EDITORIAL: Medvid returns (02/11/01)

EDITORIAL

Medvid returns

There was a measure of justice in the arrival here for a personal visit - indeed, a pilgrimage - of the Rev. Myroslav Medvid, who made headlines more than 15 years ago as a young Soviet seaman who sought freedom in the United States by jumping ship near the port of New Orleans.

The defection of the Soviet sailor in 1985 became the Medvid affair as it escalated in importance due to an upcoming U.S.-Soviet summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Though Ukrainian Americans, others of like mind and several members of the U.S. Congress fought on behalf of Mr. Medvid, he was returned to the Soviet freighter Marshal Koniev.

When The Weekly on June 4, 2000, became the first Western publication to obtain an exclusive interview with the Rev. Medvid, we reported that he was alive and well, a clergyman of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church who had been changed by the years and his ordeal, but a man who tried to harbor no ill will against those who returned him to the hands of the Soviets or against the Soviet henchmen who beat him, drugged him, sent him to a psychiatric institution and hounded him for years.

During an interview with Roman Woronowycz of our Kyiv Press Bureau, he stated: "I am thankful to everybody, from both sides. I pray for them daily. What I lived through was my first step to the Lord." He said what happened to him in New Orleans changed his life - for the better. He turned to the Church, he said, to "show [the KGB] that I was not one of them, but a person of nature, a man of God, of the Church ..."

Fifteen years after his ordeal, he wanted to return to the U.S., where he wished to celebrate liturgy with those who had supported him in those dark days. "They probably saved my life," he explained, referring to the Ukrainian Americans who demonstrated against his return to the USSR, as well as the politicians who supported them, in the face of an intransigent U.S. government. He wanted, desperately, to be in the U.S. on October 24, exactly 15 years to the day he jumped into the Mississippi.

Our Kyiv Press Bureau wanted to help the Rev. Medvid realize his dream, and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America agreed to issue an official invitation. Nonetheless, he was rejected for a visitor's visa by U.S. consular officials in Kyiv because, in their opinion, he had failed to demonstrate that he was not a potential immigrant to the U.S. "Medvid denied, again," was the title of our editorial about yet another shameful episode. "On October 11 of this year America again rejected a request by Myroslav Medvid to enter the country. This time all he wanted to do was visit. Today the Rev. Medvid is a parish priest in good standing in a village near Lviv, but in October 1985 he was a Soviet sailor whose plea for political asylum went unheeded after he twice escaped a Soviet grain trawler," we wrote, hoping that his case would be reconsidered.

The Rev. Medvid ultimately was issued a visa and he arrived in the U.S. in mid-November. He visited several Ukrainian communities and met with many of those who had defended him. Perhaps his most significant stop was in Washington, where he met with Sen. Jesse Helms who in 1985 chaired the Senate Agriculture Committee and today is the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also met with former Rep. Don Ritter, who also spoke on his behalf.

As his U.S. sojourn was coming to a close, the Rev. Medvid stated of his life's path: "God had intended it to be that way. I am grateful, however, to have met many people who supported my actions back then."

We wish the Rev. Medvid well (and we look forward to reading his memoirs).

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