Editor’s Note: In this Aug. 19, 2009 story, Vitaly Sych — who went on to become the chief editor of the popular Russian-language Korrespondent magazine and now Novoye Vremya — put his finger on a trend that still exists today: The exodus to Kyiv of young Ukrainians from the countryside, villages and provincial cities.
In his hometown of Mohyliv-Podilsky, the best job Yuri Melnyk could find was as an irregularly paid $25-a-month schoolteacher.
So, in the summer of 1997, Melnyk left his native town of 20,000 people on the Moldovan border and moved to Kyiv.
His fortunes changed dramatically after he landed a job with an international car rental agency. He is reluctant to say how much he makes as a customer-service manager, other than that his salary is much higher than the teaching job back home.
“I just wanted to work. I wanted to use my knowledge and my skills,” said Melnyk, who has a university degree in teaching foreign languages. ‘I’d have absolutely no future at home.”
Tens of thousands of other young people from the nation’s provincial capitals, villages and countryside have reached the same conclusion.
Although the State Statistics Committee keeps no numbers on the phenomenon, its officials acknowledge the heavy influx to the capital.
While Kyiv’s economy is not booming, many outside the nation’s capital are struggling just to feed themselves. And while Melnyk’s salary is not terrific, his friends back in Mohyliv-Podilsky are envious.
“I’m a millionaire to them,” Melnyk said. “I’m Bill Gates, I’m [George] Soros.”
Unfortunately, life in Mohyliv-Podilsky isn’t that much different than many other places in Ukraine, where gross domestic product has shrunk dramatically since independence in 1991.
Millions in rural areas have not had salaries for years. If and when they do get paid, it is often a pittance, especially the pensions.
According to the State Statistics Committee, 95 percent of all farms in Ukraine – most of them based on the world’s best soil – lost money last year. Many elderly survive only as subsistence farmers: they eat what they grow in their gardens and drink milk from their cows.
Eight years after losing production ties with other Soviet republics, many factories in the cities are still idle and workers are paid in goods, not money.
Then there are the markets packed with senior researchers, teachers and architects whose institutions don’t produce anything worth giving to employees. Often outnumbering their customers, they hawk shoes and underwear they bought themselves in shopping trips to Turkey.
Depression and hopelessness run high outside the nation’s capital. And fewer young Ukrainians want to go down the same path. Melnyk said that about a third of his 75 fellow classmates from the Vinnytsya Pedagogical University are now in Kyiv.
Natalya Marchenko, 23, laughed in response when asked if she plans to return to her native city of Novovolynsk, in northwestern Ukraine’s Volyn region, when she graduates from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy next year.
“Definitely, not. It’s absolutely impossible to find a job there,” Marchenko said. “There are no prospects there. I think such towns will die off soon.”
Residents of Novovolynsk, which has about 60,000 residents, relied entirely on its 11 coal mines for employment. When the mines were closed down one after another a few years ago, the people were left with few other options, she said.
Although still in college, Marchenko already works as a project coordinator in a sociological research center. Her husband had also moved to Kyiv from Dnipropetrovsk several years ago, and is now working as a lawyer for a Western consulting company.
Marchenko said many newcomers to Kyiv build their own informal networks with people from their home regions. “The people from outside of Kyiv mostly communicate with each other and support each other,” she said. “Especially those that come from western Ukraine and Lviv in particular.”
In Kyiv, they are coming to a city with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation and wages that are double the national average. The city accounts for about a third of Ukraine’s meager foreign direct investment, still estimated at less than $3 billion since independence.
Besides the entourages of the diplomatic community, foreign multinationals have set up offices here. The activity has spawned hundreds of new shops, restaurants and cafes. And young people are reading the help-wanted ads.
Since most of the newcomers rent apartments or dormitory rooms without registering anywhere, statistics about the in-migration are hard to come by.
But while Ukraine’s overall population has dropped below 50 million people, many think that the Kyiv metropolitan area population – conservatively estimated at 2.6 million residents – is on the rise.
“‘Of course, there is a clear tendency of young people moving to Kyiv,” said Natalya Vlasenko, deputy head of the State Statistics Committee. “But exact figures are impossible to determine.”
In a way, the influx makes Kyiv a city of villages. It is analogous to America’s capital of Washington, D.C., in the sense that a large percentage of the population is from somewhere else.
Anecdotally, employees in some firms estimate that half of their colleagues are newcomers from outside of Kyiv.
At least one personnel agency concurs with the estimate. “About half of the applications that we process are from the young people who have recently moved to Kyiv,” said Halyna Zimina, president of SHAUZ personnel agency. “About a half of those newcomers are highly qualified and have tremendous potential. When they feel that they’ve outgrown their region and they want more, they move to Kyiv.”
Zimina said the applicants are coming from come from all over Ukraine, with a disproportionately high number coming from the heavily industrialized Dnipropetrovsk and Donbass regions in eastern Ukraine. The most frequently listed occupations on their resumes are accounting, programming and finance, Zimina said.
The newest arrivals today appear to be facing much stiffer competition for the available jobs than even a few years ago.
Then, it may have been enough to know a foreign language and have a university degree. Now, Zimina said, employers are looking for a specialized education background and work experience. The odds of landing a job are still not good.
Zimina estimates that only about 10 percent to 25 percent of job applicants succeed. The overwhelming majority get hired by foreign embassies or Western companies, or they manage foreign relations for Ukrainian firms.
The base pay, Zimina said, is $150 monthly.
Zimina said the newcomers to Kyiv generally are far more determined to succeed than the Kyivans. They are willing to trade prestige for the prospect of long-term career development, she said. “They are more success-oriented. They’ve set their goals and they go towards them,” she said. “They just work. They know that they need to pay a rent anyway.”
Sociologists are already concerned by the growing outflow of young Ukrainians from the regions.
Although the tendency is similar to those in many countries, the reasons pushing young people move to Kyiv are different. While in many countries, young people choose the capital because of better career opportunities, Ukraine’s capital is the about the only place for any career opportunity.
“‘Maybe, it’s good for those who move,” said Svitlana Oksamytna, sociologist at Academy of Sciences. “But in the rest of the country, the social structure is changing – the share of old people is growing and the potential for population reproduction is diminishing.”
Oksamytna said the massive flows of young Ukrainians to the capital are unlikely to end, unless the dramatic economic decline in the provinces is reversed.
Politicians acknowledge the swift decline in the standards of living in the provinces.
All the presidential candidates address the issue in some form or another, but nobody is offering what amounts to a comprehensive prescription for curing the ills.
Meanwhile, more and more young people are moving to Kyiv after graduation and are staying put.
Yuri Perets, 20, has a year left to study at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and works as a regional marketing manager for the Italian ARDO appliance manufacturer. Though he’s been sharing a room with his friend in a dormitory for three years, he has already decided he’s not coming back to his native town of Krasyliv of 30,000 people in the Khmelnytsky region.
‘Of course, I’m not going back,’ he said. ‘I see many more opportunities here.”
