LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (10/04/98)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Response to Kuropas criticism of Harvard

Dear Editor:

Even the most detailed response to questions that Dr. Myron Kuropas puts to Harvard's Ukrainian studies program (September 20) will likely be unsatisfactory if he insist, on quarreling with Harvard. Most of Dr. Kuropas' queries relate to the past, i.e., issues that have already been aired and assessed. It's like questioning the merits of a black and white television at a time when everyone already has color. What's the point, if not just to settle a personal score with Harvard?

Although Dr. Kuropas does not address the substance of the responses to his previous criticism, he now raises new ones, unfortunately, replete with incomplete and questionable comparisons.

Dr. Kuropas seems to feel that Harvard should publish works that he deems fit, like popular histories of Ukraine. Authors do use various publishers, and it's not clear why other venues for presenting Ukraine to the general public should be avoided. Robert Conquest did his work on the Great Famine while affiliated with the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, and the institute and the Ukrainian National Association provided support for him, yet his monograph "Harvest of Sorrow" came out at Oxford University Press. More recently, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press published the very successful book "Ukraine Between East and West" by Ihor Sevcenko for the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research, even though Prof. Sevcenko is from Harvard and the lectures presented in the book originated at Harvard.

Dr. Kuropas' comparison of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies' publishing record on Ukrainians in Canada and the U.S. is somewhat incomplete and assumes incorrectly that the two institutions have similar missions and comparable publication profiles. He overlooks the long-lasting cooperation that exists between the two institutions and the division of labor that they practice. He also comes up short in his graduate student assessment. A call to Cambridge, Mass., or to Edmonton would have spared us the invidious comparisons. With respect to studies of Soviet disinformation regarding Ukrainians: the Ukrainian Research Institute is developing a research program focusing on new documents from the 20th century, including the World War II period.

I hope Dr. Kuropas will explain what's shabby about the Millennium of Christianity in Rus'-Ukraine booklets to which he alludes. It's odd that he did not mention the institute's Millennium publications, but instead chose publications of the Ukrainian Studies Fund (USF), the Ukrainian community organization founded by membes of the Ukrainian student's organization SUSTA in 1957. Each booklet featured reprints of important (and hard-to-get) articles on Ukrainian history and culture.

The reason they were published was because: "the Ukrainian Studies Fund [sought] to make available interpretations of the course of Ukrainian history from a perspective so lacking in most American history classes." This quote appears in the booklet titled "From Kievan Rus' To Modern Ukraine: Formation of the Ukrainian Nation" (1984) that featured Mykhailo Hrushevsky's classic piece "The traditional scheme of 'Russian' history ... ."

The Hrushevsky essay appeared in English in The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1952 with a modest press run. The Ukrainian Studies Fund reprinted this and other articles, and disseminated about 30,000 copies at a time when the Ukrainian community did not have anything else that could highlight the approaching Millennium of Christianity as a Ukrainian commemoration. Purchase orders we received show that this "shabby" series was acquired by many non-Ukrainians.

Less obvious may have been the collateral benefit that these "shabby" booklets provided when an astute cataloger at the Library of Congress used them to expand the classification "Ukraine-Church History ... ." It was time to displace the archaic, but still widely used classification "Russia-Church History," under which most older books about early Ukrainian history were catalogued. We are pleased that so much mileage came out of this "shabby" reprint series.

Dr. Kuropas should also be pleased to learn that the remedies he recommended are already practiced. The visiting committee of the Ukrainian Research Institute became a formal university body in 1974 and is composed of academics, donors and representatives of Ukrainian institutions. It meets every two or three years and its duty is to keep the university's Board of Overseers well informed about the state of Ukrainian studies program at Harvard. Its recommendations are carefully considered by the university.

Publicity and fund-raising are the responsibility of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, which is based in New York. We access a donor base of about 4,000 individuals, while others, like The Ukrainian Museum in New York and the Ukrainian Free University Foundation, maintain donor pools several times larger. Thus, support that Dr. Kuropas could generate for Ukrainian studies by publicizing some of the achievements of Harvard's Ukrainian studies program would help tremendously.

