The Committee for the Approval of the Committee

The Ministry of Regional Infrastructure and Peripheral Concerns had, at some point in the mid-1990s, created a committee to oversee the creation of committees. This was considered, at the time, an act of administrative genius. The committee was called the Coordinating Sub-Commission for Institutional Formation Review, and it had seven members, a secretary, a rubber stamp, and a window that faced a wall.

By 2003, the committee had approved forty-one other committees. By 2011, three of those committees had been tasked with reviewing whether the original committee still needed to exist. By 2019, those three review committees had each spawned sub-committees to evaluate their own findings, and the original committee had been renamed twice — once for bureaucratic clarity and once because someone had spilled coffee on the official letterhead and the replacement paper had a slightly different font, which legally constituted a new institutional identity.

Into this situation walked Mykola Fedorovych Hrytsenko, age fifty-three, carrying a briefcase that contained one sandwich, a pen that worked intermittently, and a letter of appointment to the newly formed Temporary Oversight Panel for the Assessment of Redundant Deliberative Bodies.

His job, as far as he understood it, was to determine which committees could be dissolved.

The first committee he visited occupied three rooms on the fourth floor of a building on Horodotska Street. The committee's chair, a woman of extraordinary stillness named Valentyna Oleksiyivna, explained that their committee was essential because it processed the forms submitted by entities wishing to be recognized as committees. Without recognition, she said, a committee did not technically exist. Without existence, it could not be dissolved. Therefore, this committee was the prerequisite for all dissolution, including potentially its own, which created a philosophical situation she described as "ongoing."

Mykola wrote this down. His pen worked.

The second committee he visited did not answer the door. A note taped to the frosted glass said the committee was in session. He waited forty minutes. The note, he eventually realized, had been there since April. Which April was unclear.

The third committee was technically two committees sharing a single room and a single electric kettle, which had led to a jurisdictional dispute that was itself being reviewed by a fourth committee, which was a sub-body of the second committee — the one that didn't answer the door — and which had not met since the kettle broke.

By Thursday, Mykola had visited eleven committees. He had been offered tea seven times and coffee once, though the coffee turned out to be hot water with intent. He had been asked to sign four guest registers, two of which required a witness signature, which he provided himself after a brief internal ethical debate that he lost quickly because he was tired.

He drafted his preliminary report on a Friday afternoon, which is when Ukrainian bureaucracy achieves its most serene state of non-function. The report was eight pages. It recommended the dissolution of six committees and the consolidation of four others into a single body. He signed it, stamped it with the panel's official stamp — which he had been carrying in his briefcase next to the sandwich, now eaten — and submitted it to the Ministry.

Three weeks later, he received a letter. The Ministry had forwarded his report to the Coordinating Sub-Commission for Institutional Formation Review for review. The Sub-Commission would assess whether his panel had the authority to recommend dissolutions without first obtaining clearance from the Committee for Jurisdictional Competency Verification, which had been formed in 2007 specifically to handle such questions.

He called the Committee for Jurisdictional Competency Verification. The line rang eleven times. A man answered, sounding surprised, as though the phone had not rung in some time. Mykola explained his situation. There was a pause.

"We would need you to submit a Form 17-B," the man said.

"Where do I get a Form 17-B?"

Another pause. "We used to have them. We submitted a request for more in March."

"Which March?"

The man's voice took on the particular quality of someone consulting their memory and finding it unhelpfully vague. "A recent one," he said finally.

Mykola thanked him, hung up, and sat for a moment in his chair. Outside the window, Lviv conducted its business with its usual cheerful disregard for the systems theoretically governing it. A tram went by. A pigeon landed on the sill, evaluated the situation, and left.

He opened his briefcase, took out a new piece of paper, and began drafting a proposal for a committee to investigate the delays caused by the Committee for Jurisdictional Competency Verification.

It was the only logical next step. He could see that clearly now.

The pen, mercifully, still worked.

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