Vasyl Yatsura (Home)

Home
Vasyl and Lesia bought this huge apartment some time around 2003. They actually combined 2 units to create a single apartment. The picture here shows the view from one of the balconies. The shiny building across the street is a huge shopping mall and entertainment complex with movie theaters arcades etc. In the foreground is a little rectangular building that might actually date from Soviet days. It could have been some sort of a commercial shop that sold something unrelated to the area and odd, like plumbing supplies. When I worked in Kyiv in 1992, it was probably full only of empty shelves. In the background is a shiny new brick and gold-domed church. This one was built by the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriache). These sorts of churches are sprouting up all all over the place. As far back as 2003, the Moscow-led church was investing 60% of its money into developing its presence in Ukraine. (GET CITE). That makes for quite a handsome marketing budget. Finally, the 3-sided billboard in the foreground is blank. Between 2004 these біґбордз sprouted like mushrooms after a rain. The supply went through the roof. After the global economic crisis, demand went through the floor. As a result, many of the billboards are blank. Some have the equivalent of personals ads on them with a gigantic photo of someone's girlfriend on them with curvy, cursive letters spelling out birthday wishes to my 'true love.'To be kind you can consider it high end graffiti.

Their living room is enormous. It flows into both the generous entry foyer and the eat in kitchen that seats 12. The balcony alcove has windows that open to make the effect of a screened in porch. The fish tank is built-in between the kitchen and the living room.

Lesia had broken off from the media venture and managed several furnished apartments for rent. She had gotten up to as many as 5. She rented them to visiting Europeans and Ukrainians. Since she drives her own car, she was able to move around town, setting up the apartments and getting them ready. After a while, she hired someone else to do the housekeeping for the units, so she could handle the marketing and sales. There is yet another example of the aid audit that would show how a grant in 1992 spawned small business and created jobs in Ukraine.


The Italian shelves and drawers in the daughter's room are terrific. I want a set in New York! It's a great reminder of the fact that Ukraine really is part of Europe and goods from Italy are not far away. Now that people can see television programs and can travel outside their country, they are able to select how they want their homes to look. All this was certainly not the case in 1991.

Vasyl Yatsura (Team)

Team
Vasyl Yatsura has been running a media start up in Ukraine since before I met him in 1992. He launched a very popular TV program (Студіо Гарт ТВ) at State Television before I met him. In 1992, he came on board with his entire team to launch the International Media Center. His focus was on the production company, the news program, then on creating the first national network of independent TV stations. It was called Unika-TV. He organized and ran training programs with Internews Network all over Ukraine. As the International Media Center evolved into what is today STB, and as as Internews matured into a stand-alone presence in Ukraine, Yatsura launched Teleradio Kurier. It is a pure business-to-business media company that published a regular journal for professionals, runs an annual trade show, festival, and publishes books. In the picture here, Yatsura is standing in his offices, in front of less than half of the covers that he has published. The journal is written for TV and radio professionals. Most of the revenue comes from ads and sponsorships. He hasn't been updating his site IMHO, but follow the link and you'll see the agenda for the 2009 festival. He built his business by personally meeting all the main players in regional and city TV stations throughout Ukraine. Initially, he sent them programming (that they desperately needed) by putting videocassettes on trains. Then he launched training programs and networking events. His trade show is the 'must-do' event of the year.

When I met with him in 2009, he said that there is a changing of the guard at the regional stations as they all become part of larger conglomerates. He doesn't know all the players in the market as he once did, since the market is growing. He sounded like a 20-year veteran entrepreneur: tough, tired, proud but wiped at the latest economic crisis. Just as things had started to stabilize for business in Ukraine, the global economic crisis crashed like a wave on his shore.
Vasyl runs his ongoing venture with a core team, and he constantly recruits and develops new staff. His former employees are now sprinkled throughout the media management of Ukraine. Vasyl is the consummate people-manager. (Precisely what much of Corporate America espouses to value, but in reality has a difficult time implementing.)Vasyl partners up with this wife, Lesia (second from right). His right hand man for years has been Andrij Dashko (far right). Zoryana Yatsura is embarking on her own independent career, now that she graduated from Kyiv Mohyla Academy, but she continues to help the business by especially around the busy trade-show seaason. Behind them in this picture is a wall full of pictures of the team with various media luminaries throughout the years.

