Donald Weber: The Underclasses and its Bosses: Ukraine

The Human is an Atom That Won’t Be Split
The Underclass and its Bosses in Ukraine

Photos by Donald Weber

Marginal societies openly display the strains and contradictions of the dominant culture, and Ukraine’s underclass reveals the secret life of Western globalization.

The Human is an Atom That Won’t Be Split focuses on the contradictions the powerful forces at the centre of globalization prefer to ignore, hide or disguise.

As the industrial city of Dneprodzerzhinsk shows, I found a European people desperate to survive, isolated on the margins of the West’s consumer-driven economy. At the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s state-educated middle classes – teachers, doctors, and scientists – grew jobless, impoverished. Hard men with secret connections bought up government-owned factories for cheap, and were swiftly becoming their new masters. Brutal Malthusian competition replaced cradle-to-grave socialism.

With its 2004 Orange Revolution, Ukraine threw out the old Russian-backed political regime and took its chances with the West, electing a democratic leadership, its first since 1918. Hopes for this new regime were high but foundered as the Orange Revolution failed to address the needs of a civic society. Prostitution, drug use, and street gangs exploded under these pressures. From my first visit in June 2003, through the winter of 2006, living conditions if anything worsened.

By spring of 2005, organized gangs were stripping the hardware from public-sector buildings, selling it as scrap to China, and leaving occupants without elevators, water boilers, manhole covers. Prostitution was so widespread and meth-cooking rings so prevalent the two professions could be a paradigm for the new society. Kiev artists used fresh corpses bribed from government mortuaries for their “conceptual” art works, aiming for a provocative celebrity in New York or Berlin. What comes next? This is the question I intend to discover in my work.

The World Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency, even George Soros’ Open Society Institution, were actively promoting various agendas in Ukraine, attempting to clean-up the economic hyper-inflation of the 1980’s, the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the near-collapse of the banking system. What did they ultimately want of Ukraine, and Ukrainians? A cheap and compliant labour force for low-paying European-owned parts-factories, to compete with China’s? A dodgy place to try new theories of social engineering?

Hadn’t these starved and battered people had enough social engineering already?

I understood: this was the transgressive, shadow-side of Western economy we were witnessing, a place where the old communal rules were out, and everything had its price.

Ukraine’s underclass was not teaching us about the past or the future – but about the secret life of globalization.