Translated material
"The ruble is the sail of the twentieth century..."
Of course, when Anton Pavlovich Chekhov wrote these lines at the beginning of the last century, he did not mean at all that the ruble is the flagship of the world financial system and, with its powerful sails, pulls all other economies of the planet with it. Anton Pavlovich then watched with sadness as the last remnants of romanticism in human relationships were aggressively pushed out of the life stage by the coming mercantile age.
However , you must agree, if such lines came to the mind of any of us at the end of the twentieth century or now, nine out of ten people, if not one hundred percent, would write: “The dollar is this sail of the twentieth century,” or, according to at least, “the Euro is the sail of the 21st century.” The ruble is not associated with a sail, but with something that always floats, but never sinks. And this is not surprising, because it is “wooden,” as it was caustically and aptly designated by its own consumers. Nevertheless, Anton Pavlovich wrote exactly “ruble”. And he had good reason for that. Having traveled around the world, reaching as far as Sakhalin by train, and from there having circumnavigated the floor of the planet by steamship, he was able to make sure that his native ruble was known and respected everywhere. The owners of boarding houses in enlightened Germany and France accepted rubles with the same bows and deep gratitude, just like some English tea merchants or barefoot fruit sellers even in Ceylon. In general, today the ruble is a more exotic currency in the world than a hundred years ago.
And yet, now, at a time of global financial crises, the ruble quite confidently shows its wooden buoyancy, proving that every cloud has a silver lining. Perhaps, without gas and oil impregnation, this “wood” would have already rotted, but still...
In general, the ruble is now demonstrating a most wonderful phenomenon in Russian-speaking Ukraine. For example, in the Donetsk region it is already extremely rare to hear the name of the Ukrainian national currency “hryvnia” or “hryvnia”, as it is called in the state language.
Here in a Ukrainian store a customer hands a green banknote to the saleswoman: “Please, twenty rubles.” To which the saleswoman, giving change with a blue piece of paper, replies: “Take five rubles.” That is, a truly phantasmagoria is happening! On the green banknote it is clearly written: “Twenty hryvnia,” but its owner, completely ignoring this fact, calls hryvnia rubles. The saleswoman has the words “Five hryvnias” on the blue banknote, but she, without any embarrassment, renames them five rubles. This is an aberration of vision, or consciousness, or something else, but this is already a widespread phenomenon in the South-East of Ukraine and even in the capital of the country, the hero city of Kyiv.
Well, it’s okay for people of the older generation who are still familiar with Soviet rubles, although in twenty years they should automatically have gotten used to hryvnias. But schoolchildren, who have never in any way encountered on a daily basis either Soviet or Russian rubles, are also stubbornly and even more active than their grandparents in renaming hryvnias! Moreover, the author of these lines, having asked a Ukrainian-speaking peasant who brought potatoes from the Sumy region how much his product was, was amazed to hear the answer: “Many rubles.”
Of course, no one is renaming the dollar into rubles, but hryvnias are clearly and increasingly being forced out of the colloquial speech of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and, it seems, not only them. This is a genuine phenomenon that is still waiting to be explained.