The highest technology currently in use in official offices is the fax machine – and then only if the economy department of this particular government institution coughs up enough fax paper. People who have dealt with government agencies can give thousands of examples of how backward the state offices are.

But some of these examples are particularly impressive.

Recently, I had to communicate with the department of ethnic minorities and religions at the Lviv Oblast administration. It’s quite an important job in the seemingly multi-cultural and multi-confessional Lviv region.

The department has no Internet access – and this is 2010 we’re talking about! Information about ethnic communities and church activists is collected by phone. And God only knows how they send it on to Kyiv and analyze it, if at all.

A year ago, while preparing a “Sorrowful Mother” oratory to commemorate the Holodomor, I was in communication with the Culture Ministry that oversaw its publication. It turned out that only the minister himself had e-mail. This central reception distributes e-mails to all the other departments including, for example, the department for music and circuses (a wonderful combination, isn’t it?).

The central e-mail is kept secret. You will not find a single electronic address at the ministry’s website: They have no time to communicate with real people when they’re fighting battles to produce publications for these very people.

And then the Culture Ministry demanded a faxed copy of [famous Ukrainian poet] Pavlo Tychyna’s poems from his famous collection “Sunny Clarinets” (Sonyashni Klarnety), which were the basis for the oratory. An irritated official voice in the telephone said that a fax is needed because they don’t know these poems, don’t have them around and have no idea where to get ahold of them. So, we faxed them Tychyna from Lviv to Kyiv to read off the roll of fax paper.

Restrooms in theatres, museums, philharmonics, and art schools are a classic example of the culture shock for foreigners in Ukraine. Our bureaucratic intelligentsia cannot get it into their heads that consumers of things cultural are just regular people with physical needs. The actual culture of satisfying these needs leaves a lasting impression after the theatrical performance, exhibition or concert.

So why does all this art have to smell of a dirty water closet, irritate with the absence of toilet paper and even running water? Most of our theaters are more like circuses, and that’s why the combination of theatre and circus-related officials in the same department of the Culture Ministry looks quite organic.

Anyone who has visited the Lviv National Drama Theater might have seen women in pretty dresses or skirts carrying about aluminum buckets filled with water to flush the toilets. Anyone could have experienced unheated halls of this theatre in the winter. They could also have seen, on the shabby facade of this theatre, two modern and painted windows and a nice balcony of the theatre’s director – a sight that smells of corruption.

A woman I know works as a cleaner in the Lviv Oblast administration building. It wasn’t until 2008 that they got vacuum cleaners to do their jobs. Until then, they swept offices with brooms and dusters wrapped around wooden mops. Every official in that building keeps their own roll of toilet paper in a drawer, knowing that such paper is in short supply – just like in the old days.

That cleaning lady has a student son. She decided to get Internet at home, paying through her nose. That’s because she understands that it’s an investment in her son’s future. That’s not something the Culture Ministry is investing in.

Iryna Magdysh is an editor of Ji magazine, www.ji-magazine.lviv.ua. It is published in Lviv and specializes on cultural, political and philosophical issues. She can be reached at [email protected]