1950s, with veteran New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling, famed for his distinctively literary journalism, increased her regard for nonfic- tion writing.
She certainly published her fair share of it, appearing everywhere from McCall's to the New York Times. Her New Journalism-style portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, A Mother In History (1966), complete with per- sonal asides, received mixed reviews. She churned out articles such as "Love among the Rattlesnakes," on Charles Manson, "It's Not the Thought That Counts," revealing her aversion to Christmas, and "Somebody Out There Hates Me," a response to the hisses and boos that greeted her Oswald book.
For all that, Ryan notes, Stafford was out of step with the New Journalism in one impor- tant regard. A cultural conservative, she was appalled by all the "isms" of late-20th-century America, from consumerism to feminism, and especially by what she saw as the decline of her beloved English language. Stafford wrote that she yearned for a world "predicated on the principles of construction and conserva- tion," for a new "Age of Orderu-perhaps for a culture more hospitable to "a writer as tra- ditional as I."
OTHER NATIONS
Ukraine's Crash Landing?
A Survey of Recent Articles
When Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union in a referendum on December 1, 1991, many of them believed that democracy and the free market would automatically follow, writes Angela Stent, a Georgetown University politi- cal scientist, in World Policy Journal (Fall 1994). Now, they know better.
Ukraine (pop. 52 million) is still gov- erned by its Soviet-era constitution because
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the Rada has blocked efforts to have a new one drawn up. And while free elections for the parliament and the presidency have been held, Ukraine's economy is in a shambles, beset by high inflation and unem- ployment. Hardship is "widespread," An- drew Cowley reports in the Economist (May 7, 1994). The cost of food, by one estimate, rose more than 4,300 times between Decem- ber 1991 and March 1993.
Under independent Ukraine's first presi- dent, Leonid Kravchuk, there was much talk about economic reform-but no reform. Misha Glenny, author of The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992), notes in an op-ed piece in theNew York Times (July 14,1994) that Kravchuk "remained an unreconstructed Communist."
Kuchma, former head of the world's big- gest missile factory, at Dnepropetrovsk, served as Kravchuk's prime minister from October 1992 to September 1993, when he re- signed over the government's foot-dragging. He defeated Kravchuk in a run-off election for the presidency last July. That gives Ukraine "a chance to start over and take on the challenge of internal reconstruction," notes Eugene B.
Rumer, a senior staff member with the RAND Corporation. "But," he adds in Foreign Policy (Fall 19941, "it is only a slim chance, and the odds are even less in Ukraine's favor than they were at the outset of its independence."
The political gridlock that has blocked eco- nomic reform reflects a much larger problem facing Kiev. "The histories and traditions of both eastern and western Ukraine are so dif- ferent," Misha Glenny notes, "that the creation of a democratic, independent Ukraine in- volves unifying two countries." The western region, which is overwhelmingly Ukrainian in language and culture, is a hotbed of natio-nal- ism, while in the highly Russified east, which has much of the country's heavy industry and is closely tied to the Russian economy, the sense of national identity is weak. The mother tongue of most easterners is Russian.
Many of Ukraine's 11 million ethnic Rus- sians supported independence in 1991, in the belief that it would raise their living stan- dards, F. Stephen Larrabee, another senior staff member with the RAND Corporation, points out in Arms Control Today (July-Aug. 1994). "But if Ukraine's economy continues to decline while Russia's rises, it could provoke increased pressure for [regional] autonomy and closer ties to Russia. The result could be a growing split between eastern and western Ukraine, possibly even leading to civil war. In such a case, Russian military intervention can- not be excluded."
Ukrainian nationalists may look upon their country's history as a story mainly of victim- ization, but Russians take a very different view, observes Paula J. Dobriansky, an ad- junct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a U.S. National Security Council staff member dur- ing the Reagan administration. "Russians genuinely believe that, the commonly suffered privations of communism aside, throughout most of its history their country has behaved altruistically toward fellow Slavs in general and Ukrainians in particular," she writes in the National Interest (Summer 1994). For gen- erations, Russian textbooks have depicted the 1654 Treaty of Pereyslavskaya Rada, which brought Ukraine into the Russian Empire, "as a glorious event that freed Ukraine from Ot- toman and Polish oppression."
