The following are excerpts from a conversation recorded during a discussion organized at the Invisible University for Ukraine Summer School 2025, “Beyond the Post-Soviet: Rethinking Environmental, Social, and Cultural Agency in Wartime Ukraine” (1-10 July 2025, Budapest), moderated by Ostap Sereda and Nadiia Chervinska. A transcript of the full discussion can be read here. Part 1 can be read here.
I came to Ukraine in January 1991 on a sabbatical leave, intending to write a book. Every day life in the 1990s did not surprise me; the big eye-opener was the “hollow state,” which I could closely observe from my vantage point.
Shortly after arriving, I met Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, who in 1989 established the International Institute of Management in Kyiv, financed by George Soros. They had also formed a Council of Advisors to the Praesidium of the Ukrainian Parliament, whose members included Sir Geoffrey Howe, Zbigniew Brzeziński, and Shirley Williams.
At that time, the Praesidium, headed by Leonid Kravchuk, served as the political leadership of the country. The Council needed a Secretariat, and when Soros asked me about my plans, he said, “You can sit and write about history, or you can be part of its making.” I jumped at the opportunity. I spent a lot of time in the Verkhovna Rada, witnessing the key dramatic events that unfolded. I was a member of working groups on monetary reform and the anti-crisis program. One of my tasks was to write a policy paper outlining the key steps Kravchuk should take in state-building when he assumed the presidency.
Under the Soviet regime, there was no civil service as such. The USSR was a bureaucratic behemoth because the state owned everything; the Communist Party existed at every level and institution, and GOSPLAN determined the economy. In this scheme of things, the actual “state,” especially in the republics, was small.
When the entire Soviet edifice disintegrated, one found that Ukraine, with 52 million people (1991), had only 12,000 people working in central government agencies. The comparable number in Greece, with a population of 10 million people, was 60,000. Eighty percent of Ukraine’s economy was under the Union jurisdiction but now came under Ukrainian purview. Moreover, as a colony, Ukraine faced institutional incompleteness – no central bank, customs service, ministry of defense, a tiny ministry of finance that was in reality an accounting office. Since there was no justice under the Soviets, the Ministry of Justice had only 130 employees.
With independence, the central government had 35 agencies which retained the same names and people as in the previous period, although the functions of government had changed, and policy development was added, something few understood.
Kravchuk’s team agreed with my recommendation to establish a national school of public administration to educate a new cadre of civil servants who understood the challenges of the time, especially a market economy and rule of law. I became the founding director of the Institute of Public Administration and Local Government, Cabinet of Ministers, modelled after the French École nationale d’administration, which opened its doors in 1992.
Living and working in Ukraine, I was taken aback by the blatant discrimination against women, where it was simply assumed that certain types of jobs would be only for men.
Women’s new role
The school was a rigorous, intensive 12-month program ending with internships in Canada, France, or Germany. It recruited on a competitive basis current mid-career civil servants from central and oblast structures, who on graduation would either move to a new position in a government entity or be promoted at their previous place of employment. But much to my surprise no women had applied. When I called Volodymyr Piekhota, Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, for an explanation he said that the heads of personnel departments did not realize women would be eligible. On the contrary, I said that at least 40% of the learners have to be women. He picked up the vertushka (government phone) and called every ministry. Two days later, we filled the quota. When I met Piekhota he asked, “Is this how you do it in Canada?” I said, “No, but your way is more efficient.”
Also in 1992, we wrote, and parliament passed a law on the civil service – the first such act in the former USSR – that defined the hierarchy of authority and established a system of rules governing the rights and duties of employment, promotion, and selection based on merit. I also managed to convince donors of the obvious fact that you cannot teach courses without books, and they agreed to support an ambitious publications program implemented by Osnovy, which was established that year and headed by Solomiia Pavlychko.
Solomiia, like others, was working in institutions led by individuals whose intellectual and administrative practices had been shaped by the Soviet system. With glasnost, the Institute of Literature could finally discuss Ukrainian writers whom Soviet authorities had forbidden, and it became a hotbed of the national movement before 1991.
However, when Solomiia and her colleagues sought to take their reading of Ukrainian literature further and apply the insights of contemporary literary criticism, they encountered resistance. I heard someone say, “We do not need Western fads. Lesia Ukrainka was a Ukrainian patriot, not a feminist,” as if one precluded the other.
The “old guard,” apart from being culturally conservative, did not access new scholarship for the simple reason that they did not know foreign languages. However, for Solomiia, integration into the international scholarly community was a far greater priority than arguing with the current leadership. And there was Osnovy to take care of.
The broader problem was the state of the humanities and social sciences, which were the most politicized and tightly controlled by the Soviet regime. These fields, a key stepping stone to party careers, attracted mediocre students.
The smart ones studied math and physics, fields relatively free from ideological interference, and they were the most politically active groups in the mass movements. Recall, the 1990s expression – “фізики і лірики,” (physics and lyrics) and that all Rukh meetings in Kyiv were at the Polytechnical Institute, not Shevchenko University.
