Soviet Flag,” showed a bending laborer, who, strangely, looked like an African-American character in black-face, lifting the Soviet flag from the mud.

His other work, the pair, “Seven Pairs of Dirty” and “Seven Pairs of Clean,” each showed fourteen characters. The dirty were laborers, the clean were Marx’s supposedly exploitative classes — priests, aristocrats, entrepreneurs, a fat military general. It was pointed out to me that the “exploiters” were in disarray, while the laborers were in relative conformity, all facing the same direction.

It was painted very unusually, shapes and lines invoking caricature and movement. I recognized it, vaguely, from some art book.

The most ridiculous work in the collection was the 1968 embroidery by Ivanova A. A. entitled “V. I. Lenin speaks with Hutsul Villagers. It depicted Lenin in his suit and determined expression preaching the gospel of Marx to fascinated Hutsuls. Of course, the part of Ukraine inhabited by Hutsuls didn’t fall under the Soviet Union until 1944.

The painting I found most moving, and consider my favorite, was Portrait Kolhospnytsi (Portrait of a Collective Farm Worker) by Rotnytski, born 1915. (Ротницкій — Портрет Колгоспниці)

She was a middle aged peasant women with a scarf and white embroidered shirt resting her chin in her hand. I felt overwhelmed by the sadness in her eyes. They spoke volumes, as did the wrinkles on her face, and her swollen hands.

I returned many times to look at her, much to the distress of the grumpy old woman who practically ran after me to flick on the light and make sure I didn’t find a way to tuck the large portrait into my sleeve.

[Show slideshow]

Economic Outlook

This was publish in Media Star’s newspaper and elsewhere.

В українській мові: here.

***

It is difficult to contemplate the enormous extent to which the world changed when the Soviet Union collapsed. The more economists and historians study the Soviet Union, the more apparent it becomes that it existed as a house of card built upon economic fallacies and that its collapse was inevitable.

We should remember, however, that the economic fraud of Soviet central planning is not only known historically, in retrospect. It was predicted before it happened. Based strictly on a theoretical understanding of human action, in other words, of economics, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union was apparent to L’viv-born, Austrian School Economist, Ludwig Von Mises.

In 1921, before Lenin was even forced to restored partial property rights through his New Economic Policy (Новая экономическая политика, НЭП, Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika ), Mises criticized central planning in a book entitled “Socialism.” He predicted not only that the Soviet Union’s collapse, but that it would eventually have many factories and empty stores. His reasoning was simple: without market prices, society is blind to its true desires.

We are now facing a second collapse which may alter the world as much as the collapse of the Soviet Union did — the collapse of the dollar. Using a similar theoretical understanding of human action, economists of the Austrian School unanimously predict the dollar’s collapse. The reason is also simple and should be self-evident: the United States government cannot stop printing money.

The intellectual work of the Austrian School is largely devoted to unmasking the many euphemisms the government and its apologists use to conceal this fact: economic stimulus, quantitative easing, liquidity traps.

The exact date of the dollar’s collapse is not only unknown, but unknowable. As Mises noted, an objective way of determining the date of a significant economic event cannot exist because the knowledge itself would change the date of the event.

For example, if we could determine that the dollar was going to lose half its purchasing power on Friday, this would cause people to spend dollars as quickly as possible on Thursday, changing the date of the collapse. Theoretically, however, it is clear that the United States government will be forced to chose between destroying the dollar and defaulting on its debt, and default appears out of the question.

It is very likely that the hryvnia will collapse along with the dollar. The price increases plaguing Ukraine are at least partially (perhaps totally) attributable to the country’s monetary policy. By keeping a fixed exchange rate between hryvnias and dollars, Ukraine’s central bank imports inflation from the United States.

There are probably two reasons for this monetary policy. First, Ukraine’s government is dependent upon IMF loans to avoid it’s own long-overdue default. The IMF promotes dollar-friendly policies. The more inflation gets exported to other countries, the longer the collapse of the dollar can be delayed, and the further the gravy-train of printed money can carry the vast bureaucracies of government. (In the United States, one of out six people works for government.) It is likely that the IMF pressures Ukrainian monetary policy.

