PRESS REVIEW: Ukraine takes a holiday

Following is an excerpt from a story by Matthew Kaminski that appeared in The Financial Times on April 26.

Ukraine, at the peak of a post-Soviet craze for public holidays, is shutting down today for 10 days.

The happy coincidence of the old Communist stalwart, May Day, and the even older Orthodox Easter, observed (officially only since 1992) later than usual, gave the government a popular idea: take the whole week off.

By official decree, nothing will be open until May 5. Then from May 8 until May 12 - for (second world war) Victory Day - Ukrainians will do it again.

The fondness for time off is nothing new. The Soviet Union idealized work, liberally awarding Heroes of Socialist Labor medals that many Ukrainians treasure to this day, but its people actually did very little of it. ...

Sensitive to charges of official sloth, Ukraine's foreign affairs minister, Mr Hennadii Udovenko, said Kyiv's leaders would use the occasion for "important" diplomatic trips. ...

Some private entrepreneurs who have fully embraced the capitalist work ethic complain about lost business. And the tax men are positively irate.

Mr. Mykola Azarov, the director of the national tax authority, this week presented a staggering bill: the holiday will cost Ukraine at least 350 million hryvni ($191million) in lost revenue. ...

Disenchanted opposition politicians are echoing Ukraine's national poet, Taras Shevchenko, who in the 19th century struggled in vain to arouse his native land against Russian rule.

A Shevchenko verse invoked his frustration with Ukrainian inaction: It's terrible to lie in chains/And rot in dungy deep/ But it's still worse, when you are free/To sleep, and sleep, and sleep.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 18, 1997, No. 20, Vol. LXV

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