Kiev Growing in Sophistication

My latest three-week visit to Kiev has led me to a refreshing conclusion: Kiev and Ukrainian cities in general are rapidly developing in line with worldwide urban trends. Moreover, Kiev is slowly regaining its rightful cultural status after the crippling collapse of the Soviet Union and ensuing brain drain. 

In today's globalized world there's no good reason why a large, densely built city with a highly educated populace wouldn't have a robust economy and a highly sophisticated cultural life with a wide variety of opportunities for people of all skills and interests. Continuing corruption and backwards governance may slow, but they cannot stop Kiev's evolution into a sophisticated modern megapolis. 

Here's what I'm seeing these days in Kiev:

Fitness has become fashionable

Colorful public playgrounds and exercise bars have popped up in every neighborhood around town and in almost every courtyard. And people of all ages use them for free. Trendy modern gyms have popped up all around town in addition to the cheaper Soviet-era basement gyms. Indoor swimming pools are becoming overcrowded as people rush to get fit.

Not only have fitness and exercise become popular, but there has also been an explosion of organized sports activities for adults. When I learned to play Ultimate Frisbee in Kiev 10 years ago, there was one team, and it was dominated by American expats and their coworkers playing at an intermediate level. Now there 4 teams with tight organization and impressive skills, almost no foreigners, and rigorous workouts. The same can be said for almost any other sport and physical activities from basketball to swing dancing. 

Sports used to be something that adults only do if they are professional athletes or ex-athletes. Now it has become a common way for adults to enrich and balance their lifestyle. 

The same sports and fitness fads that sweep through urban areas worldwide leave their mark on Kiev and other Ukrainian cities: breakdancing, bungee jumping, aikido, skateboarding, parcours, yoga, rock climbing, tango, slack lines... Any respectable progressive young Ukrainian these days should be engaging in some kind of organized physical activity. Just doing aerobics or "shaping" (for women) or working out at the gym (for men) won't surprise anyone anymore. 

While there are still plenty of public drinkers and smokers, these vices are becoming less and less visible. Ukrainians are getting used to not being allowed to smoke at bus stops and in underground passageways. Smoking indoors in clubs and restaurants is now forbidden, whereas it used to be difficult to find a place to hang out without cigarette smoke. 

Vegetarianism, veganism, and other attempts to improve one's diet are becoming increasingly popular. People are more and more concerned about what they're eating, and laws have been improved regarding the proper labelling of food products. There are restaurants serving vegetarian and even non-cooked foods. 

I see the above trends as part of a worldwide trend towards organized self-development to counterract the emerging ill effects of technology and modern living upon the human body. It is gratifying to see urban Ukrainians joining this global movement. 

Increasing "intelligentnost"

Ukrainians and Russians have always been known for reading a lot. This hasn't changed even with the advent of smartphones and tablets. While a significant portion of commuters pass the time playing games on their electronic devices, even more of them read books. Popular genres include psychology, self-development, and professional literature, as well as fiction. It's also fairly common to see people reading in foreign languages. 

In modern Ukraine, knowing a lot is increasingly rewarded socially and professionally, as it should be. During the post-collapse years this was not often the case. Normal values were flipped on their head, and those with the most influence were often brutish types with crude tastes. This has changed, especially in high-tech sectors and other industries exposed to international competition. 

The Slavic word intelligentnost does not just refer to intelligence but refers to one's general degree of cultural refinement, including manners, self-control, taste, and knowledgeability. "Intelligentnost" was once a recognized characteristic of Soviet-era Kievites, and it was commonplace in the 90s and 00s for people to bemoan the general loss of culture in Kiev and other Ukrainian urban areas. This loss was probably attributable to the massive brain drain and upside-down values mentioned above. 

What I am seeing now is that it is once more popular to be "intelligentnyy." Crudeness and brutishness are out, and braininess and self-development are in. Did you know Kiev has become a worldwide IT hub? Did you know "TEDx Kyiv" talks are held regularly? Did you know coworking and working from home are becoming popular among cutting-edge IT workers and freelancers who do sports and travel in their free time? 

