I've been living in Poltava, Ukraine (pop. 330,000) for the last seven months. I feel trapped in a black and white movie here. There's few shades of grey in this film. A brand new Mercedes pulled up to the curb once. In the afternoon heat I could smell the leather seats before the driver even got out. Not twenty feet away, in front of a dilapidated, pre-Stalinist shack of a residence was the hand-pump for the home's well water. It's business as usual here.

Two-thirds of all the goods in the country are sold out-doors. That isn't so bad in September, but it's a whole other block of ice in January. You think you hate your job? Try standing in –25C temperatures all day trying to sell a bucket of chicken heads. I don't know who buys them. These kinds of working conditions may also help explain the prevailing abrasive attitudes here. With Bulgaria and Romania being admitted in 2007, practically every country in eastern Europe is in the European Union except Belarus and Ukraine. At least with Belarus' very authoritarian style of government, things "work" there. But Ukraine has virtually none of the advantages of the new emerging eastern European nations and none of the advantages of the still intact old ways of Belarus.

A good case could be made that it is the worst place to live in all of Europe. Ukrainians find themselves in a political twilight zone these days. It's a weird hybrid existence trapped between east and west. Prices rise on almost a weekly schedule. Hot water and some utilities are up almost 300% this year alone. The price of a staple like bread is constantly going up.

At the same time, a friend received notice that his rent in Kiev was going from $250 US to almost $500 US. My landlord just raised mine from $150 to $250, plus the ever-rising utilities. The "hidden hand" of the marketplace might be at work, but no employers raise their wages. They all expect to keep handing out the same table scraps from the old Soviet era, a time when citizens had much more of a safety net in the form of social services. So the top 10% find their lives vastly improved while the great majority are in a downward spiral, hoping the so-called better new life will take traction before they're flushed. Deregulation has been an issue in the West for decades. Imagine being plunged into it with few of the judicial or legislative niceties routinely provided in North America and Western Europe. Some of the crunch in Kiev is being blamed on foreign investment.

There are banks on practically every corner of Poltava. I've never seen so many stores with brazenly scripted credit signs—pushers of the new dope addicting all takers. The inventiveness of the new consumer market is something to behold. It has to be to separate Ukrainians from the little cash they have.

The average monthly income of Ukrainians is now about US$300 a month. And none of these people could survive on that income if they weren't still living with parents in a house procured during the Soviet era.

Being trapped between the East and West has other unsavory results too. Russia has cut Ukraine loose, like they did with Cuba before. Remember those huge sugar subsidies? Well, here it was natural gas. Ukraine, no longer having its "special" relationship with Mother Russia, no longer receives natural gas at one quarter of the world price. Ukraine is an independent country now and must pay the rate. But being trapped in transition between opposing economic systems is particularly brutal in that the industrial oligarchs have taken all the domestic natural gas (read: cheap) for themselves, and left others to absorb the full brunt of the harsh new era.

This explains why households had no hot water for a few months.

I smile when reading about the American political posturing over Russia's energy policies. When Russia started to significantly raise the prices of its energy exports to its neighbours (but still not as much as it charges its western European customers), the Bush administration went on a propaganda offensive about “Bad Russia” using its energy resources as "a weapon."

Ukraine's federal government is a complete shambles. The Orange Revolution is a distant memory. The original "forces for change" are completely involved in internal partisan struggles. So bitter was the infighting, they could not reach any power-sharing agreement and the March elections were a disaster for them.

The "evil" and formerly disgraced (during the Orange Revolution) Russian-backed Yanukovich emerged with a plurality of the vote at the March elections, and was ultimately made Prime Minister after months of wrangling—the very same Yanukovic of the "crooked" election which helped spark the "revolution." But now he's been to the White House. The Kiev Post had a glorious photo-op on its front page a month ago showing the dazzling smiles of Condaleezza "Condi" Rice and Yanukovich as he was practically feeling her up.

During the period of no hot water, it caused hardly a stir. It is Ukraine, I was told. There are no hot water heaters in apartment buildings. It comes from one big plant in the city. No big-shot official is ever dragged from his bed at night when this sort of thing happens.

Gogol was born in the Poltava region and is a big hero here. There is a huge statue and tons of people show up on his birthday and lay roses all over the monument. "The Inspector General” is still considered the greatest Russian satire ever written. The weird thing about it is, in this part of the world, it's still as timely as it ever was. And the only reason the book and play were ever allowed to be seen and to continue with successful runs, and Gogol not arrested and jailed in his 20s, can be explained in one word: Pushkin. Pushkin had his own problems with the authorities (and was jailed), but he managed eventually to secure his position. Pushkin became untouchable. And then he took a great liking to the young Gogol and that shielded Gogol from reprisal. The Czar and all the royals went to see "The Inspector General," they stayed the entire performance and laughed heartily throughout, despite the play being a scathing indictment of everything the state bureaucracy was.

Pushkin died in a duel over a woman. The man who killed him was banished from Russia for the rest of his life, but he did manage to go on living for more than a half century, so he definitely came out with the better end of the stick.

Gogol soon went mad and died at the age of 43. Hey, it’s Ukraine!

You decide how much it's worth to you: