Tag: Ukraine

Ukrainian Secretary of National Security and Defense Plagiarizes From Steve Jobs

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

In a Ukrainian university, the way to get a good grade is to find several sources, copy paragraphs or pages from them, and hand the entire thing in. The way to get a bad grade is to develop your own argument. “Nobody cares about your ideas! Can’t you find a few authorities and copy them, like all normal students do?” my professors in Ukraine kept exclaiming.

This is why I’m not surprised that Ukrainian Secretary of National Security and Defense, Raisa Bogatyreva, plagiarized a speech that Steve Jobs gave to the students at Stanford in 2005.

For centuries, any original thought coming from a Ukrainian was punished first by the officials of the Russian Empire and then by their Soviet heirs. The result is that now it is commonly accepted that parroting somebody else’s ideas – hopefully, as close to the original text as possible – is the best way to proceed. In political terms, the main issue that Ukraine has been trying to resolve for a long time now is whether to imitate the Russians and allow them to guide the country or whether it’s best to follow the lead of the Western Europeans. The possibility of looking for one’s own way of doing things never even gets mentioned.

I am not excusing Bogatyreva’s plagiarism, of course. I’m simply explaining what the consequences of eradicating original thinking in a country are. The case of a bureaucrat plagiarizing Steve Jobs’s speech sounds funny at first. It is a lot less entertaining, though, if you see it in terms of what it says about the future of a country whose population is 1,5 times greater than that of Canada.

By Readers’ Request: More on Why I Emigrated, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

The reason why my groupmates were acting this way was that after decades of genocides and repressions, people had become afraid of pretty much everything. This is the kind of fear that gets transmitted on a genetic level. You might not have experienced the genocide yourself, but the genetic memory of your ancestors who conceived you in fear and gave birth to you in mortal terror is always there with you.

So the students started attending one of the courses and ignored the other one. Now, the professor of the ignored course showed up to his scheduled class and discovered that the students weren’t there. He also had the Soviet legacy of inborn terror, so instead of going to the Dean’s office and inquiring as to the whereabouts of his students, he kept coming to class in a futile hope that one day students would appear.

They never did, of course.

At the end of the semester, when the exam period came about, a huge scandal broke out. Students hadn’t taken one of the courses and couldn’t pass the exam. The professor had been getting paid for not delivering his lectures. The future schedules got messed up beyond recognition.

People got into all this trouble for the simple reason that they couldn’t deal with the simple task of going to the administration and saying, “I’m sorry, I think there might be a mistake.”

This was when I realized that I wasn’t only completely different from the older generation. I also had nothing in common with my own. Believe me, I’m not blaming my people for being the way they are. I just understood that I was so different from them that no happiness was possible for me in their midst.

So I came home and said, “You were right, we should leave. I’m now ready to submit an application to the Canadian consulate.”

This was absolutely the best decision of my life. It brought me poverty, divorce, struggle, hardship but it got me to a place where, on the most basic level, people think and act like me.

Lions, Tigers, Alligators and Elephants in Ukraine

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

David Bellamy has sent me a link to the story of a man in Ukraine who has spent 35 days in a cage with lions. Here is a photo for you, and you can see an entire slideshow over here:

Zoo owner and artist Aleksandr Pylyshenko looks out from between bars of a cage, next to female African lion Katya, at a private zoo situated in his yard in the city of Vasilyevka, southeastern Ukraine August 3, 2011. Pylyshenko decided to spend five weeks in a cage with a pair of African lions, Katya and Samson, to get money for improving the lions’ living conditions, according to local media. He is broadcasting it on internet to attract the public’s attention to plight of wild animals in private Ukrainian zoos, which do not get enough fundings.

There is, of course, a certain cultural reality behind this, and I thought my readers might find some background I can provide useful for the understanding of this piece of news.

In the Soviet Union, zoological gardens were extremely popular. We had a really big one in my city and used to visit it often. As a child, I always felt a lot of discomfort at the sight of polar bears, giraffes or elephants stuck in small cages in what was very obviously not a comfortable environment for them. I could never understand how visiting a zoo could be considered fun. I haven’t been to any zoos in North America, so I don’t know what the conditions there are like. Even though I’m not a huge animal-lover (to put it very mildly), I always suffer at the idea that a poor creature is kept away from its natural habitat because people find it enjoyable to gawk at it for some puzzling reason.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, funding for state-owned zoos became very scarce. Many animals simply starved or froze to death during our harsh winters. At the same time, many private citizens came into big money. Post-Soviet nouveau riches competed with each other in how much money each could spend on something completely outrageous. Among them, it soon became prestigious to have an iguana, an alligator, a monkey, a python, or a tiger of their own. There came into existence a huge black market dealing in exotic animals.

Eventually, this situation led to some people opening “private zoos”, like the one owned by the guy in the photo. Anybody can build a cage in the backyard of their house in a village, like he did, bring in some animals, and keep them there. It might seem strange to you that a guy could keep lions, a bear and two lynxes in his backyard just because he wants to, but in Ukraine it’s not a big deal. As the owner says on his website, he bought a lioness for just $3500 + shipping costs.

How Feminism Helped a Bad Student

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

A reader just wrote in to say that she enjoys my stories about the Soviet Union. (Thank you, kind reader!) So I decided to share yet another story. It is post-Soviet but still fun.

In Ukraine, I was a university student at the Department of Foreign Languages. The way the system worked was that an oral final exam counted for 100% of the final grade. You had to show up a the exam at the end of the semester, choose a random piece of paper among the many on the professor’s desk, take a few minutes to prepare, and speak on the 2 or 3 topics on your paper. In some courses, you needed to write a final essay to be allowed to take the exam.

I worked hard to make a living when I was a student. For this reason, I rarely showed up at the university. Normally, I’d just read the textbook the day before the exam and get a top grade as a result. The quality of education was pathetically low, and I saw no reason to waste my time coming to classes where the professor did nothing but read the same textbook out loud.

One of the courses I had to take was Sociology. I didn’t attend a single lecture or seminar. At that point in time, I was busy finishing a big translation for the Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Russian Federation. There had been an accident a little while before where I had suffered severe burns to my arm. I still had to type up my translation for hours each day, which I did while shrieking in pain from my damaged arm and hand.

So, of course, the Sociology course was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t even find an opportunity to go to the library and take out the textbook before the exam. For my final essay, I went to the British Council, took out several books on feminism, and used them to write my essay. I translated the sources and even quoted them. I was very interested in feminism at that point and cared little that nobody around me had any knowledge about what the word stood for.

When I arrived at the exam and took the paper with my questions, I realized that I had not the slightest idea what the terminology used in the questions even meant. I had no textbook or notes or anything with me. So, of course, I prepared myself to failing the exam very spectacularly.

The professor in the course was a young, nerdy-looking guy. Since I had never come to class, that was the first time I saw him. Now I not only had missed every single day of class and came to the exam unprepared. I had also handed in an essay that passionately defended feminism to a male professor in a rabidly patriarchal society.

As I was sitting there, staring despondently at my questions, the professor suddenly asked,

“Which one of you is called Clarissa?”

“Me,” I answered in a tenuous little voice.

“You are the student who handed in an essay on feminism, right? It was absolutely brilliant! I loved it,” the professor suddenly announced. “You can go now, I will give you an A for the course.”

As I crept out of the room, I mused that feminism was even better than I’d thought before.

Ohio Professors Nurture Ukraine

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

University Diaries somehow manages to find the best quotes ever. Look at this excerpt from an article about Ohio State University:

Our faculty are discovering new star systems, nurturing democratic processes in the Ukraine, and unraveling the link between emotional stress and disease.

With all due respect to Ohio State, condescending much? What if Kharkov State University, my university in Ukraine, published a release stating that its faculty members are “nurturing democratic processes in the US”, huh? Would that sound like a normal statement to make? And if you don’t see why it is completely ridiculous to make such statements, you should keep as far as possible from Ukraine. And, hopefully, everybody else.

My Ukrainian Relatives and Friends

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

On July 4, I will celebrate 13 years since, at the age of 22, I left my country forever. Since then, I never went back for a visit. After my grandfather died five years ago, I haven’t made a single call to Ukraine. Today, I read this fascinating and touching post by Spanish prof (false modesty aside, I actually suggested that it be written) and started thinking about why I have no relationship with any of my Ukrainian relatives and friends (except those who also emigrated.)

Back in the Soviet Union, everybody who tried to leave the country was considered a traitor, was persecuted and abused. Those who managed to leave were not allowed to keep in touch with those who remained. As a result, emigrating was pretty much like dying. You go away, and nobody hears from you ever again. The Soviet Union fell apart, but this attitude towards people who emigrate remained. I discovered it when I received my immigrant visa to Canada and came to my university to share the news with my friends and classmates. The second they saw me, they turned away and pretended I wasn’t there. The experience of being ignored like this by people who, for years, were your bosom buddies is not pleasant.

Then, one of those bosom buddies stole my money and said, “Well, you are leaving anyways” in explanation.

A professor – who used to like me the entire time I was at the university and who used to call me “our department’s star” – yelled that I was a traitor and that she would do everything in her power to destroy my life.

The only friend who did come to say good-bye to me and cried and hugged me was the one who was about to emigrate as well. She now lives in Baltimore and we are still in touch. (Hey, Lenchik!) Other close friends told me they were too busy to meet and say good-bye.

So I never went back. My parents, sister and aunt have visited Ukraine since we emigrated.

My mother went to visit her best friend of many decades. She brought gifts that she had chosen with care and love to suit the preferences of each family member. I saw her run from store to store for weeks trying to find the best gifts possible for the friend she loves so much. The best friend looked at the gifts, put them all back in the bag, handed it to my mother and said, “I’d rather you take your gifts back and give me their value in money.” (In case you think these people are starving or anything like that, you couldn’t be more mistaken.)

My aunt went to meet her nephew whom she babysat and adored when he was a kid. The nephew charged her for the gas he “wasted” on coming to meet her. Her niece stole her money to buy gifts for her boyfriend.

One of my aunts who remained in Ukraine stole the jewelry that had been in my father’s family for over 100 years (my father, mind you, is not related to her except by marriage) and destroyed a suitcase filled with photos of his ancestors, their records, and sentimental souvenirs. This is the aunt whom my parents helped out financially (a lot) for decades.

There are other things but they are too painful to write about at this particular moment. Please don’t think that we somehow managed to end up with a particularly vicious group of relatives and friends. The few times I tried participating in Russian-speaking blogs (run by complete strangers) I always was told that nobody had any interest in talking to a person who’d emigrated.

If I were to go to Ukraine right now, it would be like going to Greece or New Zealand, places where I don’t know anybody and would be completely alone. At least, in Greece and New Zealand I can hope to get in touch with people who read my blog and be welcomed by them. In Ukraine, I’d be completely isolated.

This was supposed to be a post on friendships but it somehow ended up being quite depressive. I will write the second part of the post later and I promise that it will be about my positive experiences with friendship.