The Rusava collective farm, like many other former kolkhozes, slid into a formidable pit of arrears. Back wages alone amounted to UAH 300,000 [$57,000]. To avoid criminal prosecution, the management started meting out the farm livestock as reimbursement. The back wages due Andriy Kushnir, 74, totaled UAH 4,000, plus UAH 7,230 worth of his property entitlement. But the old hostler refused to take cows. He wanted to take his dear black horses that cost four thousand at the most. He didn’t care, although the 40 years of his life he had devoted to the farm attending to the horses were worth a lot more. So he brought his “kids”, as he called his horses, to his home, lest they get into the “wrong hands”.

The farm accountant refused to accept his request. The old man was stunned to hear that the horses were going to be given to the neighboring village in reimbursement for debts. Into strange and surely wrong hands… That was, perhaps, for the first time in his life that the old man fell ill. His children rushed to the local authorities, asking them to let the old man have those horses. They were his reason for living, and maybe his last wish on earth, which he certainly deserved…

But the officials stared at the petitioners as if they were imbeciles and before long, officials came to the old veteran, accompanied by militiamen, to take away the horses. “Hey, old man, do you have a warrant? If you don’t, then you stole them. Now, get the horses to the farm!” And the old man, used to discipline, obeyed silently and drove the horses to the farm. He cleaned them and brushed their manes for the last time. Then he went back to the empty stable and - hanged himself.

Now we can only guess that without that pair of horses life must have lost its meaning for the old man. He died together with his last belief in justice.

After that disgraceful incident all the officials who had turned down the old man and his children had to look for excuses. As it turned out, the district administration head and even the people’s deputy from the neighboring village Lipovka, Mykola Melnyk were in the know. They called one another on the phone, but finally figured that there was nothing to worry about, because the law prohibited their meddling in economic disputes.

That’s correct, formally. But on the other hand - wouldn’t one word from the district administration head have been enough? And the people’s representative might well have objected earlier, before the terrible event. He has more rights to intervene than anybody else. But they must have forgotten their own boyhood, and how they pastured horses…

The whole village cried for the good old man. He had never missed a single day at work, he had never even been late - he never drank. No one could remember when he had refused to help - with plowing a garden or bringing firewood to a widow’s house. He helped people from his heart, not for a bottle of hooch…

At the funeral dinner, someone recalled how, in the heat of his son’s wedding party, Andriy appeared before the guests wearing his stable robe, all soaked with horse sweat. The guests found it hard to swallow, he was just going to the farm, as usual as his horses wouldn’t eat or drink from anyone else’s hands…

How many more such old men are there in Ukrainian villages, to whom not only their kolkhozes, but the whole country is indebted? How many more “little tragedies” have to happen before the Soviet attitude to human relationships, old as it is, is finally dead and gone?

They have no money to live the way they are used to even within their small yards and gardens. Officially, there is no poverty in the Vinnytsia region since Governor Viktor Kotsemir declared the very word poverty not applicable to his region, he did so in front of a large audience. The word was removed from use, but poverty is still there, as well as millions of debts. Moreover, it caused a big scandal, when the State Statistics Committee turned down the governor’s report on completely clearing wage arrears in 2002. The figures were too different from those stated in the Pension Fund’s books - the difference was almost UAH 80 million [$15M]. More than half that sum is the money owed to farmers for their work.

Reincarnationists say that every human being was an animal in a previous life. If that is true, Andriy Kushnir must have been a horse. His fellow-villagers never thought about that before. but when they came to see him off on his last journey, they brought along horses. Not his, though. His “kids” were already far away…