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.

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.

Mykola Kanishevsky (Old and New)

But for all the new things in Kanish's house, he was proud to bring in a custom of the старе село. He put together a collage of photographs of his family and of his wife's family. The photos are framed and are hanging on a wall above an old harness for oxen.

Mykola Kanishevsky (Buildings)

A Comparison

1. Main House, 3 stories
2. Two-car Garage
3. Cabana for roasting shishkababs (aka шашлики)
4. Groundskeeper house
5. Outhouse for Groundskeeper
6. Shed
7. Jungle Gym
8. Fancy foot bridge over stream and pond
9. Smaller functional foot bridge over stream and pond (further down stream)
10. Paved parking spot for the backhoe
11. Paved parking spot for cars of guests
12. Fruit and vegetable garden in flower bed style
13. Flower beds
14. Fruit trees
15. Patio that easily fits an inflatable pool for 3 kids
16. Deck that easily fits table for 3 plus a cage for a large dog
Half-hour drive to Kyiv City Center

versus

1890 square feet of indoor living space plus balcony that fits 4 seated adults
in the Far West Village of Manhattan. 20 minute walk to the Ukrainian National Home

Mykola Kanishevsky (Appliances)

As I walked around Mykola's house, I noticed that he had far more appliances than he had in his old apartment. Not only did he have a fully-stocked kitchen with an oven, range, microwave and dishwasher, but his he had a laundry machine. All of his light fixtures were stylish and all of them had the compact flourecent lightbulbs. Here is an example of how the middle-class in Ukraine has leapfrogged over the States.
The front porch has compact florescent bulbs in the ceiling. They came in handy after we finished dinner and kept talking after the sun set at 9pm when Mykola pulled out a large stash of photo albums with pictures from 1992 - 1996. I'll need to ask him to digitize those images so that we can share them.

Mykola said that he picked out all the lighting fixtures himself. He traveled around Europe, the far East and into northern Africa. No doubt he paid attention to what he liked, then found ways to get it in Ukraine. Last summer, I saw many retail outlets with home decorating goods. The selection of lighting is considerably bigger than it was just 6 years ago.Mykola said that he did not work with an architect as such, but it's interesting how he figured out how to use skylights to bring light into a large staircase. The second floor has bedrooms that all open out onto an open area around the staircase. The master bedroom as a balcony.

The fixture in the kitchen is of the same style as the fixtures over the staircase. When I asked him if he'd designed it himself, he scoffed and said that he simply picked it up in a store.

The laundry machine (which most definitely was not part of his old apartment) is in the dressing room. What a great idea. He doesn't need to schlep his laundry up and down any stairs. Of course, the appliance is the super-energy efficient European design.

Finally as someone who has renovated her apartment in New York City within the past decade, I could not resist taking a picture of the master bath and, specifically the *Happy D* model toilet. Our architect has specified this very model for our renovation. Unfortunately, we were unable to install it without doing major alternations to our Manahttan condo. It wasn't worth it. Kanish, however, in бідна Україна', built himself a whole house and put the the cool, and hip appliance right where he wanted it.

Mykola Kanishevsky (House Tour)

Then:
A tiny one-room studio apartment with a microscopic kitchen and barely a window. Mykola made dinner for three guests. We huddled around a tiny table and used every possible surface to sit or to hold food and drink. The meal had many courses. The recipes were complex and delicious. Beverages were also in abundance. Valera picked me up and drove me home.

Now:
село Гореничі 1.5 км з Житомерської Траси
As soon as I called him, Mykola invited me over. We agreed to meet on Tuesday afternoon and have dinner. His son, Dima, is a bit older than my daughters, but we agreed to come over so the kids could play in the yards as Mykola and I caught up. Valera arranged a driver to pick us up at the apartment. After making it through cross-town, rush hour traffic in Kyiv, we turned of the main highway, onto a jughandle that would make NJ DOT proud and rode past a big sign that said Гореничі. The road shifted from asphalt to loose gravel.

