"They Love the Place Where They Live"

VALERY LYUBOTA

interviewed by Natalya Golovanova

Visnyk Kupyanshchyny (Herald of Kupyansk District), Saturday, February 10, 2001,

- America is very clean. There is no dust, there is no mud on people’s footwear. Why? There is no exposed soil. Everything is paved. They have flower beds near homes. No fences. No “little farms” with rabbits and geese, no vegetable gardens. They have farmers for that. You need a flower bed? A machine will arrive to remove one layer of soil. American flower beds are different from ours. You will practically not see any soil. Everything is neat. Simply they love the place where they live, love their families, streets and homes. That is why there is order everywhere.

Valery Lyubota is a rather legendary personality in our local construction industry. The Garant Company which he founded from scratch, as they say, from surviving on bread and water, will turn 11 in April. “Do everything yourself, do not hurry, do not borrow” - these are the rules Lyubota learned through suffering during these 11 years.

            It is not the first time I listen to Valery’s story about America. Last November he shared his impressions at the conference “Literature and Culture of Slobodian Ukraine.” Now we are at a TV studio. He is waiting for his turn to be recorded for a series of Oleksandr Ivanov’s shows about Kupyansk’s economy. We have some time to talk.

            Generally speaking, there is no way I can call my talks with Valery “interviews.” For I have known this person since the first days of his career in construction. There were TV shows in the “Introduction” series, there was a TV show “Meeting for You,” TV features and evenings at “Mill,” Kivsharivka’s intellectual show, which Lyubota sponsors. There were trips to White Hill. We worked together in advertising. There was even a roundtable at the premises of the Visnyk Kupyanshchyny newspaper, which Lyubota sponsored and in which he participated. That is why talks with him are really talks. They are encounters, brief time for communication amidst the whirlpool of events. They are not simply interviews.

            So last August Valery Lyubota went on a three-week study tour to Kharkiv’s American sister city - Cincinnati.

- I cannot say that something surprised me. Rather, things got me interested. What got me interested, first of all, was that Americans do not have “giant-mania.” The companies we visited employ not more than 100 people. Small businesses - that is what they consider the most effective.

            High culture at work. There are no long smoke breaks as such. An individual eats lunch, takes a break, and goes back to work in 15 minutes. They work a lot.

            High culture in behavior. Almost nobody smokes. In the state of Ohio, where Cincinnati is, they passed a law - can you imagine? - prohibiting sales of liquor stronger than 25%.

            Movies. If they show an American movie here, you will see at once debauchery and explicit sexuality on the screen. Over there, no matter how long I watched their 18 TV channels, the most sexually explicit was an episode with a couple kissing.

            Americans love to have fun during their leisure time. Crowds aged 12-80 gather in parks for evening concerts. You can see the following picture: Young parents dance to the music, while their child is peacefully asleep under a tree nearby. And what is interesting, that in contrast to our “law-governed” country, the U.S. is certainly not a police state. There were only two policemen for 3,000 visitors in that park.

            I was also impressed with civic life in Cincinnati. When its residents decided that a downtown stadium had become obsolete, they set up a fund, contributed money and got a new stadium built. Everybody uses the stadium, jogs there or attends football games. The old stadium got dismantled. The old blocks were collected and taken away for further use in construction. They do not throw anything away. They do not destroy things when dismantling them. Everything gets used.

            The warranty for construction is, as a rule, 25 years. You will ask me why. Because in 25 years a house will become obsolete. Its exterior will grow old, its architectural elements will fall out of fashion. Although, over this period it will sustain practically no physical deterioration.

            If that is of interest, they use quite different construction technologies in America. First of all, there are no unified standards. Each building is individual, both in technology used and design. They use light materials - wood, dry wall. There are no brick or panel buildings. They use plastic for exterior design. There are plants that manufacture pre-fab homes. We got a very detailed introduction to American construction technology. We noticed great equipment in their concrete trucks. Each of them has a radio and a telephone. We also appreciated their wonderful roads.

            Americans live in neighborhoods. Some are for the middle class, some for the upper middle class, some for the wealthy. There are no poor neighborhoods at all. The wealthy people have swimming pools, children’s playgrounds, their own woods, alarm systems, which make it possible for the building owner to see the whole block. The middle-class people live in “pits”: two-level multi-apartment buildings with one entrance.

I realize during this conversation that the overseas “pits” are better than the housing of the Ukrainian lower middle class - teachers, journalists, workers of culture.

            Lyubota knows how to speak. A lot of people commented on that. And now I understand that I did not write down exactly what he said, did not keep his style. But the bright impression his talk left on me allowed me, I hope, to memorize the most important things. 

- Do you know what is surprising? he concludes unexpectedly. - No matter how many Ukrainian bosses went to America, nobody has changed anything here. Great changes require comprehensive programs, at the Oblast level, for example. We, 14 construction managers from the Oblast, went on this study tour. Who in Kharkiv invited us to come together and share our thoughts? Who is seriously thinking in Ukraine about job creation and business development? Our income tax is 30%. It is 34% in the U.S. But we obediently pay it to the government. They [Americans] can use it for their company’s development - say, to buy computers, or to spend it on charitable programs without paying anything to the government. Well, that is high politics. But we urgently need to change our life. At least, clean up our city, remodel our buildings, equip our yards and provide examples of beauty to everybody.

We will continue our column “Ours in America.” I will add that Kupyansk residents got to America because they proved to be very capable candidates for this study tour. Because they worked and learned about their profession a lot. All that started with a proposal made by Lyudmila Vasylivna Dudka, director of the Kharkiv Business Assistance Center. Two years ago she proposed that the Audit-Kupyansk Co. write a proposal to get a grant from the American Eurasia Foundation. Out of 40 candidates in our Oblast, grants were awarded to Zmiyov, Dergachi, Kegichevka, Pechenigy and Kupyansk. That is how the Business Center was created in Kupyansk. It conducted nine training sessions in marketing and management for small and medium businesses, in conjunction with specialists from the Regional Center. The best managers from the construction and food industries, who had submitted business plans, participated in Kharkiv seminars over three months, passed tests and interviews, and were selected to go on three-week study tours in the U.S. One of the best was Valery Lyubota.