Oral history project illuminates state-building process in Ukraine (08/25/96)

Oral history project illuminates state-building process in Ukraine

by Marta Kolomayets
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - What began as an evening of reminiscences among friends over a year ago has turned into an oral history project on contemporary Ukraine, growing way beyond the original expectations of its initiators.

Interviews capturing the individual accounts and opinions of more than 70 political, cultural and religious leaders and journalists from Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, the United States and Canada are recorded in over 200 hours of videotape in a project that adopted the title "Project on the Oral History of Independent Ukraine."

Originally intended as an eyewitness account of the events that occurred during the week of August 19-26, 1991, in Kyiv, the group of Western journalists and diplomats who resided in Ukraine's capital city that summer soon realized that in order to record the demise of the Soviet Union and the events that led up to that historic August 24, they would have to trace the development of the democratic movement in the Ukrainian SSR from the late 1980s to 1991.

Although many argued that the interviews should go back as far as the Chornobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, it was soon decided that the oral history project would begin with the celebrations of the Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine and go through 1991, and would concentrate on leaders from Ukraine. In order to give the events of the time a global perspective, leaders from other countries were included in the project.

However, as interviews were conducted with various political leaders - among them such former Soviet dissidents as Vyacheslav Chornovil and Levko Lukianenko - the time line often went back to events of the early 1960s. Religious leaders such as Patriarch Filaret, the Very Rev. Ivan Dacko of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, as well as Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Jemilev were also interviewed.

This project was presented to the public during a press conference on August 19 - on the fifth anniversary of the failed Moscow coup - at the Writer's Union building. This was the meeting place of democratic leaders, who on the same day five years ago made historic decisions that led to the declaration of Ukraine's independence on August 24.

In a 10-minute promotional video-clip, journalists got a glimpse not only of scenes of mass meetings and strikes, but also some of the gems of the project, including Communist leader Petro Symonenko's expressions of longing for the Soviet Union, President Lech Walesa's statement that "there cannot be an independent Poland without an independent Ukraine," and Leonid Kravchuk's recollections of his attempts to reach Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev after the events of August 19.

Margarita Hewko, who lived through these events in Kyiv, took the initiative to set up the project and became its first director, working out of Ukraine. She was later joined by Sarah Sievers, who now acts as the U.S. co-director and is a fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

"But, this project could not have been possible without the assistance of so many people working together on a volunteer basis," said Mrs. Hewko, who, after five years of living in Ukraine, recently moved to Prague with her husband, John, a lawyer with Baker & MacKenzie, and their daughter, Maria.

And she still hopes to do 30 more interviews before January, a self-imposed deadline for phase one of this ambitious project, with such people as former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, former U.S. President George Bush and his secretary of state James Baker III, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter.

The list of interviewed leaders already is impressive, including four former presidents/parliamentary leaders: Mr. Kravchuk of Ukraine, Mr. Walesa of Poland, Vitautas Landsbergis of Lithuania and Speaker Stanislau Shushkevich of Belarus. It includes politicians of all political persuasions, including Mr. Chornovil of Rukh and Mr. Symonenko of the Communist Party, as well as forgotten players of pre-independence days, such as student leader Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, who initiated the movement's hunger strikes, and Gen. Valentyn Varennikov, who was the Soviet functionary assigned to Ukraine to inform Parliament Speaker Kravchuk about the putsch that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Leading Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, Russian and Western journalists were the interviewers for the project - and many of them were also interviewed to give their perspective of the events leading up to Ukraine's independence.

[In last week's issue of The Weekly, excerpts selected by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute from interviews with four politicians who took part in the project were published, giving readers a glimpse of the type of materials that will be available some time next year.]

Phase two of the project, which has already begun, includes transcribing and editing the hundreds of hours of oral history, translating into Ukrainian and English, and then making this available to students, scholars, researchers and journalists in both Ukrainian and Western university libraries and research centers.

Currently, the project directors are reluctant to release any of the information; to date, only the excerpts published in The Weekly and videoclips presented on the Ukrainian news show "Pislia Mova" and featured in the 10-minute promotional clip have been made public. Members of the management board have said that some surprising new bits of information are presented in interviews with various leaders.

If all goes well and funding can be raised - the seed money included private funds from John and Margarita Hewko - the project hopes to expand its original scope and include a television documentary and videotape with highlights from the tapes as well as the oral history in book form, providing not only the interviews with various leaders but also commentaries on the contents.

Currently, the Project on the Oral History of Independent Ukraine has received financial support totaling $37,000 from such organizations as the Yale Center of International and Regional Research (Council on Russian and Eastern European Research), the Chopivsky Family Foundation and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Kyiv.

It is academically supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

Members of the board of managers of this project - besides Mrs. Hewko and Ms. Sievers - include Ukrainian journalists Dmytro Ponomarchuk, who has worked with Rukh for more than six years, and Mykola Veresen, a reporter for the BBC Ukrainian and Russian services, who is also the alternating anchor for a weekly television news show called "Window on the World."

Oleksander Tkachenko, the journalist, host and producer of Ukraine's most popular news show á la "60 Minutes," which is called "Afterword" (Pislia Mova), and Susan Viets, the BBC World Service correspondent in Ukraine for more than two years, also are members of the board as are Mr. Hewko, legal adviser for the project, and Kateryna Khinkulova, the project manager.

The board of directors of this project includes Suzanne Miller (U.S. Ambassador William Green Miller's wife), Mr. Chornovil, Volodymyr Vasylenko (former Ukrainian ambassador to Belgium), Gen. Kostiantyn Morozov (Ukraine's first minister of defense) and Prof. Orest Subtelny, the author of "Ukraine: A History."

For more information on the project or to help with financial contributions, contact Mrs. Hewko in Prague at 422 549-397 or Ms. Sievers in Boston at (617) 577-5517.