It has been common practice since 1973 for Ukrainian Studies Fund contributors to earmark donations for particular purposes. Actually, USF pioneered this concept in the Ukrainian community. For new named endowed funds and gifts for particular purposes, the Ukrainian Studies Fund follows guidelines established by Harvard University. Stipulation carries much responsibility and is discussed beforehand with contributors.

Unrestricted donations made to the USF are usually accumulated as principal added to Ukrainian endowed funds at Harvard, with only the endowment earnings being available each year for Ukrainian studies. Funding Ukrainian scholarship with endowed funds was another innovation that the USF brought to our community. We should thank the "grunts" of the USF, past and present, for their vision and efforts, because their endowed approach is successful and has since been emulated by other Ukrainian institutions.

Dr. Kuropas probably knows that the Ukrainian community subsidizes not only the Ukrainian studies program at Harvard, but many academic institutions working with Ukrainian studies: Yale, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian Free University (Munich), St. Basil's College, Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research, Ukrainian Catholic Educational Foundation, St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox College, Sheptytsky Institute and others. Statistics show that Harvard does not receive the most from the community all of the time, but that it did the best with what it received. For example, take the $1.8 million of community donations entrusted by the Ukrainian Studies Fund to Harvard in 1968-1972. Harvard University's latest financial report (Fiscal Year 1997) lists the market value of these endowments at slightly over $10 million i.e., a 460 percent increase in value of the community's investment in Ukrainian scholarship. And, during all of these years, the endowments produced income that was spent on Ukrainian studies each year since 1973. This is a great return for the community.

Representatives of the USF regularly participate in community meetings, present information on the latest happenings at Harvard University and convey to the Ukrainian Research Institute the interests and concerns of donors. For example, the UNA Senior's Convention has been kind enough to invite a Ukrainian Studies Fund representative to speak at Soyuzivka for the last three years. Attendees also get to view an exhibit of current institute publications.

The Ukrainian Studies Fund welcomes the opportunity to visit communities and will provide assistance with planning, publicity and expenses. We can be reached at: Ukrainian Studies Fund, Harvard University, 1583 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138.

Roman Procyk
Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Roman Procyk manages operations for the Ukrainian Studies Fund (USF) and has been with the USF since 1975.

Many unanswered questions re: UOC

Dear Editor:

Despite the coverage that has appeared in The Weekly regarding the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., an overarching question - as yet unanswered - presses to the forefront. Was all this an honest mistake, a result of good intentions gone awry, or was this a deliberate Trojan horse? Impolitic as it may be to pose the question, the upcoming UOC Sobor in October will have to ask and answer it.

One starting point is the glaring abyss between yesterday's promise of unity, strength and independence, and today's tortured reality. Does incompetence, ignorance or simple negligence adequately explain the chasm between stated goals and accomplished results?

A second, more sobering starting point is that what was "yesterday's" promise and what is "today's" reality in most cases were actually simultaneous events, the dichotomy between the two co-existing already three years ago and more. Our hierarchs promised things, made representations, at the very time that they knew the facts and circumstances were very contrary because they themselves created those facts and circumstances.

We know that Bound Brook endlessly assured the faithful that "nothing will change, that everything will remain the same," that "we will maintain our constitutional integrity," that "our Church never betrayed its independence." Yet we also know that, as assurances were being made that all this was conceived to promote the autocephaly of our Church, our bishops had simultaneously agreed - with disclosure to no one - to become bishops of another Church based in Turkey, voluntarily surrendered our autocephaly in the diaspora and agreed not to support it in Ukraine (Protocol No. 937).

After years of silence, just recently our and Canada's hierarchs suddenly pleaded bewilderment about the very existence of the infamous Protocol No. 937. Yet we know that it had been published and disseminated worldwide under their aegis without denial, excuse or explanation.