A key social science, i.e., sociology, did not exist as a discipline. Natalia Chernysh was the first to receive a PhD in the field. During her dissertation defense in Kharkiv in 1991, I had to stand up and speak in support of the intellectual legitimacy of her study, as the academic council was inclined to deny her the degree.
Living and working in Ukraine, I was taken aback by the blatant discrimination against women, where it was simply assumed that certain types of jobs would be only for men.
With this in mind, we supported Olha Kulachek’s work “The Role of Women in Public Administration” published by Osnovy in 1995. Surprisingly, I got a medal from the Ministry of Education for promoting gender studies.
With near-total employment, women bore the burden of domestic and childcare responsibilities. The situation deteriorated in the 1990s, with mass unemployment among males, who often sat at home, depressed. Women turned en masse to the service sector and trade to keep the family afloat. The economic crisis debased the role of males as providers and was a cause of increased domestic violence. I often thought that while studying feminism, we should also research masculinity, its cultural and historical construction.
The fields needed in the 1990s were economics and sociology. At that time, not one single person with a Western degree in economics worked in the government. Another critical field was public policy, the application of knowledge to public problems – a concept that did not exist.
At the Institute of Public Administration, with World Bank support, we launched the Economics Training Center. However, we were unable to recruit learners from the faculties of economics, because they lacked quantitative skills and would have to spend months unlearning Soviet concepts that shaped their understanding of economics. We recruited those with backgrounds in physics, math, and engineering because of their good quantitative skills and ability to understand theory.
Assessing the 1990s
It was somewhat surreal that the USSR collapsed “not with a bang, but with a whimper.” It was a great period of hope and discovery, so many new things happened. However, the first five years were also a period of colossal policy failure, revealing serious weaknesses in the political leadership’s understanding of social and economic processes and the actions that the government should take.
Rukh did not have an economic program, and during the miners’ strikes, it failed to develop a social vision with a broader appeal.
Understandably, the center of attention was on building the basic institutions of the state, on the army, international recognition, politics, appointments, and measures to promote the national idea.
Ukraine’s economic structure led to a deep crisis, with the economy in free fall: savings wiped out and inflation was at 1,500%. Kravchuk and his patriotic supporters failed to take necessary steps for macroeconomic stabilization initially.
These measures were only achieved under Kuchma. Ukraine adopted a neoliberal approach to economic transition favored by international financial organizations and certain Ukrainian circles. While Poland had “Shock Therapy,” Ukraine experienced “Shock without Therapy.” Under Kuchma, crony capitalism or oligarchic structures emerged, with a few powerful individuals capturing the economy and state, causing extreme inequality and corruption – similar to Russia’s social formation.
The Orange Revolution interrupted this trend, leading to clashes between two social systems. The key lesson of the 1990s is that economic and social issues are central to nation-building and must be prioritized for success. But nonetheless, the 1990s were a wonderful time to be alive, and I remember them with great nostalgia.
The central task for any country is the development of endogenous policy-making capacity. Solutions cannot be outsourced.
International aid
I witnessed first-hand the detrimental impact of externally imposed policy models in Ukraine, Central Asia, and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the failure to engage national stakeholders was so extreme that donors drafted development plans exclusively in English; these documents were never seen by Afghan ministers, who consequently had no stake in their implementation. This profound disconnect directly contributed to the government’s collapse and President Ashraf Ghani’s ignominious flight.
The central task for any country is the development of endogenous policy-making capacity. Solutions cannot be outsourced. This requires two elements: first, education in policy analysis methods, paired with deep, context-specific research.
The challenges facing Ukraine are analytically complex, with no simple solutions; they require rigorous investigation to develop practical strategies. Second, public policy must become the guiding paradigm for governmental decision-making. Currently, the public finds government processes to be opaque and often incomprehensible.
In functional European systems, each ministry is supported by a robust policy and evaluation unit that serves as its analytical engine, ensuring leadership makes informed decisions. One mechanism to enforce this standard is to mandate that all submissions to the Cabinet meet strict criteria: they must include a clear problem definition, a rationale for government intervention, proposed solutions with considered alternatives, a cost-benefit analysis, a regulatory impact assessment, and a summary of public consultations.
In the mid-1990s an international expert did a functional review of Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance. This is a critical ministry – it prepares the budget which is the main instrument of public policy and a place where you would expect policy analysis to occur. The review showed that only 4% of the tasks performed involved analysis – such as analyzing the efficiency of public spending, etc. The entire focus was on dealing with daily operational issue, putting out fires. Ruchne upravlinnia (manual control) was the norm.
In 2000, as part of a team under Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, I helped draft and implement new regulations for the submission of documents to the Cabinet of Ministers. Furthermore, Ukraine once possessed a vibrant Institute of Public Administration, which educated a core cadre of civil servants in policy analysis – a program supported by a body of literature from Osnovy publishers. Regrettably, this progress was halted when Yushchenko was replaced, and the successor Academy of Public Administration was later liquidated.
For Ukraine to progress, public sector reform must be a top priority. Building national policy capacity and policy as the guiding principle for how government should work is a fundamental precondition for a successful fight against corruption and for building an effective state and European integration.