PERSPECTIVES: An eye on the past, a look to the future (06/29/97)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

An eye on the past, a look to the future

Many years ago when I was going to college, I played a record of the Red Army Chorus and Band. My mother asked me to turn it off. "But it's beautiful music," I protested.

"I know," she said. And that's why she couldn't stand to hear it. It reminded her of when the real Red Army marched into her Podillian village in 1944.

"They sang so beautifully," she said, "... but they were so cruel. They beat people and killed without mercy ... these were the songs they sang as they marched by."

That exchange opened the door for me to many discussions with my mother about what she had witnessed in World War II during German occupation, Soviet "liberation" and the partisan war in the years immediately following. Much later, after she and my father both passed away, I found more than three years' worth of letters - two or three a week - that my mother wrote my father throughout their forced separation during the war. It was only last year that I finally sat down and read them.

They amplified the impact of what she had related over the kitchen table, the mere memory of which left her gasping in horror three and four decades later. She saw young women ("nashi divchata" - our girls) being shipped off to Germany to work slave labor. Young Ukrainian men ("nashi khloptsi" - our boys) were executed before her very eyes for taking up arms against the Red Army in a hopeless struggle for independence from the Soviet version of the Russian Empire.

She saw the bodies of massacred Jews littering the main street of her village; others were in the woods hiding in hopeless terror. Some of the villagers ("nashi liudy" - our people) were complicit in these crimes; others risked their lives to help the victims. Most people - like my Mama - cowered in fear and prayed that the nightmare would pass them by. As she recalled those events, a dark, painful cast would come over her eyes, she'd shake her head and almost whisper, "No, you can't treat human beings like that."

My mother's experience was but a tiny sliver of the hell that constitutes much of 20th century Ukrainian history. My father had his own story that included Polish prison in the '30s, arrest in Vienna and a Nazi prison later in 1943, cat-and-mouse games with the Soviet secret police ... Many post-World War II Ukrainian refugees could relate similar stories. Famine survivors from eastern Ukraine lived through even greater horrors.

Growing up in Cleveland's old Ukrainian neighborhood near Lincoln Park, I knew the outline of Ukrainian history and absorbed many of our people's stories from the very air I breathed, but because I grew up with them they seemed almost ordinary. It took until my adulthood when they were gone, to fully associate these kinds of stories with my parents, and to realize how extraordinary their experience had been and how heroic their generation was to have nurtured the idea of Ukrainian independence in the face of such hopeless odds.

Now, as I read my mother's letters - desperate with longing for my father and frantic with fear for herself and their infant child, both of them trapped in a remote village with the frontline of the most horrible war in history soon to pass by her front door - I wonder what she would have made of all the diplomatic activity that occurred in May of this year when free and independent Ukraine signed a friendship treaty with Russia, a treaty with Romania settling territorial disputes, another treaty with Poland, a boundary agreement with Belarus and a special partnership charter with the world's most powerful military alliance, NATO. To top it all off, the president of the United States welcomed the president of Ukraine to the White House. In 1944, to the 27-year-old woman fighting insanity in the face of total war, all of this would have seemed an impossible fairy tale.

Today, Ukraine is one of the focal points of Europe's restructuring. Russia, whose very music was offensive to my mother, is now a "friend and partner" of Ukraine, the relationship formalized in a treaty whereby Russia recognizes Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

If I know my mother, she would first have given credit to "our boys" who fell to Red Army bullets and are now buried in unmarked graves. Independence, she'd explain, came because of the heroic sacrifice of men and women who fought in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who suffered in the labor camps, who stood up for generations at thousands and thousands of forums for Ukraine's right to exist.

Then, of course, she would bring up the Treaty of Pereiaslav, concluded nearly 350 years ago between tsarist Russia and Kozak Ukraine and point out that the treaty also guaranteed Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. I wouldn't trust Russia for one minute, she'd say. And she'd be right: Russia still yearns for empire.

Look no further than the Russian election two or three years ago when more than 30 percent voted for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a lunatic who openly admires Stalin and Hitler and wants to reconstitute the Russian Empire. Yurii Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow and a bona fide contender for Russia's presidency, is a much smoother advocate of the same imperialist dream.

That's why President Yeltsin's offer at the treaty signing to defend Ukraine in "extreme situations" set off immediate alarm bells. Volodymyr Horbulin, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, needs no history lessons. He politely and firmly stated that Ukraine did not request such assurances. Besides, he probably thought, Ukraine has an army of its own now and is working to strengthen its relationship with NATO.

Ukraine has come a long way since the dark days when her people had no voice, no defense, and faced a horrible choice between Hitler and Stalin or the suicidal decision to fight both. Today's Ukraine is built on a foundation of enormous suffering and many hard feelings. It will take a long time for the suffering to be expiated, for the hard feelings to be resolved.

The treaties Ukraine signed in May look to the future, laying the basis for good relations with those nations that destiny placed on Ukraine's borders. Those treaties, however, will be effective only if Ukraine is respected, and Ukraine will be respected if she is strong.

The country faces a generation of hard work to establish an honest society with a prosperous economy that can support an effective military. Then, when Ukraine stands as an equal in the community of nations, the beauty of other people's culture will become a delight, not a threat.

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