“Of course,” I said. I was a hired hand on a U.S. Agency for International Development assignment for a global PR firm. I expected a year-long assignment. I had left boxes of memorabilia and knickknacks in the office, and had told my assistant, “I’ll be back. Take care of my stuff and keep my seat warm.”
That was 19 years ago. In truth, though I visit the United States most years, this strange, infuriating, corrupt, bureaucratic, leaderless, beautiful, gracious, captivating country is my home. Everything I had done in business up to that point in 1994 was poor rehearsal for navigating the riskiest of markets.
A few months later, I returned to Washington and Capitol Hill for a quick visit and ran into a friend, Gaston Caperton, the then-governor of West Virginia.
“Hey, I hear you are in Russia,” he bellowed across the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building.
“No, governor. Ukraine,” I corrected, shouting back.
“I know, Russia,” he repeated.
Now, most everyone knows (even though a few in Moscow pretend otherwise) Ukraine is a separate country. Our melodramas are played out on the world stage in real time, from the brilliant but short-lived Orange Revolution, to the Kafkaesque machinations of government, and what is commonly known these days as “The Family” surrounding President Viktor Yanukovych.
Ukraine took center stage during last summer’s European football championship, and gave most everyone a reason to think well of their nation. Now, however, the party is long over, and stories of corruption, construction waste and sheer incompetence emerge.
In this spring of our discontent, when currency devaluation hangs over every business like a guillotine blade, when government appears more autocratic, dictatorial and isolated by the day, I am asked the obvious question: “Do you regret that long-ago decision to come and stay in Ukraine?”
The question – using a term often conjured to describe relationships – is complicated, but the short answer is “no.” It was the beginning of a second act, one which eventually led to the greatest of challenges, attempting to return the Kyiv Post to profitability and keep independent journalism alive.
But the fact is that most of my aunts and uncles have died over this period. My mother turned 91. I missed seeing grandchildren go from Pampers to puberty. A huge chunk of my life in Kyiv has been spent careening from one crisis to another, like one of those silver balls in a pinball machine.
I missed a daughter’s “make-up” wedding, her first having been in Las Vegas with an Elvis impersonator crooning in the background. Being a political guy, I miss the rush of handling a candidate and the anxiety of that live or die moment on election night as returns come in.
I miss American college football. I miss that national pastime, baseball. For goodness sake, I miss the Kentucky Derby and NASCAR racing.
I miss friends, some of whom have died in the interim. The man I helped win his first term in the U.S. Senate years ago, John D. Rockefeller, somehow turned 75, walks with a cane, and recently announced his retirement. It seems like only a heartbeat ago we were traveling to hamlets across West Virginia, scurrying for votes.
My greatest teacher, former Senate Leader Robert Byrd, slipped away at 91. We had chatted in his Senate office a year earlier, where he had met my wife, Olga. If he were confused that she was the third Mrs. Willard to whom I had introduced him, he didn’t show it.
But that question of regrets always bring up the song Frank Sinatra made popular, the standard off-key 50th birthday solo sung by the slightly drunk guest of honor in which he belts out he has regrets, “but then again, too few to mention.”
I was nearly 50 when I landed at Boryspil International Airport for the first time. That was back when you picked up your luggage on the tarmac. Despite its flaws, the country energized me. In two decades, I have led new businesses, written seven books, painted 400 canvases and, most of all, I survived.
Today, along with others at the Kyiv Post, we are attempting mightily to make the newspaper viable. But obviously it is the challenges that invigorate us. This is what makes it interesting, and gives a balance to all those regrets.
But I can’t go along with the Sinatra song. Regrets are rarely “too few to mention.” They are the heavy coat you wear that no one sees.
Kyiv Post CEO Michael Willard can be reached at [email protected]
