frustrated that politicians are so consumed with the upcoming elections and their own lustings for power that they seem to forget what is important for most Ukrainians. I am forced to ask myself, over and over: how much has Ukraine changed, and is this what we fought for?
Ukrainians have always had an attachment to the land, and the settlement of land-related issues is one of the most important ongoing issues of the independence period.
Even after 12 years of independence, however, the perfection of land law is far from complete. The process of appealing for your rights is subverted by the greed and mendacity of public officials.
This summer, I returned to my native Lviv with the idea of spending a few weeks renewing old acquaintances and enjoying time with my family. Instead I was soon immersed in a process that seemed more like something out of Gogol than anything logical.
Early in my visit, my family received a letter from the city council, informing us that the privatization of our land, which my family has occupied continuously since 1897, could be accomplished only in part. We could rent the rest of the land from the city for the next 25 years. This came as a surprise, since the Land Code makes it clear that my family should be able to privatize the whole parcel.
First, the land has belonged to us since 1897: my great grandmother received it from her parents as a dowry. According to the law, if you use the land for more then 15 years, it becomes your property.
Second, the law says that each Ukrainian citizen can privatize that portion of land on which his house stands (10 sotych in the city) and in which he gardens (12 sotych in the city). [Editor’s note: A sotych is one-hundredth of a hectare.]
Since there are three owners of the house and 37 sotych of land, there should have been no problem, particularly since the land has been in use by my family not just for 15 years, as the law stipulates, but for over 100.
Upon visiting the city council to do the necessary paperwork, however, I learned you have to go through seven circles of bureaucratic hell, which my 92-year-old grandfather is incapable of. And if that weren’t enough, I was informed that my family will have to pay a monthly rent of Hr 1200 for land that we should be able to claim as our own.
The process is supposed to be a simple one: you submit a request to privatize the land you are using; your request goes to a special commission that verifies your claim, and then sends it to the city council, which in turn votes. The whole process, according to the new Land Code, is supposed to take no more than a month, if you’re on the level. It takes another month for the documents to be processed.
Since I believed in the basic goodness of the people in the city administration, the next day I ran to them to explain the injustice of our situation.
And that is how the nightmare began. I spent the next two and a half months running to the city administration every day, talking to everybody I could, from clerks to deputies, including the mayor. I also called every possible government body in Kyiv that deals with land privatization, to find out more about our rights, and about precedents around the country; called lawyers and read up on the issue; phoned my husband long distance in despair; and waited for another city council meeting to see if my issue would be presented. None of this brought any result.
Why? Because, apparently, my family had too much garden land as part of our city property.
Meanwhile, our privatization request had been moved from one city council hearing to another in a sort of bureaucratic ping-pong game. I had been told privately that everything was possible, if the appropriate private payments were made.
Then I ran into a different problem: there were three existing agencies that dealt with land registration. Thus instead of going to one agency, you had to go to all three, and pay accordingly. You had to stand in long lines, deal with unhappy public servants, and pay fees to the local post office – all multiplied by three.
At the end of the process, when I was positive that my grandfather would receive his land title document, the city arrested all of the documents and archival material of one of the agencies we had to deal with. “Fighting corruption,” of course, was the stated reason for this.
No one knows for sure how long the process will last. My grandfather is 92, and survived the horrors of the Stalin era and four years in German concentration camps. Neither did anything to improve his health. In case he dies, his right to own the land he worked on all his life expires, and the land goes to the city. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the government wants to shuffle papers until after he passes, so that the city can sell his land to whomever it wants. He has observed that what the Soviets did not complete, independent Ukraine’s bureaucrats will. They will finish us.
I also received a moral lesson from a deputy in the city administration: the best virtue for a woman, he told me, is modesty. After yet another Land Committee meeting, I had the nerve to approach the administration to find out what decisions the committee had taken behind closed doors. The deputy, of course, was annoyed at my interest.
Do we really want an independent Ukraine in which rights can be “adjusted” or overlooked by the authorities, and where a person’s private property cannot be preserved or saved or justified? It seems we are very much back in the same position we were in under the Communist regime. Only the faces of the bureaucrats have changed.
Olga Onyshko works in Washington, D.C. as a Ukrainian-language news correspondent for the Voice of America.
