PERSPECTIVES: There's only one Ukraine, isn't there? (09/07/97)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

There's only one Ukraine, isn't there?

Maybe the most important person in the rebirth of national consciousness in post-Stalin Ukraine was the poet, Vasyl Symonenko (1935-1963). With unpretentious straightforward verse, he made it respectable again to be assertively Ukrainian and he wasn't afraid to mock people in authority when they deserved to be mocked. One of those puffed-up officials confronted Symonenko. "You said to love Ukraine, but which Ukraine are you referring to?" he challenged the poet, setting a trap where he would have to declare for a nationalist Ukraine or a communist one.

"There's but one Ukraine," Symonenko replied simply, evading the trap, while articulating a truth that's deeper than any a politician could define. Ukraine is diverse; Ukraine is age-old; Ukraine is ever-changing and eternal at the same time, Symonenko seemed to say. Well, the truth is, there is but one Ukraine, but there are a million ways to describe it. Today, Ukraine is a deeply divided country with sharply diverging historical threads waiting to be gathered and woven together.

All of this occurred to me when I got a large, unsolicited envelope in the mail from a Cincinnati woman who has just come back from Kharkiv, Cincinnati's sister city. The envelope, addressed to me as director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, contained a selection of oral histories, translated from Russian, along with photographs from 28 Ukrainian women, all of them Kharkivites, all of them World War II combat veterans of the Red Army. The interviews, recorded in September 1996, recount horrible events these women witnessed and participated in.

Lida Sokolova-Korchmar, for example, volunteered as an 18-year-old girl in 1941 and served in the Siberian Volunteer Division. She saw action as a sniper in the Crimean Peninsula and killed 32 Germans, she relates, before being wounded from her position behind the destroyed caterpillar of a burnt-out tank. In 1944 while convalescing in Moscow, she met a Ukrainian man and moved with him to Kharkiv, where together they raised their family.

Natalia Zakruzhetska volunteered in 1943 after her father was killed at Stalingrad. She rode in a tank where she served as a signaler in the second Ukrainian Front. "Our tank brigade took part in the liberation of Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Hungary, Romania, Austria and Czecho-Slovakia," she recounts. Today, a grandmother, she still carries metal fragments in her left arm and more than a dozen medals on her tunic.

Tamara Butenko was 20 when she was "baptized into combat." She has vivid memories from 1941: "It was bitter and painful during the retreat, because we saw burned-down populated areas, gunned-down or hanged children, women and old people. We would see bodies that were not burned completely, the bones of women and children." She also wears well over a dozen medals on her chest.

Like millions of other Ukrainians, these women joined the Red Army in World War II, either as volunteers or conscripts. Their experiences are part of Ukrainian history. They fought hard, suffered bitterly and survived long enough to see the Soviet Union they had fought for collapse from the weight of its own injustice and incompetence. When the future of Ukraine hung in the balance in December 1991, it was veterans like these, their children and grandchildren who voted overwhelmingly for Ukrainian independence. Kharkiv, where a third of the citizens are ethnically Russian, voted more than 90 percent for independence.

Based on the interviews I read, they still support independence, despite the hardships. Listen to Ms. Zakruzhetska, the tank brigade signaler: "We love our Motherland, our beautiful and blooming Ukraine. We hope for a better future. We would like to wish you peace. Come visit us more often. Come to our dear, singing Ukraine. Soon life here will be very good." Ms. Butenko, who saw "wells filled with corpses of children and old people," took the opportunity of the interview with her friend from Cincinnati to "address our Ukrainian women to raise their children in the spirit of patriotism - this is the most important. To be honest, to be patriots of their motherland, each woman must raise her children in such a spirit."

People like these must continue to support Ukraine if the country is to have a future, because they are the ones who are the target population for those who would reunite with Russia. You know for sure that the functionary - if he's still alive - who harassed Vasyl Symonenko 34 years ago is no friend of independent Ukraine.

For me, it was portentous and ironic that some stranger would mail me these Red Army veteran interviews, so soon after my column appeared in The Weekly about my mother and her aversion to the Red Army Chorus and Band. Many people share that aversion, I know. One of my elderly friends looked at the photographs of the women veterans with their medals and ribbons, shuddered and in Ukrainian said words to the effect that, "These Sovietky give me the creeps."

When Ukraine's history is written years from now, the present post-revolutionary era will be viewed, I think, as a period of consolidation - military treaties and economic restructuring designed to ensure a prosperous and secure Ukraine. It must also become an era of reconciliation, when the different threads of Ukrainian history are woven together. Steps need to be taken in both directions: it's vital, for example, that the Kuchma administration respond positively to the many calls that he recognize the historic significance of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), give it the recognition it deserves and provide its veterans with the same benefits other veterans receive.

It's equally important, however, that those of us with a lifelong commitment to Soviet Ukrainian independence - here and in Ukraine - accept the validity of the Ukrainian experience, especially World War II. I know that's hard, for the very reasons my mother couldn't stand to listen to the Red Army Chorus and Band, but having read the recorded memories of the women Red Army veterans I'm persuaded that they were fighting for their homes and families and not for Stalin, although Stalin certainly reaped the benefits of their efforts.

The Cincinnati woman who sent me the interviews is working with the encouragement of the Ohio Humanities Council on a major grant to tell the story of the Ukrainian women veterans and to relate Kharkiv's experience during World War II. She'd like the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland to be part of the proposal.

What should we do?

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