Tragedy in the Making

Consider the situation that is shaping up in the Ukrainian countryside, where about a quarter of the country’s population still live. Soon the people who are working some of the best farmland on earth, a population with neither money nor power, will get the dubious privelege of selling that soil to those who have both. The buyers, not the sellers, are protected from any foreign buyers, who might threaten to bid the price up to a level where the sellers might receive something resembling adequate compensation, while the state in an election year has announced that bread prices will not be allowed to rise, thus increasing the pressure on those with nothing to live on but something to sell, the land that produces the wheat that will be sold at cheap prices. What happens then? One not need to have a Ph.D. to predict what could happen next.

The more attractive young ladies of twelve to fifteen years or so might always find a place in the market for white slaves in Turkey or some such place to be sold over and over. Their male cousins, without any urban skills and precious little cash, might in turn try to sell their services as guards or policemen against those not so fortunate as they and thus forced into thieving for a living, so that half of the male villagers might be employed to chase the other half. Meanwhile their elders will go around searching for cardboard, newspapers, and empty beer bottles that they can exchange for a crust of bread the way urban pensioners now do. Is this social justice?

This writer’s late lamented father-in-law was able to turn collective farms into millionaires in Galicia, where the soil is not as good as in much of Ukraine, without much schooling to his credit. Of course, he never figured out that being the head of a collective farm was for most in that position a synonym for stealing, and somebody else always came after him and squandered the money he had accumulated within the next few months. They once even offered to make him a hero of socialist labor in exchange for two breeding sows. He refused and was put on pension literally the next day.

The villagers, essentially turned back into serfs according to Stalin’s version of social justice, were left with nothing. And now, it seems, they are being prepared for eviction from the land that fed them and their forefathers. Is the writer of these lines the only person in Ukraine who is ready to scream bloody blue murder? It has already been written here that some things are just plain wrong. The deliberate impoverishment of the family farm is one of those things. Without the broadest possible help to those attempting to try their hand at private farming away from the former kolhosp chairman kleptocrat, still the cock of the walk in most villages, giving those without money or power the dubious right to sell their land to those who have both is just plain wrong. One of Ukraine’s comparative advantages in this world is good soil. Let those who learned how from their forefathers farm it, and this country will feed much of the world to the benefit of all who live here. Let those who have made their careers exploiting those who grow the grain go to Turkey or some such place where their nether parts can be sold for whatever they might be worth. I think it will not be much.