Secondly, large industries which export their products benefit in the short term from a devalued currency, and many of Ukraine’s most influential people are industrialists who rely on exports. They may also be pressuring the Central Bank of Ukraine to import inflation from the United States. It is important to remember, however, that they only benefit in the short term. In the long term, all of society suffers under the skyrocketing prices and the chaos they create.

The question remains, what to do about this?

For individuals, both dollars and hryvnias should be treated like the hot potato in the similarly named children’s game. Do not get caught holding a large amount of dollars or hryvnias when the music stops. People who have worked hard and lived modestly and want to preserve the value of their savings for the distant future should find ways of doing so that do not involve keeping large quantities of currency.

For society, we should distinguish between what Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek called the voluntary, private-sector economy and the coercive, public sector economy. He called the public sector economy coercive because it runs on taxes which are collected by force.

After the collapse of the dollar, the voluntary sector of the economy will go through a difficult time as it finds a new medium of exchange. Where currencies have collapsed, cigarettes, cows, flour, and bottled water have served as temporary mediums of exchange. Gold have silver almost always emerge as the voluntary choice when a society isn’t forced to use its government’s currency.

The private sector will recover naturally and peacefully because people will still want all the goods and services it produces — food, clothing, entertainment, books, technology, travel. Those businesses who fail to produce goods and service which others want at prices they are willing to pay will go bankrupt, and their land, labor and capital goods will eventually be incorporated into more productive enterprises.

By contrast, the coercive sector of the economy will recover neither naturally nor peacefully because it doesn’t produce goods and services which people voluntarily consume. They run on money which is collected by force or printed. Look for the vast bureaucracies of governments all over the world to suddenly find themselves starved for money, and look for all manner of demagoguery as they attempt to justify their existence and reimpose another system of wealth extraction upon the private sector of the economy.

The recent protests in Greece and in the U.S. state of Wisconsin were protests by government workers and their economically misguided allies against fiscal responsibility. They are a premonition of what is to come on a much larger scale.

Preserving bloated, unnecessary, inefficient government bureaucracies, will make everybody, including those protesting, poorer. Forcing these people to enter the voluntary sector of the economy and to produce goods and services which you and I will voluntarily pay for will make everyone richer. Those who contend that there is a limited number of jobs in the world over which we must all compete are wrong. The only limit to the number of jobs in the world is the number of needs and desires felt by humanity. In other words, none whatsoever.

Perhaps the most important question of our time is what comes after the dollar’s collapse. The rather obscure question of whether people will be free to choose their own medium of exchange, or if another printable, government currency is imposed on society by the brute force of law is a question between freedom and slavery. It is too late to save the dollar. I hope it is not too late to educate society about the nature of money.

***

Roman Skaskiw Media Start Article

Customer Service in Ukraine

Spring has fully arrived. Instead of cold rain and snow, there has been sun for several days now, and also a dusty wind which causes you to squint and breathe through your nose.

A diaspora friend from my childhood recently stayed with me for a few days. He’s lived in Kyiv for six years. It was nice empathizing with a fellow American. Aside from history, politics and economics, the topic which dominated yesterday’s dinner conversation was customer service in Ukraine. It sucks.

I’ve been ignored in mostly empty restaurants for a good 5-10 minutes before being handed a menu. Waitresses are rude. They don’t look at you when they pass.

You can get service, of course, but you need to act tough and rude. You need to TELL the staff what to do — give me a menu, come here, take my order, bring the drinks right way, bring all the dishes out at the same time (or else you might get them as they are prepared, sometimes with a 20 minute gap between your meal and your friend’s). You can get all the service you want, but you need to bring the authority. You can’t relax and expect to be taken care of. I prefer to relax.

Sometimes I bring the authority. Sometimes I get up and leave. I also have a growing shit-list of restaurants I no longer patronize, including MVF (a cute name which shares the Ukrainian acronym for International Monetary Fund, but substitutes the word “Varenyky” — dumplings — for “monetary”) where, despite being the only patron in the restaurant, the three girls ignored me for twenty minutes after handing me the menu. In their defense, it sounded like their conversation was *extremely* interesting. That was the first time I left a restaurant.

