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.

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

Living in Memory

It's a new Ukraine.
It's being made by the twenty-somethings
Language: Ukrainian, Russian, Dollars,
Extensive travel throughout Europe, Turkey, Egypt, then getting around to 5-year visas to the US

Role switch. Musical chairs. It's their turn now. Our turn to do a different role.

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I'm reminded of Memory by Rauschenberg. When it was in the Princeton University Art museum, I wrote a paper on it. Rounding the corner at a museum (was it Bilbao? was it the Met?) I saw an old friend.
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Traveling, retracing steps. It's comfortable. Walking down well-worn paths. Seeing old friends.

Yesterday I started to make new ones. Not intentionally. It was reluctant. I wanted to be just and observer so I went to an art auction fundraiser as a guest. Ja nestrymalas' I started talking to a few people. I wanted to be home around 10ish, so I left before I really got going.

Almost tested out the driving range and the 2-level golf club, but I looked at my Stewart Weitzman (sp?) espadrilles slingbacks and declined the offer from the very competent (Ukrainian-speaking) golf pro and headed out to meet the cab that someone had called for me.

Kyiv Connected

Saturday Morning
My daughters picked out dolls yesterday. They are playing with them now as I drink coffee and eat yogurt with fresh strawberries. We had gone to Tsum on Tuesday to check out the goods. On Thursday, we returned. Lianne remembered that the dolls were on the second floor. As soon as we got off the Soviet-era escalator, both Lianne and Katia were off in a flash, running directly to the shelves that display the dolls. All the dolls are made in China. There are even first-run Barbie dolls. The 50th Anniversary series, for 700 hryvnia each (about $100 USD).
Lianne and Katia pulled down several of the clear plastic boxes. One by one. Finally, they each settled on a doll that had her own wardrobe. A change of 4 outfits (with luggage). The box (which doubles as a clothes closet) has a big photo of the Eiffel Tower going up one side. Next to it are solid block letters that spell out WORLD. The color block pattern has fragments of maps. One is of Burkina Faso.

It strikes me that kids in Kyiv now are infinitely more connected to the rest of the planet than the kids who were born just 15 years earlier. During the Soviet era, people could not travel unless it was related to work (e.g. army post, official work-related travel, or a work-mandated trip to a resort with the family.). Now kids go with their parents on charter flights to Dubai (direct, non-stop). They travel overseas to study or to work. They surf the web. (What are the generational gaps that shift is going to cause? It makes the chatter about 'how to manage and motivate millennial employees in the US seem downright frivolous.)

Earlier this week, I went to the Kyiv Mohyla Academy (KMA), a private, selective university. Each student needs to apply and to pass a series of exams to get in. Down the hall from the library was a computer lab, chock full of computers and students. In the hall way were 4 kiosks hooked up to the web. (I posted a tweet from one.) On benches in the hallway were kids tapping out on their own laptops. It looked like a basic college campus. Quite a change from 15 years ago, where we had 1 computer, 3 telephones and 1 fax in the entire offices of the Ukrainian-American Renaissance Foundation, founded by George Soros. (Later, the Foundation was renamed the International Renaissance Foundation.) The only person still on staff was the computer guy who came before I left. I arrived unannounced on a Friday at mid-day. He graciously gave me a tour of the offices and introduced me to each person as:

“This is Dora Chomiak. One of the first employees of the Ukrainian-American (emphasis) Renaissance Foundation. (She is) The founder of UNIAN.” Many looks of 'oohs and ahhs' invariably ensued. UNIAN, the news agency that we founded in 1992, still exists and still occupies the offices at Khreshchatyk 4 that we took over. When we moved in there was no parking lot in front, and all the calendars in the offices inside were still open to August 1991, the day of the putsch that kicked out Gorbachev and led to the dissolution of the USSR.

The news agency was a radical notion. A group of us got together, got funding and convinced many journalists to leave their state jobs and come to work to create a non-governmental news agency. The whole story took months, or really years. It spawned many different organizations, several newspapers, and countless tv shows. I'll write about them another time. For now, I continue to be amazed at how so many things that were so difficult to do here once (e.g. send a fax, get a piece of news) are totally commonplace.

It's still a young country. In many ways, it is still a mess, but the number of people who now have access to a tremendous quantity of information is staggering. It has got to help to country's chances to make it through to the next phase.