PERSPECTIVES: Cold War monuments (01/13/02)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Cold War monuments

Lasting nearly half a century and costing trillions of dollars, the Cold War was the longest and most expensive conflict in U.S. history. It began soon after World War II and ended only a decade ago. Most of the world's countries and nearly every sector of American society became involved, even children. When I tell my own kids - now 7 and 11 - how we used to duck under our desks in grade school for air raid drills, their jaws drop. Then they laugh: "That was supposed to protect you from nuclear bombs?" I smile too. Now I can see that the whole exercise wasn't designed to save lives. It was to let kids know we were at war.

The stakes in the Cold War were enormous. America's adversary, the Soviet Union (1922-1991), was organized to promote an ideology based on the premise that history obeys certain predictable laws. A small group of men who met in the Kremlin in Moscow believed they could sway events in the direction they wanted. To serve their vision of a state-run economy, Soviet rulers had a multi-million-man army at their disposal, along with tens of thousands of nuclear missiles and a vast propaganda bureaucracy that pushed Marxist-Leninist values from the local level to the global.

The whole construct was held together by bluff and fear. Every person was subject to total control - thoughts as well as actions; hence the term "totalitarian." Notoriously, the government banned religion while pushing a cult-like worship of its leaders. The secret police hunted down anyone who wouldn't conform. Over the decades, the Soviets murdered tens of millions of people. Their goal was to impose this system on the whole world. That's why Soviets ended up in such unlikely places as Cuba, Angola, Vietnam and the Manhattan Atom Bomb Project at Los Alamos, N.M.

Led by the United States, a coalition of nations styling itself "the free world" deployed vast fleets of bombers, surface ships, submarines, tanks and nuclear-tipped missiles to face down the Soviet Union. Moscow matched them tank for tank, plane for plane, rocket for rocket. We called it the Cold War.

Given the significance of this struggle and the magnitude of the U.S. victory, its strange that so little has been done to commemorate it. Rep. Joel Helfley is trying to remedy that. He authored a bill directing the Interior Department to identify sites and resources in the United States that were significant to the Cold War. In December, the bill passed the House and now awaits Senate approval.

The Colorado district Mr. Helfley represents includes airbases, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Obviously, many servicemen and women who played a key role in the Cold War lived in his area and he'd like to honor them. Which is what they richly deserve. Stopping the Soviets militarily allowed the force of ideas and democratic values to ultimately overwhelm their society. When that happened, the "Evil Empire" fractured along its natural ethnic lines.

That's where the Taras Shevchenko Monument in Washington comes in. Located just a short walk from Du Pont Circle, it should certainly be included in any Interior Department list of significant Cold War sites. For Ukrainians, poet Taras Shevchenko is a national icon who combines elements of Washington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Dante and Martin Luther King. Born a slave in the Russian Empire in 1814, he became an orphan shortly thereafter. Because of his talent as a painter, Shevchenko miraculously won his freedom at age 24 and found welcome in the highest levels of St. Petersburg society. Instead of celebrating his own good fortune, he elevated a personal fairy tale to historical significance when he started tapping into Ukraine's past to write eloquent poetry about freedom, human rights and independence. He took special aim at serfdom, autocracy and Ukrainian servility. Two years after Shevchenko's death in 1861, the tsar banned the use of the Ukrainian language, but it was too late. People had memorized Shevchenko's poetry and recited it at every occasion.

When the Bolsheviks took power in Ukraine, Shevchenko was far too big to ignore, so they made him one of their own, casting him as a proto-Communist. Whatever didn't fit into their construct, they downplayed or rewrote, or censored altogether. Understandably, Ukrainians in the West who had fled Soviet terror, resented the way Shevchenko had been co-opted and distorted. That's why the Shevchenko Memorial Committee of America, organized by leading Ukrainian American organizations, launched a campaign to construct a monument to Shevchenko in Washington. In 1960, Congress gave its official approval.

The Soviets, who had named thousands of towns, streets, schools, post offices, etc. after Shevchenko, were livid. The sponsors of the Washington statue, they said, were "bourgeois speculators and blasphemers," whose "monstrous, disgusting and provocative purpose was to slander the homeland of Shevchenko." And so on...

I was one of 100,000 people who came to Washington on a hot day in June 1964 to see former President Dwight D. Eisenhower unveil the statue. Those were unsettled times. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated just a few months before. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in everybody's mind and Southeast Asia was starting to simmer. Those who gathered in Washington that day were deeply engaged in the Cold War. They were there to thumb their noses at the Soviets and reclaim Shevchenko's legacy.

Not everyone in America was in favor of the statue. The Washington Post called it a "monument to ignorance," and "a blunt weapon in a fierce Cold War propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union." Its writers were puzzled by the tug of war over Shevchenko and disapproved of the monument's inherent message heralding the "implausible goal of Ukrainian nationhood." They called it "a peculiar notion of how to fight communism." As it turned out, of course, a healthy form of nationalism is precisely what ended up defeating communism. Obviously, the Shevchenko monument alone did not do that - it's just a symbol, a very powerful symbol. It cost $275,000, all raised by the private sector. I can't think of a better bargain.

When the Cold War ended, it did so with a whimper, not a bang. On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians overwhelmingly ap-proved a referendum on independence. A week later, the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine quietly dissolved the Soviet Union.

Now, 10 years later, it's time to start identifying symbols that can teach our children just how big an effort the Cold War was. Please contact your senators and urge them to support passage of H.R. 107.

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