I now understand my mistake. You can’t show any fear. You must be like an animal trainer. For example, when you walk into a restaurant, there will likely be a three or four young staff members chatting amongst themselves. Their conversation will stop and they will look up at you without smiling. Several things may go through your head at this point: Am I interrupting? Is the restaurant open? Do I seat myself? Is this the hostess who sill seat me?

This is a very common moment in Ukraine, and I’ve discovered the most important thing is to show no fear. If you hesitate, meekly inquire about their status, beg permission to sit, feel embarrassed by your broken Ukrainian, they will smell your fear and consider you powerless and unimportant. On other hand, if you walk in like you own the place and tell them what to do — take me to a free table, give me a menu — they will often spring to life and serve you as if their well being depends upon it.

It is sad and pathetic, but unfortunately that’s the way things are for the moment.

I tend to cut my fellow Ukrainians a lot of slack. Outside the black market, capitalism has only existed here for two decades. The free market can solve the customer service problem, though it will take much longer in a market as mutilated as the Ukrainian one, where success is determined more by political and criminal connections than by one’s ability to serve customers.

The most notable exception to the characteristically poor customer service is McDonalds, where the cheerful call of “vilna kasa” (free register) from smiling employees are as uplifting to me as the springtime flowering of Crocuses.

A couple weeks ago, I was so excited by the good customer service at a restaurant called “Pol’iana” (Prairie) in Kyiv’s largest shopping mall, Dream Town, that I left a 50 hryvnia tip on a 60 hryvnia meal.

Another exception was the restaurant at which my diaspora friend and I had our conversation. A wonderful L’viv restaurant called “Miaso i pyvo” (Meat and beer). They knew to hand us English menus even though I gave the polite, attentive hostess my best “dobri vecher” (good evening) upon entering.

The duck tasted wonderful, but next time I’ll try one of their many steaks.

EDIT: I recently spoke about this with a Ukrainian girl who once lived in the U.S. for a year and half. She’d worked in the U.S. as a waitress, but said doing so here would be degrading, because customers are more rude here. She says the culture of service is much less developed.

EDIT 2: Tip — the smoking sections are always the cool place to sit.

Spontaneous Cooperation in Transportation

Marshutka i.e. bus In the two small examples I am about to present, I see yet another rebuttal to the Hobbesian notion that without a supreme authority, the natural state of man is a war of all against all.

By U.S. standards, one might say there is a shortage of traffic lights in Ukrainian cities. Instead, there are designated cross-walks. The dynamics of them are interesting. The exact behaviors they cause aren’t perfect, but are much closer to ideal than the brute legal force of traffic lights.

A lone pedestrian, unless he or she is in a big hurry, will usually wait until several others accumulate to form a critical mass before they cross. But the pedestrians won’t go if there are just a few more cars. In that case, they’ll wait until there is room. These spontaneous behaviors all seems to be astonishingly mature.

They are also consistent with the experiences of a British town which saw a several-fold improvement in commute times after they shut off all their traffic lights. That’s right. They shut off all their traffic lights. There was no decrease in safety either.

[youtube]vi0meiActlU[/youtube]

***

The second example of spontaneous cooperate is a compliment to Ukrainians and a counter-example to this country’s ubiquitous corruption.

The marshutky (semi-private busses) in the city of L’viv are the most crowded public transportation I’ve ever encountered — as a child of the NYC subways, I do not make this claim idly. Imagine the impossibly crowded buses. How does everyone have room to pay the driver?

They don’t.

People pass money back and forth. You’ll be standing awkwardly, barely reaching the overhead railing for balance, and someone will pass you a 10 hryvnia note. “For two,” he’ll say. (The price is usually 1.5 to 2.5 hryvnias, i.e. 12 to 20 cents, depending on the route.)

Money gets passed forward, and change is passed back. Astonishing. Sometimes I spend the better part of my trip passing money back and forth, but this isn’t even the most impressive part.

There are no automatic machines like in NYC busses. The driver is responsible for all the financial transactions, making change, etc. How does he do it?

He doesn’t.

