RC#23: Selling Mom

published in Eastern Economist #404, October 29, 2001

Before passing a Land Code becomes equated with selling Mom and Apple Pie down the river, let’s put something down for the record.

            “Motherland” is not a word Ukrainians use. The word for a person’s homeland is bat’kivshchyna, a name used, for instance, by Yulia Tymoshenko’s party. It comes from the word bat’ko and bat’ky, which mean father and parents in Ukrainian. Russians, on the other hand, use the word rodina, which means place of birth. Neither nation uses the term "motherland" in ordinary circumstances.

            However, when Russian-speakers really get hot and bothered about nationalism and stuff – like the Germans and their Vaterland – they start to get very Romantic about the homeland and refer to it as rodina mat: the motherland. This is the name of the titanium lady brandishing her sword over the Dnipro river and the Paton Bridge. In other words, them’s fighting words.

            That’s how some of Ukraine’s communists used the word this week during the Land Code debate in the Verkhovna Rada. The resulting madness and mayhem would have beat the best ratings for Survivor, had it gone on in English and been broadcast in America.

            But Mr. Yurchuk, our intrepid VR observer, has done a fine job of describing the hysteria in the cover story.

            The main point is that a Land Code was passed. And that the real debate on land ownership in Ukraine has hardly begun.

            The question of owning land has been a tricky one ever since humans first began plowing it next to each other. But not the question of ownership per se, as the communists would have it. The question of who owns it and how they own it.

            The communists would have all land “collectively owned,” in the hands of the state. But theirs is a system where “l’état, c’est nous” is the unspoken rule – "nous" being the Communist Party, of course.

            The good question is what they really mean by “Only idiots sell land,” “Selling land is selling the motherland,” and “Land is holy.”

            First, “Only idiots sell land.” If you can get perpetual use of 1,000 hectares of land from your buddy, the Agriculture Minister, at no cost to you – other than a little whining and dining at government cost and 10% of all the yield every year, also at government cost – why would you want to pay for it?

            And only an idiot would try to sell it to you. I mean, why sell it, if you can peddle the use of the land among your buddies, and collect all kinds of “benefits” in perpetuo, in return for all the favors. After all, if you sell it once, you can’t sell it again, right?* The guy who bought it from you, probably at far too low a price in the first place, gets to sell it the next time, often for a lot more than what you got for it from him. So why would anyone in their right mind want to sell land?

            How about “Selling land is selling the motherland”? As I said, them’s fighting words. The Russians, like the Americans, understand that you have to have some bottom-line issues and fundamental slogans that get everyone standing tall with a rifle in their hands. Well, the men, at any rate.

            For the Americans, it’s Mom and apple pie. Who knows why “apple pie” when pumpkin pie and turkey dinner are far more American than apples, but there you have it. There’s no logic to propaganda.

            Nevertheless, when the message gets out that Mom and apple pie are under threat – Mom alone wouldn’t work: Americans wouldn’t want anyone to think they’re sissies, or Italians or something – when the word gets out that these twin icons are under attack, all but the most perverted hophead hippy understand that it’s time to mobilize.

            For the Russians – and most Ukrainian communists are crypto-Russians – it’s Rodina Mat. The mother birthplace. The motherland. Once again, Mom alone won’t do the trick to get all those handsome young Slavs to go out there and be cannon fodder. The threat of Siberia was historically much more effective.

            But put together mother and land, in an agrarian culture, and you’ve got the magic combination. The song whose tune millions of soviet-era pensioners have been humming ever since their parents and grandparents were killed or exiled or both before and during the Holocaust Famine of 1931-3.

            The tune that millions of soviet-era veterans learned to march to while tens of millions of their brothers and sisters died in the trenches in WWII.

            The tune that millions of farmworkers – read modern-day serfs – hear while they continue pulling yokes through the fields and ride wooden carts pulled by horses to market. It promises them that they will be able to keep growing their own vegetables and chickens on a tenth of a hectare so that they can survive on no money at all. And it reminds them that even Ivan Tarasiuk, the private farmer down the road with his shiny rented tractor and Dupont chemicals, is an evil threat.

            Finally, there’s “Land is holy.” Coming from a bunch of atheists, this is a real conundrum. Land is holy.

            Well, say you worship at the altar of materialism. Say you know you’re sitting on 25% of the world’s best black topsoil, chornozem. Say you want to benefit for eternity from the bestowal of land use rights. And say you see that your own capitalists are busy exploiting left and right and taking the profits offshore, while you don’t even have a single secret bank account.

            Of course, land is holy. It makes all those things possible.

            And if it stays in your collective hands – well, then, like the lilies of the field, you will never have to toil or spin to reach paradise.

            How do you know? Jesus said so. Right in the bible. •

–from the notebooks of Pan O.

* Well, maybe you can, but that’s a topic for another column…