The Washington Group awards 1988 fellowships to three (12/25/88)

The Washington Group awards 1988 fellowships to three

WASHINGTON - Marta Kolomayets, Ihor Fedorowycz and Markian Bilynsky are the winners of 1988 Washington Group Fellowships. TWG is a Washington-based group of Ukrainian American professionals.

Ms. Kolomayets of New York City, is associate editor of The Ukrainian Weekly. She will write a monograph on the personal experiences of the Kolomayets family during the 1930s famine in Ukraine, using the resources of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine and the Library of Congress. She will receive $2,000.

Mr. Fedorowycz, a Rhodes scholar from 1980-1983 of Ann Arbor, Mich., will work on "British, French and American Foreign Policies and Ukrainian National Self-Determination in East Galicia, 1918-1923." This will serve as his dissertation at Oxford University's Queens College. He will do research at the State Department, Presidential Archives and the Library of Congress, with an award of $2,000.

Mr. Bilynsky, a TWG member and a master's student at American University, will use his $1,000 award to complete his master's thesis on the topic "A Systems Analysis of the Relationship between the Ukrainian Catholic Church and the Soviet Political Authorities Under Glasnost." A graduate of the University of Manchester and a native of England, he is pursuing his master's degree in international affairs.

Fellowship Project director Andrew Mostovych made the announcements on November 11 at a TWG Friday Evening Forum that also featured presentations by TWG member Adrian Karmazyn and Petro Melnycky, the winners of the 1987 TWG Fellowships. Their talks, at St. Sophia's Religious Center, Washington, provided enlightening information about their areas of research.

Did you know that the city of Chornobyl, near the site of the world's worst nuclear power disaster, was first mentioned in The Chronicles in 1193, a history compiled by the rulers of that period? Or that Ukrainians from Galicia who lived in Western Canada at the turn of the century were considered racially inferior beings? Messrs. Karmazyn and Melnycky offered such tidbits as they explained the work that the TWG Fellowships had funded.

Mr. Karmazyn, an international radio broadcaster at the Ukrainian branch of the Voice of America, reviewed work that included an in-depth study of portions of the 26-volume work on Ukrainian cities and towns, "Istoria Mist i Sil Ukrainy," (History of the Cities and Villages of Ukraine).

Under the guidance of Paul Goble, the special assistant for Soviet nationality affairs at the State Department, Mr. Karmazyn culled little-known facts from the massive work and set course for possible future research. He also did four case studies analyzing the data in the books and presenting some ways of using it.

He concentrated on four subjects: Communist Party membership, a tally of physicians in Lviv and Dnipropetrovske oblasts, Ukrainian casualties in World War II, and historic churches in existence in the Lviv oblast at the time of publication. In addition, Mr. Karmazyn translated from Ukrainian into English the 20-odd page history of the city of Chornobyl found in the work.

The hefty review, which he called remarkable for its thoroughness and the only work of its kind in any of the Soviet republics, was published in Ukraine between 1967 and 1974. At that time, it was more or less in sync with the prevalent Ukrainianization and anti-Russification trends. It was commissioned by the Ukrainian Communist Party, led by First Secretary Petro Shelest, a supporter of the cultural renaissance of Ukraine in the 1960s.

This history was a significant component of what Mr. Karmazyn called Shelest's campaign for glasnost" - 20 years before Mikhail Gorbachev. The work was an important part of the post-Stalin thaw in the Ukrainian SSR.

The undertaking was massive. Some 100,000 scholars, artists, historians, writers, educators and eyewitnesses, directed by Communist Party officials, were engaged in researching, writing and producing the history of 34,000 "population points" of Ukraine, Mr. Karmazyn explained.

Mr. Karmazyn gave his audience a sampling of findings from his areas of concentration. An astonishingly high proportion of war casualties in the nine Ukrainian oblasts for which figures were provided in the history were civilian, he found. (There are 25 oblasts in all, but the work does not distinguish between military and civilian casualties in the others). For example, about 92 of deaths in the Ternopil oblast were non-military. Based on the available data, Ukraine lost 12 percent of its population during the war, Mr. Karmazyn said.

He said he considers the information about houses of worship especially valuable for organizations monitoring the religious situation in Ukraine. If any churches listed as existing in 1967 no longer stand today, he said, one can only conclude that this is most likely due to the actions of Soviet authorities during the last 20 years.

"It's hard to get your hands on 'Istoria,'" Mr. Karmazyn informed his audience. Many of the volumes are in the Library of Congress, some in the European Reading Room. Even a portion of the work would be a valuable addition to the libraries of Ridni Shkoly (Ukrainian schools) where they could be used for 'Roots' projects," he added.

Mr. Melnycky, a resident of Edmonton, presented results of his research on internment of Ukrainians by the United States and Canada during World War I.

While internment in the United States was limited - only a handful of Ukrainians, ex-citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with which Canada and the U.S. were at war, was ever confined - the situation was much more grave in Canada. Of the former Austro-Hungarians in Canada, most were Ukrainians and it was they who made up the vast majority of the camp population. Canadian authorities feared that the internees were liable to commit subversive acts or otherwise interfere with the war operation.

Mr. Melnycky displayed photographs of the internment camps. Of particular interest were the pictures of the camp near Banff, Alta. During World War I, the hotel-resort that was to become world famous was rising at Banff-Lake Louise. Documents reveal the parts of the structure were constructed by internees and so, Mr. Melnycky noted wryly, visitors who marvel at the cornice work or other ornamentation on the building are admiring the work of people confined, in hindsight, very wrongfully.

Conditions at the Canadian camps were appalling - poor hygiene, inadequate nutrition, hard work and separation from families and loved ones. Most of the internees were men. In many cases, internees had to dig ditches when a camp was first established to provide a sanitation system. Shelter often consisted of flimsy tents. In the Canadian Rockies, even during the summer, this was not enough. During the winters, when outdoor work was less feasible, the camps moved into villages, Mr. Melnycky related.

One stunning photograph presented by Mr. Melnycky shows a man in the middle of a rushing river, tied by a rope to a horse onshore, being dragged upstream by the horse. This was a form of punishment that the camp officials used on one of their errant guards or staffers. One can only imagine, Mr. Melnycky said, what kind of discipline was devised for disobedient camp internees.

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