We know that for years Bound Brook succeeded in convincing our Church leaders in Ukraine of the Christian grace of its cause. Thus, on April 11, 1995, Kyiv Patriarch Volodymyr Romaniuk abruptly reversed his public call for diaspora unity with the Kyiv Patriarchate (issued only a month before), and officially expressed his "joy" over Bound Brook's deal with Istanbul. Even Patriarch Volodymyr's successor, the "street smart' Patriarch Filaret, had been convinced, to the point of writing on September 28, 1995, the very eve of the 1995 Sobor, also expressing his support.

This allowed the Rev. John Nakonachny to broadcast in his March 22 letter to The Weekly that Patriarchate Filaret "expressed his joy at our recognition" by Istanbul. The Rev. Nakonachny further wrote that he proclaimed to seminarians in Ukraine that the autocephaly of our Church in the diaspora was "recognized" when, in truth it was voluntarily surrendered and our Church became subservient to a foreign Church irreconcilably opposed to ours. And he knew that.

Finally, we most certainly know that our bishops have endlessly repeated that the deal was approved by the last Sobor, when in fact the 1995 Sobor resolution specifically interposed two overriding preconditions to approval, neither of which have been accepted by Patriarch Bartholomew and, safe to say, never even presented to him. This leaves the Points of Agreement a dead letter as far as any Sobor approval is concerned. Yet, for the last three years Bound Brook has been deliberately publicizing a "done deal" even though operating without authority and in direct violation of its own Constitution.

Yet a third starting point for the question is that our bishops swore loyalty to, and chose as their supreme hierarch, a person whose stated position they know was and remains that of an enemy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and, concomitantly, the proponent of a murderous, hypocritical institution that presses its stranglehold in Ukraine, both east and west. They understood quite well what they embraced, and therefore endorsed. There never has been any secret about it. Predictably, after Patriarch Bartholomew's statements in Odesa, Bound Brook nonetheless loudly trumpeted a counterfeit surprise. Suddenly, it's "news".

The clincher will be Moscow's and Istanbul's grant of "autocephaly" to Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan, Moscow's janissary in Ukraine. Our bishops, who have already elected to be "in communion" with Patriarch Alexei (a successor of Stalin's original appointee) will come under Sabodan's jurisdiction. After all, Bound Brook's Council of Bishops itself approvingly quoted Patriarch Bartholomew's intention that it be "united" with Kyiv. And what happens to Bound Brook's memorial for 7 million famine victims? Back into the hands of the perpetrator.

One should think, hard, about the June 1971 decision of Moscow's Synod of Bishops decision to bring the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the diaspora within its jurisdiction. Moscow's newly elected Patriarch Pimen well knew that, with Metropolitan Mstyslav at the helm, it would take a generation or more. And now? After initially professing devotion and commitment (including money; remember the much-touted fund-raising?) for the Kyiv Patriarchate, "our" bishops have now anathemized it.

On June 30, the Rev. Frank Estocin, dean of the Philadelphia Deanery and secretary of the Consistory, derisively referred to the UOC-Kyiv Patriarchate, not as a church, but as a mere "ecclesiastical jurisdiction," and declared it "an insult to holy Orthodoxy." He added that "it is an obvious fact of life that the interests of authentic Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity will not be served in Ukraine, Canada, the U.S.A ... by groups who spread schism" [read: the Kyivan Patriarchate].

I previously wrote briefly about the mind-bending Russian influence in Bound Brook since Patriarch Mstyslav's death. How about the fact that "Bozhe Velykyi, Yedynyi" is being squeezed out of our services? Want to commemorate Alexander Nevsky, declared a "hero of Russia" by Stalin? Now you know where to go to get your handout specifying the "holy" day on which to do that. The Rev. Estocin's son, Andrew Estocin, preps the "raby" (serfs) by writing in his regular column in The Orthodox Word that we abandon "secular provincialism" and in The Weekly that Metropolitan Sabodan is a nice guy.

The cat's out of the bag. (Or, if you prefer, the "shylo" just poked through the "mishok.") This all comes to pass by accident? Mistake?

Victor Rud
Ridgewood, N.J.

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