Once, it was I who found myself closest to the driver — I tried to avoid the spot, but couldn’t overcome the movements of the crowd. I was handed a 5 hryvnia note. “For one,” said the lady with the gigantic fur hat.

There was no one else between me and the panel beside the driver — no one to whom I could pass the money and responsibility. I looked above the windshield. A note read “1.75 hryvnias.”

I dropped the five onto a panel beside the driver which had money and change all over it. I gathered 3.25 hryvnias and put it back in the lady’s waiting hand. More money came my way, and still more. I dusted off my arithmetic and spend most of the trip making change. Money flew all over the place. A couple times, the driver reached over and organized some of the bills. I was too busy providing quick, accurate change.

***

I am reminded of anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s late-in-life observation about cooperation: “I failed to find,” he wrote, “although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life and the main factor of evolution.” What he saw instead was “Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.”

He concluded that

life in societies enables the feeblest animals, the feeblest birds, and the feeblest mammals to resist, or to protect themselves from the most terrible birds and beasts of prey; it permits longevity; it enables the species to rear its progeny with the least waste of energy and to maintain its numbers albeit a very slow birth-rate; it enables the gregarious animals to migrate in search of new abodes. Therefore, while fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colors, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual or the species the fittest under certain circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species which willingly abandon it are doomed to decay; while those animals which know best how to combine have the greatest chance of survival and of further evolution, although they may be inferior to others in each of the faculties enumerated by Darwin and Wallace, except the intellectual faculty.

The Ghostly Bandurist of Desyatynna Street

During my recent visit to Kyiv, I veered off the touristy Andriivs’kyi Descent, and walked down Desyatynna Street, hoping to find the Bandurist I had once seen playing there. Desyatynna is a very unspectacular street. The sounds of the merchants at their tourist shops on Andriivs’kyi fades as you walk. It is residential. From an apartment of one building hung a sign protesting the construction of additional units on the roof. The street gets more interesting when it dead-ends into the parking lot of the imposing, Soviet-style Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not far from St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, but I only walked to where I had once seen the ancient Kobzar. As on my previous four or five attempts, there was no sign of him.

I’d seen him only once, and now wonder if he wasn’t a ghost. There are many more ghosts wandering over Ukraine’s black earth than over the U.S. I don’t know how to describe it to my American friends. Perhaps it can be understood by Southerners and Indians, by the losers of wars. Those ghosts, half in the wind, half in your blood, press you with that lonely urgency. You sense some critical knowledge which nobody’s telling you, as if you missed a day of school and are now condemned to stumble on in confusion.

It is a rare thing when one of them speaks to you.

I saw him in November. Small, sharp drops of cold rain had just begun falling through the wind. I actually walked past him, coming within several steps without noticing him. Then I heard a tinkling in the wind, bells you might associate with angels or the souls of babies. I turned and saw the ancient man.

His sun-baked cheeks were sunken, and eyes half shut. He looked so emaciated, my first thought concerned whether or not I should seek medical attention for him. The grey ends of his mustache curled off his face, and blew in the wind beneath his chin as I wondered what to do. His fingers were gnarled like roots, with thick, brown finger nails. They seemed to barely move over the strings of his bandura, perhaps having learning efficiency over several lifetimes of practice. I saw all this before I heard him, as he played very quietly.

The street was empty except for us. I would have liked a second opinion, a verification of sorts. Some magic in the sounds he produced held me frozen in place.

The wood of his instrument was blackened where his fingers gripped it, and the strings too were black with grime except for where he plucked them. There, the strings shone as brightly as the domes of St. Michael’s Monastery. He wore a great wool hat, and an over-sized coat. I felt so absorbed by this strange apparition that it was his ragged velcro sneakers which seemed anachronistic, rather than the man himself. A melodic groan blew from his skinny neck, and I stepped still closer.

Between breaths he opened his eyes slightly and seemed to take me in without giving anything back, never interrupting his ancient song. I leaned even closer, tilting my good ear toward him. It seemed he sung of a young girl whose lover will not return from war, children begging for bread, and a solemn line of horsemen and the grasses of the endless steppe opening then closing behind them like water. The sounds unwinding from his strings contained the rocking of slave ships on the Black Sea, devastated cities, and a mother whose children are condemned to work foreign lands. There were Scythian Mounds, torn open graves, betrayal and forgotten glory. There were people hiding in their gardens with the wagon cars outside, and the ashes of a library.

