Shortly after the collapse of the USSR, the CIA rated Ukraine as the most likely to succeed and prosper in the post-Soviet era. Indeed, all the objective indicators were there: a highly educated population, unrivaled agricultural potential, a wide and diverse array of industry, an abundance of natural resources, temperate climate, and a strategically favorable location between the Occidental and Oriental worlds
But, in the short term, Ukrainians would have to survive a very difficult transition while the economy ground to a halt. All assets in Ukraine, other than small private homes and tiny plots of adjacent land, had been owned by “the people” (i.e., the government), and Soviet authorities never envisioned or provided for any other possibility. So the first order of business was to print up and distribute to “the workers” shares of ownership in the plants where they had been working, and to the farmers, portions of the land which they had worked “collectively.”