Most Russians today find the existence of an independent Ukraine hard to accept. "For them," RAND'S Stephen Larrabee says, "Ukraine is inextricably tied to Russia through language, culture, and history." Most Rus- sians, according to opinion surveys, including most of the country's democratic politicians, regard Ukrainian independence as "a tragic mistake" in need of correction, Dobriansky notes. Even so, Russia's mainstream political leaders seem content for the moment to wait for that correction to happen by itself.
Ukraine imports 90 percent of its natural gas and 50 percent of its oil from Russia. "Over the past year," Larrabee writes, "Mos- cow has several times shut off the supply of both because Kiev has not paid its debts, which amount to about $3.2 billion." Ukraine has had little choice but to forge closer eco- nomic ties to Russia.
"The most serious threat to the integrity of the Ukrainian state," in Stephen Larrabee's view, comes from Crimea, the traditional va- cation spot on the Black Sea for Russian tsars and the Soviet nomenklatura. In 1954, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev "gave" the Crimea to Ukraine in celebration of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's unification with Russia. Khrushchev's grand gesture had no practical meaning at the time, but now, with an independent Ukraine, it does. Some 70 per- cent of Crimeans are ethnic Russians. In De- cember 1991,54 percent of Crimean residents voted for an independent Ukraine. Since then,
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the economy has crumbled. Now Crimeans-and their ethnic Russian presi- dent, Yuri Meshkov, elected last January- seem to want independence from Ukraine. Kiev has urged Russia not to encourage that
Down and Out In Western Europe
"The Future of Europe" by Daniel Bell, in Dissent (Fall 1994), 521 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017; "Europe and the Underclass," in The Economist (July 30,1994), 25 St. James St., London, England SW1A 1HG.
To most Americans, it is a depressingly famil- iar story, the linked details forming an almost numbing litany of social failure: urban pov- erty, chronic unemployment, crime, drug abuse, single-parent families. Now, sad to say, the underclass has ceased to be a strictly American story. "In cities across Western Eu- rope-such as Frankfurt and Berlin, Lyons and Paris, Amsterdam and Utrecht, Naples and Dublin, Liverpool and Manchester-the shadowed lives of the urban poor are getting darker," the Economist reports. Long-term unemployment appears to be the driving force, and the munificent European welfare state seems to be making the problem worse.
Manufacturing jobs in Western Europe are fast disappearing, and not enough new jobs are being created to absorb the long-term un- employed. More than 40 percent of the 17mil-lion jobless in the European Union have been out of work for a year or longer; one-third have never worked at all. Most are native whites. Four Dutch sociologists found that about 55 percent of the long-term unemployed in their sample taken in three Dutch cities had stopped looking for work. Some had simply lost heart. But more than half had found "other activities to give meaning to their lives: hobbies, voluntary work, studying, or work- ing in the informal economy." With its gener- ous welfare benefits, the Dutch researchers concluded, Holland had produced "a group of enterprising and calculating unemployed
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desire, Eugene Rumer notes, and so far Mos- cow has shown restraint. But three years after it emerged as an independent state, Rumer says, Ukraine seems to be "on a downward spiral."
people. . . the strategically operating welfare client." Holland now has only four full-time workers for every three nonworkers receiving benefits.
For political, economic, and even moral reasons, social-welfare spending in Europe has reached its limit, sociologist Daniel Bell declares. Such spending accounts for 25 per-cent of the gross domestic product, com- pared with only 15 percent in the United States and 10 percent in Japan. "Economic costs have reduced industrial competitive- ness," he says, "while the large social-insur- ance benefits reduce labor mobility, since workers often prefer to draw on unemploy- ment compensation rather than move else- where." When the state takes too much away from those who work and gives too much to those who are idle, the incentive to work is reduced. That is a familiar conser- vative argument-but now, perhaps signal- ing how serious the situation has become, it is appearing in the socialist magazine Dis-sent.
Excessive social welfare is not the only major reason for the long-term unemploy- ment, Bell argues. The other is that Europe, particularly Germany, is failing to make the transition to a "postindustrial" economy, and insists on propping up inefficient smokestack industries such as steel and autos. In "the cru- cial areas of microchip technology and [com- puter] software," Bell points out, "there are no major players in Europe."
There is much talk in Europe today about what to do, but the focus is on such "illusory" solutions as enhanced social benefits and work sharing, Bell says. The real solution is "to create more jobsu-something, the Econo-mist mournfully notesÃ?â??nfo which Europe seems to have lost the knack."