If I could only have listened longer, taken a seat at his torn, velcro sneakers and listened, I might have learned that missing bit of knowledge for which I’ve been so hungry, that elusive clarity. The movements of his long-practiced fingers to retell the stories and glories consumed by fire, reignite the lights vanished by darkness. It was all there, but I woke up. I startled awake, as if from a dream.

The ghost had vanished in the wind. I stood over the withered Kobzar. He played on, but my usual reality crept back into my thoughts, crowding him away. Some important obligation — I don’t remember what — compelled me to move on. I made a mental note to return to that spot, thinking, idiotically, that I could capture all the loneliness and history with my digital camera and post it on this blog.

Regardless of how futile it would be, I’ve returned five or six time now with no luck. If I do come across the ghost again, I hope I’ll find the courage to sit at his feet and listen.

Legalize Land Ownership

A Column appeared in the Kyiv Post a while back arguing the criminalization of selling agricultural land to non-Ukrainians should remain in place. My response was going to appear as an op-ed, but it seems they decided for this one instead, so I’ll post it here.

You can read the original column “Business Sense: Nation should not be in rush to lift moratorium on sale of farmland” by Michael Lee here. I also saved a copy here.

My reply:

***

I was disappointed to read Michael Lee’s column last month in support of the national moratorium on the sale of farmland. I am always saddened and amazed to see that even analysts who readily reject central economic planning quite happily centrally plan once they seize the reins of government or a journalistic platform.

We should remember that there is no law without punishment. Every law, statute, regulation is backed, ultimately, by force or threat of force. The use of force to restrict peaceful, voluntary activity, like the sale of land by an “owner,” should always be viewed with extreme suspicion. “Owner” bears quotation marks, because one doesn’t truly own something whose usage is severely restricted by the state.

Throughout history, restrictions on peaceful, voluntary activity have been justified in various ways. Mr. Lee echoes one of the most popular — security for the incompetent. Because he believes some land owners will squander the money they receive, any land owner who sells his property must be considered a criminal.

His column bears the same pretense of knowledge assumed by history’s many glorious central planners. He knows, for example, that the current practice of landlords receiving “their annual rental income in cash or in a combination of cash, seeds and straw” is superior to the lump-sum profit from a sale of land because of its reliability, and that land value as well as rents and the landlords’ income will increase as the global population increases. I’m not sure how he’d reconcile this argument with Ukraine’s crashing population (which I’m certain has nothing to do with the countless, arbitrary restrictions over the lives of Ukrainians) and even if it were true, it assumes all land owners will prefer more income tomorrow instead of less income today. What if an 85-year-old land owner wants to see the world for the first time in her life? Is she condemned instead to wait for tomorrow’s supposedly higher income?

The column presumes these rental increases (driven by a nonexistent population growth) may be the difference between a “village thriving or dying a slow death,” and that leasing land coupled with “some initiative from the state” will “lead to a wider renaissance in rural communities.” No doubt many will feel reassured to hear the great planners not limiting their genius to economics.

He presumes that land ownership and renting is “an efficient way to filter foreign investment directly to where it can have the greatest impact,” as if anybody knows where that is. He knows too that for companies forced to rent instead of buy, “not having to find huge amounts of capital to pay for land is advantageous. . . it can be put into equipment, inputs and infrastructures where it will have a greater impact on the return on investment.”

If the case for the superiority of renting, both from the perspective of owners and agri-businesses, is so obvious, one wonders why the selling of land even needs to be criminalized. Are we to believe businesses are so stupid they need to be forced into the most beneficial course of action?

The fact is, neither Mr. Lee, nor any technocrat, nor I know which specific business practices are best. The only way to discover it is to respect property rights and allow the capitalist process to work.

Those who consider Ukrainians not ready to manage the property they supposedly own are mistaking the poison for the cure. It is precisely because the capitalist process here has been so mutilated for so long, that there is less competence, innovation, and discipline than in more capitalistic countries. In Ukraine those who posses such virtues have had less opportunity to receive rewards or accumulate capital, and those who don’t, little reason to learn them as one’s success in this economy seems determined too much by obtaining the political connections necessary to navigate arbitrary restrictions like the ones Mr. Lee supports.