The above mentioned trend towards increasing self-improvement opportunities for adults also extends into the cultural and intellectual realm. There are now more and more activities for adults to participate in simply for the sake of self-development:

improvizational theater classes, song writing courses, free public lectures on stimulating topics, etc. etc. The industry of self-development used to be dominated by corporate training (e.g. team building or time management seminars), professional skill development courses, and ideologically oriented groups offering classes in Zen meditation, gestalt therapy, tantric yoga, etc. It is refreshing to see more and more courses and organizations specializing in skill development without an ideological component, as well as more and more self-organized groups doing fun and interesting activities together. 

City pride instead of national pride

Anyone who's spent much time in Ukraine knows that Ukrainians aren't particularly patriotic, to put it mildly. This hasn't changed, but what I am seeing in Kiev is an increasing sense of pride in one's city. After all, Kiev — not the abstract "country of Ukraine" — is the actually physical place where Kievites spend 99% of their time. I believe there is a global trend towards the increasing role of cities and their management and a relative drop in the importance of national governments. 

In the Soviet Union, central management dominated over individual initiative, and the fall of the USSR left people unprepared to take responsibility for anything beyond themselves, their families, and friends. Little by little, a sense of community and collective responsibility is emerging in Kiev. One sees this in many ways, but perhaps most noticeable is the grassroots effort to beautify public spaces around the city. 

Today one sees people planting flower gardens and even edible plants around their high-rise apartment blocks, building and painting short fences around them to keep people and dogs from trampling them. Whimsical sculptures are popping up on the city streets, and people love to take pictures next to them. Near Adreevskiy Spusk there is a massive Gaudi-esque playground featuring scary animals plated in colorful tiles. Needless to say, the place is packed with people having fun. Clever graffiti artists are having their fun around Kiev, too, just as in other metropolises worldwide. 

The street performers that show up on Kreschatik on the weekends (when it is closed to traffic) are getting better year by year. One used to see only amateurs and the occasional destitute conservatory graduate. More and more, one sees professional artists and musicians and organized performances. 

Kievites are showing their growing sense of creative freedom in other ways as well. Concept cafes are popping up around town where you can not only have a coffee, but have a unique aesthetic experience as well. Younger Kievites now expect novelty and an element of fun in their daily city experience. 

In short, there are more and more reasons for Kievites to go out and be impressed with what other people are doing in their city. This reflects a general rise in individualism and sense of collective responsibility. 

As Kiev and other cities around Ukraine become more and more interesting and sophisticated places to live, I think we will see Ukrainians becoming less and less tolerant of bureaucratic hassle, inefficient governance, and mistreatment by government officials. I see some signs that this is happening already, but that will have to be the subject of another article. 

The English Language Conquest of the World

As the electronic, cultural, and economic interconnectedness of the world increases, more and more languages of regional importance are losing ground against English, which is now the indisputable global leader. There are very few contenders left that can be considered languages of international communication: Spanish (Latin America), French (France, Quebec, and parts of Africa), Arabic (however, the various dialects of Arabic are quite different, making communication difficult), Chinese (east Asia; some competition between Mandarin and Cantonese), and Russian (former USSR). All of these languages are losing ground to English as their respective regions of dominance increasingly interact with others. Even Chinese will likely not obtain anything near the status of English, as its citizens are learning English at a much faster rate than the rest of the world is learning Chinese. With its outmoded non-phonetic script and challenging tonality, the barriers to learning Chinese are high, whereas English is more accessible to beginners.

The most recent "casualty" in this competition of international languages is Russian, which used to be the primary language of international communication across much of Eurasia. Within as little as 10 or 20 years, its importance could fall to the level of, say, German — a language studied by people outside of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland primarily as a hobby rather than an economic necessity.

