Tim Judah - In Wartime - Stories from Ukraine

Now that the threat from Russia had receded he had another concern. The government needed to get a move on and reform the country fast. When they carry out reforms they don’t explain why, he said. A year ago no one would have thought of saving water, gas or electricity because, as they were heavily subsidized, they were cheap. Now the subsidies were going and prices were rising, but no one was explaining to people why this was happening and so they got angry. The revolution had also led to new people being put in charge of a system, of ministries and administrations full of people who “need to be fired.” They were destructive elements left over from the past, he said, and sabotaged attempts to change things. New people at the top spent 80 percent of their time fighting those who were supposed to work for them and only 15 or 20 percent of their time on reforms. One serious problem was that Ukraine simply did not have enough individuals with the right skills to replace those he thought should be sacked. Andrey said he spent time at the Ministry of Infrastructure and it was full of people “who are against any changes,” while the new intake “don’t know anything about ports.” For this reason, and “because it is easy to criticize and I am trying to help,” TIS employees were being dispatched to Kiev to give master classes on how ports operated. In the railway sector, energy and mining, he saw the same problems.

Maidan, he lamented, had been a “revolution of merchant bankers,” by which he meant that many of the top posts in government had gone to people who worked in finance and were rich enough to take time off to take them on. Ukraine had plenty of good people with financial and banking experience, but not enough who had other types of business experience. The problem with this was that the finance types

don’t like to come into conflict with anyone. By their very nature they have to be friendly and tolerant but, given the way the country is, they must be decisive and tough and it is just not in their nature, so when it comes to fighting corruption and putting people in jail they just can’t do it. Some good examples: none of the former politicians are in jail. No corrupt prosecutors or judges have been arrested. How can you do reforms like this? In Odessa they changed the head of the prosecutor’s office, but everyone else is the same.

Judges were bribed to put people in jail, and the person who paid the most wins when a commercial dispute comes to court. It is not surprising that there has been far less foreign investment in Ukraine than its size and potential suggest it should have. Many corporate agreements are done under British law, Andrey said, but whatever a British court might decide, it is of little use if its decision cannot be enforced in Ukraine. There are no multinationals in the Ukrainian port business “because they are afraid. They say, ‘Why come to Ukraine when we can go to Slovenia or the Baltics?’” Above all else, Ukraine’s corrupt legal system needs fixing, “and that has not even been touched by the reforms yet.”

Before leaving and turning out from the port back onto cratered roads, I asked Andrey if he was an optimist. “An optimist is not the first to shout ‘hurray,’” he quipped, “but the last to shout “we’re finished,” and there is still time to shout that.” A banker who knows Andrey said that the shame was that there were far too few businessmen like him in Ukraine.

“Yes, kids! We’re coming!” shouted Viktor Gavrilenko happily out of the window of his green Lada Niva as we hurtled over the steppe. They stood, looking sullen and stared at him. A little bit away from the main group, one was standing beside another one lying on the ground. “Oh my God! He’s dead!” said Viktor. We jumped out to have a look. His eyes had been pecked out by crows who had streaked his body with their white excrement. If this had been an African wildlife reserve the overnight death of a zebra would have been a mundane affair. Here at Askania-Nova, less than an hour’s drive from the border with Crimea, where they have lived on and off for well over a century, the murderous overnight assault in which an alpha male had kicked a younger male to death was, said Gavrilenko, “very rare.”

Phone calls were made and a team summoned to take away the victim for a postmortem. After this he would be fed to the guard dogs. We moved off to see the bison nursing their young, wild donkeys from Tajikistan and rare Przewalski horses from Mongolia. Then we came to the herds of saiga antelope, with their characteristic snuffling muzzle that looks like a tiny elephant’s trunk. A quarter of a century ago, a million ranged across the Eurasian steppe all the way to China, but the post-Soviet world has not been kind to them. There are perhaps only 50,000 left. They have been hunted for their meat and above all for the distinctive horns of the males which are used in Chinese medicine. Now there are none left in China. Suddenly Viktor and Viktoria Smagol, his thirty-nine-year-old saiga specialist, leapt out of the car and within minutes Viktor was cradling a two-day-old foal which Viktoria put in a cardboard box that happened to be labeled “From Ukraine.” The Chinese want them for breeding and pay $3,000 a head. Half an hour later he was in a pen with eight others. When they are four months old they will be flying to China.

There is something surreal about the zebras of the Ukrainian steppe, the camel which had just given birth in Askania-Nova’s zoo, with its ostriches, immaculately kept gardens and arboretum. It is a jarring contrast to what you would expect in the crumbly and dilapidated little towns of this part of the south. But the strange thing is how, despite all the odds, this place has survived the whirlwinds of history.

Viktor is a turbocharged fifty-nine-year-old. Since 1990 he has headed up the steppe biosphere reserve and steered it through the difficult post-Soviet years. Now bad times are here again, but Askania-Nova has seen far worse. Walking around the arboretum at dusk he began to tell the tale. In 1828 this tract of land, designated as parcel “71,” was bought by the Duke of Anhalt-Kothen, a small duchy in the center of Germany. The plan was to turn the steppe here into sheep country. His retainers had experience with sheep, and the port of Odessa, just a few days’ trek away, was open for business to export wool. On the designated day a long column set off from the small town of Rosslau on the river Elbe toward the planned settlement. It was to take its name from one of the duke’s 800-year-old titles. In the column were fifteen men, four women, six children, two bulls, six cows, eight horses and 2,866 sheep. They traveled, according to one account, with three covered wagons which “had been loaded with all the equipment: clothes, linen, tools, seeds—everything that had to go.” But the steppe was dry, the project badly managed and the venture was not a success. In 1856 it was sold to Friedrich Fein. He was the prosperous descendant of a man who, according to one version of his story, for accounts differ slightly, had fled to imperial Russia from his native Germany in 1763.

Fein managed to turn Askania-Nova into a successful sheep farm, and eventually there would be several hundred thousand sheep here. After his death the estate passed to his only child, a daughter, and her husband, a man called Johann Falz. By permission of Tsar Alexander II, they were allowed to create the name Falz-Fein to preserve the Fein name. It was their grandson Friedrich Falz-Fein who, in 1884, began to create a zoo, an arboretum and a reserve here and fenced off a large area of virgin steppe to preserve it. By this time the family also had a fish-canning plant and a small Black Sea port nearby from which they could export their wool. When Tsar Nicholas II came to visit in April 1914, Friedrich had fifty-eight types of animals and 402 types of birds. The tsar is reported to have exclaimed: “My goodness, what harmony there is here, what peace… What a paradise!” As he set off back to his brand-new Livadia palace in Crimea, he said he hoped to visit again in autumn, “if we haven’t got a war on our hands by then!”