Mykola's driver came out to navigate us to his house. We met him at the side of the road with a big field on the left. We turned right, onto a road that was paved even less that the one before it. Past a few rural homes, that were hanging together with cinder block and mortar. Around the free range chickens, past a few cows, down a steep decline and onto a perfectly manicured plaza of bricks. Laid out in a nice pattern, so we could park and face a house that sat far back, on the other side of a large lawn.

Mykola strolled off his second floor patio and came out to great us. A big dog beat him to the gate.


A few years ago, Mykola decided to leave his television career. He told me that he 'put it on a shelf' and started to build residential buildings full-time. As we walked me around his home, I saw that he not only put his TV career on a shelf, but he built himself a shelf to hold mementos of that career. (Actually, he built several shelves in his home to showcase the trophies, certificates, photos with famous people, and microphones that he has used.)


To walk around Mykola's house right now is a very different experience from walking around his old apartment. First of all, you can't see the whole place the minute you set foot across the door. Second of all, everything is clean and crisp. The walls are straight. The paint is white. The crumbling hodge-podge of patchwork linoleum floors and flowery wallpaper patterns composed of 'whatever was available at the time' is gone.


Mykola still loves to cook and he has designed his kitchen to make it easy to prepare and to serve food. It's big enough for an eat-in kitchen, and it opens out onto a covered terrace that has a table and chairs. The day I came over, Mykola made some simple dishes for the kids to eat on the lawn, while he and I had a simple pan fried fish steak with fresh green salad on his terrace. All the greens were from his garden. Fresh-picked berries were desert.


The living room flows from the kitchen. It is interesting in what is *not* in it. There is no table that can double up as a dining room table. There is no single overbearing well-unit that houses books, clothes, sheets, and pillows. It's a room for sitting. There is a working fire place. The windows are large so there is lots of natural light. In the States, it'd be called a 'living room.'

Dima is in elementary school. His room (he has a room!) is also light and airy. The square footage is definitely generous by Manhattan standards. His room has toys, a bed and a desk. My kids figured out how to play with the train sets pretty quickly. Dima is a student at the British International School in the center of Kyiv. He gets a ride there every day. When we visited he skipped his weekly tennis lesson so that he could entertain my daughters. I could have been having a conversation with a neighbor in the West Village.

Mykola Kanishevsky (Landscape)

Mykola is confident that his houses will continue to sell well. He told me what differentiates his designs from the other houses that are sprouting up in the Kyvian Suburbia. Front yard. His own house is set back from the road. It is the third house that he has built. All of them have had this design. The other two sold within a day of going on the market. I took this picture from his second floor balcony. You can see the parking spot for his truck (on the close side of the fence) as well as parking for guests (on the far side of the fence). The garage for their own cars is off to the left of the frame. Mykola was also proud of his fence. It is not an impenetrable brick wall of the style that is more common right now. His fence has brick posts, but the area between them is fairly open.


The back yard is very small. He put all the land in front of the house so that it will be in better proportion with the house. The main sightlines out of the house go towards the front lawn, directly to the land that he can control. Behind him are houses that are built in the current traditional style: heavy cinderblock monstrosity.

The garden was a hot button issue for Mykola.