While national languages have grown modestly in importance as a result of measures to sideline Russian in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Transcaucasia region, the primary — and perhaps surprising — beneficiary has actually been English. English is now the language children are learning in school instead of Russian, it is a popular language for all sorts of public events, and — as opposed to Russian — is hardly ever perceived as a threat by nationalists. One can hold nearly any public event in Kiev in English without hearing complaints from Ukrainian "patriots," while similar events in Russian often draw public disapproval. It is prestigious and fashionable to give businesses and events English names and practically taboo to give them Russian ones except for the most stalwart historically Russian-speaking regions. Any event or entity that has any sort of international orientation is now automatically written in English. It is as much a gesture to increase the perceived importance of the event or entity among locals as a pragmatic measure to ensure that any influential international guests do not experience the slightest linguistic discomfort. The discomfort of non-English speaking visitors/clients is typically not taken into consideration.

In places where it used to be standard practice to duplicate street signs and metro information in Russian, this is now being done in English, and the Russian signs are gone. Across much of the former Soviet periphery, the generation under 20-25 years of age is growing up with better English skills than Russian. Even in countries that use Cyrillic or national alphabets (Armenia, Georgia), people usually send text messages in Latin characters and often post things on Facebook in their respective languages using Latin characters, or simply write in English. Increasingly, younger travelers from former Soviet states are speaking English rather than Russian with locals in other former Soviet states — for instance, Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians or Estonian-speaking Estonians who visit Georgia. In 10 years or so, English will probably have replaced Russian as the dominant regional language in the Transcaucasus and Baltic states. In other words, Azerbaijanis in Georgia or Lithuanians in Latvia will use English to get around and do business more than Russian. This is where current trends are pointing.

Within countries as well, English is gaining cultural influence faster than most national languages can keep up. This is particularly true in smaller or poorer countries which don't have large and powerful economic and cultural institutions churning out lots of interesting products in the national language. So, for instance, rather than using or creating domestic websites or software, locals use international ones whose default language is English. Instead of getting their own academics to write textbooks for students in the local language (which may require inventing new terminology), many universities make use of foreign textbooks and learning aids, which are usually in English. Much other literature is translated from other languages, usually English. Instead of listening to their own bands, youth listen to "international" music, which means more English. They look up names and information in English online because there is so much more information available. There aren't enough translators, cultural adapters, writers, musicians, home-grown academics and scientists, etc. to meet demand.

The smaller the country, the greater the proportion of materials from English-language sources present in the infosphere. Of former Soviet states, only Russia appears to be populous and dominant enough economically, culturally, and academically to produce enough of its own information products in most spheres. For instance, there are Russian social networks that compete regionally with Facebook (Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki) and Russian-made search engines that compete regionally with Google and are even trying to go international (Yandex). Russia also has, by far, the best-funded science and research institutions (science is all but dead in many post-Soviet states) and the greatest software and literary output of the post-Soviet states. Even in Russia, though, cumulative adoption of English-language culture and information products within Russia is clearly greater than adoption of Russian-language culture and products outside of native Russian speaking regions of Eurasia.

As English comes closer to becoming the single global lingua franca and more and more products are produced in English relative to other languages, individual countries progressively lose their cultural self-containedness and self-sufficiency. The larger and more powerful the country, the longer it can "hold out" against the wave of externally produced English-language culture and information. In general, the smaller a country, the faster and more thoroughly it "internationalizes." In Georgia, for instance, academia and technology are too weak and too poorly funded and staffed to keep up — linguistically — with scientific and technical progress. There are now many things that can't be properly discussed in Georgian because the vocabulary just isn't there. Hence, Georgians are particularly receptive to foreign language penetration — before Russian, now English — and are more outward looking than Russians or even Ukrainians. There was even a serious initiative to make English the second official language despite an almost complete absence of native English speaking Georgian citizens. Throughout the process of foreign linguistic assimilation Georgian has remained the language of traditional culture and values: the dinner table, relationships, music and poetry, rural life, etc.