Just above his computer is a dog-eared copy of picture with me from my Thank You (and Going away) Party in 1994. It was really nice to see that image up there.It serves as yet another link in the unconventional audit trail from foreign grants to support open society and the manifestation of that society. Yatsura's office on Haydar street and the dozens of people he has on payroll will not appear on an audit of the Soros grant that we got in 1992. The millions of dollars in value of deals that were transacted between vendors at exhibitors at this trade show will not show up on an audit of the US AID grant that we got to launch the International Media Center. However, that tradeshow wouldn't have come into being, that journal wouldn't be published, those journalists wouldn't have been trained if Yatsura stayed at State Television that winter night in 1992.

Yatsura always blurred the line between family and business. You could say that it was all business all the time with Yatsura, so family gets folded into the mix simply by definition. It is still like that. We had the old gang over to my parents apartment for dinner one night. Yatsura, his wife and daughter came as did Dashko, and Nechyporuk with his family (which includes a grandson). By chance, a friend of my parents was in town from the US. Yatsura spent much of the evening explaining the landscape of media business to this man. Yatsura continues to be always on. Luckily, he still plays very well with kids. In this picture, my two daughters and Nechyporuk's grandson bested Yatsura in a game. In this regard the trip was very personal as, I too blended the facets of personal and professional that I had intentionally kept so separate while in Corporate America.

Vasyl Yatsura (Offices)

Vasyl's offices are in an new building, next to an even newer building. He bought the space in 2003 and had it custom fitted for Teleradio Kurier. Before he moved to this address on Haydar Street, he rented space from a former state-run enterprise. Now his place is across the street from TVi, a big new private TV venture. When we moved there in 2003, the neighborhood was mostly industrial; something a real-estate agent in New York would call 'changing, with lots of potential.' Vasyl bet well, now there is a luxury residential tower next door. Immediately outside his door is a small playground with a swing set. Two buildings down is a high-end steak house.

The location makes lots of sense for Vasyl. At around the same time that he bought the office space, he bought himself an apartment nearby: just on the other side of the tracks in a building near those on the horizon with the pyramids on the top. This picture was taken off the smoking balcony of his office. In the foreground you can see the start of some of the rail yards. Much of this land used to be controlled by enterprises that were connected to the rail system. It was both industrial and residential and was doled out to people who worked on the railroad. Over the past two decades, much of the land has been privatized (probably with various shades of transparency and legitimacy).

At this point, however, does it really matter if the land was sold at an open auction or if it went to new owners through прихватизація? Someone is developing it and maintaining it. On the hillside to the left, some stand-alone houses were built. Rumour has it that an entertainment complex with an indoor ski hill is in the works.

Vasyl Yatsura (Now)

Now Home
Owns an apartment in the center of Kyiv, not far from the train station
Top floor of a new building
Combined 2 large apartments to make a very large apartment
Lesia, his wife, designed and decorated it

Large eat in kitchen (seats 12 comfortably)
Large living room
Two bedrooms
Two bath plus wooden sauna
Large entryway foyer
Two balconies
Built in fish tank between kitchen and living room
Plus space for rowing machine and elliptical trainer in alcove (with window) just outside the door to the apartment
24-hour doorman and security

Now Work:
Runs TeleRadioKurier, a multi-media business-to-business publisher
Industry journal 6x per year
Trade show 2x per year
TV festival 1x per year
Publishes books as needed
Employs 6 people full-time plus freelancers
Trade show has been run 15 times

Vasyl Yatsura (Backstory)

Then:
- Apartment on left bank of the city (long commute)
- Born in Siberia (where his parents had been exiled)
- Worked in radio, then television. Knew that his career was going to be restricted based on his birthplace

Backstory:
In the days of perestroika, State TV had to show some examples of new types of TV programming. Vasyl was tapped to launch a youth-oriented TV show. There were to be three crews and each crew was repsonsible for creating one show per 3 weeks. Vasyl agreed on the condition that he could hire his own team and that the team would be half the size of the other teams. Vasyl reasoned that his team would be issued an office in the State TV headquarters on Khreschatyk. The rooms were small and it was unpleasant to be stuffed in such a small space with 14 people. He wanted 7.
can, l
Vasyl was the first person that I recruited to join the International Media Center after Mykola Knaiazhytsky and I got access to the building on Khreschatyk.