He love to cook and he wants to have fresh vegetables. He is also a life-long resident of Ukraine, where every family who had any possibility whatsoever, carved out a scrap of land and planted their own food. Each season the family would trek out of town to the 'dacha' or the 'horod' and tend the garden. After the harvest, they're would be the obligatory fury of canning and preserving. Once the bitter grey winter settled in, you'd eat out of the jar and pull your own potatoes off your city balcony. Of course, this didn't come from some Michelle Obama/Michael Polin (GET LINK)-inspired desire boost healty eating. It was a simple, cold calculation to just be able to eat. Too many times in the last century, food was taken away by war, by famine, by purges, etc. It was simply in everyone's social DNA that you had to grow your own food (or be linked to a relative who did). The striking thing about Mykola's garden plot is that it does not take up the *entire* acerage of his lot that is not covered by a building. He built a lawn and even a playground. He put his crops in planting beds that look like flower beds. Mykola told me that he recently built a house for his elderly parents in a town nearby. They moved from a village several hundred kilometers away to be closer to their grandson. His father wanted enough land to plant potatoes. His mother wanted chickens and a goat.Mykola said no. Картопля за мною. ('I am responsible for the potatoes.") He also promised to provide his parents with milk and eggs. What has all my work been for if I can't give my parents potatoes and dairy to last the winter. He is trying to transform his father from being a substiance farmer to a gentleman farmer of leisure. He wants him to choose to garden instead of being forced to garden.

(In contrast, in Frankivsk, we visited a home where the garden was every inch of available land. The owner knew how many pototo plants he needed to feed his family through the winter. He had beehives that made honey adn traded with the neighbors down the street for eggs.)
(Also in contrast, Yatsura's in-laws started their farm in 1991. It covers practically all of their land and they continue to harvest veggetables, fruits and honey as they live in the center of Kyiv.)
(Similary, Froliak and Soloviov have started a flowerbed-syle garden. They set aside a piece of their front lawn for fresh veggies. I doubt that they will do any canning this year.)

Mykola Kanishevsky (House Tour Downstairs)

Mykola took the left-over building materials from the house and designed and built a jungle gym for his son. It's across the pond that he created by damming up a stream that ran through his property. This is a piece of land that he bought after he started building the house. Originally the spot was used as a dump by the village residents. He cleaned it up and hauled our the garbage. Old habits die hard. Some villagers kept using the area as a trash dump. He cleaned it out again and put a fence around it. Once he built the playground for his son and a house for his groundskeeper the dumping stopped. Mykola had priced out the cost of a slide for the jungle gym. It was pricey, so he used a piece of plastic instead. My daughters checked it out and gave the whole set-up a big thumbs up.


A big piece of the side yard between the main house an the stream is handed over to a lawn. Mykola set up a table for the kids to have dinner as a picnic while the two of us ate dinner on the front patio. We could see the kids, but they were able to run around and play. In addition to a part-time governess/house keeper, and the groundskeeper, Mykola hired a driver/fixer to helps with the cooking and running the house. The evening that I was there, the driver/fixer kept an eye on the kids after the governess left, then gave us a ride back to our apartment in the center of Kyiv.

The cabana is really an outdoor kitchen. It has a charcoal or wood grill and a gas range with several burners. The blue roof matches all the other buildings on the property. It is large enough to fit a table full of adults. The walkway goes from the cabana directly to the dining room and second kitchen on the ground floor.

Mykola set up this large room for entertaining. It is clearly a substitute for either going to a restaurant or for getting guests into the private areas of the house. The table was set for 10, but you could easily add tables and chairs to get almost twice that number. He put a sink with soap at the door. It reminded me of the Soviet cafeterias of the 90s (but there was never any soap nor paper towels). Later I saw the same sort of set-up at the swanky Columbus Circle Whole Foods grocery store in Manhattan.


Mykola put more built in bookshelves on the ground floor. He filled them with photos and objects from his archives. He works from home so I understand why he's put so much effort into decorating. It is an edited collection. Very different from the crammed shelves of apartments that I used to visit where the стінка was jammed with an entire family's books, mementos and bedding -- all in the living room.

Every house has a storage room. Perhaps the biggest indicator of the development of a middle-class in Ukraine is the emergence of stuff. Back in the day you didn't have anywhere to put your stuff. Also you were not like to have much stuff. It could be contained in your all-purpose stinka. Now, you can see stuff, buy stuff, and get stuff. That means to need to store it as well. Mykola built himself a wine cellar that has two alcoves. One is full of racks for bottles. The other side is a скад with, as he described it, the stuff that collects and is usually underfoot. He wanted a place for it, so he built it.