Even in larger countries with plenty of economic clout, such as Germany, Japan, or Russia, the relative importance of national languages is still eroding as people increasingly look outside their home countries for information and cultural and intellectual products. This process of "opening up to the world" is commonly viewed in a positive light; we have all heard the platitudes that "there is so much we can learn from each other" and "cultural exchange enriches everyone involved." However, contrary to popular belief, cultural exchange is more often one-sided than not, and often extremely so. The incentives for people from the less-dominant culture to learn from and absorb the more-dominant one are greater than vice versa. Imagine a group of equal numbers of American and Ukrainian youth who spend a year together at some isolated camp. Who will gain more from the experience? Will the Americans end up speaking Ukrainian or will the Ukrainians end up speaking English? Will the experience prove more valuable for the Americans in their future careers or for the Ukrainians? Anyone who's been to Ukraine knows that Ukrainians are more susceptible to English-language cultural influence than Americans are to Ukrainian culture. How many non-Ukrainians have been tangibly "enriched" by Ukrainian culture compared to Ukrainians who have been enriched by international (i.e. English-language) culture? Whichever area we look at, we see that far more Ukrainians are being drawn into the predominantly English-language international cultural realm than vice versa. Cultural exchange is really not two-directional, and the people who promote it are usually spokesmen for the dominant culture who have the privilege of experiencing a "taste" of different cultures for "personal enrichment," while people in the less dominant culture are subject to a total onslaught of new information, values, practices, and cultural products coming from the developed West, along with the necessity of learning English to increase their material opportunities in life.

This same pattern of unequal cultural "exchange" holds true even in more powerful countries such as Germany, Japan, and Russia, mentioned above. Consider how so many people in creative professions adopt the use of English to "reach a global audience," and how few of their counterparts in other countries adopt the other language to reach audiences in that country. For instance, there are far more German bands that sing in English than bands from non-German speaking countries that sing in German. In nearly every area of life there are economic and social benefits attached to the use of English and consumption of English-language cultural and information products. Movement in the opposite direction — from a dominant culture to a less dominant one — in contrast, only confers individual benefits or niche economic benefits. Expats from more dominant cultures who settle in less dominant ones tend to be viewed with an incredulity that is proportional to the difference in the level of dominance of the two cultures aggregated with the difference in per-capita GDP. For instance, an American who has settled in Germany might be a bit of an oddity, one who starts a business in Kiev or even Moscow raises many eyebrows, but one who moves to a village in Siberia merits a detailed, sentimental report on national television. In contrast, immigrants from Ethiopia, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, or Japan who speak fluent English barely arouse curiosity in the U.S. Few people question their motivation for immigrating or display much interest in their mother culture and tongue.

The future

It is safe to assume this powerful global anglification trend will remain in place as long as there is a high degree of global economic and cultural interconnectedness and of international travel. Anything that reduces interconnectedness — such as major wars and massive economic downturns — could reverse this trend temporarily (or, in theory, permanently if the upheaval is global in scale). The last bastions of non-English regional usage will probably by China and Latin America, which have large populations already speaking, more or less, a single common language and are geographically removed from the dominant West. It appears no longer crucial to the anglification trend that the U.S. (or U.K., pre-WWI) is the world's most powerful economy. Enough people now speak and use English outside native English-speaking countries that English is perceived more as the language of international communication than as the language of Americans, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis.