When we launched IMC, then UNIAN, and Vikna and UNIKA, Vasyl, and his business partner Volodymyr, played the roles of COOs (Chief Operating Officers). While Kniazh and I raised funds, schmoozed in Kyiv, Washington, and Arcata, Vasyl kept the troops engaged. In today's workplace in the States, the equivalent would be that while I made powerpoint decks, Vasyl recruited and managed people.

He spent hours at the office. 7 days a week from 9am to well-past 9pm. He lived with his wife and daughter in an apartment on the left bank. It was frequently full of his family, their large dog, and several younger staffers who did not have a place to stay in Kyiv.

Language Мова

The Tally


Yatsura bi
Nechyporuk bi
Kniazh bi
Kanish leaning Russian
Frolyak/Soloviev leaning Russian
Sashko leaning Russian
Ruban unknown but probably Ukr
Shevchenko- Ukr
Pavlykh/Kutsij - Ukr
Zakusilo - Russian
Prykordonij - Russian

Mykola Kanishevsky (Conclusions)

Mykola
Then:
- Former Komsomol member (and probably leader)
- Tool within YT-2/not a radcial golden boy, but rather he fit the mold on a Soviet newsanchor
- NOT a news reader (because he actually wrote the words he said whereas readers just read them)
- A good manager of people. He attracted staff and built teams that were like a family around him.
- A calm proper speaker. Not one to lose his temper.

Now:
- He keeps his cash with a functioning business enterprise. Not in a bank. He says he can get the money out (up to a certain amount) within a day, or for larger amounts within a few days. He preferes to do it this way since he knows the people who are running it and he can see the benefits.
- He bought his first piece of land while he was still working as a journalist. Once he had one good transaction, he decided to go full-time into real-estate and ended his TV career and aspirations.
- Within the past year, he bought a back-hoe and hired someone to drive it. The back-hoe is parked in front of this house each night. Each morning, the back-hoe driver/operator shows up and drives it off to jobs. Once a month, the operator pays Mykola cash. He says that he doesn't keep track of where the back-hoe goes each day, but the does collect the money. If he makes enough, then he'll consider buying another backhoe.

- The week after I saw him, he was off for a vacation at a beach resort in Egypt. They had been there last year. His wife and son were going to stay longer, Kanish was planning on heading back a few days earlier to keep working.

Is that corrupt or is it capitalism? What is the difference? Does it really matter?

At the end of the day, Kanish wants predictability so that his son can go to and from school each day, take his weekly tennis lessons, and learn to speak Ukrainian, Russian, English and French. Isn't that what we all fought for in the 70's? Isn't that what all the Свічки were about?

Development Grants and Loans - Are they worth it?

Today's New York Times ran an Op-Ed by a former colleague of President Obama's mother. In the piece, he writes about her dissertation which was based on 15 years of field work in a remote part of Indonesia. Read it.

Op-Ed Contributor
Dreams From His Mother
By MICHAEL R. DOVE
Published: August 10, 2009

It brought to mind several themes that I've considered through the years, and that have been more in the forefront of my thinking this summer as I returned to Ukraine, in part, to revisit my old stomping grounds and to meet up with my old colleagues from the early 90's. I'd first arrived in Ukraine 20 years ago, in the summer of 1989. By 1991, I had a politics degree from Princeton, and I was working in Kyiv at the Renaissance Foundation. We were at the forefront of grant-giving foundations in the newly-independent Ukraine. (It's likely that the Soros-backed Renaissance Foundation was actually the *first.*) Needless to say that the process of submitting grants, writing applications, vetting them, reviewing them, evaluating them, administering them, etc was not very well-developed at the time. Our mandate was to find worthy recipients and administer Mr. Soros's money responsibly. Most of my days were spent listening to a seemingly endless stream of people who made the pilgrammage from around Ukraine to our unique building at vul. Artema 46.



