LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (10/16/05)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Right star, song, but wrong movie

Dear Editor:

Alas, what has happened to the film buffs among The Weekly's readers?!

Back on September 11 Boris Danik of North Caldwell, N.J., in his letter praising Prof. Alexander Motyl's optimism on Ukraine (and I have no quarrel with that), wrote, "It reminds me of Marlon Brando's rendition 'Luck Be a Lady Tonight' in the movie 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' "

Right star, right song, wrong movie.

Brando sang it in "Guys and Dolls," a very different film from "Streetcar" - as New York is different from New Orleans, as Damon Runyon is different from Tennessee Williams, as Sky Masterson in a well-tailored suit is different from Stanley Kowalski in a sweaty T-shirt.

And I fully expected my fellow-film buffs to flood you with letters pointing this out. I have just gone through three issues of The Weekly since the September 11 issue, and there is nothing.

But I do agree with the rest of Mr. Danik's thoughts. And, like Mr. Danik, I would like to see more Sky Mastersons in Ukraine, because there is no shortage of Stanley Kowalskis there, or in the diaspora.

Yes, "Luck Be a Lady Tonight," and every day in Ukraine! Sky Masterson is a successful risk-taker, and Stanley Kowalski is a brutish f-a-i-l-u-r-e. As I understand the gist of Mr. Danik's thoughts, Ukraine needs more of the former.

And as an American citizen living most of the time in Ukraine, I fully endorse Mr. Danik's view that the idea to grant Ukrainian citizenship to any ethnic Ukrainian living abroad, "ranks somewhere between the bizarre and mindless." Commitment, like skepticism, is a virtue. Fence-sitting is just uncomfortable.

R.L. Chomiak
Washington

Half-time score for Ukraine

Dear Editor:

The capacity to mess up was proved again to be at least as possible as optimistic predictions. This appears to be the half-time score from Ukraine's government crisis, sparked by the dismissal by President Viktor Yushchenko of his entire team. It looked like someone pulled the wrong rabbit or stepped on the wrong pedal, with the president mixing drastic measures with blame for all but himself.

Viktor Yanukovych commented that the president made the right decision - an indication that it could not be worse.

In the months after the Orange Revolution, Ukraine appears to continue not living up to the expectations of potential Western investors. Business regulations are stifling, corruption is not visibly subsiding, and jitters persist about possible re-privatization.

None of the same symptoms (and worse) deterred Western investors from plowing $9.3 billion into Russia in the first six months of 2005, nearly double that a year ago, despite recent depressing accounts of Russia's backsliding, e.g., in the Financial Times (July 14, 21 and 22), such as "Bribery in Russia Up Tenfold to $31 billion in four years."

Besides the re-privatization of the Yukos oil consortium, President Vladimir Putin has been quietly increasing the state's share of ownership of the economy. The Financial Times reported on August 21 that a deal has been cut with Western banks to loan the Russian government $7.3 billion to fund the government takeover of majority control of the natural gas giant Gazprom. This, according to experts, reflects the rapid rise in oil prices and the Kremlin's consent to lift restrictions on foreign ownership of the remaining shares.

Western investors' genial disposition was not extended to Ukraine's intent to acquire control of some wrongfully privatized assets. Anders Aslund, the American pro-market orator who at one time declared that Russia had successfully accomplished privatization, wrote in The Washington Post on May 20: "Yulia Tymoshenko has opted for an economic policy that appears to be socialist and populist," adding, "The biggest blow to the country has been the new government's foggy plans for re-privatization." That was just before President Yushchenko apologized for the actions of his prime minister, rebuked her and expressed his belief in the infallibility of the marketplace.

At this time little is publicly known about the specifics of the allegations of corruption in Mr. Yushchenko's circle. But cardinal mistakes by the leadership stand out:

The first error was the confused lines of authority between the National Security and Defense Council (where Petro Poroshenko held sway) and the government. The former repeatedly tried to change the decisions of the prime minister. In effect, the president divided the government into two parallel channels and then wondered why they didn't get along.

A second mistake violated the very essence of the Orange Revolution, and is succinctly stated in a New York Times editorial of September 9: "On dismissing the government, Mr. Yushchenko declared that his one goal was to assure stability. But the protesters (at Independence Square last fall) wanted change."

They may yet get change. Look out to see who gets to be prime minister after next spring's parliamentary elections - with increased powers, per the constitutional amendments taking hold in January 2006.

Boris Danik
North Caldwell, N.J.

Arthur Koestler in National Review

Dear Editor :

In the September 12 issue of National Review, British journalist and author David Pryce-Jones wrote an essay titled "Appreciation: A Man Who Knew His Century."

Arthur Koestler, born 100 years ago on September 5, 1905, in Budapest, was hailed as one who was able "to dramatize the epoch's defining struggle between democracy and totalitarianism" and who "powerfully dispelled the appeal of Communism" among European and world intellectuals. He is famous and best known for his political novel "Darkness at Noon," a grim interpretation of the Russian Revolution, Stalin's terrifying show trials and the horrible drama of Soviet prisons' environment. He dedicated his book to "the memory of the victims of the so-called Moscow Trials," several of whose victims "were known to the author" (Darkness at Noon, translated by Daphne Hardy, The Modern Library, N.Y. 1941).

Mr. Price-Jones noted that Koestler, a Hungarian Jew as a young man attended the University of Vienna; he became a Jewish nationalist, a Zionist. In 1926 he emigrated to British-controlled Palestine. Later he got a job as a journalist with a leading German publisher and moved in 1930 to Berlin, at the time when Hitler came to power. The idea that "Communism appeared to oppose Nazism" appealed to Koestler, who joined the Communist Party and moved to Moscow.

It is at this period of Koestler's life that we find his little-known connection with Ukraine. One can find a somewhat similar scenario or analogy with Walter Duranty.

Mr. Pryce-Jones writes: "The party commissioned him to write a travel book about the Soviet Union. Now he learned Russian, and in July 1932 he took a train to ... Kharkov [sic]. Much later - long after the commissioned travel book he wrote an account of that journey to analyze how he could so have deceived himself, but it still comes as a shock that someone of such superior intelligence could have observed the victims of Stalin's enforced Famine in Ukraine and rationalized the horror away. (The party published only an expurgated version of his original travel book. Some KGB archives must have the complete manuscript of what would be a major literary curiosity.)

Mr. Koestler's further biography reads like a spy thriller. He left the Soviet Union, and while in Paris he continued to be active in the Comintern. He was almost executed in Franco's Spain as a Communist agent. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, living in Paris, Koestler come to realize that "Communism in fact proved not to be the opposite of Nazism, but its kindred spirit." After his metamorphosis he wrote, in addition to "Darkness at Noon" (1940), several books condemning and exposing Communism, including "The Yogi and the Commissar" (1945), where he described the horrible scene from the Famine in Ukraine. Some of his descriptions are quoted in Robert Conquest's "The Harvest of Sorrow" (1986).

As Mr. Pryce-Jones writes above in his annotation about the KGB archives, Ukrainian historians and/or Ukrainian government officials should try to get the original (or a copy of Koestler's travel book) from Russian KGB archives, publish it and put it on display as a historical exhibit in the future Holodomor Memorial Museum.

Myroslaw Burbelo, M.D.
Westerly, R.I.

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