Rascalndear is my orange cat

Before I get into a standard diary-like exchange (aka blog) here, my purpose is to get all my Reluctant Capitalists columns on-line for those of you who have been in and out of Ukraine over the last 18+ years. So bear with me. This is gonna take a little time! I'm only sorry I wasn't able to continue to do this column in the last five years... needed a good researcher, like Nina Sarkisian, who worked for us for years as a translator. She was terrific at calling just about anybody up and getting them to give the poop. If anyone knows where she is today, tell her I'm looking for a great research assistant... :)

As luck would have it, my very first Reluctant Capitalists was about Yulia Tymoshenko. How timely, she smirks. And how revealing, she grins.

Now the story of how I got to write these columns was simple. RC began as a replacement for Pieter Stroop's Tip of the Week column in Eastern Economist, taken over by our favorite Scotsman, Euan MacDonald. Euan scribbled RC until he left EE in February 1997 for more serious stuff at the Kyiv Post, i.e., his girlfriend Katya. Next to pick up RC was the intrepid Marusia Hnatkevych, our Sakatchewan gal, a tiny but not token, as it turned out, Canadian. When Marusia got tired of having her tongue deeply embedded in her cheek, week after week, another Canadian, Evan took over. For the life of me can't remember his last name and don't have a copy of EE here in Yaremche, but it started with O, as his byline was "Pan O." (Aha! found it! Ostryzniuk). When Evan decided it was time to move on in March 2001, I picked up the gauntlet as a temporary lark. That lark took me through nearly 90 columns by the time EE as we knew it shut down in mid-2003.