Yes, letting capitalism work means allowing people to fail. I would remind those who seek to compromise property rights in the name of security for the incompetent that throughout history and without exception all levels of society, rich and poor, have been better off when property rights were upheld, and restrictions of peaceful, voluntary activities were minimal.

Secret Potatoes

Happy New Year, everybody.

There’s a hole in the floor near the entrance of my building. I’ve been passing it several times a day since moving to L’viv. Once, to my astonishment, there was a light shining from within the hole. It was no ordinary pit.

I looked inside and saw potatoes. I felt like a child discovering mysteries in the woods, like an explorer finding a lost civilization. I also felt tired, as it happened late and night. In the morning wasn’t completely certain whether I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. I dutifully checked the pit every day from then on, but until a few days ago, it remained dark.

You can imagine my excitement when, almost as a New Year’s gift, the potatoes revealed themselves to me again. I sprinted up to my fourth floor kvartyra, and back down to produce this photographic proof:

$secret potatoes of L\'viv$

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BJJ in Rivne

12 December 2010

I’m on the train writing in the elephant adorned notebook I just bought. The train isn’t moving yet. I’m still a little drunk from our post-workout beers. There’s a specific beer made in Rivne named Bergshloz. It’s very good, particularly the dark. The train is now moving.

A BJJ friend invited me to Rivne. I learned that he not a painter of houses, as I had previously believed, but a painter of art. He quit his job as a lawyer to do something closer to his passion. He paints and draws for advertisements including what sounded like high-end perfume ads in magazines. He also showed me a woman’s shirt on which he had painted some wonderful Irises. I was very impressed with his old portraits, his subject of choice. He hasn’t painted them in a long time.

He met me at the train station yesterday (Saturday) and we walked through town to a fantastic pizzeria. The cooks apparently learned their craft in Italy. Having been born and raised in NYC, nourished largely on parlor pizza, I believe I know my stuff. Trust me, Pich Na Drovakh is worth visiting, for the food, the ambiance and the river view.

We trained in the evening. I taught, by invitation, and had a wonderful time. They’ve only been practicing BJJ regularly for 2 months, but do so four times a week, most recently that morning with Ilya. They also do Akido three times a week.

As in Kyiv, they don’t stop for water breaks at all. This was difficult for me at first, but I’ve gotten used to it.

I taught three techniques for escaping mount — trap & roll, shrimping out, and pulling one leg into half-guard. There were about five or six kids there and I only slowed down for them a little. Then, because Ilya had mentioned my sneaky chokes during his introduction, I showed them how to do a baseball choke to someone passing your guard, how to defeat it, and that quick lapel choke from guard where from a loose cross grip, you raise your arm under their chin and weave the other over the back of the head and under your elbow.

After training, we went for some post-workout beers. I asked about the main industries in Rivne. After much though, people named Amber mining & works, granite mining a fertilizer plant, a linen factory, and the fact that many frogs and snails eaten in France come from the woods surrounding Rivne.

A little information about people’s family histories was offered to me without my asking. Perhaps its partly my imagination, but it seemed to speak to a time when societies and lives were broken and scattered to the winds. Ancestors were from Poland, Russia and other parts of Ukraine. Few seemed to have very deep roots in Rivne itself.

My guidebook says Rivne was the capital of Nazi Ukraine, and was consequently obliterated. I did not ask any questions, but I know what the Soviet liberators did in other parts of Ukraine. All Rivne’s construction is in a square, practical, repetitive Soviet style with wide roads and prominent monuments. In the central square, poet and national figure Taras Shevchenko has replaced Lenin, and the church is once again a church, shared by the Kyiv and Moscow patriarchs of the Orthodox Faith. During Soviet times, it had been the city’s “Museum of atheism” with displays about the Soviet space program.

I slept at my friend’s. Before breakfast, we went to bathe in the frozen lake. (Pictures below.) It was very exciting and fun. I don’t think I’d ever walked barefoot on ice before. Getting dressed afterward was the worst part, but only for my hands. One of my pinkie fingers is still a bit numb.