If interconnectedness continues to increase and English achieves the status of a universal language of international communication, a number of interesting consequences are conceivable. First, interest in learning foreign languages other than English may drop because there is no longer any necessity, and all other competing regional languages have been displaced. Second, English may gradually take over more and more functions within individual countries, eventually reducing local languages to a kind of everyday vernacular. First this will be done in politics, because it will save costs in paperwork and translation. The academic community will also find it more efficient to just publish most things in English for the sake of information interchange with colleagues worldwide. Public events involving participants from different countries will also be easier to organize and conduct in English. English could eventually become the language of public life and institutions within countries as well, which would elevate it to the status of Latin — a language that originated in west-central Italy, became the public language of western civilization, and remained the language of scholarship and administration across Europe for well over a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Old Soviet Film Festival at Zhovten Cinema in Kiev

Many people in the former USSR have a soft spot for Soviet movies. You can find out why every Wednesday at 10 am at the "Zhovten" (October) movie theater in Kiev (Podil district), just a 5 minute walk from m. Kontraktova Ploscha.

A schedule of the movies can be found on the theater's website. The festival started last week with a showing of Белорусский вокзал and will continue till the end of August. Admission is free! Be prepared for an elderly audience, though, and there are no subtitles, so you'll need to know some Russian to enjoy the movies.

On the first day of the festival there were some addresses by the people who run the cinema and by a well-known singer and performer. All the old people were given flowers, and there was a small TV crew there that filmed parts of the pre-film presentation, focusing in on some of the whitest heads and most stooping backs. I was one of a small handful of young people.

Soviet cinema is a sentimental subject for these older people. It was a different era with different values and different social institutions. Many of them still feel lost in today's society. For these people, the Soviet times were a period with some sacrifices and difficulties, but all in all it was a kinder society with much more solidarity and security. Soviet-era films are like a glimpse into that bygone world. I usually find these movies refreshing and starkly different from modern, high-tech cinema. Белорусский вокзал (Belorussian Train Station), for instance, is a very minimalist, but moving film about the bonds of friendship and how they can be rekindled many years later.

Garbage Scenes Around Kiev

Taking pictures of garbage is one of my favorite pastimes. I do it when I go hiking in Crimea or the Carpathians (where garbage is most out of place) and recently have been pulling out my camera more and more often in Kiev.

Garbage has its own aesthetics. It can be strikingly dramatic, colorful, grotesque. It tells a story about the side of things we don't always see.

Here are some recent shots from Kiev:

This is a view of the artists' market on Andreevsky Spusk that so many foreigners know so well. Paintings are put up in makeshift sheds covered with plastic on an empty plot of bare ground. Behind the impromptu market is a communal waste heap of plastic, glass, food scraps and waste (left by homeless people). Right next to these heaps there is a nice old building with expensive apartments. With little vegetation to stabilize it, the slope is gradually eroding.

Here's a lake near Petrovka metro station.

A closer look at the garbage reveals the usual plastic and glass bottles, drink cartons, and a bit of furniture.

Are Ukrainians Incapable of Establishing Good Rules?

Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in Ukraine is at some point struck by the mind-boggling quantity of rules governing one's behavior in public places and in all official dealings.

When you get on the bus you see a long list of rules in Ukrainian legalese taped to one of the windows with the title "Excerpt from the Terms and Conditions of Use of Means of Public Transportation" or something like it. The document continues: "Article 1. General Provisions." When you get on the subway you see another long list of rules on the window outlining passengers' duties and responsibilities. If you look for them, you'll see these lists of rules that nobody ever reads in virtually any public or commercial facility.

Also on the bus, you'll often see prominent signs saying, "Driver is obligated to give passengers a ticket stub after payment" or "Passengers, please demand a ticket stub from the driver following payment!" And yet very few drivers pass out ticket stubs, and in all my years riding buses I have never seen a passenger demand a ticket stub from a bus driver.

On occasion I actually read the rules, only to find that I have already inadvertently broken half of them! To illustrate, the other day I visited a geology museum. When I came back later and happened to see the list of rules next to the door, I saw that during my previous visit I had broken four of them. I had 1) failed to leave my outer clothing at the cloakroom downstairs, 2) failed to sign in at the register which is mandatory for all visitors, 3) carried in a backpack that was too large by museum standards, and 4) touched a couple of the exhibits, which is against the rules.