Mykola Kanishevsky (Backstory)

In 1993 Mykola Kanishevsky invited me to his apartment for dinner. We'd been working together for several years already. Two other people were coming that evening as well. Back in 1992, I'd convinced Mykola to leave his prestigious job at Ukrainian Television Channel 1 (UT-1). He was one of the main news anchors, still pretty young, but established enough that when he walked down Khreshchatyk, people would sometimes stop him and ask for an autograph. His parents did not live in Kyiv. (CHECK EXACTLY WHERE). Mykola was a member of the Komsomol Communist Youth League. He was pretty straight laced. Never a hair out of place. (INSERT PICUTRE OF MYKOLA AT YT HERE.) Mykola made it into the capital city and was climbing the ladder as any self-respecting tool.

Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It was ratified 18 years ago today on August 24, 1991. Mykola kept working at the State Television news operation. It was not only the biggest game in town, it was pretty much the only game in town. A few small channels had started to spring up by 1992, but very few were actually producing news shows.

I'd known Mykola from the air, then I'd been introduced to him at a few functions around town. As we started to pull together the International Media Center, and as we collected a larger and larger critical mass of people, a few of us sat down with Mykola.

This year, he told me that he could never forget me, since I was the person who "перевернула мені мозґи." Who turned his brains upside-down, and convinced him to leave his stable job and State Television to walk down the street and join us in creating an alternative.

At the time I didn't understand the significance of the move. I was fresh out of college, convinced that democracy would prevail. I had little to lose: no mortgage,no family, no career reputation. I had time and I had optimism.

Now (with kids, career, and mortgage), I see the situation differently. Mykola quit his job to work for something that barely existed. I'm certain that he must have left a safety net of some sort for himself, but the did make the move.

At the International Media Center, he developed, launched and let a TV news show called 'Вікна' (Windows). He later moved it to other channels. It became quite popular. The show is still on the air.

After a few years, he 'put television on a shelf,' and embarked on a new career being a real-estate developer full-time. Last summer, he invited me back for dinner.

Olena Frolyak

Then:
Olena Frolyak and I first met in 1992 or 1993. I was looking for someone to send to an internship training program at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. She was a recent grad and working in journalism. I was at the Renaissance Foundation and collaborating with Internews Network.

Olena grew up in a village in the Carpathians. You should know that Kosiv is full of artisans who make beautiful household objects from wood. The decorative spoons, boxes and plates are carved by hand and have intricate inlays of beads an mother of pearl. Kosiv, in the early 90's at least, was *not* full of many phone lines. After meeting Olena in Kyiv, I was able to get things lined up for her to attend the program. She fit the profile of the program, she had the right background, was in the right stage of her career etc. But then the hard part started: I needed to get in touch with her. She was visiting her family in Kosiv, and their home did not have a phone. Somehow I got word to her via a complicated string of contacts. She got to a phone and called me back. The connection was horrible. I could barely hear her.

Somehow we made it. She collected her paperwork for the visa and shipped out to Moscow to process the paperwork. (This was before the US had a consular presence in Kyiv.) Olena returned to Kyiv crushed. Her visa application was denied. She was young and unmarried. The right profile for the journalism internship was the wrong program for the Consular division of the US embassy. Oops. Exchanges were still pretty rare are there were some kinks to work out in the system. I gave Olena a pep talk and assured her that we'll find a way to make it work. 'The US is opening an embassy in Kyiv soon. We'll apply for the visa here!' she remembers me telling her.

And it worked. The embassy opened. We reapplied. Olena went from the backwoods of the Carpathians to Atlanta, Georgia. CNN was booming. Olena returned to Ukraine and worked at several different news shows. (Including some that I helped to launch.)