Then we ate and went to train no-gi. I told them I was very impressed with them, given they’d only been training two months. I suggested they work on on being tighter in their movements and transitions, relying more on body weight and positions instead of arm strength to control their opponents.

I showed them Pedro’s drill of switching sides in side control, replacing guard from side control, sit-out from sprawl position, rolling to replace guard after a sit-out, the spinning drill where someone holds your feet, and basic armbars and triangles. The my friend showed the lock-down from half guard and some half guard sweeps and escapes, including Eddie Bravo’s twister into a calf splicer or back mount.

Then we had after-workout beers. They gave me a Rivne mug as a gift and I hurried to the train , buying this notebook from a shop along the way.,

[Show slideshow]

First Few Days

As I had expected, very simple things were difficult, at least in the beginning. I set modest goals.

Day 1: Food. (This might be a surprising first priority to those of you who know me. Normally internet access comes ahead of food, but fortunately, the friend of the family from whom I’m renting this kvartyra leaves her internet running, and the lengthy password worked on the first try.)

I went to the “Products” store, and after some impatience on the part of the checkout lady I stocked my tiny fridge chock-full of provisions: bread, butter, and delicious cherry juice.

before the trip

I also bought some water for drinking, following the advice of the nice lady who had let me into my apartment.

before the trip

It was nice seeing a childhood friend of mine for a brief lunch. I called him from my kvartyra’s phone, not completely sure which of many digits I should enter. I guessed right on the second try. I gave myself plenty of time to make the walk to our meeting place – the McDonalds in the Maidan (square) of Independence. I followed the map carefully, passing Saint Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery where I photographed myself.

before the trip

I arrived early and waited for 40 minutes, watching people and telling myself to look comfortable. McDonalds seemed to be a common meeting place. Most people looked very affluent.

The familiar face and familiar language put me at ease. We went to the dining area at the mall, at a franchise which serves traditional Ukrainian food. The girl smiled at my heavily accented Ukrainian. Sometimes they seem irritated, or only speak Russian. My friend works as a journalist, and we had a very vigorous discussion about politics and political philosophy. He returned to his work, and I wandered around a bit before heading home and unpacking.

Day 2: Communications.

After a breakfast of bread, butter and cherry juice, I followed the familiar route passed Saint Michael’s Cathedral to Maidan and to the same mall, but I couldn’t find the dining area. I ate at a different spot. The sausage smelled a little ripe. I ate one of the two and decided not to return. I felt myself digesting the one for the rest of the day.

I wanted to get Kyivstar for mobile service simply because I’d heard of it before, but the clerk at the mobile store insisted MTC (which is MTS in latin letters, since Cyrillic C = Latin S) was the best. I didn’t initially realize it was an MTC store. They were able to simply replace the sim card in my U.S. phone which had been unlocked.

Anyway, they were so excited for my patronage, that on the next day, MTC threw a dance party all over the Maidan:

before the trip
(I’m a pretty big deal.)

Before leaving the mall, I went to look at the gallery there. I had visited the same gallery during my 2004 visit to Ukraine, and was so impressed by some of the painting, that I journaled about them, then returned to look at them again to finish my description. I was stunned they only cost the equivalent of $200. Had I been better prepared, I would have bought a bunch.

On this trip to the gallery, I was particularly impressed with the landscapes of an artist named Vladimir Hrubnyk. I can not explain why they were so moving. Their cost ranged from $700 to $7000 for the larger ones. I guess this is good news. As is the fact that in 2004, that was the only mall in Ukraine, now, according to my friend, there are many.

I was feeling a little lonely after awkward interaction in coffee shops, and also a bit restless, as I often am on lonely Saturday nights.

I took a different route to the Maidan after studying the map, passing Saint Sophia’s Cathedral and the statue of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, leader of the 1648 uprising against the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which established a Kozak state.

before the trip

before the trip Boxing matched were underway in the Maidan. I had seen the posters before, but hadn’t taken the trouble of reading them. It was a big affair, and I couldn’t get very close.

