Charity can bring out the worst in people. Anyone who has bathed in self-congratulation at a charity dinner or bought a schlocky benefit album knows, however secretly, that vanity is the engine of public giving.
Frivolity, however, is a necessary unpleasantness of fundraising, and for every weepy Sally Struthers-style appeal, some pocket change may make it to that doe-eyed orphan.
Ukraine, of course, ups the ante for the conscience-stricken. The Post has run a raft of articles on charity shipments sidelined by corrupt customs officials and routed to commercial interests. This is a routine hazard.
In another life, I worked for an aid organization, and I spent more than a few days in fruitless arguments with recalcitrant officials over impounded containers of aid.
It should also be no shock our readers that donors often profit from disaster; Ukraine is a dumping ground for expired medicine and ramshackle secondhand equipment donated by charities interested in inflating their donation figures.
All par for the course – concerned humanitarians know they have to reckon with territory that is hostile to good intentions.
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster spawned a range of aid efforts ranging from the ineffectual to the impressive.
Government efforts included the creation of a cabinet-level ministry, an extensive benefits system and a lavish 10th-anniversary commemoration.
For many public figures and politicians, attaching themselves to the Chernobyl cause is a de rigeur exercise in public relations.
Some characters linked to the disaster and its coverup, moreover, have found it a convenient avenue for public rehabilitation.
In June, I was shocked to see Anatoly Romanenko, the head of the state Institute of Radiation Medicine, shilling for a new multimillion-dollar U.S. Agency for International Development program to give diagnosis, treatment and psychological support to children with thyroid cancer. Earlier this year, he chaired a World Health Organization Conference on Chernobyl.
The fact that Romanenko has been reincarnated as the director of the institute is troubling enough – at the time of the disaster, as Ukraine’s Minister of Health, he was one of the apparatchiks responsible for the lame official response to the crisis.
Once known in Kyiv as the ‘Chernobyl nightingale’ for optimistically chirping on the radio that the contaminated zone was ‘safer than Switzerland,’ Romanenko apparently found that his previous career was not a hindrance to jumping on the aid bandwagon.
Here he was, at the official opening, with the grave pronouncement that ‘it took years of work and thousands of diagnoses for … the world community to recognize that the rise in thyroid cancers is a direct result of the catastrophe.’
Perhaps the infusion of U.S. foreign aid dollars was able to help Romanenko see the same.
Valentyna Shevchenko, the chairwoman of Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet at the time of the disaster, is another dubious figure who has recostumed herself as a humanitarian. To this day, Shevchenko strenuously claims that she was ‘uninformed’ about the disaster, but allegations continue to circulate that she, along with the rest of Soviet Ukraine’s upper echelons, deliberately withheld information about the disaster from the public.
Now we find Shevchenko installed in the comfortable offices of Ukraina-Dityam (Ukraine for the Children), an ‘independent, nonprofit charity’ backed by Ukraine’s first lady, Lyudmila Kuchma, and headquartered inside the Health Ministry.
From her ministry building office, which is larger and more luxurious than that of Health Minister Andry Serdiuk, Shevchenko once told me that Ukraina-Dityam receives ‘not a kopeck’ from the state till.
Even if we discount the in-kind donation of office space from the government, by the standard post-Soviet measuring stick, the dimensions of Ukraina-Dityam’s office are a fair indication of who wears the pants at the Health Ministry.
Ukraina-Dityam recently sponsored a ‘benefit concert’ in the castle grounds of the old fortress town of Kamenets-Podilsky, which was preceded by a barrage of television advertisements featuring Mrs. Kuchma doting on premature babes.
Ostensibly organized to ‘help the children,’ the concert, featuring rock acts Brothers Karamazov and Komu Vnyz and folk singer Nina Matviyenko, appeared to be more of an official junket than a charity event. I traveled to Kamenets-Podilsky on that day and was treated to the bizarre scene of people in evening dress milling around the ampitheatre, with a stage cordoned off by army regulars who seemed to outnumber the crowd. Railway officials told me that train carriages were pulled from the Kamenets line to accommodate official visitors.
‘What about ticketed passengers?’ I inquired. ‘They will be left on the platform.’
I am not the first to have criticized these two for jumping on the Chernobyl bandwagon.
Ironically, others have made an entire career out of it.
Volodymyr Yavorivsky, a former parliamentary deputy, launched his political career after writing Mariya z polynom u kintsi stolittya (Mary With Wormwood at the End of the Century), a book that lambasted the likes of Shevchenko and Romanenko for their complicity in the disaster. He also called publicly for Shevchenko’s prosecution.
In some respects, Yavorivsky found Chernobyl the ultimate career move; in one stroke, he distanced himself from his former life as a Soviet hack writer and was able to recostume his socialist-realist novels as patriotic potboilers.
In addition to his clever literary transformation, he also gained immediate notoriety, and went on to serve as one of the founders in the Movement in Support of Perestroika, or Rukh.
Yavorivsky the official writer found Chernobyl an occasion for rehabilitation after a life in praise of Lenin. It was, as well, an occasion for fundraising.
Friends of mine in the Ukrainian diaspora recall his first visit to the United States in 1989, when, as one witness recounts, ‘people were literally opening their wallets’ for him. He helped found a charity, hand-carried medicine to Ukraine and won great fame.
Eventually, however, he fell from political stardom and lost his deputy’s mandate in recent elections.
Charity is not always a cynical business in Ukraine. I have met dozens of people who toil anonymously for charitable causes, many for Ukrainian children, regardless of their classification. And, yes, conversions do happen. But when fame or funding is involved, I tend to be a disbeliever.
Nathan Hodge is a Kyiv Post staff writer.