If the rules were important, I thought, why had no one made an effort to bring them to visitors' attention? Particularly the rule about not touching exhibits. All it takes is posting a sign above the open exhibits that says, "Please do not touch." Of course, given that this is Ukraine, the sign would probably say, "Touching exhibits is categorically forbidden!" But even this is lacking. That means it is up to the museum staff to personally monitor visitors. Then these staff are constantly in a bad mood because people keep breaking the rules, and the staff has to spend their time monitoring them instead of doing something more productive and interesting. And yet all it would take is to put a bit of thought into the rules, put up some more visible signs and get rid of the unnecessary rules, and everything would be okay.

The same is true in the Kiev subway (metro). I have 1) dared to sit down on the steps, 2) brought objects longer or larger than are permitted on trains, and 3) ran down the steps of the moving escalator. As it turns out, all these things are against the rules, but you see people do it all the time. And those elderly and poor people who take carts on the metro? That's also "strictly forbidden."

Have you noticed how many people work in the subway system? You have the woman behind the class box watching people pass through the turnstyles, who frequently comes out and shouts at people who aren't using them correctly or has to let people through whose social security or student status allows them to use the metro for free or at a discount. Then you have the young policeman standing nearby who makes sure everyone is on good behavior and occasionally nabs the most obviously drunk passengers. If the metro station has a long escalator, there's another worker in a booth at the bottom watching passengers on the escalator to make sure nothing goes wrong. It's actually nice to have such a human presence in the subway as opposed to, say, the completely mechanized Paris subway where half the passengers just jump over the turnstyles to avoid paying. What I find funny is that the Kiev subway workers let so many rules slide. They let through old people with carts, people carrying skis, teenagers with bikes, and turn a blind eye to people running down the escalator steps and disobedient youths who sit down on the steps. It's as if subway workers have an internal set of rules to enforce that differs quite radically from the official list.

To answer the question contained in the title of this post, I think we must answer two more specific questions: 1) Why do Ukrainians make so many rules? and 2) Why do they make rules that nobody follows?

Before I give my answers to these questions in a full-length article, I'm interested in hearing readers' opinions.