Now:

Olena heads up the news operation for one of the largest broadcasters in Ukraine. She has been with the same company for about 8 years and took over the leadership less than 12 months ago. She also runs her own bi-monthly segment called SvitloNews (watch it at svitlonews.com.ua).

Olena married Serhij Solovyov, a camera man. They have 2 kids, a boy and a girl. After living in a small apartment in the city the family designed and built a custom home that is on the banks fo the river Dnipro and in the near suburbs. It's a 10 minute bus ride to the last metro stop. Their older daughter commutes from school on her own by public transport.

By the time they were designing their house, Olena and Serhij had traveled quite a bit. I had lined Serhij up with a trip to the US whe we were working together at the International Media Center. They've been to Western Europe, Asia, Africa. They collected ideas of houses that they liked and put it together to make their home.


The house is not huge. There is a nice foyer, eat in kitchen, master bedroom and 2 kids bedrooms on the first floor. The open stairs lead up to a den that is lined with portraits and awards of Oleana, the media personality. There is also a playroom and a small office, under the eaves where Solovyov has his computer set up to play video games. His father was an M-25 pilot in the Soviet air force. They travelled a lot, but Solovyov did not pass the eye exam.



Outside there is a big lawn. Instead of building a huge brick fence (as is currently the style) Olena and Serhij opted for an open fence. "Хай дивляться! Ми не майємо що ховати." (Let them look. We have nothing to hide.) is their explanation for the design choice.

Recently they planted a small garden. It is minuscule compared to what Olena and her neighbors had in Kosiv. We joked that it looked more like Michelle Obama's garden in the White House.

Get a phone

I survived less than a week in the new Ukraine and I got a cellphone (мобілька). Thankfully, Valera set me up with a flip-phone and a pay-as-you-go program on Life. He programmed in key numbers (e.g. his number, my mom's number, my dads' number). He set it to the loudest right and vibrate combo I'd ever heard.

I learned that cell-to-cell calls are free. Texting is unlimited. I picked my language to be English for commands and Ukrainian for texting. (Arabic and Japanese were also options.) To add money, all he had to do was go to an ATM-like machine and feed it bills. I'd get a text notifying me that my account was 'topped up' (as the Brits used to say in London).

Having a cell phone in Ukraine immediately made the entire visit totally new. Everyone else having a cell phone fundamentally changed the dynamic of interaction. Twenty years ago, I'd walk down Khreshatyk Street and wait in cafe to meet up with a friend. Frequently, you'd quote the Russian film and say 'Место встечи изменить нельзя.' (sic -- I don't have a Russian keyboard). I'd wait for an hour or so. Meanwhile, someone unexpected would walk in, carrying a shoulderbag with rolled up newspapers. Maybe I'd head off with him. Maybe we'd both wait around.

Now, when you get stuck in the (brand-new and inevitable) traffic jam, you send a text or make a call.

When you need to get from point A to point B, you call a cab service. They text you back with the make, model and lisence plate number of the car that will pick you up.

Revolutionary.
Loss of serendipity, but gain in productivity.

Vitaly Portnikov

I always liked conversations with Vitaly. I'd met him both in Moscow and in Kyiv. He is a journalist who wrote many pieces for many different outlets in the early 90's and he has continued to do so now. He's a good observer, knows that he's good and he does what he knows. It's always refreshing to speak with someone who is so in his groove.

This trip, I didn't meet up with Vitaly, however I did see him smiling at me from more than one billboard. The one here was at the entrance to the Arsenal metro stop in the center of town. It is promoting a newspaper called 'The Left Bank,' (Refers to the left bank of the Dnipro River. Formerly less desirable place to the right bank that has the seat of gov't etc. I wonder if the left bank is repositioning itself to be a hip alternative -- think Brooklyn vis a vis Manhattan.
OR is it a play on the eastern regions of the country, where the majority of the industrialists and oligarchs made their mark,and where Russian is more commonly heard??