Putin’s Counter-Revolution James Meek reports from Ukraine Corruption is everywhere, high and low, in Ukraine as in Russia. Yanukovich’s son Olexandr, a dentist by training, quickly became one of the richest men in the country after his father became president. Just before the regime fell Olexandr Yanukovich’s companies were winning half of all state contracts. Dima told me about a friend who worked as a customs officer. His official salary was 250 euros; bribes took it up to 3000. Perhaps he was exaggerating. But people boasting about the size of the bribes they receive when they’re working for the state doesn’t bode well. In Donetsk I heard about the coal scam. Ukraine pours millions into subsidising deep-mined Donbass coal. It is subsidised by weight and so rogue strip-miners carve open-cast coal cheaply out of unlicensed sites, add that coal to a load of expensive coal, and collect a deep-mine subsidy for the lot. A miner’s daughter told how her father had been injured at work and needed an operation on his arm. The operation should have been free, but before the surgeon carried it out, he strongly suggested the girl’s father demonstrate blagodarnost – gratitude – in advance, to the tune of ten thousand Ukrainian hryvnia, about a thousand US dollars.
Alexei Inozemtsev, a student in his sixth and final year at KNMU, told me the trouble was that patients understood that doctors were so poorly paid – $170 a month is typical – they couldn’t live without taking backhanders. And because the politicians and senior bureaucrats who have the power to change the system assume that doctors, teachers, police, judges and so on are on the take, they feel no urgency about finding ways to pay them decently. Ukraine’s population has shrunk by more than a tenth since independence, yet it’s easier for governments to pay civil servants starvation wages and let them get by on bribes than pay them properly by cutting their numbers, or increasing taxes on the rich, or both. The quality of medical education, Inozemtsev said, was high, and a student would not be allowed to graduate without adequate practical training. But many teachers in the first three years – the theoretical part of the course – were corrupt. You could pay them to have work that was merely adequate marked up to ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. Some KNMU students have their tuition paid by the state; others, like Inozemtsev, pay fees. ‘I already pay to study,’ he said. ‘Why should I pay extra so as not to study?’ full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/03/07/james-meek/putins-counter-revolution _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