Russian / Ukrainian vs. American Textbooks

What could be duller than comparing a bunch of textbooks? And yet that is precisely how I recently got some insight into basic cultural differences between the Slavic world and the English-speaking West.
Two months ago I began studying to prepare for a masters program in geography starting next fall. I plan to get my masters somewhere in Ukraine or Russia and have been studying Russian language textbooks on things like geology, geomorphology, ecology, etc.
One's first experience with a Soviet-era textbook can be daunting. You open what seems to be a fairly small and lightweight book only to find an unbroken wall of small-font text with nary an illustration to be found. Your eyes rest on the first sentence you see, perhaps something totally confounding like the following:
"С процессами медленной солифлюкции связаны такие формы рельефа, как солифлюкционные валы и гряды, приуроченные к основаниям увлажненных склонов, и сопряженные с ними "гофрированные" участки склонов -- солифлюкционные покровы с характерными формами полосной солифлюкции, а также делли". 
Most native Russian speakers wouldn't find this text out of the ordinary; it's just "academic language." They're used to it from school. But if I translate it into English while preserving the grammatical structure, you'll see just how complex the language is:
"With the processes of slow solifluction are connected such forms of relief as solifluction banks and ridges associated with the bases of moistened slopes, and coupled with them "corrugated" areas of slopes -- solifluction sheets with characteristic forms of strip solifluction, and also dellies."
With English sentence construction, you almost always know what the subject is from the very beginning. Structural nuances also don't depend on which endings happen to be on the end of words. I would argue that Russian and Ukrainian academic texts tend to be grammatical more challenging than their American counterparts.
Back to the visuals. If you flip through a few more pages of unbroken text, you may finally find a chart, diagram, or illustration. Instead of having arrows pointing to different parts of the illustration, Soviet-era and modern Russian/Ukrainian textbooks tend to fill in parts of the illustration with different markings. To find out what the markings mean, you look below the illustration to see the number of each marking type, then look below that for a list of what each number means. Two steps for something that could be identified with simple arrows!
In contrast, American textbooks are thick, have narrow columns which make the text easier to read, are printed on higher-quality paper, and are filled with visual differentiation -- charts, shaded side blocks, diagrams, and illustrations.
American textbooks also have a hefty price tag, costing 5-10 times more than their Ukrainian/Russian counterparts. Part of this is the result of corporate capitalism making things as overbuilt and expensive as possible in order to make more money, while forcing substitutes off the market.
But it's more than that. America's culture is deeply consumer-oriented, in stark contrast to most parts of the former USSR. Authors of everything from textbooks to refrigerator instructions try very hard to make it as easy and pleasant as possible for all readers to get the information they need. A side-effect is a certain "dumbing down" of inherently difficult subjects in order to reach a greater number of "consumers."
Making things easier to understand has its advantages and potential disadvantages. Many visuals in English language textbooks are elegantly informative and are truly worth a thousand words. On the other hand, when commercialization creeps into education some authors resort to entertainment in an effort to keep readers' limited attention, and some quality and accuracy is lost.
In contrast, Soviet and most post-Soviet textbooks typically lack any sort of entertaining elements and require significant effort to read. At first I was daunted by the lack of visual differentiation, but now I've come to see the books as something challenging to labor over, with satisfaction coming after you've taken the time to figure everything out. You can't just flip through them to look at the pretty pictures like you can many American textbooks.
Studying this kind of textbooks, I think, has contributed to Russians' and Ukrainians' strong abstract thinking, while American education prepares one for using applied knowledge with a weaker theoretical base.
In all Russian-language textbooks I've read, great attention is given to defining terms and laying out the central theoretical axioms and propositions of the field. In comparison English-language authors tend to give attention to definitions and theory in side columns rather in the main body of the text, which is devoted to descriptions of studies and methods.
On this subject Geert Hofstede, author of the excellent book Culture's Consequences, wrote the following:
"A country's UAI [uncertainty avoidance index] norm affects the type of intellectual activity in the country in an even more fundamental way. In high-UAI countries [these would include Russia and Ukraine], scholars look for certainties, for Theory with a capital T, for Truth. In low-UAI countries they take a more relativistic and pragmatic stand and look for usable knowledge.
The difference between the high-UAI and low-UAI approach is most pronounced in the social sciences. In low-UAI countries the scientific logic favors induction -- that is, the development of general principles from empirical facts. In high-UAI countries deduction -- that is, reasoning from general principles to specific situations -- is more popular. The great theoreticians and philosophers of the West tend to come from higher-UAI countries, especially Germany and Austria: Kant, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Popper, to mention but a few. Theories based on nonfalsifiable hypotheses, such as those developed by Freud and Marx, appeal most to scholars in high-UAI countries... In a society with a strong uncertainty avoidance norm scholars fear the risk of exposing their truths to experiments with unpredictable outcomes. On the other hand, in lower-UAI countries like the United States and Great Britain empirical studies dominate. The orthodox methodological justification of such studies is that the progress of scientific knowledge passes through the falsification of hypotheses in testing them on reality; actually attempting to falsify one's hypothesis requires that one have a large tolerance for uncertainty.
Of course, good hypotheses presuppose good theory. Social science research in the Anglo-American tradition often suffers from a lack of such theory. Empirical studies degenerate into fishing expeditions equipped with powerful computing tools that are doomed to find only trivialities because they do not know what to look for... A marriage between a high-UAI concern for theory and a low-UAI tolerance for empiricism represents the best of both worlds." (pg. 178)

On Cafes and Culture

My wife and I visited Chernihiv this weekend, enjoyed the stately center, the ancient churches, autumn leaves, and peaceful atmosphere. It was chilly, so we dropped by a randomly selected cafe on the central street.