The poster only depicted the Ukrainian in the main event. For his opponent they only listed a name. Perhaps they didn’t want to advertise him.

I walked several blocks to a common bar for ex-pats which I knew from my 2004 trip: Baraban (the drum). Sometimes you beat the drum, sometimes the drum beats you.

It’s in an alley and has no sign. Unfortunately, the bar looked to be undergoing renovation, so I went to another ex-pat bar, O’Briens. I actually knew about it from overhearing the heart surgeon – orphan savior who sat behind my on the plane. By chance, I had passed it earlier and recognized the name.

At the bar, I instantly met Mike from England on his last night in Ukraine. He’d just returned from a tour of Chernobyl. The video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. inspired his short trip. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a popular Ukrainian-made video game, an alternate-reality first-person shooter modeled on actual Chernobyl and the nearby town of Prypiat.

Mike had a job and a passion, not unlike me, though I don’t do much of the former anymore. He’d just had a success with his passion, namely establishing himself as a record label for digital music.

He inquired about my work, and I told him about my program. I told him I wanted to survey political and economic philosophies in Ukraine. To illustrate, I said that poet and national Ivan Franko began as a Marxist, but later went on to say that Marxism is a philosophy based on hatred. Ivan Franko, by the way, is apparently the only man in history to be kicked out of a University which was later named after him. I also mentioned famous anarchist Nestor Makho, and his anarchist black army. I want to read everything he wrote too, find as coherent a philosophy as I can, and criticize it.

Mike asked about my own beliefs. I was happy to have made a friend for the evening, and didn’t want to get into politics, but we were already on good terms and he was genuinely curious. For the second time since arriving in Ukraine, I drew the chart from Jesus Huerta de Soto’s essay, Classical Liberalism versus Anarcho-capitalism, which, I think, offers a good overview and classification of political and economic thinking.

before the trip

As I drew and explained, he objected to my putting communism beside fascism in the same box, the pro-state, anti-property rights box, because communism is beautiful, at least in theory. I conceded that many educated people have subscribed to its tenets, but I personally, don’t find it beautiful. It fails in practice, of course, he said, but in theory it is beautiful. I said it fails in theory too, because when you abolish prices, society is blind. I talked about all the information and coordination which happen through prices. They tell you from what materials you should build your home, what jobs to apply for, and what to study in school.

I also related to him Mises’ identification of German socialism as opposed to Soviet socialism, where on paper capital goods remain in private hands, but all important decisions are made by the state.

We went upstairs to listen to music, and kept talking. Five musicians played played a damn good rendition of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. I couldn’t even hear an accent. Four had gray hair. The fifth had a mullet. They were fearless.

Mike asked how I would summarize it. I approached it from George Reisman’s, angle, the non-initiation of force. Force should only be used in defense or retaliation. We spoke about what this would mean for education.

They played Blue Suade Shoes, then Pink Floyd’s The Wall, as we listened in stunned silence. My heart leapt with joy and excitement every time they sang: Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!

Mike kept listening to the music, and I became increasingly drawn to the television on the other side of the bar. The boxing matches from the Maidan were on, and I watched rounds 9 to 12 of the main event. The Ukrainian pressed the action for all the rounds, trying to get inside, but I though his lanky African opponent out pointed him, jabbing and circling away. They were close rounds, but by my reckoning, the Ukrainian lost each one. They embraced after the fight. The African fighter raise his hands. The decision seemed to take forever. It went to the Ukrainian.

Mike remained lost in the music. It really was quite good, as far as I knew. I watched a little Cricket, then bid him farewell.

I felt a little buzzed on the way back. Excuse me, Mr. Khmelnytsky, I imagined asking the statue, which way is my kvartyra? I want to lie down and sleep. The statue said nothing, stoicism being appropriate to his Kozak spirit, but he pointed with his scepter to exactly the correct street. Thank you, I imagined saying.

Days 3-5:

Build romaninukraine.com.

Continue eating, drinking.

Contact Kyiv Mohyla Academy about Ukrainian classes. They had me take a Ukrainian test – my first since I was 14 years old in Saturday school.

Contact the think tank which agreed to host me.

Iron my shirts and slacks.