We didn't have much furniture in the office when I started working there, so frequently I met with people out on the park bench in the back yard or perched on the (narrow) windowsill on the second floor. It was like open mike night, except it lasted for hours and for days on end. All sorts of people came. Earnest academicians with neat stacks of papers wrapped with a папка для бумаг (sic). Crazy zealots with half-baked ideas. I remember one woman who came from Kryvij Rih, a city in Eastern Ukraine. She told me it had the most pollution of any city. She had been working with kids for a decade to keep them out of trouble and to get them healthier. (She was a 'community organizer.') Early on, we were not overrun by slick applicants who knew how to game the system.

It didn't take long for me to hone in on the questions surrounding the development of non-governmental media. I had run a nationally-syndicated news program while I was still in college. My dad is a reporter. Everyone in my nuclear family writes. It's what I knew.

I set out to meet journalists in Ukraine. I met with people one-on-one. I organized a few roundtable discussion sessions. People I met introduced me to other people. We partnered with a US-based non-profit. We sent some individuals on training internship programs overseas. We secured a starter grant of $65,000. We launched a Press Club, published a directory of media contacts, founded a national news agency, started several TV production houses. I'll write more about the details of that elsewhere and later.

One of the things I tried to do while in Ukraine, was to find the people who were likely to do the best work, as measured by having being the most-likely to support the sustained development of an open society in that country. I wasn't always right, but the majority of the bets paid off.

The debate about the value of aid (in the form of grants or loans) rages. And has been raging for decades. Dove's piece in the Times touches on it as well.

Dove wrote in the Times:
Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, “many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,” who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.


How do you measure the value of those programs? If you were to go back and follow a paper trail of the handful of grants and programs that I worked on in Ukraine in the early-1990's would be able to trace a line from the dollars invested directly to the return to society today? My guess is, 'probably not.' Many of the specific entities that received the investments are gone.

However, if you were to do a Rolodex audit instead, if you were to look at the specific individuals who were involved in these early programs. And if you were to trace their careers from 1989 to 2009, then you will find evidence of value. Is it enough to justify the investment?

I will try to do just that in these posts. I'll endeavor to steer clear of generalizations. I'll keep things as specific as possible. And I'll show snapshots of my former colleagues, as they are living today.

Pre-K

Дитячий Навчальний Заклад номер 171
Маркіянчик Хомічак and his mother invited us to his closing program at the end of his pre-K school year. The nursery is on the main street of Kyiv, Хрещатик. It is right next to the movie theater called Дружба. If you've been to Kyiv, then you've gone past it. The school itself runs a Ukrainian-language program (as most schools are now required to have). Twenty years ago, however a nursery school that ran the program in Ukrainian was the exception, not the rule. The teaching materials are still catching up. The teaching corps is still catching up. When my mom and I walked in, the staff clued in quickly that we weren't from around these parts. I did notice, however, that they did not make a big fuss about it. Having foreigners in the room was no longer as exotic as it was in 1989 when I'd regularly be put up on a stage in front of hundreds of people just because I was (the only American and) in the room.

At the number 171 Nursery School on that Friday morning on May 22nd, however, we were not the only foreigners. A kid in the program was not originally from Ukraine. His grandparents sat in the audience with us.

I'd been in the market for nursery schools in Manhattan so I'd toured a few recently. The one in Kyiv looked sweet. It had some definite Soviet elements (e.g. slippers to put over your shoes to keep the street dirt out). Overall, however the room was cheery.

It turned out that the school got the location and used an adjoining yard. A few years ago, a residential development was going up. The owners of the developmetn agreed to build a private playground for the school. It's lovely. They leveled the grade, put in sparkling equipment and made a high fence all around it so kids can play.

The teachers switched to Ukrainian in front of the kids (but spoke in Russian amongst themselves). The kids all had (complicated) costumes and performed little rhymes and songs. My nephew played the part of 'kolobok' who took the audience through a journey to each of the nursery storied they'd read throughout the school year.

See Saws at the майданчики (playgrounds)

The kids got to play on equipment that is no longer allowed in their
native New York.