The cafe was called "Абажур" (Abazhur) and had a classy interior design, light colors, a high ceiling, a spacious feel despite the relatively small space, and classical music playing. The waitresses were wearing old-fashioned dresses reminiscent of the late 19th century, and the walls were lined with classic literature, mostly Russian and European.

Perhaps for the first time ever in Ukraine, we were in a cafe we truly enjoyed and felt comfortable in. In other cafes there's always something that bugs us -- tacky interiors, loud music, pop music, TV, crowded space, too dark, smoking allowed, etc. etc.

It occurred to me that I had never before heard classical music in a cafe in Ukraine. What a shame. Instead, music for public places in Ukraine is chosen based on the "least common denominator" principle. In other words, music is chosen that satisfies the tastes and expectations of the least sophisticated visitor.

Basically, nearly everywhere you go in Ukraine you must listen to music for young teenage girls -- unsophisticated, sexy, and pathetic pop. Baffingly, this is even what most minibus drivers turn on, and these are grown men who should be beyond girly teenage pop.

There are few places to go where you can enjoy more sophisticated tastes, aside from the local philharmonic hall. Older educated people say that the culture has degraded and that things used to be better. I wasn't around then, so I can't say for sure.

A few hours after leaving this unexpected cafe filled with sophisticated-looking people and reserved but charming waitresses, we took another break at a kiosk next to the park. We bought our MacCoffee and chocolate bar and sat down on plastic patio chairs underneath an open "Obolon Beer" cloth pavilion and sipped out of the plastic cup while trying to stay warm. A nearby speaker blared in-your-face teenage girl pop. We were back in the real Ukraine.

Civic Attitudes in Ukraine and Poland

During my recent trips to Poland I've had a chance to compare the attitudes of Poles and Ukrainians to their society and government, as well as how society is governed in general. These attitudes pervade people's public behavior and public interaction in addition to their interaction with government structures.

Poles' attitudes towards government is much more like those of Americans and western Europeans. Many people I've met are basically policy wonks with opinions on how things could be run better in their neighborhood, city, and country. They believe that there is a chance of making these changes for the better, though they are often critical of how some things are managed.

Contrast that to Ukraine. Here, most people are fatalistic about government and society and, though they have general opinions on the state of affairs, believe that nothing can be done about it because all decisions are made by distant political and business leaders who they have no connection to. Most people are convinced that their government is corrupt, inept, and interested only in personal gain.

These attitudes are related to public behavior. In Poland people on the street are more polite, calm, and approachable. They do not have a pervasive fear of power structures like so many Ukrainians have. Why then fear one another?

Most Ukrainians avoid police officers and interaction with official government offices, where they tend to feel helpless and mistreated. To keep as far away from the government is most Ukrainians' strategy. In Ukraine, the more one tries to do things by the book, the more problems one has.

Poles generally feel a certain loyalty to their government. Most mourned over the loss of top national leaders in a recent plane crash. Many Ukrainians joke that if the same thing had happened in Ukraine, the people would have rejoiced.

The "Solidarity" movement arose in Poland, and Polish towns today have a tangible sense of community that is lacking in most of Ukraine, where there is a sense that people generally look out for themselves and their kin and ignore strangers.

This is felt everywhere, even in trivial acts of politeness or rudeness towards other such as walking your dog on a leash and muzzle. In Ukrainian cities dog owners are quick to unleash their dogs and almost never muzzle them. In Poland you don't see people toss trash out of the windows of moving buses or drop their plastic beer cups on the ground wherever they happen to finish them.

Poles feel more freedom to take initiative in creating community projects in events. In Ukraine organized projects and events often run into bureaucratic obstacles, so people tend to do things together only informally -- again, to avoid interaction with government.

Poland is essentially governed by the rule of law, whereas Ukraine is a semi-anarchic remnant of a collapsed state.