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now running the new system and were willing and interested in talking about it, because
it’s very much a part of their success and failure, on the one hand, and very much in their
thinking as leaders of the country. This issue of the value of work cuts across the board in
every field, and it’s something that we, in the West, certainly most diplomats don’t
usually think about. I would say that it is necessary to have an understanding of this kind
of question, if you wanted to have an empathetic insight into what motivates of leaders in
countries like Ukraine and Russia. It’s very, very necessary to share what is inside the
minds of Ukrainian leaders to begin to understand why they’re doing, in some cases,
terrible things, in some cases laudatory, generous acts.
Q: I think one of the things that’s always bothered Americans who have gone to the
Soviet Union was how poorly doctors were paid compared to the United States. I mean,
health care people …
MILLER: Yes, that’s a very interesting case in point, because, as you know, the majority
of physicians in Ukraine are women. The women doctors do most of the general health
care and especially take care of women and children. The high end of medicine is in
research. The top physicians, in fact, were very well paid, because they were on the
cutting edge of medical research and technology. They were the doctors in the best
hospitals that took care of the leadership. They were academicians. So you would find
many physicians who were professors in the university or in the Academy of Sciences, as
scientists, when they happened to be physicians. The top of the scale among what doctors
were paid and their benefits and their way of life – houses and apartments that they would
be given – were rewards. And the same one might say, even among professions like coal
miners, when you were director of the coal mine, even though you had started as a pick
and axe man at the age of 17, if you were a director you were accorded considerable
honor and benefit. You were rewarded for your lifetime of work, and this was the
philosophical congruence with Socialist theory of labor when it was justly applied. One
can say that in the major categories probably it was for the most part justly applied.
Where it fell apart, of course, is in the Soviet times, was at the top, the political class, the
sort of bureaucrats, the parasites, as the Soviet theoreticians called those who didn’t work.
They became parasites themselves, the ones who invented the notion of just reward for
hard work of benefit to society as a whole.
So there is a very deep, psychological struggle taking place among the Ukrainians,
intellectual leaders, not just thoughtful leaders in Odessa. I found it throughout Ukraine in
almost every field of work. You mentioned medicine, and I certainly saw it there among
the doctors, in their great agony about whether they should open private clinics. The
reason they opened the private clinics is because they were fed up with the bureaucrats,
not with the mission that they had devoted their lives to. They blamed the bureaucrats for
the collapse of the supply system, for necessary medicines and spare parts for the
machines in the hospitals – having enough materials and medicines to run a decent
hospital. The drive to privatization is as much a response to a now inadequate state
structure, as it is a drive to do their own thing. The collective mentality, the service to the
group idea – is still very strong in Ukraine, much stronger than it is here in the United
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