Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 18 – Many people make the mistake of judging countries on the basis of
life in the capital cities, but that is a serious mistake. One needs to get out
beyond these places and see life in rural areas as well. That is what Denis
Lavnikevich, a Belarusian journalist who has just moved to Kyiv, has now done.
While
living in Belarus, he says, he spent a great deal of time in rural areas and
small towns; but before moving to Ukraine to work as a commentator for Delovaya stolitsa, he says he had not seen
the rural parts of that country except out of the window of a bus (dsnews.ua/politics/hozyaeva-na-svoey-zemle-12112018220000).
Now, he has had the chance to do
more and what he saw, Lavnikevich says, are “two different backwoods worlds.”
At first glance, many Ukrainian
villages do not look that different than most Belarusian ones. There are
numerous half-destroyed wooden houses, many of which are deserted, even though
the cost of purchasing any of them would be less than for a smartphone. Both
seem forgotten by the authorities and probably are, except at election time.
But then you encounter in Ukraine
what might be called “a backwater town of a new type,” an indication that in
Ukraine “there are not just ghost villages” but something else. There you see
brick homes, carefully maintained yards, and average cost cars. People are working, and they have money to
spend.
“In Belarus there also are such
villages,” Lavnikevich says. “They are populated as a rule by Protestants” who
don’t drink and have a strong work ethic. A well-known example is Polesya’s
Olshany.
“The life of a Ukrainian village is
organized in a principally different way than the life of a Belarusian one,” he
says. “Ten to fifteen years ago, there was practically no work in the village
in Ukraine. People lived on the basis of their gardens and small farms; young people
and working-age men left for the city.”
“But everything began to change with
the development of agricultural business,” the journalist says. “Major
agro-holdings concentrated under their administration large areas of land and
launched massive export-oriented production, which has rapidly become one of
the foundations of the economy of the country.”
These concerns need workers, and “they
have become the largest employers in the village. Of course, today those who
want to make a lot of money continue to leave, to the cities, to Poland or even
further. But those who remain in their provincial area and do not sit around without
work.”
“In Belarus,” Lavnikevich says, “everything
is different.” Kholkozes and Sovkhozes inherited from Soviet times continue to
provide work, but wages are truly small.
Private production “in the best traditions of the USSR” is prohibited,
and people increasingly turn to alcoholism.
In
sum, the journalist says, “the difference between rural Belarus and rural
Ukraine is in the different self-assessments of the people. Both live very
poorly. But in Belarus, this poverty is the conserved Soviet model where an
individual does not feel himself to be the master on his own land.”
“In Ukraine,” in contrast, “the
decline of the village is the result of the political and economic chaos of the
last two decades. But here people know that they themselves are the masters and
therefore the Ukrainian backwoods s changing by relying on its own resources.
The Belarus village isn’t.”
