Radekhiv's citizens take their rights seriously and head for the polls (04/05/98)

Radekhiv's citizens take their rights seriously and head for the polls

by R.L. Chomiak
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

RADEKHIV, Ukraine - In this town 50 miles north of Lviv, the inhabitants take their democratic rights seriously: from morning until late afternoon on March 29 the voters lined up to cast their six ballots in the made-in-Ukraine carton ballot boxes with large golden tridents on blue shields.

Radekhiv happens to be the town where in the 1950s, Levko Lukianenko worked as a Soviet lawyer - before he got the idea of forming a political party in competition with the "one and only" Communist Party in what then was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This virulent idea ended in a death sentence for Lukianenko, later commuted to life imprisonment. Today he is no longer in prison, because the system that sentenced him collapsed. Mr. Lukianenko went on to become a statesman in independent Ukraine, now a nation with more political parties than he could have dreamed of. Now he is the honorary chairman of one of them, the Ukrainian Republican Party.

I walked to polling station No. 189 of the 119th election district with voter Osyp Baran who will be 90 this summer. Dressed in his best dark blue suit, white shirt and tie, a topcoat and a Homburg hat, supporting his ramrod body with a cane, he walked the three blocks to the polling place with the seriousness of one who knows well what it means not to have a vote. (In 1947 this former schoolteacher was sent from these parts to Stalin's Siberian gulag for 10 years, and his only daughter, now a professor at Lviv's veterinary school, carries a passport listing a Siberian birthplace.)

Around 10:30 a.m., the long and narrow hall of the Radekhiv National Home (former Soviet cultural club) looked like a Times Square subway platform during rush hour, with voters lining up in front of the 15 officials who were issuing six ballots to each eligible voter: one two-foot-long sheet with the names of the parties trying to win half the seats in the new Verkhovna Rada, one shorter ballot with the names of the candidates running for the 119th district seat who will be part of the other half of the new Rada, and four other letter-size ballots for city council, raion council, oblast council and the town's mayor.

As in other places in Ukraine, a secret vote was not possible for most voters. There were only five booths available for working with the ballots in privacy, so many voters used window sills, tables or just their laps to mark the sheets before putting them into the boxes. Consultations with relatives and friends were frequent. No one prevented a younger person from accompanying an older one into one of the booths.

Ten chairs for observers along one wall of the hall were empty in the morning, then they were filled by older women voters too tired to stand. Around 4 p.m., the polling place was still crowded and one woman sitting in an observer's chair said that this was her third visit to the polling place that day, and this time she wouldn't leave until she voted.

All age groups were represented among the voters, with several 18- and 19-year-olds voting for the first time.

Mr. Baran waited patiently, standing, for about 20 minutes to complete his civic duty; then he showed me the town where he began his teaching career in the 1930s.

A couple of blocks from the National Home are the grounds of the palace of Count Joseph Badeni, the viceroy for the Halychyna province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The palace is gone, destroyed during World War II, but a good part of the intricate brick wall surrounding the grounds still stands. Tall trees planted by Badeni's landscape architects form straight park alleys, and the neat houses built by the count for his servants line the street parallel to the palace grounds.

Nearby is the old and present market square, one side of it still lined with almost identical white townhouses once owned by Radekhiv's Jewish merchants. There also are a few buildings that went up between the two world wars when Radekhiv was part of Poland. A majority of the town's 15,000 inhabitants live in detached one- and two-story homes with a plots of cultivated land surrounding the buildings.

Even the homes built during the 1960s, and more recently, are in the style that evolved from the 19th century. In this environment, the boxes constructed by the Soviet cookie-cutting designers look simply silly. They represent the half-century-old bad dream that was very real here during the time Radekhiv was part of the "unshakable" Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

One inhabitant sarcastically remembered that during the Soviet period voting used to be 99 percent complete by noon on election day in Radekhiv. But he didn't seem to mind today's "messy democracy" with its multi-party ballots after he emerged from the crowded polling place around 4 p.m.

R.L. Chomiak, a veteran journalist who writes for The Weekly on a free-lance basis, is now stationed in Ukraine, where he heads a project for Continuum International of Alexandria, Va., to train journalists in regional media to write on economic topics, or "pocketbook issues."